Back from the Cursed Earth and ready to party.

How is this news exactly?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/us/12holocaust.html?_r=4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_paperclip

New York Times headline "Declassified Papers Show U.S. Recruited Ex-Nazis". How the fuck is this news exactly? The New York Times is a little behind on this story, by 70 years or so.

Operation Overcast was initiated in May of 1945, and was renamed Operation paperclip in March of 1946 after the OSS realized that the caveat about not bringing any active or ardent Nazi's to the US had to be abandoned. Turned out that everyone they wanted were pretty enthusiastic about the whole Nazi thing.

This is a pretty good historical example of a conspiracy that is actually true, and easily verifiable. Hell, its been easily verifiable for decades.

Something that never sat well with Israel in our relations was the fact that NASA was composed largely of Nazi war criminals in the early days. By early days I mean until the mid-to-late 1970's.

One of the reasons I have yet to do an Operation Paperclip article is that I thought everyone knew about it. Its not so much a conspiracy theory, as an easily provable and admitted to conspiracy fact.

When Bullshit Theories Collide: The Nibiru/Planet X Question
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru_collision
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_x
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian%E2%80%93Ordovician_extinction_events

I have been really amazingly depressed the last two years, with the worst coming in the last four months. So pardon me for the lack of updating.

Now, this unfortunately means that my inclination is to shit on other peoples parades rather than tossing beads to see titties. Therefor it looks like another debunking article for my return to electronic print conspiracy mongering.

This one will no doubt get some dander up as it is a hot-ticket item in the weirdness circles right now. With the Mayan long calender supposedly coming to an end in 2012 everyone is thinking the end must surely be upon us. What form will it take? A winged serpent adorned with colorful plumage (lovely plumage at that)? Sunspots crippling the global power grid and leading to a new Dark Ages? Zombies? Alien invasion? My ex wife finding a way to somehow leave me again, thus causing a black hole to form from my intense depression that would tear apart the planet? The last one is to be expected when someone who has the complete discographies of Bauhaus and Joy Division gets a divorce, well a second divorce. Done purely for spite.

No no, none of that. The current prevailing apocalyptic wind among my tin foil hat loving brethren is...

PLANET X!

Or Nibiru, or Nemesis, depending on who you listen to. Well, Nemesis is used less often now, due I suspect to the generally bad reviews of the Star Trek film bearing that name. Which is sad, as it was not an entirely awful film. Loads better than Star Trek V.

The story goes something like this. Planet X has a seriously wide elliptical orbit waaaaay the fuck past Pluto. Somewhere in the area of 300 to 30,000 AU from the Sun. Which as any first year astronomy student can tell you is a really fucking long way away. 1 AU is about 93 million miles, the rough distance between the Earth and the sun. Which takes you 8 minutes or so to traverse if you are doing the speed of light. So for fun you do the math and see where I am going with this.

The two schools of thought on how Planet X (I just love calling it that, makes me feel like a character in an old Sci-Fi movie) is going to ruin our collective shit are either by crashing into the Earth Rudolph Mate style, or by swinging through the Oort Cloud and hurling comets at us.

Either one would suck, and one of them is actually a bit more likely than the other. The second one. The first has the problem is the largest of the gas giants in our solar system would have absorbed or ejected something that size with an orbital path that would bring it near Earth. Jupiter is not to be fucked with. In this set of circumstances it would be like a cosmic bouncer, throwing out chumps before they ever got close enough to the inner system/VIP Room (where we are) to do much damage. This also would have happened millions of years ago. We have about two years before 2012, and for an object of sufficient size to shoulder past Jupiter (basically something about the same size) it would have to travel at galactic escape velocity. Which means it would not have been held by the suns gravity for this long, it would instead be careening through intergalactic space. Likely on its way to fuck up someones day in the Andromeda galaxy.

This theory has its own modern day prophet even. Nancy Lieder, a woman who claims to have received the information via a brain implant given to her by aliens from the Zeta Reticuli system. An advanced alien species with the ability to traverse the distance between here (Earth) and there (Zeta Reticuli, a lovely system with a dual main-sequence binary star arrangement), which is 39 light years (12 parsecs for those pretentious first year astronomy students and/or Star Wars nerds). They traveled 39 fucking light years (12 parsecs, or 741 quadrillion miles, give-or-take) to Earth to abduct a woman from Wisconsin, implant a brain transmitter through her rectum (I'm guessing), and then gave only her this information vital to our species survival through this advanced brain/rectum/radio interface.

While we are on the subject, her rectal/brain communicator would need to involve quantum entanglement in order to be able to pass messages to her without worse call lag than Sprint. Maybe the Zeta's have something better, so entangled q-bits are the sort of nonsense they use for internet access in their knock-off iPhones. Either way, they stuck seriously advanced technology in this woman's brain to communicate a message they could have more effectively given in person. Which would have made sense, seeing as they already spent the gas money to get here.

If they feared us as hostile little monkeys (we are) and thought we might try to saucer-jack them on the White House lawn (we would) they could have simply beamed it to us from orbit around the moon. Pointed their antennae (or whatever) at our radio telescopes or communications satellites and told us that way. We would be able to see them with the Hubble and other serious telescopes to verify them. They could have spoken to people in the position to actually maybe do something about it (or negotiate to get them to help).

The second one, an object with a non-dramatically colliding stable orbit that occasionally sends a comet stampede our way may have a bit of truth to it. Well, a possible grain of totally unverified truth. Really more of a theory that fits the currently available facts, but those facts are kind of anorexic.

Essentially if there was a planet out there past Pluto and Eris (another dwarf planet around the same size as Pluto) screwing up orbits in the Kuiper Belt/Oort Cloud it would be pretty hard to find. Even if it was very, very big. The problems with the orbits of a few outer planets were more-or-less figured out with the discovery of Eris and some other trans-Neptunian objects. Or maybe just Eris.

Further evidence suggests that Earth suffers mass extinctions on a somewhat regular basis. The suggested schedule is somewhat less than clockwork (according to the time-line suggested by proponents of the Nibiru theory). Every 26-34 million years, which leaves a margin of error of, oh, 8 million years or so. Not a big gap by geological standards but its still there. One must consider that not every extinction event on this planet was caused by a space rock (or comet, a space snowball packed with rocks) slamming into us. Hell, there were several during the Cambrian period alone, with not a single massive space rock in sight.

"On a long enough time-line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero." - Narrator/Jack, Fight Club

I do love a good doom and gloom scenario don't get me wrong. Like most conspiracy nuts I have all the supplies I need to set myself up pretty well in a barren post-apocalyptic wasteland. However if death comes from above its not going to come from Planet X. The possibility exists for a large object to be floating out past the Kuiper Belt, but before the Oort Cloud. It, if it exists, might even be big. Mars big. Or even bigger. However bigger means orders of magnitude less likely. It is possible however.

Jumping from there to the conclusion of it being responsible for most or all of Earths mass extinctions is a bit of a stretch. Even for me.

+ + +

So that is that. A new update. Not the best but I am a bit rusty. An emotionally crippling divorce preceded by months of relationship turmoil and family illness managed to suck all of my enthusiasm for, well, everything away pretty thoroughly. Im getting it back. Slowly. No promises of regular updates again but stay tuned. It could happen.

Tell your friends. I'm fucking back.

Also, comments are even more encouraged now. I like feedback, need a self-esteem boost (if they are positive, or at least of the constructively critical type), and am curious to see who still follows this blog.

/End Transmission.