Discuss.

oo! i did one of these threads.

my favorite is dulce, new mexico.

http://www.wingtv.net/liquidconspiracy.html

this is a book not to read high.

http://www.inthe00s.com/index.php?topic=17110.0

The late U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone being murdered instead of a "plane crash".  In other words someone was messing with the plane.

What's the World Cup conspiracy? A way to keep 3,000,000,000 of us entertained whilst blacks ops steal our walletS?

John F Kennedy/Lee Harvey Oswald

"Men In Black" by a mile - it must be all true, I saw not one but *two* films about it.

http://www.inthe00s.com/index.php?topic=17110.0


Thanks.

Fake Moonlanding

It has always captured my imagination for the majority of my life.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy is required reading for anyone who's ever enjoyed a good conspiracy theory, because it explains them all.

Gravity's Rainbow and Catch-22 are good follow-up reading, but start with Illuminatus.  All three are fine literature, and the more often you'll read them, the more you'll enjoy them.

No disrespect to Pynchon and Heller, but I had to wait a few months to re-read Gravity's Rainbow and Catch-22. Out of the dozens of forests' worth of pulped trees in the thousands of books I've read over my life, Illuminatus was the only 800-page book I've ever read, only to immediately turn back to page one and start re-reading it the next day.

Do not Google this book, do not search the Wikipedia for it.  Too many spoilers out there in the Intarweb.  Just read it, twice, from start to finish.  It'll take about 150 pages of "why am I reading this crap?" and another 150 pages of "I think there's a plot here, but even if there's not, the author's kinda like Douglas Adams on acid, which is pretty funny, so I'll keep going", and then... well, then the threads of the conspiracy start to be unveiled, and you'll know who shot JFK, what inspired HP Lovecraft's works of non-fiction, what happened to John Dillinger, what happened to Atlantis, and why there's a pyramid on the back of the one dollar bill.  You might even see the fnords.

(Obligatory 9/11 conspiracy theory:  The book was written in 1975, more than 25 years before 9/11.  After you get through the book,  you'll never look at an aerial photo of the still-smoldering 9/12 Pentagon in quite the same way again.  No, I won't tell you which page.  You'll know it when you get to it.)

Ewige Blumenkraft!

gravity's rainbow is the best novel ever written.

I lived through the 60's, I see conspiracy everywhere    :o

The Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Bushes and the Windsors gathering in a secret location and metamorphosing into godzilla lizards and whatnot.  Once you go down the ancient secret societies controlling everything road, nothing but nothing is too outrageous! 

The occult and symbology everywhere:

http://poweredbychrist.homestead.com/files/bush/rituals.htm

Why do such fantastic urban legends endure?
Simple.
It's more comforting to think of the Bushes, the Windsors, the Rothschilds, and the Rockefellers as superhuman demons than just people like you and me.  Then you don't have to ask, "Why are these bastards so rich and powerful and why am I just an ordinary schnook?"
::)

Martin Luther King's murder, JFK's murder, and the Illuminati

The Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Bushes and the Windsors gathering in a secret location and metamorphosing into godzilla lizards and whatnot.  Once you go down the ancient secret societies controlling everything road, nothing but nothing is too outrageous! 

The occult and symbology everywhere:

http://poweredbychrist.homestead.com/files/bush/rituals.htm

Why do such fantastic urban legends endure?
Simple.
It's more comforting to think of the Bushes, the Windsors, the Rothschilds, and the Rockefellers as superhuman demons than just people like you and me.  Then you don't have to ask, "Why are these bastards so rich and powerful and why am I just an ordinary schnook?"
::)
i was into david ike (i can't remember how to spell his last name) for a while. not because he's plausible but because the writeup on him in the book "Them," which i totally recommend, is so hilarious, and that his whole lizard thing appears to be a way of dealing with the essential problem of conspiracy theory -- how could people be so evil? you know, deliberately flying planes into buildings in your own country? lying to create pretexts for wars in which tens of thousands of innocent people die? deliberately trying to undermine the most noble ideals of human endeavor like peace and freedom for shallow personal gain? his answer appears to be, well, they're that evil cuz they're not human.

i actually think the real answer is much more interesting. there's almost no limit to what you can get people to do if you appeal to their zeal and their shame. i could picture the planning meetings for 9/11 where, whenever someone balked, someone else would say, why are you going soft? don't you have what it takes to make these tough decisions? those sorts of appeals, those implicit challenges to one's masculinity and the threat of public shaming, are so devastatingly effective on those who're susceptible. they'll accede to virtually anything.

whenever someone balked, someone else would say, why are you going soft? don't you have what it takes to make these tough decisions? those sorts of appeals, those implicit challenges to one's masculinity and the threat of public shaming, are so devastatingly effective on those who're susceptible. they'll accede to virtually anything.


And thus we come back to Gulf War II, and Celine's Laws as outlined in (what else?) the Illuminatus Trilogy. 

Law #1:  National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity.

(AKA:  "Stalin's paranoia was a self-fulfilling prophecy.")

Leader:  "What are the bad guys up to?"
Bureaucracy:  "Haven't a clue."
Leader:  "Then hire more spies until you find out!"
Bureacuracy:  "We did.  They haven't found anything."
Leader:  "Take 'em down town."
Bureaucracy:  "They say they don't know anything."
Leader:  "Torture the prisoners until they fess up!"
Bureaucracy:  "They've confessed to everything and named thousands of names!"
Leader:  "My God, if even 10% of these plots are true, we're doomed!  We need more spies!  And bigger prison camps!  And fewer restrictions on torture!"

Law #2:  Accurate communication is possible only in a non-punishing situation.

Saddam:  "How's my nuke program going?"
Iraqi Underling:  "Sir, we don't have a nuke program!"
Saddam:  *BANG*
Iraqi Underling II:  "Actually, Sir, it's going pretty well.  Give us another six months for research."

Bush:  "How's Saddam's nuke program coming along?"
American Underling I:  "Our spies tell us it's going pretty poorly."
Bush:  "You're fired."
American Underling II:  "Our spies tell us it's going pretty well.  Give us another six months to dig up more intel.  And hire more spies."

Saddam:  "How's my nuke program going?  That Hans Blix is breakin' my bawlz, man!"
Iraqi Underling II:  "What nu---oh, that guy?  He hasn't found a thing!"
Saddam:  "Good work.  Make sure he continues to find nothing."
Iraqi Underling II:  "Oh, I think I can manage that, Sir!"

UN:  "What's up with Saddam's nuke program?"
Hans Blix:  "Nothi--err, actually, they seem pretty skittish about something.  Gimme six months for more inspections!"

Bush:  "How's my invasion plan coming?"
General I:  "Rummy's wrong.  It'll take at least 500,000 more men than Rummy suggests."
Bush:  "You're fired."
General II:  "Rummy's right. 200,000 tops, they'll welcome us as liberators!"
Bush:  "Good work.  Continue planning the invasion."

Law #3:  An honest politician is a national calamity.

National Security Council:  "So do go to war or what?"
Joint Chiefs:  "Well, the UN is playing that give-Hans-six-months-longer delaying game, and all of our intelligence suggests that Saddam's making good progress every six months."
Bush:  "I know BS when I smell it.  Someone has to be hiding something, even if we don't know what.  We know the UN will always work against us.  Enough of this crap.  Launch the missiles!  We'll find out what the Iraqis were up to after the smoke clears!"

The fundamental scaling problem with hierarchical organizations is that the people at the top of the pyramid have to make all the decisions -- but by Celine's Laws, they have to make these decisions without knowing a damn thing about the real world.  And the people at the bottom of the pyramid know what's going on in their microscopic segment of the world -- but don't have access to the big picture, and even if they did, they don't have the power to do anything about what they figure out.

Everyone's homework:  It's September 10, 2001. Imagine a dialogue between (a) an FBI field agent who spent the summer taking notes on flight schools in Florida, (b) his manager's manager's manager's manager, who has spent the past 8 years worrying about them redneck types in Oklahoma City and Waco, because that's what his manager's manager's manager's manager was worried about, and (c) the poor Chuck a few levels above them whose job it is to reword everything he knows about the world into a one-page memo that will be personally read by President Bush II.  Everything in his filing cabinet was written by his predecessor, who wrote similar memos for Clinton I.

You don't need a conspiracy to explain the security lapses that led to 9/11, nor even the faulty intelligence that prompted Gulf War II.  You just need a bunch of bureaucrats who want nothing more than to keep their jobs by telling their bosses what they want to hear.

i was into david ike (i can't remember how to spell his last name) for a while. not because he's plausible but because the writeup on him in the book "Them," which i totally recommend, is so hilarious, and that his whole lizard thing appears to be a way of dealing with the essential problem of conspiracy theory -- how could people be so evil? you know, deliberately flying planes into buildings in your own country? lying to create pretexts for wars in which tens of thousands of innocent people die? deliberately trying to undermine the most noble ideals of human endeavor like peace and freedom for shallow personal gain? his answer appears to be, well, they're that evil cuz they're not human.
Exactly what I was getting at.  When human lives become an abstraction and the abstract theory becomes applied policy, you get Bolsheviks and neo-cons, and a lot of human suffering.

"The dividing line between good an evil runs through every human heart."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

When the prep you to do evil things, of course they don't say "let's do evil things."  There's no Lex Luthor out there.  The evil is usually sold as restoring national glory, securing our people, and making the world a better place for the moral and righteous.  Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Joe Stalin, GW Bush, it's all the same modus operandi. 

When evil people are doing evil things, they usually justify the ends with the means.  That's how they keep justifying the occupation of Iraq.  That's why one of the most eloquent spokesmen for the Bushies as a second-rate comic who made his entire career on sarcasm--Dennis Miller.

i actually think the real answer is much more interesting. there's almost no limit to what you can get people to do if you appeal to their zeal and their shame. i could picture the planning meetings for 9/11 where, whenever someone balked, someone else would say, why are you going soft? don't you have what it takes to make these tough decisions? those sorts of appeals, those implicit challenges to one's masculinity and the threat of public shaming, are so devastatingly effective on those who're susceptible. they'll accede to virtually anything.

Exactly.  Karma +1.

The Skull&Bone American Domination Conspiracy theory.  Frat boys gone wild!!! :P

The Skull&Bone American Domination Conspiracy theory.  Frat boys gone wild!!! :P
oo! you guys know about bohemian grove? alex jones is the big bohemian grove-skull and bones dude. he makes this stuff more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

oo! you guys know about bohemian grove? alex jones is the big bohemian grove-skull and bones dude. he makes this stuff more fun than a barrel of monkeys.


Yeah, I know about Bohemian Grove.  It's amazing how much psychotic bonding and cross-dressing goes on in those circles.

i once called a number to report unusual activity cuz I saw a black helicopter.

duh.

but i love the MiB stuff.

oo! you guys know about bohemian grove? alex jones is the big bohemian grove-skull and bones dude. he makes this stuff more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

Isn't there some sick ritual at Bohemian Grove involving an actual barrel of monkeys?
:D

You know the Gibbs brothers and Tony Blair are friends.  The group is in the power circle. Nobody realizes the origin of the name the BeeGees.  BG = Bohemian Grove!

(see what I mean about how fun secret society conspiracies can be?)
;D

i once called a number to report unusual activity cuz I saw a black helicopter.

duh.

but i love the MiB stuff.


ATF honey.

ATF honey.

Azzwholes, Terrorists, and Funnyfarms!

"Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms" should be on a the front of a store, not on the back of a jacket :)

hey, that's catchy! did you just make that up?

Isn't there some sick ritual at Bohemian Grove involving an actual barrel of monkeys?
:D

You know the Gibbs brothers and Tony Blair are friends.  The group is in the power circle. Nobody realizes the origin of the name the BeeGees.  BG = Bohemian Grove!

(see what I mean about how fun secret society conspiracies can be?)
;D


OMG they're everywhere.  Is no one safe.

So, what so they do with that barrel full of monkeys?  Even J. Edgar Hoover admitted  it was a pretty freaky scene.

there really is no such thing as a favorite theory, just one you believe in most passionatly. under those circumstances, i voted for 9/11.