Trump’s Great Wall

BBC

US President-elect Donald Trump has said his planned wall along the Mexican border could be partly fence.  In some areas, “a wall is more appropriate”, he told US broadcaster CBS, but “there could be some fencing”,

Mr Trump repeatedly promised during his election campaign to build a wall to keep out illegal migrants. He said he planned to deport or jail up to three million undocumented migrants with criminal records, such as gang members and drug dealers.

Other undocumented migrants would be assessed once the border was secured, Mr Trump added.

Forcing Mexico to pay for a border wall became a rallying cry among Trump supporters during the campaign.

Their candidate caused outrage by suggesting Mexicans were exporting “their rapists” to the US, along with drugs and other crime.

 

‘The Donald’ negotiating with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto.

 

The Republican defeated Hillary Clinton in Tuesday’s presidential election, shocking many who had expected the Democratic candidate to win following favourable opinion polls.

In his first major interview to a US broadcaster since the election, Mr Trump told CBS: “What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, where a lot of these people, probably two million, it could be even three million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate.”

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The Idiocy, Fabrications and Lies of Ancient Aliens

The History Channel presents self-appointed challengers of science who take on the idea that aliens caused the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs

By Brian Switek

smithsonian.com

Until now, I have assiduously avoided Ancient Aliens. I had a feeling that if I watched the show—which popularizes far-fetched, evidence-free idiocy about how human history has been molded by extra-terrestrial visitors—my brain would jostle its way out of my skull and stalk the earth in search of a kinder host. Or, at the very least, watching the show would kill about as many brain cells as a weekend bender in Las Vegas. But then I heard the History Channel’s slurry of pseudoscience had taken on dinosaurs. I steeled myself for the pain and watched the mind-melting madness unfold.

I’m actually glad that my editors don’t allow me to cuss a blue streak on this blog. If they did, my entire review would be little more than a string of expletives. Given my restrictions, I have little choice but to try to encapsulate the shiny, documentary-format rubbish in a more coherent and reader-sensitive way.

The episode is what you would get if you dropped some creationist propaganda, Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods and stock footage from Jurassic Fight Club into a blender. What results is a slimy and incomprehensible mixture of idle speculation and outright fabrications which pit the enthusiastic “ancient alien theorists,” as the narrator generously calls them, against “mainstream science.” I would say “You can’t make this stuff up,” but I have a feeling that that is exactly what most of the show’s personalities were doing.

There was so much wrong with the Ancient Aliens episode that I could spend all week trying to counteract every incorrect assertion. This is a common technique among cranks and self-appointed challengers of science; it is called Gish Gallop after young earth creationist Duane Gish. When giving public presentations about evolution and creationism, Gish rapidly spouted off a series of misinterpretations and falsehoods to bury his opponent under an avalanche of fictions and distortions. If Gish’s opponent tried to dig themselves out, they would never be able to make enough progress to free themselves to take on Gish directly. Ancient Aliens uses the same tactic—the fictions come fast and furious.

While the main point of the episode is that aliens exterminated dinosaurs to make way for our species—a sci-fi scenario accompanied by some hilarious, mashed-together footage of dinosaurs fleeing from strafing alien craft, perhaps a preview of Dinosaurs vs. Aliens the movie—the various ancient alien experts do little more than assert that such an event must have happened. Surprise, surprise, they provide no actual evidence for their claims. Instead, they borrow evidence for fundamentalist Christians, who are never actually identified as such. Creationist Michael Cremo is identified only as the author of Forbidden Archeology, and Willie E. Dye is credited as a biblical archaeologist without any mention of his young earth creationist views. Ancient Aliens producers clearly did not care about the credentials or expertise of the talking heads they employed—just so long as someone said the right things in front of the camera.

And the creationists didn’t disappoint. About halfway through the program, Cremo says, “Some researchers found human footprints alongside the footprints of dinosaurs.” The quote is a line out of context from Cremo’s interview, but is played in a section claiming that American Museum of Natural History paleontologist Roland T. Bird found human footprints associated with dinosaur trackways in the vicinity of Glen Rose, Texas.

Bird didn’t find any such thing. He found many dinosaur footprints and trackways—one of which he and his crew partially excavated and anachronistically placed behind the AMNH’s “Brontosaurus“—but no human tracks. Strangely, though, hoaxed human tracks did have a role to play in Bird’s decision to initially visit the tracksites.

Erich Von Daniken is one of the noisiest blow-hards propagating the myths and archeological lies of the Ancient Aliens family.  He is a big proponent of the theory that the Nazca Lines in Peru were space alien landing strips. The aliens travel billions and billions of miles through outer space to get to earth and they need landing strips?!! 

The show can’t seem to decide whether aliens exterminated dinosaurs 66 million years ago or whether dinosaurs somehow survived to the modern era. Which is it? Did aliens clear away dinosaurs so that we might live? Or did some dinosaurs escape extinction somehow? Competing ideas bounce around like ping-pong balls during the whole episode. Grandpa Simpson tells more coherent stories.

Ancient Aliens is some of the most noxious sludge in television’s bottomless chum bucket. Actual experts are brought in to deliver sound bites that are twisted and taken out of context while fanatics are given free reign. Fiction is presented as fact, and real scientific research is so grossly misrepresented that I can only conclude that the program is actively lying to viewers. To present the show as a documentary, on a non-fiction network, is a loathsome move by the History Channel spinoff. (Technically, Ancient Aliens airs on an offshoot of the History Channel called H2.) If the network and the show’s creators want to present Ancient Aliens as a light survey of fringe ideas and make it clear that the ideas aren’t meant to be taken seriously, I can’t quarrel with that. But Ancient Aliens and shows like it winnow away at actual scientific understanding by promoting absolute dreck. Ancient Aliens is worse than bad television. The program shows a sheer contempt for science and what we really know about nature.

The narrator on the show does nothing but postulate conjecture. Question after question: Is it possible…, could it be…, is there a chance…, what if…,?  The questions go on and on. And the ancient alien theorists assume that their speculation has to be true!

This clown has gotten dirty rich off this TV show. He is laughing all the way to the bank.

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Idiots!

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The conspiracy theorists have too much free time on their hands and they also have unlimited imaginative minds. One of the more bizarre conspiracy theories is that MA flight 370 was hijacked by U.S. military personnel and flown to the U.S. base on Diego Garcia.  Diego Garcia is a small island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The reason for this subterfuge is that American Intelligence wanted to get there hands on some passengers.

These passengers were Chinese computer engineers that were hackers extraordinaire.  They had been hacking into sensitive U.S. government sites and the Americans figured this was the best way to put a major dent in the Chinese hacking offensive.  It does seem surprising that China does not back up this conspiracy claim.

Here is a conspiracy website that backs the hijacked claim:

INDIAN OCEAN (INTELLIHUB) — According to freelance journalist Jim Stone, one of the American passengers, Phillip Wood, a technical storage executive at IBM, who was aboard the now missing Malaysian Airlines flight 370, keystered his iPhone 5 inside his anus after the Boeing 777 carrying 239 people was hijacked by military personnel while on route to China.

Amazingly Stone claims that metadata within the photo yields evidence confirming “100 percent” that Phillip Wood sent the photo along with a brief voice activated text from GPS coordinates which put Wood only a few miles away from the U.S. controlled Diego Garcia military base which is located on an island south of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean.

Diego Garcia has an infamous reputation for being a stop off location for captured Islamic terrorists during the rendition operations of the C.I.A. after 9/11.  However, there is no credible evidence that any terrorists were held there for long or were interrogated there. Also no evidence that MA 370 is being stored there. Recent plane pieces washed up on beaches in Africa have been 99.9% verified as MA 370 wreckage.

More about Diego Garcia:

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Diego Garcia is an atoll located south of the equator in the central Indian Ocean. Diego Garcia is the largest of the 60 small islands comprising the Chagos Archipelago. Diego Garcia was settled by the French in the 1790s and was transferred to British rule after the Napoleonic Wars. It was one of the “Dependencies” of the British Colony of Mauritius until it was detached for inclusion in the newly created British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) in 1965. Between 1968 and 1973, the population of the BIOT was removed to Mauritius and The Seychelles, following which the United States built a large naval and military base on Diego Garcia, which has been in continuous operation ever since. As of March 2015, Diego Garcia is the only inhabited island of the BIOT; the population is composed of military personnel and supporting contractors.  Population 4,239.

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During the Cold War era, following the British withdrawal from East of Suez, the United States was keen to establish a military base in the Indian Ocean to counter Soviet influence in the region and protect the sea-lanes for oil transportation from the Middle East. The United States saw the atoll as the “Malta of the Indian Ocean” equidistant from all points. The value has been proven many times, with the island providing an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” for the United States during the Iranian revolution, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Operation Enduring Freedom, and Operation Iraqi Freedom. In the contemporary era, the atoll continues to play a key role in America’s approach to the Indian Ocean as a flexible forward hub that can facilitate a range of regional strategies.

The United States military facilities on Diego Garcia have been known informally as Camp Justice and, after renaming in July 2006, as Camp Thunder Cove. Formally, the base is known as Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia (the US activity) or Permanent Joint Operating Base (PJOB) Diego Garcia (the UK’s term).

Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia provides Base Operating Services to tenant commands located on the island. The command’s mission is “To provide logistic support to operational forces forward deployed to the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf AORs in support of national policy objectives.”

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Nimitz Class aircraft carrier tied up at the Naval Base.

 

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The atoll shelters the ships of the United States Marine Pre-positioning Squadron Two. These ships carry equipment and supplies to support a major armed force with tanks, armoured personnel carriers, munitions, fuel, spare parts and even a mobile field hospital. This equipment was used during the Persian Gulf War, when the squadron transported equipment to Saudi Arabia.

Ships anchored in the lagoon top middle.

USNS GYSGT Fred W. Stockham (T-AK-3017) Roll on Roll off ship. Likely loaded with tanks and other vehicles. The ship is over 900 feet long. Eight other ships are anchored in the lagoon.  Five of these vessels carry supplies for the US Marine Corps sufficient to support a Marine Air-Ground Task Force for 30 days: USNS Button, USNS Kocak, USNS Lopez, USNS Stockham, and USNS Fisher.

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The United States Air Force operates a High Frequency Global Communications System transceiver site located on the south end of the atoll near the GEODSS station. The transceiver is operated remotely from Joint Base Andrews and locally maintained by NCTS FE personnel.

Naval Security Group detachment Diego Garcia was disestablished on September 30, 2005.Remaining essential operations were transferred to a contractor. The large AN/AX-16 High Frequency Radio direction finding Circularly Disposed Antenna Array has been demolished, but the four satellite antenna radomes around the site remain as of 2015.

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Diego Garcia may be identified as an ETOPS (Extended Range Twin Engine Operations) emergency landing site (en route alternate) for flight planning purposes of commercial airliners. This allows twin-engine commercial aircraft (such as the Airbus A330, Boeing 767 or Boeing 777) to make theoretical nonstop flights between city pairs such as Perth and Dubai (9,013.61 km or 5,600.80 mi), Hong Kong and Johannesburg (10,658 km or 6,623 mi) or Singapore and São Paulo (15,985.41 km or 9,932.87 mi), all while maintaining a suitable diversion airport within 180 minutes’ flying time with one engine inoperable.

Following the fall of the Shah of Iran and the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1979–1980, the West became concerned with ensuring the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz, and the United States received permission for a $400-million expansion of the military facilities on Diego Garcia consisting of two parallel 12,000-foot-long (3,700 m) runways, expansive parking aprons for heavy bombers, 20 new anchorages in the lagoon, a deep-water pier, port facilities for the largest naval vessels in the American or British fleet, aircraft hangars, maintenance buildings and an air terminal, a 1,340,000 barrels (213,000 m³) fuel storage area, and billeting and messing facilities for thousands of sailors and support personnel.

12,000 foot runways.

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I’ve counted 29 B-1 Bombers parked on the apron, also a couple of B-52’s.

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DIEGO GARCIA (June 28, 2010) The guided-missile submarine USS Florida (SSGN 728) conducts a fast cruise in Diego Garcia following a remote crew exchange and the first voyage repair period of her second deployment. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Seaman Christopher Johnson/Released)

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Very thick jungle forest on the island. No mammals, just crabs and lots of birds.

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Living quarters. Pretty nice. Diego Garcia would be a great base to get posted to.

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