Fighting the Brainrot

Nonsense never dies. On the Internet that's doubly true as - far from being more ephemeral as so many think - it doesn't sink to the bottom and die, but hangs around in search engines and obscure blogs, waiting to be dredged up. You may remember John Loftus, who claims to know more intelligence secrets than any man alive but not that Abu Hamza (one hand) and Omar Bakri Mohammed (two hands) aren't the same man.

Well, he dropped off my radar screen after that. But I see he's back, touting tapes supposedly suggesting that Saddam really like totally did have so many WMDs (the Armchair Generalist reports). And what a bunch he's with, too. Astonishingly, the best and most sceptical report is in, dear God, National Review Online, home of Jonah Goldberg and Co.

It seems his source is convinced that God told him where the weapons were, as well as the unconscious mind giving him a tip-off too.

Tierney's methods of ascertaining this location were rather unconventional. "I would ask God and just get a sense if something was valid or not, and then know if I needed to pursue it," he said. His assessments through prayer were then confirmed to him by a friend's clairvoyant dream, where he was able to find the location on a map. "Everything she said lined up. This place meets the criteria," Tierney said of the power generator plant near the Tigris River that he believes is actually a cover for a secret uranium facility.

Well, presumably no-one's found any uranium there - they would hardly have shut up about it - so I wonder how his faith is getting on. Read the whole thing.

Also at the "intelligence summit" - funded, NRO tells us, by a man barred from the US as a suspected Russian mafioso - was the risible Loftus and old TYR target John A. Shaw, a Bush official who popped up at the height of the great pre-election RDX furore to feed the Washington Times a cock-and-bull story about Russian special forces spiriting the stuff over the border to Syria and the US authorities blaming Israel in order to cover this up. Immediately afterwards, TV evidence appeared that the RDX had been right there when US forces passed by. But Shaw had kept the story off the front pages for a news cycle or so in the last week of a presidential election. (You may recall this post.)

His reward was to be quietly fired a couple of months later. Apparently, the poor fool actually believes the story, rather like the chap who quit wrestling when he found out it was rigged and was horrified because he thought he won some of the fights fair and square.

But however hard the initial debunking, you have to do it all again, and again, again...