TenuredVulture wrote:

Monkeyboy wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:Let me be specific. Hedge funds have openly driven many people into foreclosure, wrecking the economy while doing it. They did it openly. They were aided by generous campaign contributions, which got favorable legislation passed so that their massive income is taxed at a lower rate than mine. This was all done openly. Even the campaign donations are easily identified. There's a conspiracy, sure. But it has nothing to do with 9/11 or the Kennedy assassination.

Or go to PTK's (and now Woddy's) other obsession--our food supply. Again, why is our food so literally shitty? Again, it's all done out in the open. Interest groups fund campaigns, getting favorable legislation passed, and the rest of us eat shit.

There's no need for secret conspiracies when we can be robbed and poisoned for reasons that we can easily understand by people we can easily identify by means we can easily understand.

I think there are things openly being done and others things not so openly. If there's a way to make money off of it, somebody is doing it.

The food problem has become the thing that gets me the most upset, I think. We are literally producing the worst possible food we can, subsidizing the least nutritive and most unhealthy food while ignoring fresh water and soil loss, all while poisoning the environment in the process. And fossil fuels are used throughout the process. It's unsustainable in every way. Hell, farmers aren't even allowed to plant what they want in many areas due to ridiculous litigation by big ag companies. Want to complain about it? Too bad, it's illegal to criticize these companies in some states.

edit: I don't want to post a pro-swiss comment twice in two days lest someone tell me to renounce my US citizenship, but they subsidize the right things here. Fresh veggies are cheap and processed food is expensive.

My point is the food thing isn't a secret conspiracy. It's right on the damn package when you buy it. Conspiracy theories are a distraction that allow corporations to exercise their control in broad daylight. Ever wonder why in the main conspiracies seem to have a greater hold on right wingers? It's to prevent cognitive dissonance. "It can't be corporations that are screwing me, it's the UN!"

bleh wrote:Before Ruby shot Oswald he went to Western Union and sent money to a stripper who worked for him. Afterwards they found the receipt in his pocket and the time on it was 4 minutes before Oswald was shot.

Monkeyboy wrote:

bleh wrote:Before Ruby shot Oswald he went to Western Union and sent money to a stripper who worked for him. Afterwards they found the receipt in his pocket and the time on it was 4 minutes before Oswald was shot.

Wow, he cut that close, too close. I haven't read much about this stuff, so I don't know much about it. Is it possible he decided to shoot him as more of an impulse. Like he made the money transfer, went outside and saw Oswald, then just decided to shoot him because he had nothing to lose due to his cancer? It just seems weird he would risk missing maybe his only chance to get Oswald, if he was really planning to do it.

Houshphandzadeh wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:Let me be specific. Hedge funds have openly driven many people into foreclosure, wrecking the economy while doing it. They did it openly. They were aided by generous campaign contributions, which got favorable legislation passed so that their massive income is taxed at a lower rate than mine. This was all done openly. Even the campaign donations are easily identified. There's a conspiracy, sure. But it has nothing to do with 9/11 or the Kennedy assassination.

Or go to PTK's (and now Woddy's) other obsession--our food supply. Again, why is our food so literally #$!&@? Again, it's all done out in the open. Interest groups fund campaigns, getting favorable legislation passed, and the rest of us eat #$!&@.

There's no need for secret conspiracies when we can be robbed and poisoned for reasons that we can easily understand by people we can easily identify by means we can easily understand.

I'm 100% with this. I'm always trying to tell my crazy friends that you don't need to look any farther than politics and economics that are right there on the front page, but that just doesn't satisfy them for some reason.

WHEN Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London, he occupied himself with writing a history of the world. He had finished the first volume and was at work on the second when there was a scuffle between some workmen beneath the window of his cell, and one of the men was killed. In spite of diligent enquiries, and in spite of the fact that he had actually seen the thing happen, Sir Walter was never able to discover what the quarrel was about; whereupon, so it is said—and if the story is not true it certainly ought to be—he burned what he had written and abandoned his project.

This story has come into my head I do not know how many times during the past ten years, but always with the reflection that Raleigh was probably wrong. Allowing for all the difficulties of research at that date, and the special difficulty of conducting research in prison, he could probably have produced a world history which had some resemblance to the real course of events. Up to a fairly recent date, the major events recorded in the history books probably happened. It is probably true that the battle of Hastings was fought in 1066, that Columbus discovered America, that Henry VIII had six wives, and so on. A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don’t like it. Even as late as the last war it was possible for the Encyclopædia Britannica, for instance, to compile its articles on the various campaigns partly from German sources. Some of the facts—the casualty figures, for instance—were regarded as neutral and in substance accepted by everybody. No such thing would be possible now. A Nazi and a non-Nazi version of the present war would have no resemblance to one another, and which of them finally gets into the history books will be decided not by evidential methods but on the battlefield.

During the Spanish civil war I found myself feeling very strongly that a true history of this war never would or could be written. Accurate figures, objective accounts of what was happening, simply did not exist. And if I felt that even in 1937, when the Spanish Government was still in being, and the lies which the various Republican factions were telling about each other and about the enemy were relatively small ones, how does the case stand now? Even if Franco is overthrown, what kind of records will the future historian have to go upon? And if Franco or anyone at all resembling him remains in power, the history of the war will consist quite largely of “facts” which millions of people now living know to be lies. One of these “facts”, for instance, is that there was a considerable Russian army in Spain. There exists the most abundant evidence that there was no such army. Yet if Franco remains in power, and if Fascism in general survives, that Russian army will go into the history books and future school children will believe in it. So for practical purposes the lie will have become truth.

This kind of thing is happening all the time. Out of the milions of instances which must be available, I will choose one which happens to be verifiable. During part of 1941 and 1942, when the Luftwaffe was busy in Russia, the German radio regaled its home audiences with stories of devestating air raids on London. Now, we are aware that those raids did not happen. But what use would our knowledge be if the Germans conquered Britain? For the purposes of a future historian, did those raids happen, or didn’t they? The answer is: If Hitler survives, they happened, and if he falls they didn’t happen. So with innumerable other events of the past ten or twenty years. Is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion a genuine document? Did Trotsky plot with the Nazis? How many German aeroplanes were shot down in the Battle of Britain? Does Europe welcome the New Order? In no case do you get one answer which is universally accepted because it is true: in each case you get a number of totally incompatible answers, one of which is finally adopted as the result of a physical struggle. History is written by the winners.

In the last analysis our only claim to victory is that if we win the war we shall tell fewer lies about it than our adversaries. The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits ‘atrocities’ but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future. In spite of all the lying and self-righteousness that war encourages, I do not honestly think it can be said that that habit of mind is growing in Britain. Taking one thing with another, I should say that the press is slightly freer than it was before the war. I know out of my own experience that you can print things now which you couldn’t print ten years ago. War resisters have probably been less maltreated in this war than in the last one, and the expression of unpopular opinion in public is certainly safer. There is some hope, therefore, that the liberal habit of mind, which thinks of truth as something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not as something you can make up as you go along, will survive. But I still don’t envy the future historian’s job. Is it not a strange commentary on our time that even the casualties in the present war cannot be estimated within several millions?

Slowhand wrote:I just recently learned of this Reptilian conspiracy. Speechless.

VoxOrion wrote:Since I started this thread can I delete it now?

swishnicholson wrote:

VoxOrion wrote:Since I started this thread can I delete it now?

As if that would be your own decision. We know who pulls the strings, and it's a skein that leads back through three continents and into the highest offices of power.

VoxOrion wrote:

swishnicholson wrote:

VoxOrion wrote:Since I started this thread can I delete it now?

As if that would be your own decision. We know who pulls the strings, and it's a skein that leads back through three continents and into the highest offices of power.

I operate so big no one can believe I'm this obvious. I'm the Argo of intergalactic conspiracies.

pacino wrote:- 15% of voters think the medical industry and the pharmaceutical industry “invent” new diseases to make money

Voters are split 44%-45% on whether Bush intentionally misled about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. 72% of Democrats think Bush lied about WMDs, Independents agree 48-45, just 13% of Republicans think so