A little common sense goes a long way. It’s quite astonishing, some of the stories that get shared between people as fact. Often, just taking a few moments to think about them will make them seem highly unlikely. We can also do some really basic checking of stories and sites to get an idea of whether we should be paying any attention to them.
I’m going to post a few questions and then share some thoughts about how to assess whether the questions are likely true or not.
Do Sans-Serif Fonts Mean Economic Ruin?
Do you ever find yourself getting irritated by something and then telling yourself that you won’t let it get to you? And then it does?
This does it for me. The claim that sans-serif fonts lead to low levels of understanding compared to serif fonts really scrolls my nurd.
Because of my work, I’ve come across this claim quite regularly and repeated by people I otherwise consider to be super-smart. It’s quite different to the other claims we’re going to pick apart, but I’m including it because of the way it’s presented. The claim is part of a book published in 1995 with the title “Type & layout : how typography and design can get your message across–or get in the way” by Colin Wheildon.1 The book is based on a white paper he published in 1990, called “Communicating or just making pretty shapes”.2
In case you’re not familiar with the difference between serif and sans-serif fonts, serif fonts have little flicks at the end of most strokes.
I’ll quickly summarise how the test was carried out in case you’ve not read the full explanation. The 112 test subjects were given an article set in a sans-serif font and asked to read it. They were then asked questions about what they’d read. They were then given another article set in a serif font and asked to read it, again being asked questions after to assess their understanding of what they read.
Wheildon found that when test subjects read an article that used a serif font, 67% showed good comprehension and just 14% showed poor comprehension, the remainder showed fair comprehension. By contrast, when the same subjects read an article that used a sans-serif font, just 12% showed good comprehension and 65% showed poor comprehension. So, according to Wheildon, five times as many people show good comprehension when a serif font is used compared to a sans-serif font.
This is about using common sense to assess whether we should believe a claim or not. So, with your experience of reading material that uses both serif and sans-serif fonts, do you notice a difference? Do you notice friends or family struggle with text written in sans-serif fonts?
No, of course you don’t. Sans-serif fonts are used all over the place, in everything from adverts to user guides to technical books.
If this claim was correct, the economic effects would be huge. Do you think that over the course of 100s of years, big businesses wouldn’t have worked it out?
Every time they ran an ad using a serif font, it would be five times as successful. Every time businesses gave staff manuals printed in serif, five times as many staff would comply compared to when manuals were printed in sans-serif fonts.
Big businesses are always looking to maximise their profits. They test these things and with modern technology, even small businesses can easily A/B test. Patterns like this would have been recognised long ago in the pursuit of profit. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and countless other huge corporations would all be using nothing but serif fonts on their websites and in their marketing material, yet the reality is that sans-serif fonts tend to dominate.
To suggest that sans-serif fonts cause such poor comprehension simply isn’t plausible.
So how did Colin Wheildon’s study end up with these implausible results? If you read the book or white paper, he presents his work in a way that looks quite scientific, superficially anyway. In reality, it falls short. A proper scientific study should explain the full process so that anyone else can repeat the test and replicate the results.
With this test, we don’t know how many questions were asked, whether there was a time limit and there’s no indication of how the answers were assessed to place subjects in the good, fair or poor categories. Were the subjects warned in advance that they would be asked questions to assess how much they understood or were the questions a surprise?
Obviously, it wasn’t a well-planned or executed study, but that doesn’t explain how the test found readers struggled so badly to understand text presented in a sans-serif font. However, I shared the explanation above. It’s easy to miss, but the explanation is in the paragraph where the test is summarised.
Imagine you are one of the 112 test subjects. I hand you an article printed on a piece of paper using a sans-serif font and ask you to read it. You finish and hand it back to me and I then ask you a series of questions about what you just read. You hadn’t expected that and now realise you hadn’t really been concentrating, which explains why you don’t know the answers to most of the questions. Now I hand you another article printed using a serif font and ask you to read it. This time you assume you’re going to be asked questions about this article too, so you concentrate and do your best to memorise as much as possible. After taking the paper back from you, I do indeed ask you questions and you do a much better job, answering most of the questions correctly.
Based on what Wheildon says in his book and white paper, every single test subject was given the sans-serif article first. Even if they knew questions were coming, they’d still be better prepared for the questions after the serif article, because the questions after the sans-serif article would have helped them understand the kind of things they’d be asked.
If the test had randomised the order the fonts were presented, as we’d expect in a truly scientific study, the results for each font type would have been much the same.
So how come so many people overlook the obvious failings of the study and repeat claims that just aren’t plausible when we view the stated results?
Probably because the information is in a published book.
We naturally assume the information must be valid just because of that, and remember the book was first published in 1995, long before the days of Print-On-Demand meant anyone could be a published book author. The validity of the book is further supported by it having a foreword written by David Ogilvy, perhaps not a name you know, but a rockstar in the world of advertising. The result is readers take the claim that serif fonts are the better choice without even registering how implausible the quoted results are. And once a few respected readers start repeating the claim, it becomes truth as more people who have never read the book also repeat the claim to others.
That’s the lesson to learn, don’t be guided by how or where information is presented, be guided by whether the information seems to make sense. Just because we read something in a book, rather than it being spray painted on a wall, doesn’t automatically make it more trustworthy. We need to use our own experience to sense-check and if something doesn’t feel right, try and work out why.
Before pressing on, if you’re interested in seeing a better example of a scientific study into how different fonts can affect readers, a study called “If It’s Hard to Read, It’s Hard to Do”3 is quite interesting. And if you came into this believing serif fonts are more comprehensible and I haven’t convinced you otherwise, Mary Dyson goes deep on this subject in her free book, Legibility.4
Do Masks Stop Covid 19 From Spreading?
No-one likes paying taxes do they? During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments were throwing huge amounts of money at trying to reduce cases and treating those who were infected. That money came from taxpayers, so surely every taxpayer would want to do all that they could personally to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The less it spreads, the less money has to be spent dealing with it.
Sounds simple, yes? Yet across many societies, there were groups of people who argued against wearing face masks. Often the same people who complain about big government and how it wastes money. At its base, it generally seemed to be people who felt their personal liberties were being trampled on. I understand that feeling to a degree, but also feel that as we live in societies, we should do what we can to help society as a whole, particularly when it’s something so minor as wearing a mask to cover our mouth and nose.
While most people initially complained about masks being an attack on personal liberty, many then focused on claims that masks didn’t prevent the spread of COVID-19 to justify their position.
I did a quick search and the first page of results would have given us a 90% to 10% split supporting masks in the GTH Question simulator – the one result that didn’t find a clear result in favour also came with caveats from the authors.
But forget about that, we’re focusing on using common sense to help us assess what is most likely to be true.
Have you seen the MIT photos of sneezing that show the droplets we blast into the air? How gross is that? In case you don’t have the internet right now, trust me that it is gross. The series of piccies show an expanding cloud of…euuuurggghh…being blasted from someone’s mouth and nose to fill large parts of the air for feet in front of them. That is not a space you or I wish to be stood in.
Obviously, someone who’s correctly wearing a mask when they sneeze is going to reduce or with some masks completely block that spray blasting out into the air that other people are breathing.
If everyone wears a mask, the amount of virus floating in the air will be reduced. If there’s less virus in the air, the chances of people catching the virus are reduced. And if they’re wearing masks, it makes it harder for the virus to enter too, with just the soft tissue around the eyes exposed to the air, so even further reducing the chance of transmission.
It’s so obvious, a child can understand it. It’s impossible for an intelligent and rational person to argue against. Someone’s really got to throw themselves into some advanced mental gymnastics to argue against something that’s so clear to see.
Conspiracy Theories
People love conspiracy theories. They work because they’re great stories and also because they can’t be proven wrong. They rely on the premise that the truth is being hidden from us and it’s impossible to prove otherwise because the theory believers will always insist the generally accepted reality is a lie.
It offers the believers a feeling of power, being on the inside and knowing something that others don’t. Unfortunately, in most cases, it’s almost certainly an illusion of knowledge.
In reality, the world is incredibly random and full of coincidences, but we don’t like random and coincidences. They make us feel uncomfortable and we’re instinctively always looking for patterns in everything to try and make the world seem less chaotic and scary. We see animals in the clouds and Jesus’ face on a slice of toast and a distant sniper in a police uniform on the grassy knoll.5
If we stop and take a few moments to consider various conspiracy theories, it’s remarkable how many really make no sense. They’re as ridiculous as the claim that five times as many people will understand something that’s written in a serif font or that black people in the UK are five times as likely to commit crime as white people (based on prison populations relative to the general population).
9/11
On 11 September 2001, almost 3,000 people were killed in terrorist attacks on targets in the USA.6 The attacks were carried out by the Al-Qaeda terrorist group, but that didn’t stop various claims of a conspiracy involving the US government or official US agencies.
There’s a mix of claims, some suggesting elements within the US orchestrated the whole attack, while others believe the attacks were known about by some in the US, who ensured the attacks were successful.
Whichever is the preferred theory, they both generally assume the end goal was to give the US the grounds to wage war against Afghanistan and Iraq, or possibly to justify war against Muslims in general.
Immediately after the attacks, Iraq really wasn’t on the radar. Al-Qaeda were identified as responsible and only later did Iraq hit the headlines when it was wrapped up in the Axis of Evil, along with North Korea and Iran. Even then, it only got attacked when questionable intelligence arose about the country developing weapons of mass destruction.
There was no need to kill 3,000 people to justify war with Iraq, the weapons of mass destruction argument was always going to have that one nailed down.
How about war with Afghanistan then? In 2001 Afghanistan had an economy worth less than $2.5 billion. Granted it was home to Al-Qaeda and the group’s leader Osama Bin Laden, but surely that was as good a place as anywhere to know you’ve got a load of terrorists holed up. As long as they’re not presenting a threat, why go to the trouble of fighting a war in a country that had not so long ago defeated the forces of The Soviet Union?
What’s the motivation for starting a war with Afghanistan? Okay, that’s not an unexpected response. The military-industrial complex wants more money and when you fight a war you need more money.
It’s a reasonable point, but why does the military want more money? They want to buy new toys. More modern and more advanced weapons to add to their arsenal. But when you’re fighting a war, there’s not an abundance of time to worry about newer and better weapons, the focus is often just getting sufficient volume of what works and then using it. The last thing the military wants is a hot war. If they want to get more money to buy better weapons, they want to start a cold war. Build up concern and worry and apprehension about a dangerous enemy who could attack at any time. That’s how they get the money for new toys.
Well, maybe it was industry who orchestrated the attacks. Feels like a longer shot for private businesses to pull off on their own, particularly as the new toys route is much more attractive to them too. There’s big money in developing new and advanced weapons that old and established weapons just don’t offer. The older a weapon is, the more the profit margins get squeezed as other potential suppliers can offer competing stock.
With the development of new weapons, all sorts of wonderful things can happen for the manufacturer. Consider the US Air Force’s F-22 fighter jets. Originally planned to cost $149 million each, their manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, made $412 million each in the end.7 That program seems pretty efficient when compared to the program to develop the B-2 bomber that started in the 1980s. A $40 billion program intended to secure at least 135 aircraft, resulted in just 20 bombers delivered.8 Clearly, cold wars are much better for producing exciting new weapons and at higher prices too.
The many years of war in Afghanistan are predicted to have cost the USA $2.313 trillion.9 Just think what they could have bought with all that money if they hadn’t been wasting it on an ultimately pointless war in Afghanistan.
Still, maybe they did just want an excuse to fight Muslims, but why Afghanistan if that’s the case?
15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were citizens of Saudi Arabia and Al-Qaeda’s leader, Bin Laden, was also a Saudi Arabian citizen. Unlike Afghanistan with its economy revolving around poppy farming and goat herding10 (there was a reason I mentioned the size of their economy earlier), in 2001 Saudi Arabia’s economy was worth about $170.5 billion.11 Oh, and the two holiest sites in Islam are in the country too.
If 9/11 was all about kicking Muslim butt, wouldn’t Saudi Arabia have made a much more tempting proposition?
Like all the best conspiracy theories, the different ideas put forward make for great stories like a Hollywood blockbuster. But common sense shows us the narrative has been formed to fit around the events.
Conspiracy or Creative Writing?
A good conspiracy theory will have a plot that even the Hawaii Five-O reboot would have struggled to pull off without the audience rolling their eyes.
It really is an opportunity for people to get creative and let their imaginations run free. If you look into the birth of QAnon, it was basically one person expressing themself through creative writing. It then grew into something so huge, it seems to have a finger in just about every conspiracy theory pie, even attempting to resurrect President Kennedy and his son John F. Kennedy Jr.
There’s so much to take in, let’s just focus on the Pizzagate/Illuminati mashup that claims a group of the rich and famous are killing children for their adrenalin. Sounds like a cracking good yarn doesn’t it? Actually, if I recall, it doesn’t seem too far removed from the plot of a Stephen Leather book, San Francisco Night. Anyway, considered at its most basic, this is a theory about a gang of serial killers. Remembering that people are people, let’s apply some simple common sense to the theory.
So, what do we know about serial killers? Yeah, okay that’s good, serial killers are naughty. Not quite what I was looking for though…umm…I was kind of thinking about the fact that most serial killers are loners.12 Psychopaths operating on their own for their own gratification. That isn’t exclusively the case though, but when it isn’t, groups tend to be small, often just two, and there may be a family connection. In the cases where serial killers have formed larger groups, it’s often for financial gain or some shared political ideology, rather than self-gratification.
This shouldn’t be a surprise, the fact that it’s unusual for serial killers to team up.
How do you find other serial killers?
And even assuming you think you have found one, it’s a bit of a gamble just introducing yourself and suggesting you have something in common, killing innocent people.
Come on, let’s role-play. Let me introduce you to little Johnny Treaclemagnet, a 13-year-old on a journey of self-discovery.
Here he is now, as he…ooh my, is he doing what I think he is…oooeuurghh, he is too. Well, this feels a bit uncomfortable and voyeuristic, but I can hardly be blamed for dropping in on him during such a moment of intimacy. A moment where his short breaths are coming quickly and sharply, driven by his excitement as he runs the tips of his fingers over the lacy cups of the bra. His fingers dart inside one cup and brush against crushed toilet tissue and “I’m home!”
Sheer panic takes over Johnny. He starts scrabbling wildly at the catch of the bra, wondering why they have to put them at the back.
“Johnny? Are you home, Johnny?”
“I’m in the bathroom mum, I’ll be out in a moment,” he says as he finally releases the catch of Sandra’s bra and flings it back into the laundry basket. Gathering all the tissue paper, he flings it into the bowl and flushes, while simultaneously zipping his fly shut. The bowl starts to fill with water and Johnny attacks the clump of tissue paper with the toilet brush. After a moment, the water slowly starts to drain and then suddenly forces all the paper through the bend. His heart pumping like a steam engine, Johnny tries to calm himself as he unlocks and opens the door, his hands clearly trembling a little. Best strike a casual pose with hands in pockets, Johnny thinks to himself.
Well, that was rather a close call. You see, Johnny Treaclemagnet has a little peccadillo, he likes to…sorry, what was that? Um, er, sorry say that again, I think I might have misheard you…
☉_☉
…
☉_☉
…oh, of course, you’re thinking of an armadillo. No, a peccadillo is like a little kink. Unlike an armadillo. An armadillo would be a very big kink. Major league Marquis de Sade level kind of a kink, in fact.
So Johnny Treaclemagnet’s little kink is to stuff toilet tissue into the cups of one of his older sister’s bras and wear it while brushing the ferret. You get my drift?
No. Okay, he likes to wear her bra while splashing the holy water.
Yes? No.
He likes to run his finger over the lacy fabric while he’s choking the cobra. Are we on the same page now?
Okay then, when he’s throttling the turkey?
When he’s piping the icing?
When he’s stirring the butter churn?
When he’s spanking the monkey?
When he’s mixing a smoothie?
When he’s waltzing the worm?
When he’s chucking the custard?
When he’s introducing Mr Slaphead to the world?
When he’s fanning the gerbils?
When he’s shaking a milkshake?
When he’s saluting Captain Spanky?
When he’s taking milky tea with Mrs Bratwurst and her boys?
When he’s splashing the tadpoles?
When he’s riding the private pogo stick?
When he’s battering the bongos?
When he’s flinging the frankfurter?
When he’s warming up the mic?
When he’s summoning the genie?
When he likes to Roger without Rachel?
Right, fine, let me make myself completely crystal clear.
Johnny Treaclemagnet likes wearing his sister’s bra when he’s masturbating. He enjoys fondling the lacy fabric of a girl’s bra when he’s masturbating. This really isn’t the golden generation when it comes to the art of euphemism, is it?
Anyway, I want you to imagine that you are Johnny Treaclemagnet. How on earth are you going to meet someone else locally with a shared interest in your private pursuit? What you gonna do? Post on Facebook? Craigslist, perhaps? Or go all old-skool and put a poster on a noticeboard at school explaining your kink and inviting others of a similar persuasion to join you in an after-school club to celebrate your shared interest?
No, of course not. If it’s awkward for serial killers to meet others to socialise with, this scenario is arguably on a whole different level. But let’s inject a little bit of random good fortune into the mix to move things along, I’ve a point to make after all.
So, Johnny Treaclemagnet is caught drawing graffiti on the door of a toilet cubicle at his school. Part of your punishment is to clean all of the graffiti off the door you wrote on. Armed with the cleaning products the caretaker has provided, you head back to the scene of the crime and kick open the door of the cubicle.
“What the fudge?”
It’s Josiah Crutchmuncher, only the weediest, most pathetic kid in the whole school sat on the pan with his erect penis in hand.
“But what the fudge, part two?!”
He’s wearing a black Reebok sports bra (surely stuffed with toilet tissue) over his shirt. Or is it a ghost of Josiah Crutchmuncher? He looks pure white.
Crutchmuncher’s eyes meet yours only briefly before turning up to the heavens as if seeking help from God (you’re not to know he’s trying to calculate whether the exposed pipework by the ceiling could take his weight for at least five minutes).
“It’s okay Crutchmuncher, I prefer a lacy bra myself,” you say as you pull one of your sister’s bras from the inside pocket of your jacket.
And so by a strange quirk of fate, you, little Johnny Treaclemagnet, have somehow chanced upon a kindred spirit who you can be honest and open with because you both now hold existential power over each other.
It’s perhaps one of the more unusual roleplaying exercises you’ll ever find yourself in, but I think it illustrates rather well the difficulty faced by just two serial killers joining together. Perhaps counterintuitively, it gets even harder though to bring more serial killers into the group.
Let’s rejoin Johnny Treaclemagnet and Josiah Crutchmuncher a couple of months later. All is not well with the founding members of the Brabation Society, following an incident witnessed by Crutchmuncher. One of the most popular boys in their year, Brad Anglegrinder Jnr, had dropped a bra from his pocket during an Art class, which he claimed must have got in there in the washing machine. He’d faced some ribbing from his friends, but Crutchmuncher’s convinced that Anglegrinder is another brabator and wants Treaclemagnet to agree to invite Anglegrinder to join their secret group.
Treaclemagnet is not so convinced though and is adamant that they can’t invite Anglegrinder, hence the tension currently existing between the pair. This is the problem faced in the rare situations where serial killers may work together. They both possess immense power over each other, in a way they could never have fully understood before they united. Having just one person hold such power over you can make you feel an extreme sense of jeopardy. It’s always going to be difficult to pass that power to one or more other people.
And what if Crutchmuncher is wrong and the bra really did just end up in that pocket in the washing machine? They’d be outing themselves. Every other kid in the school would know by lunchtime and their lives would effectively be over.
So really, how does anyone think more than 100 people joined together into a little cult to kill children for their adrenaline? That would have required more than 100 introductions to potential members asking them if they’d like to join a cult of serial child-killers. Every single introduction filled with the risk of having misjudged the person and them refusing. Every single introduction occurring with increasing jeopardy as more and more members’ lives are put at risk each time. And remember, these are people with a lot to lose. Some of the most powerful and influential in society.
And it’s not just the risk with every introduction. With modern mobile phones and the internet, everyone’s a paparazzo. Everyone makes mistakes. A group of more than 100 famous and closely watched people coming together to murder children is going to lead to a stupid up-cock sooner or later, and more likely sooner.
Do you remember the group of 100 people you visualised at the beginning of the book? How many of those do you think could possibly be open to the idea of killing children? Seriously, which one would you ask first? Go on, send them a text right now just to say you were thinking of them.
And even if you did get all 100 of them to join you in a Satanist child-killing cult, I bet you already know which ones will make the stupid mistakes that land all of you in prison for life or strapped to a gurney with an IV line of toxic chemicals in your arm.
Look, people are people. It’s just not plausible that such a large group of serial child killers could form, particularly among members of society who are so closely scrutinized on a daily basis.
Was The 2020 US Election Really Stolen?
At the end of 2023, almost a third of US voters believed that the 2020 Presidential election result was not legitimate.
Why have these people just rolled over? If they believed their democratic right to choose their president was denied them, why did they let the anti-democratic forces win?
This apathy within much of our societies is a huge threat to democracy which we’ll get to shortly.
First though, I’ve read and heard all sorts of claims of there being masses of evidence of electoral fraud. You’ve probably heard such claims yourself. Have you looked for the evidence yourself? Even if you’re not American, such claims of electoral fraud should still concern you. To remix a line from the Letter From Birmingham Jail13, anti-democratic acts anywhere are a threat to democracy everywhere.
If the powerful in one seemingly democratic society can rig a national election, the techniques could easily be copied and used to rig national elections in any other democratic society.
Before going any further, I know that for many people, the 2020 US Presidential election is a very emotive subject. Don’t see me as pro-Trump or pro-Biden, pro-Republican or pro-Democrat.
Donald Trump’s pro-heffalump, well he is a heffalump. Joe Biden’s pro-heffalump.
The Republican party prioritise the heffalumps. The Democratic party prioritise the heffalumps.
Trump’s an old man who appears to me to believe his ego is more important than the people he claims to want to serve. Biden’s an old man who appears to me to believe his ego is more important than the people he claims to want to serve.
All I’m interested in is using common sense to try and work out whether it’s likely the election was stolen from Trump or not.
Let’s just consider the likelihood based on what would have had to happen.
Trump, his campaign and others pressed legal claims alleging unlawful acts in the elections in Georgia, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Minnesota and Nevada. That’s eight different states that are claimed to have acted unlawfully to block Trump’s election as President. That would have had to have been a significant conspiracy. It would have involved multiple people in each of those states. How many do you think would be required to fix a state election? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?
In 2020, Georgia had 2,678 polling locations, New Mexico had 784, Wisconsin had 3,698, Michigan had 3,355, Pennsylvania had 9,235, Minnesota had 4,110 and Nevada had 196 (if I counted correctly).14 For Arizona, I had to go through the various county websites to try and find the polling locations, but less than half had the information available, which I tallied to 276, though there will have been more, maybe a lot more.15 Anyway, in total, there were at least 24,332 different polling places across those eight states.
Do you need at least one person in every polling place? It’s not like one person could have flicked a switch in one central place and made all the necessary changes. If that were the case, surely Fox News could have proven that for much less than the $787 million that they had to pay Dominion Voting Systems, the voting machine makers that sued Fox for defamation.
I really have no idea how many people would be required. If we say it would require just 5% of the polling places to be covered, that’s 1,216 people and we’re not including the high and mid-ranking public servants or the judges who must have been involved too.
To put this operation into effect, the organisers would have faced a similar problem to Johnny Treaclemagnet. Who should they ask to help? Just making one wrong choice out of those 1,216 people could have exposed the whole conspiracy. Yet, despite not only requiring the collusion of Democrats, but independents and Republicans too, every single person who was invited to help steal the election chose to join in. Or at least remain silent. Doesn’t that sound remarkable to you?
Or do you think they did pick a few wrong’uns, but just didn’t worry about it because it was just a case of one person’s word against another?
When I was a kid, Roger Moore was our James Bond. The Man of a Thousand Eyebrows they used to call him. He literally had two or three different eyebrow poses for every situation.16
Anyway, his Bond had great gadgets. In The Spy Who Loved Me it was a white Lotus Esprit that doubled as a submarine and fired anti-aircraft missiles out of the rear window. In Moonraker, I’m pretty sure he had a watch that fired a laser, and not for pointing at a Powerpoint slide on the wall. And in Thunderwall (still one of the greatest Bond themes that Oasis number…well, perhaps after Billie Eilish and Adele and those Scandi fellas who did Take On Me, though what was their Bond theme called? nope, it’s gone) he had a full-size grand piano that ingeniously concealed a “mini” computer. It also had a bottle opener, an emergency window breaker and a little glow-in-the-dark tritium insert to help Bond find it in the dark. The latter proving invaluable in the climactic scene as Bond tries to crack the code to the nuclear suitcase bomb in the roof space of the Royal Albert Hall, as Dr Toe’s last two cloned henchmen, Gallagher-L and Gallagher-N (appearing in alphabetical order in the surely forlorn hope of avoiding arguments), cut the power to the lighting circuit. Of course, that didn’t work out so well for Gallagher-L as he never saw the bottle opener coming or Gallagher-N as he never saw the window breaker coming. Or was it the other way around? And then in the final scene as it dissolves into the credits, as the piano autopilots the jet-propelled narrow boat down the Thames, Bond pulls some brain tissue off the bottle opener, cracks a cold one that he passes to Booby Galore and, with a masterful piece of eyebrow work, says “get your laughing gear around this,” and it’s not clear if he’s talking about the beer bottle or…well you have to remember, the 70s were a very different time. Sex abuse was basically seen as the sincerest form of flattery or a bit of harmless fun back then, unless you were two or more consenting male adults.
Fudge me, that was a sidetrack.
Anyway, the point now arriving at platform one is that in 2020 we were all carrying “mini” computers that fitted in our pocket which meant that with a couple of taps, we could be surreptitiously recording audio and/or video of anyone who made a request of us to enter into a plot to steal the election. We were much better-kitted out than James Bond ever was. Well, I don’t mean the later Bonds, of course, your Daniel Craig and Pierce Brosnan Bonds probably had smartphones too, though the latter’s probably at the dumber end of the scale. We were clearly better equipped than Roger Moore though, well except for the Lotus.
Do you buy it that anyone could pull off a conspiracy that relies on the help of so many people without asking multiple people who refuse to take part? And if that happened, wouldn’t you find it odd if absolutely none of those people got audio or video clearly exposing the conspiracy? And why weren’t these people shouting about the plot before the election and naming the conspirators?
We’d not be alone if we did feel that the evidence didn’t support the claims of a stolen election.
Ever heard of Ken Block of Sympatico Software Systems?17 He’s probably not a big name, but big enough for Donald Trump’s campaign to drop a wedge of cash on to find hard evidence of election fraud.
It would have been easy for Block to be vague and hint that maybe there were some things that didn’t look quite right. However, he was 100% clear that he and his team were unable to find any evidence supporting the claim of fraud.18
It’s also been reported that a second company, Berkeley Research Group, was also hired to look for evidence of voter fraud and again they found no supporting evidence.19 Considering Block’s company is reported to have been paid over $700,000 for the work, don’t you think Trump’s campaign would have taken action to recover the money if they believed Sympatico Software Systems had failed to conduct its research correctly? And the same for Berkeley Research Group, yet I can’t find any evidence suggesting any action against either company.
In Think Big And Kick Ass, Donald Trump’s 2007 book, he devoted an entire chapter to revenge. In his own words, “If you don’t get even, you are just a schmuck!”
So if Trump and his campaign knew the election was stolen and he paid more than $700,000 to one business to prove it, and you imagine a similar amount to the other, and they took his money and gave him nothing in return, don’t you think Trump would have gone crazy on them? That’s what he tells us he’d do in his book. Instead, he seems to have let them off as they laugh all the way to the bank. Why didn’t he destroy them to send a clear message to everyone else, when he knows doing nothing makes him a schmuck?
Only Trump can really know the truth, but here’s one more quote from the same chapter. “Always have a good reason to go after someone. Do not do it without a good reason.”
Anyway, while the opinion of two expert businesses seems compelling, the fight for democracy is too important not to look deeper into the claims. Educated professionals on Trump’s side were convinced that fraud was perpetrated and we can’t ignore that out of hand. Rudi Giuliani made a big difference to the city of New York during the years that he served as the Mayor, even becoming known as America’s Mayor for his response to the 9/11 attacks. He may have looked a bit sketchy lying back on that hotel room bed in that Borat film20, but he was a respected politician once and as such I believe has earned the right to be listened to. If he’s prepared to stake his reputation on a belief, don’t we owe it to him to listen?
He was involved in at least some of the court cases that we’re going to consider below, but perhaps his most significant intervention was his unsubstantiated claim that two election workers in Georgia had committed election fraud. Based on misrepresented video evidence, Guiliani repeatedly claimed that Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman were engaged in changing votes. Following a court hearing during which Guiliani never disputed that the claims were false, he was ordered to pay $148 million in damages to the two women.21
If he had solid proof of their guilt, why didn’t he present it in court to defend himself? And if he truly believed they had stolen the democratic rights of the American people, why didn’t he fight for justice for the people and argue strongly for what he believed? It may be worth noting that you can perjure yourself in a court of law, but not on a podcast, which seem to be Giuliani’s favourite outlet for sharing his claims.
Now, Sidney Powell I knew nothing of, but as a professional working in the legal industry, again we should listen to her claims too, shouldn’t we? Unfortunately, I don’t think she really helped her cause by outlining a conspiracy involving voting machines that were apparently created to rig elections for the dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.
Quite brilliantly, her defence against claims of defamation by the makers of the voting machines revolved around the claim that “No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.”22 I kid you not, her defence team apparently made that argument. In effect they seem to believe that it should be legal to slander and defame, as long you make your lies really big and outrageous. To me, that doesn’t sound too dissimilar to what Adolf Hitler believed.
The seeming improbability of the various claims made by Trump and those close to him probably goes a long way to explaining why they had so little luck in challenging election results in the courts.
Of 56 cases alleging various aspects of different state elections were unlawful, 53 saw the plaintiffs fail to prove their petition.23
Of the remaining three cases, two were in Pennsylvania, with Hamm vs Boockvar resulting in some ballots being segregated while their validity was considered24, and Donald J. Trump For President, Inc vs Boockvar which blocked the counting of segregated votes.25 One small thing to note is that the latter ruling seems to reference the wrong date for the earlier hearing. Could be a scrap of interest for the conspiracy theorists, though this was the one case that Trump’s campaign won and actually led to votes being discounted, though clearly not enough to make any difference in terms of the result.
That leaves us with one last case, which is still pending. The irony of that one though is that Trump’s the defendant, with the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization claiming he violated voter laws.26
Some will claim that the problem is corrupt judges ignoring overwhelming evidence. Considering what to many outsiders does appear to be a strangely politicised legal system in the US, could there be merit in that argument? Might it also go some way to explain how the US prison population has a disproportionate number of black inmates compared to the general population? On the latter question, I couldn’t say, but looking at the judges involved in the election results challenges, it doesn’t appear to be obviously driven by political affiliations. There are even judges nominated by Trump, including three Supreme Court Justices, who rejected the claims presented to them.
Still, can’t we do more to try and find evidence? And by evidence, I mean information that at least seems to strongly indicate interference and not just someone making a claim with no supporting evidence or using one fact to claim another is true.
Alex Jones spent years insisting that the Sandy Hook school shootings were faked, seemingly to help promote his own business that’s reported to have made him between $135 and $270 million. That carried on until, when under oath in court, he changed his tune and admitted the massacre was “100% real”. It’s much the same as Giuliani insisting two women in Georgia rigged election results until given the opportunity to prove it in court and he decides to offer no evidence instead.
People making unsubstantiated claims is not proof. It doesn’t matter how much we may like and respect them. Advertisers understand the power of celebrity. That’s why Dwayne Johnson can reportedly earn over $1 million for a single Instagram post27, while poor little Kylie Jenner doesn’t quite make a million for one of her posts. Celebrities can influence our actions and that’s why we shouldn’t just accept what someone says as fact unless they can back it up.
And just because thing number one happens, doesn’t mean that thing number two must have happened. For example, in the 2020 election, a camera live feed that was meant to maintain a view of a counting room overnight failed for eight hours.28 That led to some people claiming that the camera failure looked very suspicious as it happened during vote counting.29 However, despite other security cameras outside the room showing that no-one could have entered the room, there are still those who suspect it was to hide fraud and not just a random coincidence.
It obviously hasn’t occurred to them, that if the cameras outside the room could be manipulated to show no-one entered the room, surely the camera in the room could have been manipulated to show no-one entered the room. How many movies and TV shows have you ever seen where someone spoofs a security camera to hide a gang breaking into a safe or the hero investigator searching for incriminating evidence? If you’re going to commit fraud in the room, why flag it by cutting the camera when you can just fake the camera’s output? I’m not being entirely flippant when I say that perhaps the suspicious events that really need checking are all the counting rooms where the cameras didn’t black out.
This story is just typical of all the claims about fraud that I’ve found. Outside of biased podcasts making unsubstantiated claims, I wasn’t finding anything that offered any hard evidence of fraud, but there was still one more thing to try. The dark web isn’t managed in the same way as the main web. It’s a bit more like the wild west and perhaps I could find something there. Maybe somewhere there is a repository of explosive information that would blow the whole thing wide open.
It must be 15 or 20 years since I last used TOR and despite connection speeds being much faster now, I’m not sure it felt any faster. Pages can have painfully long response times, though page loads may be more rapid, which means it’s still a frustrating experience. It’s important to note that the dark web is a bit of a free for all and finding stuff may not always be easy. I relied on a few specialist services to see if I could find anything, including Ahmia, Haystak, Torch, Onion Search, Deep Search and The Hidden Wiki. It was a disappointing experience. To cut a long story short, all I found were rehashes of the same unsubstantiated claims on the main web. Just more claims that we can get excited about if we’re happy to let others manipulate us, but that don’t offer any kind of real proof.
Ultimately, common sense should tell us that if we wanted to pick a US Presidential election that was rigged, 2020 should be the last one we pick. It’s the most closely scrutinised ever.
A lot of people have spent a huge amount of time and money trying to find evidence with no success. A multi-billionaire candidate with massive resources failed to find anything concrete and appears to have wasted millions in the process.
There were 56 court cases, with just one of those resulting in an inconsequential number of votes being discounted.
A huge media organisation had to pay a penalty of $787 million because its massive resources couldn’t find the evidence to protect itself after making claims against the maker of voting machines. This is the land of the heffalumps. The heffalumps normally get whatever they want, and yet not even they could come up with real evidence to back up the claims of a rigged election.
If we really want to be suspicious of a US election, we’d be much better off focusing on one of those in the past where very little time and effort was spent scrutinising them. Common sense tells us it’s much more likely there’s hidden evidence there that was never unearthed because no-one looked for it.
No one likes to fail or having to admit to failing. That’s why a few of us consciously uncouple30 while the rest of us split up or divorce. By giving it a different label, we can make it feel less like a failure and more like a win.
It’s similar to how Trump and much of the Republican party have relabelled losing an election as having an election stolen. It removes the stigma of failure and means they can blame others rather than admit they weren’t up to the job.
And so, in one of those sentences that, if we’re really being honest with ourselves, I don’t imagine either of us could ever have expected, I find myself declaring that Donald Trump is the new Gwyneth Paltrow.
⋋| ◉ ͟ʖ ◉ |⋌
Anyway, whatever the reasons behind the claims by Trump and his campaign that the election was stolen, the effects are dangerous.
If you can convince the people that what is democratic isn’t, then you can also convince them that what isn’t democratic is. Lying about the validity of a democratic process, whether intentionally or otherwise, weakens the democratic process.
When people lose faith in the democratic process, then why should they waste their time or energy fighting for that process.
The heffalumps rely on this apathy of the people, to just accept what is given to them. One of the reasons for keeping the poor poor and struggling is to make them doubt the benefit of democracy and to wonder if they might be better off submitting to autocratic leadership. If you feel like you’ve lost everything, there’s nothing more to lose. Even when all the evidence from autocratic societies clearly demonstrates there is much more to fear and much more to lose from such leadership.
We may be poor in a democracy, but at least we are people. In an autocracy we’d be nothing more than assets, owned by the autocratic leaders. Assets that can be sacrificed in bulk on the battlefield to stroke the ego of the leadership or imprisoned and forced to work as slaves in return for nothing more than the right to live for one more day.
For as long as we live in a democracy, we have the power to change our society. If the poorest 50% in the USA want more than just 2.5% of the wealth, all they have to do is get one person from the richest 50% to join them in voting for a candidate who promises to distribute the wealth more fairly and that change will happen.
Okay, as we’ll see in Trump’s Election Was Stolen – Here’s The Undeniable Proof, that’s not exactly the case, but we do have the power if we ever choose to use it. Oh, and yes, you’re right, as that text suggests, after all that I’ve said here, I’m going to share undeniable proof that Trump’s election really was stolen.
Are COVID 19 Vaccines More Dangerous Than COVID 19?
Who is this superhero? Sarge? No. Rosemary, the telephone operator? No. Penry, the mild-mannered janitor? Could be.31
So, are Covid 19 vaccines more dangerous than COVID 19?
Could be.
It’s still relatively early days, so who knows what we could discover about these vaccines in the future.
For now though, remember that arrogance makes us stupid. Once we think we know the truth, we hold it tight for fear of being proven wrong. We should always remember we may be wrong. Often it’s only when we discover we’re wrong that we have any hope of being right.
Whichever side of the vaccines fence you’re on, with new technologies being deployed for the first time, I don’t believe anyone can really know 100% whether the vaccines are completely safe and there couldn’t be an unanticipated long-term side effect. Anyone claiming 100% certainty is likely letting arrogance take the driving seat. I’ve read quite a few articles about COVID 19 vaccines on The Epoch Times site and I find it astonishing how fired up some of their readers get about vaccines, though they also get very worked up about stolen elections and fake ballets. I can kind of understand that. I was at a production of Swan Lake the other night and over the whole three hours, not one of the corps de ballet got up on their tippy-toes even once. #FAKEBALLETS people!
To get to my point, among all the rants and fake ballot typos, there’s a remarkably large body of readers who have apparently read all of the research and data on COVID 19 and modified RNA vaccines and used their unparalleled knowledge to decide against being injected with the devil’s serum (I may be paraphrasing, but possibly not).
I don’t believe for one minute these people have really read all the research and data on the subject (it’s not uncommon on The Epoch Times to read comments that show the commenter hadn’t even managed to read and understand the article they’re commenting on). There’s the financial cost for a start of subscribing to the various journals that publish such research. Then the difficulty of tracking down all of the self-published work, which likely won’t have been peer-reviewed. Though peer reviewing doesn’t always guarantee reliable research.
And if they had read everything, did they actually understand everything? I’ve clicked through to cited research on occasion and it’s like trying to read Greek. Just to be clear, I can’t read Greek. And assuming they actually did understand everything, they also need to understand how to interpret that data to ensure that the findings that are presented are actually correct. That’s a whole different skill again and an essential one too.
A 2009 study of scientific studies reported that 33.7% of scientists admitted to using questionable research practices, including outright fabricating or modifying data, applying biased methodology, reporting their findings in a misleading way and intentionally not publishing some results.32 And if we add on top of scientists misrepresenting their research, journalists misunderstanding and misreporting research, things get even muddier and confused
Incidentally, if you clicked through to the study about questionable practices employed by scientists, did it make perfect sense to you? Personally, it started to scroll my nurd in the third paragraph.
We’ve considered before how people desire status and fiddling with scientific research, as we can see a significant minority of scientists seem to do as a matter of course, can make a study stand out and draw attention to it, in the process elevating the status of those behind the research. And if we want something to stand out and draw attention, the easiest way is to say something different to what everyone else is saying.
Right now, the consensus of opinion is overwhelmingly positive towards COVID 19 vaccines, but that doesn’t mean they’re never harmful. We do know they can cause myocarditis in some people, particularly young males.33 We also know that other vaccines can present a similar risk of myocarditis and that COVID 19 infections cause myocarditis at a higher rate. If you’re worried about myocarditis, then any vaccine might be a concern if very small numbers worry you, but catching COVID 19 is riskier. Of course, many people who suffer from myocarditis don’t experience any symptoms and will never know they suffered from it.
There have also been claims for some time that COVID 19 vaccines have led to an increase in cancers, but the things I’ve read appear to be anecdotal rather than proving a concrete link. Other reasons, such as our societies growing older and more effective techniques and systems for diagnosing the most common cancers should also be considered as explanations for any increases. And while cases like a 73-year-old woman quickly developing a form of cancer at the injection site of a second COVID 19 vaccination34 should serve as a reminder that we don’t know everything and should continue to be cautious, we also need to remember not to react disproportionately to rare events.
Ultimately, as with everything else, I subscribe to the Gun To Head Question approach. As convincing as some articles and studies may seem in isolation, if a clear majority of experts are united in one opinion, my preference is to be guided by them.
Of course, I used Brexit to illustrate the GTH Question approach and that was a very emotive subject. The question of vaccines, considering their potential effect on our lives, is probably an even more emotive subject. At some time in the future, we should be able to unequivocally prove the case for or against COVID 19 vaccines, but until then we should respect the beliefs of others and let them make their own choices as to whether or not to be vaccinated.
We can all find articles that will support our point of view over others and we all know of cases where people who chose to be vaccinated have since regretted their decision and people who chose not to be vaccinated who went on to regret their decision. If we let our differences divide us, we just make life easier for the heffalumps who thrive on divided societies where the people focus on what is wrong with their neighbours rather than what is wrong with their societies and their leaders.
Before we move on, I think I’ve probably made my own position obvious, but let me be completely transparent.
I’ve been vaccinated. Multiple times during my life for protection against multiple things. And I’ve been vaccinated for COVID 19.
Despite one concern, it was an easy choice for me. The concern? Have you ever been in a rush to finish something or under pressure to hit a deadline? It tends to work out one of two ways. On a good day we enter a flow state and absolutely nail our goal. On a bad day, we don’t quite think through something properly and make a mistake. A small one, if we’re lucky, a catastrophic one if we’re not.
The COVID vaccines were developed and tested quickly in a pressured situation. Common sense tells me there will be the possibility for things to have been missed, mistakes to have been made and potential outcomes to have not been anticipated. That’s why I know we should always be cautious and why I respect the choice of those who didn’t and don’t want to be vaccinated.
So, you may be wondering why I’d accept a vaccine developed in such circumstances.
I could point to the practical reason that I had a life to live. During the pandemic, we had a buyer for our house and were preparing to move to a different continent. That required taking multiple flights and that could only happen for the vaccinated. However, that didn’t play any part in my decision-making process.
The main reason was my belief that it was the right thing for the society I lived in. Hospitals were being put under such pressure, there was a real danger that there just wouldn’t be the capacity to handle both COVID and the side effects of everyday life. Mrs Forclift is rather more social than me with friends in various places, including one who lived in a flat opposite one of the big hospitals in Madrid. She described the road outside turning into a car park for ambulances, hearses and refrigerated lorries serving as overflow morgue space.
Rightly or wrongly, I believe our strength is in our societies and it’s in my best interest to support society.
Besides, my faith made it a simple decision. If you don’t have faith, my next sentence will likely make me sound like a lunatic. But, I blindly believe that for as long as god wants me to be alive on this planet, I will continue to be alive on this planet. Vaccinated or unvaccinated, it makes absolutely zero difference.
And yes, I do see the irony. Having spent the last however many words highlighting how conspiracy theorists rely on blind faith rather than real evidence, I share that I also rely on blind faith.
There is difference though. I know it’s an emotional crutch for me. That it’s simply a belief that makes life easier and less confused.
Logically, I know it makes no sense to believe something so completely without any evidence to support it. It just a belief born from the way various events in my life have shaped my thoughts. And obviously I hope that it will actually turn out that I’m right, however small those odds may be.
From a rational point of view, I had a much more convincing understanding of everything as an atheist. So if I look at my faith objectively, I have to accept that it indicates an intellectual weakness on my part.
That’s why I wouldn’t dream of forcing my beliefs onto others. I have nothing more than my own faith to support my own faith and that’s obviously not a solid platform to preach to others. I don’t think anyone on this planet really knows the truth of the universe, though unfortunately some of us seem to do a better job of convincing ourselves that we do have that pure insight.
That’s why a conspiracy theorist would describe a very different contrast between us. They’d claim they do have proof and it isn’t blind faith.
Nah. We clearly share a similar intellectual weakness, but one of us is deluded too. So deluded that they don’t see the harm they’re doing.
- https://archive.org/details/typelayouthowtyp0000whei/mode/2up ↩︎
- A few sites offer the white paper as a PDF download, here’s one – https://www.enablersofchange.com.au/wp-content/uploads/Communicating-or-just-making-pretty-shapes-Colin-Wheildon-1990.pdf ↩︎
- https://www.academia.edu/15077965/If_Its_Hard_to_Read_Its_Hard_to_Do_ProcessingFluencyAffectsEffortPredictionandMotivation ↩︎
- https://legible-typography.com/en/ ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badge_Man ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks ↩︎
- https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-advanced-fighter-woes-20130616-dto-htmlstory.html ↩︎
- https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2018/05/B-21-stealth-bomber-stealthy-price-tag/148372/ ↩︎
- https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/human-and-budgetary-costs-date-us-war-afghanistan-2001-2022 ↩︎
- That’s not really an accurate description of the Afghan economy ↩︎
- https://2009-2017.state.gov/outofdate/bgn/saudiarabia/26136.htm ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_serial_killers_by_number_of_victims ↩︎
- https://www.csuchico.edu/iege/_assets/documents/susi-letter-from-birmingham-jail.pdf ↩︎
- https://github.com/PublicI/us-polling-places/tree/update-2020 ↩︎
- https://www.azcleanelections.gov/arizona-elections/November-3-election ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1p3yYZuJq4 ↩︎
- https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4385239-voter-data-expert-trump-campaign-2020-election-not-stolen/ ↩︎
- https://www.businessinsider.com/ken-block-disproven-book-trump-campaign-election-fraud-2024-3 ↩︎
- https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/02/politics/fulton-county-trump-georgia-election-probe/index.html ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiH97O542jA ↩︎
- https://apnews.com/article/giuliani-2020-election-georgia-defamation-moss-freeman-6f6446c4f5224f521db8ff7763fb12d1 ↩︎
- https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/sidney-powell-s-legal-defense-reasonable-people-wouldn-t-believe-n1261809 ↩︎
- https://electioncases.osu.edu/case-tracker/?sortby=filing_date_desc&keywords&status=all&state=all&topic=25 ↩︎
- https://electioncases.osu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Hamm-v-Boockvar-Order.pdf ↩︎
- https://electioncases.osu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/DJT-v-Boockvar-Injunction-Order.pdf ↩︎
- https://electioncases.osu.edu/case/michigan-welfare-right-organization-v-trump/ ↩︎
- https://manofmany.com/lifestyle/highest-paid-celebrities-instagram ↩︎
- https://eu.rgj.com/story/news/politics/elections/2022/11/10/livestream-cams-washoe-county-vote-count-area-went-dark-heres-why/10661538002/ ↩︎
- https://www.naturalnews.com/2022-11-13-cameras-dark-in-nevada-ballot-counting-facility.html ↩︎
- https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2014/mar/26/conscious-uncoupling-gwyneth-paltrow-chris-martin-separation ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dum1WJXJMA ↩︎
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2685008/ – yes, this does mean we should also assume that misrepresentation occurs to the same level in studies supporting COVID 19 vaccines as in studies finding against them. That’s a different argument again, for now I’m just highlighting how unlikely it is that any one person has really read and fully understood all the evidence on RNA vaccines and specifically COVID 19 vaccines ↩︎
- https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/news/coronavirus-and-your-health/coronavirus-vaccine-your-questions-answered/myocarditis-and-covid-19-vaccines-should-you-be-worried ↩︎
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10184721/ ↩︎