Panic Watch!

What do you get when you rotate the 2012 Olympic logo four times and superimpose them in Windows Movie Maker? You get "the biggest ownage in the history of man"!

'Ownage' is a term typically used by twelve-year olds who play video games, but in this case it's from Gorilla199, a British YouTube conspiracy detective extraordinaire who most likely has the mental faculties of a twelve-year old who plays video games.

What is the ownage he's referring to? Why, hidden 3D symbols in the olympic logo depicting Planet X, a Nazi iron cross, pyramids, UFO landing pads of fire, anunnaki, Dagu the Fish God, and reptoids of course!

Mr. Ownage's symbolism is a complex jumble of ancient coins, sculptures, scripture, and a heaping helping of crackpot madness. This guy isn't joking and it's one of the most bizarre videos you're likely to ever see. Highly recommended! Bring popcorn!

It seems every few months we're going to need to reassure people that the Large Hadron Collider will not swallow the earth, because the stupid story keeps coming back. Three scientists posited this week that any microscopic black holes created might persist for slightly longer than previously thought. They did not say earth-swallowing black holes will be created. In fact they said that still doesn't seem possible. But somehow this is being construed as "serious safety doubts" by the media.

And so, once again, scientists are forced to release statements to point out the obvious fact that the Earth will not fall into a LHC black hole lest angry mobs start tearing down one of the most groundbreaking pieces of scientific equipment ever created. This is about the 500th time they've had to do so in the past year (see our earlier coverage here).

Some media outlets just can't let this one die though. In reporting the above story about how safe the LHC is, FoxNews chooses the headline "Scientist Insists 'Doomsday Machine' Is Perfectly Safe". Give me a break. The only thing we accomplish with this kind of stupid scaremongering is forcing little girls to commit suicide.

Ralph Rene is a prominent conspiracy theorist whose claim to fame includes extensive research into the moon landing hoax and also a bit of dabbling in 9/11 cover ups. But amazingly this renaissance man has even more to offer: he also claims that Einstein's theory of relativity and Newton's law of universal gravitation are false.

We'd never dismiss somebody out of hand here at Panic Watch! so in the interest of fairness we've prepared a comprehensive study to help evaluate these claims.

Albert Einstein: Graduated from ETH Zurich with a degree in physics.
Ralph Rene: Dropped out of Rutgers.

Albert Einstein: Evaluated patent applications for electromagnetic devices at the Swiss Patent Office.
Ralph Rene: Patented a variable pitch roof bracket during his 23 years as a carpenter and millwright.

Albert Einstein: His paper on the electrodynamics of moving bodies introduced the radical theory of special relativity, which showed that the observed independence of the speed of light on the observer's state of motion required fundamental changes to the notion of simultaneity.
Ralph Rene: Uses the phrase "gas bag" 16 times on the web page outlining his scientific theories.

Albert Einstein: In his paper on mass–energy equivalence (previously considered to be distinct concepts), Einstein deduced from his equations of special relativity what later became the well-known expression: E = mc2, suggesting that tiny amounts of mass could be converted into huge amounts of energy.
Ralph Rene: Sells a pamphlet disproving Pi = 3.14159 for $6.00

Albert Einstein: During 1909 published "The Development of Our Views on the Composition and Essence of Radiation", on the quantization of light.
Ralph Rene: Sells hand-pressed copies of "NASA MOONED AMERICA" for $26.00

Albert Einstein: Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Ralph Rene: Sued by MENSA for using their name to sell books without permission.

The jury is still out on this one so we'll continue our research. Is Ralph Rene the Einstein of our times? Has he disproved hundreds of years of scientific theory and posted the proof in MS Comic Sans font on his website? You can find out these answers and more for a small fee (payable by check or money order); we've got our orders placed.

If you're looking for a high quality portable guide to media panic (and who the hell isn't?) check out Panicology, a new book by statisticians Simon Briscoe and Hugh Aldersey-Williams. The book takes a hard look at over forty of today's latest and greatest scare stories and cuts through the nonsense with critical thinking and a bit of wit. In places the book is a tad UK-centric but most of the topics apply to us all--because they're the same damn ones that fill newspapers the world over on a daily basis. Superbugs. Crime. Nanotechnology. Frankenfoods. Overpopulation and alien invaders. It's all here folks.

The book also examines why we, as humans, can't seem to get enough of this stuff and want to blame ourselves for all of it.

The media doesn't get a free ride either.

Even if you don't agree with every conclusion they draw, the authors are straight shooters with a good sense of humor. From the cover art featuring a spacesuit-clad man feeding pigeons, to a "panic scale" for each topic consisting of headless blood-squirting chickens, if you like Panic Watch! I'm pretty sure you'll like Panicology too.

We all know some people with pretty big buckets (many of them overflowing). So the next time one of them runs into the office waving the latest headline, sit them down with the appropriate chapter of this book and start that poor soul down the road of recovery.

Asteroid 2007 TU24 paranoia has been circulating on the internet recently, reaching a head earlier this month when a poster on Godlike Productions claimed to have anonymous insider information from NASA that the asteroid was on a collision course with Earth and poised to strike on January 29th.

Today, Sorcha Faal (the mysterious Russian insider mentioned a few days ago) published a new article on the asteroid, detailing the horror we're in for:

Of course NASA and the U.S. government are supposedly imposing a media blackout (this is "supported" by the fact that NASA removed 2007 TU24 from it's Impact Risk Assessment), etc, etc, etc. Dozens of YouTube videos are ratcheting up fear levels as we approach the fateful day.

So, will it hit us? Will it barely miss and instead unleash monster volcanoes and a thousand El Ninos worth of terror? Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy is pulling his hair out on this one:

Be sure to check out Phil's own video on this killer 'roid. Asteroids of this size and distance pass by the Earth, on average, once every five years--and obviously without any catastrophic electrical disasters.

Forget asteroids, and forget the pole shift. Errant black holes may be prowling our galaxy!

It's just a computer simulation, but it's got me worried--when they say "swallows all matter" I'm assuming this includes my titanium Y2K bunker.

So how worried should we be about these wandering giants? Not very. The closest black hole to Earth is 1,600 light years (about 9,408,000,000,000,000 miles) away. And this isn't the first time this story has scared the masses. Bad Astronomy tackled the issue in 2006:

But hey, it makes a really cool headline.

Asteroid to miss Mars, may hit Earth

A completely asinine article. "Probably make it target Earth"? Is this an asteroid or a kamikize pilot? There are no projections for 2007 WD5 to hit the Earth any time in the foreseeable future, let alone probably hit the Earth.