Tetherd Cow Ahead

No new cracks. Oopsy. Another miss for the fruitloops.

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Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

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Ah, you gotta love the combination of the internet and the tendency for people in large numbers to suddenly lose all capacity for coherent thought. The Guardian reports today that, probably due at least in part to a Facebook group called 11 Maggio Terremoto a Roma, thousands of people in Rome believe that the city is destined to be destroyed by an earthquake tomorrow, May 11.

And it is, supposedly, all because of the predictions of a self-styled ‘geophysicist’ by the name of Raffaele Bendandi.

It will not surprise you to learn that Bendandi, who died in 1979, was not any kind of proper scientist. Despite being awarded a knighthood by Mussolini, he had no formal scientific training and none of his research was ever supported by independent corroboration. The many ‘theories’ that he advanced in his lifetime were not inhibited by actual factual content. Among other things, Bendandi advanced an hypothesis for the flooding of Atlantis and believed that he had discovered a planet in an orbit between the sun and Mercury.

But here’s the best part – the rising panic in Rome appears to be the result of some idiot somewhere getting his wires crossed. Bendandi didn’t actually ever predict an earthquake for May 11, 2011. According to Paola Lagorio, the president of an organization who looks after Bendandi’s legacy, there is no such indication in any of the the writings attributed to him. Someone just pulled that right out of their ass (Paola Lagorio didn’t say that, you understand, but I bet she was thinking it).

But hey – Rome is the where the Pope lives, right? Why don’t the people who think there’s going to be an earthquake just pray to God that it won’t happen? ((I’m betting that the Venn diagram of People Who Are Very Religious in Rome and People Who are Very Gullible in Rome has a pretty big area of intersection…)) Oh, yeah, right. I guess they will, and that’s why it won’t happen. Silly me.

Be sure to tune in tomorrow Faithful Acowlytes, in order that we might comprehensively ridicule all those Romans who took their kids out of school and fled to the countryside. You know you want to.

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Thanks once more to Atlas for bringing this to the attention of the Cow.

I really love a good mystery! In my last post Desperate? I talked about the apparent spamming of my (and others’) blog comments by Microsoft. Cow reader Damned Skeptic took me to task about this conclusion, and I defended my logic in the Comments of that post.

In a nutshell, what I said was that given that 99.9% of all the comment spam I get is about link hoarding, what evidence is there that the Bing (and also Yahoo) links were not cut from the same cloth? To me it looks like someone is trying to get some link action happening for those sites.

Except…

This morning I was inundated with a whole lot of spam such as this one from ‘Datherine’:

Here’s where Datherine is linking:

Now, is that not totally bizarre? Firstly, I will acquiesce: it’s fairly conclusive evidence that my first hypothesis was incorrect. I doubt that ALL the search engines are attempting to up their ranking like this. That would just be ridiculous. But what IS going on, then?

One thing that I can tell you is that Akismet (my spam filter) is on top of this – look at the stuff that was scooped up overnight:

There were dozens like this. These, of course, are all generated by bots and are easy to screen, unlike the spumans I mentioned yesterday. But look at those links! Way to add some pile carpet to the noise floor. Why would anyone want to generate lots of links to just any search engine? What are we seeing here? Are the big search engines involved in some kind of clandestine link deluge war? Is there any relevance in the fact that all the attempted links from yesterday and the day before were exclusively Bing and Yahoo, and this morning, for the first time, it’s Google? Wow.

Another thing I can tell you is that this spam was targeting my most visited pages, such as the FAQ, the Rasputin contests and some of my Peter Popoff posts. There is definitely some method behind this madness…

It really doesn’t take long does it? A news story of any magnitude comes along and, within mere hours, some idiot journalist decides it would be a great idea to attempt to relate it to their particular paycheck. Take this migraine-inducing offering that appeared in the Hollywood Reporter yesterday:

Eerie Links Between ‘Harry Potter,’ Osama Bin Laden; Why Movie May Benefit

You know, when I read something like that, I just want to smack the perpetrator with a dead halibut. WHAT. THE. FUCK. Smack. Smack smack smack smack.

OK. Eerie links it is, then. We’ve dealt with them before, so we are not intimidated. Let’s see how Mr Gregg Kilday, our hamfisted excuse for a newshound, manages the contortionist feat of tying Harry Potter to the execution of Osama bin Laden.

While the first volume in J.K. Rowling’s seven-book series was originally published in England in 1997, the first movie, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” was released in November 2001, just months after 9/11.

Er… so what are you saying here, Sherlock? That J.K. Rowling was clairvoyant and foresaw 9/11 in a book written more than four years before the film came out? Because I’ll tell you something about the movie industry: the last four months of a movie the size of Harry Potter, and you don’t have your picture in pretty good shape, you’re in fucking trouble. And I’m going out on a limb here and saying that Warner Brothers probably had their release date figured out a teensy bit before then, you clown. You write for the Hollywood Reporter – you must know that huge films like this have established release dates years in advance. What can the confluence of the 9/11 attacks and the release of ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ possibly have to do with one another? It is nothing more than a coincidence. ((Unless Mr Kilday is suggesting that J.K. Rowling and al Qaeda are in kahoots. Well, I guess that’s at least as plausible as anything else he’s written in this article.)) Actually, it’s not even a coincidence. A coincidence implies some kind of connection and there isn’t one.

Voldemort is introduced as something of a formless boogie-man — not unlike the mysterious Osama — but then, over the course of the series, takes on more and more of a physical presence until in the last volume he and Harry go head-to-head in a final, cataclysmic battle.

Oh God. Give me the halibut again. Right, so just like Voldemort takes on a greater physical appearance as time goes by, Osama.. let’s see now… disappears from the view of the world and turns into an insubstantial wisp of rumour and guesswork. Yeah, that’s a really well thought out analogy. And that final cataclysmic battle with Harry is… what… bin Laden being shot in the head by Obama? Or by a Navy SEAL? Oh wait – maybe the SEAL is Harry? Was there a Hermione SEAL and a Ron Weasley SEAL? Did they have owls? Are you a FUCKING MORON?

Of course, what Gregg Kilday is really saying is that there’s some kind of supernatural element to all this – that the first film was released just after 9/11 and then that the last film is released just after bin Laden is killed and that means something. Never mind that the books don’t follow any kind of temporal logic in that respect, nor that it makes absolutely no sense in as many ways as you’d like to find; Obama represents Harry? Why doesn’t George Bush represent Harry? He was in charge when the planes flew into the WTC. Oh, maybe there are two Harrys? It’s dual personality thing! Smack smack smack smack.

For a generation of kids who grew up reading Rowling’s books and watching Hollywood’s big-screen adaptations in the shadows of 9/11, there have been inevitable echoes of the real world in Harry’s sometimes reluctant quest to defeat Voldemort.

You don’t have kids, do you Mr Kilday? This is what happens when kids go to watch Harry Potter: they see wizards and whomping willows and wands and werewolves. They see butterbeer and Every Flavour Beans and pumpkin juice. They see people flying and turning invisible and riding on broomsticks. They do not think about, care about, or even spare the most fleeting thought for, Osama bin Laden, George Bush, Pakistan, Barack Obama, international politics, Navy SEALs, the CIA, Wikileaks, conspiracy theories, or the Hollywood Reporter. This is what is referred to by people in the business as the magic of the cinema. It is only failed academics looking for attention, and sad geeks with nothing better to do, who draw stupid connections between escapist fantasy and the real world. Kids are not that dumb.

And as for Harry’s ‘sometimes reluctant quest to defeat Voldemort’, well there you go with the vacant analogies again. As far as I can tell there has never been any ‘reluctance’ on the part of the US in attempting to defeat Osama bin Laden. It seems to me (and most of the rest of the world) that the US has been pursuing him with relentless and almost psychopathological determination.

Back in 2004, a poster on mugglenet.com made some of it explicit, comparing the Death Eaters to Al Queda and noting of that “just as Voldemort was shaped by his mother’s death and his father’s abandonment, Osama was shaped by his personal struggle between Western pleasures and Islamic discipline.”

That ‘someone’ was you, wasn’t it Mr Kilday? C’mon, you can tell us. We won’t laugh at you for hanging around in Harry Potter chatrooms. Just in case you can’t see the utter crapness of the comparison from that muggle contributor (who – if it wasn’t you – is undoubtedly a failed academic looking for attention or a sad geek with nothing better to do), let me reword it for you:

“just as Voldemort was shaped by his mother’s death and his father’s abandonment, Adolf Hitler was shaped by his mother’s death and his father’s abandonment.” ((Hitler’s father actually died too, when the boy was young, but that’s abandonment, near enough, right? He was also violent and authoritarian.))

See, THAT is an analogy. It’s where you effortlessly draw comparisons between two things that have some meaningful commonness. It’s not where you take one thing, and then hammer another thing to within an inch of its life in an attempt to make it seem like it relates to the first thing in some vague manner. But I guess there’s no real point in drawing an analogy between Hitler and Voldemort because no-one is currently releasing a film about Hitler, and anyway, he died nearly 80 years ago on April 30, 1945 (just hold that date in your mind for a bit). ((And, just in case anyone is tempted, no, I’m not intending to draw comparisons between World War 2 and Harry Potter. I was just making a random example for a point of illustration. You could probably do the same with any despot you cared to name.))

And just as Harry is known in the books as “the anointed one,” a number of President Obama’s critics like Rush Limbaugh have frequently dismissed the president by disparagingly referring to him as “the anointed one” as well ((It was actually conservative radio commentator Sean Hannity who first used this term in reference to Obama, anyway.))

Oh, right. Wow! That is eerie! And crikey, there was an ‘anointed one’ in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, right? And Jesus – wasn’t He called ‘the anointed one’ too! So, what you’re saying is that Obama, right, is like Jesus and Harry Potter and the kid from Buffy. But hey – wasn’t the anointed one in Buffy evil? So Obama is, like, conflicted like Harry, the saviour of humankind like Jesus and an evil little bloodsucking monster who can only be killed by sunlight, all rolled up in one!

Sorry – I didn’t quite catch that. Did you just say I was pulling arbitrary connections out of my ass? C’mon! Who’d do that?

Meanwhile, in the wake of Bin Laden’s death in a mansion near Islamabad, a meme has already popped up on the web, noting the weird coincidence that Osama and Voldemort both died on the same day, May 1. But true Potter fans have been quick to point out that’s not quite true: When Harry and Voldemort actually finally come face-to-face in the Battle of Hogwarts, in the books’ chronology the date is really May 2, 1998

Wowzer! Now THAT’s eeeeeerrrriiiieeeeeeeeee! So, Osama was killed ON THE SAME DAY as Voldemort! Well, OK, not the same day – a day apart and thirteen years later. Yessirree, can’t get much closer than that! You know what would be REALLY creepy though? If Adolf Hitler was killed on May 1 or a day on either side! ((And, I might point out, J.K. Rowling would have actually known that.))

But Bin Laden’s death is now likely to give the movie an extra emotional resonance for the Potter generation, and that could translate into an even bigger box office bonanza.

Oh yes, I can imagine that the execs at Warner’s were just wetting themselves when they heard bin Laden was dead. The thought of the cleverness of their allegory playing out must have been uppermost in their minds. In fact, I’m going to propose something really radical: Warner Brothers themselves arranged the killing of Osama bin Laden! Think about it – it’s the end of their lucrative Harry Potter franchise, they needed to do something to wring out those extra dollars! What could be more obvious?! I bet they even sent in their very best team for the job…

What a truly terrifying last moment it must have been for Osama, with Daffy holding him down, Bugs taking aim with his SIG 9mm and Porky gloating…

‘Th-th-th-th-th-that’s all folks..’

Well, now that The Wedding ((Yes, apparently there was a wedding of some kind.)) has cleared the airwaves for some real reportage, we find out yesterday the extraordinary news that President Obama is, in fact, dead. Whoopsy, did I say President Obama? What I meant to say was Osama Bin Laden! But shucks, it’s a mistake anyone could make, right? Especially if that anyone is Republican-biased, Murdoch-owned Fox News.

Well, maybe you could forgive a tongue-tied reporter in the heat of the moment… it’s not like he was typing it or anything…

Dammit, that ‘b’ is so close to the ‘s’ on the keyboard isn’t it? I’m always accidentally typing abbholeb when what I actually meant to type was assholes.

Dear friends. This morning I’m angry. I’m also sad and a little depressed, but mostly angry.

Yesterday ((World Malaria Day, coincidentally.)), Cow reader Battman, in a comment on the post Shoo Us the Science (Project)!, pointed me to an article on CNBC headlined:

Energetic Solutions Corporation Donates $30,000 of shoo!TAG Product to Family Legacy’s Camp LIFE in Zambia, Africa. Donation will help to prevent mosquito bites among children, staff and volunteers at Camp LIFE.

Yes, you read that correctly. Right now, in the 21st Century, some little kids risk illness and death because badly-educated ignorant people believe that stupid plastic trinkets with magnetic strips are somehow going to help protect them from contracting a life-threatening disease. ((Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass about the staff and the volunteers at Camp LIFE themselves. Christian proselytizing also ranks high on my list of crimes against humanity. I figure that if God really wants people to be ruining the cultures and communities of poor third world countries, then the least He can do is protect his flag-wavers against mosquitoes.)) It’s bad enough that the peddlers of this ridiculous magical thinking are imposing their hocus-pocus on pets, but when it comes to the lives of kids, they have, in my book, crossed a line into criminality.

Before we go on, though, let’s get some perspective. $30,000 is an impressively generous amount if we’re talking about actual money, but what does Energetic Solutions’ donation mean in real terms? ‘People’ ShooTags are selling for something like $30 or so on Amazon at the moment. That means that $30k buys around a thousand of the things. Doing a quick search tells me that you can get blank swipe cards for about 5c apiece (probably less if you have bulk orders). Let’s be magnanimous and add another 5c per card for printing and packaging. The truth of the matter is, then, that the boastful ‘$30,000 worth of ShooTag product’ has a cost value of something like $100 to Energetic Solutions (in other words, the retail cost of 3 ShooTags). Wow, I bet they feel really good inside about that big sacrifice. ((It’s actually worse than that in fact – the tags being sent to Zambia are part ShooTag’s ‘shoocycle’ program, which entails ‘spent’ cards being ‘refurbished’ and sent off to charity. Thus, these cards probably cost them nothing at all, since they’ve already been paid for by some poor gullible sod.))

From the CNBC report:

“When we saw Family Legacy’s dedication to the children of Zambia, we knew there was an opportunity for shoo!TAG to deliver a unique level of support,” said Carter McCrary, CEO of Energetic Solutions Corporation.

In the light of what we can assume about the true value of the tags, I think we can confidently re-interpret Mr McCrary’s statement to actually mean: “…we saw this as a unique opportunity to once again hoodwink people by deceiving them. By throwing around some big numbers we’ve made ourselves appear like really swell caring-and-sharing folks.”

He goes on:

“Our hope is that shoo!TAG will assist in providing relief from mosquitos and contribute to the prevention of disease among Camp LIFE participants this summer.”

No, Mr McCrary. Your hope is that publicity stunts like this one will help make you rich. Energetic Solutions doesn’t give a flying fuck about the children of Zambia, in the same way that you don’t give a flying fuck about people’s pets.

If you did – if you were really, sincerely concerned – you’d take the time to do some proper science on your product, instead of making unsubstantiated claims supported by nothing but lies and duplicitous sleight-of-hand. Because you seem completely determined not to make proper scientific investigations of your tags, any rational person must conclude that you are afraid of what such investigations would reveal. ((Or, I guess, that you haven’t a clue what a proper scientific investigation is.)) This, in turn, demonstrates your utter indifference to the wellbeing of African children.

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A big thanks to King Willy for the suggestion for this post’s image. Photography by Queen Willy.