Ex-FBI Agent Claims to Have Seen Angels at 9/11 Crash Site

The FBI’s central PA emergency response team.

One of the FBI agents who responded to the botched hijacking of Flight 93 on September 11, 2001 has retired and released a book. In it, she claims to have seen angels assisting in the clean-up efforts:

God’s PR Squad Lies Again! Alex Jones! Stoned Angels Ordering Pizza!

STOP THE PRESSES: Alex Jones is being stupid again, you guys! He has exposed the secret atheist agenda, and can you guess what it is? You get one guess. If your guess was a mishmash of Jonesian buzzwords like “New World Order,” “conspiracy,” “Luciferian,” and “occult,” then you win!

Alex Jones does this “research,” OK? He doesn’t ever cite any sources because usually his research involves just making shit up. But according to his research, everyone funding atheist groups are secretly occultist Luciferians, like pretty much everyone else who doesn’t believe everything published on InfoWars.

Ghost-Enabling Landlords! Ted Nugent! Coked-Up Judges! And Why Astrologers Shouldn’t Babysit!

So I’m back to doing a series of short news stories in this space. You should all just get used to there being no real consistent structure here. The best you can hope for is a focus on people doing and saying crazy things. So let’s get to it.

5 Psychological Effects That Can Cause People to Believe in Nonsense

All of us humans are the result of an unconscious biological process called evolution. Based on the conditions at the time, lots of different pressures selected for certain traits. And after those conditions changed – for example most of us don’t need to prioritize escaping from predators on the savannah anymore – all of the selected-for traits remained. We can’t just say, “Hey! Now that we have houses and locked doors and stuff, I don’t need to wake up in the middle of the night whenever there’s a loud noise because chances are very good that it isn’t a fucking tiger here to eat me and dismember my children!”

Nowadays, lots of these psychological traits have become a target for charlatans and frauds out to scheme you out of your time and money. Here are a few of them to bear in mind the next time one of them approaches you.

Please Buy Our Useless Junk So You Can Find Nothing

Last year around this time of year I made fun of a Sun article which was essentially an advertisement for a theme park which was allegedly “haunted” by the “spirit world.” Since I am apparently very un-creative, I am going to do pretty much the same thing again this year.

But there’s a twist! This year’s Advertisement For Ghost-Related Business Disguised As A News Article (AFGRBDAANA) is from what’s supposed to be a more reputable newspaper, the Boston Globe.  The first problem here is with the headline:

CNN’s “expert” advice on ghost hunting

It is available here.

I will go through the main points and translate them into normalspeak.

First tip:

“Nighttime is good for ghost-hunting because the absence of noise, people, and other distractions of the day helps your sixth sense stay in tune with your environment.”

-Garrett Moffett, tour guide and author

If you are reading this, your ancestors were good at Hearing Things Go Bump In The Night. Earlier in human history, it was better in terms of survival and reproduction that someone be more sensitive to sensory input than to be indifferent. Those hominids were better at hunting prey and escaping predators, and they were able to pass on their genes more successfully than others. There was no evolutionary consequence for overreacting to a faint noise or something in one’s peripheral vision, but failing to react to such stimuli could have life or death consequences. Because our species has lived for so long as basically nomadic hunters and gatherers in the wild, there is an asymmetry in our psychological evolution where instant fear pays off in the historically wider sense where critical inquiry does not.

Stupid theme park management is stupid, even by those standards

I think I’ve been somehow sent back in time to the 12th century, except it’s in a different possible past since this one appears to have things like working computers which erroneously report the current year as 2009. It can’t possibly be 2009, because of this:

“SPOOKED bosses at a theme park have suspended six members of staff and called in an exorcist after a late night seance on their top horror ride sparked a string of ghostly happenings.”

It’s like a Monty Python skit. OH NO YOU EVIL ONES HAVE SUMMONED SPIRITS ONTO THIS PLACE, BEGONE YE, THOU ART BANISHED WITHOUT PAY. QUICKLY, FETCH THE EXORCIST SO THAT WE MIGHT ONCE AGAIN KNOW PEACE.