January 16, 2013

This man helped save six children, is now getting harassed for it

Gene Rosen sheltered six kids during the Sandy Hook massacre. Now he's become a target of conspiracy theorists

By Alex Seitz-Wald


(Credit: AP/Mary Altaffer)

“I don’t know what to do,” sighed Gene Rosen. “I’m getting hang-up calls, I’m getting some calls, I’m getting emails with, not direct threats, but accusations that I’m lying, that I’m a crisis actor, ‘how much am I being paid?’” Someone posted a photo of his house online. There have been phony Google+ and YouTube accounts created in his name, messages on white supremacist message boards ridiculing the “emotional Jewish guy,” and dozens of blog posts and videos “exposing” him as a fraud. One email purporting to be a business inquiry taunted: “How are all those little students doing? You know, the ones that showed up at your house after the ‘shooting’. What is the going rate for getting involved in a gov’t sponsored hoax anyway?”

“The quantity of the material is overwhelming,” he said. So much so that a friend shields him from most of it by doing daily sweeps of the Web so Rosen doesn’t have to. His wife is worried for their safety. He’s logged every email and every call, and consulted with a retired state police officer, who took the complaint seriously but said police probably can’t do anything at the moment; he plans to do the same with the FBI.

What did Rosen do to deserve this? One month ago, he found six little children and a bus driver at the end of the driveway of his home in Newtown, Conn. “We can’t go back to school,” one little boy told Rosen. “Our teacher is dead.” He brought them inside and gave them food and juice and toys. He called their parents. He sat with them and listened to their shocked accounts of what had happened just down the street inside Sandy Hook Elementary, close enough that Rosen heard the gunshots.

In the hours and days that followed, Rosen did a lot of media interviews. “I wanted to speak about the bravery of the children, and it kind of helped me work through this,” he told Salon in an interview. “I guess I kind of opened myself up to this.”

The “this” in question is becoming a prime target of the burgeoning Sandy Hook truther movement, which — like its precursor that denied the veracity of the 9/11 terror attacks — alleges that the entire shooting was a hoax of some kind. There were conspiracy theories surrounding the shooting from Day One, but the movement has exploded into public view the past two weeks, and a Google Trends search suggests it’s just now picking up steam. It’s also beginning to earn the backing of presumably credible sources like a professor and a reporter.

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/15/this_man_helped_save_six_children_is_now_getting_harassed_for_it/

January 15, 2013

The History Channel - the Fox News of the Social Sciences for terminal dumb asses

For a few days I have been switching to the History Channel hoping to find some sort of history documentary even if from a pop culture version of history. All I found were programs like that silly show about a pawn shop in Las Vegas or spinoffs from that show. Or I have found shows about truckers in Alaska or spinoffs shows about truck drivers in Alaska. Tonight I had a moment of hope when I saw that the programming was not about pawn shops, Alaskan truck drivers, swamp people or lumber jacks. What I found instead was show after show speculating preposterous and downright loony conspiracy theories about UFO’s, Atlantis and Nazi experiments with time travel. Now, I am all for unconventional theories. But this crap did not even come close to presenting any case for alternative world views. It had no more intellectual content than any crackpot theory you might find on the back of some cheap dime store magazine of yesteryear.

How could this happen? I know that the so-called “History Channel” has no golden age of the past when they offered anything resembling a true critical and intellectual interpretation of history. It has always offered pop culture versions of history similar to what many of us learned in elementary school. But the direction it has now taken is simply ridiculous and frankly it embarrasses America as this network reaches around the whole world. The very fact that this cultural and intellectual depravation ino doubt is a response to ratings and an effort to please the masses in order to sell advertisement space is sad. What is happening?

January 10, 2013

Sam Harris: The outspoken atheist responds to Sandy Hook by calling for more guns --

Why does anyone take Sam Harris seriously?

The outspoken atheist responds to Sandy Hook by calling for more guns -- and offers the NRA an unexpected assist

By Ian Murphy, Alternet

There are many mysteries posed by this world for which science offers no answer: Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? Who let the dogs out? And, perhaps most confounding, why does anyone take atheist pundit Sam Harris seriously?

In response to the Sandy Hook massacre, Harris stopped sputtering about Muslims long enough to weigh in with a post Sandy Hook essay, “The Riddle of the Gun.” Unlike the above mysteries, however, the gun is no riddle. As the NRA recently reminded us, firearms are merely a tool. They can be used as a sturdy hammer, a nifty paperweight, a handsome tie clip, a rather crap spaghetti strainer, and, in a desperate pinch, as a convenient murder weapon! Guns are as far from a riddle as one can get. The numbers are brutally simple. According to this Harvard study, and the least bit of common sense, more guns = more gun homicides. And expounding on this topic, without accepting that fact as the moral epicenter of your argument, is tantamount to protecting gun rights over the lives of innocents. Harris, in his continuing quest to overcome the vicious stereotype that atheists are typically rational people, takes a page from NRA President Wayne LaPierre’s handbook of douchebaggery, and suggests the answer to the “riddle” of guns should be, in fact, more guns. Only a corporate shill or a professional philosopher could arrive at this position without realizing (or admitting) how utterly full of shit they are.

Those familiar with Harris’s record will have already spotted the logical inconsistency. For those blissfully unaware of his many crimes against thinking, the uncharacteristically sound reason Harris gives above for not imprisoning all mentally unstable people is precisely the “common sense” reason he’d previously used to justify a policy of Muslim profiling at airports. (For the satisfaction of reading security expert Bruce Schneier deliver Harris a much-deserved drubbing, see here.) Granted, committing people to a cuckoo’s nest is a great deal more severe than subjecting them to airport screenings, but there’s probably a folksy aphorism I can conjure to make this work–apples and oranges are both fruit, if you get my drift. Yeah. That’ll do the trick, just like a junebug in May, or Dan Rather in a Texas teapot.

The ultimate tragedy of Harris’s article is that he touches on the answer to “the riddle of the gun” only to dismiss that answer as existing beyond the parameters of debate. Unlike god or gods, that’s one of those things that’s true if you say it’s true, and false if you say it’s false. Harris is, confoundingly, a popular figure, capable of shifting the frame of acceptable discourse. Why doesn’t he give it a go? Well, that may be the biggest mystery of all.


read full article:


http://www.salon.com/2013/01/10/why_does_anyone_take_sam_harris_seriously/

January 9, 2013

Meet the Sandy Hook truthers: Theorists think they've found “absolute proof” that Newtown was a hoax

Have they no shame?


Credit: Reuters/Eric Thayer)

By Alex Seitz-Wald for salon.com

In the crazy world of Sandy Hook conspiracy theories, this one may be the worst yet. (Maybe you’ve already heard some of the others, like the one about fantasy ties between the gunman’s family and the LIBOR banking scandal and a related theory about the Aurora shooting and the “Dark Knight Rises.”) Most of the theories are really pieces of a larger meta-theory: that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax, perhaps by the Obama administration, designed to stir demand for gun control.

In the latest angle, theorists think they have found “absolute proof” of a conspiracy to defraud the American people. “You reported in December that this little girl had been killed,” a reader emailed Salon in response to a story. “She has been found, and photographed with President Obama.”

There are dozens of websites, blog posts and YouTube videos extolling the Emilie Parker hoax theory. If you Google her name, the very first result is a post mocking her father for crying at a press conference after the shooting. One popular video, which already has 134,000 views, was made by the producers of a popular 9/11 Truther film. “Just as the movie ‘Operation Terror’ shows the 9/11 attacks were a made-for-TV event, so too were the mass shootings … There can be no doubt that Sandy Hook was a staged event,” the narrator intones. He goes on to say that the adults who participated in the media coverage of the shootings “should be prosecuted as accessories after the fact in a mass murder” — i.e., the parents whose children were murdered in the massacre should be thrown in prison.

But the hoax theory has even earned the backing for some presumably more credible sources. James Tracy, a tenured professor of communications at Florida Atlantic University, sparked controversy this week after he wrote a blog post suggesting the parents were “crisis actors.” “While it sounds like an outrageous claim, one is left to inquire whether the Sandy Hook shooting ever took place — at least in the way law enforcement authorities and the nation’s news media have described,” he wrote.

Websites owned by Alex Jones, the conspiracy theory pundit who helped start the 9/11 Truther movement and has millions of readers, are a virtual one-stop shop for Sandy Hook “false flag” miscellanea. So far, mainstream conservative figures haven’t hopped on board, though Gun Owners of American head Larry Pratt told Jones this summer that he thought there was a good chance the Aurora massacre was perpetrated by government agents.

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/09/the_worst_sandy_hook_conspiracy_theory_yet/

January 9, 2013

Can “jihad” be rebranded?

It's an uphill fight, but Muslim activists are trying to reclaim a holy word that's become synonymous with terror

By Alex Seitz-Wald


MyJihad.org bus ad featuring two volunteers, an American-Muslim and an Israeli-Jew. (Credit: MyJihad.org)

So you want to rebrand a word. It’s hard to think of a more difficult rebranding project than “jihad.”

Since Sept. 11, the term has become synonymous with terrorism and villainy — but now a group of Muslims is trying to reclaim the word from the extremists, and redefine “jihad” to mean something normal and peaceful and good. They realize this won’t be easy.

The campaign hinges on the idea that “jihad” has two commonly accepted usages. One is the violent, physical struggle most of us are familiar with. The other, which many Muslims and Islamic scholars consider the more correct definition, refers to the inner struggle to do good and follow God’s teaching; Muslims strive to attain this every day. This is the “proper meaning” being promoted by My Jihad, a public education campaign recently launched on billboards and on buses in Chicago.

One would think that My Jihad is exactly the kind of moderate Muslim voice that Geller — who claims to be so threatened by Muslim “extremists” — would want to promote. But in reality, “the extremists on both sides need each other for validation. And we’re a threat to both,” Rehab said

Rehab and his compatriots realize it will be difficult to change the meaning of “jihad,” but he’s hoping the campaign will at least “start a conversation” about a concept that is critical to the practice of Islam, yet completely misunderstood. The same could be said about Islam more generally in the West. The religion, omnipresent in pop culture and foreign policy debates, is still mysterious to so many Americans and its popular image too often dictated by the extremists, and not its everyday adherents. If nothing else, the fact that Geller feels threatened shows they’re doing something right.

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/09/can_jihad_be_rebranded/

January 4, 2013

Lawyers should never ask a Mississippi grandma a question if they aren't prepared for the answer

a Facebook story I just read...

In a trial, a Southern small-town prosecuting attorney call...ed his first witness, a grandmotherly, elderly woman to the stand. He approached her and asked, 'Mrs. Jones, do you know me?' She responded, 'Why, yes, I do know you, Mr. Williams. I've known you since you were a boy, and frankly, you've been a big disappointment to me. You lie, you cheat on your wife, and you manipulate people and talk about them behind their backs. You think you're a big shot when you haven't the brains to realize you'll never amount to anything more than a two-bit paper pusher. Yes, I know you.'

The lawyer was stunned. Not knowing what else to do, he pointed across the room and asked, 'Mrs. Jones, do you know the defense attorney?'

She again replied, 'Why yes, I do. I've known Mr. Bradley since he was a
youngster, too. He's lazy, bigoted, and he has a drinking problem. He can't build a normal relationship with anyone, and his law practice is one of the worst in the entire state. Not to mention he cheated on his wife with three different women. One of them was your wife. Yes, I know him.'

The defense attorney nearly died.

The judge asked both counselors to approach the bench and, in a very quiet voice, said,

'If either of you idiots asks her if she knows me, I'll send you both to the electric chair.'