Okay, that title is a little hyped. But I thought I’d give the Glenn Beck fan boys something else to lose their sanity over besides Obama winning the Nobel peace Prize. And French officials did arrest a man with a connection to Al Queda who worked at the CERN Super Collider (which some have anxiously suggested would create a black Hole that could destroy the earth).
France has arrested a researcher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) for suspected links with al-Qaeda, officials have said.
Hey, if this was the Bush administration that had arrested this guy he would have been shipped to Guantanamo (where he would no doubt confess to many more plots of imminent terrorist attacks involving singularities of mass destruction), the Department of Homeland Security would be hyping the danger of black holes falling into the hands of Al Qaeda and Dick Cheney would be lauding the benefits of enhanced interrogation techniques in saving the world from Isalmofascists bent on killing all of humanity. So using that metric, one could say France may have indeed saved the world from imminent doom. Right, wingnuts?
Of course, officials at SERN who clearly weren’t instructed by the French government to follow the patented Karl Rove blueprint for keeping people in constant fear as a means of winning elections have already put a damper on that PR strategy:
The organisation told the Associated Press that the researcher, whom it did not identify, was working for an outside institute and had no contact with anything that could have been used for terrorism.
Silly conservative French politicians. Republicans would have milked this story for at least two weeks in the media, both lauding the president and blaming Democrats for the danger with it. Oh well, life is so boring when disseminating propaganda is not the principle function the government actually performs well.
In addition to possibly, but unlikely, creating a black hole that destroys the world, the CERN may also create world-destroying “strangelets” — postulated matter more stable than protons that, when touched by ordinary matter, changes the ordinary matter to “strange matter” (Can you say “run-away chain reaction that kills everyone”?), or lead to so-called “vacuum decay”, bubbles of emptiness more empty than the vacuum of space (which expand rapidly, destroying everything — Google “decay of the false vacuum”). There are some other theorized possible CERN Dooms-Day scenarios that I think I forgot about, as well as there possibly being world-ending scenarios that no-one has considered. I stress, this is all conjectured and unlikely. But the chance of the black-hole scenario occurring alone (or was it the strange matter scenario? I forgot.) is about the chance of winning many lotteries, I heard. This all may sound like crazy talk, but there have been many serious academic papers written on all of this. If you don’t believe me, research it without using any emergency loans.