Was Marilyn Monroe murdered?

Her death was highly suspicious
Out of all the celebrity death conspiracy theories, Marilyn Monroe's death is one of the most suspicious and most often debated. (Second only, perhaps, to Elvis Presley.)
 
Monroe died on August 5, 1962 at the age of 36. Her death was ruled "acute barbiturate poisoning" by the LA County Coroner. Everyone agrees that Monroe died from an overdose of barbiturates, but there are enough inconsistencies in her death to raise suspicion. Several LAPD detectives were convinced at the time she was murdered, and the suspicious circumstances of her death remain a perennial topic today.
 
First, the conventional explanation. Monroe had developed a serious dependency on Nembutol, a barbiturate which is so lethal that it is used today to euthanize animals and as one of several drugs used to execute prisoners in the United States. 
 
Monroe's dependency had grown so bad that her doctor was trying to wean her off the stuff and onto chloral hydrate (which is so dangerous that it is has not been approved for use by the FDA or in Europe). Ostensibly she took the drugs for insomnia, but in reality it had gotten to the point where she was taking them around the clock.
 
It would be pretty easy for Monroe to have died due to an overdose, either accidental or intentional. However, there are a lot of inconsistencies in her death, and in the report given by the housekeeper Eunice Murray who was there at the time, and who cleaned up Monroe's room (including changing the linens) after finding her dead but before phoning the police to report the death.
 
Police noted that although they found empty pill bottles, there was no water glass at the scene of the crime. A water glass later appeared on the floor, in an area which the police claimed to have searched. Monroe had a well-known difficulty swallowing pills, and would often gag on them even if she had water. It's highly unlikely she would have dry-swallowed two entire bottles of pills.
 
Her internal organs did not show signs of Nembutal poisoning, which you would expect if she had swallowed the pills. This has led some people to believe that the drugs had been injected into her bloodstream. Although the county coroner was ordered to investigate, no record of his findings was kept. The toxicologist destroyed Monroe's organs after his initial report.
 
But who stood to gain from Monroe's death? One theory is that she had threatened to go public about her affair with John F. Kennedy, and that she was presumably killed by the Secret Service to keep her quiet. Another theory is that she was killed by the Illuminati because, aging and increasingly insane, she had outlived her usefulness to the Hollywood machine.
 

Did "holding it" kill Tycho Brahe?

New evidence seems to rule out mercury poisoning
I had always heard that famed 16th century astronomer Tycho Brahe had been poisoned by mercury, perhaps by his main rival, Johannes Kepler. But I recently learned that not only is the mercury belief unfounded, but researchers think Brahe most likely died from having to pee. Sadly, one of the world's greatest minds may have died from an excess of politeness.
 
When Tycho Brahe, a Danish nobleman, attended a royal banquet in October, 1601, etiquette kept him from excusing himself to use the facilities. As the story goes, his bladder ruptured as a result of the excessive pressure, and he died from the ensuing infection.
 
At the time, Brahe's physician reported that he died from kidney stones. It certainly seems marginally more plausible that Brahe would have died from being unable to urinate due to a blockage. 
 
However, several sources online have pointed out that it isn't actually possible to rupture your bladder simply by "holding it." In the case of voluntarily refusing to urinate, eventually your body's reflexes will take over, and you will wet your pants. In the case of a physical blockage (like a kidney stone), the urine will back up into the kidneys, and the kidneys will fail first.
 
The mercury rumors came about from an exhumation of Brahe's corpse in 1901. It's not known how exactly the investigators decided that Brahe had been killed by mercury, but a recent exhumation showed that, although Brahe had a certain amount of mercury in his system, it was far less than a recent dose. And tests of his beard hairs showed that he had been exposed to less mercury in his last two weeks of life than he had been previously.
 
Aside from being famous as an early astronomer who was able to make precise measurements of stars and planets, for cataloguing over 1,000 stars, and for hiring Johannes Kepler (who went on to become a famous astronomer in his own right) as his assistant, Brahe is known for having had a metal prosthetic nose. Brahe's own nose had been cut off in a dueling accident, and the legend had always been that Brahe's replacement nose was made of silver. 
 
But in fact, recent analysis of his facial bones proved that Tycho Brahe's nose had been made of brass. Perhaps a sensible choice since, unlike silver, brass is resistant to tarnishing. (You wouldn't want to have to scrub your nose with silver polish every week.)

The mystery of India's Skeleton Lake

Hundreds of skeletons found dead of unknown causes
In the midst of WWII, a British forest guard came across an alarming sight in the northern mountains of India: hundreds of human skeletons surrounding a high alpine lake. At the time, the British military worried that the skeletons might have been from Japanese soldiers trying to sneak into British territory, so they sent a squad of archaeologists out to examine the remains.
 
Roopkund, known as the "Skeleton Lake," is located in an uninhabited area of the Himalayas, near the intersection of India, Tibet, and Nepal. The lake is at 16,500 feet above sea level, and the extreme cold temperatures and lack of human contact helped preserve the skeletal remains (and some bits of skin and hair) for hundreds of years.
 
What the archaeologists quickly concluded was that the skeletons were ancient, dating to about 850 AD. They came from two groups of people: a group of people who were closely related (either a large family or a small tribe), and a smaller group of shorter people. Based on the way they were dressed, as ascertained from remains like metal rings and durable spears, the archaeologists decided that the skeletons belonged to a large group of people who had been traveling through the mountains. The related people were the travelers, and the group of shorter people were presumed to be their hired local guides and porters. The travelers had stopped at this remote, high mountain lake, probably to refill their water supplies and rest. And then they had all died.
 
At the time, guesses ranged from ritual suicide to landslide and even an sudden epidemic. But in 2004 an expedition did further analysis and came to an interesting finding about the bizarre cause of death.
 
The cause of death was the same for everyone: blows to the skull, but not from any ordinary weapons. All of the blows had been caused by hard, spherical objects, and all had landed on the head and shoulders, as if coming from directly above the travelers. 
 
The scientists concluded that the culprit was a freak hailstorm, one which dropped hailstones the size of baseballs on the travelers. The lake is barren, with no rocky outcroppings or trees where you would be able to take shelter, which means that a sudden barrage of giant hailstones could turn lethal for the entire party.
 
Still unanswered is the question of who this large group of people was, and why they were traveling through the Himalayas. The forbidding area is on no known trade routes, and is far from the nearest human settlement.

Oklahoma tornado conspiracy theories

Thanks again to Alex Jones for fueling the fires of American paranoia
Whenever a disaster strikes, the conspiracy theory crowd manages to churn out a conspiracy theory within a few hours, no matter how preposterous. 
 
By the way, I recently read an interesting blog post (I wish I could find it now...) about what is so toxic about the "false flag" argument. It essentially takes a tragedy about other people and coopts it so that it becomes a tragedy about yourself. 
 
Take the Boston Marathon: the bombing is a tragedy that struck hundreds of other people, killing three of them. That's pretty bad, but it has nothing to do about me personally. 
 
Now let's say that I argue that the Boston Marathon bombing was a false flag operation designed to ultimately take away our freedoms. And presto: I have managed to make the Boston Marathon bombing be all about ME. 
 
There are some people who insist that the entire world actually revolves around themselves. This is a great example of how they twist their worldview so that everything that happens is actually something to do with them.
 
Anyway, on to the tragedy of the giant tornado that demolished Moore, Oklahoma. The core of this theory is that it was caused by the HAARP antenna array, because of course it was. Alex Jones is fine with propagating this particular conspiracy theory, although even he is somewhat tentative about it. Is it possible that we have finally found the line that even Alex Jones won't cross?
 
Under our new lens, we can see that conspiracy theories about HAARP are a way to make the weather - which most people would consider to be an indifferent, uncaring force of nature - all about you. It's not a random act of weather, it's a conspiracy designed by the government to keep you under control.
 
Why would the American government deliberately destroy one of its own towns with a tornado? The main theory here is that it's a diversion tactic to distract people from the scandals that have been piling up lately, including the Benghazi hearings, the IRS targeting the Tea Party, and various other items of right wing outrage.
 
Here's the thing about the HAARP antenna array. You can tell it can't control the weather, because we are not controlling the weather. Huge storms, devastating droughts, and even more devastating seasonal floods have hit American cities in the last decade. Why would our government attack our own cities with its own weather controller? Why not ensure that our own weather is pleasant all around (thus minimizing expense, loss of life, and crop damage) while attacking other countries with bad weather? If the HAARP antenna array worked, why is the weather in Afghanistan, Iraq, and North Korea so stable?
 

Sylvia Browne gets it catastrophically wrong

Claimed Amanda Berry was dead

In an interesting coincidence, last week I read Jon Ronson's Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries. One of the chapters covered a cruise that featured celebrity psychic Sylvia Browne. 

Ronson was scathing on the topic of Browne's utter lack of success. Browne once told a grieving parent of a missing child that her child had been sold into sex slavery in Japan, when in truth the girl had been killed the same night she was snatched. Another time, she told parents that their child was dead, when he had actually been abducted and imprisoned in an apartment in a nearby town. Shawn Hornbeck was found alive almost five years later… no thanks to Sylvia Browne.
 
Why is Browne's advice (and the advice of so many other psychics) so toxic? Because it can cause families to give up hope and stop looking. Which is exactly what happened in the case of Amanda Berry, whose mother consulted with Browne to help with Berry's disappearance. 
 
In 2004, Sylvia Browne (a regular guest on the Montel Williams show) told Amanda Berry's mother, Louwana Miller, that her daughter was dead and that she (Sylvia) was in contact with her ghost. Louwana Miller died a year later of a heart attack; her friends and family say she died of a broken heart, due to her belief that her daughter was dead.
 
Of course, as we now know, Amanda Berry was not dead. She was one of three Cleveland women who had been imprisoned as sex slaves in the home of Ariel Castro. Maybe if Louwana Miller hadn't given up hope, maybe if she hadn't been told that her daughter was dead, she would have kept up the search. It's hard to say.
 
Last week Sylvia Browne issued a statement along the lines of, "Hey, my bad. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes." But Browne's bad psychic reading was more than a "mistake." It was a corrosive lie with severe real world consequences.
 
I find it interesting that Browne is trying to frame it as being similar to the mistakes made by lawyers, doctors, and other professionals. Browne is right that those professionals do sometimes make mistakes. And when they do, their clients sue them for malpractice. 
 
I wonder, can you sue a self-proclaimed psychic for malpractice? It's true that, as Browne proclaims, "Only God is right all the time." But when Skeptical Inquirer ran an analysis of the 115 predictions she made on the Montel Williams show, they found that she had a success rate of exactly 0.00%. Browne may claim that nobody's perfect, but she does have a perfect failure record, that's for sure.

Cannibalism at Jamestown, VA

Jamestown settlers had to resort to dire methods to survive

Ten years before the Thanksgiving feast to celebrate the bounty at Plymouth, the Jamestown settlers were trying to eke out a living on a malarial, brackish island with little arable land. Despite the many setbacks faced by the Jamestown colony, our country's founding settlers struggled on despite their travails. After all, they had little choice.

Many settlers died in those early years. And new evidence has come to light that those few who survived did so by cannibalizing the remains of those who died.
 
The worst year at Jamestown was the 1609-1610 winter, known as the "starving time." Out of 500 colonists, only 61 survived the winter. The settlers had arrived too late in the year to plant crops, were not accustomed to the hard labor required to build a settlement from scratch, and had very few supplies.
 
Initially, the local Native Americans greeted the Jamestown settlers with feasts and gifts of food. But as the settlers grew more desperate, they became more belligerent and arrogant toward the Native Americans, aggressively demanding food and supplies from their neighbors.
 
There have been rumors and written accounts of cannibalism at Jamestown, but little physical corroboration until last week. A group of archaeologists working on a trash pit at the original Jamestown location unearthed the skeletal remains of a 14-year-old girl. Analysis showed clear evidence that her flesh and brains had been removed from her bones, butcher style.
 
According to the man who was president at Jamestown during the starving time, the villages resorted to digging up corpses in order to eat them. Most likely, this girl had died (of unknown causes) and been buried, then disinterred for the dinner pot. 
 
The girl had most likely been the daughter of a gentleman, and probably arrived at the colony in August of 1609 aboard a supply ship. She would only have lived in Jamestown for a few months before dying and being cannibalized. 
 
As for how her remains came to be discarded in a trash pile, blame the colony's saviors. When relief ships finally arrived in the spring, they were greeted by 60 near-skeletal remaining colonists. The captain of the relief fleet, Lord De La Warr (for whom the state of Delaware is named) had all of the grisly remains - not just human, but the scattered bones of their cats, dogs, and horses the colonists killed for food - swept aside and dumped into the same refuse pile.

Boston Marathon Bombing conspiracy theories

In any disaster, conspiracy theorists are quick to respond (with conspiracy theories)

Any time there is a big disaster in America, the conspiracy theories start flying almost immediately. In the case of the Boston Marathon bombing, conspiracies initially took a back seat to mob justice, as inexperienced and unqualified users on sites like Reddit leaped in and began identifying random strangers as the bombers.

Once this excitement faded and everyone sheepishly realized that they were dead wrong (and that our conventional law enforcement techniques are actually fairly useful when employed by traditional law enforcement personnel) the topic of conversation turned to What Really Happened and Who Really Did It.

For a brief moment, right after the bombing happened, some people instantly denied that it had happened at all. Many people claim that the bombings were a hoax, or that it had all been staged. Subsequent evidence and the overwhelming amount of first-person testimony has done nothing to quiet this crowd.
 
Next we have the inevitable cries of "false flag operation." This is a term which is used almost exclusively by conspiracy theorists. Here's how a false flag operation works: let's say that I sell anti-tiger insurance. "I don't have a tiger problem," you might say. I then sneak into your neighbor's house in the dead of night and release a tiger into their bedroom. I come back the next day and use the attack at the neighbor's house as leverage to get you to buy my insurance.
 
False flag operations are, like tiger attacks in suburban American homes, very rare. (In fact it is a phenomena which is almost exclusively limited to the fictional world of conspiracy theories.) It's easy to see why: false flag operations are a huge amount of effort, with a colossal risk of things going wrong. It also presumes that The People In Charge are so malevolent that they will cheerfully bomb a bunch of their own civilians in order to make a political point. Which, I have no love for the government, but seriously people.  
 
The odious Alex Jones seems to be the main proponent of the current round of Boston Marathon conspiracy theories. Jones claims to have uncovered evidence that the bombings were staged, that the Tsarnev brothers were set up, and that the whole thing was meticulously constructed in order to take away more civil liberties from honest God-fearing Americans. (In other words: your run of the mill Alex Jones diatribe.)
 
As always, it seems that for some people, it's easier to believe in a vast and evil conspiracy than it is to believe that two guys with a pressure cooker could wreak so much damage on so many innocent people for no good reason whatsoever. Gotta say… I empathize.
 

Baal's April blood sacrifice

The conspiracy theory behind our bloody week

If the events of last week - including the bombing in Boston and the fertilizer plant explosion in Waco - seemed horrible beyond imagination, some people are claiming that they are not in fact random happenstance. The end of April (April 19 through May 1) is reportedly The Rites of Baal, a period of time in which believers are urged to make blood sacrifice to Baal, who is often equated to Satan. 

There is a list floating around the internet (I found it here, but I have seen it many places in the last week) of violent, tragic acts which have occurred at the end of April in the last twenty years. These include the siege at Waco (note the coincidence of location), the Oklahoma City bombing, the Columbine massacre, the Virginia Tech massacre, and more.
 
Of course, one could argue that this is a classic example of selection bias, in much the same way that the Bermuda Triangle doesn't really exist. Draw a triangle anywhere on the map and you will find huge numbers of ship and airplane disasters that happen inside its boundaries. Choose two weeks of the calendar and you can quickly compile a list of horrors that seem unrelated on the surface.
 
Baal is a sun god who demands bloody sacrifice - ideally involving incineration - in exchange for riches and power. It is clear that people have in the past worshiped Baal in this way. In fact, Baal-worship is mentioned in the Bible. Jeremiah 19.5: "They have built the high places of Baal to burn their children in the fire as offerings to Baal." 
 
According to this theory, these large violent events (like the Columbine massacre) are carried out as secret sacrifices to Baal. Instead of building an altar, the worshippers build pipe bombs and amass weapons stockpiles. And instead of sacrificing their own children, they arrange to have complete strangers sacrificed instead. 
 
As always, I am drawn to the logistics of this theory. When Harris and Kliebold walked through their school shooting everyone, neither one became rich and famous as a result. They both died, as was their original plan. Were they simply hired by someone who arranged the whole thing (and reaped the rewards of the sacrifice)? Does Baal accept sacrifice-by-proxy in this fashion? I thought that kind of thing went out with Papal indulgences in the middle ages. 
 
The sad truth is that sometimes it's more comforting to believe in a preposterously elaborate, secret and powerful conspiracy than to believe that sometimes bad people do bad things at random. 
 

 

Hermit burglar caught in Maine woods

The "North Pond Hermit" has finally been busted.

Christopher Knight was recently arrested in Maine at the age of 47 for a lengthy string of hundreds of burglaries going back for decades. Knight had taken to the woods at the age of 19, and had apparently been living out in the elements ever since, through blistering Maine summers and freezing Maine winters, with virtually zero human contact. (Once, in the 1990s, Knight passed someone on a hiking trail and exchanged "hello." That was the last time he had spoken to another human being, until his recent arrest.)

Police have been unable to contact Knight's family, and Knight (unsurprisingly) does not seem to be particularly talkative. It's too bad, because a lot of people have a lot of questions about how Knight has spent the last 28 years. Not to mention why he decided to give up on society at the tender age of 19 and live in the woods alone in the first place.
 
A game warden found Knight's camp, hidden deep in the woods, after capturing Knight on a trail cam. (Knight himself was captured while stealing supplies, and gave up without a struggle.) Knight's camp was covered in tarps to keep things dry, and featured propane tanks and batteries. Knight never made fires, as they attract the interest of other people, and had strictly used propane for cooking. He kept warm by bundling himself in layers of blankets and sleeping bags during the coldest weather. Reportedly, Knight had been a fan of news, a local rock station, and right wing talk radio shows.
 
Although many may admire Knight for his solitude and fortitude, and others might admire his survival skills, it must be pointed out that Knight had survived by stealing thousands of dollars worth of food and equipment from local cabins and a nearby summer camp for special needs children. However, he had managed to keep his appearance fairly tidy, and had somehow been able to struggle through decades of Maine's difficult climate.
 
Local lore had long held forth on the existence of a hermit in the nearby woods, but many people scoffed at the idea. Personally, I'm sure that Knight isn't the only person who has dropped out of society to live in the woods. And I have long suspected that hermits like Knight - secretive; perhaps clothed in shaggy animal skins - are the basis for many Sasquatch sightings.
 

Is the flu vaccine being used to control your mind?

Who knows what's in those syringes!

There are a lot of claims about the mandatory vaccines including the seasonal flu vaccine, but perhaps the wildest claim is that the government is using the vaccine as a secret mind control device. 

These fears have risen in response to the increased availability of flu vaccines, because until the last few decades, only children were routinely immunized. It's one thing to be able to control and/or track the youth of your nation, but obviously if you are going to run a respectable dystopic totalitarian nightmare shadow government, you need to implant this ability in adult citizens as well. Thus, the seasonal push to vaccinate adult Americans against a dangerous and highly communicable virus is framed as a heavy-handed measure to institute controls on the adult population.
 
The flu vaccine is also demonized because it is seen as one of the ways in which the government "touches" every citizen once a year. The problem with that theory is that the flu vaccine is neither created nor distributed by the government. Off the top of my head, IRS forms and annual car license tabs are much more direct annual routes to infection. 
 
The purported method of the mind control varies by conspiracy. According to one theory, vaccines contain "miniscule tracking devices" which "act as beacons for various satellites." The flu vaccine doesn't just protect you from seasonal influenza threats; it also allows the government to track your every move. Why the government would want this ability is never made clear. I guess it will make it easier for the Terminators to track down the last remaining rebel forces.
 
In a variation of this belief, the implant is a secret ID chip that only the government can detect. (This seems like an unnecessarily technical solution to the problem of citizen identification, given that we all have fingerprints and DNA which can easily be tracked and collated.)
 
This four minute video purports to show the other form of threat being injected along with your flu vaccine: chemical means of controlling behavior. The video claims to be a clip of a presentation given at the Pentagon, but it has been widely debunked as a complete fabrication. Even if this were a real presentation, there's a wide gulf between "I'm giving a presentation to a mostly-empty room at the Pentagon" and "we have created and deployed this method of mind control." 
 
(Besides, why would you want to dampen down people's religious spirits? I would think that doing so would also dampen their patriotism. I doubt any government would want to inoculate its own citizenry against patriotic thoughts.)

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