Hej til dig i Danmark!
At the slightly subdued looking jamboree that the Truth Movement are having for AE9/11 getting a thousand signatures for their petition to re-investigate 9/11, the three Most Scholarly Leaders: David Ray Griffin, Richard Gage and Steven Jones made a few closing remarks in which Griffin seems a bit upset with Cass Sunstein's paper on conspiracy theories and how to deal with their proponents, and Richard Gage gives an ever-so-slightly cult-esque sendoff, "unity...oneness...networks of love and connection". But Steven Jones has a giddy turn in between them when he reminds the audience that people from George Bush Senior to Henry Kissinger to Rahm Emmanuel have used the term "New World Order" and how it might relate to human-generated disasters. Jones' nervousness seems to come from fearing being thought of as the nuttiest man in a room full of nuts as he goes on to suggest that maybe, just maybe the Haiti earthquake was manufactured.
Surely this guy is an NWO shill infiltrating the 9/11 Truth Movement to make it look ridiculous. This is all too much for some Truthers.
Update: 28th February: Alien Entity has a good post at JREF putting Steven Jones' assertions that the oil reserves "around Port-au-Prince... are larger than the reserves of Venezuala" into perspective. The amounts of "proven reserves" of oil in the Greater Antilles area (which includes Haiti but isn't confined to Haiti) would be enough for seven days of the US's current consumption. Even unproven or "undiscovered" reserves are only estimated at 941 million barrels of oil whereas Venezualan oil reserves are estimated at 87 billion barrels.
So, once again, Steven Jones appears to be full of 9/11Troof.
20 comments:
This guy is a nut. I haven't been able to find any legitimate sources showing vast amounts of oil in Haiti. Haiti probably has marginal amounts of oil in her waters as do Cuba and Puerto Rico. These reserves are probably in the hundreds of millions of barrels. The world consumes 80 million barrels a day and 29 billion a year. Haiti is nothing worth fussing over. Venezuela on the other hand has over 80 billion barrels of proven reserves of conventional oil and the equivalent of hundreds of billions of barrels in oil sands which are expensive and environmentally devastating to produce.
As far as sites claiming that Haiti is some kind of island Venezuela, the name of French "scientist" Daniel Mathurin keeps reappearing. I haven't been able to find anything else on this guy outside of the usual conspiracy blogs.
Of course the conspiracy folks will believe whatever makes them feel good about themselves and claim to be "awakened" and enlightened while the rest of us are just ignorant sheeple. Nothing new here.
As far as sites claiming that Haiti is some kind of island Venezuela, the name of French "scientist" Daniel Mathurin keeps reappearing. I haven't been able to find anything else on this guy outside of the usual conspiracy blogs.
This seems to ba a pattern with conspiracy theorists. They often treat certain ideas as if they were unequivocally true and noncontroversial. But when you try to find the source of the claim you end up only on conspiracy sites.
That doesn't mean something is false, of course, but it does send up a red flag that the claim should be treated with greater skepticism. So you can look for the source of the claim and very often find it comes from just one article. Again, it doesn't mean it isn't true but it will make you even more skeptical given that the claim was being so strongly endorsed.
Then, when you read the original article you find that the claim itself has been made either very tentatively, unanonymously, or by someone that you have other reasons to doubt. Either way you find that the source really is of a very low reliability.
Again, that in itself doesn't prove it is untrue but gives away the epistemology of the consppiracy theorist whose world view seems to be formed by believing in large numbers of these highly, highly dubious, or unlikely "facts" and when pushed into finally acknowledging this will retreat back to their last redoubt, which is to ask back, "How do you KNOW it isn't true?" But of course, I was never the one saying, "I KNOW..."
The Osama bin Laden in hospital in Dubai is a perfect example of this. Almost no 9/11 Truther is skeptical of it and almost all will start off by saying it is an undisputed fact. David Ray Griffin's "flight manifest" thing is also like this. And for 9/11 Truthers, the thermite claim was originated by Steven Jones, I believe, so his latest claim that Haiti's earthquake was somehow manipulated by the US calls into question his "objective" credentials. Truthers will beg to differ on that, of course.
Of course, abiotic oil is controversial across conspiracy sites. Two of the articles that feature on the Wikipedia page on the subject come from Michael Ruppert's From The Wilderness blog and Ruppert's current interests seem to be in "peak oil". Abiotic oil would seem to cause that theory a problem (unless it is just as limited as mainstream science tends to think fossil fuels are now).
Many of the conspiracy people think "peak oil" is a fraud made up to oil companies profits. Never mind that they have to buy most of the oil that they refine. I've even read some accuse Rupert of being a CIA plant to promote this theory.
While I'm not nearly as alarmist as Rupert, I do believe there is an unsettling truth beneath the peak oil argument. Specifically new demand is rising faster than new supply (3 billion new capitalists) and the remaining supply is increasingly concentrated within OPEC countries and Russia.
However, non-petroleum based energy sources are within our technological reach, it's a matter of investment. Also, oil production is a function of investment in addition to the underlying geologic factors. New drilling technologies are extending the lives of oil fields that were thought to be out of gas, so to speak. Of course, more investment means higher costs and higher prices.
I don't think the era of oil is over, but the era of cheap oil is. And I say good riddance!
It will be a shock to Americans but the Europeans and Japanese will hardly notice thanks to their longstanding tax policies.
"How do you KNOW it isn't true?"
The important question is "how do you know it is true?"
Crippled epistemology!
The important question is "how do you know it is true?"
Yes, and their belief is often based on something so unreliable that it makes very little sense to believe in it.
In fact, to say we "know" or "don't know" about almost anything in the world is probably too strong. The best we can say about almost everything is that something is extremely likely or extremely unlikely.
Speaking of epistemology, Bertrand Russell told an anecdote about a woman who said she had become so convinced that the doctrine of solipsism is correct that she didn't understand why more people weren't solipsists.
As you probably know solipsism is the doctrine that we can only have knowledge of our own thoughts and therefore that we have no justification for believing in anything outside our own minds. If she really believed this then she has no business believing in other people in the first place let alone judging what they should believe.
:-D
I don't remember hearing much about HAARP until a few years ago and it was only in connection to conspiracy theories.
But...
When I was at university I took a part-time job in a dairy working a nightshift. Very long and boring but with a few interesting characters working there. One guy was from Holland and he told me about how the only thing governments are interested in is greater and greater control and gave as his example the recent, at the time, earthquakes in California. I ventured the idea that the earthquake was a natural disaster and he looked at me as if I were insane. "You believe that? Don't you know how earthquakes are manipulated?"
This was about ten or more years ago, so I don't know if the HAARP-is-used-to-cause-earthquakes theory was popular at the time. But the idea that earthquakes are manipulated by humans is clearly quite old.
In 1923, Tokyo was hit by a massive devestating earthquake and many rumours sprang up that the Korean community had caused it using an earthquake-machine. This led to hundreds of Koreans being attacked and killed in the aftermath of the earthquake and the army having to be deployed to protect the Korean population.
(When I went to North Korea, though, I discovered that according to DPRK lore, when Kim Il-sung was young he was shown a map of the world in which Korea was occupied by Imperial Japan. According to this story he dipped his thumb in a pot of ink and smeared it across Japan. The 1923 earthquake was a result of this! Or he prophesied it or something which means what started as a pernicious "blood libel" seems to be celebrated as true in North Korea.)
I humbly submit that this proliferation of conspiracy theories teaches us more about us human nature and our willingness to believe such outrageous nonsense than it does about the existence of earthquake-making machines.
It seems to be a trope that is popular with people of a religious bent too. Didn't Pat Robertson come out with some extremely evil nonsense about how the earthquake in Haiti was a punishment from God for throwing off French colonial rule over a hundred years ago? Didn't Sharon Stone also come out with some evil nonsense that the earthquakes in Sichuan, China were karma for China's occupation of Tibet?
Here's a question: Are conspiracy theories contemporary attempts at moral judgments that religions used to take care of?
(There are a lot of problems with that question but I think there is something to it.)
she had become so convinced that the doctrine of solipsism is correct that she didn't understand why more people weren't solipsists.
LOL I get the humor! I'm a fan of objective reality myself, even if all we see are shadows in a cave.
HAARP CT's began in the early or mid '90s almost immediately after HAARP was built I believe. Ironically, the Soviet's had a very similar machine almost a decade earlier than we did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sura_Ionospheric_Heating_Facility
That's an interesting story about Japan. Hardly surprising. How many Jews got killed after they were blamed for the Black Death? Same story over and over again.
The good news is that the Japanese no longer blame Koreans for earthquakes. On that note, how do you find the Japanese attitude towards Koreans? Sorry to constantly ask you about Japan but its among my favorite countries and I'm always curious to learn about it.
Europeans don't blame Jews for disease anymore right?
Sorry to call you a "European," I know some Brits don't like that label =)
Sorry to constantly ask you about Japan but its among my favorite countries and I'm always curious to learn about it.
No problem. I'm happy to tell anyone what I know (or what I think I know).
The good news is that the Japanese no longer blame Koreans for earthquakes. On that note, how do you find the Japanese attitude towards Koreans?
As unhelpful as this answer may be the relationship is "complex".
It doesn't help that there are two very different states that call themselves Korea. As you can imagine most Japanese have very different opinions of each Korea. The DPRK is considered the most dangerous foreign threat because of its volatility and because of its abduction of Japanese citizens (mostly in the seventies) which the North Koreans only recently admitted to doing.
While a number of those citizens were repatriated very recently after having lived there for around twenty to thirty years the subject is still a touchy one as many people in Japan believe that some of those that were claimed to have died "of natural causes" or of suicide or in car accidents are still alive. This was fueled again recently when a former North Korean spy, Kim Hyun-Hee claimed that she was taught Japanese by one of them whilst training to pass as a Japanese citizen. The problem is that she was arrested in the early 80s so her information about North Korea is seriously dated by now.
In terms of South Korea, most Japanese, particularly younger people view the country and its people quite positively. And, it seems to be, finally becoming reciprocated. Japanese music and culture was banned in South Korea until quite recently (I think that went for Taiwan as well). But these days Korean dramas are popular and there is a pretty large tourist trade between the two countries. There is, of course, some residual prejudice particularly with nationalists. This is usually stoked up anytime North Korea launch a missile test or set off a nuclear weapon. There are also difficulties for Korean residents of Japan. Many of them are second, third or fourth generation Koreans having been born and raised in Japan and speaking no other language but Japanese yet still have to carry alien registration cards that all foreigners in Japan are required to have on them. Korean citizens with alien registration cards will have either "Kankoku" as their nationality or "Chosen". The former denotes South Korean affiliation and the latter North Korean affiliation. There are two organizations in Japan for Korean residents, Mindan (pro-South) and Chongryon (pro-North). It also means they don't get to vote in elections (I believe) and can't get work in government or some other institutions. I think this will gradually change and things have been getting easier for Korean residents.
I sometimes feel like atomizing Pyongyang would be the best policy option. But then my sentimental humanist side chimes in.
I imagine that Korean culture is popular in Japan and vice versa. By "Korean" I mean South Korean since the North is an isolated gulag. I sincerely hope that Japan and South Korea realize that they have more in common than either do with authoritarian China, and that if they work together they might be able to influence the giant Red Dragon to become even less Red than she already is.
I sometimes feel like atomizing Pyongyang would be the best policy option. But then my sentimental humanist side chimes in.
Erm...I think that there would be no moral justification for atomizing Pyongyang. The practical problems it would create would also be prohibitive.
As far as I remember from my reading, Curtis LeMay and General MacArthur were all for raining down nukes on North Korea but Truman, who knew a thing or two about dropping atomic bombs ruled it out.
Although the Korean War still ended up with everything above the 38th parallel completely devastated and millions of people dead.
I sincerely hope that Japan and South Korea realize that they have more in common than either do with authoritarian China, and that if they work together they might be able to influence the giant Red Dragon to become even less Red than she already is.
I think that in a way they do. China is clearly more of a long-term problem for Japan than North Korea (although North Korea has stubbornly refused to fall apart in the way that just about every economist and political scientist has insisted it must).
Most people in Japan generally have a positive view of South Korea, although some of Japan's politicians have a habit of doing things which aren't very tactful such as visiting Yasukuni shrine in their official capacity (I personally don't have a problem but it doesn't go down well in South Korea where kids are still indoctrinated to hate Japan). Some of the statements by Tokyo mayor, Shintaro Ishihara don't help matters either.
Erm...I think that there would be no moral justification for atomizing Pyongyang.
I know, I know, I don't actually want to nuke anyone. I feel bad for the people of North Korea, I want them liberated not incinerated. I just really despise the Kim dynasty.
Didn't LeMay also want to strike at the Russian missiles in Cuba during the Crisis? Kennedy could have listened to him and we'd probably all be dead!
I was looking around. MacArthur certainly seems to have wanted to drop nukes. He had some plan to cut off the China-Korea border with "cobalt" bombs that would make the border impossible for the Chinese to cross for something like 60 years, apparently.
Curtis LeMay, on the other hand may have only favoured conventional weapons but wanted to go in as hard as possible at the beginning. Apparently he was rebuffed but he blames the eventual situation, which was to burn down every city, town and village with more napalm than was even used in Vietnam on the incremental policy.
Actually, it's a little difficult to find good sources on the Korean War. The two books I have on it (neither of which I have read in their entirety) are probably not that reliable. One of them has a heavy focus on the British involvement there while the other is a book printed in Pyongyang and is a piece of utter propaganda called, "The US Imperialists Started the Korean War" (!)
"The US Imperialists Started the Korean War"
LOL are you sure that wasn't a publication by Harvard?
Joking!
How well did we understand the effects of radiation in the 1950s? We barely understood it in 1945 but by the 1950s did we have a better understanding of the long term consequences of nuclear war? The Korean War is a fascinating period in history about which I am woefully uninformed.
How well did we understand the effects of radiation in the 1950s? We barely understood it in 1945 but by the 1950s did we have a better understanding of the long term consequences of nuclear war? The Korean War is a fascinating period in history about which I am woefully uninformed.
There's an article here by Bruce Cumings which does have some interesting information. Cumings is an historian who has written a lot about the Korean War particularly on the origins and his detractors often call him an apologist - I can see why for a number of things that I’ll come to in a minute. His opinion is that North Korea didn't start the war but that it "just happened". I suppose he means that North Korea isn’t to blame for the war.
I think a lot of his research has been useful but the book of his on North Korea that I've read has some incredibly fatuous points in it. He says at the beginning that he is not, contrary to many people's beliefs, a supporter of the North Korean regime and believes that the North Korean government is largely responsible for the problems of the country. But it made me wonder “Who needs to actually preface their book with such an explicit disavowal of support for the Kim Jong-il regime?” and from then on I couldn't help but be a bit more skeptical of some of his claims.
But a few things stuck out for me.
For example:
He is a little condescending towards those who may well have been genuinely upset about Taepodong missiles being fired across Japan. Some Japanese I have spoken to rightly point out that Japan provides North Korea with a lot of food aid and considered such saber-rattling to be not just provovative but ungrateful.
p. 78: In late August 1998, a hailstorm of alarmist press reports claimed that North Korea was building nuclear weapons in an enormous underground redoubt, and had sent a long-range missile arcing through the stratosphere over Japan, leading to virtual panic in Tokyo – as if the missile had barely cleared the treetops.
There’s clearly a bit of a mocking tone to that. And while his book was published in 2003, he’d probably look a bit foolish writing that reports of North Korean nukes are alarmist.
He also reviewed a book that was written by a survivor of the gulags, called “Aquariums of Pyongyang” which he said was a good book because it didn’t go over the top and make them sound unrelentingly grim. This is odd given that the book was grim, indeed, while the author makes it very clear in the book that he wasn’t in the worst camp or the worst part of the camp. Other parts of Yodok are far worse, according to him. But Cumings has whether rightly or wrongly, come to be known as someone who shows an undue skepticism to the horrors of the stories of refugees.
In the same book he finds it hypocritical of George Bush to complain about Kim Jong-il’s gulag “the size of Houston” given the numbers of prisoners in US jails. Which is just an absurd comparison!
And finally, Cumings makes some kind of excruciating plea that while North Korea may not be free in the “liberal sense of the word”. It wants to be free in its own way. Or some other utterly stupid statement that I can’t find right now.
So, I have to take Cumings with a heavy dose of salt.
As for what you were saying about knowledge of radiation in the early 50s, I imagine that it had come on in leaps and bounds since 1945 and many people in Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) found out the hard way. In fact, you may have read John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which if I remember rightly, does go into many of the problems of radiation sickness.
In fact, that article is a condensed version of the opening chapter of North Korea: Another Country which is the book of Cumings' that I've read.
I notice the name of Caroll Quigley pops up. That name would have had no significance for me the first time I read it, but I realize now that he's one of the academics that a lot of conspiracy theorists like to quote. Apparently the John Birch Society, of all people, are fond of him.
Moral relativists love to compare our (admittedly flawed) criminal justice system with the worst Stalinist Gulags across the world. It strikes me the same way comparisons to Nazi Germany do, excessive and inappropriate, something that could only be done by someone with an immature understanding of history. You can call us racist and evil all you want, but once you start comparing us to North Korea you lose credibility.
Quigley is an interesting character. I'm still not sure if he's for or against the Anglo-American establishment. As far as I can tell he supports it but wants to make some marginal changes to it. He goes into a lot of detail about how "round-table groups" affect policy in the US and in other countries. Leaders in business and politics consult each-other for advice. How nefarious!
This is the quote I often hear attributed to him, I think if comes out of Tragedy And Hope:
"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one perhaps of the Right, and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.... Either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same policies."
This is not the sentiment of a man who wants to overturn the establishment. It's also a sentiment with which I can only slightly disagree. I think he overstates the similarity between the two parties, although he may have been referring specifically to foreign policy.
Moral relativists love to compare our (admittedly flawed) criminal justice system with the worst Stalinist Gulags across the world.
It's not moral relativism but false equivalentism.
i.e Hitler gassed millions of people but Britain bombed Dresden so they're equally bad.
Moral relativism would be to say, "Well, gulags would be evil and unacceptable here where we live. But in North Korea they're perfectly acceptable and we have no right to judge them on the way they do things."
This type of relativism, while not usually applied to the gulags is highly prevalent. The "who are we to say what's right...?" question.
I suppose you are right, though, because the same moral relativists often do end up by saying, "And anyway, it's not as if the US prison system is perfect." But of course, many of those would, by the logic of their own argument, have no right to judge the US prison system.
Quigley is an interesting character. I'm still not sure if he's for or against the Anglo-American establishment. As far as I can tell he supports it but wants to make some marginal changes to it.
I don't know much about Quigley myself. Only that I have seen him quoted by conspiracy theorists online. According to Wikipedia, Bill Clinton said this of him:
As a teenager, I heard John Kennedy’s summons to citizenship. And then, as a student at Georgetown, I heard that call clarified by a professor named Carroll Quigley, who said to us that America was the greatest Nation in history because our people had always believed in two things–that tomorrow can be better than today and that every one of us has a personal moral responsibility to make it so.
According to the same article Quigley was misrepresented by a few conspiracy theorists and even responded to dismiss their claims. It seems that his ideas were wildly extrapolated from especially by the John Birch Society and later by Jim Marrs.
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