Conspiracies: Tawdry Subset of Generalized Delusion

I don’t suffer fools gladly. As BSJ moves into a new decade, I’ve decided that certain subjects are not worth discussing, just as people who hold certain extremist opinions are not worth debating. Still, there’s no shortage of tin-foil-hatters who like to pretend there is life in their dead-end ideas. The further removed they get from reality, the more their behavior begins to resemble the desperate begging of the religious, praying in vain for help (or acceptance) that will never come.

I get the sense that, birthers, 9/11 ‘truthers,’ climate change deniers, Alex Jonesers and other New World Order nutjobs all have this one thing in common with fundamentalists: They think that wishing will make it so. They feel that if they, “believe” their delusion strongly enough, that if they can somehow convince enough people–or better still–make their case “heard” by the “mainstream media” that there will be a “great awakening” through which their delusion will carry the day. Then they imagine that everything wrong with the world will be ‘exposed’ and put right.

It’s a very, very old story.

So I’ve updated my comment policy to reflect this. Birthers, Truthers, Climate Deniers and fundies are trolls. It’s not merely that some can be trolls, it’s that the very act of posting such opinions defines trolldom. Such posts contribute nothing of value about the subject being discussed, yet shout loudly about the psychology and poor mental skills of the person posting the ‘information.’ They’ve replaced analysis with wishing and willing, proving Hume right when he said (of non-objective thinkers) “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”

The bottom line is this: I have no interest in debating these subjects, only debunking. If someone has truly new information that has been properly vetted and survives the critical thinking process, then I’m very, very glad to hear from you. I have a lot to learn, and there is much we do not know about many subjects including the climate, the brain, and our government. But I set the bar very high.

What that means is please post nothing less than peer-reviewed data that is properly documented, and would survive rigorous scientific analysis worthy of acceptance by organizations like the NAS, AAAS, or the Royal Society. Lack of certainty about such subjects is no excuse for wild posturing. As I’m fond of saying, you don’t have to know “everything” to know “something.”

If you Google the ‘fact’ you are planning on posting and all you get are a bunch of conspiracy sites, then you ought to plan not to post it here, because I will delete it and block your IP address faster than you can say “Bullshit!”

I’m just no longer interested in spending the finite time I have left on this earth entertaining nonsense. If you wonder why, check out this fruitless exchange I had over the holidays with a former CUT member:

It appears that at least some folks are still deluded with the “Anthroprogenic Global Warming” scam. Haven’t you been following the latest news ? (Google search “Climategate”). The one-worlders hijacked the environmental movement decades ago. They are using it as a Trojan horse to set up their global government to be financed by, guess what,..Carbon Taxes!

Carbon dioxide is NOT a harmful gas and does NOT contribute to the warming of the planet. If anyone is interested in finding out more about the lengths and depths of this scam, look up Lord Monckton, advisor to former British Prime Minister Thatcher. He is probably one of the most knowledgable and articulate debunkers of this man-made global warming hoax. He has posted a detailed report called “Caught Green-Handed” on his website.

Re: Black Sun Journal comment–I delete any comments which say words to the effect that “AGW is a scam.”

I do support an eventual global government. Pollution, people, goods, money flow across borders. We are becoming too interconnected to manage the world without some form of global legal cooperation.

I’m sorry I’ve been down this road too many times and won’t put much time into arguing with anyone about climate change. It is real, documented and accelerating. The information is overwhelming. It’s something close to mental illness to deny it. It’s psychologically very hard to deal with the fact that our lives and industry could be destroying the Earth’s capacity to sustain future generations. But that’s exactly what’s happening, and nature doesn’t give a crap what anyone thinks about it.

America is falling far behind, in no small part thanks to the utter unforgivable willful stupidity of people who would rather ruminate about conspiracies than listen to their scientists and deal with the problem. Fortune favors the bold, and in this era, the boldest thing to do would be to tax carbon, shut down the coal plants and stop importing oil over the next 20 years. Then shift all that capacity to wind, tidal, geothermal and solar power, for both fixed installations and electrified transportation. (Nuclear as currently designed is too expensive).

It would be the single biggest stroke of genius America could accomplish and it would put us back in a position of global leadership. It would make us a leading exporter of green energy solutions. But we probably won’t because we’ve become a nation of cowards who refuse to change. We’ve elected a series of leaders who’ve failed to confront difficult issues of finance, energy, and effective use of our massive military strength. And many of us want to pretend some evil conspiracy is stealing everything from us rather than realizing we’ve ruined it for ourselves by becoming hopeless fossil fuel addicts. We’ve filled our atmosphere with nearly double the natural concentration of CO2. Clearly you do not understand the carbon cycle if you deny this. Every year the world burns through a million years of stored carbon. Plus we continue to burn rain forests which took thousands of years to grow.

We’re too afraid of owning up to our shadow and joining the rest of the world in a low-carbon economy to be worthy of being its leader. It’s a damn shame. China will kick our ass–both in being green and becoming a 21st century political and economic power. They’ll burn all their coal and simultaneously build out a green economy, because they’re smart, realize what’s happening, and they think long-term. Even if there’s a global carbon treaty, China will delay implementation until the last possible minute. Then they’ll sell us geoengineering schemes to make us pay for fixing the damage they caused.

Or we can just keep trying to negotiate this away from a worst-case scenario. China might change its behavior if the rest of the world moves together with concerted action. They do care about their global image, since their coming dominance is based on their continued trade relations.

Seriously, I don’t want to sound insulting, but this denial BS is just killing me (and the planet). I have ZERO patience for it, OK? Or was that not clear from the article?

Perhaps you’re right. I realized by way of our exchange that I simply don’t know enough about the subject (AGW) to argue about it. I am not a climate scientist. It’s better to let the experts duke it out.

All I know is it looks mighty suspicious. Why would the scientists at East Anglia University be conspiring to manipulate data? Why would they be trying to supress other scientists who disagreed with their theories? Why were they defiant even in the face of a Freedom of Information request, to release their data, computer codes, etc. so that other scientists could check their work?

Thirty-five years ago the scare was global cooling. Now it’s global warming. But wait a minute, they’ve changed it again to “climate change”. They don’t know for sure if the global temps are trending up or down, but it doesn’t matter. As long as they can convince folks that human activity, left unchecked, will ultimately cause an environmental catrastrophe.

I said I wasn’t going to argue about it and here I am arguing.

On other fronts; I’m not sure what you were referring to when speaking of “birthers”. As far as “truthers” go, I, myself, am convinced that the attacks of 9-11, 2001 were a “false flag” operation orchestrated by rogue elements within our own government. As you have repeatedly said, the info is out there. In my view the evidence is overwhelming. What is so frustrating is that the conspirators, and we know the names of the major players, are still out running around free when they should be in jail awaiting trial for treason and mass murder.

Being a former staff member of the Summit Lighthouse, I usually stop by your website to check for any new SL/CUT-related articles. I apologize that I haven’t read and digested all of the material on your site. By the way, I was saddened to learn that your mother passed away a few months ago. I found out when I was browsing through David Lewis’ website. This delusion of ascended masters just goes on and on doesn’t it?

If I attempt any more posts, I will avoid the climate subject. And I will be more diligent to eliminate all typos and mis-spellings before pressing the submit button. It’s embarassing. My eyesight is not what it once was.

Again, a small dose of critical thinking should dispel those rumors. First, the government can’t manage to keep much of anything secret, even the smallest events are subject to leaks. Second, there were again hundreds of scientists and engineers involved in the forensics on the WTC, and a stack of reports several feet thick, documenting the most heavily photographed news event in history. So in order for there to have been a “false flag” attack, every one of those investigators has to be an idiot, a stooge, or both. I don’t like Bush, but to suggest that he or Cheney or someone else sworn to protect the Constitution would knowingly slaughter 3,000 Americans is to defy all reason.

All these conspiracy theories serve a twisted psychological agenda. It’s self-congratulatory and condescending toward those “rubes” like me who accept the “mainstream” explanation.

Sadly, the plain unvarnished truth is we were attacked and humiliated by a few guys with knives who used the element of surprise to turn our own technology against us in a horribly effective way. That’s again, like climate change, a very sobering and difficult reality to face. It puts the responsibility squarely back on us, where it belongs.

That is why I don’t allow birthers, truthers, or climate deniers any leeway. That stuff is the product of weak and twisted minds, a total corrosion of knowledge. Sorry.

A dose of critical thinking. If the world trade center buildings collapsed because of fires, then why was explosive residue found in dust samples from ground zero?

You don’t hear much about this in the mainstream media. NIST never even checked for explosives. It took the research efforts of independent scientists to expose it. Google search “Active thermitic materials discovered in world trade center dust”.

Thermite and thermate are explosives. Nano-thermite is even more energetic as the particles in the mix are ground down to microscopic size, thus increasing exposed surface area, accelerating the reaction. How did nano-thermite, a high-tech explosive, get into the dust samples? Maybe those few guys with knives pre-planted it there to throw us off.

False flag attacks are nothing new. Governments have used this tactic to further their agendas for a long time. The U.S. sunk the Maine so that we could enter a war with Spain. Hitler had the Reichstag torched so he could blame it on his political enemies and further consolidate power. Look up the “Northwoods” documents. A plan was on the table for President Kennedy to approve where we were going to kill Americans so that we had an excuse to invade Cuba. Even the Gulf of Tonkin incident which helped get us into the Vietnam war is now understood to have been a staged event. And still some people say our government would never do such horrible things. As Peter Josephs said in his film “Zeitgeist”, ‘If 9-11 was not a false flag attack, it would be the exception to the rule.’

I don’t give the slightest credibility to any of these theories. There’s any number of reasons those chemicals could have been there (if they were), with the collapse and burning of two 110 story buildings, complete with a shopping mall and train station underneath. See, conspiracy theories are not falsifiable. This takes them out of the realm of evidentiary investigation.

You bring up those chemicals as if it were conclusive. Really, if there were chemicals, all it proves is that there were chemicals. Then the difficult work begins of figuring out why they were there. It’s not enough to say thermite –> therefore explosive demolition –> therefore false-flag attack. Those are leaps of logic not even the Golden Gate Bridge could span. But when you’re working backward from your preferred conclusion, none of that matters to your broken brain. (Ooooohh. NIST didn’t check for explosives. Ooooohhh, they whisked away the steel beams. That PROVES it.)

Critical thinking is the key. Break the addiction to delusion. Start today.

Zeitgeist, Loose Change and the like are pandering fantasy stories. Fairy tales for the modern tin-foil hat crowd. This stuff is so patently absurd as to be offensive. I won’t even talk to anyone who spouts this drivel. I’ve tried, and I can’t watch for more than about 20 minutes. The logical fallacies, non-sequiturs, guilt-by-association tactics, historical misrepresentations and lies pop out of the screen at such a furious rate it defies description. These are propaganda films of the worst kind. You should be ashamed of yourself for even quoting this horseshit. Did you ever stop to think why expert historians and political scientists avoid it like the plague?

Did you really read the NIST report? Or are you just taking these charlatans’ word for what it says and what it doesn’t say. Here’s a direct quote from the NIST site:

12. Did the NIST investigation look for evidence of the WTC towers being brought down by controlled demolition? Was the steel tested for explosives or thermite residues? The combination of thermite and sulfur (called thermate) “slices through steel like a hot knife through butter.”

NIST did not test for the residue of these compounds in the steel.

The responses to questions number 2, 4, 5 and 11 demonstrate why NIST concluded that there were no explosives or controlled demolition involved in the collapses of the WTC towers.

Furthermore, a very large quantity of thermite (a mixture of powdered or granular aluminum metal and powdered iron oxide that burns at extremely high temperatures when ignited) or another incendiary compound would have had to be placed on at least the number of columns damaged by the aircraft impact and weakened by the subsequent fires to bring down a tower. Thermite burns slowly relative to explosive materials and can require several minutes in contact with a massive steel section to heat it to a temperature that would result in substantial weakening. Separate from the WTC towers investigation, NIST researchers estimated that at least 0.13 pounds of thermite would be required to heat each pound of a steel section to approximately 700 degrees Celsius (the temperature at which steel weakens substantially). Therefore, while a thermite reaction can cut through large steel columns, many thousands of pounds of thermite would need to have been placed inconspicuously ahead of time, remotely ignited, and somehow held in direct contact with the surface of hundreds of massive structural components to weaken the building. This makes it an unlikely substance for achieving a controlled demolition.

Analysis of the WTC steel for the elements in thermite/thermate would not necessarily have been conclusive. The metal compounds also would have been present in the construction materials making up the WTC towers, and sulfur is present in the gypsum wallboard that was prevalent in the interior partitions.[Italics added]

How can people really believe that scientists are that stupid that they would miss controlled demolition in a forensic analysis? I think it’s a way of a lot of dumb people make themselves feel better about their low intelligence, i.e. taking the piss out of ‘high and mighty’ scientists.

Someone’s making money off of other people’s gullibility. Nothing at all new, of course. There’s a sucker born every minute. The worst part is, these types of delusions play the same role as religion in keeping people stupid, off-track and out of the way of the real and ongoing machinations of power. In this sense, the conspiracy theories serve two purposes, one intentional (making money for the purveyors) one accidental, (they become tools of mass consciousness control, a diversion that actually preserves the status quo). Did you ever think of that??

Lenin was on to something when he talked about “useful idiots.” Now please don’t bother me with any more of this nonsense. It’s neurological abuse. I had to figure out if you were really that naive, your brain really that dysfunctional, and based on the fact that you’re still not dropping the conspiracy charade, it seems that you are.

Sorry to be blunt, but after all the bullshit conspiracies I put up with in my life, I tell it like it is. Remember, I was born to my delusional parents. You followed them intentionally. Big difference. And it seems people who fell for the Ascended Masters are more likely than average to uncritically accept conspiracy theories.