Let me start by saying that I think this article is silly
I was having lunch today and browsing through comments here at OCT on my device. I saw that RuhRoh mentioned an article at WND:
WND has a new article up using “ThoughtPrint Decoding”, which they swear is a science, to “prove” that Obama’s speech to the U.N. September 25 was a confession of his ineligibility and a call for the public to storm the White House should he be re-elected.
Ways of creating information ex nihilo reminded me of a gimmick from a few years back called the “Bible Codes” that extracted prophecy from the Bible by taking equidistant letter sequences (ELS), like every 50th letter, and finding words that can be interpreted to mean something. That set me to thinking whether we could find some choice nuggets in Jerome Corsi’s writings using the ELS methodology.
I was looking for some software so I wouldn’t have to write my own, and one thing lead to another, and I ended up at the Wikipedia article on Bible Codes. Then something caught my eye. According to the Wikipedia citation, Haralick, Rips, and Glazerson. 2005. Torah Codes: A Glimpse into the Infinite. New York: Mazal & Bracha. 125, these researchers found a rather extended sequence in the Torah saying:
Destruction I will call you; cursed is Bin Laden and revenge is to the Messiah.
Well isn’t that special!
Special meaning “cute” perhaps, but not meaningfully special. BTW, you can find “Corsi lies” in the Bible codes too.
For another bit of silliness, check out my 666 generator. Click on the sample below to visit the web page with the live generator on it. You must have Java installed on your computer, and I guarantee that page won’t send you to Oracle’s web site.
I replied to the story at WND:
Just a note: The previous entry (Secret Bible codes) is redirecting to another site after a few seconds.
I am not observing this behavior.
It’s happening to me, too. When I click on “Continue reading” or the comments in that thread, I am being redirected to Oracle’s website.
The Bible codes comment link is definitely redirecting.
Says it’s an Oracle site, but I have my doubts.
Either way, better check your code and for malware.
OK. The WordPress plug-in that manages the Java Applet was developed using the Oracle Development Toolkit. I can only speculate that the thing needs some software you don’t have on your computer and so it’s sending you to Oracle to get it.
Just viewing the page with the Applet (which you see if you click Continue Reading or link directly to the page which you do when reading comments) causes a load of the Java Virtual Machine on your device, and that’s probably why you see what you see when you see it.
Since this is keeping folks from viewing comments, I have removed the applet code, and provided a link (via the image) to my other non-WordPress site where the applet is native without the plug-in. It may or may not work there for you, but since no Oracle tools are involved, at least you won’t get sent to Oracle for anything.
This is definitely NOT a malware problem, just a technical shortcoming in getting a Java applet to work.
Quoted from another article:
Oddly enough, even before I stopped by here this morning (though after you fixed the applet), my Java Run-Time Environment (JRE) decided to annoy me with another upgrade available message. Since JRE is not normally pre-installed on most machines, I assume that is why applet was running home to Oracle.
The difficulty with JRE is the constant upgrades keeps far ahead of many of the companies that use it, so you can end up with an upgraded version of JRE that will not work on the software you are using (such as some products from SAP). It can be made worse if you also use an Oracle product, which also does not always keep up.
Jerome Corsi’s Ring Cycle
Even birthers don’t believe the WorldNetDaily writer’s claim that President Obama’s ring says “There is no god except Allah.” And that’s merely the latest discredited Obama-bashing story Corsi has peddled.
WorldNetDaily’s Jerome Corsi has managing to pull off what was once thought impossible — writing a story that even birthers refuse to believe.
In an Oct. 9 WND article, Corsi claimed that “Arabic-language and Islamic experts” think that “the ring Obama has been wearing for more than 30 years is adorned with the first part of the Islamic declaration of faith, the Shahada: ‘There is no god except Allah.'” Corsi added: “Sincere recitation of the Shahada is the sole requirement for becoming a Muslim, as it expresses a person’s rejection of all other gods.” Corsi included numerous blurry, blown-up images of the ring on Obama’s hand, going on to note that “Egyptian-born Islamic scholar Mark A. Gabriel, Ph.D., examined photographs of Obama’s ring at WND’s request and concluded that the first half of the Shahada is inscribed on it.”
Corsi went on to note that “‘Dreams from My Real Father’ producer Joel Gilbert, an Arabic speaker and an expert on the Middle East, was the first to conclude that Obama’s ring, reportedly from Indonesia, bore an Islamic inscription.”
Corsi’s boss, WND editor Joseph Farah, was eager to promote this story, wondering in an Oct. 10 column why nobody else was covering Corsi’s big scoop:
Would you consider this to be a rather explosive story weeks before the presidential election?
I would, too.
But the abject lack of curiosity by the media – both establishment and alternative – is, shall we say, somewhat stunning.
That’s not to say the public isn’t fascinated. In fact, the story is off the charts in terms of readership. More people read the story and viewed the images and analysis in the first few hours of its release than watch CNN in the same time period.
Yet it is another of those stories about which we cannot speak – at least insofar as the self-appointed information cops have determined.
[…]
I don’t know about you, but I think this is an important story – maybe one of the biggest of the presidential election year. That it had to wait so long to be told reflects the inherent mystery still surrounding the man in the White House and a hapless press just too afraid to go certain places in the pursuit of the truth.
Farah has inadvertently hit upon the problem with Corsi’s story — it’s not true. And the people who debunked it were the last people one would expect to contradict anything Corsi or WND reports: birthers.
The Birther Report blog, a.k.a. Obama Release Your Records — which insists that Obama has ” criminal identity fraud,” has “forged documents,” and that he is “is constitutionally not a natural born Citizen of the U.S. since his father was not a U.S. Citizen when Obama was born” — cited a “prominent computer software and graphics expert” who says that Corsi and Gilbert’s claim about Obama’s ring is a “major hoax,” that Gilbert’s images were Photoshopped, and that a high-resolution image of Obama’s ring shows that it has no Arabic symbols on it.
(cont’d)
http://conwebwatch.tripod.com/stories/2012/corsiring.html
Frankly, that WND story was one of the most idiotic things I have ever read, fairly close to the ‘Prince Charles is a Nazi and the Antichrist’ flyer someone put through the Church letterbox last year. There was a crazier one, but it was so crazy that it was also completely incoherent. Cranks often seem to think that ministers want to hear their cranery. We do not.
Frankly, the first time I read it, I was not sure it was not satire, it’s that bad. Then I realised it was meant to be taken seriously, and involved with hawking a book promoting this lunacy. I am sure it will have wonderful sales among the crank community.
Doc, I am afraid your post, while silly enough, is still NSFWND.
I know, I know, you must be heartbroken.
You can still access the old version here, so long as is the blog’s cache doesn’t change.
http://www.obamaconspiracy.org/tesst/
I’d be curious to know if you get redirected to Oracle, since you have the JRE. Who knows. I wrote that app a decade ago and it might even require the JDK. I don’t have the development project any more.
On the Java/Oracle issue: I didn’t have a problem, but was prompted to update Java. I hadn’t even considered that the update prompt was a result of your previous post, but perhaps it was!
Unusual for me, I know, but I’ll try to re-approach the subject.
The whole Bible Code/ThoughtPrint/squiggles as Arabic writing idea strikes me as fundamentally the same thing as the ad in comic books when I was a kid.
Every comic book has a full page ad for joke turds, whoopee cushions, and ‘X-Ray’ glasses. Everybody knew these was novelty rubbish.
But the one that got me was the one that was usually about a third of a page promoting ‘Genuine Ersatz Spanish Fly’. They tell you right up front that it is fake, a genuine fake, but a fake none-the-less but most people just can’t see the word ‘ersatz’ and only see ‘genuine’. Its like ‘ersatz’ is Yiddish for ” (‘
fnord‘).This is how the magnetic motor perpetual motion machine promoters get away with putting a 9 volt battery right in the middle of their video showing their machine running for weeks. They even make a big deal out of it when the change that battery.
Its just weird how the human mind lets confidence tricksters get away with plain sight deception, but it does. There was a great TV show about that that just played in Australa a couple of weeks ago with Magicians showing how they did things, and still fooling folks.
I had not updated my JRE so it prompted it when I went to your site. After updating, I no longer have the prompt update, but the applet does not actually work but only shows the following:
[applet code=”Smaller.F6.class” file=”http://www.davnet.org/kevin/articles/F6.jar”]
I suspect, if Java thinks it needs it, the appropriate version is well below Java 7, update 9 Actually, at may day job, I had to revert back to version 6 update 31 because 7 does not work with much (or SAP and, ironically, Oracle, are dragging their feet).
The same applet code result appeared in IE 9 and Firefox (I normally use chrome). On a side note, my Android (Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0.4) phone using both the installed web browser and Chrome had the same result but did not run for an update, which is no surprise.
Sorry for the delay in responding. Thursdays are, after the day job, choir rehearsal prep, organ practice and choir rehearsal night.
The code in the post probably triggered your Java Run-time environment to start. The default for JRE is to automatically check for updates and then annoy the user with update reminders.