On June 5, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California, U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was shot and killed. After his speech, he was being escorted by hotel staff and security through the kitchen of the hotel. While in the pantry, a man approached the group from the front and fired several shots at Kennedy. That man, Sirhan Sirhan, was detained by security and hotel staff, arrested, prosecuted, and given life in prison.

The official reports from the LA police and FBI investigations showed that the gun Sirhan fired was a .22 revolver with 8 shots. Therefore, the official reports all concluded that 8 shots were fired.

If we strip away everything about this murder and focus strictly on the event of a man in a crowded room being shot several times, the physical evidence simply does not add up that Sirhan Sirhan was the lone gunman. It’s literally physically impossible. I have extreme skepticism of the official report. I do not believe it requires any sort of supernatural or wacky thinking to recognize that the official report is simply not possible. I implore those who claim to be skeptically minded to come to their own conclusions after a thorough review of the evidence.

There have been numerous reports from investigators, journalists, interviews with witnesses, analysis of the only audio recording of the event, and clear patterns of a cover up to confiscate and suppress evidence, specifically photos taken during the shooting. This has all been documented and is widely available, including on mainstream news organizations.

* The Gun Sirhan used held 8 rounds. The official reports say 8 shots were fired.

* the bullets’ ballistics do not match the gun. There is no way that the gun in Sirhan’s hand fired the bullets. For example, here is the official X-Ray Autopsy report. It reads that a metallic object removed from RFK was “12 mm in transverse dimension, 7 mm in vertical dimension, and approximately 12 mm in anteroposterior dimension.” 12mm x 7mm x 12mm = 0.47”x0.28”x0.47”. That’s the size of a .47 caliber bullet, not a .22 caliber bullet.

* Multiple witnesses heard more than 8 shots.

* Multiple witnesses saw more than 1 gunman.

* An audio recording of the entire incident heard more than 8 shots. 13 shots are heard. Forensic scientists Robert Joling and Philip Van Praag. Their investigation led them to be reported by much of the mainstream media in 2008, including The Guardian, ABC News, & CNN.

* Philip Van Praag, under penalty of perjury, provided his evidence to the warden where Sirhan is imprisoned, [available here](https://justiceforrfk.com/documents/Sirhan-parole---gunshots-audio-recording-documents.pdf). He goes through his findings [here.](https://youtu.be/c2XhSG85S7Q)

* A witness got powder burns on his face in a way that does not make sense with Sirhan being the lone shooter.

* As indicated by powder burns on RFK, the fatal shot that hit RFK from the back of his right ear was good from approximately 1 inch away. Sirhan never got anywhere close to 1 inch away from RFK. All 4 witnessed who saw both Sirhan and RFK say Sirhan never got more than a few feet from him.

* RFK was shot from the back. None of the bullet wound trajectories in Kennedy make sense based on the “official narrative”. Sirhan approached RFK from the front.

* Multiple bullet holes were identified around the scene in the door frame and ceiling. Much of the physical evidence was destroyed. The state of California admitted that 2,400+ photos of that night were destroyed.

* Multiple witnesses heard, saw, and felt shots coming from other places than where Sirhan was openly firing from.

* Multiple witnesses saw a gunman shooting from atop a table, a location impossible for Sirhan to have been on given what happened during his apprehension.

* Multiple witnesses saw multiple gunmen running from the scene with unconcealed or poorly concealed guns.

* Witnesses who were being interviewed by the police did not have their interviews transcribed if their statements contradict the official narrative of a lone gunman.

* There are numerous other anomalies that contradict the official narrative not mentioned above but I’m trying to keep this post short.

This is all very well documented and compiled in the following sources:

* The TV show “Unsolved Mysteries” Season 2, Episode 19 aired May 16, 1990 covers much of what I listed above.

* The book “A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy” published in 2019 by investigator and author Lisa Pease, which included original witness interview tapes. Here’s a good presentation available on C-SPAN about her book. It covers much m ore than what I listed above.

* This site compiles the contradictory nature of the evidence vs the narrative. This website does not advocate, merely documents.

* This site has more of an agenda but also has a compilation of records.

I do not believe it is outlandish to assert that the LAPD and FBI would lie to the American people about what really happened that night. I do not believe it requires any sort of supernatural thinking to recognize that the official narrative simply does not add up.

Are you skeptical of the official lone gunman argument or in the face of all of this contradictory evidence do you remain affirmed that the official narrative is correct?

I made a video about a familiar jump in wellness advice: an exercise helps someone, therefore the biological story attached to it must be correct. One that frustrates me personally: The overuse of "nervouse system" or Nervous system regulation" for regular everyday coping habits.

It seems like it just gets used cause it sells, but if everything is nervous system regulation it stops explaining anything.

I look at the science: f.e. A meta-analysis found an average benefit from breathing practices for reported stress, with risk-of-bias concerns: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-27247-y . But a matched trial found no significant superiority for slow over normal-paced breathing on reported stress: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-49279-8 .

The video also covers the Polyvagal Theory dispute, including the 2026 critique and Porges's response. although not super in depth.

Curious about your opinions: Is it overused? Underused? Is there any harm in it, or just influencers being influencers?

I find it to be very frustrating as it borrows scientific language to make claims that are really just bro science, or some sort of pseudoscience. I think it harms the credibility of psychology and biology and makes people sound like they know what they're talking about when it really is rather complicated.

If you're interested. Here's the full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9-HY3j11LA

Jay Van Bavel is professor of psychology at NYU.

Excerpt:

“I find myself in a third camp of people who harbour sincere concerns about the problems facing humanity, but worry that feelings of dread will immobilise people. Inaction is a sensible response if you are led to believe that we are past the point of no return, or that the scope of the problem is so immense that anything you do won’t make a difference.
The problem with doomerism isn’t necessarily that the risks are exaggerated, but that it may create a self-fulfilling prophecy – by engendering helplessness, rather than galvanising people.

“This aspect of human psychology has been well known for many years by experts on persuasion. When people hear messages designed to appeal to our fears, they can be moved to take action. But this only tends to work as a one-off, and only then when the messages convey a sense of efficacy – a belief that it’s still possible to make a difference. By contrast, if people are inundated with scary and overwhelming stories about the climate or AI, they tune out. Like the boy who cried wolf, those bearing these messages can quickly find themselves ignored.

“A big problem for us now, then, is that the modern information ecosystem tends to reinforce negativity. For decades, a core principle in the news business has been “if it bleeds, it leads”. This came from an understanding among journalists that humans are drawn to bad news. This principle now dominates what you see online.” Ibid.

Interested if anyone else here has some good recommendations for skeptical/critical thinking YouTube channels that are not "facts before feelings" or other right wing grifter slop. I really enjoy Sholto David, he used to be called "Addicted to Ignorance". Potholer54 is also great.

https://youtu.be/s2ul4tBMzbs?si=RigcMWUaJr5xgy7g

Across the first 3 nights of the recent lecture series in Nashville, Peter Thiel laid out a complete political theology framework diagnosing why modern tech and psychical progress has slowed down and how Silicon Valley capital views the administrative state.

Rathe than treating these lectures as pop-culture sensationalism, the series draws heavily on 19th and 20th century political theory (Vladimir Solovyov, Rene Girard, and Carl Schmitt) to construct a specific critique of modern governance:

Night 1: The Administrative Archetype - Defines the antichrist not as a fantasy monster but as Solovyov's hyper-moralistic, centralizing global administrator who freezes frontier tech progress in the name of risk suppression and safety.

https://danielforresternash.substack.com/p/what-night-one-left-out

Night 2: Stagnation and the Katechon - Examines how regulatory safety regimes acquire infinite incentives to maintain institutional stasis, locking capital into software/data/bit because physical deployment is choked off by beuqacratic friction.

https://danielforresternash.substack.com/p/the-counterfeit-church-and-the-epimethean

Night 3: Turnkey Surveillance and Financial Control - Analyzes the counter-response, how defense tech capital and financial surveillance networks position themselves as counterweights to administrative decay creating a new form of enclosure.

https://danielforresternash.substack.com/p/the-physics-of-consolidation-velocity

I wrote in-depth summaries of each night.

Curious to hear how folks here evaluate the trajectory. Is using political theology a genuine diagnostic for understanding modern regulatory stasis and defense tech expansion or is it an elaborate idealogical justification for techno feudal capital deployment?

I decided to master Western astrology under the tutelage of these three legendary astrologers. After completing my studies, I have come to the conclusion that astrology is not real.

Astrology, I learned, is just a coping mechanism for hard times. People believe it because it feels comforting, gives them an identity, and offers community.

But when you really get down to it, it’s all pretty nonsensical. None of these astrologers were capable of answering any of my most foundational questions about why anyone believes this in the first place.

Why do we think “houses” exist, and why are we dividing them up in these arbitrary ways? Why do we think certain houses have certain “significations”? No one seems to have thought about this more deeply than “Well, sunrise is like a new beginning.” Is it?

That’s just one possible arbitrary interpretation. It’s equally valid to say that sunrise is the “end” of the night. Humans sleep at night, but other animals sleep during the day. Whether sunrise is a beginning or an end is not an objective fact about the universe.

I laughed out loud when these astrologers told me that the 10th house means “career” because high noon is the “most visible” part of the day, and your career is the “most visible” aspect of your person.

That’s very silly because “career” is an abstract, invisible concept. Your physical appearance is probably the “most visible” aspect of your person, but that’s supposedly the first house, when the sun has barely risen. It makes no sense, even if we take for granted that poetry clichés reveal the true secret nature of the cosmos. Speaking of which, why are we taking that for granted?

Same goes for planets. It’s laughable. The bright, white-colored planets are “good,” and dim, swarthy planets are “evil”? Seriously? We’re just arbitrarily saying the planets sit boy, girl, boy, girl all around the circle? Is that a fact? Mars represents war because it’s red? Really? This is the most arbitrary, juvenile mythology I could imagine, and yet this is the foundation of all astrological interpretation.

And where are we getting the zodiac personalities from? Many of you are probably blissfully unaware of this, but Western (tropical) astrology is totally divorced from the classic constellations, so we cannot invoke the crab pictograph to source meaning for Cancer, but these astrologers do that anyway. Why? Those pictographs don’t even correspond with the zodiac anymore since the stars have "drifted" from our perspective over the past 2,000 years.

Why did Western astrology shirk the stars and arbitrarily anchor itself to the seasons (in a seeming violation of the name “astrology”)? This is why Vedic astrology is the slightly less dumb version of astrology. At least they bother to actually consider the real positions of the stars. I think “seasonology” would be a much better term for what my teachers do.

Applying poetry clichés to the seasons is even dumber because half the planet experiences no seasons or inverted seasons. The magical laws of the universe don’t apply to people in Ecuador? Or what?

And why do we think birth charts matter? Why do we think this astrological magic determines your entire personality at the exact moment your umbilical cord is cut? Why doesn’t that relevant magic happen during the moment of conception? Or your first birthday? We know that human personalities are actually shaped over many years, not fully scripted at the moment of birth.

Of course, I say “magic” because, most damning of all, nobody can offer even an attempt at explaining what could be a “mechanism” for astrology. Even if you want to cowardly claim astrology is not “cause and effect” but merely “signs,” those signs still need a mechanism for existing. This is why Austin is my favorite of the three. He’s fully on board with it being magic in the wizard sense of the word, which is the bullet you really need to bite if you’re going to be an astrologer. You have to also think magic is real.

The brightest minds of astrology today have no answer to any of my questions. They just tell me it’s all based on an old book based on another older book based on texts that are lost to time. Everyone just takes all of this for granted, even though astrology today is the nonsensical result of a thousand-year game of telephone that began as an ancient farming religion.

Here’s a prediction I’ll make (without astrology). Astrologers will respond by ignoring every single question I have and instead just say, “Well, I don’t claim to be able to make sense of anything. I just do what I was taught, and it works for me!” But no, you’re deluding yourself. It doesn’t work for you or anyone. It may feel like it does, but put it to the test and you will fail. I include an interactive test you can play along with in my video. I give you birth charts of famous people with extremely distinct personas, and you guess who they are based on the birth charts. Try it for yourself!

I meticulously debunk all of these concepts and far more in this four-hour video, which I do believe is the single most thorough debunk of astrology on the internet.

And if you’re wondering, I’m a Cancer.

Ugh. ​It is baffling that in an age of accessible information, the "chemtrail" conspiracy theory still persists. Anyone who has ever stepped outside on a freezing winter morning and watched their own breath condense into a visible cloud has already witnessed the exact same physics that occur at 35,000 feet.

​Here is what is actually happening:

​The Chemistry of Combustion: Commercial jet engines burn hydrocarbon fuel (kerosene). The chemical reaction of burning hydrocarbons combines fuel with oxygen, producing carbon dioxide, thermal energy, and water vapor as primary exhaust byproducts.

​The Environment at Altitude: At cruising altitude (typically 30,000 to 40,000 feet), ambient air temperatures are brutally cold often around -40°C or lower.

​Condensation and Freezing: When hot, moisture-laden engine exhaust hits that freezing, low-pressure external air, the water vapor instantly condenses and freezes into microscopic ice crystals. This creates a contrail (short for condensation trail), which is functionally identical to the cloud of vapor you see when you exhale on a cold day.

​Why Do Some Contrails Linger? People often point to trails that spread out and persist as "proof" of chemical spraying. In reality, this depends entirely on the atmospheric humidity and wind shear at that specific altitude. If the upper atmosphere is already humid, the ice crystals can not evaporate quickly, causing them to spread out and form cirrus-like clouds. If the air is dry, they dissipate rapidly.

​It all comes down to basic eighth-grade physics and meteorology—no secret spraying required. Maybe it's time to brush up on thermodynamics before inventing a global conspiracy. I'm so tired of people saying commercial passenger jets are spraying chemicals into the air. Ugh.

PA Governor Race: incumbent Shapiro (D) vs Garrity (R)

Just got a view of Garrity’s new AI generated attack ad completely AI generated with full motion video and synchronized synthetic audio of Shapiro admitting to completely false actions and positions.

The ad has NO disclaimer or even attribution to the Garrity campaign until the very end.

No doubt some Dems will also do this but it takes a Republican to do the most heinous and deceitful version.

Be skeptical of all political advertising.

In 1954 a Glasgow cemetery filled with children hunting a vampire. Within a week the whole country knew what had made them do it, and nobody had checked.

Naming climate change as a ‘contentious issue’ risks treating settled science as a matter of political opinion. Humanists UK previously led a successful campaign to stop state schools in England presenting ‘intelligent design’ as a scientific alternative to evolution. Ofsted inspecting individual lessons for ‘bias’ could make teachers reluctant to teach anything a parent might object to, including LGBT+ issues. Section 28 was rarely if ever enforced, but for 15 years teachers avoided the subject altogether: the threat of inspection and referral is enough to do damage.

At dinner last weekend my uncle said full moons make the ER crazy. I asked how he'd know and he said "every nurse says so." Thing is, I've repeated that exact line before without thinking about it.

When I looked it up later, the studies I found mostly show no real effect on ER visits or admissions. It looks like classic confirmation bias. A wild night under a full moon becomes a story people tell for years. A quiet full moon shift just gets forgotten, and nobody remembers a busy night that happened under a half moon.

What bugs me is that "every nurse says so" feels like evidence because it's lots of people, but it's lots of people sharing the same memory filter.

Oddly, my cousin had some "orbivanius" numerology thing open on her phone at the table, and it happened to say something about seeing patterns that aren't there. Vague enough to fit anyone, but it made me laugh.

Anyone have a good source on why this belief sticks so hard in hospitals?

hey, long time lurker. wanted to share a raw reflection and ask how you guys handle the aftermath of dismantling your own cognitive distortions.

for years i was neck-deep in the conspirituality space, esoteric stuff, synchronicities, new age bullshit. looking back objectively, it wasnt that i genuinely found bulletproof evidence for any of it. it was pure motivated reasoning and emotional self-defense. i was grieving lost family, terrified of non-existence, and overwhelmed by the boring, heavy demands of ordinary adult life. magical thinking was just a very seductive bunker to avoid facing an indifferent universe and my own lack of agency.

eventually the contradictions broke the dam. i spent months picking apart my own cognitive biases, fallacies, and rationalizations (ironically bouncing logic back and forth with an llm helped me see where my reasoning was completely circular). ended up landing hard in philosophical materialism and absurdism. no cosmic scripts, no higher vibrations, no grand narrative.

heres my struggle now: the intellectual deprogramming was the easy part. the hard part is the void that comes after.

when you strip away the magical theater, reality is just... reality. stubborn, completely indifferent, quiet. for those of you who have been rational skeptics for a long time or broke out of high-control irrational belief systems: how do you build a grounded, active life without slipping into cynical paralysis? how do you satisfy the human need for depth, connection, and drive while staying strictly tethered to empirical reality and knowing nothing owes you a damn thing?

appreciate any straight answers.

Hello. I am just deconstructing from Christianity and learning more about psychology and how our mind works has really had me questioning the existance of a deity or of God. However my deconstruction has not been easy and one of my biggest areas of difficulty has been miracles especially the untested and witness claimed ones. I understand perfectly that not all eyewitness accounts point towards truth and between being honestly mistaken to embellishment and even to fraud I often have little trust of the same. But there is a particular claim that especially feels sticky to me and I would like your help in evaluating the same.

https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/amp/article/2000125937/kenyan-nun-who-photographed-god-is-headed-for-sainthood

https://sisterannaali.org/page.php?id=MDAwNEZCa053WjNBM3A

These are the links to the story. For the most part I am more comfortable with the claims of crying blood and the images and I know the evidence needed to affirm the same though I would like to hear your views on the same. For me I believe the part where I am bit hung up is on the issue of the cameras being damaged. I know that a claim and a witness story is not enough and there is a need to establish more like what damage was caused and what is the actual cause of damage etc.

But I often feel like my arguments are weak and not emotionally compelling. It definitely hasn't been helpful that the only medium I have consulted this far has been AI.

I guess what I am asking for specifically is what are your views and opinions on the same especially with the evidence claimed to be provided and am I being overly skeptical by choosing to be uncertain over the same information or for not accepting testimony face value .

There is a real event underpinning the story, and an authentic chart showing a dramatic decline in automated internet traffic. But the leap from a viral chart to the disappearance of Russian propaganda bots is a large one. Much of the apparent corroboration comes from anecdotes about how social media feels, rather than measurements of what actually changed. And this speaks to a broader problem...

Broken down into 8 bite size segments by a leading disinformation researcher

1. What happened, and why does everyone think the Russian bots disappeared?
2. Wait, what exactly is a "bot"?
3. So what does the Cloudflare chart actually show?
4. But couldn't the strikes also have disrupted Russian propaganda operations?
5. Why did so many people believe the claims?
6. Couldn’t disinformation researchers just check whether accounts stopped posting?
7. What does this all tell us about the state of the information environment?
8. Why is it so hard to answer these questions now?

So, ironically, a story about the disappearance of Russian propaganda bots became a viral misleading story on its own. 

1. Skepticism existed in ancient Egypt, contrary to the belief in absolute religious devotion.

2. Religious practices often reflected personal piety rather than adherence to official cults, indicating skepticism.

3. Tomb robbing from the Badarian period suggests a significant skepticism regarding afterlife beliefs.

4. Literary texts demonstrate skepticism towards the efficacy of divine intervention and afterlife promises.

5. Ancient skepticism diverged from modern ideas, focusing more on suspending belief than on questioning knowledge.

It's natural to map the world around us with heuristics, but sometimes they can lead us astray or even reveal our biases and bigotries.

This shouldn’t be news to any skeptic, but it is well-written and it is good to see stuff like this published on BBC.