The bizarre looking remains of what appeared to be a very small alien has had the world wondering whether extra terrestrial beings have indeed been visiting us, despite the government’s attempts to cover it up. The skeleton, nicknamed ‘Ata’ helped turn “Sirius” into a highly anticipated documentary, with UFO fans anxious to see whether they have been right all along.

It turns out however, that the 6-inch skeleton is in fact almost certainly the remains of a human child. From the Huff Post:

In early publicity, filmmakers claimed the documentary would reveal that the DNA of the creature with an oversized alien-looking head couldn’t be medically classified.

In fact, the film, which premiered Monday in Hollywood, features a scientist who concluded the little humanoid was human.

“I can say with absolute certainty that it is not a monkey. It is human — closer to human than chimpanzees. It lived to the age of six to eight. Obviously, it was breathing, it was eating, it was metabolizing. It calls into question how big the thing might have been when it was born,”said Garry Nolan, director of stem cell biology at Stanford University’s School of Medicine in California.

This doesn’t preclude the existence of aliens or the theory that they have been visiting us (apparently the documentary presents some very interesting evidence that would certainly make hardened skeptics think twice), but we now know that we’re going to have to wait a little longer for a genuine ‘E.T’.

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Trying to understand the logic behind popularity on the web is extremely hard to do. One would think that writing a great article about a timely topic would lead to thousands of page views. Often it does, but there are no guarantees and there are occasions when a great deal of hard work is lost in the ever expanding sea of content on the internet.

One of the ways content gets read on the web is through search. Articles are tagged with key words, and search engines (ie. Google) pick them up. Predicting what people search for is incredibly difficult to do, and content generators work hard to pump out pieces they think will get the most ‘Google juice’.

We’ve been experiencing somewhat of a traffic surge over the past 24 hours, most of which is going to a piece I wrote about Gwyneth Paltrow’s trainer, Tracy Anderson. I wrote the piece after reading about her extremely dubious claims about what she could achieve through her workouts and calorie restricted diet. I worked in the fitness industry for a long time, so know what I’m talking about, and it was pretty clear Anderson did not. Anyhow, the piece went down pretty well for whatever reason, and has quite steadily been spread around the web (we can tell this through our analytics tools).

Anyway, fast forward a couple of weeks, and the article starts to surge again, generating a couple of thousand page views in the space of a few hours. I spent some time trying to understand why the piece was generating so much traffic and did some digging in our analytics system. We can see where the traffic is coming from, and the vast majority was coming through search. I googled ‘Tracy Anderson’ and my piece appeared on the front page of google (now third from the top).

Why were people googling Tracy Anderson so much? She’s definitely well known, but the fitness guru isn’t exactly an A-list celebrity. Then I saw this on Express.co.uk:

Gwyneth’s rear end seems to be the major marketing tool for the movie, and the Tracy Anderson trained celebrity has been doing the rounds letting everyone know just how good it looks. At a recent event, Gwyneth told a reporter, “You know, this isn’t so bad for 40, right?’And [my friend] goes. ‘It’s not so bad for a 22-year-old stripper!”

Putting two and two together, it finally came to me. People wanted to know how Paltrow achieved her ’22-year-old stripper’ backside.

I then googled ‘Gwyneth Paltrow’ and ‘Trainer’ and the following came up:

My piece was now second on the Google’s front page, just after Anderson’s own website. The traffic spike suddenly made sense.

We cover political, cultural and media type stuff here at The Daily Banter, and we’re doing pretty damn well. We write fairly lengthy pieces and to the best of our ability, do them thoughtfully. We have a strong reader base and we’re growing pretty damn fast. But it hasn’t been plain sailing. Speaking for myself here, I’ve spent countless hours writing pieces on economics, poverty and social injustice to have them read by only a couple of hundred people. Not exactly what’s needed to become the next Huffington Post (and yes folks, that’s who we’re aiming to take down…).

It’s nice to get big traffic spikes and some attention, but I’m not entirely sure the readers looking for Tracy Anderson butt exercise tips are the ones who will be coming back here too often.

Regardless, we’ll enjoy the attention while we get it. So here’s to Gwyneth’s lack of underwear and 22 year old bottom.

And I might even go and see ‘Iron Man 3′ as a thank you.

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14 years late, it still looks the same

A man from Utah has now definitively proved that you should never eat burgers from McDonalds. Appearing on a recent episode of ‘The Doctors’, he claimed he kept the burger for 14 years. Incredibly (and disturbingly) the burger looks exactly the same as it did when he bought it.

Pediatrician Jim Sears stated on the show:

“If the mold won’t eat it, if the fungus won’t eat it, the bugs won’t eat it, maybe we shouldn’t be eating it”

Check out the horrifying footage below.

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Why bother with facts when you can make shit up?

You have to give it to Glenn Beck. The bubbly Mormon conspiracy theorist has found a way to stay relevant, despite being wrong about pretty much everything. But then in his world, connecting dots don’t have to make any sense – it just has to be really, really scary to get everyone onboard.

The Boston Marathon bombing was to Beck another chapter in the inevitable demise of the United States. According to Beck, the Saudi Arabian national detained by authorities had a lot more to do with the bombing that originally suspected. Why? Because after the bombing, U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s National Targeting Center issued an event file recommending Abdul Al-Harbi be deported under section 212, 3B that indicated ‘proven terrorist activity.’

According to Beck, this is definitive proof of a gigantic conspiracy. “You don’t one day put a 212 3B charge against somebody with deportation, and then the next day take it off,” said Beck on his TV show.  ”It would require too much to do it.” Beck and his team at The Blaze promised to bully the government into responding to their iron clad proof that Al-Harbi was the next Osama Bin Laden. According to Beck, the governments response “will either save our country or we will be done.”

It turns out it wasn’t actually all that complicated.

When it became clear Al-Harbi had nothing to do with the bombing, he was taken off the list. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano why the Saudi student was allowed a student visa if he was on a watch list. “He was not on a watchlist,” replied Napolitano. “What happened is — this student was, really when you back it out, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was never a subject. He was never even really a person of interest. Because he was being interviewed, he was at that point put on a watchlist, and then when it was quickly determined he had nothing to do with the bombing, the watch listing status was removed.”

There goes that theory. Not satisfied with the explanation though, Beck has promised to reveal more in the coming days.

Regardless of the ‘secret documents’ he and his team will no doubt be revealing, he is going to have a hard time getting the mainstream on board with whatever he comes up with. Beck’s problem is that the rest of the country doesn’t follow his special line of thinking. If only they would take random events and tie them together to draw completely arbitrary conclusions, he’d get far more traction when it comes to uncovering vast conspiracies that threaten to kill us all.

Let’s take Glenn’s logic on the Boston bombing:

Barack Obama’s father was Kenyan. There are Muslims in Kenya. Therefore Al Qaeda is in the White House.

There was a Saudi Arabian at the Boston Marathon. The Homeland Security has cleared him of all wrong doing.

Homeland Security is controlled by Obama.

Therefore the Saudi Arabian is responsible for the Boston bombing!

Surely anyone rational would see the logic in this. Why bother with fancy legal definitions or actual evidence when you can create completely new realities that must be true because you came up with it?

Poor Glenn. Still, he has time to prove everyone wrong and save the nation from its ultimate demise. If only they would listen…

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Got to love the Hipsters. So cool they know about bands that don’t actually exists…

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This is very, very funny:

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Greenwald and Jones: Always right

Let me begin by stating that I do not believe there is an equivalency between conspiracy nut Alex Jones and civil libertarian Glenn Greenwald. Jones peddles loony theories on government plots to destroy freedom that include 9/11, the moon landing, and now the Boston Marathon bombing. Greenwald on the other hand, diligently attacks government for civil liberty infringements and illegal activities abroad. Jones is not concerned with actual evidence, whereas Greenwald meticulously sources his work. You could  have a civilized and rational debate with Glenn Greenwald. You could not with Alex Jones.

But both men have a defining characteristic in common: A complete inability to connect with audiences outside their respective ideological universes.

There are elements of both men’s ideological system that merit serious attention. Scattered between Jones’s angry rants about government killing astronauts and the need to buy gold are genuinely relevant critiques on the ever expanding security state and government’s collusion with Wall Street that creates a corrupt and doomed monetary system. Greenwald’s insights on civil liberties issues are far easier to detect, and often difficult to disagree with. His work on Obama’s drone policies, indefinite detention, and government wire tapping is very important given the issues rarely see the light of day in the mainstream media.

But there is a style and monotony that both deliver their message with that turns off huge amounts of people who would otherwise be receptive to some of the ideas both men put forward.

Alex Jones spends most of the time ranting about pedophile TSA agents  conspiring with the government to turn everyone into slaves, making anything interesting he has to say almost entirely irrelevant. I mean, just try to make your way through this absurd video on the Boston Marathon bombing being a conspiracy to ‘take our guns’ and feel confident saying Jones should be taken seriously on anything else:

Glenn Greenwald’s laser like focus on his pet topics and high handed disdain for anyone who disagrees with is also very hard to swallow for open minded people who would probably agree with him on a lot of issues.

Take for example Greenwald’s blithe dismissal of the liberal site Raw Story because one of its bloggers dared to disagree with him on drones and another wrote posts that supported Obama. Wrote Greenwald:

Raw Story is a moderately well-read political outlet that touts itself as “a progressive news site that focuses on stories often ignored in the mainstream media.” It recently began publishing a blog devoted exclusively to venerating the President and sliming his critics: because that’s so edgy, brave and rare; after all, the meek “MSM” would never dare glorify the nation’s most powerful political official and the party in power, so we really need a brave, dissident anti-MSM site like Raw Story to provide that.

There are a lot of good writers at Raw Story, and they do a lot of good pieces. But if you disagree with Glenn, you are automatically dismissed as a propaganda wing of the Obama administration. Greenwald has even gone as far as comparing a Jewish Obama supporter to Nazi film propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. I’ve done a fair amount of Greenwald bashing over the last few months, and I don’t feel the need to rehash all the same arguments. But the examples of his annoying piousness and inability to admit being wrong ever are numerous and ongoing (see here for his ridiculous denial that he supported the war in Iraq and here for examples of extreme smugness).

It is hard to imagine that both men don’t care about what they are saying. It takes an extraordinary amount of passion and dedication to write/speak day in, day out on topics that most people couldn’t care less about, and you have to respect their work ethic. But you also have to wonder what the overriding motivator is when them being right supersedes everything else. Jones and Greenwald want people to care about the issues they cover and they do a great job of whipping up anger over them. They have dedicated followers that hang on their every word and go to war for them in the comment section of critical articles (in a couple of hours just check below for examples). But they are not reaching people who don’t agree with them already. I look at the headline of an Alex Jones video segment and tune out. I see Glenn Greenwald writing another scathing attack on Obama’s drone policy and know exactly what he is going to say without reading it. They offer an ideological hardened view of the world that you either accept without caveat, or become an enemy of. The problem is that it then ceases being about the message and more about the messenger. Of course Jones and Greenwald would never accept that criticism and would argue that they work only to enlighten the masses.

But then that is exactly what you would expect.

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Not the best first day

Recent college graduates listen up. This is what not to do on the first day of your spanking new job as a TV news presenter. TA.J. Clemente got a job as a news anchor for Bismarck NBC affiliate KFYR in North Dakota,  then proceeded to self destruct seconds into his opening segment,  saying ‘fucking shit’ as he went live on air for the very first time. It’s probably one of the most awkward moments you are likely to see as it dawns on Clemente that he has effectively ruined his career before it had even started. His co-anchor does her best to make light of the blunder, but there was no salvaging the situation:

According to Clemente, the station let him go 24 hours later: 

You can’t help but feel sorry for A.J – the poor chap was apparently nervous about pronouncing a difficult name. He tweeted: ”I was trying to pronounce the London Marathon winners name Tsegaye Kebede.”

In American news media culture, it’s OK to have live footage of people getting their legs blown off and shootouts with the police, but not to say ‘fuck’ by accident. Priorities anyone?

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BuzzFeed, ‘The Next Big Thing’ in journalism has a very clear business model: Do anything to get clicks, regardless of how fucking stupid it is.

This isn’t to say that the viral site is without merit – BuzzFeed is certainly very clickable and quite fun to read (the french bulldog/baby pictures really were hard not to smile at). But it’s foray into journalism is misguided at best, and at worst, downright dangerous. Take this epically irresponsible piece titled “Boston Bomber’s” Former Friends Suspect Him In Triple Murder“.

The staff at BuzzFeed interviewed three of Tamerlan Tsernaev’s friends who now suspect the killed suspect may have been involved in a triple homicide involving a close friend in 2011, because he ”didn’t show up” at the funeral. If you’re looking for some serious evidence or argument that Tsernaev had something to do with the horrific murders that saw three men have their throats slit, think again. The thousand word piece speculates that because Tsernaev didn’t appear at the funeral, may or may not have been with one of the people killed the night before the incident, went to Russia a few months after the murder and apparently slept a lot, he might have had something to do with the killings.

Apparently this constitutes journalism – interviewing anonymous people who claimed to know Tsernaev, pondering whether his behavior was suspicious at the time, and quoting tweets from other supposed accomplices like this:

Tsernaev may well have committed the triple homicide. He might have committed all 51 murders in Boston last year. While we’re speculating, lets throw in 9/11 given we don’t know his exact whereabouts or what he was doing at the time. After all, as his buddy told BuzzFeed, Tsernaev “kind of had an accent,” and “was sociable but kind of distant.”

Case closed!

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Helga Esteb / Shutterstock.com

I’ve received quite a few emails in regards to the article I wrote about Tracy Anderson and her questionable claims about exercise and nutrition. My basic argument was that Anderson’s method is no better (or worse) than any other form of exercise, and her dietary advice is extremely dubious given it strips out many essential nutrients the body needs to regulate itself (particularly when doing grueling workouts).

Many of the emails and comments were from people in the fitness industry who wrote to thank me for speaking out about celebrity gurus and the nonsense they promote. But this email from Emily Gallant stood out:

The irony of having a Man review Tracy Anderson

Doesn’t my subject title say it all? If you aren’t certain about something, or haven’t actually tried it out for a period of time, you shouldn’t spend time bullshiting about it, especially not on a website, no matter how self-important that makes you feel. You shouldn’t accept writing assignments that you have to be blasphemous in order to complete. Tracy Anderson is the future in which fitness for women is moving. She may not be for everyone but her system truly works. No longer are male fitness regimes being inaccurately prescribed for women. Instead we finally have a form of exercise that makes women look how they want to look. As someone immersed in various kinds of extreme exercise and tried every form of it you can imagine, I can attest that the Tracy Anderson method does work to lean women out in a way that is normally Impossible. I always cringe when I find blogs like this because it is clearly for entertainment, not to continue in the formation of a supportive community in support of an improved world. You can do better.

I’m not going to respond to Emily’s orders that I stop ‘accepting writing assignments’ because she doesn’t like what I’m saying. But I will respond to her charge that because I’m a man, I can’t comment on fitness methods for women.

I worked in the fitness industry and have several professional qualifications. I’ve been taught by women, and have taught women (in fact, one of the people in the business I respect the most is a woman named Maura Barclay - one of the most knowledgable and brilliant yoga/martial arts instructors around – and if you are in the Seattle area, go and train with her).

I’m genuinely not sure what being a man has to do with anything here. There is sound exercise and nutrition advice, and bad exercise and nutrition advice. Tracy Anderson has pretty good workout advice and pretty bad nutrition advice – and that’s me being charitable. Her series of exercises are good for a certain type of fitness (aerobic fitness and muscle tone) but not so much for others (you won’t develop much strength for example). I went over her nutritional advice in my article, but to recap, it’s dangerously low in essential fats, minerals and calories in general. This is particularly bad for women, who need to maintain a significantly higher percentage of body fat than men to regulate their hormones (especially if they want to have children).

While Emily says that my piece ‘is clearly for entertainment’, I’d argue the exact opposite. I don’t usually write about fitness and nutrition, but felt the need to point out some facts after reading Anderson’s claim that “you need to stop every other kind of exercise and only do my workout.” Sure, I haven’t done the Tracy Anderson Method, so I’m not speaking from experience, but I’ve been around the industry for long enough to know that it is complete and utter nonsense.

And I think Emily could do a lot better.

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