1. People will believe the dying person has nothing to gain from it so they MUST be telling the truth. 2. Anyone who says it's a hoax will be criticized as being insensitive. 3. There is no way those fooled to get even with the dead person once they figure out they've been duped.
None of that is the point.
First of all, the man was in a position to know. He's the one who researched and authored the original press release wherein the military at Roswell announced that they had recovered a crashed flying saucer. It was the brass from Washington who flew in and ordered the story classified and changed. Listening to him because he has nothing to gain is petty thinking based on a deep desire in oneself to profit. Considering his claim because he can no longer be punished for talking is another story.
With regard to your point #2, "Insensitivity" is not an accusation I've seen anybody throw around with regard to this story, so I'm not sure what you are getting at. I certainly don't care how sensitive to an old man's suffering one is being when discussing Roswell, although it does indicate a type of thinking in a person which is more likely to be counter-productive as being unaware and un-open to emotions limits understanding of the human condition and thus the knowledge which can be obtained and worked with. But that's neither here nor there. --As for people being unable to exact revenge for thinking that they've been fooled? HUH??? You really must exist in an odd head-space to even consider that. Profit from lying, using emotions to protect your lie, and fear of revenge when found out? If those are any indication of the sorts of rules you live by on a regular basis, then it's no wonder you assume this man is hoaxing.
Fortunately, I live in a world where those rules are far, far from the norm, (people tend to attract the kinds of people into their lives they best resonate with. If you are representing yourself accurately here, then I imagine your life would be rather difficult when it comes to intimacy and trust.), and I am willing to entertain the idea that the deceased lieutenant might have had somewhat different motives than profit, cruelty and manipulation for fun on his mind.
The CSICOP webpage you linked to simply reiterated the government's story and used the government's evidence while ignoring all the inconvenient details. The only way people could call that a 'thorough debunking' is if they were willing to delude and blind themselves in order to maintain a dogmatic belief structure. This isn't anything new; it's textbook 'fullaholes' scepticism. --I'm not saying I know what happened, but I will say that there is a lot of information which doesn't fit with the 'truth' the he sceptics are promoting. See the difference?
That's why I spell the word two ways; There's Skeptic, which is somebody who doesn't believe anything, but explores all avenues of thought without pre-judgment or bias, (there are very, very few people like this.) And then there are the Sceptics, who only pretend to love science and rational thinking, but really they only apply it when it fits with their pre-fabricated beliefs. I spell their kind of Sceptic with a 'C', because then it rhymes with "Sewage" (as in "sceptic tank"), which I think is quite appropriate.
This point is moronic. This is not a "leak" it is an old man with an ulterior motive, nothing more.
I'm not going to play "clashing definitions" with you. The fact of the matter is that this represents new information from an inside source. You can choose to believe or to not, but the leak, whistle-blower, informant, whatever you choose to call him, obviously exists. He's sixty years late, but that doesn't change the fact that he is in a position to know. He's the one who researched and authored the original press release wherein the military at Roswell announced that they had recovered a crashed flying saucer.
Why do I say this? Because if he had this information, and really felt the need to share it, he would have done so sooner. Instead he waited until it was impossible for the consequences to matter. That's all the proof I need.
You can make a statement like that and call my reasoning moronic? You know nothing about this man or how he worked. How can you possibly make any kind of statement about how he would or would not react to the influences in his life and what those reactions mean with regard to the validity of the information he is passing on? You can't, plain and simple. From my perspective, I can see a lot of sense in his approach; while alive, as you point out, he was available to pay the consequences for not towing a military secret. How does that do anything to take away from his testimony? Your reasoning is broken.
And calling his motives "ulterior" is even worse. That's a huge, baseless assumption and judgment based on what appears to be a strong dogmatic bias on your part.
And save that "you've been programmed" crap. It makes sense when you're sitting around your dorm room stoned, but in the light of reason, it's just vacuous. The only thing I've been programmed to do is seek REAL evidence, and this ain't it, not by a mile.
First of all, I don't take drugs. Secondly, the light of reason shines quite brightly in my life; The logical fallacies in your post suggest, however, that you spend less time in the same light. You say you are programmed to seek REAL evidence, and you couldn't be more correct. But who defines REAL for you? Think: you are not even considering the current information now; you are brushing it aside based on assumptions and logical fallacies without even having seen it. All you have is a second hand news report which was light on details.
The point is, the claim may be false, and it may be real. I won't know until I see more. But I am not brushing it aside so thoughtlessly. Thoughtless and forceful rejection of an idea is one of the hallmarks of having been brainwashed.
Just for the sake of argument, what if the government managed to... um... keep a secret secret? Is it possible that we wouldn't have heard about it?
This little logic loop is one of the sillier and yet most effective ones in circulation amongst the sceptic crowd.
Here's the way out of the, "People can't keep secrets" trap. . .
It's true; people really can't keep secrets. There are leaks all the time. This article is just such an example. But so what? The military industrial complex has installed a failsafe to catch these leaks. It has gone to massive effort to teach everybody from a very young age that only losers who don't get laid believe in conspiracies, UFO's do not exist, James Randi is not an ego-maniacal twit, your highschool science teacher was not just repeating the same crap they taught him, and that the material universe is the beginning and the end of everything you ever need to know.
With all of that programming in place, when a leak does happen, (like the one in this very article), people climb over each other to rationalize it and ignore it.
How clever is that? Programming the inmates to keep themselves locked up. It's genius.
Interestingly, the slashdot crowd is more apt to falling for this trick because special attention is placed upon them; they're the ones with the brains to work everything out, so you have to make sure they are good and programmed. It's baked into the school system on many levels, one of the most poignant being where jocks are rewarded for bullying the geeks, the cheer leaders would never love a geek, and so the geeks are shunted away from relevance on a deeply emotional level. And so they retaliate by being smart and fearing being laughed at and seeking approval from teachers and authority figures. Any subject which taps this programming, (like UFO's,), simply cannot be argued with just reason. There's huge emotional baggage preventing rational thought from prevailing. --You have to deal with deeply buried emotional trauma and self-worth issues. Believing in UFO's gets you ridiculed, and ridicule means you will never be loved. That's emotional wall #1. It offends the science teachers, who the geeks turned to for emotional validation, so that's emotional wall #2. Two big emotional walls will not be breached with reason alone.
Unless they shed the programming, geeks maintain pretty much a permanent handicap when it comes to TV talking heads lying to them; (talking heads who speak with authority in the same warm-fuzzy tones felt in the, "Isn't Science Nice" stage of programming in the school system).
So realistically, even if Lieutenant Walter Haut had left a movie reel of an alien being cut open, or bits of space metal in with his testimonial, the truth would still be rejected if the Military Industrial Complex did not want it to be accepted, which they don't.
Not until the warm-fuzzy talking TV heads, the school teachers, and the sex-drive of teen-age girls are radically altered, will such ideas become 'real'. And thus, between the church and the science teacher, you have your population under a level of control which allows you to dictate to it what it actually chooses to think and believe.
Suffice it to say that a Lieutenant is not exactly going to be high on the "need to know" list.
Need to know what? UFO's weren't classified in the 1940's. They were new and weird. The military and political structures of the day were making it up as they went with regard to the super-paranoid secrecy structures we are so familiar with today. That's why the Roswell staff made the decision to broadcast to the world that they had retrieved a crashed flying saucer. They didn't have standing orders not to.
--And I imagine that if you work on a dull little air training base in the middle of nowhere, when something like a crashed UFO enters your life, you might consider it awe-inspiring and important to all humans on the Earth. You might think that the rational thing to do would be to share news of it with the world. The gues at Roswell weren't paranoid presidential military advisors. They were Air Force working stiffs posted in the middle of nowhere on a boring little training base.
Of course, when the brass from the important parts of the military showed up, they put an end to that. The gears of secrecy had been beginning to turn in Washington for a few years with regard to UFO's, and though there was no official doctrine at that point, when a UFO crashed in your backyard, the government had enough paranoid minds at the top to know it was in their best interest to lock everything down tight. So the Roswell staff was forced to officially retract the original story and replace it with the tin-foil balloon thing.
Guys, he was a PR officer! He and others filling his job receive scripts to read and is told what to say and puts a happy face on everything. Why does everyone think that just because he was there that he had security clearance to see the deep dark secrets they had there? He's nothing more than a mouth-piece and no one to take final statements from as in he was not in the inner circle of people who would be truly in the know.
You're forgetting; this was the U.S. Air Force in the 1940's. Things were much more relaxed with regard to secrecy back then. In fact the high-paranoia secrecy structure in the U.S. today is, arguably largely the result of UFOs and all they entail. Read Richard Dolan's book on the subject.
Roswell was a simple training base in the middle of the desert. They didn't have much in the way of secrets. Roswell wasn't important until the multiple UFO crashes. (The nearest actual crash being over 150 miles away; the nearby farm only had debris, no ship.) In any case, Roswell didn't know how to deal with crashed UFO's. UFO's weren't considered secrets at that time. They had no classification because the human race was still trying to figure out what to make of the phenomenon. Indeed, the Roswell staff dealt with it perhaps as any rational humans might do; honestly and with a desire to share the astonishing knowledge with the world.
They took their public relations guy and they showed him the evidence they had collected so that he could prepare his report for the newspapers and radio stations. --Which he did, thus we had the infamous press release of 1947 which started this whole thing; the announcement that the U.S. Air Force had retrieved a crashed flying saucer. --Understand that a news reporter back in the forties was not just a voice for reading things over the radio. Reporters were expected to actually do their jobs; directly collect information and describe it to others, (as opposed to just mindlessly read off Pentagon press releases.), and since he was the first and only reporter on the scene, he executed his job appropriately and as was expected of him. Of course they showed him the evidence. It wasn't classified or even military in nature, so why not? The system of news gathering and dissemination in the 40's made a lot more sense than it does today.
Of course, when the big boys from the important parts of the military showed up, they put an end to all of this. The gears of secrecy had been turning in Washington for a few years now, and though there was no official doctrine as of yet, when a UFO crashes in your backyard, the government had enough paranoid minds at the top to know it was in their best interest to lock everything down tight. So the Roswell staff was forced to officially retract the original story and replace it with the tin-foil balloon thing. --And because people trusted their government and their news delivery systems, they believed the lie. People in the forties, as sadly they do now, are very easy to fool if you use an authoritative tone when you tell lies.
Crackpots can have deathbed confessions too. They may honestly believe that what they say is true even on their deathbeds. It doesn't give it any more credibility and dying people aren't necessarily their most lucid in their final moments.
True, but you're leaving out one important detail; the particular individual being discussed was in a position to know a great deal more than you do on the subject. So really, it's your word against his as to whether or not he was a 'crackpot'. --And you sound rather judgmental and thoughtless to me. For instance. . , nobody is attributing credibility to the fact that he was dying. Why would you even think that? The credibility comes from the fact that he was beyond the reach of the military after dying, meaning he could no longer be punished for speaking out.
Just for the record, I spelled it correctly when I submitted this nugget of weirdness. I also used the sentence, "Ever wonder what sort of company gets green lit to grab a share of the free flowing gobs of taxpayer Warbux?" but my brand of editorializing is a tad left of left.
The article seemed too dumb to be true, but guess what? The company is actually selling systems. I guess paranoia is as effective a sales tool when used on military budgeteers as it is when selling insurance to people. Better to spend a big pile of money on something which might possibly work, (unless it doesn't), rather than let somebody else maybe possibly get one up on you. Or something like that.
I seem to recall that Dr. Who had a parallel universe simulator in one episode. Seemed like a cool idea. But I bet it wasn't trawling information from Facebook to make its updates. How many people with brown skin are you friends with who like films with explosions as reviewed on Flicker?
First of all... Considering that most owners of that Audi had no problem figuring out which pedal was which I don't see how the automaker could be at fault.
Perhaps because no other car in the history of cars ever had this problem. With Audi, however, it was common enough to become a newsworthy issue. Part of the design department's mandate is to take into account human psychology. If you are in the business, like Audi, of designing such critical elements as human/car control interfaces, and if a small, though regular percentage of your users are accidentally hitting the gas instead of the brake, then your design department hasn't just screwed up, it has potentially killed people through poor design.
Second, I don't see where you're coming from with this notion about individuals being marginalized. If anything, in the United States the individual is being valued more than at any point in the past. Not that there aren't problems, but I don't think the reality is anything like you're claiming. I agree with you about what's going on in China, but then we're not talking about China here.
I don't even know where to start. Have you seen what the government has been doing to the bill of rights recently? How's your health care system doing? How about that USDA allowing factory farmed meats into USDA Organic products? How's the all volunteer army doing in Iraq? Are the thousands of amputees and brain damaged troops returning getting any help from their government? No? What a surprise! Where does the U.S. rate on the scale of standard of living when compared to other first world nations? Right at the bottom. There is more malnutrition, fewer vacation hours, worse working conditions and higher levels of illieracy in the U.S. than any other developed nation on the planet. Interestingly enough, it also has the largest percentage of its population in prison than any other first world nation.
Like I said, 11 consoles in a row with problems is not an insignificant number. I can't help but conclude that this guy is somehow mishandling these consoles. But because I haven't seen these units and how they've been used I can't make that assertion. It could very well be that Microsoft representatives and their technical staff have done a crap job of dealing with this matter. But again, considering that they've dealt with this guy so many times already I don't see how they haven't been very accommodating.
The guy even had an electrician come to his house to check the wiring and got a clean bill of health. Microsoft sent him DOA boxes and most likely a bunch of shoddy refurbs. And the basic unit is by many accounts, a piece of junk which regularly overheats and breaks. MS doesn't deserve praise. They deserve, as you point out, to lose a customer. The only problem with that idea is that I very much doubt MS offers much in the way of refunds. It's easier to let him languish in the endless repair cycle than to give his money back. That's shoddy enough, but if they ever told him, "Sorry, we've decided that our poor service and poor product is your fault so we're not going to give you anything at all now for your money", they'd deserve to be hauled in front of a judge.
Really, honestly, if a customer bought something, then brought it back broken, 11 FREAKING TIMES in a row, do you really think most retailers would keep accepting it back, over and over again? Eventually they'd be blaming it on you and refusing to take it back.
You give MS a bunch of money for a faulty product which they fail to replace with a working one 11 times in a row? That's pathetic. They should be punished, not praised!
The individual is NOT GUILTY and should not be treated as such. --Two of those eleven replacements arrived DOA for goodness sake! The corporation should be giving him a working box AND his money back AND a written apology from the president for wasting his time. They should be getting a -1 in EVERYBODY's book for having such low standards that they were able to produce a huge number of faulty boxes and allow them onto the market. Read the comments; there are several other users who complain that the box is unreasonably delicate.
It has poor cooling, so if I put it on top of my TV or in my video cabinet, (where every other video component in the world has been specifically designed to be placed since the first VCR rolled off the assembly line), it's somehow my fault and I should feel ashamed of myself for not knowing better? That's insane!
When the heck did Corporate America succeed in making people feel guilty and ashamed for asking that Corporate America do it's job?
When a car manufacturer puts the pedals in a place out of keeping with all other cars, is it the user's fault for not adjusting to the new controls or is it just bad ergonomic engineering?
Blame the individual? Because MS has never (sarcasm) shipped faulty product before. The list of symptoms listed in the article were all different, and in a couple of cases, the replacement game box showed up DOA. How is that his fault?
I find it disheartening that it is becoming more and more common for the human individual to be marginalized. According to few friends of mine who have lived and worked in China, the value of the human individual over there has been the subject of massive propaganda designed to make sure everybody knows that they are without value, easily replaced and should shut up and be happy with whatever the government gives them. Do we want that same level of repression here? I don't.
Why people voluntarily spread the kind of sick message around today which puts humans last is just plain aggravating. MS should bloody well be hauled over the coals for producing broken product and for dropping the ball repeatedly in their shoddy attempts to fix the problem. But instead we see Slashdotters actually siding with MS, an organization which has been found guilty numerous times in numerous ways for lousy and morally repugnant business practice.
The funny part is that Microsoft's team of PR engineers were paid generously to come up with a slogan which was not just effective in extending the MS empire of BS, but which was also somewhat tamper-proof. --One which works to defy attempts by those aware of MS BS to twist its wording into a farce.
After much tweeking, the best I was able to come up with was,
"Vista Sucks"
Hm. Even sort of rhymes with 'business' if you say it the right way.
I remember one fellow telling me back in 2000 (with a nice head-patting) that until there were brownshirts with arm bands marching in the streets, that he would consider people's concerns about the Bush presidency to be nonsense.
How intelligent. People who see the future don't look into a crystal ball. They just look at pattens and understand how they evolve. It's not so difficult.
US university students will not be able to work late at the campus, travel abroad, show interest in their colleagues' work, have friends outside the United States, engage in independent research, or make extra money without the prior consent of the authorities, according to a set of guidelines given to administrators by the FBI.
It's all stemming from the 'legitimate' fear that technology students might be involved in giving away state secrets. Article
Uh huh. You can always sell a bad bill of goods to the people if you spin it right. People are such suckers for spin. Better to trust your own senses. If it stinks like a dead rat, chances are it's a dead rat.
Why? Did he say anything which was not demonstrably true, or is it simply the old text-book pattern?
That is, conservatives tend to be low-intellect, fact-unsupported push-button ideologues whose reaction to people who point out the obvious flaws in the nationalistic dogma, is one of anger and flailing nonsense. Nonsense which when put in a crucible, burns off as smoke and fury leaving only the befuddled 'troll' asking rational questions and wondering why the obvious is so difficult to accept for some.
This is just an administration's response to the insinuation that they are somehow the first to do unpleasant things "in the service of" their country. This says, "even you Democrats did bad things; not only that, your great Champion Kennedy did some of the worst. We could easily declassify plenty of damaging goods on Clinton the Popular, but we don't want to set that precedent, now, do we?
Bitter and delusional? Reality not lining up with how you'd like it to be? Try Love, Forgiveness and looking at reality straight on without flinching.
So what? Wikipedia is already run by the dark side on every issue which actually matters that I've ever looked up on it.
Wikipedia seems to be run entirely by science geeks who never figured out that highschool and TV are brainwashing tactics. How sad for a bunch who supposedly take pride in using their brains that they should have been so easily tricked.
Thus, in Wikipedia, if it doesn't fit with conventional wisdom, it isn't in there.
This is fine if I need to look up how jet engines work or what the capital of Sweden is, but if you want to look up anything which hedges into areas which are controlled, then you might as well forget it. You'll just get loads of false wisdom spat at you with cult-like vehemence.
The genius of the New Big Brother is that Thought is self-policed these days. Who needs Orwell?
Congratulations, humanity. That paper bag trap is going to baffle you for a long time yet.
Unless you are being deliberately coy, you clearly know virtually nothing about the subject you are condemning. This is very common, but wow. What a shame! Most Slashdotters, I would guess, spent a lot of time wishing to experience the very thing which is now passing right under their noses. It's tragic when the curiosity of youth is co-opted by misplaced cynicism and willing blindness.
Honestly. This is worth investigating. There's even a good documentary on the subject. I found a copy at BlockBuster, (of all places)!
Not meaning to flame, but... if you're too dense to get it, you can't very well blame the filmmakers.
Dense? I like to think of it as 'substance'. As opposed to hot air.
And who's blaming the film makers? They did what they did, and they did a fine enough job. But killer robots with a dash of Shakespeare seeing things we people wouldn't believe? Black rain and Vangelis doesn't make existential angst any less tiresome. Well, actually it does. Blade Runner was certainly noteworthy, but not for any grand light it shed on the human condition. Star Trek's Data did as much, but with IKEA lighting and more brass, the way the Future oughta be, darn it!
Life is an exciting place to be experienced with courage, verve and awareness, not moped over in search of some intellectual prize worth nothing unless accompanied by a bit of wool-pulling among the assembled.
Well, as movie sci-fi goes, I suppose. I thought it was just a story about killer robots. The film adaptation looked nice, and it was certainly dark and miserable enough to be taken 'seriously' by film critics at large, but honestly, I got the same message out of Terminator II. "Humans are paradoxical and life sucks after nuclear war."
I found Bladerunner's so-so handling of the psychopath angle disappointing. The scene where replicants were tearing legs off spiders without compassion was one of the more straight forward and insightful elements in the book. Too bad it got cut.
As science fiction goes, I thought The Matrix had more interesting things to say; and presented with enough camp to make the critics sputter in self righteous glory. Always a plus.
"Contact" was naive, but fun. I found, however, its blundering introduction of Occam's Razor into the public lexicon and its endless misapplication thereafter unforgiveable. --And that contact from aliens would become officially recognized public domain knowledge was almost too childish to swallow even for the sake of a ten dollar afternoon distraction. We've got crop cirlces right here, right now and the media and public at large prefer to look the other way blaming such an astonishing phenomenon on a couple of bozos with ropes and planks. That's reality. Jodi Foster all fumbling-cute with a clip board is a total pipe dream.
You're right, though, about sci-fi being better in book form. There are just so few writers who know how to think beyond the societal confines. Perhaps Philip K. Dick being a bit crazy is probably why he was able to do a passable job. Seems like a needlessly painful way of going about it though.
So you're saying that proof of 9/11 Conpsiracy is that the Manhattan Project was kept secret?
Proof that conspiracies exist does not mean that all theories are without flaw. It does, however, mean that you cannot condemn the very notion of conspiracy in over-generalized terms as you appear to be doing.
I've worked at two national labs. Hanford was not kept secret. It was impossible to keep it a secret. A whole town was evacuated, and everyone in half the state of Washington knew the military was doing something there. To a lesser extent, the same applied to Los Alamos. Again, people in Santa Fe knew something was going on up there.
Who said anything about Hanford being kept secret? You're leaping to conclusions. I imagine, if you work in a lab, that you have been trained how to not leap to conclusions, so you must be aware that attacking 'conspiracists' the way you have been taints your arguments with hypocrisy when you jump to respond to things nobody actually said or intended. Such irrational thinking is what you are opposing, is it not?
Hanford did not itself need to be a secret in order for it to be the site of secret activities where very few of the workers knew what they were laboring towards. It is just one example of a very large group of people being deftly controlled by a much small number of planners working in secrecy. Given the types of personalities who are attracted to political power and who are competetive enough to win it through morally defunct means, (sociopathic), it is entirely logical to assume that such small groups are fully willing to conspire to achieve goals which are selfish in nature.
What is today's excuse for thousands of firefighters, police officers, air traffic controllers, NIST investigators, Manhattan witnesses not just to clam up, but to outright lie? 9/11 Truth is an phantasm of a mistaken worldview.
Small people do not need to know anything important in order to participate in a large plan. With common sense, one can deduce which elements of a plan are more or less likely to be false simply by determining the route which requires the smallest number of liars. People who feel repelled by the idea of conspiracy tend to look only at the most outlandish set of theories when using such arguments as, "Firefighters, police officers and air traffic controllers, etc., had to tell lies in order for these theories to work."
Instead, we can ask, "How could the theory work in such a way as would require the smallest number of knowing paricipants, and participants over whom pressure to stay silent cannot be exerted?" --Having known a couple of people who live in the high-level political and military realms, it is clear to me that there are more than enough people willing to lie and who can exert pressure to keep secrets to pull off the kind of jobs we have seen. How many firefighters and Manhattan witnesses and air traffic controllers, etc., are needed to lie in order for a conspiracy using a plane load of brainwashed political dupes?
Numerous people in the pro-conspiracy world, including radio show personalities like Jeff Rense, have been demonstrated to have connections to clandestine organizations. There is a great advantage to having such people in place; spewing faulty theories into the world and then having those stories shot down, serves to cloud and confuse the issue. It effectively allows people such as yourself to be much more likely to write off the entire idea that there are people with secret agendas acting in the world. It's a fairly straight forward psychological ploy, but it works quite effectively. --Much like the fake moon landing material.
The trick is to assume malice when it comes to people like Bush and the supporting structures which put him in place. There is more than enough evidence in plain sight that the Military Industrial Complex, corporate, political and elements of the military, are working in a manner which is entirely detrimental to the general population. So when
The Manhattan Project was a pretty giant secret. It cost a couple billion 1940's dollars, employed tens of thousands, and required the building of three small cities in different parts of the U.S. They even test-detonated the world's first atomic bomb without anybody in the public catching wise. People didn't know what their government was doing until it was officially announced that mushroom clouds were sprouting over Japan.
Now. . , consider: What if they never used those atomic bombs on Japan and never announced officially that the U.S. had invented nuclear weapons? Would anybody know?
Well, some of us would, because yeah, it's true; There are always leaks, people really can't keep secrets. The problem is that those who listen to those leaks and talk about such projects are labeled 'nutty conspiracy theorists' by smug people who only believe what television tells them.
The thing most people forget when it comes to secrecy, is that the leaks are very small, and for the most part secrecy can to a large degree be enforced. It is done on an individual by individual basis. Everybody in the military who is in a sensitive position has to sign a binding document and swear not to tell others what they are working on, and failing to uphold this vow, face charges of treason. And that's just the official branch. If you are part of a government arm which operates outside the law, the penalties are probably much more frightening. --Not to mention, that what people involved in secrecy are working on is often compartmentalized, so that even they don't know what's really going on.
Conspiracies most certainly exist. If they didn't, judges wouldn't be able to convict people on charges of 'conspiracy'. It's human nature to plan in secret.
If people don't like to believe in government conspiracies, I find it is useful to change the word to one which has not been the subject of such strong negative marketing; I ask, "Okay then, do you believe in government Corruption?"
Fake moon landings? I don't know about that. That was promoted by Television and then shot down by Television, which suggests to me that it was designed simply to further scandalize the idea of conspiracy theory among people who watch and schedule their lives according to Television, (which is almost everybody). However, there are a lot of other shady things I certainly wouldn't put past the military industrial complex!
Geez. Everybody knows the CIA has been up to no good. I don't know what a bunch of mild reading is good for. Do they get into their mind control experiments? Or their involvement in the JFK and MLK assassinations? Or any of the really dark stuff? No? Whatever. I don't know what's up with this, but stuff that happened 30 years ago isn't. Plus, they're just the CIA. What about the heads of state? Here's a snippet from an article detailing what's going on right now in full public view. ..
Sure, you've heard of the Patriot Act, and you know about the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy. Many Americans are cynical about the human rights record of the Bush administration. But, what do you know about these directives and acts Bush signed into law in the past few months -- The John Warner Defense Appropriation Act, The Military Commissions Act, The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directives? These acts and directives give dictatorial powers to the President of the United States, and leave open the question -- are these guys planning to leave office?
[. ..]
Good-bye Habeas
The United States Military Commissions Act of 2006, (Senate Bill 3930[1]) signed on October 17, 2006, set out to "facilitate bringing to justice terrorists and other unlawful enemy combatants through full and fair trials by military commissions." The Act creates the category of "unlawful enemy combatants," who lack the right of habeas corpus, and traditional protections from torture under the Geneva Conventions. Furthermore, the Act avoids any clear language ensuring that U.S. citizens will not be classified as unlawful enemy combatants. This Act side-steps the traditional protections associated with the judiciary branch. The determination of the status of an individual as an "unlawful enemy combatant" is made by tribunals established under the authority of the President.
Good-bye Posse Comitatus
The John Warner Defense Appropriation Act for Fiscal Year 2007 (H.R. 5122.ENR), signed on the same day, allows the President to "...employ the armed forces, including the National Guard in Federal service, to... 1. restore public order and enforce the laws of the United States when... the President determines that,...domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of maintaining public order; 2. suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy..."
Good-bye Separation of Powers
The National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD 51), and the Homeland Security Presidential Directive (HSPD-20), signed on May 9, 2007, give special powers to the President in the event of a "Catastrophic Emergency," which means "any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions." In such situations, "The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government."
During the Bush presidency these totalitarian laws have arisen. At the same time there has emerged a rising cynicism among the people. There is a hope for a silver lining during oppressive presidencies that at least the people get to see how bad unchecked power abuses are. I once read that when Hitler came to power, the German communists were relieved that at least the people would get the opportunity to see how bad the Nazis were, and would therefore be more likely to vote communist in the next election. But there was no next election. [. ..]
It's easy to slip into a little nap and forget what's just around the corner. War with Iran, and either 'terrorist' attacks on U.S. soil, or a U.S. ecconomic collapse, (or both), which pr
And after so much speculation on how aliens must have done it because of how the corn was bent at the stalk and how we cannot produce that effect, it was shown that some of them were created by a couple people walking and dragging a log behind them.
Actually, pranksters don't drag logs. They use a plank and they place it in front of them and crush the plant stalks down by stepping on the plank, moving forward a notch and repeating the process. They use ropes and poles stuck in the ground to measure out circles.
This technique cannot, however, produce the wide range of effects measured in what are considered to be authentic formations.
These effects include, stalks bending at the 'knuckle', (as opposed to snapping or causing crushing damage to the plant). In some formations, the first knuckle is bent for the middle bits of the formation and the second 'knuckle' up in areas further out from the center. Distinct genetic abnormalities have been repeatedly noted in seeds taken from within a formation and grown beside control seeds taken from outside the same formation. Seeds have even been turned magnetic in a couple of cases. Huge formations being created in under 20 minutes in daylight. Weird floating lights observed during formation creation. Burnt/blown out sections at the bend point of the stalks in numerous formations, as though the bend point was super-heated from the inside for an instant, etc., etc.
Of course, there are also pranksters with planks, but so what?
There has been a LOT of research put into this area, and very very little of it is reported upon. The media largely ignores the whole phenomenon, despite the fact that it is proof positive of something very powerful and world-changing happening right now, right here. There is a very informative documentary on the subject called, appropriately enough, "Crop Circles, the Search for Truth". If you are interested, check it out. I found a copy down at my local block buster. It includes an interesting interview in the extra features where one of the researchers relates a fairly horrifying story about CIA harassment. Oh yeah. And black unmarked helicopters were also caught on film buzzing some circles. It's all there. The world, as I have said, is a very interesting place and anybody who wants access to more than the pre-packaged 'knowledge' is invited.
Yet it operates on rules, not magic. If those rules didn't exist, the universe simply wouldn't exist as we know it.
Agreed. Absolutely. It's just that the rules most people are working with are those that come in the beginner set.
Get rid of your TV, don't own a cell phone, get a basic land-line account and a dial-up service.
After getting totally screwed over by Bell's DSL 'service' for several months, I got fed up and dropped back to a third party dial-up ISP. Wow. No more headaches, and I realized that there was very little about the internet which I needed high speed for anyway.
Interestingly, the trouble with my DSL account, (my login and passwords being locked out and nobody on the service help end being able to figure out why or how to fix it, setting up new accounts where the same thing would happen, lots of head scratching, blah, blah, blah), all started when I began posting mountains of political stuff during the launch of the war in Iraq. It had been a fine service up until that point. --The crap the establishment was trying to pull at that time was amazing, and the holes in all the stories were typically open only during the first few hours/days of an operation, so research speed was a priority.
Slashdot Mirror
None of that is the point.
First of all, the man was in a position to know. He's the one who researched and authored the original press release wherein the military at Roswell announced that they had recovered a crashed flying saucer. It was the brass from Washington who flew in and ordered the story classified and changed. Listening to him because he has nothing to gain is petty thinking based on a deep desire in oneself to profit. Considering his claim because he can no longer be punished for talking is another story.
With regard to your point #2, "Insensitivity" is not an accusation I've seen anybody throw around with regard to this story, so I'm not sure what you are getting at. I certainly don't care how sensitive to an old man's suffering one is being when discussing Roswell, although it does indicate a type of thinking in a person which is more likely to be counter-productive as being unaware and un-open to emotions limits understanding of the human condition and thus the knowledge which can be obtained and worked with. But that's neither here nor there. --As for people being unable to exact revenge for thinking that they've been fooled? HUH??? You really must exist in an odd head-space to even consider that. Profit from lying, using emotions to protect your lie, and fear of revenge when found out? If those are any indication of the sorts of rules you live by on a regular basis, then it's no wonder you assume this man is hoaxing.
Fortunately, I live in a world where those rules are far, far from the norm, (people tend to attract the kinds of people into their lives they best resonate with. If you are representing yourself accurately here, then I imagine your life would be rather difficult when it comes to intimacy and trust.), and I am willing to entertain the idea that the deceased lieutenant might have had somewhat different motives than profit, cruelty and manipulation for fun on his mind.
The CSICOP webpage you linked to simply reiterated the government's story and used the government's evidence while ignoring all the inconvenient details. The only way people could call that a 'thorough debunking' is if they were willing to delude and blind themselves in order to maintain a dogmatic belief structure. This isn't anything new; it's textbook 'fullaholes' scepticism. --I'm not saying I know what happened, but I will say that there is a lot of information which doesn't fit with the 'truth' the he sceptics are promoting. See the difference?
That's why I spell the word two ways; There's Skeptic, which is somebody who doesn't believe anything, but explores all avenues of thought without pre-judgment or bias, (there are very, very few people like this.) And then there are the Sceptics, who only pretend to love science and rational thinking, but really they only apply it when it fits with their pre-fabricated beliefs. I spell their kind of Sceptic with a 'C', because then it rhymes with "Sewage" (as in "sceptic tank"), which I think is quite appropriate.
-FL
I'm not going to play "clashing definitions" with you. The fact of the matter is that this represents new information from an inside source. You can choose to believe or to not, but the leak, whistle-blower, informant, whatever you choose to call him, obviously exists. He's sixty years late, but that doesn't change the fact that he is in a position to know. He's the one who researched and authored the original press release wherein the military at Roswell announced that they had recovered a crashed flying saucer.
Why do I say this? Because if he had this information, and really felt the need to share it, he would have done so sooner. Instead he waited until it was impossible for the consequences to matter. That's all the proof I need.
You can make a statement like that and call my reasoning moronic? You know nothing about this man or how he worked. How can you possibly make any kind of statement about how he would or would not react to the influences in his life and what those reactions mean with regard to the validity of the information he is passing on? You can't, plain and simple. From my perspective, I can see a lot of sense in his approach; while alive, as you point out, he was available to pay the consequences for not towing a military secret. How does that do anything to take away from his testimony? Your reasoning is broken.
And calling his motives "ulterior" is even worse. That's a huge, baseless assumption and judgment based on what appears to be a strong dogmatic bias on your part.
And save that "you've been programmed" crap. It makes sense when you're sitting around your dorm room stoned, but in the light of reason, it's just vacuous. The only thing I've been programmed to do is seek REAL evidence, and this ain't it, not by a mile.
First of all, I don't take drugs. Secondly, the light of reason shines quite brightly in my life; The logical fallacies in your post suggest, however, that you spend less time in the same light. You say you are programmed to seek REAL evidence, and you couldn't be more correct. But who defines REAL for you? Think: you are not even considering the current information now; you are brushing it aside based on assumptions and logical fallacies without even having seen it. All you have is a second hand news report which was light on details.
The point is, the claim may be false, and it may be real. I won't know until I see more. But I am not brushing it aside so thoughtlessly. Thoughtless and forceful rejection of an idea is one of the hallmarks of having been brainwashed.
-FL
This little logic loop is one of the sillier and yet most effective ones in circulation amongst the sceptic crowd.
Here's the way out of the, "People can't keep secrets" trap. . .
It's true; people really can't keep secrets. There are leaks all the time. This article is just such an example. But so what? The military industrial complex has installed a failsafe to catch these leaks. It has gone to massive effort to teach everybody from a very young age that only losers who don't get laid believe in conspiracies, UFO's do not exist, James Randi is not an ego-maniacal twit, your highschool science teacher was not just repeating the same crap they taught him, and that the material universe is the beginning and the end of everything you ever need to know.
With all of that programming in place, when a leak does happen, (like the one in this very article), people climb over each other to rationalize it and ignore it.
How clever is that? Programming the inmates to keep themselves locked up. It's genius.
Interestingly, the slashdot crowd is more apt to falling for this trick because special attention is placed upon them; they're the ones with the brains to work everything out, so you have to make sure they are good and programmed. It's baked into the school system on many levels, one of the most poignant being where jocks are rewarded for bullying the geeks, the cheer leaders would never love a geek, and so the geeks are shunted away from relevance on a deeply emotional level. And so they retaliate by being smart and fearing being laughed at and seeking approval from teachers and authority figures. Any subject which taps this programming, (like UFO's,), simply cannot be argued with just reason. There's huge emotional baggage preventing rational thought from prevailing. --You have to deal with deeply buried emotional trauma and self-worth issues. Believing in UFO's gets you ridiculed, and ridicule means you will never be loved. That's emotional wall #1. It offends the science teachers, who the geeks turned to for emotional validation, so that's emotional wall #2. Two big emotional walls will not be breached with reason alone.
Unless they shed the programming, geeks maintain pretty much a permanent handicap when it comes to TV talking heads lying to them; (talking heads who speak with authority in the same warm-fuzzy tones felt in the, "Isn't Science Nice" stage of programming in the school system).
So realistically, even if Lieutenant Walter Haut had left a movie reel of an alien being cut open, or bits of space metal in with his testimonial, the truth would still be rejected if the Military Industrial Complex did not want it to be accepted, which they don't.
Not until the warm-fuzzy talking TV heads, the school teachers, and the sex-drive of teen-age girls are radically altered, will such ideas become 'real'. And thus, between the church and the science teacher, you have your population under a level of control which allows you to dictate to it what it actually chooses to think and believe.
-FL
Need to know what? UFO's weren't classified in the 1940's. They were new and weird. The military and political structures of the day were making it up as they went with regard to the super-paranoid secrecy structures we are so familiar with today. That's why the Roswell staff made the decision to broadcast to the world that they had retrieved a crashed flying saucer. They didn't have standing orders not to.
--And I imagine that if you work on a dull little air training base in the middle of nowhere, when something like a crashed UFO enters your life, you might consider it awe-inspiring and important to all humans on the Earth. You might think that the rational thing to do would be to share news of it with the world. The gues at Roswell weren't paranoid presidential military advisors. They were Air Force working stiffs posted in the middle of nowhere on a boring little training base.
Of course, when the brass from the important parts of the military showed up, they put an end to that. The gears of secrecy had been beginning to turn in Washington for a few years with regard to UFO's, and though there was no official doctrine at that point, when a UFO crashed in your backyard, the government had enough paranoid minds at the top to know it was in their best interest to lock everything down tight. So the Roswell staff was forced to officially retract the original story and replace it with the tin-foil balloon thing.
-FL
You're forgetting; this was the U.S. Air Force in the 1940's. Things were much more relaxed with regard to secrecy back then. In fact the high-paranoia secrecy structure in the U.S. today is, arguably largely the result of UFOs and all they entail. Read Richard Dolan's book on the subject.
Roswell was a simple training base in the middle of the desert. They didn't have much in the way of secrets. Roswell wasn't important until the multiple UFO crashes. (The nearest actual crash being over 150 miles away; the nearby farm only had debris, no ship.) In any case, Roswell didn't know how to deal with crashed UFO's. UFO's weren't considered secrets at that time. They had no classification because the human race was still trying to figure out what to make of the phenomenon. Indeed, the Roswell staff dealt with it perhaps as any rational humans might do; honestly and with a desire to share the astonishing knowledge with the world.
They took their public relations guy and they showed him the evidence they had collected so that he could prepare his report for the newspapers and radio stations. --Which he did, thus we had the infamous press release of 1947 which started this whole thing; the announcement that the U.S. Air Force had retrieved a crashed flying saucer. --Understand that a news reporter back in the forties was not just a voice for reading things over the radio. Reporters were expected to actually do their jobs; directly collect information and describe it to others, (as opposed to just mindlessly read off Pentagon press releases.), and since he was the first and only reporter on the scene, he executed his job appropriately and as was expected of him. Of course they showed him the evidence. It wasn't classified or even military in nature, so why not? The system of news gathering and dissemination in the 40's made a lot more sense than it does today.
Of course, when the big boys from the important parts of the military showed up, they put an end to all of this. The gears of secrecy had been turning in Washington for a few years now, and though there was no official doctrine as of yet, when a UFO crashes in your backyard, the government had enough paranoid minds at the top to know it was in their best interest to lock everything down tight. So the Roswell staff was forced to officially retract the original story and replace it with the tin-foil balloon thing. --And because people trusted their government and their news delivery systems, they believed the lie. People in the forties, as sadly they do now, are very easy to fool if you use an authoritative tone when you tell lies.
-FL
Indeed. -A ship which may well have been moving at speeds several orders of magnitude greater than any human jet was capable of at the time.
-FL
True, but you're leaving out one important detail; the particular individual being discussed was in a position to know a great deal more than you do on the subject. So really, it's your word against his as to whether or not he was a 'crackpot'. --And you sound rather judgmental and thoughtless to me. For instance. . , nobody is attributing credibility to the fact that he was dying. Why would you even think that? The credibility comes from the fact that he was beyond the reach of the military after dying, meaning he could no longer be punished for speaking out.
-FL
The article seemed too dumb to be true, but guess what? The company is actually selling systems. I guess paranoia is as effective a sales tool when used on military budgeteers as it is when selling insurance to people. Better to spend a big pile of money on something which might possibly work, (unless it doesn't), rather than let somebody else maybe possibly get one up on you. Or something like that.
I seem to recall that Dr. Who had a parallel universe simulator in one episode. Seemed like a cool idea. But I bet it wasn't trawling information from Facebook to make its updates. How many people with brown skin are you friends with who like films with explosions as reviewed on Flicker?
-FL
Perhaps because no other car in the history of cars ever had this problem. With Audi, however, it was common enough to become a newsworthy issue. Part of the design department's mandate is to take into account human psychology. If you are in the business, like Audi, of designing such critical elements as human/car control interfaces, and if a small, though regular percentage of your users are accidentally hitting the gas instead of the brake, then your design department hasn't just screwed up, it has potentially killed people through poor design.
Second, I don't see where you're coming from with this notion about individuals being marginalized. If anything, in the United States the individual is being valued more than at any point in the past. Not that there aren't problems, but I don't think the reality is anything like you're claiming. I agree with you about what's going on in China, but then we're not talking about China here.
I don't even know where to start. Have you seen what the government has been doing to the bill of rights recently? How's your health care system doing? How about that USDA allowing factory farmed meats into USDA Organic products? How's the all volunteer army doing in Iraq? Are the thousands of amputees and brain damaged troops returning getting any help from their government? No? What a surprise! Where does the U.S. rate on the scale of standard of living when compared to other first world nations? Right at the bottom. There is more malnutrition, fewer vacation hours, worse working conditions and higher levels of illieracy in the U.S. than any other developed nation on the planet. Interestingly enough, it also has the largest percentage of its population in prison than any other first world nation.
Like I said, 11 consoles in a row with problems is not an insignificant number. I can't help but conclude that this guy is somehow mishandling these consoles. But because I haven't seen these units and how they've been used I can't make that assertion. It could very well be that Microsoft representatives and their technical staff have done a crap job of dealing with this matter. But again, considering that they've dealt with this guy so many times already I don't see how they haven't been very accommodating.
The guy even had an electrician come to his house to check the wiring and got a clean bill of health. Microsoft sent him DOA boxes and most likely a bunch of shoddy refurbs. And the basic unit is by many accounts, a piece of junk which regularly overheats and breaks. MS doesn't deserve praise. They deserve, as you point out, to lose a customer. The only problem with that idea is that I very much doubt MS offers much in the way of refunds. It's easier to let him languish in the endless repair cycle than to give his money back. That's shoddy enough, but if they ever told him, "Sorry, we've decided that our poor service and poor product is your fault so we're not going to give you anything at all now for your money", they'd deserve to be hauled in front of a judge.
-FL
You give MS a bunch of money for a faulty product which they fail to replace with a working one 11 times in a row? That's pathetic. They should be punished, not praised!
The individual is NOT GUILTY and should not be treated as such. --Two of those eleven replacements arrived DOA for goodness sake! The corporation should be giving him a working box AND his money back AND a written apology from the president for wasting his time. They should be getting a -1 in EVERYBODY's book for having such low standards that they were able to produce a huge number of faulty boxes and allow them onto the market. Read the comments; there are several other users who complain that the box is unreasonably delicate.
It has poor cooling, so if I put it on top of my TV or in my video cabinet, (where every other video component in the world has been specifically designed to be placed since the first VCR rolled off the assembly line), it's somehow my fault and I should feel ashamed of myself for not knowing better? That's insane!
When the heck did Corporate America succeed in making people feel guilty and ashamed for asking that Corporate America do it's job?
-FL
Blame the individual? Because MS has never (sarcasm) shipped faulty product before. The list of symptoms listed in the article were all different, and in a couple of cases, the replacement game box showed up DOA. How is that his fault?
I find it disheartening that it is becoming more and more common for the human individual to be marginalized. According to few friends of mine who have lived and worked in China, the value of the human individual over there has been the subject of massive propaganda designed to make sure everybody knows that they are without value, easily replaced and should shut up and be happy with whatever the government gives them. Do we want that same level of repression here? I don't.
Why people voluntarily spread the kind of sick message around today which puts humans last is just plain aggravating. MS should bloody well be hauled over the coals for producing broken product and for dropping the ball repeatedly in their shoddy attempts to fix the problem. But instead we see Slashdotters actually siding with MS, an organization which has been found guilty numerous times in numerous ways for lousy and morally repugnant business practice.
Hello? Don't people see the disconnect here?
-FL
After much tweeking, the best I was able to come up with was,
"Vista Sucks"
Hm. Even sort of rhymes with 'business' if you say it the right way.
-FL
How intelligent. People who see the future don't look into a crystal ball. They just look at pattens and understand how they evolve. It's not so difficult.
It's all stemming from the 'legitimate' fear that technology students might be involved in giving away state secrets.
Article
Uh huh. You can always sell a bad bill of goods to the people if you spin it right. People are such suckers for spin. Better to trust your own senses. If it stinks like a dead rat, chances are it's a dead rat.
-FL
That is, conservatives tend to be low-intellect, fact-unsupported push-button ideologues whose reaction to people who point out the obvious flaws in the nationalistic dogma, is one of anger and flailing nonsense. Nonsense which when put in a crucible, burns off as smoke and fury leaving only the befuddled 'troll' asking rational questions and wondering why the obvious is so difficult to accept for some.
Silly me.
Half the Trolls out there are actually Saints.
-FL
Bitter and delusional? Reality not lining up with how you'd like it to be? Try Love, Forgiveness and looking at reality straight on without flinching.
-FL
Wikipedia seems to be run entirely by science geeks who never figured out that highschool and TV are brainwashing tactics. How sad for a bunch who supposedly take pride in using their brains that they should have been so easily tricked.
Thus, in Wikipedia, if it doesn't fit with conventional wisdom, it isn't in there.
This is fine if I need to look up how jet engines work or what the capital of Sweden is, but if you want to look up anything which hedges into areas which are controlled, then you might as well forget it. You'll just get loads of false wisdom spat at you with cult-like vehemence.
The genius of the New Big Brother is that Thought is self-policed these days. Who needs Orwell?
Congratulations, humanity. That paper bag trap is going to baffle you for a long time yet.
-FL
Unless you are being deliberately coy, you clearly know virtually nothing about the subject you are condemning. This is very common, but wow. What a shame! Most Slashdotters, I would guess, spent a lot of time wishing to experience the very thing which is now passing right under their noses. It's tragic when the curiosity of youth is co-opted by misplaced cynicism and willing blindness.
Honestly. This is worth investigating. There's even a good documentary on the subject. I found a copy at BlockBuster, (of all places)!
-FL
Hevens no. Watch whatever you like.
It's useful to keep in mind, though, that your reality is only as mundane as you ask it to be.
-FL
Dense? I like to think of it as 'substance'. As opposed to hot air.
And who's blaming the film makers? They did what they did, and they did a fine enough job. But killer robots with a dash of Shakespeare seeing things we people wouldn't believe? Black rain and Vangelis doesn't make existential angst any less tiresome. Well, actually it does. Blade Runner was certainly noteworthy, but not for any grand light it shed on the human condition. Star Trek's Data did as much, but with IKEA lighting and more brass, the way the Future oughta be, darn it!
Life is an exciting place to be experienced with courage, verve and awareness, not moped over in search of some intellectual prize worth nothing unless accompanied by a bit of wool-pulling among the assembled.
-FL
Well, as movie sci-fi goes, I suppose. I thought it was just a story about killer robots. The film adaptation looked nice, and it was certainly dark and miserable enough to be taken 'seriously' by film critics at large, but honestly, I got the same message out of Terminator II. "Humans are paradoxical and life sucks after nuclear war."
I found Bladerunner's so-so handling of the psychopath angle disappointing. The scene where replicants were tearing legs off spiders without compassion was one of the more straight forward and insightful elements in the book. Too bad it got cut.
As science fiction goes, I thought The Matrix had more interesting things to say; and presented with enough camp to make the critics sputter in self righteous glory. Always a plus.
"Contact" was naive, but fun. I found, however, its blundering introduction of Occam's Razor into the public lexicon and its endless misapplication thereafter unforgiveable. --And that contact from aliens would become officially recognized public domain knowledge was almost too childish to swallow even for the sake of a ten dollar afternoon distraction. We've got crop cirlces right here, right now and the media and public at large prefer to look the other way blaming such an astonishing phenomenon on a couple of bozos with ropes and planks. That's reality. Jodi Foster all fumbling-cute with a clip board is a total pipe dream.
You're right, though, about sci-fi being better in book form. There are just so few writers who know how to think beyond the societal confines. Perhaps Philip K. Dick being a bit crazy is probably why he was able to do a passable job. Seems like a needlessly painful way of going about it though.
-FL
So you're saying that proof of 9/11 Conpsiracy is that the Manhattan Project was kept secret?
Proof that conspiracies exist does not mean that all theories are without flaw. It does, however, mean that you cannot condemn the very notion of conspiracy in over-generalized terms as you appear to be doing.
I've worked at two national labs. Hanford was not kept secret. It was impossible to keep it a secret. A whole town was evacuated, and everyone in half the state of Washington knew the military was doing something there. To a lesser extent, the same applied to Los Alamos. Again, people in Santa Fe knew something was going on up there.
Who said anything about Hanford being kept secret? You're leaping to conclusions. I imagine, if you work in a lab, that you have been trained how to not leap to conclusions, so you must be aware that attacking 'conspiracists' the way you have been taints your arguments with hypocrisy when you jump to respond to things nobody actually said or intended. Such irrational thinking is what you are opposing, is it not?
Hanford did not itself need to be a secret in order for it to be the site of secret activities where very few of the workers knew what they were laboring towards. It is just one example of a very large group of people being deftly controlled by a much small number of planners working in secrecy. Given the types of personalities who are attracted to political power and who are competetive enough to win it through morally defunct means, (sociopathic), it is entirely logical to assume that such small groups are fully willing to conspire to achieve goals which are selfish in nature.
What is today's excuse for thousands of firefighters, police officers, air traffic controllers, NIST investigators, Manhattan witnesses not just to clam up, but to outright lie? 9/11 Truth is an phantasm of a mistaken worldview.
Small people do not need to know anything important in order to participate in a large plan. With common sense, one can deduce which elements of a plan are more or less likely to be false simply by determining the route which requires the smallest number of liars. People who feel repelled by the idea of conspiracy tend to look only at the most outlandish set of theories when using such arguments as, "Firefighters, police officers and air traffic controllers, etc., had to tell lies in order for these theories to work."
Instead, we can ask, "How could the theory work in such a way as would require the smallest number of knowing paricipants, and participants over whom pressure to stay silent cannot be exerted?" --Having known a couple of people who live in the high-level political and military realms, it is clear to me that there are more than enough people willing to lie and who can exert pressure to keep secrets to pull off the kind of jobs we have seen. How many firefighters and Manhattan witnesses and air traffic controllers, etc., are needed to lie in order for a conspiracy using a plane load of brainwashed political dupes?
Numerous people in the pro-conspiracy world, including radio show personalities like Jeff Rense, have been demonstrated to have connections to clandestine organizations. There is a great advantage to having such people in place; spewing faulty theories into the world and then having those stories shot down, serves to cloud and confuse the issue. It effectively allows people such as yourself to be much more likely to write off the entire idea that there are people with secret agendas acting in the world. It's a fairly straight forward psychological ploy, but it works quite effectively. --Much like the fake moon landing material.
The trick is to assume malice when it comes to people like Bush and the supporting structures which put him in place. There is more than enough evidence in plain sight that the Military Industrial Complex, corporate, political and elements of the military, are working in a manner which is entirely detrimental to the general population. So when
Now. . , consider: What if they never used those atomic bombs on Japan and never announced officially that the U.S. had invented nuclear weapons? Would anybody know?
Well, some of us would, because yeah, it's true; There are always leaks, people really can't keep secrets. The problem is that those who listen to those leaks and talk about such projects are labeled 'nutty conspiracy theorists' by smug people who only believe what television tells them.
The thing most people forget when it comes to secrecy, is that the leaks are very small, and for the most part secrecy can to a large degree be enforced. It is done on an individual by individual basis. Everybody in the military who is in a sensitive position has to sign a binding document and swear not to tell others what they are working on, and failing to uphold this vow, face charges of treason. And that's just the official branch. If you are part of a government arm which operates outside the law, the penalties are probably much more frightening. --Not to mention, that what people involved in secrecy are working on is often compartmentalized, so that even they don't know what's really going on.
Conspiracies most certainly exist. If they didn't, judges wouldn't be able to convict people on charges of 'conspiracy'. It's human nature to plan in secret.
If people don't like to believe in government conspiracies, I find it is useful to change the word to one which has not been the subject of such strong negative marketing; I ask, "Okay then, do you believe in government Corruption?"
Fake moon landings? I don't know about that. That was promoted by Television and then shot down by Television, which suggests to me that it was designed simply to further scandalize the idea of conspiracy theory among people who watch and schedule their lives according to Television, (which is almost everybody). However, there are a lot of other shady things I certainly wouldn't put past the military industrial complex!
-FL
It's easy to slip into a little nap and forget what's just around the corner. War with Iran, and either 'terrorist' attacks on U.S. soil, or a U.S. ecconomic collapse, (or both), which pr
Actually, pranksters don't drag logs. They use a plank and they place it in front of them and crush the plant stalks down by stepping on the plank, moving forward a notch and repeating the process. They use ropes and poles stuck in the ground to measure out circles.
This technique cannot, however, produce the wide range of effects measured in what are considered to be authentic formations.
These effects include, stalks bending at the 'knuckle', (as opposed to snapping or causing crushing damage to the plant). In some formations, the first knuckle is bent for the middle bits of the formation and the second 'knuckle' up in areas further out from the center. Distinct genetic abnormalities have been repeatedly noted in seeds taken from within a formation and grown beside control seeds taken from outside the same formation. Seeds have even been turned magnetic in a couple of cases. Huge formations being created in under 20 minutes in daylight. Weird floating lights observed during formation creation. Burnt/blown out sections at the bend point of the stalks in numerous formations, as though the bend point was super-heated from the inside for an instant, etc., etc.
Of course, there are also pranksters with planks, but so what?
There has been a LOT of research put into this area, and very very little of it is reported upon. The media largely ignores the whole phenomenon, despite the fact that it is proof positive of something very powerful and world-changing happening right now, right here. There is a very informative documentary on the subject called, appropriately enough, "Crop Circles, the Search for Truth". If you are interested, check it out. I found a copy down at my local block buster. It includes an interesting interview in the extra features where one of the researchers relates a fairly horrifying story about CIA harassment. Oh yeah. And black unmarked helicopters were also caught on film buzzing some circles. It's all there. The world, as I have said, is a very interesting place and anybody who wants access to more than the pre-packaged 'knowledge' is invited.
Yet it operates on rules, not magic. If those rules didn't exist, the universe simply wouldn't exist as we know it.
Agreed. Absolutely. It's just that the rules most people are working with are those that come in the beginner set.
-FL
After getting totally screwed over by Bell's DSL 'service' for several months, I got fed up and dropped back to a third party dial-up ISP. Wow. No more headaches, and I realized that there was very little about the internet which I needed high speed for anyway.
Interestingly, the trouble with my DSL account, (my login and passwords being locked out and nobody on the service help end being able to figure out why or how to fix it, setting up new accounts where the same thing would happen, lots of head scratching, blah, blah, blah), all started when I began posting mountains of political stuff during the launch of the war in Iraq. It had been a fine service up until that point. --The crap the establishment was trying to pull at that time was amazing, and the holes in all the stories were typically open only during the first few hours/days of an operation, so research speed was a priority.
-FL