The TDS guys did a show with someone calling himself Ryan Dawson, who is something of a conspiracy theorist. That’s not entirely fair as he does not seem to be pushing a theory, as such, but more of a systematic skepticism of the prevailing narrative on issues like the Iraq War and 9/11. Questioning the official narrative is often lumped in with the conspiracy stuff, because all conspiracy theories start with the argument that the official truth is, in fact, a well orchestrated lie to cover up the real truth behind whatever.
Conspiracy theories, of course, are wildly popular, despite the fact most people swear they don’t believe in them. There’s a reason the people who make movies often use the conspiracy as a plot devise. Even the most skeptical people enjoy following the plot as the real power behind the scenes is revealed. Still, most people have been programmed to say they don’t believe in this stuff. You’re cast as a weirdo or a nutjob if you think the CIA killed JFK, for example. Yet, most people believe JFK was the victim of a conspiracy.
The funny thing about the conspiracy theory stuff is that the official narrative that spawns the conspiracy theory always relies on the same probabilistic flaws as the conspiracy that seeks to discredit it. For example, the official JFK story strikes most people as laughably implausible. Basically Oswald pulled off a one in a billion effort and then was killed by Jack Ruby, who also pulled of a one in a billion long shot. The theory the JFK was killed by Joe DiMaggio, who was a CIA sleeper agent, is really not that crazy in comparison.
Similarly, both halves of a conspiracy theory follow the same set of rhetorical rules, in that they don’t make the affirmative case. Instead, they rely on all other explanations being seen as less plausible. The people who think Mr. Coffee killed JFK and RFK don’t have a lot of evidence, but they can explain in detail why the official story is bogus. Of course, the people who think Oswald was the lone gunman don’t have a great argument either, so they rely on the fact that no one saw Joe DiMaggio in Dallas with Ted Cruz’s father.
The thing that makes conspiracy theories popular is not their amusing leaps of faith and logic, but that they satisfy our need to know. JFK was most likely not killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, at least Oswald did not act alone. Whoever helped him either got very lucky, which is always a possibility, or they were very good at covering their connections with Oswald. Either way, we’ll never know, because the people who investigated it were never able to solve the riddle. Some crimes go unsolved and as humans, we truly hate that.
Something similar will probably happen in time with 9/11. The neocons expertly used the event as a propaganda tool to get their war plans passed. We know guys like Richard Perle were scheming about remaking Mesopotamia for a long time. That does not mean, however, that the neocons pulled the 9/11 job. It means that the official story is mostly bullshit to cover-up gross incompetence and to promote the forever war. In time, people will stop believing the official story and most people will think 9/11 was a conspiracy.
Of course, just because the official version of events is nonsense, it does not mean there is a conspiracy. In the case of 9/11, gross incompetence is the most likely issue being covered up by the government. We see how this works with the current FBI scandal, where the DOJ and FBI are feverishly trying to hide the fact that senior people in both agencies were ham-handedly running a domestic spying ring. The same clowns running the Trump spying operation were the ones who bungled 9/11 and the aftermath.
There are actual conspiracies, of course. Just type the word “Itanimulli” into your favorite search engine. Then read the word backward. On a more serious side, the FBI was running a spying operation on the Trump campaign. The IRS did conspire to keep conservative groups from participating in the 2012 election.The Gulf of Tonkin incident was faked. Gamblers did fix the 1919 World Series. Whoever plotted the 9/11 terrorist attacks obviously pulled off one of the great conspiracies in modern history.
Logic suggests that there is a correlation between the public’s willingness to indulge in conspiracy theories and the degree of trust in the society. People in a high trust society that thinks their government is generally honest should be less inclined toward conspiracy theories than people in a low trust, high corruption society. On the other hand, there is some evidence that the more confident you are in your understanding of politics, the more likely you are to believe in conspiracy theories. Dunning-Kruger strikes again.
The funny thing about America, versus other countries, is our conspiracy theories always sound like a Hollywood script, thus they tend to the ridiculous. Americans are strangely naive about the reality of government power, for example, but willing to indulge is crackpot beliefs about corporations plotting to spike the water supply. Yet, the story of civilization is the story of people conspiring together to seize power, overthrow the king and advance their political agenda through stealth. Government is nothing but a conspiracy.
Finally, even the smartest people can be let down by their own bias. Greg Cochran is pretty sure the Soviets weaponized small pox against the German Army in the war, but this has been covered up for decades. His evidence is not conclusive, but he makes a pretty good case. The events during the war suggest something very strange happened and his answer would explain the data. It also means there has been a multi-generational conspiracy, involving multiple countries, to conceal this truth from the public.
On the other hand, he thinks the official Holocaust narrative is a precise telling of history and that the skeptics are succumbing to insane conspiracy theories. This despite the fact there are a lot of problems with the official narrative. It’s pretty reasonable to think that maybe there has been some exaggerations. If it is is possible to conceal the use of germ warfare, exaggerating the details of German war crimes as a propaganda weapon should be easy to accept. Social pressure and belief are powerful motivators.
That’s the thing with conspiracy theories. There really is no definition of what separates the conspiracy from the skeptical analysis or even genuine speculation. Wondering why the 9/11 hijackers went undetected, despite multiple warnings to the FBI containing very specific information is often called a conspiracy theory. On the other hand, Progressives are still certain that Bush lied about chemical weapons so that Dick Cheney’s friends at Haliburton could make tens of billions rebuilding Iraq after the war.
People will believe anything and doubt everything.
Good original post by the Z Man. A few late thoughts:
1. My experience with conspiracy theorists mostly has to do with the JFK murder, and I was not impressed. I was initially pre-disposed to support a conspiracy, and did my best. But it just isn’t there. What is there is thousands of details, many very strange, that can be interpreted different ways. The problem is, without exception, the interpretations come down to two options: (A) Oswald did it, or (B) There’s some other explanation. The problem is all the B, C, D, E, and F interpretations all point in different directions.
The only possible coherent explanation for the shootings of JFK and JD Tippit are that Oswald did it. If he were part of a conspiracy, no one has definitively explained what the point was. In other words, conspiracy theorists all get together on one side, but they have just as many disagreements with each other about the evidence as they do with LNers. (Lone Nutters, btw.)
Maybe if there were a coherent conspiracy by the mafia that ruled out the one by LBJ, maybe … but no one argues that way. It’s about Cuba, no it’s about Vietnam, no, it’s about mafia revenge, no, it’s a right-wing coup masking itself as a left-wing coup, no, it’s about LBJ about to go down for bribery.
Bottom line: Oswald’s rifle was found on the 6th floor. Oswald’s rifle was missing from Ruth Paine’s garage. There was an Oswald signed copy of the backyard photos with the rifle in George DeMorhenschildt’s storage unit from the spring of 1963, which somehow the conspirators would have had to put in place.
A government sized conspiracy, but too much damn effort to shoot a president publicly when you could put him down with a cup of coffee and muscle relaxant. Then leak his health problems.
Here’s what happened. The FBI lost track of Oswald the Kook. The CIA was keeping an eye on him. They royally screwed up. There was some CYA that looked very bad. (See James Hasty.) And then Jack Ruby did the unthinkable and screwed the pooch for all time, saying, “I wanted to show the world a Jew has guts.”
I’ve studied the heck out of it. I’d love to break the conspiracy wide open. But Oswald was a friggin weirdo, and the shots from 411 Elm Street are a chip shot, if you’ve ever been in Dealey Plaza. It wasn’t a billion to one shot–that’s backward thinking, and typical of conspiracy thinkers, where they think because something happened, you can project backward and make that the intent. Oswald was not trying to create seven wounds in two men and leave a bullet unscathed. All he needed to do was shoot. What happened after that was not fixed at the time of the shooting.
And for my southern friends, the thing that stuck out at me more than anything is that Texas girl Nellie Connally had already pulled her husband John Connally out of the line of fire by the time of the headshot. Jackie was still trying to react. IJS. If JFK had married a southern girl, he survives Dallas.
The establishment has no one to blame but themselves for the “establishment” of the conspiracy theory culture, since they gave rise to it themselves with a real conspiracy. If the assassination of JFK wasn’t a conspiracy committed by our ruling class then why won’t even Trump release all the documents scheduled to be released, over 50 years later?
Epic thread indeed. Given the blatant corruption lately it’s not hard to believe the government would be responsible for any and all so-called conspiracies.
90% negative reporting on the president and it’s never ending diatribe makes it obvious mainstream media is the lap dog of DC. aka “The Swamp”.
Politicians turn out contrived nonsense on obvious crimes and the media sells it as fact.
Have felt foolish as of late for believing in the media all these years, but grateful to the president and my fellow Americans for finally dragging evil out into the light.
“The temp for melting the steel in the WTC has to be 1000 degrees.”
“No, burning jet fuel will not blow the temper out of structural steel, it literally takes forced draft air forges to reach those temperatures.”
I cast a lot of bullets and use a simple open cast iron pot on a propane grill to melt the alloy (lead wheelweights, typically). Those require 600 degrees to melt and my pot usually varies between 600 and 750 degrees. I have also done it on an outdoor grill using white gas.Easy-peasy to get those temps out of
an energy dense fuel source like hydrocarbons.
Conspiracy theories are a form of rationalization to make one feel ‘superior’? Not really. It’s more that the one eyed man is king in the land of the blind.
Your fellow human beings allow the conspiracies to continue by being both ignorant and gullible.
When you understand that Jerusalem or Tel Aviv (take your pick) is the capital of FUSA then “conspiracy theories” don’t seem so far fetched… read’em an weep, suckas
…..conspiracy as a plot devise.
Do you use auto correct or was this done manually?
AndyRooneyPosting
People conspire all the time. Put three people in a room and you’ll have four conspiracies going on in a matter of minutes.
My theory is that Zman is 5 different guys. How does one guy work a job and have time to put out top grade material every day and not repeat himself in any obvious or boring way? He may be the point man, but there has to be others. Z is the Lee Harvey Oswald of blogging. Prove me wrong.
That’s ridiculous, Frip, you poor deluded sheeple. I suppose you believe everything Zman tells you.The evidence points to a bot. Prove me wrong.
If you deploy to the Korean penninsula on orders as .mil/contractor/some civilians, you will be smallpox vaccinated.
“Smallpox is one of the biological agents determined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to pose the greatest potential threat of adverse impact on public health and medical systems. Col. Kanatjan Alibekov, First Deputy Chief of the Soviet Union’s offensive biological weapons program, stated that after smallpox was eradicated, and vaccination ended, the virus had the potential to be the most powerful and effective weapon ever created. Other biological agents in this category are anthrax, plague, botulism, tularemia, and viral hemorrhagic fevers.”
Best wishes on your deployment. The NorK’s have a very large army of thin men.
I tend to accept the standard narratives. They’re never less plausible than the conspiracy theories. Sure, there are always loose ends and things that don’t seem to fit. That is the case in all complex events in the real world. It’s not the case with conspiracy theories, because the theorists don’t include loose ends or inconsistencies.
Unless you believe in a miracle of Allah, it is less plausible that normal office fires brought Building 7 straight down into its own footprint at free fall speed than that it was destroyed by controlled demolition. Buildings do not fall LIKE THAT unless all the core columns fail simultaneously. This is not conspiracy theory. It’s science. Deal with it.
https://www.ae911truth.org/evidence/technical-articles/articles-by-ae911truth/101-free-fall-and-building-7-on-9-11
We don’t want exclusive knowledge so we can feel superior. We keep trying to share.
Zman: “The thing that makes conspiracy theories popular is not their amusing leaps of faith and logic, but that they satisfy our need to know.”
Yes, it’s the need to know, but further, it’s the need to “know” what others don’t. Conspiracy theories flatter the ego of certain types of men.
Having read the comments I’d also just like to say that many of you are freakin wacko.
I don’t if it’s the old “I know something you don’t” or perhaps it’s a result of having ones world view shattered as a number of people had on 9/11, then went bonkers.
They simply could not conceive of the government as anything but all knowing, perfect and all powerful. Then comes along a son of a construction contractor who recruited a bunch of middle-class Muslims who hated the West to kick us in the nuts.
These are the same people who also end up supporting jihadists in the U.S. and Europe since they believe they are totally innocent in all of this. Many also will tell you that every jihad attack since 9/11 is a false flag done by the CIA/FBI/Mercenary group.
I’m trying to comment. But the new system won’t let me. This is a test.
You don’t need to believe in conspiracies, conspiracies believe in you.
In any case the US was founded by conspirators conspiring on a conspiracy , that is a bunch of guys meeting up to decide to rebel; against their Sovereign
Its seditious conspiracy and a capital offense at the time, rightly so,
There are also plenty of other publicly documented conspiracies out there, the USG experimenting on citizens for example.
And sure there are outré ones, the E.T. one and more sketchy ones, the JFK ones, conspiracies are commonplace and ancient
Adam Smith
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
There are even laws, poorly enforced against such things.
While you can pick and choose what to believe in but only an idiot or a dupe believes everything the government tells him and doesn’t believe in conspiracies.
This is not a Hallmark Chanel world
A non relevant thought just jumped into my head. Anybody heard from Tiny Duck, Trent Denton etc. I’m worried.
9/11 happened because white people needed a new Pearl Harbor in order to sacrifice black bodies in the Middle East fighting the enemies of the ((( ))). That’s why America and white women are going black and won’t look back.
Oh thanks, David. Now see what you’ve done.
IMHO Oklahoma City was the most outrageous false flag operation in the history of this country. They were beyond sloppy, from being caught wiring the columns with C-4 to the coverup aftermath with the Terrence Yeakey and Kenneth Trentadue murders. They still haven’t releases the security camera footage across the street, showing who departed the Ryder truck with Timothy McVeigh.
As someone who has looked at the evidence in Achitects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth and a dozen or so of the other major documentaries and read half a dozen of the books by serious researchers, I state plainly that nobody can encompass the evidence and have any doubt at all : 9/11 was an inside operation with on-site operations by the Mossad and coordination from the CIA. Also probably Cheney in the White House via the Continuity of Government comm net, but that is about the only doubt possible.
There is no possibility of doubt about the explosives, 4 peer-reviewed papers on the dust show explosives were used and we know the names of the people who transported the explosives to the trade centers every night. They were Mossad, claimed so on Israeli TV in interviews later.
Any Saudis who were involved were patsies, window-dressing.
The term ‘conspiracy theory’ was specifically devised to denigrate the doubters of the Warren Commission’s findings. So yes, unfathomable corruption occurs under these oppressive systems on a daily basis, but the normies must rationalize otherwise. When your ‘representative’ government and media is controlled to such a degree, anything is on the menu.
“Conspiracy theories” exist in abundance, only they aren’t called that most of the time, namely false-flag operations, influence operations and other psychological warfare, etc. These are what the intelligence community call some of their various methods.
Those of you who can’t imagine Hillary Clinton or the like getting away with a conspiracy because of arrogance, incompetence and an inability to shut one’s mouth, are looking in the wrong place. Elected officials aren’t the ones doing these ops – they’re done (if they’re done) by deniable people and organizations deep inside the government or – if in the private sector – major corporations.
For years, NGOs (non-governmental organizations), such as humanitarian agencies, have been used as official cover for intelligence/counter-intelligence operations, a case in point some years ago being the CIA using Soros-fronted NGOs to operate in the Ukraine.
False-flag operations have a long history. The Nazis used one to kick off WWII in Europe, in the form of what is now known as the Gleiwitz Incident. German Chancellor and Fuhrer Adolf Hitler wanted the Danzig Corridor back from Poland, but didn’t have an actionable pretext for seizing it militarily. So, he directed the SS-Gestapo to manufacture one.
Under the direction of SS-Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujocks, on August 31, 1939, a team of SS operatives staged a covert night raid upon the Sender Gleiwitz radio station along the Polish-German frontier. Concentration camp prisoners had been dressed in Polish military uniforms, fatally-drugged and then machine-gunned along with inmates dressed like radio station employees. Their faces were mutilated to make visual identification impossible.
The following day, using this incident and similar false-flag operations as his justification, Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland, on 1 September 1939.
The details of the Gleiwitz false-flag operation and others like it, came out in Naujocks’ testimony at the post-war Nuremburg Trials.
False-flag conspiracies are extremely common in the intelligence-espionage world. Virtually every major nation – including the United States – has, at one time or another, employed false-flag ops. Since many of these operations are done under the cover of secrecy, the public may not learn about them until months, years or even decades after the fact, absent some sort of leak or other source of hard information.
The proclivity to believe in speculative causation is innate, and it exists because it helped our ancient ancestors survive in a world of enormous unknowns and routine existential threat. Before entering a dark cave, it was best to assume a mortal threat may lurk there, even if your theory of the threat may be wildly inaccurate. And while most of government’s inefficiency is due to incompetence, corruption also accounts of a lion’s share, and outright criminality is growing in popularity.
People need to place events into a narrative, be it the “official” one or a “conspiracy” one. Narratives are how we make sense of the world. Reality is much more random and noisy than most narratives allow for.
Agreed, but that is a relatively new phenomenon relative to our evolutionary history and essentially is an adaption to civilization and modern urban-centered life. Our innate biases are typically very ancient and much more difficult to override with force of will. The “narrative” is powerful because we are morphing into herd animals.
I’m with John Derbyshire on this one: most conspiracy theories are untrue. That includes JFK and 9-11. The “accepted” theories for both of them are more or less true.
People believe conspiracy theories for the same reason people do a lot of stuff: vanity and a need to feel superior: “I know these deep, dark secrets that the simpleminded suckers don’t know; that makes me better than them.”
Unfortunately, both of those event have real significance, which the conspiracy nonsense obscures.
In the JFK shooting, the important thing is the psychology of Oswald. It shows the intellectual “virus” of communism. Oswald supported communism, and shot Kennedy because Kennedy was perceived to be anti-Communist. (Remember that Oswald attempted an assassination earlier in 1963 of anti-communist general Edwin Walker.) Simple as that. And of course he wasn’t *working for* the Communists, they didn’t need him to: he was a useful idiot.
In this, he was really just like James Hodgkinson, the Scalise baseball-practice shooter. It shows the intellectual evil of communism, and then its successor cultural Marxism–how they can “activate” people to carry out crimes on their own, without need for in-person conspiring.
In 9-11, the lesson is even more simple: non-Muslims and Muslims can not live together.
Our Guys shouldn’t be wasting time on the bottomless brainpower-pit of conspiracy theories, when there are so many broad-daylight crimes and degeneracies that need to be ended.
Yes, right here. Babe Ruthless. These events are basically true with some false (and useful to TPTB) elements wrapped around them. Those guys flew the planes into the buildings and they came down. They got the idea from desktop flight simulator video games, because once you take off and land a couple of times, the next thing you do is crash your pixel-plane into something. Doesn’t explain WTC7 or the possible/likely elements of willful blindness on many levels that allowed it to happen. The narrative didn’t need the big towers to fall, but for some reason, WTC7 had to go.
I think Babe has the psychology wrong. There is very little appeal to vanity in supporting an unpopular conspiracy theory. To the contrary, it’s unpleasant to be ridiculed, dismissed as an idiot and accused of moral turpitude. The same doubt that prompts someone to investigate a conspiracy theory can also work to make one doubt oneself. I don’t understand why people would be okay with their government lying about something of that magnitude. If they’re lying about one aspect of the event, how do you know they’re not lying about other particulars? Since we are still at war because of 9/11, it seems it might be just a little bit important to know what really happened. But since that is about as likely as Hillary ever facing the music, you’re probably right that at this point it may be a waste of time. I never needed 9/11 to know that Muslims are incompatible with Western societies. Some people never did take away that lesson from 9/11, including our President at the time. Just one more reason I’m sceptical about very much of the narrative being true. That’s a whole lot of serendipity to swallow!
I’m certainly not a 9/11 Truther, but I gotta admit, WTC 7 was weird…
Babe Ruthless, I disagree with your theory about why people believe conspiracy theories. Maybe it’s true for some, but I believe most are independent thinkers, with a drive to find out the truth, and know that the mainstream news and our overlords lie quite often.
I think it’s more interesting to examine the psychology of those that believe the official narrative of these events. That’s more crazy than asking questions about things that don’t seem to add up. Like Building 7, for example.
I recently read a somewhat ridiculous study in some neural science mag that (among other things) said that Republicans (right wing) were more susceptible to believing in conspiracy theories, along with being more influenced by fake news, etc. No coincidence that right now, the truth of the conspiracy aimed at Trump is being exposed (small group, etc.). My note on their blog was curb stomped enthusiastically, of course, since if I believe there was ever a conspiracy about anything, I was a nut job. The fact is, that in government, as soon as someone in power says, we need to .. tamp that down .. keep this off the front page … redirect attention towards …. etc. a new conspiracy begins from a retrospective shaping perspective. Orders are given, people are paid, papers are written, fake studies are generated and on and on. That is what the vast array of part time employees of the government do with so many of the various grants, etc. that the government hands out.
If you want small proof, just look at the solicitations that come out of USAID. So many of them are such obvious fiction that the people writing them have to be laughing their asses off. They are simply vehicles to send our money off to the various odd jobs the CIA has people doing across the world. One of my favorites was a study of the impact of circumcision rituals of Mossia (SP?) tribesman in Africa on school attendance for a few hundred K. These people are nomadic herdsman, their children do not attend school. Are these all little conspiracies? Of course they are.
Our government is pulling off little conspiracies every day. Although I agree that many of them are retrospectives to cover their gross incompetence, or to keep unfortunate facts (like the Los Vegas shooters girlfriend working for the FBI) off the front page. Notice how little attention or postmortem detail has emerged from the largest mass shooting in US history?
Some, however, like the effort to keep Trump from being elected, or to nail him with something right now, are obviously pre-planned and executed with our tax dollars. So, we have to fund studies to notify everyone that people who believe in conspiracies are right wing nut jobs, in case anyone notices the conspiracy going on right in front of us on a daily basis.
Given that it involved multiple hijackers acting in concert, 9/11 was, by definition, a conspiracy. It just wasn’t a governmental one.
I doubt you know exactly what Cochran thinks about “the” official narrative — whatever that is. (Does wikipedia adequately replicate “the” narrative?) Have you asked him?
What he says is that the narrative (of 6m Jews exterminated deliberately by the Nazis) is basically correct. Could the number be just 5m, not 6m? I’d guess he’d say sure, maybe. 7m? Sure, maybe. Censuses weren’t perfect.
Certainly you won’t find him arguing for anything “precise” about it. What he argues is more like: we know from eyewitness testimony that Germans were massacring Jews in the East where ever they could get their hands on them. We know from eyewitness testimony that Jews were being herded onto trains and taken to concentration camps. We know from German records that Jews were being sent to camps, and clothes and such coming out of them, but not much food was going in. We also know from censuses both before and after the war that all the Jews in Europe disappeared.
… so, fill in the blank. This isn’t hard.
Now, how do I know all that? Because I read the recent thread about Ron Unz on westhunt, and looked at Cochran’s comments (he was very active in the resulting argument) and others. Some he argues against. Some he lets stand unrebutted. The former is direct evidence. The latter, indirect. Judgement is necessary.
Likewise, I think the characterization of Cochran’s position as a slavish adherence to some “official narrative” is false and intellectually dishonest. It was a similar case with Moldbug years ago, who really exploded a lot of heads at the time with his apparent sympathy and “it’s complicated” stance toward the Nazis, but the usual KM dork squad would still constantly shit up his comments because he refused to deny the actual facts.
Good history – reliable history – is based on the convergence of evidence. Everybody ultimately has to make up their own mind on what they believe to be true, but the combination of eyewitness testimony, official statements, census data, paper and punch card records, and physical evidence obtained after the war, are collectively far more persuasive to me than minor quibbles over individual accounts or aggregate numbers, which very few intellectuals, least of all Greg, are claiming is known with perfect accuracy.
I know there are many atheists, pagans and other non-Christians here. Do you accept the theory of evolution? If so, is it because independent evidence from multiple fields (geology, paleontology, molecular biology, modern medicine, etc.) is consistent with a single theory, revised several times since Darwin but still essentially the same idea? Or is it because evolution is the “official narrative”?
Maybe – and I know it sounds crazy but just maybe – Greg is not posturing to deflect left-wing hostility, but rather making a simple statement of his actual opinion.
Whenever someone uses the phrase “intellectually dishonest” what they really mean is “immoral.” You’ll deny it, of course, but the fact is I hurt your feelings, so you lash out by accusing me of being a liar.
You may want to look at the beam in your own eye first.
If the Nazis are merely accused of mass killing in a military campaign then they are not unique in any way. The USA has done that. The Soviets did that.
The reason that the Nazis are branded “uniquely evil” is that they are charged with setting up camps for premeditated, mass industrial slaughter. This is clearly false. The people who died in the camps died because they were captives of a government that was losing a total war. With respect to the claims of intentional, mass industrial slaughter in camps, the H0locaust is a hoax.
Hey there pol. Shouldn’t you be yelling about how Hitler had to have his armies rampage against Slavs?
The thing that leads to conspiracy theories is that everybody knows that at least “some” of the official story surrounding the JFK Assassination, 9/11, the Holocaust, etc. is lies, but no one knows exactly what. I have always personally believed that the main cover-up concerning 9/11 was the complicity of our Saudi “allies” in the attack, along with possible Israeli for-knowledge of the attack, and that the cover-up concerning JFK involved communist involvement, probably Castro, but who really knows? As for the Holocaust, demographic data indicates that, yeah, it happened, and killed about as many people as advertised, (probably around 5 million or so) but there’s no doubt that some of the details were “enhanced” for political effect. See also “Holocaust lampshades” which was too absurd for even our alleged “historians”.
We also have a binary worldview imposed upon us. In an ideological state, you’re either all in or you’re all out. There’s not room for indifference, skepticism, doubt, etc. The Nazis were cast as pure evil during the war for propaganda purposes. After the war, there was never a reason to rehabilitate them, so they remained a useful bad guy. As a result, their misdeeds grew in number and depravity. The Nazis most certainly killed a lot of people and they hated Jews, but the scope and efficiency of their killing is most certainly overblown.
We see something similar happening with the Russians. The Left needs them to be pure evil, so we’re told all sorts of scary stories about them. Anyone who questions the one true faith is called a shill for Putin.
Yeah, Zman, the Russians are easy prey for this BS.
They have nowhere near the extra $$, to buy the sort of defenders that, say, the Saudis can afford.
And, the MIC can gain more power, if we all fear Russia.
I listened to some of the TDS guys’ podcast. It reminded me of how much better than average the Zman’s podcasts are. Vastly better.
Keep it going, Z.
Z Man;
A correction re Cochran & Smallpox: He claims that the Soviets used *Tularemia* at Stalingrad, not Smallpox.*
A pretty credible source for this claim is: https://www.amazon.com/Biohazard-Chilling-Largest-Biological-World–Told/dp/B00IBZ603M/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1474298329&sr=1-1&keywords=ken+alibek
The discussion about Smallpox is that because vaccination stopped, there is increasing opportunity to use smallpox as a bioweapon as the vaccinated population dies off due to natural causes over time. Plus, the Russians have a history of creating (for sure) using (maybe), and stockpiling (for sure) insanely vast quantities of bioweapon agents, not to mention being notorious liars about such things.
The author cited above was near the top of the USSR biological warfare apparatus during the Cold War and accepts the Stalingrad bio-attack as a given. Is there a conspiracy to cover this up_?
Well, the victims (Nazis) are not very sympathetic and were not in a position to credibly complain right afterward, the actual perps were very secretive DARVA-masters and are now all dead anyway. The subject is highly unpleasant. Our own arrangements to counter bio-warfare obviously need to be Top Secret. The Elite in general and the Elite Media in particular are still sympathetic to Communism, etc. So, if there is a conspiracy, it is more likely a passive one of convenience.
But, as shown by the recent medical quarantine of two jumbo jets from the M.E. the subject of biowarfare is still very much on the official radar (Good_!). A planeload of Moslems coming from Mecca where there are multiple people suddenly taken sick in flight (wouldn’t have been allowed to board if they were obviously sick beforehand) and who will scatter across N America as soon as they land is *exactly* what a bio-attack might look like. So Cochran is not crazy to wonder about the subject.
_________________________
*Smallpox would have been useless *then* as a bio-weapon because nearly everybody in the 1st world had been vaccinated against it, now not so much.
ahhhh…JFK
K.I.S.S.
The Truth would have put a Presidential Security Agency out of Business.
Been a HUGE Propaganda Coup for every country hating us at the time.
A HUGE Embarressment for Said Agency and The Country.
The Conspiracy is The Coverup for The Agency.
Oh, Oswald was there,he shot…313 was a Accident.
The Bullet Don’t LIE
After all…If Smortinzaks Security Detail Accidently Kills him in Reponse to Gunfire..boy that would sure not go over well for Smortinzaks Security Detail or his Fellow Countrymen.
If the USAF Accidently Bombs the WH(even if no one is there), Do you Think you’ll get that Truth?
It really is Just That Simple.
Yeah, Jack, see my comment above, at 10:11 am.
The coverup was of SS, and Dallas PD / FBI, incompetence or deliberate laziness.
The way the SS left the barn door open, someone would’ve gotten it done, if LHO had chickened out.
Likewise with Ruby, he just managed to get to LHO before anyone else.
And, Jack, please clarify “313 was a Accident.”
One of the problems I saw with the JFK thing was the amount of Americans who refused to believe anything contrary to the “official” Warren Report. The reason for this is cultural. For decades, millions of my countrymen have been spoon-fed through our vaunted “Public Education System” and Hollywood propaganda, a squeaky-clean image of mom, apple pie, the flag, John Wayne, etc. They have been and still are, totally brainwashed and clueless.
Now, along come a group of smart, well-educated, experienced, analytical people who are saying after much research: BACK THE TRUCK UP! What is the response? Accusations of treason, mental illness, etc. This is simply because the legions of sheeple cannot wrap their pointed heads around the possibility that their beloved “sweet land of liberty” could do these terrible things. But as Fox Mulder has said: THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE.
I heard it was the lone gunman.
Just a few DAYS !!! before the USSR fell apart in 1989 (or was it 1990? ) the intelligence agencies of the USA were clueless as to the events about to unfold.
This event was the most significant event in the last quarter of the 20th century and not one “intelligence” agency saw it coming.
Is this because of incompetence within the agencies or just due to the fog of massive data flowing into the intelligence agencies that must be sorted out?
Probably both, IMHO.
In 2008, just a few short months before the worst financial/economic dislocation since the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve Chair, Ben Bernanke (PhD MIT; Prof. of Economic “Science” at Princeton) proclaimed that the housing downfall would not affect the overall economy.
Sure.
Was he just lying, or incompetent or just trying to make sense of a mass of data (all backwards looking, of course, as is ALL data) in an effort to discern the future?
Or was it intentional to bring down the financial system of the USA and allow the “globalists” to take over?
Well, as someone once said, “making predictions is really hard, especially about the future.”
Must comment about the World Trade Center.
I used to work on the 78th Floor of one of the towers – forget which – but well before 9-11.
The towers did NOT have interior columns (thus increasing usable interior floor space ) ; the floor slabs were supported along their perimeter by the exterior (and exposed) structural steel facade and by a central, interior,reinforced concrete “shaft” that ran from the building’s foundation to the to the top. This central shaft contained the elevators, stairs and bathrooms.
On windy days, elevators oft times would not work – due to building sway, and if you were in the bathroom on such days, you could easily hear the building creaking and groaning as it swayed in the wind.
When the elevators did not work, we would have to walk down several floors
10 ? 15? 20? – don’t remember, to catch operable elevators at lower levels.
If particularly windy, desk drawers would open and close, unassisted, as the building swayed in the wind.
Once the plane hit the towers, the impact and incredible heat of the burning jet fuel destroyed and structurally compromised the steel perimeter supporting the slab, the structural integrity of the reinforced concrete floor slabs themselves, as well as the sprinkler system (which are NOT designed to extinguish jet fuel fires).
If you doubt me, recall those instances where a gasoline tanker truck – due to a collision – catches fire under a highway overpass (which are typically constructed of reinforced concrete) and the heat generated literally destroys the overpass.
What is required to bring down a steel and/or reinforced concrete structure is just enough heat to compromise it’s strength, which is way below the melting point of steel; and excessive heat will also cause concrete to literally burst (rendering it’s structural support capacity nil and thus exposing its reinforcing steel to excessive temperatures and thus decrease it’s structural capacity. Also note that if the concrete surrounding reinforcing steel bursts, the reinforcing steel is now useless – it must be embedded in “sound” concrete, otherwise it is useless).
Once one slab “pancaked” , well, that is all she wrote. Then, it was just a cascading series of events as one slab pancaked atop another, until the entire tower collapsed. The expulsion (expulsion, NOT explosion) of air as the floor slabs fell upon those below caused the air betwixt the floors to “explode” outward, thus providing the appearance of a true explosion.
Two of my friends barely made it out of the towers; they were still working there during 9-11.
If anybody thinks that Jack Ruby – a Chicago mobster – shot Oswald because he, Ruby, loved JFK, well, best get your head out of your anus. Recall that Robert Kennedy went after the mafia with all guns blazing; the mob was none to pleased, esp, after they helped JFK win Illinois.
Coincidence?
I don’t think so.
The Warren Commission was a whitewash – pure and simple.
There were about 100 witnesses, scattered about Long Island that saw a missile head up and strike TWA Flight 800.
These witnesses viewed the event from different perspectives and locations – some miles apart from each other (so they could not compare notes) and all saw a missile strike the plane.
All this witness testimony was ignored and made to disappear by some FBI?
CIA ? concocted computer simulation that “proved” they were seeing burning fuel ejected from the plane.
Yea right.
By the way, normally a plane crash is investigated by the NSTB and the FAA. The FBI (and CIA? and Navy?) also “investigated” the TWA Flight 800 crash.
Why?
As for the holocaust, please recall that Lenin/Stalin/Bolsheviks exterminated betwixt 20 and 50 MILLION souls – all BEFORE WWII even began. Hitler was a rank amateur when it came to mass murder; he ‘only” exterminated 10 to 12 million folks – slavs, gypsies, commies (well, this part is OK) , jewish folks and other enemies of the people.
By the way, Stalin was a USA ally during WWII.
So much for the “good war.”
Excellent take on the towers John. The highway overpass analogy works for me. But looking back of me I see commenters coming with pitchforks for you on this one.
( A building that I can feel the swaying is enough for me, too unnerving)
Okay, now explain the symmetrical, free fall speed collapse of Building 7. Even NIST couldn’t do that adequately.
https://www.nist.gov/pba/questions-and-answers-about-nist-wtc-7-investigation
Building 7, that’s the one that gets me. I’ve never heard a rational explanation how it fell like that. The most logical explanation is planned demolition, from what I can see.
From what I ‘ve read, can’t remember where, building 7 had a design flaw.
How difficult is it to rig a planned demolition. My understanding is it’s quite an axtebsive process. That would mean lots of people both rigging it, and witnessing the operation.
Plus I always figured if rigging with explosives were the plan to blame terrorists than why bother with the planes at all? They could have just said terrorists blew up the towers with equal effect and much more simplicity. Heck, terrorists had attempted to bomb the WTC a few years earlier already.
And it was free fall.
https://youtu.be/Rkp-4sm5Ypc
John;
Great post. Yet another example is that the three-letter-agencies were apparently completely surprised by Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. Or at least the information didn’t get to the War Room in time for GHWB to issue a demarche that Saddam would likely have acceded to and stopped the invasion before it began.
IOW, they missed ‘seeing’ the Iraqi buildup prior to the invasion. No place to hide those tanks, BMP’s, trucks, etc, in the desert. No way any of our satellites couldn’t have ‘seen’ them there.
From what I was given to understand, once somebody actually looked at the images, there they all were, just as if on parade. The problem was waay more images than lookers. No doubt they would have been seen, eventually, and an alert passed up the chain, eventually.
But Saddam got it done inside our lethargic OODA (see, comprehend, decide, react) loop.
Good write up.
Just add one thing concrete fails at about 700 degrees.
Uhm. The towers did not have.a concrete center core.
When a crime is suspected the FBI investigates plane crashes.
The only 9/11 conspiracy that holds any water in my world is that Bush covered up a large amount of involvement by the Saudi gov’t.
Re: Flight 800
My brother was an investigator (now retired) with the NTSB out of Dallas. We grew up on Long Island and I still lived there at the time the plane exploded. He had been in the reconstructed plane and agrees with the finding that it was not shot down. I’ve had no reason to distrust my brother’s assessment.
The NTSB doesn’t investigate criminal acts, or potentially criminal acts, hence the FBI. Navy divers retrieved the black box, I don’t know anything about them investigating.
I used to get a kick out of listening to Art Bell’s radio show back in the day, and from that I realize how readily we can be persuaded into conspiracy theories. I consider myself skeptical by nature, but if you spend say 3 hours listening to some guy who has accumulated all kinds of factoids to argue that the mafia had JFK killed because RFK was cracking down on them in spite of the mafia helping JFK win the election (an actual theory I heard on that show) it’s hard not to get swept away by the rhetoric.
Somewhere I read that more information/data actually makes it easier to concoct conspiracy theories. More camera footage just means more potential for people to see supposed bulges on the underside of planes, etc.
Anything short of the absolute truth is a ‘conspiracy’.
9/11, “gross incompetence”? For God’s sake man, get your head out of your ass and do some research.
I have rules for such things:
#1, There are no unrelated spontaneous innocent circumstantial isolated naturally occurring or originating events in America today.
#2, The USC has never created one iota of Liberty or Freedoms. It is and has since it was ratified, an instrument of administrative centralism & regulatory tyranny. A veritable employee handbook for the Amerikan Nomenklaturer Class, a road map if you will for observation with no limits and controlling every facet of the sphere of the peoples lives.
#3, The Fabian Socialists where right. For raw naked power to prevail over the audacity & motive power, to dilute the vivaciousness of the unfettered economic activity which is a critical leg of Liberty, it would require generations to destroy what America is. It is then the western hemisphere would come under the jack boot of one omnipotent world power.
#4, Divide & Conquer will always be the 1st choice of tyrants working to overthrow the American people and bring them under a one world order, out of the ensuing chaos.
#5, Taken in toto, the 4 rules being so pervasive & insidious, for all practical purposes, overwhelm in numbers or occurrences all happenstance or chance. It is why it is called Totalitarianism. There is no such things as conspiracy theory under such all pervasive tyranny because conspiracy theory whether correct or imaginary is a welcome distraction from the truth and reason to never let conspiracy theory go to waste.
I have a feeling we are loooking at a record comment thread!
Conspiracies exist. Grander conspiracies require a proportionate group of high iq, similarly motivated people. Kennedy po’ed several powerful coalitions: communists(bay of pigs and nam), the mob, and Zionists. Who is the brains behind all those operations? Or behind all human affairs perhaps…
Does anyone here believe the moon landing was a hoax? I believe it was real, but am plagued by some doubts. More than that, I am intrigued by these recurring media hints that it wasn’t real. Here’s what I’ve accumulated: the rem song if you believe they put a man on the moon, the red hot chilli peppers “space may be the final frontier but it’s made in a Hollywood basement”, the end of the ram stein video for were all living in America, the movie Interstellar where the history books have been corrected. Weird.
Doubt no more on the moon landing. I watched it on tv as a child.
A conspiracy is merely two or more people cooperating to accomplish something, but with an element of secrecy…Most things in life are the product of conspiracies, but unless those things are criminal, or we want to make them sound criminal, we don’t use the word “conspiracy.”
Z Man;
I’d say the best evidence for an official conspiracy is self-righteous indignation at the mere suggestion that mistakes have been made. That plus refusing to hold anyone accountable.
As you say, believing that people regularly lie to cover up their own bungling does not make one a conspiracy theory nut-job. It should be the default posture when preventable bad ‘stuff’ happens, yet for some reason it isn’t.
Likewise, sociopaths in power routinely employ DARVA (deny, attack, reversing victim & attacker) by accusing people questioning them about their bungling of being insane conspiracy theory believers. That alone should be the ‘tell’ but it isn’t. Why_?
Well, people are unjustly accused all the time by both honest critics and dishonest opportunists. To me, the tell is usually if the people accused insist that it is impossible that mistakes were made despite obvious evidence to the contrary.
For example, contrast Pearl Harbor with 9/11. After Pearl Harbor there was no effort made to pretend that mistakes were not made, that the enemy had been underestimated, etc.. The two individuals locally responsible were dismissed and one of those over them in DC HQ was shortly replaced. Incompetent commanders at all levels were ruthlessly weeded out. Not so after 9/11, creating ample space for conspiracy concocting.
You have obviously missed the fever swamp that is Pearl Harbor. The dismissed commanders and admission of mistakes was to cover FDR’s fiendish plan to involve us in WWII. He expertly tricked and goaded the Japanese into not only attacking us, but attacking Pearl Harbor in a sneak attack.
I’ve read a couple of the conspiracy books and they are the standard piecing together of data points to arrive at dubious conclusions. About the only point that holds some water is that the US guaranteed a Japanese military response by withholding oil. I agree that FDR, et. al., knew that. (BTW, I didn’t know we were required to sell oil to the Japanese.)
Beyond that, three things caused Pearl Harbor. No one in the chain of command expected anything like the attack the Japanese launched. Second, the US military severely underestimated the ability, skill, and equipment of the Japanese navy. You can see that today with regards to the Chinese and the armchair commanders. Finally, the Japanese conceived of and executed a brilliant tactical plan.
>BTW, I didn’t know we were required to sell oil to the Japanese
It’s part of a wider, New Left (I’m including libertarians here) and/or Pro-Axis revisionist narrative to recast Showa Japan as noble warrior victims of the White Devil/American Gubnit. The dastardly Roosevelt schemed to provoke innocent Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor so that he could nuke the Japan.
Chris;
Agree with your 3 points. In addition/amplification there was the important role of enemy deception/mis-direction that also appears (or should appear) in the analysis of many other actual conspiracies by active, intelligent enemies.
Specifically, once FDR cut off Japan’s petroleum supplies they had two choices: Capitulate (evidently the then-elite’s fantasy) or strike out and get it elsewhere by force. The obvious elsewhere source of vital petroleum was Brunei in SE Asia, a Dutch colony which the Dutch could not possibly defend, their homeland having been overrun by the German army a year before. It is unimaginable that FDR’s cabinet didn’t understand this. The must/should have been aware of this correlation of forces prior to mid 1941. Consequently, they then must have decided that this was an acceptable risk (or they were really, really stupid – also possible).
So everybody in DC expected a Japanese move towards the ‘SE Treasure Area’ as the Japanese described it. In late Nov. 1941, the Japanese obliged the elite’s theory by making poorly concealed, massive military moves SE.
Meanwhile they effective concealed the unexpected Pearl Harbor strike force via outstanding operational security (op sec): Hence the complete surprise.
I wish some people would do more debunking Hillary and Bill’s Russian Uranium deal cosnspiracy.
You don’t have to buy all of Dawsons’s conclusions to realize he has done a ton of research on Zionist underhanded and duplicitous history.
Just investigate Larry Silverstein and building seven. I will bury my tin foil hat forever after that. Give me something.
Zman, not sure what you have changed with the website but it appears thezman.com is being blocked by Centurylink. I had to work my way into this blog by the back door.
I have done nothing, but you want to make sure to update your bookmarks to use “https://” versus “http://” on this site.
Done. Still blocked. As far as I can the block started yesterday.
I can get to the blog by doing a search which pulls up a link to an old post, then clicking through to the link.
It looks like this URL has been added to a block list at Centurylink.
Call them. Or, if you manage your own little wireless router in the house, plug in OpenDNS addresses for name-server resolution vs. what the provider gives you.
208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220
Try that – but I’d call them first & rip ’em a new one. With civility of course.
As a fairly competent rifleman I can tell you right now that Lee Harvey Oswald did not shoot JFK. Period. End of story.
When the twin towers came down, it looked to me more like a controlled implosion than a structural collapse. No, burning jet fuel will not blow the temper out of structural steel, it literally takes forced draft air forges to reach those temperatures.
But here is the problem I have with all this. Look at the goofs doing this stuff. Hillary Clinton and any number of her friends can’t even handle top secret documents or secure computer systems. Every time you turn around, even in the lefty controlled media – some politico, judge or highly placed deep state flunky is in the nooz for diddling kids, texting dick pics to women that want nothing to do with them, or having inappropriate relationships with farm animals or what have you. None of those idiots could keep a secret to save their lives. We can say what we want about the FBI, CIA, ABCDEF… But in point of fact they are all ridden with whistle blowers, traitors, finks, and cheaply bought lickspittles. You could probably turn any one of ’em with pocket change.
My question isn’t as much of ‘who dunnit’ with JFK and 9/11 – it’s a case of ‘how did they get away with it’? If we could answer that, getting the perps will be a slam dunk.
First, LHO could have made the shots necessary. He qualified expert as a Marine rifleman, and as the Lincoln made the turn, the lead angle decreased as Kennedy moved directly away from LHO’s position-not right or left, which complicates the shot immensely. The range wasn’t excessive. People have easily made the same shot, with the same rifle. It’s not magic, it’s skill and training and practice.
That being said, you’re entirely correct about government agencies being venal morons who can’t keep secrets that long before they’re inevitably exposed. (Incidentally, that also debunks the Great Bagel Conspiracy some are so fond of as well).
” He qualified expert as a Marine rifleman…”
– No, he qualified as “marksman” with a score of 191 in May of 1959. While I don’t know about “people having easily made the same shot”, I do know that Carlos Hathcock (founder of the Marine Corps sniper school) had visited the Texas School Book Depository, the site that Oswald is supposed to have made his famous shots from, and having examined the situation Hathcock went on record stating that HE could not have made that shot himself.
The difficulty is usually in explaining how many shots Oswald is said to have fired. Was it three, four or five shots? The sound recording is disputed, the fifth shot is said by some to be an echo.
The establishment is not against conspiracies, John McCain accused various Chechen terror attacks in Russia as being “inside jobs”. Bush and Cheney framed Iraq for involvement in 9/11. Iraq is also alleged in the 93 bombing, and in Oklahoma City. I do suspect that Terry Nichols had some assistance from AQ during his Philippine visits.
This book here was written under sponsorship of the government. Producing an implausible theory that Saddam was cooperating with sworn enemy Iran to help McVeigh bomb OKC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Terrorist
The Las Vegas shooter’s life story has echoes of Terry Nichols from OKC.
http://peterlance.com/wordpress/?p=203
No he could not. Not with that rifle, and certainly not with a broken scope mount. I’ve shot against squaddies, I know what they can do and I can beat all but a handful of them on any given day.
The man that shot JFK had practiced and rehearsed that shot until he could make it in his sleep. Moving targets are a can of worms most sqaddies are never trained for. To me this means resources and money – and lots of it to train the marksman that made the shot. This would not be the doing of a disgruntled lone wolf loon, or the mob. The man that made the shot was trained far beyond the level of your average marksman, and he was given the opportunity to shoot by the security around the president. This implies govt involvement but does not prove it. That is all I know for sure.
There was no real investigation, and much of the evidence was “lost”, including the bullet.Also, quite a number of witnesses were murdered…Since LBJ was probably in on it, and Allen Dulles, who had been fired by JFK, controlled the investigation, the whole thing was a whitewash.
pyrrhus, your comment on Dulles is getting to the core of this.
Guys like he, J. Edgar, etc. would’ve had the clout to have gotten things to go as they really went, both in Dallas, and after:
the Secret Service took the day off, and 2 days later, the Dallas PD (and the FBI) took the day off.
See e.g. http://vincepalamara.blogspot.com/2013/11/my-response-to-gerald-blaines-good.html .
GF wrote:
“As a fairly competent rifleman I can tell you right now that Lee Harvey Oswald did not shoot JFK. Period. End of story.”
Bullshinola.
I’ve been there and seen the shot he would have to make. Not difficult at all, especially if LHO had shot his milsurp to zero it.
Rooster knows what’s up. Why aren’t we taking his word for it? He’s a known guy around here. Why would he lie to us?
Having worked in DC for 5 years and the Clinton WH for 2, I don’t believe bumbling government bureaucrats (to include most Presidents) are capable of keeping secrets or executing long-term, complicated, precision plans, the ingredients necessary for successful conspiracy. I do believe the conspiracies exist, but they’re probably more likely pulled together at Davos or other naturally secretive, esoteric organizations. But then I’m highly skeptical of how the 9/11 buildings came down, or TWA 800, etc. My bottom line belief is that there are conspirators who think America needs to be dismantled, and they use stooges of both parties (along with public “education” and other socialist programs) to bring that to fruition. Throw in the occasional red flag event (not conspiracy, just manufactured “news”) to stir up the sheeple and set them against one another. So as America deconstructs, I think more along the lines of “comedy of compounding errors” than conspiracy.
I think a relatively small number of people exert an enormous amount of power in Washington. Is that a conspiracy or simple observation? The neocon cabal wanted to “finish the job” in Iraq and had designs on Iran and Syria. Was the Iraq War a conspiracy or simply the result of the neocons winning the political game?
Serendipity also plays a much bigger role than most people are willing to accept.
“The funny thing about America, versus other countries, is our conspiracy theories always sound like a Hollywood script.”
I would say the official narratives sound like a Hollywood script. The Lone Gunman?
https://www.corbettreport.com/articles/20080225_gunmen_911.htm
Paul Craig Roberts states that a war in Iraq was being discussed in Bush’s Cabinet shortly after W was sworn in…The drafting of the Patriot Act is also known to have preceded 9/11.
Title III of USA-PATRIOT (Money Laundering) preceded 9/11 but only in the sense that, after 9/11, they just scooped up all the anti fraud and anti drug trafficking bills that had been proposed under Clinton (and which the banks had swatted down), glopped them all together, and passed them as Title III.
I’m definitely on the “they’re bureaucrats not supervillains” team but they’re bureaucrats with a clear and strong class consciousness. That can easily present as conspiracy without the need for anything like microfilm in pumpkins…..
9/11 has a singular quality about it, and I think the truth may be unknowable unless some confessions or new discoveries emerge. Planes have never been flown into towering skyscrapers and our theories over what would happen are untested.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sympathetic to various truthers, but the official story is actually the best for our purposes. We kicked the hornets nest of a radical, destiny driven people for decades(see bin laden’s official three reasons for details), then let them into our country in droves, left our pants down, and they wrecked a horrible revenge.
Some things might be knowable. For instance we can test the tinsel strength of the type used to build the towers after being subject to the heat form the event. I have never heard of that type of test being done.
The tensile strength of the steel was already known. 1000 degrees for 20 minutes leads to failure. 800 degree for 15 in the case of lightweight steel trusses. What I want to know is why the beams were cut at an angle at the bases.
the posts cut at an angle are the result of thermite used in building demos. do a search of how thermite is applied and you’ll see the angle. explain building seven. explain why thermite residue was found in the area. explain the reports from firemen and cops saying they heard explosions in the subterranean areas of the towers before the collapse. explain why for the first time ever the air force wasn’t by the side of the ‘hijacked’ airliners in ten minutes or less, show us a picture of airliner parts at the pentagon, and the list can go on………
There is a simple non-conspiracy answer for fighters needing over 10 minutes to get to the hijacked aircraft: Not being on Full (Pad) Alert any more.
Full alert means the fighter is fully fueled and fully armed and the pilot is < 2 minutes away in an 'alert shack'. Being fully fueled and armed means being in a isolated location far away from the rest of the airbase in case anything goes wrong.*
Why_? The Cold War had been over for 10 years; full alert is wearing on men and machines, thus costly; the only air threats were the very occasional Russian sub-sonic *propeller driven* long range bomber off the coast, slow, can be seen coming for hours, etc.
Besides the NORAD air defense mission being reasonably de-prioritized, the US military had been mostly occupied doing Clinton Admin. meals-on-wheels type 'stuff'.
Also, not unlike Pearl Harbor, not nearly enough credit was (and is) given to enemy capabilities and operational planning. Evidence: all aircraft takeovers and attacks were accomplished within the NORAD reaction time window. The possible exception being Flight 94 which was delayed on takeoff.
______________
* Being fully fueled means that as the sun heats the aircraft fuel is likely to spill due to expansion,….
They were very busy that day.
“Little did we know at the time, 9/11 was not a normal day of blue sky aviation. On the contrary, it was one of the busiest days in the history of American aviation, a dense forest of live fly exercises, drills, simulations, fake radar injects and utter confusion.”
https://www.corbettreport.com/911wargames/
They were even doing hijacking simulations.
Tinfoil;
Yours is a perfect illustration of how willing people are to believe the worst about the details in a compound cockup that they know nothing about. Even if what you say is completely true, it is not relevant to the point being discussed.
What was immediately needed in the early morning of 9/11 were either fully fueled and armed fighters on full alert nearby (and there were none) or, by coincidence, fully armed fighters, at altitude, able to rapidly pick the hijacked aircraft out of the multi-aircraft clutter described while those hijacked aircraft had their radar transponders turned off.
Aircraft on exercises are not all fighters. Fighters on exercise are not armed with gun ammunition unless they are heading for or over one of a few designated bombing ranges. These bombing ranges are well away from populated areas, for obvious reasons (bombs have been know to fall off occasionally due to mechanical failure). IOW they would have been a long way away even had they been previously launched and had they already climbed to altitude and had they enough fuel to run the intercept.
Fighters on exercise armed with the live air-to-air missiles that would have been most useful are only allowed to be so armed flying to or over the very few air-to-air training ranges for use against target drones. These ranges are over oceans or the Nevada desert, IOW an even longer way away.
Desperate, brave, pilots in the unarmed fighters that were urgently launched that day were ready to ram those hijacked aircraft once the enemy plan became known. But this drastic plan was OTE (overtaken by events) because the enemy got it all done before they could get there.
I absolutely agree. I just don’t think that the “small number of people” include many (if any) elected officials, or the front men who show up on news shows … these are the marionettes. A successful conspiracy requires a very few number of folks that are completely “in” on the big picture – everyone else has a piece of the compartmentalized strategy. So while I agree conspiracy exists, most of those involved in the implementation are clueless, and that’s why I chalk most of this up to human error & herd mentality … which might also fall under the heading serendipity, although its not going to have a happy ending.
I believe in a thing I call “a conspiracy of interests”. Vested interests know who they are and where their interests lie. While they might not know each other personally, they can be counted on to work towards the same goal, in keeping with their combined common interests.
Indisputable case in point: the failure of any element of the massive the federal judicial system, or any state court, to pursue indictments against the obvious and documented criminality of the Clinton Foundation.
It’s not about truth, it’s about careers.
Serendipity is another word for a blank-eyed universe splattering awful chance all over our lives. That’s terrifying. It’s far more comforting to believe in conspiracies.
“It means that the official story is mostly bullshit to cover-up gross incompetence and to promote the forever war.”
The forever war has been on for the past 1400 years and will not end until one side or the other is eliminated.
Incompetence and the inability of stupid people to keep their mouths shut is what makes me doubtful of most conspiracies. That and Occam’s Razor.
I believed in JFK conspiracies until I saw an actual reenactment of how Oswald would have shot him. He was closer to JFK than my front door is to the street. And the real kill-shot occurred when the car turned and was moving directly away from him. Literally a can’t miss shot with a rifle.
Which is why expert riflemen couldn’t duplicate the shots, even with good rifles, not $13 crap…Have you ever done any shooting with a rifle? The obvious assassin’s spot would be the grass knoll, which would be an easy shot, and there was testimony of such from dozens of witnesses, which was excluded by the Warren Commission, which was run by Allen Dulles, JFK’s enemy.
Like Oswald, I shot SharpShooter in Marine Boot Camp. With a lot of practice, I improved to expert the last few times I qualified.
The shot was from 75 feet (not yards). For the last shot, the car was moving directly away from Oswald. it doesn’t get any easier.
I know Jesse Ventura says he couldn’t make the shot, but I saw a decent reenactment on TV a few years ago. Using the exact same model rifle, same elevation, shooting at a target taking the same path, a guy made the last shot every time – because it’s an easy shot!
Dude, I have been there. LHO chose a good spot for an easy shot.
I’ll put my bona fides against any:
1. Shot rifles since 10YO
2. Trained in .mil to shoot even more.
3. Been to the location.
4. Own and shoot several milsurp rifles of similar capability.
All this talk about an impossible shot or how the “grassy knoll” was a better spot is warmed over horse manure.
Thank you for interjecting actual experience. I was 90% certain LHO was a patsy and the whole event was staged until I was in Dallas and went to the school book depository and museum. I spent an hour wandering around the site and examining the locations, then I went through the museum. The distances are much closer than people think; shockingly close. I believe that many experienced shooters could have made the shots. My entire perception of the incident changed after spending time on the ground. I walked away 90% certain LHO acted alone. Sometimes a determined nut changes history (see also Sarajevo 1914).
The only real variable was the Carcano rifle. Italian manufacturing during the war was haphazard—those rifles can be very good or very bad. Oswald shot his before—he knew where it would hit and if it would do so consistently. The rest was pretty easy. I can group 6 inches at 100 yards over iron sights with a variety of rifles and consider myself an average shot—though been shooting since age 8
I also like to apply Occam’s Razor to these issues. But sometimes, after accumulating and analyzing the evidence and information, the most likely explanation is the “crazy conspiracy.”
yes – That crazy shooting in Las Vegas last year. No way did that happen the way I’m supposed to believe.
Like the Manhattan Project.
If you believe in JFK conspiracy theories, you’re an idiot. All else is detail.
Takes one to know one.
watch the zapruder film and then say it was oswald. if you know anything about ballistics that film will show you it was a conspiracy with more than one involved.
The recent documents released add to suspicions that Oswald was a CIA asset at some point.
The idiots are self identifying here.
If you’ve been to the Book Depository / JFK assassination museum and stood in the window closest to where LHO was supposed to have shot, you’d realize it was an easy shot that required not one scintilla of conspiracy.
Now, maybe there was a conspiracy with folk other than LHO, but it is not necessary.
Any deer hunter in Texas – with the nerve to kill a man – could make that shot. I get shaky shooting a deer but I’ve made tougher shots.
Marine with a rifle? Yeah I think so.
I’ve been on the ground and agree, not a difficult shot at all. The only variable was the Carcano rifle—those could be a crapshoot for accuracy—very good or very bad. But Oswald shot if before and thus knew. The 6.5 x 52 is a pretty soft recoil so holding target acquisition while cycling the bolt would not be hard. I regularly shoot an Enfield over iron sights and can hit within a 6 inch radius at 100 yards from a rested bench rapid fire.
The Carcano is a very good, highly accurate rifle. It only got the legacy of being inaccurate due to the rifle being fired with the wrong caliber of ammunition, 0.265 instead of 0.268 caliber. Much like trying to do a tight grouping with your Enfield loaded with 0.302 caliber bullets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=LcjKYBccoqs
i know a great deal of firearms,ammunition,interior and exterior ballistics however I do not claim to be any type of expert. The “pristine bullet” to me, was problematic
however this was explained to my complete satisfaction,
see the PBS NOVA documentary. Also explained is the Zapruder film that seems to show that kennedy was struck from the front.
as for 9-11 see the popular mechanics documentary explaining exactly why the towers came down as they did.
Both of these examinations and programs were very well and will enable most people with any type of technical background or just plain common sense to understand.
Be kind.
Most have never visited the Book Depository to see what an easy shot it was and are talking out of their hindparts.
Yes, it was entirely do-able by LHO given his training and hardware and political inclinations. So, Ockham and his razor is on our side. But, there is still a possibility that more than LHO was involved if you bring Ockham’s butterknife to the debate.
There was an eyewitness at the scene who described she heard a gunshot followed by another report that sounded much louder than the first. I think some point to evidence such as this to assume two shooters. Anyone who spends time at a range knows how the variation in intensity of gunfire can occur with only a few steps in one or another direction.
It’s guys like you who laughed at Edison, the Wright Brothers, Buzz Fluhart…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yiYF4uFI8U
Next, you’ll doubt that George W detonated the levees during Katrina.
On a serious note, I vote for cynicism, of course, but also, and equally, for Occam’s Razor.
“If you believe in JFK conspiracy theories, you’re an idiot. All else is detail.”
Correct. Watch the Zapruder film carefully. Between frames 312 and 313, JFK’s head moves violently forward, only taking 1/18 or 56 milliseconds to do so. Only a bullet could cause forward motion at that speed. The reward head motion after the shot occurs much more slowly, and is the result of a nerve reaction / contraction of JFK’s back muscles. Also, the giant plume of blood and tissue at the front of JFK’s head in Z313 is consistent with an exit wound. Case closed.