The tentative suggestion has been made. Turns out he was shot three times in the forehead from within 10 yards, which stuck in the medical examiner’s craw for some reason… Rumor is also that he maybe was not well-liked in his unit, possibly because he was a public critic of the Iraq war who quoted Chomsky … His uniform was burned after his death and his diary apparently disappeared … There are even whispers that a faction of his unit had some hand in the opium trade…? Add in the constant official obfuscation, and you have - viola - the Pat Tillman Conspiracy.

One of the commenters in the linked article says,

Three rounds in the forehead? That was no mistake, no friendly fire incident. Whoever killed Tillman was close enough to kiss him. The cover-up has all the characteristics of a cover-up conducted by flag officers. Too many people have been silenced in too many different places for anyone of lower rank to have done it. They shut down the unit itself and cut off contact with the outside world while they were getting their story straight, they burned Tillman’s uniform and armor, and they somehow kept the medical question from triggering a real investigation. Then the CID investigation was shut down. The reach was outside the Special Operations Command. That says “Flag officer involvement.”

Flag officers = political appointees.

Amazing sight (basically this from this site I found later when I looked up dragonflies):

“When the nymph is completely grown and ready to become a dragonfly it will crawl up the stem of a water plant and emerge out of the water. The nymph is now ready to change from an underwater predator into an aerial one! The adult dragonfly emerges from the skin of the nymph. This discarded skin is called the exuvia and can be seen still clinging to stems long after the dragonfly has emerged. After emerging from skin, the dragonfly body and wings grow rapidly as it pumps fluids into them.”

Still have the nymph’s discarded exoskeleton.

Someone cut some wires on a non-essential piece of equipment. WTH? It seems at first glance like disgruntled workers to me. But could it be … Drunk astronauts? A cryptic message to the outside world? A deliberate distraction from some even greater act of sabotage? Can’t wait to see hot this one pans out.

NASA - an exciting place these days. If they aren’t trying to bind, torture and kill love rivals, they’re flying drunk or committing acts of sabotage.

Astronauts drunker than a goat at takeoff? If the rumors are true, someone’s got a lot of ’splainin’ to do… first diapers and now this. I’ve heard of being higher than a kite but this is ridiculous. Of course when flying the shuttle is like the world’s most dangerous job, you can imagine wanting to take the edge off, and a ’screw it’ attitude sneaking in as you face your mortality on the way to the launch pad, stopping at the local bar…

UPDATE: The rumors might not be true.

UPDATE 2: Then again they might be true after all. Hitting the ‘conspiracy’ button - ‘C’ is for ‘coverup’…

I could not believe this shit. Mastodons: similar to wooly mammoths, but leaf eating instead of grazing, and with straight tusks instead of curved. Length of tusks: more than 16 feet!! Giants strode the earth!! (And then humans ate them.)

And they are disappointing to the anomalist, but with a silver lining. Turns out only a chance amount of people can tell when the microwave tower is on. BUT: a high proportion dropped out of the study due to illness. You do the math.

From the article:

…But another campaign group, Powerwatch, commended the research as “one of the best designed and executed studies to date” while stressing that the number of dropouts was unfortunate.

“So whilst it cannot be entirely ruled out that a small minority are truly sensitive, the proportions of any truly sensitive people are likely to be far lower than the 3-35% that has been quoted.”

Unless you count the dropouts, see?

From waaay back in 2002. Paraphrased: “Free Science has the potential to undo politically motivated science.” Word. Plus, this writer (Ran Prieur) linked to us as an example of a good science site that doesn’t mouth the party line. He even likes Halton Arp and Rupert Sheldrake.

To be given to terminal patients as a part of their psychotherapy. Ye gods this study should have been done 50 years ago.

It was billed as an ‘attack’ when I found it but really it’s more of a love-tap.

Sinful creatures. Apparently self-aware too with culture and everything - “eat these or the guys won’t leave you alone”. Okay I’m extrapolating. Link. (Forwarded by Gonzo Blog Team member jakers.)

… is one step closer to being solved, according to this article. Unfortunately the article is a little short of details, but apparently they’re this close to reporting on what a spectrometer has to say about the elemental composition of an anomalous lightball.

Mr. Nice in the “Mayoral Roundup” of the Duluth Budgeteer News.

I have a morbid fascination with wild animal attacks, shark attacks in particular. Part of it is the troubling knowledge that being eaten alive is a rather common death in the animal kingdom and that I have no guarantee that it won’t happen to me. It rather seems to be something one could reasonably expect. We are all potential food. 

Awhile back there was some flap about bees disappearing and people blaming it on Cell phone towers even though the evidence for it was a little sketchy. Read this today which puts another nail in that theory

Routinely. What could go wrong? Thank you, Big Science! Oh, plus the delay in reporting a radioactive leak, also routine. God I hate the nuclear industry.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070716/japan-quake/

The latest:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/7/18/92527/0219

Anatomy of a country’s reliance on nuclear reactors right on top of fucking fault lines:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6903146.stm

Mr. Nice, puppet candidate for Mayor of Duluth Minnesota, suffers an injustice and makes the news.

http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/articles/index.cfm?id=46191

 And here’s the poll:

http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/includes/poll/poll.cfm?id=188

Note that a pluraity of @60% would vote for a puppet if it could balance the budget.

Like duh.

http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn12245-organic-farming-could-feed-the-world.html

Why isn’t this jetpack guy fighting crime??

Latest details of the international assassination of a Putin critic. I guess conspiracies can be real…? Naw!

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/070715/world/britain_poisoned_spy_29

The disintegration of John McCain’s campaign, while a little off-topic, is still fascinating to me as a study in reality engineering. It is hard to turn my eyes away from this man who thought he’d have a chance at the Presidency by aping someone unpopular (George Bush). The hubris is staggering …

The center cannot hold, man!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/13/AR2007071302227.html?hpid=topnews

EIGHT MONTHS LATER: He’s the nominee. A pretty amazing comeback I should say. One for the history books, especially if he becomes president, god forbid.

Frozen baby woolly mammoth discovered, where they always find frozen mammoths, in Siberia: http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/baby-mammoth/ .

The gonzo science angle is: these mammoths often appear flash frozen. Yes it is Siberia, but several smart folks have suggested that all these frozen mammoths died at the same time, in a catastrophe (like a comet strike) that melted the ice cover, which swallowed the mammoths and then re-froze.

UPDATE: Evidence against comet strike theory.

no sightings, but a great link to all past sightings. did see some seals,though

http://www.bigfootencounters.com/sightings.htm

Turns out it (allegedly) wasn’t ‘natural causes’ - although we all knew that. What we didn’t know was that heroin killed him in a nightclub bathroom and that the drug dealers had his body moved to his apartment, threatening the witness to keep quiet. Intriguing stuff.

Posting pictures…

I noticed a few people asking about how to post pictures. There are etiquette rules and a few steps of technical stuff.
To post images: Consider this part especially if you want to post a picture that is on another site. Just linking to it can suck their bandwidth and is generally considered rude, as well, if they notice what you have done they can change the picture give it the same name and address and you’ll end up with any old image (can we say goatse.cx?) poping up on your site.

Now, the technical part. Okay, you say, but how can we put up pictures that are on other sites without linking to the pictures on their site? You have to make a copy of that picture and put it somewhere to link to that doesn’t mind you doing so. There are two options here. I can set it up so users can upload images to gonzoscience.com then just link to where the image is stored on site. But, just as good, and something that gives you more direct control over your images is if you set up a free account with a service such as photobucket. You can image link to the images you upload there, no bandwidth stealing issues, you can use those images where ever you post across the net, win win.

As this is going to take up a bunch of space the rest is inside. Read on …

This article is about as rational and reasonable as you can get with this topic. I appreciate that they call “Earth Lights” author Paul Devereaux an expert, since he doesn’t believe the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis. It shows there is a respectable, “not crazy” face of ufology. Kudos to the BBC. They even mentioned Michael Persinger, who pioneered the Earth Lights idea (ie UFOs = bizarre natural phenomena).

You just know the career spies in the basement at Langley are clicking their poison pens over Bush letting Libby walk. And we all know what happened when JFK crossed this community. How long ’til Libby falls down an elevator shaft onto some bullets?

From this article. I have created a new category for this post, ‘BVM’, indicating the paranormal community’s shorthand for apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I consider this different from ‘Religious Whackjobs’ as posts with that category deal with a wide variety of nuttery, while the category ‘BVM’ refers to a specific class of phenomena and may or may not deal with the nuttery. [Couldn’t figure out how to just post the picture … I’ll find my sea-legs yet.]

More pain for the House of Biotech.

Forwarded from Alpha: The Bad Astronomy blog. Warning: mainstream skeptic-type. I found some of the more sarcastic comments fun.

And here is his (reasonable) take on the real color of Mars, a topic discussed here eons ago in blog time.