Netroots: Jerome Armstrong and astrology

Are you sure this isn’t a deliberate hoax to smear Armstrong? I followed some of those links and found nothing. This link, for example, takes you to an article about astrology and refers to an astrologer named Jerome Armstrong. It claims that Armstrong posts at astroworld.mydd.com, which would make it the same Armstrong, but the actual link in the piece goes to http://www.astro.com which has no evidence of any Jerome Armstrong. And astroworld.mydd.com goes nowhere, simply to mydd.com (that doesn’t prove it wasn’t once a real “sub-site”, but it isn’t now).

I’m definitely not convinced. Putting any reliance on right-wing sites is treading on thin ice.

The positions of local river rocks at the time of your birth are as meaningless
as the positions of planets for revealing anything about your life.

check out the Skeptic’s Dictionary entry
http://www.skepdic.com/astrology.html

Follow the link to the Red State blog. Note the nifty picture of the “evidence,” which is a poorly airbrushed version of “Crashing the Gates” which Armstrong has just published with Markos Moulitsas. (You can go to the front page of the “Daily Kos” for a scan of “Crashing the Gates” and compare it to the “Crashing the Stars”). The airbrushing was so poor (perhaps deliberately) that you can still see the word “Gates” behind the word “Stars!” which has replaced it. Some conservatives were just having fun to see if some left-wing bloggers would swallow the bait.

No, it is NOT a redirect on the mydd.com server that’s doing it from the astrology article. The astrology articles gives the address astroworld.mydd.org, but if you look at its html code or put your cursor over the link, the link is actually http://www.astro.com, which as far as I can tell is completely unrelated to mydd.com.

Aside from some astrologer writing in 2003 about somebody named Jerome Alexander who’s an astrologer, any other independent source for the attribution? The web can be very handy, but it can also be extremely misleading.

As for this claim by “The Commissar”: “You may check my site, where an astrologer identifies him as “Jerome Armstrong of Portland,” which IS our Jerome’s hometown.” — are you kidding me? “An astrologer”? Who? This doesn’t pass the laugh test as serious proof. And who is “The Commissar” anyway? The website is replete with references to “Lefties.” That hardly gives him or her credibility in my eyes; as far as I can see this is a right-wing site obsessed with Kos.

The 2003 article may well be by a well-known astrologer, but there’s nothing to suggest that the Jerome Armstrong mentioned in that article is the same Jerome Armstrong of MyDD.com. The fact that Wikipedia picked it up (which is what I bet happened, since the article was written less than a year ago by some programmer who probably Googled Jerome Armstrong) simply shows the weakness of using the Web as a primary source as though it were as thoroughly vetted as an encylopedia. All that tells me is that using the Web as a primary resources without being very, VERY cautious is dangerous and can lead you down the wrong path, all of which should be news of the last decade.

I’m still looking for the smoke, much less the fire. The citation is a right-wing blog that has already alterned the cover of Armstrong’s book (probably infringing the copyright, but who knows these days). There’s also a Jerome Armstrong listed under IMDB as the screenwriter for “Volcano.” Same guy? Beat me; there’s no way of knowing short of further investigation. Googling “Jerome Armstrong” gives half a million hits. Bet they aren’t all the same guy! You’re evidence is thin at best. If I were allocating money to investigate further, I’d want something a whole lot more substantial than a coincidental name identity, a Wikipedia article, and a right-wing joke.

If the other questions are that much more serious–maybe they are; maybe they aren’t; at the time Armstrong is alleged to have touted stocks I knew plenty of people on the left who were saying the market would boom forever, that EnRon had discovered a new energy model, etc. for me to be really judgmental about people who look foolish in retrospect–why even bring it up?

Sheesh. Joe Hartley is in serious denial mode.

How about this from MYDD (yesterday):

“Another Update [2006-6-25 14:13:39 by Jerome Armstrong]: Oh yea, on the astrological stuff. I have done the new age type things over the years—life’s never boring that way. Down that line, I dabbled with planets and predictions in the most abstract manner, as one of several different predictive mathematical disciplines, when coming out of finances and into politics during my early blogging days (nobody is surprised that remembers the early 2001 days here), and since then have completely tapered out of it over time. So yea, the cons got me on this one being a little out of the ordinary… It has nothing to do with what I consult with in online political strategy. But hey, like JP Morgan once said, “millionaires don’t use astrology, billionaires do!” I hope to see those wingnuts that are obsessed with every little thing I do at the next bikram yoga or vipassana meditation session in DC– but fair warning that I believe we evolved from monkeys!”

No … wait … Karl Rove has hacked into MYDD and posted this pretending to be Jerome Armstrong.

Before posting this on Polizeros, I read several posts, followed all their links, then Googled “Jerome Armstrong astrologer” and read more.

I’m satisfied it’s not a hoax. Among other things, as pointed out above, Wikipedia lists him as an astrologer.