Shedding Purple Light on Conspiracy Theories

People all across North America have noticed the appearance of these eerie purple road lights in their car-dependent hellscapes. WCCO in Minnesota ran a story on them, and some drivers theorized what they might be for, such as energy savings or a reminder to pay attention to the traffic signal, and some even thought they looked cool. It turns out the purple lights were actually the result of a defect. LED street lights actually use blue LEDs with phosphor coatings stuck to them to turn that blue light into white light. In the defective batch, the phosphors came loose and flaked off, causing the purplish blue light that would’ve otherwise been turned white to shine through. That’s all there is to it. Nothing more to see here.

That, however, hasn’t seemed to sink in with a lot of Americans. Many Americans have a profound distrust of government, not only because the United States was founded on the principle of minimal government but also because these Americans haven’t actually travelled the world and experienced life in different countries. The only central government they know is the endemically corrupt one in Washington, DC. Were they to get a passport, travel and experience other countries, that would probably change their perspective of government, but I digress.

And what do a lot of Americans think these purple lights are? Government surveillance and control, of course.

And foolish me, I thought I could talk some sense into one of them. I commented on a video by this one arrogant metalhead YouTuber where he pushed the now-typical spiel about purple street lights being some sort of government surveillance and control. All I said is that the purple lights are the result of a defect. Did he provide any evidence to back up his claims? After all, the burden of proof was on him, since he was the one making the positive assertion. Nope! He just namecalled and blocked me. Right then and there, it became obvious to me that were this guy any dumber, he’d have to be watered twice a week.

Trying to convince these dimwits just isn’t worth it. The best thing I should do, I realized, is to just ignore them and laugh at their stupidity.

Ideological Chaff

Like China, Japan has a Communist Party. You might think the Communist Party of Japan are 100% behind the Communist Party of China, but you’d be wrong. The Japanese Communist Party actually denounces and disavows its Chinese counterpart. It might be thought that the Japanese Communists are more “woke” due to Japan’s ideological proximity to the West, but I think there’s more to it than that. The Communist Party of China has held a monopoly on a large and diverse country for the past seventy years, and those seventy years might have given it a sort of ideological dechaffing. When policies they expected to work failed, they learned from their experiences and “fine-tuned” their ideology to better fit reality. Granted Deng Xiaoping got in a faceful of trouble for saying “This doesn’t seem to be working. Let’s try something different,” but he turned out to be right and ended up succeeding Mao Zedong as President. By contrast, the Communist Party of Japan has never held such a monopoly on power in Japan, and so they’re still loaded with ideological chaff. Probably the one thing a Chinese Communist can say to most irritate a Japanese Communist is “We tried that. It didn’t work.” Interestingly, the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, which has held such a monopoly on power in Japan, has had its own ideological dechaffing over its own seventy years of power. Its policies aren’t really all that liberal, since workers’ rights and tenants’ rights, two things that Trve Kvlt Liberals are averse to defending, are fairly strong here.

Lords of Chaos : Based on (Little) Truth and (Many) Lies

As a fan of black metal, among various other genres, I heard about the movie Lords of Chaos, a biopic movie about the Norwegian black metal band Mayhem … in particular about the interpersonal dynamic between Øystein “Eronymous” Aarseth and Varg “Count Grishnak” Vikernes. The director, Jonas Åkerlund, briefly played drums for Bathory, another black metal band, so I figured he had to have enough street cred in the black metal scene to come up with a decent movie about black metal. Having read Vikernes’s Burzum website and seen his Thulean Perspective videos on YouTube, I was naturally curious about the movie, so I watched it this weekend.
  What a huge disappointment it was.
  The official trailer says the biopic is “based on truth and lies,” and judging from what I saw, it was much moreso the latter than the former. Vikernes himself concurs, denouncing it as not only crap but also “character murder,” and he refused to allow any Burzum music to be used in the movie. Fenriz, a black metal acquaintance, likewise vetoed the use of music from his own band, Darkthrone.
  The movie had its positives in the acting, notably Jack Kilmer’s portrayal of Per Yngve “Dead” Ohlin. I admit I was too squeamish to watch the cutting scenes, but I think Kilmer captured Dead’s personality quite well. (The lynched cat in his room was disturbing, however.) The rest of the cast performed well as well, but it was clear they really didn’t do their homework.
  The real-life Vikernes notably took issue with being portrayed by a “fat Jewish actor.” Emory Cohen’s Jewish heritage isn’t really an issue for me. All I care about is that an actor captures the true essence of their character on the sound stage, and Cohen has demonstrated that he can play a psychologically unhinged character very well …
  … which is why he should’ve been cast as Euronymous instead.
  In real life, it was Euronymous, not Vikernes, that was unhinged. Rory Culkin (younger brother of Macaulay from Home Alone) would’ve made a great Vikernes. As Euronymous, however, he was way off the mark. Culkin’s “Euronymous” is depicted having a semifunctional moral compass that just needs to be jimmied a little to get working again, finally redeeming himself at the end of the movie before Cohen’s “Vikernes” offs him. The real Euronymous, however, not only had a broken moral compass but one that was run over several times with a steamroller. He bought a camera and took pictures of Dead’s corpse to put on a bootleg album cover, and that’s something someone with even a semifunctional moral compass doesn’t do.
  And he certainly wouldn’t shed any tears for Dead either.
  Vikernes is no angel himself, but Cohen’s portrayal obviously fails to show us the true Vikernes. Cohen depicts him as an approval-seeking noob, when Vikernes had actually been well established in the Norwegian black metal scene via his old band Old Funeral before meeting Euronymous. Vikernes also thought Venom, who Euronymous liked, was lame, so we can safely say he wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a Scorpions patch. He also first met Euronymous at the old farm house Mayhem was using as a rehearsal space, not at a kebab shop, and Harald “Demonaz” Nædval from Immortal was with him. Also, he has never been a vegetarian, though he is indeed a teetotaler.
  The next gripe I have is with the sex scenes. I don’t mind a movie having sex scenes at all, but Åkerlund seems to have just thrown them in as a lazy band-aid for obvious fact-checking failures. The worst scene is one where Vikernes is depicted using and abusing a groupie, which is potentially defamatory considering how the real Vikernes has exhorted how Germanic peoples have treated their womenfolk with the utmost reverence. On the same note, the excessively graphic gore is just another cover for a lousy story.
  Finally, the colossal schmuck Cohen makes Vikernes out to be has absolutely no credibility as the charming character who now makes witty YouTube vlogs on his Thulean Perspective channel. You just have to see photos and movies of the real Vikernes, young and old, to get a sense of his very charismatic true character. Don’t think I worship the ground Vikernes walks on, though, as I have my doubts about his assertions that he killed Euronymous in self-defense, as did Åkerlund. However, biopics are ultimately judged on their factuality, since even if they admit to their lies, viewers are still expecting many grains of truth in them.

Flat Earth Fun

When I was a toddler back in the early 1970s, I myself thought the Earth was flat. I thought we were living on this big lunch tray floating around in space, and I once had a dream of people jumping off the edge of that tray. I also remember watching someone performing on TV playing a piano on a platform moving through a slowly-moving star field, not realizing that he was just greenscreened in a TV studio. Then I saw an image of the planet Earth as a globe, but I thought it was a planet off in space somewhere else. It took me a while to realize that I was actually living on that planet and not some big floating lunch tray.
    As an adult going on fifty next year, I now know better. YouTube, however, has no shortage of flat earthers, adults who really believe that the Earth is flat. Albeit instead of the rectangular lunch tray my toddler self thought we lived on, orthodox flat earthers believe the Earth is shaped like a vinyl phonograph record with the North Pole at the center and the South Pole … well … not really existing. So delusional are they that they won’t accept the hard evidence presented before them. They claim that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA for short, is embroiled in a conspiracy to deceive the public with images of the globe Earth from space. They tout the globe-Earth model as an elaborate hoax designed to hide the alleged “truth” that the Earth is a large disc. They claim that Antarctica, which they tout as a “wall of ice” holding in the world’s oceans, is so off limits that you risk being shot if you try going there. Never, however, do they explain what motive NASA could have for allegedly lying about the shape of the Earth. NASA would have absolutely nothing to gain from lying about something so innocuous. If the Earth were indeed flat, NASA would’ve told us.
    Our own observations would’ve told us as well. The globe Earth model, which flat earthers denounce as a NASA hoax, is so easy to prove that even the ancient Greeks knew the Earth was a globe. (If indeed the globe Earth model originated with NASA, then Eratosthenes somehow managed to found an agency over two thousand years before its associated government existed.) If you live in Argentina or New Zealand, all you have to do is set up a long-exposure camera aimed due south on a clear night and see how the stars rotate clockwise around the South Celestial Pole. If the flat Earth model were true, the stars would just all move straight from left to right. Speaking of the Sun, a flat Earth model would always have the Sun to the north in these two countries, but at their summer solstice in December, the Sun rises in the southeast and sets in the southwest.
     Do you work for Qantas as a pilot? Which way do you leave Sydney when you fly out to Santiago? By the flat Earth model, you’d have to fly north by northeast, but most flight charts I’ve checked are consistent with the globe Earth model, which would have you flying southeast first past Antarctica. (Be careful that NASA doesn’t shoot you down on the way.)
    Flat earthers claim that the Sun and Moon are only about 55 kilometers across, which, calculating a distance-to-diameter ratio of about 110 for both, would put them about 6 megameters above the Earth. (A megameter, you may ask? That’s simply a million meters, or a thousand kilometers. Ah, the wonders of the Metric System you Americans are missing out on!) The modelled flat Earth would have to be 40 megameters in diameter. The problem, however, is that the Sun and Moon would literally have nowhere to hide in the sky in the flat Earth model. Not only wouldn’t there be any moonless nights, but there wouldn’t be any nights at all, because the Sun would never dip any lower than 9.6° above the horizon, and that’s in Antarctica. In the United States, it would dip no lower than 15.1°. Not only that, the Sun and Moon would vary much more in apparent size, the Sun shrinking to as much as 17% of its maximum size in Antarctica.
    However, the Sun and Moon often drop below the horizon completely out of sight, which is what we call “night” when the Sun does so, and they always appear very much the same size when visible. This is easy to explain with the Globe Earth model, where the Sun and Moon simply don’t appear on the side of the Earth turned away from them. Also, both bodies have very little variation in their apparent size due to having very little variation in their actual distance from each location on Earth. The Moon, which is actually 3.5 megameters in diameter, sits 385 megameters away from Earth. Given that the Earth’s radius is about 6 megameters, that allows the Moon to appear no less than 98% of its maximum apparent size, such a tiny variation that it’s hardly noticeable. The Sun varies even less than that in apparent size, being 1.4 gigameters in diameter, and it has to be that big to support nuclear fusion in its core. (A gigameter is a billion meters, or a million kilometers, by the way.) Compared to the 150 gigameter distance between the Sun and the Earth, the 6 megameter distance variation is almost nothing. In order to see the Sun reduced to 17% of its apparent Earth size in the globe Earth reality, you’d have to go out past the orbit of Jupiter.
    I guess I have to admit it, then: My own two eyes and my sense of reasoning are all in on the “Globe Earth Conspiracy.”

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Nuke?

After the reactors at Fukushima First Power Plant here in Japan melted down in March of 2011, a wave of paranoia gripped Japan. Anti-nuke scaremongers had a field day, and opposition to nuclear power had become quite popular. Before a popular position is adopted, however, it should first be checked against the numbers to make sure it stands up to reality.

  I’m not saying that nuclear power is entirely safe, and nothing ever is, but the dangers of nuclear power have always been blown way out of proportion. It’s understandable that people would be scared of nuclear anything, considering the horrific damage that nuclear weapons did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki back during World War II. It’s especially scary here, since this is the only country in history, so far, to get hit with nuclear weapons.

  But is this fear justified when it comes to peaceful nuclear power? I don’t think so. Too many people look too much at the TV screens showing power plants going kaboom and not enough at the hard numbers. I support stringent safety measures to insure that nuclear power plant workers are working in a safe environment, but I don’t support abandoning nuclear power outright. Such a position is based on sensationalist paranoia and will prove untenable in the long run once fossil fuels become too expensive for Japan, a country with no significant fossil fuel sources of its own. Since renewables are far too limited to take up the slack, nuclear power is, like it or not, here to stay.

  Where I used to work in Fukushima prefecture, I would see the hard numbers every day. At all five schools I worked at were these radiation monitors placed outside. Increased cancer risk, the barest minimum of ill effects from radiation, requires at least ten microsieverts of constant dosage, and it must stay above ten microsieverts to do so, but I have never seen even one of those monitors top the one microsievert per hour mark. They all stayed in the nanosieverts range.

  Finally, we should ask those seeking to ban nuclear power if they’re equally or more willing to get rid of cigarettes. Tobacco, aside from contributing nothing good to society, kills more people in one hour worldwide than nuclear power has killed in its entire history. In fact, nuclear power plant accidents such as Fukushima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island make the evening news because events like these happen so rarely. People dying of heart disease brought on from cigarette-induced inflammation happens so often that it’s nowhere near as newsworthy. News is, after all, entertainment as well as information. They know the sight of exploding power plants keeps the viewers coming back for more.

Thoughts on Heavy Metal

I grew up in the 1980s, a time when heavy metal (or more a popular imitation of it) became popular. I got to know big names like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, and I still love both those bands. Granted, the former have produced a few albums not worthy of their name, but the rest have been good, and Iron Maiden have never made an album unworthy of the Iron Maiden name. Along with those two greats have been “glam rockers” such as Mötley Crüe (pronounced “Murtley Cree” for those of you who don’t know how umlauts really change the sounds of vowels), bands that somehow think we all care about their sex lives.
   Metallica gave me a welcome alternative to glam by introducing me to thrash metal. It was far more authentic as metal to me than glam rock. From there, it led me to other thrash metal bands. However, even thrash was sorely lacking, as it was just too political for my taste. Too many thrash songs sounded like news reports. If I wanted news, I’d read it off the internet. I now make fun of some of the bands I used to like at the time.
   Then came the 1990s. Metal was declared “dead,” but it wasn’t. It was just untrendy. The trendy thing at the time was grunge. I listened to grunge greats like Pearl Jam and Nirvana. They seemed weak musically, but lyrically, they were far better than the glam and thrash I was listening to in the previous decade. I remember how the original members of Kiss got back together in the early 1990s with their famous make-up to try to “save” metal, but Kiss, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t metal, so how could they save it?
  Rather, it was another band, one I now love, that truly helped save metal.
  In university, I told someone I was into heavy metal. “You mean like Korn?” they asked. I hadn’t heard of Korn at the time. Eventually, I saw a poster of them, and they looked nothing like a metal band. Honestly, I thought they were gonna be some weak grungy knockoff undeservedly calling themselves “metal.” Then one night, I watched the video for “Right Now” from their album Take a Look in the Mirror. It blew me away. Not only is Korn very much worthy of being called metal, but they’re even more metal than Judas Priest! Their music, however, does have a clear grunge influence, in that their lyrics are at a personal level. Korn’s lyrics, though, convey personal anger and frustration, things that metal ought to be about.
  In short, the 1990s were the best thing to ever happen to metal. By putting the anger and negativity back into the lyrics, bands like Korn, often called “new metal,” take metal back to its dark roots. MTVs Headbanger’s Ball, from which I first heard Korn, showed a remarkable improvement in the quality of the music it played around this time. New metal is true metal!
  Not that it’s the only true metal.
  Not too long ago, I came across (or actually Yahoo search-engined) an online radio station dedicated to extreme metal. Death FM, it’s called, but it plays black and doom metal as well as death metal, and I love all three subgenres. Death metal is an extension of new metal, making it more brutal musically and lyrically. Death metal lyrics take the lyrical negativity one step further, depicting characters surrendering to their dark impulses. Black metal conveys a hostile natural environment and the tribulations it puts its characters through. Both these forms of metal tend to be fast-paced in their rhythm, but metal can also have a slow rhythm. Doom metal is rhythmically slow, conveying a sense of impending death and the dread attached to it. All have one thing in common with new metal: personal introspection.
  I have a rule towards metal lyrics: Tell me about you. Don’t bother telling me about the world, like thrash does. I have eyes to see the world for myself, so I don’t need your input. Don’t brag about your wonderful sex life either. I frankly don’t care, and I don’t believe most of it anyway. Tell me about your anger, as it lets me know that I’m not alone in my own times of anger.