I remember cigarettes being referred to as “coffin nails” in 1946, so it was common knowledge that smoking was dangerous.
The fact that I grew up thinking Professional Mens Wrestling was real, I guess…
Hey, I expected to find a conspiracy when I looked into the assassination in depth years ago. I do remember thinking the postulation that LHO was a lone assassin was like heresy.
But it finally seemed to completely make sense.
I am enjoying this discussion. I remember in the mid-70s when RollingStone magazine had a guy, I think his name was Howard Cohn or something, who exposed some big conspiracy. After that, they hired him and he started exposing MONTHLY theories.
At the same time was Charles Berlitz and his Bermuda Triangle and Erich von Daniken and his Ancient Astronauts. Then I went to a lecture at our little Planetarium and saw Stanton Friedman, the UFO guy. In particular, i came to realize how profitable conspiracies were for Berlitz and Friedman. They even put the latter in the Close Encounters movie, i think. Finally, the big one: Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Baigent et al, purporting that Jesus came to France and has living descendants with implications involving Knights Templars, Freemasons, etc etc. This one just reappeared sort of, on ABC tv.
Sooooo, the Weekender has basically lost the capacity to embrace or entertain ANY conpiracies, though some may indeed exist, from oversaturation of preposterous fancies. But like Jim Stone pointed out, the ones that operate at a above usual levels of human SNAFU have the least credibility in my book.
Cheers.
Heh, yeah, he even did an ancient astronauts book called “Genesis Revisited,” which purports that the Tower of Babel was a spaceship launch pad.
Funny how some of you get touchy, or so disdainful of any possible conspiracy when it would imply harm within the USA while being forced by material evidence to admit the conspiracies led by the Presidency and/or CIA abroad. Just to name a few of these conspiracies which pop up in my memory:
- The coup against Mossadegh in Iran (Eisenhower, A. Dulles))
- The forged incident (attack of US ships) of Tonkin gulf to get in a full-scale war in Vietnam (Johnson)
- The secret bombings of Cambodia and Laos (Nixon-Kissinger)
- The dozen acknowledged attempts of assassination of F. Castro (starting from JFK)
- The capture of Patrice Lumumba, delivered to Mobutu
- The putsch agains S. Allende in Chili, etc.
Now, it can’t possibly be that the CIA would have done anything in the US against the US citizens: this would have been illegal! :roll:
:roll: As always Zoob I think you have a handle on it. 
Love yer new car, is an Alfa or one O the Frog mobiles 
Not exactly Dems vrs. Reps, but: a joke that circulated around Warsaw 20 years ago: “Capitalism is the opression of man by man. Communism is the opposite.” At the height of the purge trials in the late 30’s Stalin received a 11 minute standing ovation. Finally a brave Party member ceased clapping and sat down; he was arrested later that night.
The various pseudosciences and conspiracies are wonderful entertainment, as long as you’re not stuck in debate with a true believer. It would be great fun to put together a book tying it all together - how ancient astronauts created a race of humans by interbreeding with autochthons, put a magic bullet in Oswald’s rifle, erased all record of his activities as a Freemason, buried the evidence in the king’s chamber of the Pyramid of Cheops, and if you fold a $2 bill just so it all becomes clear - a perfect likeness of Bigfoot riding on a flying saucer…
Go to http://i.am/jah/truth.htm for some truly out there gibberish.
[quote=What’s the biggest conspiracy you believe has ever been perpetrated on the American public. I mean a single one you refer to as ‘a conspiracy?’ Thanks. Steve[/quote]
Stewy responded: The fact that I grew up thinking Professional Mens Wrestling was real, I guess…[/quote]
Thanks for responding. Really good discussion.
Best,
steve
I think it’s the U.S. income tax laws
Many of the conspiracies you cite involved common players from the intelligence community, which grew out of Naval intelligence. Their early successes gave them false confidence in their methodology. The Navy was once the elite branch of service and something of an ‘old boys’ club for the ivy leaguers. The American public was oblivious to activity carried out on their behalf. They also would not have stood by had they known.
US citizens should educate themselves by reading the product of the Church/Pike Committee hearings of 1975. The product of those hearings reveals many unlawful acts perpetrated on the American public by the intelligence agencies. The deeds include: domestic and foreign mail interception (CIA code named HTLINGUAL and various other code names 1950s through 1973, NYC, New Orleans, San Francisco, Honolulu), administering mind altering drugs to unknowing US citizens in asylum settings and average Joes as they went about their daily business and thought they were losing their minds (code named MKULTRA), illegal surveillance and influence of legal political groups that didn’t fit the “American” model (code named CHAOS). Testimony of participants was taken under oath. Some took the oath seriously, some higher-ups did not, or answered deceptively.
CIA “covert activity” generally isn’t “covert” in the places it takes place. Those who reside in the area where the ops take place understand who the big, sanitized white cargo planes belong to. They recognize the national affiliation of the white men building landing strips and handing out automatic weapons. They get it, and the intelligence operative of other countries inform the leaders of their own countries. The place where the operations largely remain “covert” is within the US borders, and that’s because those funding the activity are uninformed. It isn’t “covert” to everyone.
The problem comes home to roost in the opportunity we have in using our vote to empower representatives. Without understanding what the US is doing, and who specifically authorizes it, voting quickly gets defined as the act of placing a vote, not empowerment of a representative who reflects the will of the people. This is all, of course, opinion. But this opinion was formulated over twenty years of studying actual events that portray the USA to the balance of the world. It certainly is not an indictment of the American public, or even the entire system. But particularly regarding foreign policy there is a very different dynamic understood domestically, than what is perceived from abroad. Some of the American public not only don’t seem to recognize that fact, they seem eager to ignore it, and it’s a shame because it is more complex than just “bashing.”
It’s an interesting area of research, but virtually impossible to apply to current events. Individual agencies employ “official historians” who provide real-time perspectives for the text books. Our children learn from these perspectives almost entirely, with regard to current events and recent history. The facts trickle out over time. Usually thirty years after-the-fact, Freedom of Information Act requests increase the flow of facts, and old CIA operative write their memoirs and try to frame portrayal of their motivation, partly so their family tree won’t think GeePaw was a murderer or didn’t have regard for humanity.
This is the dirty business of the intelligence community and it’s very worldly stuff. It isn’t unique to US intelligence agencies. And any government of any notable power is involved by virtue of self-preservation. But those who act as if it isn’t reality do themselves a real disservice. That’s probably saying way more than is appropriate on a whistle site, but certainly an issue equal to some topics that come up here.
Best,
steve
Well, piper, IRS and the rise of the Federal Reserve. There is a book called, I think, the Nightmare on Jekyll Island, that traces the history of the FR and the way that US taxpayers have repeatedly footed the bill for huge economic blunders, like the NY city bail-out and Chrysler. We paid because the consequences of their breakdown would cost us so much, goes the reasoning, I believe.
No flying saucers, just sickening manipulation. After reading a book like that, you literally have to play ostrich because the reality is so painful.
Easy now, my friend…
I got into the JFK assassination thing, not because it involved a conspiracy but because I remember that day and the times most vividly. I am not one of those people who is into conspiracy research. Sorry if my answer disappoints, but it was the only one I could come up with. I feel it is a legit answer.
Sorry to bust anybody’s bubbles but citing a documentary film as “evidence” of anything is pretty silly. One must remember that the films are created as entertainment, almost always with the intent to make money, and almost always by someone who has one axe or another to grind. (How much money do you think someone would make from a non-controversial documentary?) Documentaries, and the individuals who make them, are not held to even the extremely loose standards we expect of modern journalists.
Documentaries can, and very often do, present totally unsupported claims as “evidence” and “proof.”
Remember the hew and cry over crop circles a few years ago? I remember one station airing a documentary that had a whole assortment of “scientific experts” who all agreed that it was absolutely impossible that the crop circles could be man made – we just didn’t have the technology to do it without leaving a trace. Unfortunately for the maker of the documentary, it aired about three days after another channel had showed a documentary of a couple of college kids with boards and rope making a perfect, and complex, crop circle in a few hours in total darkness without leaving a trace of evidence behind!
As for the proponents of the theory that JFK had to have been shot from the front – they cite as “evidence” the fact that his body jerked backwards and that blood appeared to spray out the back of his head on impact.
Any knowledgeable shooter can tell you that a bullet, powerful though it may be, simply doesn’t pack enough energy to push an adult body around. Those who paid as much attention to their high-school physics teachers as they did to violent TV shows would know that if the bullet is being “thrown” from the barrel with enough force to knock over a man, the equal but opposite reaction would knock down the shooter. This is an absolute law of physics and the only way around it is to accelerate the projectile independent of the gun (i.e. a “rocket bullet”).
People hear about the few hundred foot-pounds of energy carried by a bullet and think it means that a bullet carrying 250 ft pounds of energy can push a 250 pound man one foot. They forget that, even if the bullet expends all of its energy in the victim (i.e. no exit hole), the vast majority of that energy is expended in penetrating and damaging tissue, not in pushing the victim away from the bullet. In fact, for almost any situation and any given bullet there is more “kick” or “push” energy at the shooter’s end of the transaction than there is at the target’s.
Most people and animals when they are shot don’t jerk much (flying bodies are good TV but bad science) – those that do jerk on impact may do so in almost any direction because the movement is a result of their muscles spasming in response to a shock to the nervous system.
As for the direction of the blood spray, any decent forensic investigator can tell you that it is not at all unusual to see a great deal of spray come out the entry hole because of the compression of fluids caused by the bullet taking the path of least resistance even before the bullet has created an exit wound. There are probably a lot of murders in jail because they thought there was no way that blood from their victim, several feet away, could have splattered “backwards” to them (marking their shoes, clothing, and so on with a fine spray of tiny blood drops).
So, while conspiracy documentaries can be fun if you’re into that sort of thing, remember that they are almost always produced by those with axes to grind or fortunes to make, they are by nature very thin on real science and long on speculation disguised as science, and they just don’t mean very much.
wow. Now I get the full sense of your nick. Ever tried Ventoline? 
Many have wondered, with the recent success of Walt Disney Productions’ animated feature Atlantis, featuring the voice talents of televison’s Michael “J” Fox, how such an obscure piece of ancient Greco-Egyptian legend has persisted in a society which is so quick to dismiss other Greek legends, such as Hercules and Kitty Dukakis, as mere fables.
Atlantis would have remained a mere curiosity, and dramatic device for the occasional utopian writer, were it not for a young woman named Anna, who in 1902 began to have dreams of an ancient, yet advanced civilization. She described an Atlantis with yet undreamed of (till her dreams) technical marvels such as closed-circuit television, hovercrafts, and email. It was this latter technology that alarmed her into penning her first book, in 1903, “Atlantis and the Conspiracy of the Wright Brothers’ Oh so Wrong Invention of the Flying Machine.” This became an instant hit with occultists and Amish alike.
What Anna did not know was that she was descended from an ancient Rosicrucian family, and that her name, Roosevelt, was Dutch for Rose-Cross (this of course is not modern Dutch, but Late High Dutch). The Roosevelts had been guardians of an ancient race of Portuguese Gypsies called the Melungeons, who had settled Appalachia in April of 1238. She also did not know that at her birth, it had been arranged, in a secret ceremony at the Oddfellows Temple, that she should marry her cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as she was the chosen one, and it was important that the pure bloodline be preserved.
In 1905, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt married Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the Church of the Holy Library, in Ithaca, New York. When the Rev. Mr. Lincoln pronounced them man and wife, he said, “Elenor and Delano Roosevelt.” From that point onward, she became known as Eleanor Roosevelt, as it rhymed with Delano, and reminded her of the sacred and ancient duty she was to perform. Franklin, however retained use of his first name, in order to remind himself that the initials F.R. spoke of his mission of enabling the Federal Reserve to be formed. He became commonly known as F.D.R. as a reminder to himself of the D which separated his name from that of Eleanor.
The Melungeons possessed the secret of the ancient Librarians of Nineveh. When the Libraries of Nineveh were discovered, it was feared that the truth might become public, so the Melungeon shepherds of the Dead Sea region chose to expose the ancient scrolls, which they had buried there, as a diversionary tactic.
With interest focused on the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls, and the completely fabricated Essenes of Qumran, they had time to obscure the Ninevite findings, eventually making public the scans of the scrolls, through Eleanor’s dreaded computer networks, in the early 90’s, at the very time when George Bush was popularizing the term New World Order, through his Points of Light Speeches. It was another diversionary tactic that the Freemasons were granted (and later revoked) the right to use the name New Age, for one of their magazines.
On the death of President Roosevelt, a secret Oddfellows ceremony was held on the grounds of the White House, at which time the New World Order was instigated. President Al Smith, of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints–Reorganized officiated at the ceremony. The LDS-Reorganized were founded, as a separate organization from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints of Utah, in 1852. after Joseph Smith III had been initiated into the Oddfellows, at Zion Missouri. It was he who had founded the first public library, west of the Mississippi. It is interesting to note that the first public library east of the Mississippi was founded by Benjamin Franklin, also an Oddfellow, though maintaining the public illusion of Freemasonry.
The LDS-Reorganized of today bear no relation to these secret organizations, and to distance themselves from it have renamed their church “Community of Christ,” though they do continue to sponsor an annual performance of Handel’s Messiah, which was originally intended to pique people’s interest in music, and thus to visit the library.
To instigate the New World Order, the United Nations were formed shortly after the death of FDR, in his memory. Not surprisingly, Mrs. Roosevelt was appointed as United States delegate, where she forged many of the practices, such as UNICEF trick-or-treating, that still characterize the UN. It is for this reason, and this reason only that the United States continues to observe Labor Day on a separate day from May Day, which is reserved, in America, for May baskets and Maypoling.
During the early days of the United Nations, Gorgeous George gave birth to modern professional wrestling. Mr. McMahon, eventually bought up the various local wrestling organizations, such as Southwest Conference Wrestling, and organized the WWF, based on the UN model. A second one was formed, blatantly named NWO, for New World Order. These were succeeded by the WWE, or World Wrestling Entertainment. By these methods, the United Nations formed the United Paramount Network, which, along with the efforts of the other networks, continues to cause people everywhere to turn off the television and visit the Library, which is operated by an ancient society known as Librarians, as they were originally instigated under the sign of Libra.
Cited from
Walden, A. B. The Librarian Conspiracy.
Redhill: Waldco Press, 2003.
Sorry, It sounded so flippant it didn’t occur to me that you were being sincere. I see now that you really are. Please accept my apology.
No apology necessary. At least the air is clear!
Chris
WALDEN!!!
Now you stop that right this minute. Yer gonna get people all confuzzled!
Best wishes,
Jerry
Very good advice OOB. Last night ABC’s Peter Jennings narrated a documentary called “Beyond Conspiracy”. In it they used some very sophisticated technology to proved selective bits of evidence to be plausible. They rightly dispelled some myths, and they provided some commentary regarding Oliver Stone’s movie JFK. But while they were critical of Stone for shaping history by selectively using damning material, Jennings was guilty of the same thing.
- The computer-generated video model demonstrated that the single bullet theory is plausible. The model, shown repeatedly, also reflected the fact that Gov. Connally held on to his hat while his wrist was supposedly shattered by a high-powered projectile. That fact was never mentioned.
- They casually reported that LHO departed for Moscow three days after being discharged from the Marines, during the height of the cold war, and never pondered how he arranged it. Nothing sinister, but not worthy of a mention? I think not.
- They reported Oswald’s “defection” which is a misnomer because he understood very well where the legal lines were, yet never crossed them. But failed to mention LHO was a Marine Corp., U2 radar operator in Japan and offered to tell all he knew about the U2 aircraft. At the time, just preceding Gary Powers’ downing, the U2 flying directly over the Soviet Union was considered the biggest threat to Soviet national security. Again, not even a mention.
- They mentioned LHO took a shot at Gen. Edwin Walker. They mentioned LHO was a committed communist. They failed to mention Walker was ordered home from Europe for enrolling those in his authority in the John Burch Society, which was very much against Kennedy. Exactly what was LHO committed to? This is somewhat a conflicting indication since they claimed LHO desired to be a political assassin based on his convictions.
- The program positively stated that LHO did NOT meet with any questionable characters while in Mexico City. Author John Newman, a serious researcher, proves not only that LHO met with the KGB’s Valery Kostikov in the Soviet Embassy, but that the CIA knew it and failed to share the information with James Hosty, LHO’s FBI case officer in Dallas/Ft. Worth. Kostikov was the KGB’s head of wet ops (including assassination) for the Western Hemisphere. Not only no mention, they stated it backwards. There were multiple reasons for concern.
- No mention that LBJ reversed two national security action memorandums signed by JFK within three days of the assassination. These memorandums spelled out the removal of troops from Vietnam. Major, factual, reversal of policy - not even a mention.
- Those who vocally claimed conspiracy on any wide scale had their integrity questioned: Stone, Garrison, audio scientists (for not appearing), while those who concluded “lone nut” were not even questioned. No counter-point in the production whatsoever. That’s really similar to what ABC criticized O. Stone for doing, if not exactly the same - shaping history by omission of facts.
- But the thing I found most curious was the film of Oswald, in New Orleans, advocating 1) resuming diplomatic ties with Cuba 2) resumption of trade with Cuba, and 3) resume tourism with Cuba. This was presented as radical, yet that’s where many of our Congressmen are today. It could be argued LHO was much more intelligent than how the program portrayed him.
What??
I didn’t even mention the part where George Bush’s father (grandfather of the current president of these United States) stole Geronimo’s skull from the cemetery, here in Oklahoma, so that the Skull and Bones Society, of which he was a member, could perform the ritual that insured that the pentagram be made the official state seal!
