Skepticism, Science and Pseduoscience in one big package

Just another in my series of Boring Person With No Life Weekend TV Reviews...

HBO is currently running the Errol Morris documentary Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.

As noted in the Subject line, it's a fascinating mix of this forum's three raisons-de-f'ing-etre.

For those who never heard of him, Leuchter is a self-taught Massachusetts designer of electric chairs, lethal-injection machines and gas chambers.

In the 1980's he was hired, as an alleged gas-chamber expert, to testify in the trial of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel.

After that, Leuchter's life got very interesting. Oh, and after he went haring off to Auschwitz and illegally chipped rock samples from inside former Nazi gas chambers.

This is all summarized neatly in his Wiki entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_A._Leuchter

(WARNING: a Google on Leuchter pukes up links to many neo-Nazi and Revisionist websites like IHR, where you might not want to go.)

After seeing the Morris movie again, to quote a JREF thread about Leuchter, I was wondering "whatever happened to the little weasel."

The Wiki entry said he was working as a "telephone solicitor," but it's pretty old. Somebody at another website said he was currently driving a bus. So if you know what happened to ol' Fred, post and let me know. No, I do NOT want to email him, not even if that is possible.

Bonus: while searching on Leucther, I came across a Fundie Xian Holocaust-denial website. In Australia, of all places. Some invited American Nazi gasbags seem really pissed about the Holocaust Museum in Washington, and express their views under "Three Christian Views of the Holocaust."

Here's the first line of text from their Home page and their URL, which makes an interesting juxtaposition. If I were feeling friskier, I might drop this into R/T just to cause trouble...

Within five minutes, any intelligent, open-minded person can be convinced that the Holocaust gassings of World War II are a profitable hoax.

http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/holohoax.htm

I've always thought paralytics to be an unnecessary and incredibly cruel part of lethal injection. If an overdose of pentothal hasn't sufficiently anesthetized the person to the pain of a potassium OD, then more should be administered. Just don't leave him there paralyzed and unable to react.

Lethal injection only looks humane. It generally is not.

Now that I've been introduced to the nutcase who originated the process, I understand why it was designed to be inhumane.

Fortunately, I now live in a state that has joined the civilized world, wild west reputation and all, and abolished the death penalty. It had been used only once since 1961, so I suppose they thought it cost more than it was "worth," especially with the number of convictions being overturned nationwide as the result of law school innocence projects.

Thanks for wandering around on the dark side so we don't have to.

Mentioned in the Wiki, I think, but it may have been somewhere else.

At least one state legal official bluntly accused Leuchter of "extortion" for his expert-witness hijinks.

Leuchter would hire himself out as an expert witness in lethal injection. Then he would contact state prison officials and threaten to testify that their equipment was "inhumane." Which they could fix by hiring him as a consultant, natch.

Truly a weird individual. e.g., his college degree was in History. But most of the courtroom testimony about WWII and the Holocaust seemed to come as a complete surprise to him.

Though he passed himself off as an "engineer" for marketing purposes, he had no education in that field. That neatly hoisted him on his own petard. After he got his 15 minutes of fame by testifying for the neo-Nazis, the Mass. state board of engineering certification promptly banned him from selling any kind of engineering services.

I KNOW you don't mean it that way. But Kevorkian's been outrageously smeared quite enough already by this exact association. (It's on a level with the teabagger logic that the Nazis were National "Socialists" and Obama is a "Socialist" no matter what he does or claims, and therefore a Nazi.)

That BibleBelievers site is seriously loony. It has a whole section dedicated to 'Conspiracy Scholars', full of paranoia about the 'Bilderbergers', the 'NWO', and, of course, the jooooos.

Among other things, it includes a list of the original Rhodes Scholars, who are clearly deemed as sinister in some way. First time I've come across that one...

Started going on and on about the Rothschilds and couldn't figure out why people were objecting and his posts were getting pulled. Oddly the mods just pulled the links without comment and no pizza. Friends in high places, I suppose.

which works with new posters with bugs up their behinds.

Looks like the Rhodes Scholars are a flexible conspiracy - both an elitist left-wing cabal for global domination, and part of the white-supremacist right-wing conspiracy for the same.

A 1958 Rhodes Scholar was the American musician/actor Kris Kristofferson. Apparently part of the global conspiracy involves the production of really bad movies.

Have you ever seen the 11 1/2 hour....yes, that's ELEVEN AND A HALF HOUR...TV mini-series Amerika? (Shouldn't that be a "maxi-series"?)

The plot: America has been bloodlessly taken over by the Soviet Union, leading to slave-labor camps for some, collaboration for others and rebellion for yet others.

But it starred (cue ominous pseudo-Tchaikovsky soundtrack)...KRIS KRISTOFFERSON!!! As the leader of the American resistance to the Russians. Lots of right-wingers were angry about that, since Kristofferson is one of the most outspoken lefties in Hollywood.

If that story-line sounds familiar, it vaguely resembled Red Dawn. Only without Patrick Swayze, intentional humor, or a coherent plot.

No, come to think of it, Amerika makes Red Dawn look like The Battleship Potemkin.

You probably didn't see it in the UK. AFAIK, it was limited to one showing on the ABC TV network here in 1987.

Then it mercifully vanished for years, leaving only a lingering stench in the electronic ether. Not even a VHS tape release until 1995, and some small private company just recently released it on DVD.

Though in the case of this overstuffed turkey, saying it was "released" is probably not accurate. More like, "it escaped."

I actually watched part of the damn thing, until I slipped into a coma.

I do remember the part about American school-teachers acting as fifth-columnists in the Evil Russian Conspiracy. Which was masterminded by the U.N. Oh, and the American flag is replaced with a flag featuring not only the hammer-and-sickle, but the U.N. insignia! Scary!

They probably didn't work in a Jewish conspiracy because this thing was "created" by one Mr. Ben Stein - though I think he still denies that.

Incredibly, most of the IMDB reviews are from people who LIKED it. But most of them liked Ronald Reagan, too:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092316/