Thursday, November 10, 2005

Conspiracy theories?...

I have always been a bit sceptical about some of the more far fetched things I hear. I like to think I am a fairly level headed guy. And being British I am fairly reserved about my opinions. I tend not to believe the stories about Elvis still being alive for instance. And I can get quite snooty at the people who get dragged out by the media every now and then. You know them, the sad sods who think that Coronation Street is real (excuse me, but I had a friend who lived in Coronation street...blogmaster). And that the East end of London is really that polite. But we all know they are out there some where and I sure I am not alone in feeling sorry for them. After all life has dealt them a bum deal. They were at the back of the queue when the important stuff was given out like brains. Les face it most of these pore sods have what we call a learning difficulty and what the Americans call Retarded. But what about the one who are quite normal and still think little green men run the world.

You might be thinking where I am going with all this and some time when I am writing I wonder myself but bear with me because the story is about to unfold. I was sitting in a Star Bucks in the Fisherman’s Warf area of San Francisco towards the end of our holiday. And as is the custom in the US you go out for breakfast because hotels do not in general do food. Most people do call in to there local deli on there way to work or just make the effort to go out and buy food each day. In the large urbane areas like San Fran and New York where people live in flats there is a different culture to ours. People do not go to the supermarket once a week because the apartments tend not to have any storage. The kitchens are quite small and as the food is cheap and fresh people buy what there going to eat when they need it. Or eat out.

Ok so the reason for all this. As I said I was in the local Star Bucks at breakfast time with my Grande skinny Latte and a couple of fresh baked croissants. Now I can’t remember if I have mentioned this before but most of the coffee bars deli’s etc are WiFi enabled. So you get lots of people sitting with there Laptops working chatting or whatever takes there fancy. Old and young it seems to make no difference the take up of computing on the move is much greater in the USA than anywhere I have been in Europe. Anyway as I was sitting feeling all left out (I had not by this time touched a computer for almost two weeks) I glanced over the shoulder of the guy behind me. He was a normal intelligent person in smart casual clothing, about 30 and with a local accent. His Laptop was open and in between MSN chatting and mobile phone call he was writing. Its funny how someone doing something like that make you want to read it. Our man was about 400 words into an article for a blog site. And as I read my jaw fell to the floor. Now I can’t remember the exact wording but the gist is this. The Asian Tsunami that happened on Boxing Day last year was man made. And so was the big twister that was at that time making land fall in the Deep South. Not just any old man made you understand but created by the Russians to de stable the west and in particular the good old USA. I was transfixed this guy then went on to describe in detail where the technology had come from and why the good old commies were doing this. Apparently after the cold war the Russians still wanted to ………And then he saw me looking and shut his Lap top. It’s a scary world out there full of people who really should not be out alone. Mind you who was it that said “ just because I’m paranoid does not mean there not out to get me” I’m off to buy a copy of Catcher in the Rye.
Matt x

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The top 10 conspiracy theories, speculations, and plain odd things I didn't have space to discuss here:

The Mel Carnahan and Paul Wellstone plane crashes.
Jeb Bush's 7 September 2001 martial law declaration in Florida (Executive Order 01-261).
The Flight 93 debris patterns and the ease with which the Flight 93 story that circulated in the major media fits into an archetypal "hero" narrative.
Warren Buffett, who -- among with several other World Trade Center executives -- went to Offutt AFB before the attacks on the morning of September 11. This is where Bush went after the attacks began.
Potential CIA links to the coup in Venezuela.
Cynthia McKinney's insinuation of possible government complicity in September 11 on the floor of Congress.
The Phoenix memo and the curious case of the FBI whistleblowers.
The idea that the anti-aircraft missiles used when Bush visited Genoa, Italy, we intended to thwart a kamikaze attack.
The Bin Laden family's clandestine flight out of the United States in the days after September 11.
Bush's 6 August 2001, comprehensive briefing, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."
***
For about 30 minutes after his chief of staff told him that America was under attack, George W. Bush continued to sit in an elementary school classroom listening to a second-grader tell a story about a pet goat. He did a marvelous job of looking completely unsurprised. Meanwhile, four hijacked jumbo jets were able to fly off-course across several states without encountering any opposition from the most powerful and responsive air force in the world.

Less than a month later, on the pretext of pursuing terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, the Bush administration began what it called a "war" on the impoverished and already war-torn country of Afghanistan. It turns out this assault had been in the works well before September 11 took place.

Soon after replacing the Taliban government with one more to its liking (and, in what is surely a coincidence, resuscitating the world's most bountiful opium fields), the administration began agitating for a similar, but even more destructive, bombardment of the oil-rich nation of Iraq. This, although Osama bin Laden was still at large and no link between him and Saddam Hussein could be established.

For these reasons and hundreds of others, the year following September 11 has seen probably the most staggering proliferation of "conspiracy theories" in American history. Angry speculation -- focused mainly on government dirty dealings, ulterior motives, and potential complicity in the attacks -- has risen to a clamor that easily rivals what followed the Kennedy assassination. Some of these suppositions are patent balderdash. But many others are coherent and well argued, and cite disconcerting reports from the U.S. corporate media and respected overseas news desks to support their claims. Providing grist for the mill are such odd episodes as last year's partisan anthrax poisonings (using U.S. army microbes) and the sniper attacks that recently plagued Washington

Anonymous said...

The Magic Passport Theory.
We can now add Mohamed Atta's reality-defying passport to the Arlen Specter Gallery of Improbable Projectiles. This incriminating item was thrown intact from a cataclysmic fireball and miraculously plucked from 1.6 million tons of debris in a matter of hours. The corporate media rarely mention the unlikelihood of this. Many in the alternative press, though, are unafraid to draw an obvious, albeit taboo, inference: that the Atta passport is planted evidence. According to Washington, DC, peace activist John Judge, other potential plants include the Arabic-language flight manuals left in one of the hijackers' cars (with note: The discussion of the flight manuals begins at around 13:30). These manuals could serve no useful purpose at such a late stage unless the hijackers planned to finish learning how to fly during a half-hour ride to the airport. But as deliberately placed articles, they are as if a signed diary called "My Plan to Kill the President" had been unearthed in Lee Harvey Oswald's flat. Also high on the possible planted evidence list is a spiritual manifesto for the Al Qaeda kamikaze pilots, which, to journalist Robert Fisk, sounds an awful lot like it was written by a God-fearing Christian