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The Straussians formed the original core of the Neoconservatives. In two generations, this network of less than a hundred people have penetrated the nerve centers of the American state with the aim of seizing the levers of power in two areas: foreign and military policies.
There are now several prominent neocons that constitute the second generation of this sect: Irving Kristol was succeeded by his son William, Donald Kagan by his son Robert, Richard Pipes by his son Daniel, and Norman Podhoretz by his son John and his son-in-law Elliott Abrams.
Dec 11, 2015 | Peak Prosperity
Mememonkey pointed my to a 2013 essay by Laurent Guyenot, a French historian and writer on the deep state, that addresses the question of "Who Are The Neoconservatives." If you would like to know about that group that sends the US military into battle and tortures prisoners of war in out name, you need to know about these guys.
First, if you are Jewish, or are a GREEN Meme, please stop and take a deep breath. Please put on your thinking cap and don’t react. We are NOT disrespecting a religion, spiritual practice or a culture. We are talking about a radical and very destructive group hidden within a culture and using that culture. Christianity has similar groups and movements--the Crusades, the KKK, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, etc.
My personal investment: This question has been a subject of intense interest for me since I became convinced that 9/11 was an inside job, that the Iraq war was waged for reasons entirely different from those publically stated. I have been horrified to see such a shadowy, powerful group operating from a profoundly "pre-moral" developmental level—i.e., not based in even the most rudimentary principles of morality foundational to civilization.
Who the hell are these people?!
Goyenot’s main points (with a touch of personal editorializing):
1. The American Neocons are Zionists (Their goal is expanding political / military power. Initially this is focused on the state of Israel.)
Neoconservativism is essentially a modern right wing Jewish version of Machiavelli's political strategy. What characterizes the neoconservative movement is therefore not as much Judaism as a religious tradition, but rather Judiasm as a political project, i.e. Zionism, by Machiavellian means.
This is not a religious movement though it may use religions words and vocabulary. It is a political and military movement. They are not concerned with being close to God. This is a movement to expand political and military power. Some are Christian and Mormon, culturally.
Obviously , if Zionism is synonymous with patriotism in Israel, it cannot be an acceptable label in American politics, where it would mean loyalty to a foreign power. This is why the neoconservatives do not represent themselves as Zionists on the American scene. Yet they do not hide it all together either.
He points out dual-citizen (Israel / USA) members and self proclaimed Zionists throughout cabinet level positions in the US government, international banking and controlling the US military. In private writings and occasionally in public, Neocons admit that America’s war policies are actually Israel’s war goals. (Examples provided.)
2. Most American Jews are overwhelmingly liberal and do NOT share the perspective of the radical Zionists.
The neoconservative movement, which is generally perceived as a radical (rather than “conservative”) Republican right, is, in reality, an intellectual movement born in the late 1960s in the pages of the monthly magazine Commentary, a media arm of the American Jewish Committee, which had replaced the Contemporary Jewish Record in 1945. The Forward, the oldest American Jewish weekly, wrote in a January 6th, 2006 article signed Gal Beckerman: “If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it. It’s a thought one imagines most American Jews, overwhelmingly liberal, will find horrifying. And yet it is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants’ grandchildren”.
3. Intellectual Basis and Moral developmental level
Goyenot traces the Neocon’s origins through its influential writers and thinkers. Highest on the list is Leo Strauss. (Neocons are sometimes called “the Straussians.”) Leo Strauss is a great admirer of Machiavelli with his utter contempt for restraining moral principles making him “uniquely effective,” and, “the ideal patriot.” He gushes over Machiavelli praising the intrepidity of his thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech.
Other major points:
- believes that Truth is harmful to the common man and the social order and should be reserved for superior minds.
- nations derive their strength from their myths, which are necessary for government and governance.
- national myths have no necessary relationship with historical reality: they are socio-cultural constructions that the State has a duty to disseminate.
- to be effective, any national myth must be based on a clear distinction between good and evil; it derives its cohesive strength from the hatred of an enemy nation.
- As recognized by Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt in an article “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence” (1999), for Strauss, “deception is the norm in political life” – the rule they [the Neocons] applied to fabricating the lie of weapons of mass destruction by Saddam Hussein when working inside the Office of Special Plans.
- George Bushes speech from the national cathedral after 9/11 exemplifies myth-making at its finest: “Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of Evil. War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. . . .[W]e ask almighty God to watch over our nation, and grant us patience and resolve in all that is to come. . . . And may He always guide our country. God bless America.
4. The Zionist/Neocons are piggy-backing onto, or utilizing, the religious myths of both the Jewish and Christian world to consolidate power. This is brilliant Machiavellian strategy.
- the “chosen people” myth (God likes us best, we are better than you)
- the Holy Land myth (one area of real estate is more holy than another)
- the second coming of Christ myth
- the establishment of God’s Kingdom on Earth through global destruction/war (nuclear war for the Glory of God)
[The]Pax Judaica will come only when “all the nations shall flow” to the Jerusalem temple, from where “shall go forth the law” (Isaiah 2:1-3). This vision of a new world order with Jerusalem at its center resonates within the Likudnik and neoconservative circles. At the Jerusalem Summit, held from October 12th to 14th, 2003 in the symbolically significant King David Hotel, an alliance was forged between Zionist Jews and Evangelical Christians around a “theopolitical” project, one that would consider Israel… “the key to the harmony of civilizations”, replacing the United Nations that’s become a “a tribalized confederation hijacked by Third World dictatorships”: “Jerusalem’s spiritual and historical importance endows it with a special authority to become a center of world’s unity. [...] We believe that one of the objectives of Israel’s divinely-inspired rebirth is to make it the center of the new unity of the nations, which will lead to an era of peace and prosperity, foretold by the Prophets”. Three acting Israeli ministers spoke at the summit, including Benjamin Netanyahu, and Richard Perle.
Jerusalem’s dream empire is expected to come through the nightmare of world war. The prophet Zechariah, often cited on Zionist forums, predicted that the Lord will fight “all nations” allied against Israel. In a single day, the whole earth will become a desert, with the exception of Jerusalem, who “shall remain aloft upon its site” (14:10).
With more than 50 millions members, Christians United for Israel is a major political force in the U.S.. Its Chairman, pastor John Haggee, declared: “The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West, [...] a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second Coming of Christ”.
And Guyenot concludes:
Is it possible that this biblical dream, mixed with the neo-Machiavellianism of Leo Strauss and the militarism of Likud, is what is quietly animating an exceptionally determined and organized ultra-Zionist clan? General Wesley Clark testified on numerous occasions before the cameras, that one month after September 11th, 2001 a general from the Pentagon showed him a memo from neoconservative strategists “that describes how we’re gonna take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan and finishing off with Iran”.
Is it just a coincidence that the “seven nations” doomed to be destroyed by Israel form part of the biblical myths? …[W]hen Yahweh will deliver Israel “seven nations greater and mightier than yourself […] you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them, and show no mercy to them.”
My summary:
- We have a group that wishes greatly expanded power (to rule the world??)
- Among them are brilliant strategists
- They operate unrestrained by the most basic moral principles upon which civilization is founded. They are undisturbed by compassion for the suffering of others.
- They use consciously and skillfully use deception and “myth-making” to shape policy
- This is not a spiritual movement in any sense
- They are utilizing religious myths and language to influence public thinking
- They envision “winning” in the aftermath world war.
- They have infiltrated the highest levels of banking, US military, NATO and US government.
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Jul 25, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com
A child waves the United States flag from the crown of Liberty Enlightening the World, less formally known as The Statue of Liberty, on Liberty Island in New York Harbor. | Detail of: 'Statue of Liberty' by Frederic Auguste Bartholdi.Reactions to globalization, the Trump presidency, and the coronavirus pandemic have turned discussions of American conservatism increasingly into discussions of "nationalism." Regrettably, terminological confusion is rampant. Both "conservatism" and "nationalism" are words of many and even contradictory meanings.
The strengths of post-World War II American intellectual conservatism have been widely heralded. As for its weaknesses, one trait stands out that has greatly impeded intellectual stringency: a deep-seated impatience with the supposedly "finer points" of philosophy. Making do with loosely defined terms has made conservatism susceptible to intellectual flabbiness, contradiction, and manipulation.
This deficiency is connected to a virtual obsession with electoral politics. William F. Buckley's path-breaking National Review was an intellectual magazine, but its primary purpose was to prepare the ground for political victories, most of all for capturing the presidency. The desire to forge a political alliance among diverse groups pushed deep intellectual fissures into the background. Having a rather narrowly political understanding of what shapes the future, most conservatives thought that the election and presidency of Ronald Reagan signified the "triumph" of conservatism; but the triumph was hollow. The reason is that in the long run politicians have less power than those who shape our view of reality, our innermost hopes and fears, and our deeper sensibilities. A crucial role is here played by "the culture" -- universities, schools, churches, the arts, media, book publishing, advertising, Hollywood, and the rest of the entertainment industry -- which is why America kept moving leftward.
For post-war so-called "movement" conservatives, conservatism meant chiefly limited government, a free market, anti-communism, and a strong defense. These tenets were all focused on politics, and vastly different motives hid behind each of them. Why were these tenets called "conservatism"? Rather than point to a few policy preferences, should that term not refer to a general attitude to life, a wish to conserve something, the best of a heritage? One thinks of the moral and cultural sources of American liberty and constitutionalism. But, outside of ceremonial occasions, most movement conservatives placed their emphasis elsewhere.
A striking example of philosophical messiness and confusion is that the conservative movement even incorporated clearly anti-conservative ideas, specifically, the anti-historicism advanced by Leo Strauss and his followers. Strauss championed what he called "natural right," which he saw as sharply opposed to tradition. He called the latter "the ancestral" or "convention." To look to them for guidance was to be guilty of the great offense of "historicism," by which he meant moral relativism or nihilism. History, Strauss insisted, is irrelevant to understanding what is right. Only ahistorical, purely abstract reason is normative.
Hampered by a lack of philosophical education, many Straussians have been oblivious to the far-reaching and harmful ramifications of this anti-historicism. By blithely combining it with ideas of very different origin, they have concealed, even from themselves, its animosity to tradition.
One of Strauss's most influential disciples, Harry Jaffa, made the radical implications of Straussian anti-historicism explicit. In his view, America's Founders did not build on a heritage. They deliberately turned their backs on the past. Jaffa wrote: "To celebrate the American Founding is to celebrate revolution." America's revolution belonged among the other modern revolutions. It is mild "as compared with subsequent revolutions in France, Russia, China, Cuba, or elsewhere," he wrote, but "it nonetheless embodied the greatest attempt at innovation that human history had recorded." The U.S. Constitution did not grow out of the achievements of ancestors. On the contrary, radical innovators gave America a fresh start. What is distinctive and noble about America is that, in the name of ahistorical, abstract, universal principles, it broke with the past.
This view flies in the face of overwhelming historical evidence. The reason the Founders were upset with the British government is that it was acting in a radical, arbitrary manner that violated the old British constitution. John Adams spoke of "grievous innovation." John Dickinson protested "dreadful novelty." What the colonists wanted, Adams wrote, was "nothing new," but respect for traditional rights and the common law. The Constitution of the Framers reaffirmed and creatively developed an ancient heritage.
The Jaffaite notion that America rejected the past and was founded on revolutionary, abstract, universal ideas contributed to what this writer has termed "the new Jacobinism." According to this ideology, America is "exceptional" by virtue of its founding principles. Since these principles belong to all humanity, America must help remake societies around the world. "Moral clarity" demands uncompromising adherence to the principles. The forces of good must defeat the forces of evil. Inherently monopolistic and imperial, American principles justify foreign policy hawkishness and interventionism.
Compare this notion of America to what is implied in Benjamin Franklin's famous phrase about what the Constitutional Convention had produced -- "a republic, if you can keep it." To sustain the Constitution, Americans would have to cultivate the moral and cultural traits that had given rise to it in the first place. To be an American is to defend an historically evolved inheritance, to live up to what may be called the "constitutional personality." Only such people are capable of the kind of conduct that the Constitution values and requires. Americans must, first of all, be able to control the will to power, beginning with self. They must respect the law, rise above the passions of the moment, take the long view, deliberate, compromise, and respect minorities. Whether applied to domestic or foreign affairs, the temperament of American constitutionalism is modesty and restraint. There is no place for unilateral dictates.
These contrasting views of America entail wholly different nationalisms. The moralistic universalism of American exceptionalism, with its demand that all respect its dictates runs counter to the American constitutional spirit of compromise, deliberation, and respect for minorities. Exceptionalism does not defuse or restrain the will to power, but feeds it, justifying arrogance, assertiveness, and even belligerence.
During the presidency of Donald Trump many proponents of American exceptionalism who want preferment have recast their anti-historical universalism as "nationalism," showing that the term can mean almost anything. It is now "nationalist" to demand that American principles be everywhere respected. For example, Mike Pompeo, a person of strong appetites and great ambition, has put this belief behind his campaign of assertiveness and "maximum pressure."
In a speech in the spring of 2019, Pompeo declared that America is "exceptional." America is, he said, "a place and history apart from normal human experience." It has a mission to oppose evil in the world. America is entitled to "respect." It should dictate terms to "rogue" powers like Iran and confront countries like China and Russia that are "intent on eroding American power." This speech was given and loudly cheered at the 40th anniversary gala of the Claremont Institute in California, whose intellectual founder was -- Harry Jaffa.
What may seem to political practitioners and political intellectuals to be hair-splitting philosophical distinctions can, on the contrary, have enormous practical significance. American exceptionalism is in important ways the opposite of a conservatism or a nationalism that defends the moral and cultural heritage that generated American constitutionalism. Exceptionalism fans imperial designs. The culture of constitutionalism opposes them.
Claes G. Ryn is professor of politics and founding director of the new Center for the Study of Statesmanship at The Catholic University of America. His many books include America the Virtuous and A Common Human Ground , now in a new paperback edition.
Related: Introducing the TAC Symposium: What Is American Conservatism?
See all the articles published in the symposium, here.
bumbershoot • 10 days agoLeo Strauss is the father of neoconservatism.
kirthigdon • 10 days agoAmericans must, first of all, be able to control the will to power, beginning with self. They must respect the law, rise above the passions of the moment, take the long view, deliberate, compromise, and respect minorities.All lovely ideas. Too bad our "conservative" president is capable of none of these.
Feral Finster • 9 days agoGreat essay by Professor Ryn in exposing again, as he has done so often before, the phony opposition between nationalism and American exceptionalism on the one hand, and globalism. Any nationalism is only one step removed from globalism, but the nationalism of small countries is usually fairly harmless because the countries themselves are weak. But American nationalism and exceptionalism is in practice indistinguishable from globalism. It simply makes explicit from which location the globe will be ruled.
TheSnark • 9 days ago • editedAll true, every word, but the problem with American exceptionalism isn't a matter of semantics or clever arguments but a matter of power.
This is why the definition of exceptionalism keeps shifting, because as a practical matter it means "whatever is in the interests of empire" at this particular moment in this particular case.
Gaius Gracchus TheSnark • 9 days agoThe original idea behind American Exceptionalism is that we are the "Shining City on the Hill". In other words, we were a good example to others. There was nothing in there about the residents of that Shining City going out and invading its neighbors to force them to follow its good example.
These days we are trying to force others to follow good ideals and high standards that we are ourselves following less and less.
Andrew Gaius Gracchus • 8 days agoExactly. The author twists words and creates strawmen and red herrings and argues with dead men.
Washington and Hamilton set forth an idea of country separate from all others and different. Yes, America is and was exceptional. Friend to all, ally to none, an example to all the world, based in English heritage and culture. It was founded by conservative revolutionaries, who attempted to claw back freedoms taken away by those in London, who were becoming overlords of an empire. There was "year zero", and early America could draw on all of English history, plus the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, ancient Greece and Rome, as well as religious traditions going back to antiquity.
It was always the Jeffersonian impulse towards revolution that was different. Jefferson loved the Year Zero France. But Jefferson at his core was an idealist.
The problem was that idealists like Jefferson gradually gained power a little over a hundred years ago. Their idealism was used by those who wanted to exploit America's power to further their own goals contrary to the ideals of American exceptionalism and American tradition. Greed and idealism went together and America used the cover of American exceptionalism to create an empire.
As to Buckley, his goal seems more like controlled opposition than anything else. He was a gatekeeper for the powerful, defining acceptable conservatism, keeping conservatism on the plantation. Conservativism Inc continues to try to do so.
Trump is a return to classic American traditionalism and exceptionalism. He is attempting to reshape the world along nationalistic lines, which is why AMLO in Mexico praised him so much. Globalists don't want to lose their power. Oligarchs don't want to give up their exploitation and extraction systems. Pundits don't want to give up their money train and status. Bureaucrats don't want actual democracy.
We will see how it shakes out.
Disqus10021 L RNY • 9 days agoNot so sure about the traditionalism part, but he at least represents the first real rejection of Wilsonianism in decades.
Daniel Baker • 9 days agoOn Wikipedia's list of the 50 cities with the world's highest homicide rates (per 100,000 population), the US has 4, South Africa has 4 and the rest are in Latin America. It hardly makes us the shining city on a hill or exceptional, unless you think a high crime rate is good.
Mark Twain said, "The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them." Today I would modify Twain a bit; when conservatives adopt some radical idea, the radicals respond by declaring that idea worn out. Exhibit A would be the idea of "American exceptionalism."
The historical fact is that American exceptionalism is a Communist concept, devised by Stalin in 1929 to describe -- and to dismiss -- what his American agents told him about the huge differences between American society and European societies, both of which Soviet-sponsored parties were trying to control. These differences included far lesser class distinctions, greater racial animosities, a labor movement much more concerned with economic bargaining than fielding political candidates, vastly weaker political parties, much more ethnic and religious diversity, and more hostility to centralized government. Today, we would have to add far more imprisonment of criminals, more approval of the death penalty, and a jealous passion for the right to have guns, although those differences weren't nearly as wide in 1929 as now. American exceptionalism exists. You can argue about whether it is good or bad, and certainly some of the differences between America and Europe are better or worse than others, but it's pure pretense to claim that America is an ordinary, unexceptional Western country. And no one on the left made any such pretense, until people on the right started talking about and glorifying (or at least not denigrating) "American exceptionalism," which had previously been solely a term of contempt. The radicals invented the views, then declared them worn out when the conservatives adopted them.
The truth that America is an exceptional country does not, of course, mean that its foreign policy has always been wise, and certainly it does not mean that America's catastrophic blundering in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq were either morally right or good for Americans. It merely means that we can't correct those mistakes by pretending that the country we're trying to rescue is unexceptional, that it is no different from other societies, and thus that foreign policies accepted by European or Asian voters will necessarily be winners here too.
Daniel Baker Guest • 8 days ago
Scott McLoughlin • 9 days agoI don't know why you think any of this is even relevant to my point: that American exceptionalism is real, and that desperately needed foreign policy reforms won't work if we ignore that fact. Worse, the points you raise all distort the real nature of America's differences from other Western countries.
American and European laws on abortion are very little different; in most of Europe, as in America, abortion is legal and accepted, Poland being one of the very few exceptions. We're probably closest to Ireland, where abortion has been recently legalized but remains socially frowned on. Again, whether you or I think that's a good thing or a bad thing doesn't matter; it's simply not one of the major points of difference between America and Europe.
Explaining the difference in imprisonment between Europe and America solely by America's greater black and Hispanic population is wrong in so many ways I hardly know where to begin. First, the difference in imprisonment is very recent, starting in the early 1990s and largely devised by a centrist Democratic US president; America's black and Hispanic population has always been much larger than Europe's, so it can't explain the difference in imprisonment. Second, America imprisons whites as well as blacks much more than Europe does. Third, poor blacks and Hispanics commit crimes at the same rate as poor whites of the same economic status; poor people of whatever race or color choose to commit crimes more often, because they have more incentive to make that choice. The higher black and Hispanic crime rate simply reflects the fact that far more of them are poor. As long ago as the 19th century, the British poor were called by the upper class "the criminal classes," and that reflected the undeniable truth that the British poor, like poor people everywhere, committed more crime than anyone else.
I thank you for the BBC link; I had long suspected that Europe's ban on the death penalty often didn't reflect popular opinion at first, but I didn't have the data proving it. But that doesn't in any way change the fact that considerably more Americans than Europeans support the death penalty, and long have, which is why European elites were able to get away with banning it without losing elections, and American elites have not.
Again, I'm not saying anything about whether any of these differences between America and the rest of the West are good or bad.. My point is that they exist, and it's no good pretending that they don't merely because America's foreign policy isn't working very well.
Ray Woodcock • 9 days agoI'll say it over and over, but GOP is Right Wing Lockean (Maritime Imperialist) "Anything Goes" Liberalism. DNC is Left Wing Lockean (Maritime Imperialist) "Anything Goes" Liberalism. We use these words wrong in our USA. Traditionalist Conservatives have NEVER enjoyed political party representation here. We are to-date completely a-historical and delusionally racist "Novum Organum" conquistadors with English accents. Good News? Better futures lie ahead of us. Start with agrarianism, potable water, and arable land. North America is underpopulated. I worked for State Dept. I witnessed the World Bank's destruction of Ukraine. Ask me a real question. I'll answer honestly. We suffer post-WW2 legacy Daddy and Mommy Warbucks here, writing checks to their own kids. We can, must and will do better. Those without pasts are without futures. To Survive is to Sur Vivre, Live Above. Hold tight. Have faith.
dbriz • 8 days ago • editedThere is the wish for what definitions should do in political and religious discussion, and then there is the reality of what they actually do. The wish is that, by using the word "definition," I am referring to something like the definition of a mathematical concept. We can define precisely what addition means. The problem is, we cannot do that with terms like conservatism. Ryn's argument illustrates the failure of that attempt: we have "wholly different nationalisms"; we have something that calls itself conservatism but it's wrong, because Ryn says so.
Definitionism leads to abstruse dispute, as scholars tussle over what is really nationalistic or conservative. The rest of us look on askance. Most people are not interested in a discussion filled with labels, like, "I'm a cisgender vegetarian transsexual white socialistic vegetarian Capricorn with subclinical mental disabilities." For most people, that sort of definition-oriented declaration comes across as hostile to discussion. Like, "I'm here in my castle. I dare you to try to penetrate it." The intrepid soul who attempts to start an actual friendly conversation, in response to that sort of statement, is likely to move away from definitionism. Not "You cannot be white: your skin is brown," but rather, "Really! My sister is a Capricorn!"
Definitionism (in some ways a/k/a labeling) is more likely to destroy dialogue than to create it. "Oh, you're a [fill in the blank]: you can't be good." It is possible to be a Nazi, a Bolshevik, or anything in between -- and still, in various regards, to be smart, friendly, successful, etc. Political dialogue is like dipping a ladle into a soup kettle: you may pull out some beans, some meat, some corn -- but possibly no one knows what else lurks in there. The attempt to define is is not merely a lost cause -- it basically misses the point.
Feral Finster dbriz • 8 days agoAh but the revolution was not based at all on nationalism. It was for liberty. The Articles, as the war, were not based on ideas of nationalism but more libertarian than not. Lest we forget, the convention was called to improve the Articles. That the federalists (nationalists) hijacked the convention required quashing liberty in favor of a cleverly designed campaign masking the future.
Patrick Henry was on to it early:
"When the American spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different: liberty, sir, was then the primary object .But now, sir, the American spirit, assisted by the ropes and chains of consolidation, is about to convert this country into a powerful and mighty empire .Such a government is incompatible with the genius of republicanism. There will be no checks, no real balances, in this government..."
In the end the anti federalists have been proven right.
Peekachu dbriz • 3 days agoSociopaths respect no limits on their power.
David Naas • 4 days agoActually, according to Kurt Vonnegut, it was neither nationalism nor liberty - but piracy! One group of pirates trying to break away from another. Then again, perhaps that is what you mean by the heralded "liberty"?
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."(John Adams, October 11, 1798.).
Are we still "a moral and religious people"? Well, are we?
Mayhap we are in deep trouble? Well, are we?
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free . . . it expects what never was and never will be"(Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Colonel Charles Yancey, January 6, 1816.)
No comment.
"I am only one, but I am one. I can't do everything, but I can do something. What I can do, that I ought to do. And what I ought to do, By the grace of God, I shall do."(Edward Everett Hale)
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Mar 07, 2020 | getpocket.com
Stories to fuel your mind. "We rise in power and make a difference in the world due to what is best about human nature, but we fall from power due to what is worst." Brain Pickings |
- Maria Popova
Art by Shaun Tan for a special edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales .
Thoreau wrote as he contemplated how silence ennobles speech . In the century and a half since, we have created a culture that equates loudness with leadership, abrasiveness with authority. We mistake shouting for powerful speech much as we mistake force for power itself. And yet the real measure of power is more in the realm of Thoreau's "fine things."
So argues UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner in The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence ( public library ) -- the culmination of twenty years of research exploring what power is, what confers it upon an individual, and how it shapes the structure of a collective, a community, and a culture. Drawing on a wealth of social science studies and insights from successful teams ranging from companies like Pixar and Google to restorative justice programs in San Quentin State Prison, he demonstrates "the surprising and lasting influence of soft power (culture, ideas, art, and institutions) as compared to hard power (military might, invasion, and economic sanctions)."
Keltner writes:
Life is made up of patterns. Patterns of eating, thirst, sleep, and fight-or-flight are crucial to our individual survival; patterns of courtship, sex, attachment, conflict, play, creativity, family life, and collaboration are crucial to our collective survival. Wisdom is our ability to perceive these patterns and to shape them into coherent chapters within the longer narrative of our lives.
Power dynamics, Keltner notes, are among the central patterns that shape our experience of life, from our romantic relationships to the workplace. But at the heart of power is a troubling paradox -- a malignant feature of human psychology responsible for John Dalberg-Acton's oft-cited insight that "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Keltner explains the psychological machinery of this malfunction and considers our recourse for resisting its workings:
The power paradox is this: we rise in power and make a difference in the world due to what is best about human nature, but we fall from power due to what is worst. We gain a capacity to make a difference in the world by enhancing the lives of others, but the very experience of having power and privilege leads us to behave, in our worst moments, like impulsive, out-of-control sociopaths.
How we handle the power paradox guides our personal and work lives and determines, ultimately, how happy we and the people we care about will be. It determines our empathy, generosity, civility, innovation, intellectual rigor, and the collaborative strength of our communities and social networks. Its ripple effects shape the patterns that make up our families, neighborhoods, and workplaces, as well as the broader patterns of social organization that define societies and our current political struggles.
[...]
Much of what is most unsettling about human nature -- stigma, greed, arrogance, racial and sexual violence, and the nonrandom distribution of depression and bad health to the poor -- follows from how we handle the power paradox.
Art by Olivier Tallec from Louis I, King of the Sheep, an illustrated parable of how power changes us .
What causes us to mishandle the power paradox, Keltner argues, is our culture's traditional understanding of power -- a sort of time-capsule that no longer serves us. Predicated on force, ruthlessness, and strategic coercion, it was shaped by Niccolò Machiavelli's sixteenth-century book The Prince -- but it is as antiquated today as the geocentric model of the universe that dominated Machiavelli's day. What governs the modern world, Keltner demonstrates through two decades of revelatory studies, is a different kind of power -- softer, more relational, predicated on reputation rather than force, measured by one's ability to affect the lives of others positively and shift the course of the world, however slightly, toward the common good. He writes:
Perhaps most critically, thinking of power as coercive force and fraud blinds us to its pervasiveness in our daily lives and the fact that it shapes our every interaction, from those between parents and children to those between work colleagues.
[...]
Power defines the waking life of every human being. It is found not only in extraordinary acts but also in quotidian acts, indeed in every interaction and every relationship, be it an attempt to get a two-year-old to eat green vegetables or to inspire a stubborn colleague to do her best work. It lies in providing an opportunity to someone, or asking a friend the right question to stir creative thought, or calming a colleague's rattled nerves, or directing resources to a young person trying to make it in society. Power dynamics, patterns of mutual influence, define the ongoing interactions between fetus and mother, infant and parent, between romantic partners, childhood friends, teens, people at work, and groups in conflict. Power is the medium through which we relate to one another. Power is about making a difference in the world by influencing others.
In a sentiment that parallels Thoreau's wisdom on silence and shouting, Keltner adds:
A new wave of thinking about power reveals that it is given to us by others rather than grabbed. We gain power by acting in ways that improve the lives of other people in our social networks.
One key consequence of the fact that power is given to us by others is its reputational nature -- an insight both disquieting to the ego and comforting to the soul, for we are inescapably social creatures. Keltner observes:
Our influence, the lasting difference that we make in the world, is ultimately only as good as what others think of us. Having enduring power is a privilege that depends on other people continuing to give it to us.
"Enduring" is an operative word in Keltner's premise. The "power paradox" is paradoxical precisely because those who manage to wrest power forcibly by the Machiavellian model may have power, or perceived power, for a certain amount of time, but that amount is finite. Its finitude springs from the attrition of the person's reputation. But the most troubling aspect of the power paradox is that even if a person rises to power by counter-Machiavellian means -- kindness, generosity, concern with the common good -- power itself will eventually warp her priorities and render her less kind, less generous, less concerned with the common good, which will in turn erode her power as her reputation for these counter-qualities grows.
Keltner cites a number of studies demonstrating these tendencies empirically -- poor people give to charity a greater portion of their income than rich people, those in positions of power exhibit more entitled behaviors, people who drive expensive cars are significantly crueler to pedestrians at crosswalks, and so forth.
But in reading these alarmingly consistent studies, I had to wonder about one crucial confound that remains unaddressed: People in positions of power also tend to be busier -- that is, they tend to have greater demands on their time. We know from the now-iconic 1970s Good Samaritan study that the single greatest predictor of uncaring, unkind, and uncompassionate behavior, even among people who have devoted their lives to the welfare of others, is a perceived lack of time -- a feeling of being rushed. The sense of urgency seems to consume all of our other concerns -- it is the razor's blade that severs our connection to anything outside ourselves, anything beyond the task at hand, and turns our laser-sharp focus of concern onto the the immediacy of the self alone.
Art from Anne Sexton's little-known children's book .
We know this empirically, and we know its anecdotal truth intimately -- I doubt I'm alone in the awareness that despite a deep commitment to kindness, I find myself most likely to, say, be impatient with a fellow cyclist when I feel pressed for time, when I know I'm running late. Even Keltner's famous and tragicomical study, which found that drivers of expensive cars are most inconsiderate to pedestrians, might suffer from the same confound -- those who can afford expensive cars are typically people we would deem "successful," who also typically have far greater demands on their time. So could it be that a scarcity of time -- that inescapable hum of consciousness -- rather than an excess of power is the true corrupting agent of the psyche?
And so another paradox lives inside the power paradox -- the more powerful a person becomes, the busier and more rushed she is, which cuts her off from the very qualities that define the truly powerful. What would the studies Keltner cites look like if we controlled not only for power, but for time -- for the perception of being rushed and demand-strained beyond capacity? (Kierkegaard condemned the corrosive effect of busyness nearly two centuries ago.)
Still, Keltner's central point -- that power in the modern world is "gained and maintained through a focus on others" -- remains valid and important. He considers the conscious considerations we can make in order to bypass the perils of the power paradox:
Handling the power paradox depends on finding a balance between the gratification of your own desires and your focus on other people. As the most social of species, we evolved several other-focused, universal social practices that bring out the good in others and that make for strong social collectives. A thoughtful practitioner of these practices will not be misled by the rush of the experience of power down the path of self-gratification and abuse, but will choose instead to enjoy the deeper delights of making a lasting difference in the world. These social practices are fourfold: empathizing, giving, expressing gratitude, and telling stories. All four of these practices dignify and delight others. They constitute the basis of strong, mutually empowered ties. You can lean on them to enhance your power at any moment of the day by stirring others to effective action.
But "power" is one of those words -- like "love" and "happiness" -- to have become grab-bag terms for a constellation of behaviors, states, emotions, and phenomena. Noting that "a critical task of science is to provide clear nomenclature -- precise terms that sharpen our understanding of patterned phenomena in the outside world and inside the mind," Keltner offers elegant and necessary definitions of the distinct notions comprising the constellation of power in modern society:
POWER your capacity to make a difference in the world by influencing the states of other people.
STATUS the respect that you enjoy from other people in your social network; the esteem they direct to you. Status goes with power often but not always.
CONTROL your capacity to determine the outcomes in your life. You can have complete control over your life -- think of the reclusive hermit -- but have no power.
SOCIAL CLASS the mixture of family wealth, educational achievement, and occupational prestige that you enjoy; alternatively, the subjective sense you have of where you stand on a class ladder in society, high, middle, or low. Both forms of social class are societal forms of power.
In the remainder of The Power Paradox , Keltner goes on to examine, through a robust body of research bridged with intelligent insight, what we can do both as individuals and as a society to cultivate the qualities that empower us by empowering others and counter those that feed the most selfish and small-spirited tendencies of human nature. Complement it with Blaise Pascal's timeless 17th-century wisdom on the art of persuasion and philosopher Martha Nussbaum on human dignity and the nuanced relationship between agency and victimhood .
HT Shankar Vedantam / Hidden Brain
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Dec 01, 1992 | www.moonofalabama.org
On the abandonment of Enlightenment intellectualism, and the emergence of a new form of Volksgeist.
When hatred of culture becomes itself a part of culture, the life of the mind loses all meaning. -- Alain Finkielkraut, The Undoing of ThoughtToday we are trying to spread knowledge everywhere. Who knows if in centuries to come there will not be universities for re-establishing our former ignorance? -- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)
I n 1927, the French essayist Julien Benda published his famous attack on the intellectual corruption of the age, La Trahison des clercs. I said "famous," but perhaps "once famous" would have been more accurate. For today, in the United States anyway, only the title of the book, not its argument, enjoys much currency. "La trahison des clercs": it is one of those memorable phrases that bristles with hints and associations without stating anything definite. Benda tells us that he uses the term "clerc" in "the medieval sense," i.e., to mean "scribe," someone we would now call a member of the intelligentsia. Academics and journalists, pundits, moralists, and pontificators of all varieties are in this sense clercs . The English translation, The Treason of the Intellectuals , 1 sums it up neatly.
The "treason" in question was the betrayal by the "clerks" of their vocation as intellectuals. From the time of the pre-Socratics, intellectuals, considered in their role as intellectuals, had been a breed apart. In Benda's terms, they were understood to be "all those whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice of an art or a science or a metaphysical speculation, in short in the possession of non-material advantages." Thanks to such men, Benda wrote, "humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world."
According to Benda, however, this situation was changing. More and more, intellectuals were abandoning their attachment to the traditional panoply of philosophical and scholarly ideals. One clear sign of the change was the attack on the Enlightenment ideal of universal humanity and the concomitant glorification of various particularisms. The attack on the universal went forward in social and political life as well as in the refined precincts of epistemology and metaphysics: "Those who for centuries had exhorted men, at least theoretically, to deaden the feeling of their differences have now come to praise them, according to where the sermon is given, for their 'fidelity to the French soul,' 'the immutability of their German consciousness,' for the 'fervor of their Italian hearts.'" In short, intellectuals began to immerse themselves in the unsettlingly practical and material world of political passions: precisely those passions, Benda observed, "owing to which men rise up against other men, the chief of which are racial passions, class passions and national passions." The "rift" into which civilization had been wont to slip narrowed and threatened to close altogether.
Writing at a moment when ethnic and nationalistic hatreds were beginning to tear Europe asunder, Benda's diagnosis assumed the lineaments of a prophecy -- a prophecy that continues to have deep resonance today. "Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds ," he wrote near the beginning of the book. "It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity." There was no need to add that its place in moral history would be as a cautionary tale. In little more than a decade, Benda's prediction that, because of the "great betrayal" of the intellectuals, humanity was "heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world," would achieve a terrifying corroboration.
J ulien Benda was not so naïve as to believe that intellectuals as a class had ever entirely abstained from political involvement, or, indeed, from involvement in the realm of practical affairs. Nor did he believe that intellectuals, as citizens, necessarily should abstain from political commitment or practical affairs. The "treason" or betrayal he sought to publish concerned the way that intellectuals had lately allowed political commitment to insinuate itself into their understanding of the intellectual vocation as such. Increasingly, Benda claimed, politics was "mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers." The ideal of disinterestedness, the universality of truth: such guiding principles were contemptuously deployed as masks when they were not jettisoned altogether. It was in this sense that he castigated the " desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action ."
In its crassest but perhaps also most powerful form, this desire led to that familiar phenomenon Benda dubbed "the cult of success." It is summed up, he writes, in "the teaching that says that when a will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value, whereas the will which fails is for that reason alone deserving of contempt." In itself, this idea is hardly novel, as history from the Greek sophists on down reminds us. In Plato's Gorgias , for instance, the sophist Callicles expresses his contempt for Socrates' devotion to philosophy: "I feel toward philosophers very much as I do toward those who lisp and play the child." Callicles taunts Socrates with the idea that "the more powerful, the better, and the stronger" are simply different words for the same thing. Successfully pursued, he insists, "luxury and intemperance are virtue and happiness, and all the rest is tinsel." How contemporary Callicles sounds!
In Benda's formula, this boils down to the conviction that "politics decides morality." To be sure, the cynicism that Callicles espoused is perennial: like the poor, it will be always with us. What Benda found novel was the accreditation of such cynicism by intellectuals. "It is true indeed that these new 'clerks' declare that they do not know what is meant by justice, truth, and other 'metaphysical fogs,' that for them the true is determined by the useful, the just by circumstances," he noted. "All these things were taught by Callicles, but with this difference; he revolted all the important thinkers of his time."
In other words, the real treason of the intellectuals was not that they countenanced Callicles but that they championed him. To appreciate the force of Benda's thesis one need only think of that most influential modern Callicles, Friedrich Nietzsche. His doctrine of "the will to power," his contempt for the "slave morality" of Christianity, his plea for an ethic "beyond good and evil," his infatuation with violence -- all epitomize the disastrous "pragmatism" that marks the intellectual's "treason." The real problem was not the unattainability but the disintegration of ideals, an event that Nietzsche hailed as the "transvaluation of all values." "Formerly," Benda observed, "leaders of States practiced realism, but did not honor it; With them morality was violated but moral notions remained intact, and that is why, in spite of all their violence, they did not disturb civilization ."
Benda understood that the stakes were high: the treason of the intellectuals signaled not simply the corruption of a bunch of scribblers but a fundamental betrayal of culture. By embracing the ethic of Callicles, intellectuals had, Benda reckoned, precipitated "one of the most remarkable turning points in the moral history of the human species. It is impossible," he continued,
to exaggerate the importance of a movement whereby those who for twenty centuries taught Man that the criterion of the morality of an act is its disinterestedness, that good is a decree of his reason insofar as it is universal, that his will is only moral if it seeks its law outside its objects, should begin to teach him that the moral act is the act whereby he secures his existence against an environment which disputes it, that his will is moral insofar as it is a will "to power," that the part of his soul which determines what is good is its "will to live" wherein it is most "hostile to all reason," that the morality of an act is measured by its adaptation to its end, and that the only morality is the morality of circumstances. The educators of the human mind now take sides with Callicles against Socrates, a revolution which I dare to say seems to me more important than all political upheavals.T he Treason of the Intellectuals is an energetic hodgepodge of a book. The philosopher Jean-François Revel recently described it as "one of the fussiest pleas on behalf of the necessary independence of intellectuals." Certainly it is rich, quirky, erudite, digressive, and polemical: more an exclamation than an analysis. Partisan in its claims for disinterestedness, it is ruthless in its defense of intellectual high-mindedness. Yet given the horrific events that unfolded in the decades following its publication, Benda's unremitting attack on the politicization of the intellect and ethnic separatism cannot but strike us as prescient. And given the continuing echo in our own time of the problems he anatomized, the relevance of his observations to our situation can hardly be doubted. From the savage flowering of ethnic hatreds in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to the mendacious demands for political correctness and multiculturalism on college campuses across America and Europe, the treason of the intellectuals continues to play out its unedifying drama. Benda spoke of "a cataclysm in the moral notions of those who educate the world." That cataclysm is erupting in every corner of cultural life today.
In 1988, the young French philosopher and cultural critic Alain Finkielkraut took up where Benda left off, producing a brief but searching inventory of our contemporary cataclysms. Entitled La Défaite de la pensée 2 ("The 'Defeat' or 'Undoing' of Thought"), his essay is in part an updated taxonomy of intellectual betrayals. In this sense, the book is a trahison des clercs for the post-Communist world, a world dominated as much by the leveling imperatives of pop culture as by resurgent nationalism and ethnic separatism. Beginning with Benda, Finkielkraut catalogues several prominent strategies that contemporary intellectuals have employed to retreat from the universal. A frequent point of reference is the eighteenth-century German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. "From the beginning, or to be more precise, from the time of Plato until that of Voltaire," he writes, "human diversity had come before the tribunal of universal values; with Herder the eternal values were condemned by the court of diversity."
Finkielkraut focuses especially on Herder's definitively anti-Enlightenment idea of the Volksgeist or "national spirit." Quoting the French historian Joseph Renan, he describes the idea as "the most dangerous explosive of modern times." "Nothing," he writes, "can stop a state that has become prey to the Volksgeist ." It is one of Finkielkraut's leitmotifs that today's multiculturalists are in many respects Herder's (generally unwitting) heirs.
True, Herder's emphasis on history and language did much to temper the tendency to abstraction that one finds in some expressions of the Enlightenment. Ernst Cassirer even remarked that "Herder's achievement is one of the greatest intellectual triumphs of the philosophy of the Enlightenment."
Nevertheless, the multiculturalists' obsession with "diversity" and ethnic origins is in many ways a contemporary redaction of Herder's elevation of racial particularism over the universalizing mandate of reason. Finkielkraut opposes this just as the mature Goethe once took issue with Herder's adoration of the Volksgeist. Finkielkraut concedes that we all "relate to a particular tradition" and are "shaped by our national identity." But, unlike the multiculturalists, he soberly insists that "this reality merit[s] some recognition, not idolatry."
In Goethe's words, "A generalized tolerance will be best achieved if we leave undisturbed whatever it is which constitutes the special character of particular individuals and peoples, whilst at the same time we retain the conviction that the distinctive worth of anything with true merit lies in its belonging to all humanity."
The Undoing of Thought resembles The Treason of the Intellectuals stylistically as well as thematically. Both books are sometimes breathless congeries of sources and aperçus. And Finkielkraut, like Benda (and, indeed, like Montaigne), tends to proceed more by collage than by demonstration. But he does not simply recapitulate Benda's argument.
The geography of intellectual betrayal has changed dramatically in the last sixty-odd years. In 1927, intellectuals still had something definite to betray. In today's "postmodernist" world, the terrain is far mushier: the claims of tradition are much attenuated and betrayal is often only a matter of acquiescence. Finkielkraut's distinctive contribution is to have taken the measure of the cultural swamp that surrounds us, to have delineated the links joining the politicization of the intellect and its current forms of debasement.
In the broadest terms, The Undoing of Thought is a brief for the principles of the Enlightenment. Among other things, this means that it is a brief for the idea that mankind is united by a common humanity that transcends ethnic, racial, and sexual divisions.
The humanizing "reason" that Enlightenment champions is a universal reason, sharable, in principle, by all. Such ideals have not fared well in the twentieth century: Herder's progeny have labored hard to discredit them. Granted, the belief that there is "Jewish thinking" or "Soviet science" or "Aryan art" is no longer as widespread as it once was. But the dispersal of these particular chimeras has provided no inoculation against kindred fabrications: "African knowledge," "female language," "Eurocentric science": these are among today's talismanic fetishes.
Then, too, one finds a stunning array of anti-Enlightenment phantasmagoria congregated under the banner of "anti-positivism." The idea that history is a "myth," that the truths of science are merely "fictions" dressed up in forbidding clothes, that reason and language are powerless to discover the truth -- more, that truth itself is a deceitful ideological construct: these and other absurdities are now part of the standard intellectual diet of Western intellectuals. The Frankfurt School Marxists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno gave an exemplary but by no means uncharacteristic demonstration of one strain of this brand of anti-rational animus in the mid-1940s.
Safely ensconced in Los Angeles, these refugees from Hitler's Reich published an influential essay on the concept of Enlightenment. Among much else, they assured readers that "Enlightenment is totalitarian." Never mind that at that very moment the Nazi war machine -- what one might be forgiven for calling real totalitarianism -- was busy liquidating millions of people in order to fulfill another set of anti-Enlightenment fantasies inspired by devotion to the Volksgeist .
The diatribe that Horkheimer and Adorno mounted against the concept of Enlightenment reminds us of an important peculiarity about the history of Enlightenment: namely, that it is a movement of thought that began as a reaction against tradition and has now emerged as one of tradition's most important safeguards. Historically, the Enlightenment arose as a deeply anti-clerical and, perforce, anti-traditional movement. Its goal, in Kant's famous phrase, was to release man from his "self-imposed immaturity."
The chief enemy of Enlightenment was "superstition," an omnibus term that included all manner of religious, philosophical, and moral ideas. But as the sociologist Edward Shils has noted, although the Enlightenment was in important respects "antithetical to tradition" in its origins, its success was due in large part "to the fact that it was promulgated and pursued in a society in which substantive traditions were rather strong." "It was successful against its enemies," Shils notes in his book Tradition (1981),
because the enemies were strong enough to resist its complete victory over them. Living on a soil of substantive traditionality, the ideas of the Enlightenment advanced without undoing themselves. As long as respect for authority on the one side and self-confidence in those exercising authority on the other persisted, the Enlightenment's ideal of emancipation through the exercise of reason went forward. It did not ravage society as it would have done had society lost all legitimacy.It is this mature form of Enlightenment, championing reason but respectful of tradition, that Finkielkraut holds up as an ideal.
W hat Finkielkraut calls "the undoing of thought" flows from the widespread disintegration of a faith. At the center of that faith is the assumption that the life of thought is "the higher life" and that culture -- what the Germans call Bildung -- is its end or goal.
The process of disintegration has lately become an explicit attack on culture. This is not simply to say that there are many anti-intellectual elements in society: that has always been the case. "Non-thought," in Finkielkraut's phrase, has always co-existed with the life of the mind. The innovation of contemporary culture is to have obliterated the distinction between the two. "It is," he writes, "the first time in European history that non-thought has donned the same label and enjoyed the same status as thought itself, and the first time that those who, in the name of 'high culture,' dare to call this non-thought by its name, are dismissed as racists and reactionaries." The attack is perpetrated not from outside, by uncomprehending barbarians, but chiefly from inside, by a new class of barbarians, the self-made barbarians of the intelligentsia. This is the undoing of thought. This is the new "treason of the intellectuals."
There are many sides to this phenomenon. What Finkielkraut has given us is not a systematic dissection but a kind of pathologist's scrapbook. He reminds us, for example, that the multiculturalists' demand for "diversity" requires the eclipse of the individual in favor of the group . "Their most extraordinary feat," he observes, "is to have put forward as the ultimate individual liberty the unconditional primacy of the collective." Western rationalism and individualism are rejected in the name of a more "authentic" cult.
One example: Finkielkraut quotes a champion of multiculturalism who maintains that "to help immigrants means first of all respecting them for what they are, respecting whatever they aspire to in their national life, in their distinctive culture and in their attachment to their spiritual and religious roots." Would this, Finkielkraut asks, include "respecting" those religious codes which demanded that the barren woman be cast out and the adulteress be punished with death?
What about those cultures in which the testimony of one man counts for that of two women? In which female circumcision is practiced? In which slavery flourishes? In which mixed marriages are forbidden and polygamy encouraged? Multiculturalism, as Finkielkraut points out, requires that we respect such practices. To criticize them is to be dismissed as "racist" and "ethnocentric." In this secular age, "cultural identity" steps in where the transcendent once was: "Fanaticism is indefensible when it appeals to heaven, but beyond reproach when it is grounded in antiquity and cultural distinctiveness."
To a large extent, the abdication of reason demanded by multiculturalism has been the result of what we might call the subjection of culture to anthropology. Finkielkraut speaks in this context of a "cheerful confusion which raises everyday anthropological practices to the pinnacle of the human race's greatest achievements." This process began in the nineteenth century, but it has been greatly accelerated in our own age. One thinks, for example, of the tireless campaigning of that great anthropological leveler, Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss is assuredly a brilliant writer, but he has also been an extraordinarily baneful influence. Already in the early 1950s, when he was pontificating for UNESCO , he was urging all and sundry to "fight against ranking cultural differences hierarchically." In La Pensée sauvage (1961), he warned against the "false antinomy between logical and prelogical mentality" and was careful in his descriptions of natives to refer to "so-called primitive thought." "So-called" indeed. In a famous article on race and history, Lévi-Strauss maintained that the barbarian was not the opposite of the civilized man but "first of all the man who believes there is such a thing as barbarism." That of course is good to know. It helps one to appreciate Lévi-Strauss's claim, in Tristes Tropiques (1955), that the "true purpose of civilization" is to produce "inertia." As one ruminates on the proposition that cultures should not be ranked hierarchically, it is also well to consider what Lévi-Strauss coyly refers to as "the positive forms of cannibalism." For Lévi-Strauss, cannibalism has been unfairly stigmatized in the "so-called" civilized West. In fact, he explains, cannibalism was "often observed with great discretion, the vital mouthful being made up of a small quantity of organic matter mixed, on occasion, with other forms of food." What, merely a "vital mouthful"? Not to worry! Only an ignoramus who believed that there were important distinctions, qualitative distinctions, between the barbarian and the civilized man could possibly think of objecting.
Of course, the attack on distinctions that Finkielkraut castigates takes place not only among cultures but also within a given culture. Here again, the anthropological imperative has played a major role. "Under the equalizing eye of social science," he writes,
hierarchies are abolished, and all the criteria of taste are exposed as arbitrary. From now on no rigid division separates masterpieces from run-of-the mill works. The same fundamental structure, the same general and elemental traits are common to the "great" novels (whose excellence will henceforth be demystified by the accompanying quotation marks) and plebian types of narrative activity.F or confirmation of this, one need only glance at the pronouncements of our critics. Whether working in the academy or other cultural institutions, they bring us the same news: there is "no such thing" as intrinsic merit, "quality" is an only ideological construction, aesthetic value is a distillation of social power, etc., etc.
In describing this process of leveling, Finkielkraut distinguishes between those who wish to obliterate distinctions in the name of politics and those who do so out of a kind of narcissism. The multiculturalists wave the standard of radical politics and say (in the words of a nineteenth-century Russian populist slogan that Finkielkraut quotes): "A pair of boots is worth more than Shakespeare."
Those whom Finkielkraut calls "postmodernists," waving the standard of radical chic, declare that Shakespeare is no better than the latest fashion -- no better, say, than the newest item offered by Calvin Klein. The litany that Finkielkraut recites is familiar:
A comic which combines exciting intrigue and some pretty pictures is just as good as a Nabokov novel. What little Lolitas read is as good as Lolita . An effective publicity slogan counts for as much as a poem by Apollinaire or Francis Ponge . The footballer and the choreographer, the painter and the couturier, the writer and the ad-man, the musician and the rock-and-roller, are all the same: creators. We must scrap the prejudice which restricts that title to certain people and regards others as sub-cultural.The upshot is not only that Shakespeare is downgraded, but also that the bootmaker is elevated. "It is not just that high culture must be demystified; sport, fashion and leisure now lay claim to high cultural status." A grotesque fantasy? Anyone who thinks so should take a moment to recall the major exhibition called "High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture" that the Museum of Modern Art mounted a few years ago: it might have been called "Krazy Kat Meets Picasso." Few events can have so consummately summed up the corrosive trivialization of culture now perpetrated by those entrusted with preserving it. Among other things, that exhibition demonstrated the extent to which the apotheosis of popular culture undermines the very possibility of appreciating high art on its own terms.
When the distinction between culture and entertainment is obliterated, high art is orphaned, exiled from the only context in which its distinctive meaning can manifest itself: Picasso becomes a kind of cartoon. This, more than any elitism or obscurity, is the real threat to culture today. As Hannah Arendt once observed, "there are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say."
And this brings us to the question of freedom. Finkielkraut notes that the rhetoric of postmodernism is in some ways similar to the rhetoric of Enlightenment. Both look forward to releasing man from his "self-imposed immaturity." But there is this difference: Enlightenment looks to culture as a repository of values that transcend the self, postmodernism looks to the fleeting desires of the isolated self as the only legitimate source of value.
For the postmodernist, then, "culture is no longer seen as a means of emancipation, but as one of the élitist obstacles to this." The products of culture are valuable only as a source of amusement or distraction. In order to realize the freedom that postmodernism promises, culture must be transformed into a field of arbitrary "options." "The post-modern individual," Finkielkraut writes, "is a free and easy bundle of fleeting and contingent appetites. He has forgotten that liberty involves more than the ability to change one's chains, and that culture itself is more than a satiated whim."
What Finkielkraut has understood with admirable clarity is that modern attacks on elitism represent not the extension but the destruction of culture. "Democracy," he writes, "once implied access to culture for everybody. From now on it is going to mean everyone's right to the culture of his choice." This may sound marvelous -- it is after all the slogan one hears shouted in academic and cultural institutions across the country -- but the result is precisely the opposite of what was intended.
"'All cultures are equally legitimate and everything is cultural,' is the common cry of affluent society's spoiled children and of the detractors of the West." The irony, alas, is that by removing standards and declaring that "anything goes," one does not get more culture, one gets more and more debased imitations of culture. This fraud is the dirty secret that our cultural commissars refuse to acknowledge.
There is another, perhaps even darker, result of the undoing of thought. The disintegration of faith in reason and common humanity leads not only to a destruction of standards, but also involves a crisis of courage. "A careless indifference to grand causes," Finkielkraut warns, "has its counterpart in abdication in the face of force." As the impassioned proponents of "diversity" meet the postmodern apostles of acquiescence, fanaticism mixes with apathy to challenge the commitment required to preserve freedom.
Communism may have been effectively discredited. But "what is dying along with it is not the totalitarian cast of mind, but the idea of a world common to all men."
Julien Benda took his epigraph for La Trahison des clercs from the nineteenth-century French philosopher Charles Renouvier: Le monde souffre du manque de foi en une vérité transcendante : "The world suffers from lack of faith in a transcendent truth." Without some such faith, we are powerless against the depredations of intellectuals who have embraced the nihilism of Callicles as their truth.
1 The Treason of the Intellectuals, by Julien Benda, translated by Richard Aldington, was first published in 1928. This translation is still in print from Norton.
2 La Défaite de la pensée , by Alain Finkielkraut; Gallimard, 162 pages, 72 FF . It is available in English, in a translation by Dennis O'Keeffe, as The Undoing of Thought (The Claridge Press [London], 133 pages, £6.95 paper).
Roger Kimball is Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of Encounter Books. His latest book is The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press).
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Sep 13, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com
"Carlson concluded by warning about the many other Boltons in the federal bureaucracy, saying that "war may be a disaster for America, but for John Bolton and his fellow neocons, it's always good business."
He went on to slam Trump's special representative for Iran and contender to replace Bolton, Brian Hook, as an "unapologetic neocon" who "has undisguised contempt for President Trump, and he particularly dislikes the president's nationalist foreign policy." Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif echoed Carlson hours later in a tweet, arguing that "Thirst for war – maximum pressure – should go with the warmonger-in-chief." Reuters and Haaretz
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Yes, people tend to forget that Bolton and all the other neocons are worshipers at the altar of a secular religion imported to the US by members of the Frankfurt School of Trotskyite German professors in the 1930s. These people had attempted get the Nazis to consider them allies in a quest for an ordered world. Alas for them they found that the Nazi scum would not accept them and in fact began preparations to hunt them down.
Thus the migration to America and in particular to the University of Chicago where they developed their credo of world revolution under that guidance of a few philosopher kings like Leo Strauss, the Wohlstetters and other academic "geniuses" They also began an enthusiastic campaign of recruitment of enthusiastic graduate students who carefully disguised themselves as whatever was most useful politically.
They are not conservative at all, not one bit. Carlson was absolutely right about that.
They despise nationalism. They despise the idea of countries. In that regard they are like all groups who aspire to globalist dominion for their particular ideas.
They should all be driven from government. pl
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Jun 23, 2019 | discussion.theguardian.com
Imagine being stuck in a fall out shelter or an underground bunker during some apocalypse with a devoted Ayn Rand follower or followers. Gurantee they would be killed and eaten with in the first few hours.Rand followers remind me of my little neices and nephews when they fight over candy and toys. You tell them they have to share and they say no mine mine it's all mine. Now imagine a grown man or woman doing the same exact thing except they run a major corporation or worse are an elected official. They have tried to make money off of every crisis in the past thirty years.
Rands followers are selfish greedy, most likely insane, jackles who have destroyed and plundered the American and world economy for thier own ends. Usually so they can have the most toys like cars, houses, hot tubs, private jets, viagra and wild sex parties Mind you they most likely have to pay people to have sex with them. I have nothing against capitalism but they need to reeled in at some point. Sadly goverment does not do it's job by looking after the public but after their own wallets. The people who view her has a sage and goddess are seriously out of touch with reality.
Honestly her idea's are failures, the west is in debt up to it's eyeballs, Asia is rising and Latin America is telling America and Europe to collectively go and screw ourselves. I am not happy about this but apart of me is a bit amused by it.
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Jun 23, 2019 | discussion.theguardian.com
Rozina -> tom1832 , 5 Mar 2012 22:15
The intellectual antecedents of the new right go back to Leo Strauss and the University of Chicago among others. Canadian academic Shadia Drury wrote two books critical of Straussian philosophy: "Leo Strauss and the American Right" (1999) and "The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss" (first published 1988, revised 2005). Counterpunch.org carries a number of articles by Gary Leupp, Francis Boyle and others also castigating the influence of Leo Strauss and his followers on US foreign policy. Seymour Hersch also took a blowtorch to Strauss in an article for The New Yorker many years ago when George W Bush was US President (link: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/05/12/030512fa_fact?currentPage=4#ixzz1437Z8MNs).truebluetah -> Callaig , 5 Mar 2012 17:57SEP provides a decent summary of Rand's reasoning.
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Jun 27, 2018 | www.unz.com
says: June 5, 2018 at 8:29 pm GMT 800 Words The fates of Christianity and Communism are both strange and ironic.
Christianity was the New Faith of heretical Jews who turned against Jewish Tradition. It was led by radical Jews at odds with Traditional Jews. But even though spread overwhelmingly by Jews, it became the Faith of non-Jews who came to oppress Jews.
Communism was the New Ideology of radical Jews who reviled Jewish Community and Culture. Karl Marx loathed Jewishness and its association with greed, exploitation, and capitalism. And he inspired a generation of radical Jews who were committed to universal justice based on 'scientific' and 'materialist' reading of history. Early communism was dominated by radical Jews as early Christianity was dominated by heretical Jews.
But as with Christianity, Communism eventually came to be owned by non-Jews who turned anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist. Why did this problem arise? Because even as many Jews turned toward universalism and against their own tribalism, many Jews remained tribal or made common cause with forces at war with radical universalism. Suppose ALL JEWS around the world had embraced universal socialism when Soviet Union was coming into its own. Soviet Union would likely not have turned against Jews. But, in fact, even as many Jews did become full-fledged communists and univeralists, many Jews remained either Jewish or allied with International Capitalists that waged war on Communism.
And over time, there were signs of second thoughts or dual loyalty among Communist Jews. Were they communist first or Jewish first? Or did they try to be both at the same time? But can one be Jewish-tribalist and communist all at once? (Can one be Jewish and Christian at once?)Likewise, there would have been no Christian 'antisemitism' IF All Jews had converted to Christianity and gave up on tribalism. But even as a good number of Jews did adopt the New Faith, the bulk of the Jewish community kept with Tribalism. So, even though Christianity was founded by Jews, it turned into an anti-Jewish religion. Too many Jews were seen as resistant and even hostile to the Universal Faith.
Furthermore, there is something intrinsic to Jewish personality and temperament that ultimately recoils from universalism. Even as secularists, Jews tend to feel 'special' and 'unique', indeed superior over dimwit goyim. This egotism among Jews makes them both universalist and anti-universalist. It makes them universalist ON THEIR OWN TERMS. Because they are so smart, wise, and prophetic, their superior ideas must be good and right for all of mankind. They want to play the role of Moses laying down the Laws for all peoples. But once the goy masses adopt the New Law as universal truth, Jews begin to grow bored with established universalism that now seems mediocre and humdrum. It was exciting when they conceived of it and presented it to humanity as The Shining Truth. But once that Truth becomes official dogma to every idiot on the street, Jews grow bored and react against univeralism that has lost its luster.
This contradiction is seen in Judaism itself. It says there is only one God, the only true God; Jews know better than pagans who believe in silly stupid idols. And yet, Jews want to keep this God for themselves through the special Covenant. Thus, Jewish God is universal in conception but tribal in contract(to Jews).Of late, Jews came up with a new faith that might be called Homomania. Will it also go the way of Christianity and Communism? Will it turn against Jews and/or will Jews grow tired of it?
And yet, Homomania may remain as a weapon of Jews because, unlike Christianity and Communism, it favors elite-minoritism. It is essentially a special alliance between homo minority elites and Jewish minority elites. So, even as majority of dimwit goyim become enamored of Homomania, it can never belong to them in the way the Christianity or Communism could. No matter how many goyim worship Homomania, the object of worship won't be universal brotherhood of man but elite tooter-hood of fancy neo-aristo fruits(financed by Jews). Also, unlike Christianity and Communism that eventually came to favor mediocrity -- Jesus favored the meek, and Marx & Lenin stood for common workers -- , the very nature of Homomania is celebration of elitism, vanity, egotism, narcissism, privilege, new fashions & fads, and fancy-pants stuff that homos love so much. As Jews are rich and homos are whoopsy-vain, they make natural allies in the Current Year.'Neoconservatism' also isn't likely to fall into the hands of non-Jews. Unlike the spiritual populism of Christianity and economic populism of Communism, Neoconservatism was devised to be esoteric-elitist-hegemonic based on carefully crafted coordination among media, academia, think-tanks, Intelligence services, Deep State, and Israel. So, even though Neo-conservatism pays lip-service to Humanitarianism and Spreading Democracy, its real agenda and operations are a very exclusive affair. Leo Strauss came up with a way to Talk the Walk and Walk the Talk.
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May 05, 2018 | www.unz.com
I first encountered Trotskyists in Minnesota half a century ago during the movement against the Vietnam War. I appreciated their skill in organizing anti-war demonstrations and their courage in daring to call themselves "communists" in the United States of America – a profession of faith that did not groom them for the successful careers enjoyed by their intellectual counterparts in France. So I started my political activism with sympathy toward the movement. In those days it was in clear opposition to U.S. imperialism, but that has changed.
The first thing one learns about Trotskyism is that it is split into rival tendencies. Some remain consistent critics of imperialist war, notably those who write for the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS).
Others, however, have translated the Trotskyist slogan of "permanent revolution" into the hope that every minority uprising in the world must be a sign of the long awaited world revolution – especially those that catch the approving eye of mainstream media. More often than deploring U.S. intervention, they join in reproaching Washington for not intervening sooner on behalf of the alleged revolution.
A recent article in the International Socialist Review (issue #108, March 1, 2018) entitled "Revolution and counterrevolution in Syria" indicates so thoroughly how Trotskyism goes wrong that it is worthy of a critique. Since the author, Tony McKenna, writes well and with evident conviction, this is a strong not a weak example of the Trotskyist mindset.
McKenna starts out with a passionate denunciation of the regime of Bashar al Assad, which, he says, responded to a group of children who simply wrote some graffiti on a wall by "beating them, burning them, pulling their fingernails out". The source of this grisly information is not given. There could be no eye witnesses to such sadism, and the very extremism sounds very much like war propaganda – Germans carving up Belgian babies.
But this raises the issue of sources. It is certain that there are many sources of accusations against the Assad regime, on which McKenna liberally draws, indicating that he is writing not from personal observation, any more than I am. Clearly, he is strongly disposed to believe the worst, and even to embroider it somewhat. He accepts and develops without the shadow of a doubt the theory that Assad himself is responsible for spoiling the good revolution by releasing Islamic prisoners who went on to poison it with their extremism. The notion that Assad himself infected the rebellion with Islamic fanaticism is at best a hypothesis concerning not facts but intentions, which are invisible. But it is presented as unchallengeable evidence of Assad's perverse wickedness.
This interpretation of events happens to dovetail neatly with the current Western doctrine on Syria, so that it is impossible to tell them apart. In both versions, the West is no more than a passive onlooker, whereas Assad enjoys the backing of Iran and Russia.
"Much has been made of Western imperial support for the rebels in the early years of the revolution. This has, in fact, been an ideological lynchpin of first the Iranian and then the Russian military interventions as they took the side of the Assad government. Such interventions were framed in the spirit of anticolonial rhetoric in which Iran and Russia purported to come to the aid of a beleaguered state very much at the mercy of a rapacious Western imperialism that was seeking to carve the country up according to the appetites of the US government and the International Monetary Fund ", according to McKenna.
Whose "ideological lynchpin"? Not that of Russia, certainly, whose line in the early stages of its intervention was not to denounce Western imperialism but to appeal to the West and especially to the United States to join in the fight against Islamic extremism.
Neither Russia nor Iran "framed their interventions in the spirit of anticolonial rhetoric" but in terms of the fight against Islamic extremism with Wahhabi roots.
In reality, a much more pertinent "framing" of Western intervention, taboo in the mainstream and even in Moscow, is that Western support for armed rebels in Syria was being carried out to help Israel destroy its regional enemies.
The Middle East nations attacked by the West – Iraq, Libya and Syria – all just happen to be, or to have been, the last strongholds of secular Arab nationalism and support for Palestinian rights.
There are a few alternative hypotheses as to Western motives – oil pipelines, imperialist atavism, desire to arouse Islamic extremism in order to weaken Russia (the Brzezinski gambit) – but none are as coherent as the organic alliance between Israel and the United States, and its NATO sidekicks.
It is remarkable that McKenna's long article (some 12 thousand words) about the war in Syria mentions Israel only once (aside from a footnote citing Israeli national news as a source). And this mention actually equates Israelis and Palestinians as co-victims of Assad propaganda: the Syrian government "used the mass media to slander the protestors, to present the revolution as the chaos orchestrated by subversive international interests (the Israelis and the Palestinians were both implicated in the role of foreign infiltrators)."
No other mention of Israel, which occupies Syrian territory (the Golan Heights) and bombs Syria whenever it wants to.
Only one, innocuous mention of Israel! But this article by a Trotskyist mentions Stalin, Stalinists, Stalinism no less than twenty-two times !
And what about Saudi Arabia, Israel's de facto ally in the effort to destroy Syria in order to weaken Iran? Two mentions, both implicitly denying that notorious fact. The only negative mention is blaming the Saudi family enterprise for investing billions in the Syrian economy in its neoliberal phase. But far from blaming Saudi Arabia for supporting Islamic groups, McKenna portrays the House of Saud as a victim of ISIS hostility.
Clearly, the Trotskyist delusion is to see the Russian Revolution everywhere, forever being repressed by a new Stalin. Assad is likened to Stalin several times.
This article is more about the Trotskyist case against Stalin than it is about Syria.
This repetitive obsession does not lead to a clear grasp of events which are not the Russian revolution. And even on this pet subject, something is wrong.
The Trotskyists keep yearning for a new revolution, just like the Bolshevik revolution. Yes, but the Bolshevik revolution ended in Stalinism. Doesn't that tell them something? Isn't it quite possible that their much-desired "revolution" might turn out just as badly in Syria, if not much worse?
Throughout history, revolts, uprisings, rebellions happen all the time, and usually end in repression. Revolution is very rare. It is more a myth than a reality, especially as Trotskyists tend to imagine it: the people all rising up in one great general strike, chasing their oppressors from power and instituting people's democracy. Has this ever happened?
For the Trotskyists, this seem to be the natural way things should happen and is stopped only by bad guys who spoil it out of meanness.
In our era, the most successful revolutions have been in Third World countries, where national liberation from Western powers was a powerful emotional engine. Successful revolutions have a program that unifies people and leaders who personify the aspirations of broad sectors of the population. Socialism or communism was above all a rallying cry meaning independence and "modernization" – which is indeed what the Bolshevik revolution turned out to be. If the Bolshevik revolution turned Stalinist, maybe it was in part because a strong repressive leader was the only way to save "the revolution" from its internal and external enemies. There is no evidence that, had he defeated Stalin, Trotsky would have been more tender-hearted.
Countries that are deeply divided ideologically and ethnically, such as Syria, are not likely to be "modernized" without a strong rule.
McKenna acknowledges that the beginning of the Assad regime somewhat redeemed its repressive nature by modernization and social reforms. This modernization benefited from Russian aid and trade, which was lost when the Soviet Union collapsed. Yes, there was a Soviet bloc which despite its failure to carry out world revolution as Trotsky advocated, did support the progressive development of newly independent countries.
If Bashar's father Hafez al Assad had some revolutionary legitimacy in McKenna's eyes, there is no excuse for Bashar.
"In the context of a global neoliberalism, where governments across the board were enacting the most pronounced forms of deregulation and overseeing the carving up of state industries by private capital, the Assad government responded to the heightening contradictions in the Syrian economy by following suit -- by showing the ability to march to the tempo of foreign investment while evincing a willingness to cut subsidies for workers and farmers." The neoliberal turn impoverished people in the countryside, therefore creating a situation that justified "revolution".
This is rather amazing, if one thinks about it. Without the alternative Soviet bloc, virtually the whole world has been obliged to conform to anti-social neoliberal policies. Syria included. Does this make Bashar al Assad so much more a villain than every other leader conforming to U.S.-led globalization?
McKenna concludes by quoting Louis Proyect: "If we line up on the wrong side of the barricades in a struggle between the rural poor and oligarchs in Syria, how can we possibly begin to provide a class-struggle leadership in the USA, Britain, or any other advanced capitalist country?"
One could turn that around. Shouldn't such a Marxist revolutionary be saying: "if we can't defeat the oligarchs in the West, who are responsible for the neoliberal policies imposed on the rest of the world, how can we possibly begin to provide class-struggle leadership in Syria?"
The trouble with Trotskyists is that they are always "supporting" other people's more or less imaginary revolutions. They are always telling others what to do. They know it all. The practical result of this verbal agitation is simply to align this brand of Trotskyism with U.S imperialism. The obsession with permanent revolution ends up providing an ideological alibi for permanent war.
For the sake of world peace and progress, both the United States and its inadvertent Trotskyist apologists should go home and mind their own business.
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Mar 06, 2018 | nationalinterest.org
Machiavelli recounts Livy's tale of the sons of Brutus, consul of Rome, to make his point about eradicating foes of a new regime. Roman republicans had just deposed the Tarquin monarchy, and Brutus' sons intrigued to bring the kings back. Why? "As the history shows," observes Machiavelli, the youths "were induced to conspire with other young Romans against the fatherland because of nothing other than that they could not take advantage extraordinarily under the consuls as under the king, so that the freedom of that people appeared to have become their servitude."
In other words, the sons of Brutus subverted the republic because they couldn't turn its institutions to their personal gain. Their enmity left the fledgling regime in an uncomfortable predicament: "a state that is free and that newly emerges," contends Machiavelli, "comes to have partisan enemies and not partisan friends." Those who profited by the old order become implacable foes of the new order, while friends of the new order hedge their bets until and unless the new rulers consolidate their hold on power.
In other words, the new republic faced resolute opposition while commanding only tepid support. The consul had to vanquish Rome's enemies in dramatic fashion to win wholehearted allegiance from the populace. "If one wishes to remedy these inconveniences and . . . disorders," maintains Machiavelli, "there is no remedy more powerful, nor more valid, more secure, and more necessary, than to kill the sons of Brutus." Brutus oversaw the scourging and beheading of the conspirators -- and endeared himself to generations of republicans.
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Mar 02, 2018 | www.unz.com
renfro , March 2, 2018 at 2:59 am GMT
Don't worry about republicans ..democrats are ruining themselves all alone .every time the deplorables see something like this they will double down on anything but a Dem.
Regardless of one's view on blacks or whites this is a major Stupid for a politician.Chuck Schumer votes against South Carolina federal judge nominee because he's white
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer rejected President Donald Trump's nominee for a long-vacant South Carolina federal judgeship not because of his qualifications but because of his race.
The decision drew the quick ire of South Carolina's two U.S. senators and U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-Spartanburg, a former federal prosecutor.Schumer, a New York Democrat, said in a Senate floor speech Wednesday he would not support Greenville attorney Marvin Quattlebaum for a vacancy on the U.S. District Court in South Carolina
Voting for Quattlebaum, he said, would result in having a white man replace two African-American nominees from the state put forth by former President Barack Obama.
Schumer said he would not be a part of the Trump administration's pattern of nominating white men.
"The nomination of Marvin Quattlebaum speaks to the overall lack of diversity in President Trump's selections for the federal judiciary," Schumer said.
"It's long past time that the judiciary starts looking a lot more like the America it represents," he continued. "Having a diversity of views and experience on the federal bench is necessary for the equal administration of justice."
South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the Senate's sole black Republican, pushed back on Schumer's rationale and urged other Senate Democrats to instead address diversity issues by starting with their offices.
"Perhaps Senate Democrats should be more worried about the lack of diversity on their own staffs than attacking an extremely well-qualified judicial nominee from the great state of South Carolina," Scott tweeted Thursday morning.
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Sep 05, 2017 | www.theatlantic.com
My first prophet was a man named James Burnham. In 1941 Burnham was 35 years old. From a wealthy family -- railroad money -- he was a star student at Princeton, then on to Balliol College, Oxford. Burnham was an avowed Communist. He joined with Trotsky during the 1930s.
By 1941, Burnham had moved on, as he published his first great book of prophecy, called The Managerial State . The book made him a celebrity. It was widely discussed on both sides of the Atlantic.
Burnham's vision of the future is one where the old ideologies, like socialism, have been left behind. The rulers are really beyond all that. They are the managerial elite, the technocrats, the scientists, and the bureaucrats who manage the all-powerful enterprises and agencies.
You know this vision. You have seen it so often at the movies. It is the vision in all those science fiction dystopias. You know, with the gilded masterminds ruling all from their swank towers and conference rooms.
It's a quite contemporary vision. For instance, it is not far at all from the way I think the rulers of China imagine themselves and their future.
In this and other writings, Burnham held up Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany as the pure exemplars of these emerging managerial states. They were showing the way to the future. By comparison, FDR's New Deal was a primitive version. And he thought it would lose.
Burnham's views were not so unusual among the leading thinkers of the 1940s, like Joseph Schumpeter or Karl Polanyi. All were pessimistic about the future of free societies, including Friedrich Hayek, who really believed that once-free countries were on the "road to serfdom." But Burnham took the logic further.
Just after the second world war ended, my other prophet decided to answer Burnham. You know him as George Orwell.
Eric Blair, who used George Orwell as his pen name, was about Burnham's age. Their backgrounds were very different. Orwell was English. Poor. Orwell's lungs were pretty rotten and he would not live long. Orwell was a democratic socialist who came to loathe Soviet communism. He had volunteered to fight in Spain, was shot through the throat. Didn't stop his writing.
Orwell was profoundly disturbed by Burnham's vision of the emerging "managerial state." All too convincing. Yet he also noticed how, when Burnham described the new superstates and their demigod rulers, Burnham exhibited "a sort of fascinated admiration."
Orwell wrote : For Burnham, "Communism may be wicked, but at any rate it is big: it is a terrible, all-devouring monster which one fights against but which one cannot help admiring." To Orwell, Burnham's mystical picture of "terrifying, irresistible power" amounted to "an act of homage, and even of self-abasement." irresistible power" amounted to "an act of homage, and even of self-abasement."
Burnham had predicted Nazi victory. Later, Burnham had predicted the Soviet conquest of all Eurasia. By 1947 Burnham was calling for the U.S. to launch a preventive nuclear war against the Soviet Union to head off the coming disaster.
Orwell saw a pattern. Such views seemed symptoms of "a major mental disease, and its roots," he argued, which, "lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice."
Orwell thought that "power worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible."
Orwell had another critique. He deplored the fact that, "The tendency of writers like Burnham, whose key concept is 'realism,' is to overrate the part played in human affairs by sheer force." Orwell went on. "I do not say that he is wrong all the time. But somehow his picture of the world is always slightly distorted."
Finally, Orwell thought Burnham overestimated the resilience of the managerial state model and underestimated the qualities of open and civilized societies. Burnham's vision did not allow enough play for "the fact that certain rules of conduct have to be observed if human society is to hold together at all."
Having written these critical essays, Orwell then tried to make his case against Burnham in another way. This anti-Burnham argument became a novel -- the novel called Nineteen Eighty-Four.
That book came out in 1949. Orwell died the next year.
By that time, Burnham had become a consultant to the CIA, advising its new office for covert action. That was the capacity in which Burnham met the young William F. Buckley. Burnham mentored Buckley. It was with Buckley that Burnham became one of the original editors of the National Review and a major conservative commentator. In 1983, President Reagan awarded Burnham the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Not that Burnham's core vision had changed. In 1964, he published another book of prophecy. This was entitled Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism . The Soviet Union and its allies had the will to power. Liberalism and its defenders did not. "The primary issue before Western civilization today, and before its member nations, is survival." (Sound familiar?)
And it was liberalism, Burnham argued, with its self-criticism and lack of commitment, that would pull our civilization down from within. Suicide.
So was Burnham wrong? Was Orwell right? This is a first-class historical question. Burnham's ideal of the "managerial state" is so alive today.
State the questions another way: Do open societies really work better than closed ones? Is a more open and civilized world really safer and better for Americans? If we think yes, then what is the best way to prove that point?
My answer comes in three parts. The first is about how to express our core values. American leaders tend to describe their global aims as the promotion of the right values. Notice that these are values in how other countries are governed. President Obama's call for an "international order of laws and institutions," had the objective of winning a clash of domestic governance models around the world. This clash he called: "authoritarianism versus liberalism."
Yet look at how many values he felt "liberalism" had to include. For Obama the "road of true democracy," included a commitment to "liberty, equality, justice, and fairness" and curbing the "excesses of capitalism."
What about our current president? Last month he urged his listeners to be ready to fight to the death for the "values" of the West. He named two: "individual freedom and sovereignty. "
A week later, two of his chief aides, Gary Cohn and H.R. McMaster, doubled down on the theme that America was promoting, with its friends, the values that "drive progress throughout the world." They too had a laundry list. They omitted "sovereignty." But then, narrowing the list only to the "most important," they listed: "[T]he dignity of every person equality of women innovation freedom of speech and of religion and free and fair markets."
By contrast, the anti-liberal core values seem simple. The anti-liberals are for authority and against anarchy and disorder. And they are for community and against the subversive, disruptive outsider.
There are of course many ways to define a "community" -- including tribal, religious, political, or professional. It is a source of identity, of common norms of behavior, of shared ways of life.
Devotees of freedom and liberalism do not dwell as much on "community." Except to urge that everybody be included, and treated fairly.
But beliefs about "community" have always been vital to human societies. In many ways, the last 200 years have been battles about how local communities try to adapt or fight back against growing global pressures -- especially economic and cultural, but often political and even military.
So much of the divide between anti-liberals or liberals is cultural. Little has to do with "policy" preferences. Mass politics are defined around magnetic poles of cultural attraction. If Americans engage this culture war on a global scale, I plead for modesty and simplicity. As few words as possible, as fundamental as possible.
Certainly our history counsels modesty. Americans and the American government have a very mixed and confusing record in the way we have, in practice, related values in foreign governance to what our government does.
Also, until the late 19th century, "democracy" was never at the core of liberal thinking. Liberal thinkers were very interested in the design of republics. But classical liberal thinkers, including many of the American founders, always had a troubled relationship with democracy. There were always two issues.
First, liberals were devoted, above all, to liberty of thought and reason. Pace Tom Paine, the people were often regarded as intolerant, ill-informed, and superstitious -- unreliable judges of scientific truth, historical facts, moral duty, and legal disputes. The other problem is that democracy used to be considered a synonym for mob rule. Elections can be a supreme check on tyranny. But sometimes the people have exalted their dictators and have not cared overmuch about the rule of law. It therefore still puzzles me: Why is there so much debate about which people are "ready for democracy"? Few of the old theorists thought any people were ready for such a thing.
It was thought, though, that any civilized people might be persuaded to reject tyranny. Any civilized community might prefer a suitably designed and confining constitution, limiting powers and working at a reliable rule of law.
By the way, that "rule of law" was a value that Mr. Cohn and General McMaster left off of their "most important" list -- yet is anything more essential to our way of life?
Aside from the relation with democracy, the other great ideal that any liberal order finds necessary, yet troubling, is the one about community: nationalism.
Consider the case of Poland. For 250 years, Poland has been a great symbol to the rest of Europe. For much of Polish and European history, nationalism was an ally of liberalism. Versus Czarist tyranny, versus aristocratic oligarchs.
But sometimes not. Today, Poland's governing Law and Justice party is all about being anti-Russian, anti-Communist, and pro-Catholic. They are all about "authority" and "community." At the expense of ? Poland's president has just had to intervene when the rule of law itself seemed to be at stake.
We Americans and our friends should define what we stand for. Define it in a way that builds a really big tent. In 1989, working for the elder President Bush, I was able to get the phrase, "commonwealth of free nations," into a couple of the president's speeches. It didn't stick. Nearly 20 years later, in 2008, the late Harvard historian Ernest May and I came up with a better formulation. We thought that through human history the most adaptable and successful societies had turned out to be the ones that were "open and civilized."
Rather than the word, "liberal," the word "open" seems more useful. It is the essence of liberty. Indian prime minister Narendra Modi uses it in his speeches; Karl Popper puts it at the core of his philosophy; Anne-Marie Slaughter makes it a touchstone in her latest book. That's a big tent right there.
Also the ideal of being "civilized." Not such an old-fashioned ideal. It gestures to the yearning for community. Not only a rule of law, also community norms, the norms that reassure society and regulate rulers -- whether in a constitution or in holy scripture.
Chinese leaders extol the value of being civilized -- naturally, they commingle it with Sinification. Muslims take pride in a heritage that embraces norms of appropriate conduct by rulers. And, of course, in an open society, community norms can be contested and do evolve.
The retired Indian statesman, Shyam Saran, recently lectured on, "Is a China-centric world inevitable?" To Saran, "A stable world order needs a careful balance between power and legitimacy. Legitimacy is upheld when states, no matter how powerful, observe norms of state behavior." India, Saran said, had the "civilizational attributes."
... ... ...
Philip Zelikow is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia, and is a former executive director of the 9/11 Commission.
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www.truthdig.com
Editor's note: This article is the last in a four-part series on Truthdig called "Universal Empire" -- an examination of the current stage of the neocon takeover of American policy that began after World War ll. Read Part 1 , Part 2 and Part 3 .
The recent assertion by the Trump White House that Damascus and Moscow released "false narratives" to mislead the world about the April 4 sarin gas attack in Khan Shaykhun, Syria, is a dangerous next step in the "fake news" propaganda war launched in the final days of the Obama administration. It is a step whose deep roots in Communist Trotsky's Fourth International must be understood before deciding whether American democracy can be reclaimed.
Muddying the waters of accountability in a way not seen since Sen. Joe McCarthy at the height of the Red Scare in the 1950s, the " Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act " signed into law without fanfare by Obama in December 2016 officially authorized a government censorship bureaucracy comparable only to George Orwell's fictional Ministry of Truth in his novel "1984." Referred to as " the Global Engagement Center ," the official purpose of this new bureaucracy is to "recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests." The real purpose of this Orwellian nightmare is to cook the books on anything that challenges Washington's neoconservative pro-war narrative and to intimidate, harass or jail anyone who tries. As has already been demonstrated by President Trump's firing of Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian government airbase, it is a recipe for a world war, and like it or not, that war has already begun.
This latest attack on Russia's supposed false narrative takes us right back to 1953 and the beginnings of the cultural war between East and West. Its roots are tied to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, to James Burnham's pivot from Trotsky's Fourth International to right-wing conservatism and to the rise of the neoconservative Machiavellians as a political force. As Burnham's " The Struggle for the World " stressed, the Third World War had already begun with the 1944 Communist-led Greek sailors' revolt.In Burnham's Manichean thinking, the West was under siege. George Kennan's Cold War policy of containment was no different than Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement. Détente with the Soviet Union amounted to surrender. Peace was only a disguise for war, and that war would be fought with politics, subversion, terrorism and psychological warfare. Soviet influence had to be rolled back wherever possible. That meant subverting the Soviet Union and its proxies and, when necessary, subverting Western democracies as well.
The true irony of today's late-stage efforts by Washington to monopolize "truth" and attack alternate narratives isn't just in its blatant contempt for genuine free speech. The real irony is that the entire "Freedom Manifesto" employed by the United States and Britain since World War II was never free at all, but a concoction of the CIA's Psychological Strategy Board 's (PSB) comprehensive psychological warfare program waged on friend and foe alike.
The CIA would come to view the entire program, beginning with the 1950 Berlin conference, to be a landmark in the Cold War, not just for solidifying the CIA's control over the non-Communist left and the West's "free" intellectuals, but for enabling the CIA to secretly disenfranchise Europeans and Americans from their own political culture in such a way they would never really know it.
As historian Christopher Lasch wrote in 1969 of the CIA's cooptation of the American left,
"The modern state is an engine of propaganda, alternately manufacturing crises and claiming to be the only instrument that can effectively deal with them. This propaganda, in order to be successful, demands the cooperation of writers, teachers, and artists not as paid propagandists or state-censored time-servers but as 'free' intellectuals capable of policing their own jurisdictions and of enforcing acceptable standards of responsibility within the various intellectual professions."
Key to turning these "free" intellectuals against their own interests was the CIA's doctrinal program for Western cultural transformation contained in the document PSB D-33/2 . PSB D-33/2 foretells of a "long-term intellectual movement, to: break down world-wide doctrinaire thought patterns" while "creating confusion, doubt and loss of confidence" in order to "weaken objectively the intellectual appeal of neutralism and to predispose its adherents towards the spirit of the West." The goal was to "predispose local elites to the philosophy held by the planners," while employing local elites "would help to disguise the American origin of the effort so that it appears to be a native development."
While declaring itself as an antidote to Communist totalitarianism, one internal critic of the program, PSB officer Charles Burton Marshall, viewed PSB D-33/2 itself as frighteningly totalitarian, interposing "a wide doctrinal system" that "accepts uniformity as a substitute for diversity," embracing "all fields of human thought -- all fields of intellectual interests, from anthropology and artistic creations to sociology and scientific methodology." He concluded: "That is just about as totalitarian as one can get."
Burnham's Machiavellian elitism lurks in every shadow of the document. As recounted in Frances Stoner Saunder's "The Cultural Cold War," "Marshall also took issue with the PSB's reliance on 'non-rational social theories' which emphasized the role of an elite 'in the manner reminiscent of Pareto, Sorel, Mussolini and so on.' Weren't these the models used by James Burnham in his book the Machiavellians? Perhaps there was a copy usefully to hand when PSB D-33/2 was being drafted. More likely, James Burnham himself was usefully to hand."
Burnham was more than just at hand when it came to secretly implanting a fascist philosophy of extreme elitism into America's Cold War orthodoxy. With "The Machiavellians," Burnham had composed the manual that forged the old Trotskyist left together with a right-wing Anglo/American elite.
The political offspring of that volatile union would be called neoconservatism, whose overt mission would be to roll back Russian/Soviet influence everywhere. Its covert mission would be to reassert a British cultural dominance over the emerging Anglo/American Empire and maintain it through propaganda.
Hard at work on that task since 1946 was the secret Information Research Department of the British and Commonwealth Foreign Office known as the IRD.
Rarely spoken of in the context of CIA-funded secret operations, the IRD served as a covert anti-Communist propaganda unit from 1946 until 1977. According to Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, authors of " Britain's Secret Propaganda War ," "the vast IRD enterprise had one sole aim: To spread its ceaseless propaganda output (i.e. a mixture of outright lies and distorted facts) among top-ranking journalists who worked for major agencies and magazines, including Reuters and the BBC, as well as every other available channel. It worked abroad to discredit communist parties in Western Europe which might gain a share of power by entirely democratic means, and at home to discredit the British Left."
IRD was to become a self-fulfilling disinformation machine for the far-right wing of the international intelligence elite, at once offering fabricated and distorted information to "independent" news outlets and then using the laundered story as "proof" of the false story's validity. One such front enterprise established with CIA money was Forum World Features, operated at one time by Burnham acolyte Brian Rossiter Crozier . Described by Burnham's biographer Daniel Kelly as a "British political analyst," in reality, the legendary Brian Crozier functioned for over 50 years as one of Britain's top propagandists and secret agents .
If anyone today is shocked by the biased, one-sided, xenophobic rush to judgment alleging Russian influence over the 2016 presidential election, they need look no further than to Brian Crozier's closet for the blueprints. As we were told outright by an American military officer during the first war in Afghanistan in 1982, the U.S. didn't need "proof the Soviets used poison gas" and they don't need proof against Russia now. Crozier might best be described as a daydream believer, a dangerous imperialist who acts out his dreams with open eyes. From the beginning of the Cold War until his death in 2012, Crozier and his protégé Robert Moss propagandized on behalf of military dictators Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet, organized private intelligence organizations to destabilize governments in the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and Africa and worked to delegitimize politicians in Europe and Britain viewed as insufficiently anti-Communist.
The mandate of his Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC) set up in 1970 was to expose the supposed KGB campaign of worldwide subversion and put out stories smearing anyone who questioned it as a dupe, a traitor or Communist spy. Crozier regarded "The Machiavellians" as a major formative influence in his own intellectual development, and wrote in 1976 "indeed it was this book above all others that first taught me how [emphasis Crozier] to think about politics." The key to Crozier's thinking was Burnham's distinction between the "formal" meaning of political speech and the "real," a concept which was, of course, grasped only by elites. In a 1976 article, Crozier marveled at how Burnham's understanding of politics had spanned 600 years and how the use of "the formal" to conceal "the real" was no different today than when used by Dante Alighieri's "presumably enlightened Medieval mind." "The point is as valid now as it was in ancient times and in the Florentine Middle Ages, or in 1943. Overwhelmingly, political writers and speakers still use Dante's method. Depending on the degree of obfuscation required (either by circumstances or the person's character), the divorce between formal and real meaning is more of less absolute."
But Crozier was more than just a strategic thinker. Crozier was a high-level covert political agent who put Burnham's talent for obfuscation and his Fourth International experience to use to undermine détente and set the stage for rolling back the Soviet Union.
In a secret meeting at a City of London bank in February 1977, he even patented a private-sector operational intelligence organization known at the Sixth International (6I) to pick up where Burnham left off: politicizing and privatizing many of the dirty tricks the CIA and other intelligence services could no longer be caught doing. As he explained in his memoir "Free Agent," the name 6I was chosen "because the Fourth International split. The Fourth International was the Trotskyist one, and when it split, this meant that, on paper, there were five Internationals. In the numbers game, we would constitute the Sixth International, or '6I.' "
Crozier's cooperation with numerous "able and diligent Congressional staffers" as well as "the remarkable General Vernon ('Dick') Walters, recently retired as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence," cemented the rise of the neoconservatives. When Carter caved in to the Team B and his neoconservative National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski's plot to lure the Soviets into their own Vietnam in Afghanistan, it fulfilled Burnham's mission and delivered the world to the Machiavellians without anyone being the wiser.As George Orwell wrote in his "Second Thoughts on James Burnham": "What Burnham is mainly concerned to show [in The Machiavellians] is that a democratic society has never existed and, so far as we can see, never will exist. Society is of its nature oligarchical, and the power of the oligarchy always rests upon force and fraud. Power can sometimes be won and maintained without violence, but never without fraud."
Today, Burnham's use of Dante's political treatise "De Monarchia" to explain his medieval understanding of politics might best be swapped for Dante's "Divine Comedy," a paranoid comedy of errors in which the door to Hell swings open to one and all, including the elites regardless of their status. Or as they say in Hell, " Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate ." Abandon hope all ye who enter here.
This poart 4 of the series. For previous parts see
- Part 1: American Imperialism Leads the World Into Dante's Vision of Hell
- Part 3: How the CIA Created a Fake Western Reality for 'Unconventional Warfare'
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of " Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story ," " Crossing Zero: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire " and " The Voice ." Visit their websites at invisiblehistory.com and grailwerk.com .
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Mar 03, 2017 | glineq.blogspot.com
Machiavelli as an economist
I was recently rereading The Discourses (as I periodically enjoy doing) and on Sunday I read a review of an interesting new book on Machiavelli -an inexhaustible topic indeed. So I thought of writing down why I, and I would presume many economists, admire Machiavelli (and thus adding to this inexhaustible topic yet another piece).
There is a clear affinity between economists and political scientists in the Machiavelli tradition. For Machiavelli, the objective of a ruler or a politician is maximization of power in two dimensions, at any point in time and over time. This is exactly the same as maximization of income or utility over time. The ruler is a rational homo politicus in the same way that people, according to economists, are rational homo economicuses .
Moreover, the ruler is a political entrepreneur: his job is no different from a job of a tailor, carpenter, teacher. He is after selfish objectives which are attained under constraints. The constraints for the ruler are of two kinds: he must somehow acquire the power and he must be able to keep it despite attempts of many people to prevent him from coming to power or trying to overthrow him.
The ruler therefore must have the famous virtù which is indeed one of the rarest combination of talents. He must fight off domestic foes, foreign enemies or adversaries, and must combine the use of deception, violence and genuine concern for his subjects in the right proportions to be able to stay in power. Machiavelli's politician is like a businessman. There are cases when the businessman will gain more by lying and others when he would gain more by telling the truth. Similarly, the ruler would sometimes gain more through violence, guile and ruse, and at other times through honesty and improvements of his subjects' welfare. The attractiveness of Machiavelli to economists comes also from the fact his ruler always remains a self-interested individual who might do well for his subjects not because he cares about them but because he believes that doing well for them would be ultimately good for himself. In that he is like Adam Smith's baker: he is selling us bread not because he is concerned about our hunger but because he is concerned about his self-interest.
Throughout centuries Machiavelli has, of course, been accused of condoning many evils. Yet his type of the politician is much more benign and better for the mankind that the types that have normally ruled us. This is because the rulers who actually come to believe they are trying to accomplish good things are most likely to create endless bloodsheds. Most of the killings in history have been motivated by "goodness" and desire to be virtuous. Surely, all religious wars have been such. In recent past, all communist exactions (most notably, the collectivization in the Soviet Union and the Great Leap Forward in China) were motivated by the desire to lift people from their millennial poverty. George W. Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq cannot be explained otherwise since no economic or any other rational objective was ever achieved or was even given serious consideration in the decision to wage the war.
The most potentially destructive forces today are hidden under the banner of "goodness". Whether this is done hypocritically or because the rulers believe in such professions of "goodness" is immaterial; the latter is even worse. The terms under which such "goodness" is projected to the heathens-"the American exceptionalism,", "the Third Rome", "Hindutva", "the new (old) Caliphate"-are nothing but a self-license to impose own values and beliefs on those who dare disagree with them. Such rulers are the most bloodthirsty because belief in own moral superiority renders them unconcerned with reality.
Machiavelli's ruler will for sure also engage in deception and cruelty, but his objective will never be to impose one form of government or religion, or more generally a set of beliefs as such, on others. He might decide to impose a new government if he believes that this would increase his dominion. This would be a rational objective, grounded in self-interest. Ideological puritans who want to bring happiness to others would engage in such operations more frequently and fully. Disengaging from them implies for the ideological zealots a destruction of their own intimate world of beliefs; never so with Machiavelli's ruler who would give up the operation once its costs outweigh the benefits.
The world ruled by politicians who follow own interest like Adam Smith's baker, and leave the rest of the world in peace, may be the best world we can hope for.
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Feb 25, 2017 | www.theamericanconservative.com
david robbins tien , says: February 24, 2017 at 7:49 am
To understand David Brooks' "thinking" just go back to his initiation by disciples of Leo Strauss during his undergraduate days at the University of Chicago. It is all there, a "political philosophy" that somehow winds up with initiates convinced that they are a tiny elite that needs to lead dumb Americans in defending civilization, viz, the "West", against barbarism. After my own indoctrination, I was ready to jump in an F-16 and attack, well, just about anybody. See Senator Tom Cotton, Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, etc., for other examples of the phenomenon. Washington is crawling with these guys and gals.
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Jan 14, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com
anne -> New Deal democrat... January 14, 2017 at 08:16 AMhttps://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/books/review/napoleon-a-life-by-andrew-roberts.html
November 16, 2014
'Napoleon: A Life,' by Andrew Roberts
By DUNCAN KELLY
On July 22, 1789, a week after the storming of the Bastille in Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte wrote to his older brother, Joseph, that there was nothing much to worry about. "Calm will return. In a month." His timing was off, but perhaps he took the misjudgment to heart because he spent the rest of his life trying to bring glory and order to France by building a new sort of empire. By the time he was crowned emperor on Dec. 2, 1804, he could say, "I am the Revolution." It was, according to the historian Andrew Roberts's epically scaled new biography, "Napoleon: A Life," both the ultimate triumph of the self-made man, an outsider from Corsica who rose to the apex of French political life, and simultaneously a "defining moment of the Enlightenment," fixing the "best" of the French Revolution through his legal, educational and administrative reforms. Such broad contours get at what Napoleon meant by saying to his literary hero Goethe at a meeting in Erfurt, "Politics is fate."
Napoleon didn't mean fatalism by this, rather that political action is unavoidable if you want personal and national glory. It requires a mastery of fortune, and a willingness to be ruthless when necessary. If this sounds Machiavellian, that's because it is - Machiavelli's arguments about politics informed Napoleon's self-consciousness, whether in appraising fortune as a woman or a river to be tamed and harnessed, or assuming that in politics it is better to be feared than loved. Such views went hand in hand with the grand visions of politics outlined in the ancient histories and biographies Napoleon revered as a young man. "Bloodletting is among the ingredients of political medicine" was Napoleon's cool if brutal reminder of an ever-present item on his exhausting schedule.
His strategy always included dashing off thousands of letters and plans, in a personal regime calling for little sleep, much haste and a penchant for being read to while taking baths so as not to waste even a minute. He compartmentalized ruthlessly, changing tack between lobbying for more shoes and brandy for the army at one minute, to directing the personal lives of his siblings or writing love letters to the notorious Josephine at another; here ensuring extravagant financial "contributions" from those whom he had vanquished, there discussing the booty to send back to Paris, particularly from the extraordinary expedition in Egypt where his "savants had missed nothing." The personal and the political ran alongside each other in his mind.
Yet when his longtime collaborator but fair-weather political friend, the diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, suggested that Napoleon try to make those he conquered learn to love France, Napoleon replied that this was an irrelevance. "Aimer: I don't really know what this means when applied to politics," he said. Still, if grand strategy and national interest lay behind foreign affairs, there were nevertheless personal rules of conduct to uphold. Talleyrand was a party to Napoleon's strategy since supporting his coup d'état against the French Directory in 1799. That was O.K. And by short-selling securities he made millions for himself. But he was called out by Napoleon and dismissed as vice grand elector when found facing both ways politically at a crucial moment.
Napoleon understood those temptations because he was also flexible enough to tilt toward the winning side, regularly supporting any form of local religion that could help him militarily. Nonetheless, Roberts's Napoleon is a soldier, statesman and "bona fide intellectual," who rode his luck for longer than most intellectuals in politics ever do....
Duncan Kelly teaches political thought at the University of Cambridge.
libezkova -> anne... , January 14, 2017 at 10:25 AMkthomas -> libezkova... , January 14, 2017 at 11:48 AM" "Bloodletting is among the ingredients of political medicine" "Those chickenhawk neocons like Hillary, Kagan or Michael Leeden do not want to die, they want that somebody else died for them implementing their crazy imperial ambitions.
Russian troll?libezkova -> kthomas... , -1I like the way you are thinking about this issue my totally brainwashed friend (sorry Anne ;-)ilsm -> libezkova...Your remark just confirms the power of official propaganda machine
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/13/why-ridiculous-official-propaganda-still-works
== quote ==
The primary aim of official propaganda is to generate an "official narrative" that can be mindlessly repeated by the ruling classes and those who support and identify with them. This official narrative does not have to make sense, or to stand up to any sort of serious scrutiny. Its factualness is not the point. The point is to draw a Maginot line, a defensive ideological boundary, between "the truth" as defined by the ruling classes and any other "truth" that contradicts their narrative.
The current "Russian hacking" hysteria is a perfect example of how this works. No one aside from total morons actually believes this official narrative (the substance of which is beyond ridiculous), not even the stooges selling it to us. This, however, is not a problem, because it isn't intended to be believed it is intended to be accepted and repeated, more or less like religious dogma.
US press is a propaganda mill.libezkova -> ilsm...The DNC is not the "US election", therefore how can hacking the DNC be a serious issue?
Then they give front page to Mr. Lewis who says a deceitful line that 'Russians made Clinton lose'. Nothing in the hack changed my observation that she is a war monger in wall st's employ.
They print and broadcast the lines fed. Lines which have no basis in truth.
If you think of what is said you have to conclude that criminals should have privacy and those digging perpetrate harm when the "leaks" exposed truths the public is not supposed to know.
If the average American could think and get a few facts they would conclude there is no democracy because the things they know are not true.
Saturday, January 14, 2017 at 05:11 PMilsm -> kthomas..., January 14, 2017 at 03:30 PMMSM is an executive arm of "deep state" propaganda machine.
http://carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
== quote ==
During the 1976 investigation of the CIA by the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church, the dimensions of the Agency's involvement with the press became apparent to several members of the panel, as well as to two or three investigators on the staff.
...Thus, contrary to the notion that the CIA insidiously infiltrated the journalistic community, there is ample evidence that America's leading publishers and news executives allowed themselves and their organizations to become handmaidens to the intelligence services. "Let's not pick on some poor reporters, for God's sake," William Colby exclaimed at one point to the Church committee's investigators. "Let's go to the managements. They were witting." In all, about twenty‑five news organizations including those listed at the beginning of this article) provided cover for the Agency.
== end of quote ==
This is not about DNC hacking. Hacking is just a smokescreen. The real game is to prevent any change in the USA foreign policy, especially in Syria and toward Russia. That's why they tried this "soft coup" against Trump. That's why NYT, CNN, etc published all those dirty stories.
Also many CIA bureaucrats do not want to be sent from bloated Washington headquarters to distant lands to do what they are supposed to do -- collect intelligence, not to engage is domestic politics (and they were fully engaged on the side of Hillary).
ilsm said... , January 14, 2017 at 06:08 AMPreparation and objects make one lucky.
Americans are remiss in ignoring Napoleon, many of his students, etc.
libezkova is worth reading.
The problem with HRC, Kagan or Leeden is they thought a new American century was strategy, then silled a lot of snake oil.
The past year we have had two war parties tilt for the White House. Neither has strategy, both morally bankrupt!RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> ilsm... , January 14, 2017 at 01:03 PMhttp://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/pacificaviet/riversidetranscript.html
Rev Martin Luther King at Riverside Church in NYC Apr 1967.
[Awesome, Dude. THX. Should be mandatory reading for everyone that votes or expresses political opinion in the US. As inappropriate as it is to cherry pick anything from this marvelous speech/sermon out of context to its entirety, this one tidbit really stood out:] "... There's something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, Be non-violent toward Jim Clark, but will curse and damn you when you say, "Be non-violent toward little brown Vietnamese children. There's something wrong with that press!..."ilsm -> RC AKA Darryl, Ron... , January 14, 2017 at 03:34 PMI wonder had I read it as a young man would I have the courage to accept it the way I do now after I have made all the wrong decisions.
He opened my eyes nearly as much as my friend Bob who had been an SF advisor at the province level and confirmed everything written about the corruption and plundering of the RVN government.
MLK was incredibly aware of the truth on the ground in Vietnam.
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Sep 05, 2016 | www.unz.com
438 CommentsA year or two ago, I saw the much-touted science fiction film Interstellar , and although the plot wasn't any good, one early scene was quite amusing. For various reasons, the American government of the future claimed that our Moon Landings of the late 1960s had been faked, a trick aimed at winning the Cold War by bankrupting Russia into fruitless space efforts of its own. This inversion of historical reality was accepted as true by nearly everyone, and those few people who claimed that Neil Armstrong had indeed set foot on the Moon were universally ridiculed as "crazy conspiracy theorists." This seems a realistic portrayal of human nature to me.
Obviously, a large fraction of everything described by our government leaders or presented in the pages of our most respectable newspapers-from the 9/11 attacks to the most insignificant local case of petty urban corruption-could objectively be categorized as a "conspiracy theory" but such words are never applied. Instead, use of that highly loaded phrase is reserved for those theories, whether plausible or fanciful, that do not possess the endorsement stamp of establishmentarian approval.
Put another way, there are good "conspiracy theories" and bad "conspiracy theories," with the former being the ones promoted by pundits on mainstream television shows and hence never described as such. I've sometimes joked with people that if ownership and control of our television stations and other major media outlets suddenly changed, the new information regime would require only a few weeks of concerted effort to totally invert all of our most famous "conspiracy theories" in the minds of the gullible American public. The notion that nineteen Arabs armed with box-cutters hijacked several jetliners, easily evaded our NORAD air defenses, and reduced several landmark buildings to rubble would soon be universally ridiculed as the most preposterous "conspiracy theory" ever to have gone straight from the comic books into the minds of the mentally ill, easily surpassing the absurd "lone gunman" theory of the JFK assassination.
Even without such changes in media control, huge shifts in American public beliefs have frequently occurred in the recent past, merely on the basis of implied association. In the initial weeks and months following the 2001 attacks, every American media organ was enlisted to denounce and vilify Osama Bin Laden, the purported Islamicist master-mind, as our greatest national enemy, with his bearded visage endlessly appearing on television and in print, soon becoming one of the most recognizable faces in the world. But as the Bush Administration and its key media allies prepared a war against Iraq, the images of the Burning Towers were instead regularly juxtaposed with mustachioed photos of dictator Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden's arch-enemy. As a consequence, by the time we attacked Iraq in 2003, polls revealed that some 70% of the American public believed that Saddam was personally involved in the destruction of our World Trade Center. By that date I don't doubt that many millions of patriotic but low-information Americans would have angrily denounced and vilified as a "crazy conspiracy theorist" anyone with the temerity to suggest that Saddam had not been behind 9/11, despite almost no one in authority having ever explicitly made such a fallacious claim.
These factors of media manipulation were very much in my mind a couple of years ago when I stumbled across a short but fascinating book published by the University of Texas academic press. The author of Conspiracy Theory in America was Prof. Lance deHaven-Smith, a former president of the Florida Political Science Association.
Based on an important FOIA disclosure, the book's headline revelation was that the CIA was very likely responsible for the widespread introduction of "conspiracy theory" as a term of political abuse, having orchestrated that development as a deliberate means of influencing public opinion.
During the mid-1960s there had been increasing public skepticism about the Warren Commission findings that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been solely responsible for President Kennedy's assassination, and growing suspicions that top-ranking American leaders had also been involved. So as a means of damage control, the CIA distributed a secret memo to all its field offices requesting that they enlist their media assets in efforts to ridicule and attack such critics as irrational supporters of "conspiracy theories." Soon afterward, there suddenly appeared statements in the media making those exact points, with some of the wording, arguments, and patterns of usage closely matching those CIA guidelines. The result was a huge spike in the pejorative use of the phrase, which spread throughout the American media, with the residual impact continuing right down to the present day. Thus, there is considerable evidence in support of this particular "conspiracy theory" explaining the widespread appearance of attacks on "conspiracy theories" in the public media.
But although the CIA appears to have effectively manipulated public opinion in order to transform the phrase "conspiracy theory" into a powerful weapon of ideological combat, the author also describes how the necessary philosophical ground had actually been prepared a couple of decades earlier. Around the time of the Second World War, an important shift in political theory caused a huge decline in the respectability of any "conspiratorial" explanation of historical events.
For decades prior to that conflict, one of our most prominent scholars and public intellectuals had been historian Charles Beard , whose influential writings had heavily focused on the harmful role of various elite conspiracies in shaping American policy for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many, with his examples ranging from the earliest history of the United States down to the nation's entry into WWI. Obviously, researchers never claimed that all major historical events had hidden causes, but it was widely accepted that some of them did, and attempting to investigate those possibilities was deemed a perfectly acceptable academic enterprise.
However, Beard was a strong opponent of American entry into the Second World War, and he was marginalized in the years that followed, even prior to his death in 1948. Many younger public intellectuals of a similar bent also suffered the same fate, or were even purged from respectability and denied any access to the mainstream media. At the same time, the totally contrary perspectives of two European political philosophers, Karl Popper and Leo Strauss , gradually gained ascendancy in American intellectual circles, and their ideas became dominant in public life.
Popper, the more widely influential, presented broad, largely theoretical objections to the very possibility of important conspiracies ever existing, suggesting that these would be implausibly difficult to implement given the fallibility of human agents; what might appear a conspiracy actually amounted to individual actors pursuing their narrow aims. Even more importantly, he regarded "conspiratorial beliefs" as an extremely dangerous social malady, a major contributing factor to the rise of Nazism and other deadly totalitarian ideologies. His own background as an individual of Jewish ancestry who had fled Austria in 1937 surely contributed to the depth of his feelings on these philosophical matters.
Meanwhile, Strauss, a founding figure in modern neo-conservative thought, was equally harsh in his attacks upon conspiracy analysis, but for polar-opposite reasons. In his mind, elite conspiracies were absolutely necessary and beneficial, a crucial social defense against anarchy or totalitarianism, but their effectiveness obviously depended upon keeping them hidden from the prying eyes of the ignorant masses. His main problem with "conspiracy theories" was not that they were always false, but they might often be true, and therefore their spread was potentially disruptive to the smooth functioning of society. So as a matter of self-defense, elites needed to actively suppress or otherwise undercut the unauthorized investigation of suspected conspiracies.
Even for most educated Americans, theorists such as Beard, Popper, and Strauss are probably no more than vague names mentioned in textbooks, and that was certainly true in my own case. But while the influence of Beard seems to have largely disappeared in elite circles, the same is hardly true of his rivals. Popper probably ranks as one of the founders of modern liberal thought, with an individual as politically influential as left-liberal financier George Soros claiming to be his intellectual disciple . Meanwhile, the neo-conservative thinkers who have totally dominated the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement for the last couple of decades often proudly trace their ideas back to Strauss.
So, through a mixture of Popperian and Straussian thinking, the traditional American tendency to regard elite conspiracies as a real but harmful aspect of our society was gradually stigmatized as either paranoid or politically dangerous, laying the conditions for its exclusion from respectable discourse.
By 1964, this intellectual revolution had largely been completed, as indicated by the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the famous article by political scientist Richard Hofstadter critiquing the so-called "paranoid style" in American politics , which he denounced as the underlying cause of widespread popular belief in implausible conspiracy theories. To a considerable extent, he seemed to be attacking straw men, recounting and ridiculing the most outlandish conspiratorial beliefs, while seeming to ignore the ones that had been proven correct. For example, he described how some of the more hysterical anti-Communists claimed that tens of thousands of Red Chinese troops were hidden in Mexico, preparing an attack on San Diego, while he failed to even acknowledge that for years Communist spies had indeed served near the very top of the U.S. government. Not even the most conspiratorially minded individual suggests that all alleged conspiracies are true, merely that some of them might be.
Most of these shifts in public sentiment occurred before I was born or when I was a very young child, and my own views were shaped by the rather conventional media narratives that I absorbed. Hence, for nearly my entire life, I always automatically dismissed all of the so-called "conspiracy theories" as ridiculous, never once even considering that any of them might possibly be true.
To the extent that I ever thought about the matter, my reasoning was simple and based on what seemed like good, solid common sense. Any conspiracy responsible for some important public event must surely have many separate "moving parts" to it, whether actors or actions taken, let us say numbering at least 100 or more. Now given the imperfect nature of all attempts at concealment, it would surely be impossible for all of these to be kept entirely hidden. So even if a conspiracy were initially 95% successful in remaining undetected, five major clues would still be left in plain sight for investigators to find. And once the buzzing cloud of journalists noticed these, such blatant evidence of conspiracy would certainly attract an additional swarm of energetic investigators, tracing those items back to their origins, with more pieces gradually being uncovered until the entire cover-up likely collapsed. Even if not all the crucial facts were ever determined, at least the simple conclusion that there had indeed been some sort of conspiracy would quickly become established.
However, there was a tacit assumption in my reasoning, one that I have since decided was entirely false. Obviously, many potential conspiracies either involve powerful governmental officials or situations in which their disclosure would represent a source of considerable embarrassment to such individuals. But I had always assumed that even if government failed in its investigatory role, the dedicated bloodhounds of the Fourth Estate would invariably come through, tirelessly seeking truth, ratings, and Pulitzers. However, once I gradually began realizing that the media was merely "Our American Pravda" and perhaps had been so for decades, I suddenly recognized the flaw in my logic. If those five-or ten or twenty or fifty-initial clues were simply ignored by the media, whether through laziness, incompetence, or much less venial sins, then there would be absolutely nothing to prevent successful conspiracies from taking place and remaining undetected, perhaps even the most blatant and careless ones.
In fact, I would extend this notion to a general principle. Substantial control of the media is almost always an absolute prerequisite for any successful conspiracy, the greater the degree of control the better. So when weighing the plausibility of any conspiracy, the first matter to investigate is who controls the local media and to what extent.
Let us consider a simple thought-experiment. For various reasons these days, the entire American media is extraordinarily hostile to Russia, certainly much more so than it ever was toward the Communist Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s. Hence I would argue that the likelihood of any large-scale Russian conspiracy taking place within the operative zone of those media organs is virtually nil. Indeed, we are constantly bombarded with stories of alleged Russian conspiracies that appear to be "false positives," dire allegations seemingly having little factual basis or actually being totally ridiculous. Meanwhile, even the crudest sort of anti-Russian conspiracy might easily occur without receiving any serious mainstream media notice or investigation.
This argument may be more than purely hypothetical. A crucial turning point in America's renewed Cold War against Russia was the passage of the 2012 Magnitsky Act by Congress, punitively targeting various supposedly corrupt Russian officials for their alleged involvement in the illegal persecution and death of an employee of Bill Browder, an American hedge-fund manager with large Russian holdings. However, there's actually quite a bit of evidence that it was Browder himself who was actually the mastermind and beneficiary of the gigantic corruption scheme, while his employee was planning to testify against him and was therefore fearful of his life for that reason. Naturally, the American media has provided scarcely a single mention of these remarkable revelations regarding what might amount to a gigantic Magnitsky Hoax of geopolitical significance.
To some extent the creation of the Internet and the vast proliferation of alternative media outlets, including my own small webzine , have somewhat altered this depressing picture. So it is hardly surprising that a very substantial fraction of the discussion dominating these Samizdat-like publications concerns exactly those subjects regularly condemned as "crazy conspiracy theories" by our mainstream media organs. Such unfiltered speculation must surely be a source of considerable irritation and worry to government officials who have long relied upon the complicity of their tame media organs to allow their serious misdeeds to pass unnoticed and unpunished. Indeed, several years ago a senior Obama Administration official argued that the free discussion of various "conspiracy theories" on the Internet was so potentially harmful that government agents should be recruited to "cognitively infiltrate" and disrupt them, essentially proposing a high-tech version of the highly controversial Cointelpro operations undertaken by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.
Until just a few years ago I'd scarcely even heard of Charles Beard, once ranked among the towering figures of 20th century American intellectual life . But the more I've discovered the number of serious crimes and disasters that have completely escaped substantial media scrutiny, the more I wonder what other matters may still remain hidden. So perhaps Beard was correct all along in recognizing the respectability of "conspiracy theories," and we should return to his traditional American way of thinking, notwithstanding endless conspiratorial propaganda campaigns by the CIA and others to persuade us that we should dismiss such notions without any serious consideration.
For Further Reading:
- Our American Pravda
- American Pravda: Was General Patton Assassinated?
- American Pravda: Alexander Cockburn and the British Spies
- John McCain: When "Tokyo Rose" Ran for President
- The Good Fortune of Mr. Browder? – Israel Shamir
- The Magnitsky Hoax? – Philip Giraldi
- Kirt says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 4:26 am GMT • 100 Words
Conspiracy is simply a plan or agreement by more than one person to do something evil and then the pursuit of that plan. Secrecy may be needed for the success of a conspiracy, but it is not essential to the definition.
Were it essential to the definition, you could never prove the existence of a conspiracy. Either secrecy would be maintained and there would be little or no evidence or secrecy would not be maintained and the plan would become known and by definition not be a conspiracy.
• Replies: @Erik Sieven "Conspiracy is simply a plan or agreement by more than one person to do something evil and then the pursuit of that plan." but probably everything think that what he does is good, not evil Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Pat Casey says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 4:55 am GMT • 100 Words
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."
–William Casey, CIA Director, from a first staff meeting in 1981
You can read the context of that quote according to the person who claims to be its original source here:
I think it's worth pointing out what I've never seen explained about that quote, a quote with as much currency in the conspiracy theory fever swamps as any single quote has ever had. The point of the disinformation campaign was not to manipulate the public but to manipulate the soviets. Because our CIA analysts spent so much time unriddling the soviet media, we figured their CIA analysts were doing the same thing with ours.
• Replies: @AnotherLover People dismiss obviousness and redundancy, yet often both are necessary to fully paint the picture. Where you wrote:"The point of the disinformation campaign was not to manipulate the public but to manipulate the soviets"
you could have been more accurate by continuing:
"by manipulating the public."
Ah, redundant and obvious to be sure, but more complete, no? Should it pacify the average prole to know that not even their acquiescence is desired of them, but that they are useful as a disinformation tool? Have things changed since then? Is less intelligence publicly available today? Or more? And what lessons did the CIA learn in manipulating public opinion by domestic propaganda operations in the meantime?
Sure, the context of the quote adds the realism it's clearly lacking as it floats by itself surrounded by quotation marks, yet the takeaway is the same, is it not? A massive intelligence operation designed to confuse the public with the media is what we've got on the table. Let that sink in good and hard. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- FKA Max says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 4:56 am GMT • 400 Words
Mr. Unz,
this study/paper might by of interest to you: emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/CONSPIRE.doc
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Note: This paper was published in Political Psychology 15: 733-744, 1994. This is the original typescript sent to the journal, it does not include any editorial changes that may have been made. The journal itself is not available online, to my knowledge.
Belief in Conspiracy Theories
Ted Goertzel1
Running Head: Belief in Conspiracy Theories.
KEY WORDS: conspiracy theories, anomia, trust
Table Three
Means Scores of Racial/Ethnic Groups on Attitude Scales
White[W] Hispanic[H] Black[B]
Scale
Belief in Conspiracies 2.5[W] 2.8[H] 3.3[B]
Anomia 3.4[W] 3.8[H] 4.1[B]
Trust 3.7[W] 3.3[H] 3.1[B]
Note: All scales varied from 1 to 5, with 3 as a neutral score.One of the most interesting discussions of the paper:
Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All CommentsIt is puzzling that conspiratorial thinking has been overlooked in the extensive research on authoritarianism which has dominated quantitative work in political psychology since the 1950s. One possible explanation is that much of this work focuses on right-wing authoritarianism (Altmeyer, 1988), while conspiratorial thinking is characteristic of alienated thinkers on both the right and the left (Citrin, et al., 1975; Graumann, 1987; Berlet, 1992). Even more surprisingly, however, conspiratorial thinking has not been a focus of the efforts to measure "left-wing authoritarianism" (Stone, 1980; Eysenck, 1981; LeVasseur & Gold, 1993) or of research with the "dogmatism" concept (Rokeach, 1960) which was intended to overcome the ideological bias in authoritarianism measures.
On a more fundamental level, the difficulty with existing research traditions may be their focus on the content of beliefs rather than the res[p]ondent's cognitive processes or emotional makeup. As I have argued elsewhere (Goertzel, 1987), most studies of authoritarianism simply ask people what they believe and then assume that these beliefs must be based on underlying psychological processes which go unmeasured. Since these scales ask mostly about beliefs held by those on the right, it is not surprising that they find authoritarianism to be a right-wing phenomenon. Research with projective tests (Rothman and Lichter, 1982) and biographical materials (Goertzel, 1992), on the other hand, has confirmed that many aspects of authoritarian thinking can be found on both the left and the right.
- Carlton Meyer says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 5:08 am GMT • 900 Words
One of the greatest conspiracy theories of our time is that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for 9-11. This is refuted by the US government, despite occasional suggestions by political leaders. From my blog, that has links:
May 21, 2016 – Another 9-11 Truther
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In my April 16th blog post, I mentioned that former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman and 9-11 Commission co-chair Bob Graham had become a "Truther", i.e. one who openly doubts the official 9-11 story. It seems the powers that be tried to shut him up. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) openly criticized the Obama administration for trying to strong-arm Graham, who is pushing to declassify 28 pages of the 9/11 report dealing with Saudi Arabia. He recounted how Rep. Gwen Graham (D-Fla.) and her father, former Senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), were detained by the FBI at Dulles International Airport outside Washington. He said the FBI "took a former senator, a former governor, grabbed him in an airport, hustled him into a room with armed force to try to intimidate him into taking different positions on issues of public policy and important national policy."Last week, another Republican member of the 9-11 Commission, former Navy Secretary John F Lehman, said there was clear evidence that Saudi government employees were part of a support network for the 9/11 hijackers – an allegation, congressional officials have confirmed, that is addressed in detail in the 28 pages. Lehman said: "there was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi government."Events this past year in Syria highlighted close ties between Saudi Arabia, Israel, and our CIA The 9-11 attacks generated the "Pearl Harbor" type of anger they needed to rally the American people to support their semi-secret plan to conquer all the Arab world.
Here is a summary of events for those confused by American corporate media. Al Qaeda is not an organization. It is a CIA computer database of armed Arab nationalists who violently oppose western domination of the Arab world. (Al Qaeda is Arabic for database.) This database was established by the CIA in the 1980s when our CIA trained and armed Arabs to fight the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Osama Bin Laden (OBL) was never an official leader since it has never been a real organization, although he did lead a large group of Arab nationalists who lived in Afghanistan.
OBL had nothing to do with 9-11, he didn't even know about it until it was reported in the media. He was never formally accused of the attacks because there is zero evidence. OBL was a wealthy Saudi who is said to have inspired the attacks. Our government blamed a Kuwaiti, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad (pictured), and a dozen Saudis who died in the airplanes. These persons had never been to Afghanistan and are said to have planned and trained for the attacks in the Philippines, Germany, and the USA. Then why was Afghanistan invaded, and later Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, and Yemen? But we did not invade Saudi Arabia! Instead, recall that days after 9-11 several jets from our federal Justice Department rounded up Saudi suspects in the USA and flew them home before FBI agents could ask them questions.
All this explains why the accused mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, has yet to go to trial almost 16 years since 9-11! He has not been allowed to speak to anyone outside the CIA Even the 9-11 Commission was not allowed to interview him. The U.S. military set up a kangaroo court at Gitmo to hold a trial many years ago, but brave military defense lawyers keep causing delays by insisting on a fair trial. It seems evidence is so "sensitive" that our CIA does not want it revealed. even in a secret military court. Whenever documents are requested by the defense, some are destroyed instead! This included all the CIA interrogations of the accused!
Our media propaganda is so prevalent that nearly all Americans think OBL was the 9-11 mastermind, and since he is dead the case is closed. However, there is zero evidence of his involvement, something our government has long acknowledged. Americans watched thousands of hours of television coverage of the 9-11 attacks. Ask one if they think the accused mastermind of the attacks should be put on trial, and they'll have no idea what you are talking about. More Americans are becoming aware and demanding action, who are demeaned as crazy "truthers", which now include two former members of our government's official 9-11 Commission once tasked with investigating these crimes.
The failed invasion of Syria has revealed that the Saudis, our CIA (with its defense contractor and media allies), and Israel have been working to conquer all the Arab world and control it with corruption and puppet dictators. Over the past couple years the Saudi government has changed hands and this CIA-Saudi-Israeli alliance has frayed, mostly because of failures in Syria and Yemen. Will the Saudis now be blamed for 9-11 to satisfy public demands for the truth, and to protect other conspirators? Will this lead to a CIA-Israeli coup to take over Saudi Arabia? Or will other high-level truthers surface and expose our nation's darkest secret? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Lot says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 5:14 am GMT • 100 Words
Given how easy it is to create a conspiracy theory, most of them will be crazy.
Another problem with elite conspiracies is that elites usually do not have to act in secret because they already are in control. For Kennedy, a centrist cold warrior, his views already reflected those of elites, maybe even more so than Johnson.
The other problem is that actual criminal conspiracies by elites quite often are discovered, such as Watergate and Iran Contra.
• Replies: @AbrahamGiven how easy it is to create a conspiracy theory, most of them will be crazy.A statement that appears straight out of the CIA's playbook.
Another problem with elite conspiracies is that elites usually do not have to act in secret because they already are in control.
Such control does not imply they have nothing to hide, particularly when exposure of the deed would have damaging repercussions for them.
For Kennedy, a centrist cold warrior, his views already reflected those of elites, maybe even more so than Johnson.
It didn't reflect that of Israel's elites.
After JFK's assassination, American foreign policy vis a vis Israel was completely reversed under Johnson, who hung the crew of the USS Liberty out to dry.
The other problem is that actual criminal conspiracies by elites quite often are discovered, such as Watergate and Iran Contra.
How is this a problem? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Chief Seattle says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 5:17 am GMT • 100 Words
So, a conspiracy theory is a theory without media backing. There's no better recent example of this than when the DNC emails were released by wikileaks during their convention. The story put forth was that Russian hackers were responsible, and were trying to throw the election to their buddy Trump. The evidence for this? Zero. And yet it became a plausible explanation in the media, overnight.
Maybe it's true, maybe not, but if the roles had been reversed, the media would be telling its proponents to take off their tin foil hats.
• Replies: @art guerrilla ahhh, but 'Russkie!/squirrel!' worked, didn't it ? ? ?
virtually NOTHING about the actual content of the emails...
what was hysterical, was a followup not too long afterwards, where pelosi 'warned' that there might be a whole raft of other emails which said bad stuff and stuff, and, um, they were -like- probably, um, all, uh, fake and stuff...
it really is a funny tragi-comedy, isn't it ? ? ?
...then why am i crying inside... , @anti_republocrat Note also that the allegations immediately become "fact" because they were reported by someone else. As Business Insider reported, "Amid mounting evidence of Russia's involvement in the hack of the Democratic National Committee...," without any specificity whatsoever as to what that "mounting evidence" was (most likely multiple reports in other media) never mind that the article goes on to quote James Clapper, "...we are not quite ready yet to make a call on attribution." WTF! Here, read it yourself: http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-dnc-hack-black-propaganda-2016-7Totally mindless. So not only is Russia hacking, but we know it's intention is to influence US elections!!! And now their hacking voter DBs and will likely hack our vote tabulating machines. You can't make this s**t up. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Miro23 says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 5:20 am GMT • 300 Words
The British and Americans have been the victims of conspiracies (False Flag operations) for years.
For example:
The Irgun bombing of the King David Hotel (headquarters of the British Mandate Government of Palestine) in which Zionist activists dressed as Arabs placed milk churns filled with explosives against the main columns of the building killing 91 people and injuring 44. Israeli prime Minister Netanyahu, attended a celebration to commemorate the event.
Operation Susannah (Lavon Affair) where Israeli operatives impersonating Arabs bombed British and American cinemas, libraries and educational centers in Egypt to destabilize the country and keep British troops committed to the Middle East.
Or June 8, 1967, the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty with unmarked aircraft and torpedo boats. 34 men were killed and 171 wounded, with the attack in international waters following over nine hours of close surveillance. When the ship failed to sink, the Israeli government concocted an elaborate story to cover the crime. Original plan to blame the sinking with all lives lost on the Egyptians and draw the US into the war.
Or Israelis and U.S. Zionists appearing all over the most recent WTC 9/11 "Operation" with Israelis once again impersonating Arabs in a historic deception/terror action of a type that seems to carry a lot of kudos with old Israeli ex-terrorist Likudniks. Israeli agents were sent to film the historic day (as they later admitted on Israeli TV), with the celebrations including photos of themselves with a background of the burning towers where thousands of Americans were being incinerated.
Iraq was destroyed as a result of 9/11 but unfortunately for the conspirators, the momentum wasn't sufficient for a general war including Iran. Also the general war would have included the nuclear angle and justified the activation of a neo-con led Emergency Regime (dictatorship) in the US enforced with the newly printed Patriot Act and Homeland Security troops – or maybe that's just another Conspiracy Theory?
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz I accept that your explanation of the attack on USS Liberty is relatively plausible but another which runs it close is that Israel had to ensure that there was no proof left of the true order of events which were not in accordance with the Israeli official version. So I ask what are your sources?Likewise, if you are saying that suicidal hijackers flew planes into buildings on 9/11 but that it was organised by Mossad or other Israelis your story needs a lot of filling out and evidence to be credible. Or are you merely saying the Israelis knew what was going to
happen and let it go ahead because it could be turned to their advantage? , @Konga So true!
But you forgot the two missiles shot from a NATO naval and HQ base in Spain towards Damascus, shot down by the Russians (two weeks before the "agreement" on chemical weapons, remember?) and then attributed to Israel's drills turned wrong... , @exiled off mainstreet The Israelis learned their false flag lesson from the Nazis, who used concentration camp inmates dressed as Polish soldiers as part of a phony attack on the frontier radio station "Sender Gleiwitz" a day or so before they invaded Poland. , @WowJustWow Come on. If you're going to false-flag 9/11, you hijack one plane. Hijacking four planes is exactly the kind of plan that has too many moving parts to be sensible. And it didn't go according to plan! Only three out of four planes hit their targets. If the hijackers on United 93 had been fully subdued and found to be Israelis in funny clothes, the other three planes would have been for nothing.I can see the USS Liberty one though. I've never heard a plausible explanation for it. Reply , @Sam Shama [Oh well, a delicious sweet dish will attract a fly as much as a gourmet.]
LOL. I'll compile a mental list of both. Aren't the comments missing someone btw? , Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jason Liu says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 6:19 am GMT
Kinda hinges on how people define conspiracy, doesn't it? Does a group of powerful people scheming constitute a conspiracy, or does it need to be lizard people in the White House?
The former assuredly happens all the time. And those conspiracies are likely quite boring.
• Replies: @Nathan Hale Correct. Of course conspiracies are real.Among the more famous ones include:
The Watergate break-in and the coverup.
Operation Valkyrie and other plots against Hitler.
The overthrow of the Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954.
In the corporate world, it often seems that upper management spends a bulk of their time conspiring against one another or entering into secret talks to sell the company to a rival, unbeknownst to the employees or shareholders. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
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- Emblematic says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 7:17 am GMT
I get the sense Ron's building up to something.
For those who haven't seen it, can I recommend Ryan Dawson's 'War by Deception':
• Replies: @Pat Casey
I get the sense Ron's building up to something.One can only hope. This time he mentioned 9/11--- so that base is covered; no need to say more about that than that; besides I doubt even he could add to what has already been published and posted on this site re that Big Lie. I would like to see how he weighs all the evidence on RFK's assassination, what he would be willing to call what looks like nothing as much as what MK-Ultra was about. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- polistra says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 8:03 am GMT • 100 Words
Simplifying one "contradiction": Our elites have never been primarily anti-Russian or pro-Russian.
Since 1946 our elites have been purely GLOBALIST, and their secondary feelings toward Russia strictly follow from this primary goal.
At first Russia was an obstacle to globalism, blocking much of the UN's efforts. Our elites were anti-Russian. After 1962 or so, Russia became the main driver of the UN, so our elites were pro-Russian. Since 1989, Russia has been the guiding star for ANTI-globalist forces, so our elites are FEROCIOUSLY anti-Russian.
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz I have a problem with the idea of likeminded elites who all move in srep together. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- smiddy says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 8:13 am GMT • 500 Words
Mr. Unz's direct confrontation with this topic leads me to feel a sense of sentimentality or coming full circle as my "red-pilled" experience literally started with his The Myth of American Meritocracy a little over 2 years ago (I finally looked into the "white privilege" I was "highly exposed" to in college).
Long story short, I was a lazy liberal beforehand, now a highly motivated conservative; nothing helps one get their ish together better than understanding the trajectory at which our society is heading. The Myth of American Meritocracy singularly led me to have a more open mind in understanding how non-congruent the mainstream narrative can be with man's shared universal reality, and having spent way too much time in school learning research methodology, I finally applied it via whim thereafter to criminal statistics (but we know where this story ends), then WW2, the mainstream narrative of which I grew up worshiping
For someone who, when I was naive, hung on to every word one heard or read in the countless amount of hours I've spent in American history classes, for me to learn the hard way of Operation Keelhaul, the Haavara Agreement, the disease epidemic, the migrant crisis (before hand), the hand THE banksters probably played (in playing both sides), and so on, it becomes all too clear how amazingly systematically corrupt our academic system has become. Not once did I ever hear one smidgen about those extremely large plot points; they're so consistently implicitly left out of the script its terrifying.
Alternating to my freshman year of high school now, when I was still naive, I complained to our just hired 22 year old (conveniently) Jewish teacher (fresh out of the Ivy League but back to sacrifice where he had graduated high school, he had always reminded us) over having to read about the Little Rock 9 and Ann Frank for literally (in my case) the 4th time (each). Point is, even when I was entirely clueless, and had no defensive instinct at all, it still didn't feel healthy to read over and over again; I was emotionally exhausted already. I accepted their stories at face value, faced the guilt, and just wanted to move on, yet according to my teacher I "lacked empathy" (so if only we were taught about how the Irish were treated in the 17th we'd be fine). It really is this kind of dwelling on the past that has been institutionalized, and its borderline brain-washing, regardless of the said tragedy's validity.
There is one such particular event of WW2 that, once naive, I've personally cried over more than any other historical event easily (perhaps even more than anything subjectively experienced), much in thanks to programmed televising So what's so weird about all of this, is its like a meta-intellectual betrayal, but with all the emotional connotations of a woman who wronged you in all the worse ways (and she's inevitably waiting in seemingly every dark corner of history you delve into, thus the "endless rabbit hole" you fall through). And its this implicit brand of deceit that is patently feminine which can be inductively read from the MSM to "read the tea leaves"
I could go on and on but really I initially just wanted to thank you Mr. Unz, your publication, and your current and past writing staff. I don't even want to imagine a world where I had never stumbled upon your work!
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- Gordo says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 9:11 am GMT
Excellent article Mr. Unz.
- JL says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 10:40 am GMT • 100 Words
Perhaps the media tried too hard, were too eager to be complicit, and now they've completely lost the plot. The rise of Trump, in the face of a completely and uniformly hostile media, suggests that a large part of the American public, consciously or not, now completely rejects entire media narratives and assumes the exact opposite to be true. And they're panicking. Not knowing what to do, they double and triple down on the same fail that got them into this mess. Truly interesting times.
Thanks, Mr. Unz, for your "small webzine".
• Replies: @John Jeremiah SmithThe rise of Trump, in the face of a completely and uniformly hostile media, suggests that a large part of the American public, consciously or not, now completely rejects entire media narratives and assumes the exact opposite to be true. And they're panicking.Are they? Or, have they simply fired the first few rounds of easily-dispatched, easily-targeted artillery? I do note that this is the most massive full-court press in support of the oligarchy that I have ever seen. But, I sense that political wars have moved from the court of public opinion and perception, into the courtyards of the moneyed elite. Inasmuch as no rich person has ever believed that he or she has enough money and power, the national political conflict is now composed solely of issues that affect the wealth and power of the 0.1%, which is itself segmented into areas of economic focus and varying forms of wealth acquisition. For example, if air transport systems threaten the wealth and power of ocean-based shipping, that competition between oligarchs will morph into politically-expressed contexts.There is absolutely no concern, anywhere within the dominion of the 0.1%, with human values, human rights, or any of that sort of ethically-principled hoo-hoo. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Gene Tuttle says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 10:41 am GMT • 300 Words
I've often used the argument myself that conspiracies inevitably have short shelf lives in the US because it was so difficult for Americans to keep secrets. The article makes a useful point in suggesting that secret plots, even after being revealed, may nevertheless remain widely ignored. Ideology, group-think, pack journalism etc. are powerful forces, often subconsciously at work, preventing alternative theories from developing legs.
Though long an admirer of Karl Popper, I hadn't strongly associated him with attacks on conspiracy theories per se. As an American "outsider" living abroad most of my adult life, I've all too often encountered those who assumed my background alone explained an argument of mine that they didn't like. Popper had hit the nail on the head when he wrote about
"a widespread and dangerous fashion of our time of not taking arguments seriously, and at their face value, at least tentatively, but of seeing in them nothing but a way in which deeper irrational motives and tendencies express themselves." It was "the attitude of looking at once for the unconscious motives and determinants in the social habitat of the thinker, instead of first examining the validity of the argument itself."
The powerful nazi and communist ideologies of his day assumed that one's " blood " or " class " precluded "correct" thinking. Those politically incorrect challengers to their own totalitarian weltanschauung were (to put it mildly) persecuted as conspirators. No doubt, as Ron Unz notes, Popper's personal experience "contributed the depth of his feelings" - I would say skepticism – about conspiracy claims.
But the author of the " Open Society " had an open mind and I suspect he'd find the thesis reasonable that real conspiracies can both be uncovered and largely ignored because so many simply opt to ignore them. In such cases, evidence and "not taking arguments seriously" often reflects "intellectual groupieism," emotions, professional insecurities as well as venal collective interests.
• Replies: @Connecticut Famer "But the author of the "Open Society" had an open mind and I suspect he'd find the thesis reasonable that real conspiracies can both be uncovered and largely ignored because so many simply opt to ignore them. In such cases, evidence and "not taking arguments seriously" often reflects "intellectual groupieism," emotions, professional insecurities as well as venal collective interests."Possibly as in the JFK case? I actually watched Lee Harvey Oswald get drilled by the man who was later identified as Jack Ruby (real surname "Rubenstein") live on television. The minute it happened and even at age 16 at the time I smelled a rat. Who was ultimately behind it all is something which I can't answer and care not to speculate upon, but to this day I remain suspicious about the circumstances surrounding Oswald's death and Ruby's subsequent dissembling. , @Bill Jones Nice try.
The Manhattan Project was successfully kept secret despite its scope and the fact that it consumed 17% of the electricity production of the entire US. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Rehmat says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 12:03 pm GMT • 200 Words
There are more so-called "conspiracy theories" claimed by the US government, CIA, and organized Jewry than the Jews may have been killed by the Nazis. The "conspiracy theorists" like the "terrorists" are chosen by the Zionist-controlled mainstream media.
Like the September 11, 2001 attacks, the lie that Iran's president Ahmadinejad called, WIPE ISRAEL OFF THE MAP, is still kept alive by the Organized Jewry even though Israel's Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor admitted that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never said Iran wanted to "wipe Israel off the face of the map" in an interview with Al Jazeera in April 2012.
American investigative writer and author, Robert Parry, claimed on September 19, 2009 that Ahmadinejad never denied Holocaust. He just challenged Israel and the western powers to allow an open debate to find the truth behind the Zionist Holy Cow, "Six Million Died".
In reality, the only country that has been 'wiped off the map' is the 5,000-year-old Palestine by Europe's unwanted Jews.
Iran's current president Dr. Hassan Rouhani like Dr. Ahmadinejad, is also blamed for denying the Zionist Holy Holocaust as parroted by Wiesel, which he never did, saying it's up to historians to decide who's lying.
https://rehmat1.com/2013/09/28/holocaust-the-word-rouhani-never-uttered/
• Replies: @Moi If the Zionists can lie so much about Israeli history (e.g. The Arabs encouraged Palestinians to flee, that the Arabs were about to attack Israel in 1967, land without a people for a people without a land, etc.), one can only wonder about the official holocaust narrative of 6M dead, gas chambers, etc.).I've not read Elie Weisel's book Night, but I understand that no where does he mention gas chambers in Auschwitz.... , @dahoit The only conspiracy with legs is the 70 year old Zionist one,and the only one that matters today.
And only fellow travelers or their duped concern trolls disagree on that obvious truth.
Today's lying times says latent racism by the Danes is behind their resistance to their nation being inundated by the refugees of the zionists war of terror.
Coming from the malevolent racist scum in history,it sure wreaks of total hypocrisy,and another nail in divide and conquer.
Can one point out one synagogue or rabbinical statement condemning the 70 years of CCs and the imprisonment of Gaza?
The only Jewish opponents(outside of a few dissidents),the ultra Orthodox are considered self haters,as are the dissidents. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- The Alarmist says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 12:20 pm GMT
I'll believe in the moon landings as soon as the Mars Rover shows all of us what Congress Woman Shiela Jackson Lee was looking for when she asked if it could see the flags we left on the moon.
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz Are you presuming that it should be easy to travel over the entire moon surface and easily arrive at a precisely defined point - and that where the flags are is such a point? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- anonymous says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 12:24 pm GMT • 300 Words
One conspiracy theory is that some of the wilder, more incredible notions of what may have taken place are deliberately circulated so as to muddy the waters and discredit those who question the party line. For example, outlandish claims by some that no planes were crashed on 9-11 but were really just holograms are seized upon by supposed debunkers as being representative of all skeptics, overshadowing the more reasonable types who question the narrative. This seems to be quite deliberate.
The mainstream American press is the freest in the world, we've been told endlessly, and at some point I realized that I was reading these accolades to itself in the very same press. Not the most objective source one comes to realize. Now on the internet it seems there are those who appear to fan out everywhere to influence the discussion, spread their slogans and shout down opposing ideas. Paid trolls and others?Conspiracies exist. Consider the Gulf of Tonkin fabrication which certainly involved many actors and yet the general public was kept in the dark about the real facts. The results need not be rehashed yet again. There's a streak of denial in most people. They don't want to contemplate the idea that FDR may have deliberately allowed American servicemen to die at Pearl Harbor in order to get the war he wanted. Stepping back from it all to get a long distance view one can see the patterns of deceit and manipulation all throughout American political life. It's not just incidental but rather is built in.
• Replies: @SolontoCroesusStepping back from it all to get a long distance view one can see the patterns of deceit and manipulation all throughout American political life. It's not just incidental but rather is built in.Is this built-in deceit and manipulation unique to American life, or -- beyond the usual understandings about human nature -- is the systematic or institutionalized "deceit and manipulation" present in all cultures? in western cultures? in some but not all cultures? If the lattermost, in which cultures is "deceit and manipulation" less systematic and institutionalized?Was "deceit and manipulation" institutionalized into American life from the beginning -- by the Founders, or did USA deviate from its intended path at some point? If so, at what point? How did it happen?
Is there the possibility of redemption? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Pat Casey says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 12:44 pm GMT • 100 Words @Emblematic I get the sense Ron's building up to something.
For those who haven't seen it, can I recommend Ryan Dawson's 'War by Deception':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK6VLFdWJ4I
I get the sense Ron's building up to something.
One can only hope. This time he mentioned 9/11- so that base is covered; no need to say more about that than that; besides I doubt even he could add to what has already been published and posted on this site re that Big Lie. I would like to see how he weighs all the evidence on RFK's assassination, what he would be willing to call what looks like nothing as much as what MK-Ultra was about.
• Replies: @anonymous Pearl Harbor (covered in "Day of Deceit") is good starting point. I strongly encourage Mr. Unz to read Robert Stinnet's book next before moving on.FDR never intended that 2,400 Americans would die there. He just thought that if Japan "struck first", he could justify our entry into WWII to the public. What's really fascinating (and almost wholly unknown) is the sequence of events and headlines from December 8 to December 11, 1941, the date Hitler declared war on the USA.
While Pearl Harbor meant war with Japan, it did not necessarily guarantee war with Nazi Germany. For 72 hours, no one could be sure that Germany would declare war on us. Did FDR manipulate events post-Pearl Harbor to ensure it did happen? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 12:44 pm GMT • 100 Words @Miro23 The British and Americans have been the victims of conspiracies (False Flag operations) for years.
For example:
The Irgun bombing of the King David Hotel (headquarters of the British Mandate Government of Palestine) in which Zionist activists dressed as Arabs placed milk churns filled with explosives against the main columns of the building killing 91 people and injuring 44. Israeli prime Minister Netanyahu, attended a celebration to commemorate the event.
Operation Susannah (Lavon Affair) where Israeli operatives impersonating Arabs bombed British and American cinemas, libraries and educational centers in Egypt to destabilize the country and keep British troops committed to the Middle East.
Or June 8, 1967, the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty with unmarked aircraft and torpedo boats. 34 men were killed and 171 wounded, with the attack in international waters following over nine hours of close surveillance. When the ship failed to sink, the Israeli government concocted an elaborate story to cover the crime. Original plan to blame the sinking with all lives lost on the Egyptians and draw the US into the war.
Or Israelis and U.S. Zionists appearing all over the most recent WTC 9/11 "Operation" with Israelis once again impersonating Arabs in a historic deception/terror action of a type that seems to carry a lot of kudos with old Israeli ex-terrorist Likudniks. Israeli agents were sent to film the historic day (as they later admitted on Israeli TV), with the celebrations including photos of themselves with a background of the burning towers where thousands of Americans were being incinerated.
Iraq was destroyed as a result of 9/11 but unfortunately for the conspirators, the momentum wasn't sufficient for a general war including Iran. Also the general war would have included the nuclear angle and justified the activation of a neo-con led Emergency Regime (dictatorship) in the US enforced with the newly printed Patriot Act and Homeland Security troops - or maybe that's just another Conspiracy Theory?
I accept that your explanation of the attack on USS Liberty is relatively plausible but another which runs it close is that Israel had to ensure that there was no proof left of the true order of events which were not in accordance with the Israeli official version. So I ask what are your sources?
Likewise, if you are saying that suicidal hijackers flew planes into buildings on 9/11 but that it was organised by Mossad or other Israelis your story needs a lot of filling out and evidence to be credible. Or are you merely saying the Israelis knew what was going to
• Replies: @Miro23 [Sorry, long reply]
happen and let it go ahead because it could be turned to their advantage?The basic fact about the USS Liberty is that an American navy ship was attacked with the aim of sinking it, which is an Act of War since the ship was clearly marked.
In contrast, the attacking Israeli jets and torpedo boats were unmarked (i.e. they wanted to hide their identity), so a question is why were they unmarked if this was a standard military interception?
Whether the Israelis wanted to trigger a US attack on Egypt or hide their communications with regard to their attack on Syria is a secondary question. The main concern of the United States surely had to be to rescue their seamen and respond to the aggression.
And, this is where the story turns really nasty.
At least two rescue attempts were launched from US aircraft carriers nearby, but after the (obligatory) communication to Washington, both rescue flights were cancelled within minutes on direct orders of Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara (source: 6th Fleet Rear Admiral Lawrence Geis speaking in confidence to the senior Liberty survivor, Naval Security Group officer, Lieutenant Commander David Lewis in a meeting requested by Geis).
Surviving personnel all received strict orders not say anything to anyone about the attack.
Eyewitness accounts say that 4 nuclear armed aircraft were simultaneously launched from the aircraft carrier America on the instructions of President Johnson only to be recalled when, presumably, the information came through that the Israelis had not succeeded in sinking the Liberty. Nuclear weapons were not needed to defend the Liberty.
Also there was an oral history report from the American Embassy in Cairo, (now in the LBJ Library), which notes that the Embassy received an urgent message from Washington warning that Cairo was about to be bombed by US forces.
An investigation led by Thomas Moorer, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff held the opinion that the Israeli motive was to draw the US into war against Egypt , through a false subterfuge of the same type as their King David Hotel bombing and Lavon Affair operations.
Any rational person has to conclude that Johnson was virtually following Israeli orders, which raises the question of why? Maybe they were blackmailing him with regard to something else that was more important to him than the destruction of Cairo?
9/11 had some of the same features as other Israeli False Flag attacks against Britain and the US, such as Israelis dressed as Arabs (framed Arabs) motivated towards tricking these countries into military action against Arab states. In fact the Israeli involvement in 9/11 was much deeper and more generalized as shown in investigative reporter Christopher Bollyn's book, "Solving 9-11: The Deception That Changed the World". https://www.amazon.com/Solving-9-11-Deception-Changed-World/dp/0985322586/ref=cm_cr-mr-title
15 years later his account is supported in multiple ways from investigations in Florida (they didn't sneak in unseen – they were highly visible and got red carpet treatment with regard to visas etc. and they were completely incapable of flying the 9/11 airliners at the speeds and on the trajectories seen on the day + everyone who had contact with them was visited by the F.B.I. and told to shut up) - Source, a detailed and very interesting investigation by Daniel Hopsicker in "Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta and the 9/11 Cover-Up in Florida. https://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Terrorland-Mohamed-Cover-up-Florida/dp/0975290673/ref=cm_cr-mr-title
High-rise buildings don't collapse due to fire (reason given by the US government). All high rise fire disasters have been examined in detail, with most of them much more intense than the WTC ones, and no building collapsed - let alone in 7 seconds and three on the same day.
These Arabs didn't fly the jets and it's now clear that the buildings were taken down by placed explosives - the aim being to trick the US into an Iraq and Iran war and possibly launch an "Emergency" Neo-con regime (dictatorship) in the US led by Cheney and enforced by the Patriot Act/ Homeland security.
The other aspect here is that a government (and media) which genuinely represented the American people would give top priority to revealing the truth about the USS Liberty and 9/11 rather than engage in the present obfuscation, blocking, threats, smears and hiding of the truth. , @Alden Re: your first question about the USS Liberty. The media covered it up completely. I was a young adult who read the newspaper every day plus Atlantic. new Republic and sometimes Newsweek.
And I never, never heard about it until 20 years later when I began reading books about ZionismI've read the book written by survivors. They were severely coerced to not say a word about it. I wouldn't be surprised if they were not threatened with death if they talked. They were in the navy remember and subject to the military code of Justice which means no ha rays corpus no access to attorneys until the trial and other nasty things.
I can't have an opinion about 9/11 because there is no way I can discover the truth. Silverstein's insurance payout is just a version of a standard insurance scam. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- SolontoCroesus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 1:24 pm GMT • 100 Words @anonymous One conspiracy theory is that some of the wilder, more incredible notions of what may have taken place are deliberately circulated so as to muddy the waters and discredit those who question the party line. For example, outlandish claims by some that no planes were crashed on 9-11 but were really just holograms are seized upon by supposed debunkers as being representative of all skeptics, overshadowing the more reasonable types who question the narrative. This seems to be quite deliberate.
The mainstream American press is the freest in the world, we've been told endlessly, and at some point I realized that I was reading these accolades to itself in the very same press. Not the most objective source one comes to realize. Now on the internet it seems there are those who appear to fan out everywhere to influence the discussion, spread their slogans and shout down opposing ideas. Paid trolls and others?
Conspiracies exist. Consider the Gulf of Tonkin fabrication which certainly involved many actors and yet the general public was kept in the dark about the real facts. The results need not be rehashed yet again. There's a streak of denial in most people. They don't want to contemplate the idea that FDR may have deliberately allowed American servicemen to die at Pearl Harbor in order to get the war he wanted. Stepping back from it all to get a long distance view one can see the patterns of deceit and manipulation all throughout American political life. It's not just incidental but rather is built in.Stepping back from it all to get a long distance view one can see the patterns of deceit and manipulation all throughout American political life. It's not just incidental but rather is built in.
Is this built-in deceit and manipulation unique to American life, or - beyond the usual understandings about human nature - is the systematic or institutionalized "deceit and manipulation" present in all cultures? in western cultures? in some but not all cultures? If the lattermost, in which cultures is "deceit and manipulation" less systematic and institutionalized?
Was "deceit and manipulation" institutionalized into American life from the beginning - by the Founders, or did USA deviate from its intended path at some point? If so, at what point? How did it happen?
Is there the possibility of redemption?
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz It would be worth considering the different contributions to truth telling and also honest scepticism of the Puritan and other Protestant culture, and of the Enlightenment for a start. Some subjects were difficult - like whether there is a God for all Christians and of course the one that must have addled many brains: slavery. , @John Jeremiah SmithIs there the possibility of redemption?Of what is "redemption" constituted? Considering that fewer than 20% of American residents during the Revolution were actually involved in the revolt, with an estimated 40% preferring to retain the colony under monarchy, and considering that the ethical and political awareness of the Average American and the Average Illegal Resident Alien have gone downhill from there, can it honestly be said that there's enough true flavor of human rights and equal access/opportunity to redeem? , @Mulegino1 To my mind, the real point of deviation in the history of the United States is the Spanish American War, and the transformation of America from a tellurocratic to a thallasocratic power. America's traditional role had been that of a vast, continental, land based power, eschewing intervention in the affairs of Europe and the rest of the world outside the Western Hemisphere. (This is largely the reason that the Russian Czar allied with the Union in the American Civil War).Unfortunately, America's traditional tellurocratic role was abandonded - thanks to the likes of Admiral ("Victory through Sea Power") Mahan, John Hay, and the loopy Teddy Roosevelt, inter alia - and the nation went on to embrace the role of international arbiter and busybody, and became insatiable in the pursuit of empire, with catastrophic results for the world. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
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- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 1:32 pm GMT @polistra Simplifying one "contradiction":
Our elites have never been primarily anti-Russian or pro-Russian. Since 1946 our elites have been purely GLOBALIST, and their secondary feelings toward Russia strictly follow from this primary goal.
At first Russia was an obstacle to globalism, blocking much of the UN's efforts. Our elites were anti-Russian. After 1962 or so, Russia became the main driver of the UN, so our elites were pro-Russian. Since 1989, Russia has been the guiding star for ANTI-globalist forces, so our elites are FEROCIOUSLY anti-Russian.
I have a problem with the idea of likeminded elites who all move in srep together.
• Replies: @Bill Jones They don't move in lockstep-(I assume you meant) together.
They do however have a series of identical interests:Lower taxes on Capital Gains and Dividends than on Earned Income.
No barriers to entry to low-wage unskilled workers for jobs that need to be performed in the US.
No barriers to goods produced from low-wage countries, no matter what the conditions they are produced in.
Control of the Federal Reserve.
Tax-payer bailouts of failing institutions.
etc, etc.
If you want to get into it, I'm happy to. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- biz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 1:48 pm GMT • 200 Words
Actually, there is no symmetry in conspiracy theories as you imply.
The definition of a conspiracy theory is an explanation of events that traces them to a secret network, and when presented with contradictory evidence, simply enlarges the network of supposed conspirators rather than modifying the explanation.
So, just to cite one example, all of the 9/11 controlled demolition stuff is a conspiracy theory because at first it had the government and maybe the property owners in on the secret, but then the circle of supposed conspirators was enlarged to include the editors of Popular Mechanics after they did their study. Or take the moon landing, which involved 'only' thousands of NASA people until you point out that the astronauts left mirrors on the surface of the moon in a precise location, for which astronomers around the world use laser ranging to determine the distance to the moon down to the centimeter level. So then the astronomers who claim to do this had to be added to the list of conspirators and liars for this theory to stand. Then of course the more you point out, the more people who have to get added to the conspiracy, which eventually becomes all of the television industry, and even the Soviets!
That is the reason why the so-called alternative explanations for 9/11, the moon landing, the various assassinations, the safety of vaccines, etc, are conspiracy theories, while the mainstream explanations are not.
• Replies: @John Jeremiah SmithThe definition of a conspiracy theory is an explanation of events that traces them to a secret network, and when presented with contradictory evidence, simply enlarges the network of supposed conspirators rather than modifying the explanation.LOL x 2. I think you're saying that the above is YOUR definition of "conspiracy theory", not to be confused with any real and accurate definition of "conspiracy theory". , @zib but then the circle of supposed conspirators was enlarged to include the editors of Popular Mechanics after they did their studyNice attempt to conflate the planners and executors of the 9/11 attacks with those who run interference for the "official" history of what happened that day. PM editors aren't "conspirators" of the deed, they're just a mouthpiece for NIST.
Here's a link to Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth's evisceration of Popular Mechanics hit piece against skeptics of the NIST whitewash:
http://www1.ae911truth.org/en/news-section/41-articles/604-debunking-the-real-911-myths-why-popular-mechanics-cant-face-up-to-reality-part-1.html
Let's see how you rationalize this one. If you have the cajones, that is. , @Boris
The definition of a conspiracy theory is an explanation of events that traces them to a secret network, and when presented with contradictory evidence, simply enlarges the network of supposed conspirators rather than modifying the explanation.This is a fairly useful definition, and certainly highlights some of the pathological reasoning that is associated with conspiracy theories. However, not all conspiracy theories will exhibit this characteristic. Conspiracies like 9/11 that rely on scientific facts are sometimes rationalized this way, but other conspiracies are built on suspect witness testimony or a biased interpretation and don't require an ever-widening conspiracy. , Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 2:03 pm GMT • 100 Words @SolontoCroesus
Stepping back from it all to get a long distance view one can see the patterns of deceit and manipulation all throughout American political life. It's not just incidental but rather is built in.Is this built-in deceit and manipulation unique to American life, or -- beyond the usual understandings about human nature -- is the systematic or institutionalized "deceit and manipulation" present in all cultures? in western cultures? in some but not all cultures? If the lattermost, in which cultures is "deceit and manipulation" less systematic and institutionalized?Was "deceit and manipulation" institutionalized into American life from the beginning -- by the Founders, or did USA deviate from its intended path at some point? If so, at what point? How did it happen?
Is there the possibility of redemption?
It would be worth considering the different contributions to truth telling and also honest scepticism of the Puritan and other Protestant culture, and of the Enlightenment for a start. Some subjects were difficult – like whether there is a God for all Christians and of course the one that must have addled many brains: slavery.
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- Decius says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 2:22 pm GMT • 600 Words
Your characterization of Strauss on conspiracy has almost no basis in anything Strauss actually wrote. I would bet that you are presenting a dumbed -down and inaccurate version of Shadia Drury's books on Strauss, which are themselves abysmally inaccurate and libelous about Strauss.
The only place Strauss discusses conspiracy thematically that I can recall–and I have read all his books several times, and still read them; have/do you?–is on Thoughts on Machiavelli . Strauss does so, first and foremost, because conspiracy is a major theme of Machiavelli's and the subject of the two longest chapters of his two most important books ( Prince 19 and Discourses III 6). Strauss further develops the idea that modern philosophy begins as a conspiracy between Machiavelli and (some of) his readers. Strauss simply never said anything like this:
Meanwhile, Strauss, a founding figure in modern neo-conservative thought, was equally harsh in his attacks upon conspiracy analysis, but for polar-opposite reasons. In his mind, elite conspiracies were absolutely necessary and beneficial, a crucial social defense against anarchy or totalitarianism, but their effectiveness obviously depended upon keeping them hidden from the prying eyes of the ignorant masses. His main problem with "conspiracy theories" was not that they were always false, but they might often be true, and therefore their spread was potentially disruptive to the smooth functioning of society. So as a matter of self-defense, elites needed to actively suppress or otherwise undercut the unauthorized investigation of suspected conspiracies.
As for his relationship with neoconservatism, you also overstate that considerably. Yes, there are many neoconservative Straussians. But there are also Straussian paleos, tradcons, liberatarians, liberals, and moderates. There are many who are apolitical and interested only in abstract philosophy. There are Straussian religious conservatives, agnostics and atheists. Christians, Jews and Muslim. Catholic, Protestants and Mormons. The neocons just get all the attention–owing again, in part to Drury and in part to one terrible 2003 article by James Atlas, which no one these days has read, but quickly became THE account of neocon Straussians controlling the Bush administration, which everyone today believes without having read, or even being aware of (have/are you?).
If "neocon" has any meaning, it means, first, a former intellectual liberal who has drifted right. Second, a domestic policy scholar who focuses on data-driven social science. And third, a foreign policy hawk.
None of these really apply to Strauss, who spent his who career studying political philosophy, with an intense focus on the Greeks. He voted Dem in every election in which he could vote, until his last, 1972, when he voted for Nixon out of Cold War concerns. You might say that makes him a "hawk" but he never wrote any essays saying so. He simply told a few people privately that McGovern was too naïve about the Soviets. You might also say that is evidence that he "drifted right" but he didn't think so. He apparently considered himself a Cold War liberal until his death. As for data-driven social science, he famously attacked it in of the very few of his writings that ever got any attention in mainstream political science ("An Epilogue").
You may well be right about the CIA's role in popularizing the phrase "conspiracy theory." But Leo Strauss had nothing to do with it. Or, if he did, he hid his role exceptionally well, because there is no evidence of such in his writings.
• Replies: @SolontoCroesus C Bradley Thompson was educated/trained as a Straussian neoconservative, then got mugged by reality and started to re-assess his own philosophical orientation.One of the most interesting points Thompson makes in this discussion of his book, Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea, occurs in the Q&A segment when he demonstrates that Strauss was, indeed, an acolyte of Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Oh6DmjQaho , @Ron Unz
Your characterization of Strauss on conspiracy has almost no basis in anything Strauss actually wrote. I would bet that you are presenting a dumbed -down and inaccurate version of Shadia Drury's books on Strauss, which are themselves abysmally inaccurate and libelous about Strauss. The only place Strauss discusses conspiracy thematically that I can recall–and I have read all his books several times, and still read them; have/do you?....The neocons just get all the attention–owing again, in part to Drury and in part to one terrible 2003 article by James Atlas, which no one these days has read, but quickly became THE account of neocon Straussians controlling the Bush administration...He apparently considered himself a Cold War liberal until his death.I'll candidly admit I haven't read a single one of Strauss's own books, nor even that very influential James Atlas article you dislike so intensely. Instead, I was merely summarizing the extensive arguments of Prof. deHaven-Smith, who, as a prominent political scientist, is presumably quite familiar with Strauss, though I don't doubt that his views might differ considerably from your own.But on your second point, I do remember seeing a very amusing private letter of Strauss that came to light about a decade or so ago. Written shortly after his arrival in America, it was addressed to a fellow ultra-rightwing Jewish exile from Europe, and in it he praised fascism and (I think) Nazism to the skies, arguing that their regrettable deviation into "anti-Semitism" (which had precipitated his own personal exile from Germany) should in no way be considered a refutation of all the other wonderful aspects of those political doctrines. This leads me to wonder if Strauss was truly the "liberal" you suggest, or perhaps was instead engaging in exactly the sort of "ideological crypsis" that seems such an important part of his political philosophy...
It's likely my faulty memory may have garbled important aspects of the letter I mention, and given your expertise on Straussian issues, I'm sure you should be able to locate it and easily correct me. , @Pat Casey Actually I don't think Ron is so far off. And I think, at best, you must be overeducated. Strauss held that authentic philosophy is a conspiracy . From there, certain practical advice about how to carry out the philosophy of the true philosopher follows. Such advice would about seem to be how Ron said it was.
I have not read the essay by Atlas. But for the duration of the Bush Administration I did read the Weekly Standard. I recall in particular one time when the editors recommended what books to bring to the beach, and Bill Kristol said "anything by Leo Strauss." My impression is that the Weekly Standard's brazen propaganda back then was the way certain editors understood themselves to be acting like Strauss's true disciples.
And of course now Krystol is hocking a former spook to run against Trump in Utah. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Connecticut Famer says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 2:28 pm GMT • 100 Words @Gene Tuttle I've often used the argument myself that conspiracies inevitably have short shelf lives in the US because it was so difficult for Americans to keep secrets. The article makes a useful point in suggesting that secret plots, even after being revealed, may nevertheless remain widely ignored. Ideology, group-think, pack journalism etc. are powerful forces, often subconsciously at work, preventing alternative theories from developing legs.
Though long an admirer of Karl Popper, I hadn't strongly associated him with attacks on conspiracy theories per se. As an American "outsider" living abroad most of my adult life, I've all too often encountered those who assumed my background alone explained an argument of mine that they didn't like. Popper had hit the nail on the head when he wrote about
"a widespread and dangerous fashion of our time...of not taking arguments seriously, and at their face value, at least tentatively, but of seeing in them nothing but a way in which deeper irrational motives and tendencies express themselves." It was "the attitude of looking at once for the unconscious motives and determinants in the social habitat of the thinker, instead of first examining the validity of the argument itself."The powerful nazi and communist ideologies of his day assumed that one's " blood " or " class " precluded "correct" thinking. Those politically incorrect challengers to their own totalitarian weltanschauung were (to put it mildly) persecuted as conspirators. No doubt, as Ron Unz notes, Popper's personal experience "contributed the depth of his feelings" -- I would say skepticism – about conspiracy claims.But the author of the " Open Society " had an open mind and I suspect he'd find the thesis reasonable that real conspiracies can both be uncovered and largely ignored because so many simply opt to ignore them. In such cases, evidence and "not taking arguments seriously" often reflects "intellectual groupieism," emotions, professional insecurities as well as venal collective interests.
"But the author of the "Open Society" had an open mind and I suspect he'd find the thesis reasonable that real conspiracies can both be uncovered and largely ignored because so many simply opt to ignore them. In such cases, evidence and "not taking arguments seriously" often reflects "intellectual groupieism," emotions, professional insecurities as well as venal collective interests."
Possibly as in the JFK case? I actually watched Lee Harvey Oswald get drilled by the man who was later identified as Jack Ruby (real surname "Rubenstein") live on television. The minute it happened and even at age 16 at the time I smelled a rat. Who was ultimately behind it all is something which I can't answer and care not to speculate upon, but to this day I remain suspicious about the circumstances surrounding Oswald's death and Ruby's subsequent dissembling.
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz I don't dismiss your intuitions as such but you hardly present a great case for affording them much weight. What you immediately felt at age 16 watching a screen? Nope. The fact that Jack Ruby dissembled? , @dahoit I was 12 and had the same feeling. Lanskys mob member shoots down any investigation into just what happened that day. And remember Arlen Spector came up with the magic bullet theory,and was rewarded with Congress. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- anonymous says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 2:39 pm GMT • 100 Words @Pat Casey
I get the sense Ron's building up to something.One can only hope. This time he mentioned 9/11--- so that base is covered; no need to say more about that than that; besides I doubt even he could add to what has already been published and posted on this site re that Big Lie. I would like to see how he weighs all the evidence on RFK's assassination, what he would be willing to call what looks like nothing as much as what MK-Ultra was about.Pearl Harbor (covered in "Day of Deceit") is good starting point. I strongly encourage Mr. Unz to read Robert Stinnet's book next before moving on.
FDR never intended that 2,400 Americans would die there. He just thought that if Japan "struck first", he could justify our entry into WWII to the public. What's really fascinating (and almost wholly unknown) is the sequence of events and headlines from December 8 to December 11, 1941, the date Hitler declared war on the USA.
While Pearl Harbor meant war with Japan, it did not necessarily guarantee war with Nazi Germany. For 72 hours, no one could be sure that Germany would declare war on us. Did FDR manipulate events post-Pearl Harbor to ensure it did happen?
• Replies: @Hibernian "FDR never intended that 2,400 Americans would die there."Did he think our forces at Pearl, lacking needed intelligence, would limit the losses to a lesser number? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- John Jeremiah Smith says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 2:44 pm GMT • 100 Words @biz Actually, there is no symmetry in conspiracy theories as you imply.
The definition of a conspiracy theory is an explanation of events that traces them to a secret network, and when presented with contradictory evidence, simply enlarges the network of supposed conspirators rather than modifying the explanation.
So, just to cite one example, all of the 9/11 controlled demolition stuff is a conspiracy theory because at first it had the government and maybe the property owners in on the secret, but then the circle of supposed conspirators was enlarged to include the editors of Popular Mechanics after they did their study. Or take the moon landing, which involved 'only' thousands of NASA people until you point out that the astronauts left mirrors on the surface of the moon in a precise location, for which astronomers around the world use laser ranging to determine the distance to the moon down to the centimeter level. So then the astronomers who claim to do this had to be added to the list of conspirators and liars for this theory to stand. Then of course the more you point out, the more people who have to get added to the conspiracy, which eventually becomes all of the television industry, and even the Soviets!
That is the reason why the so-called alternative explanations for 9/11, the moon landing, the various assassinations, the safety of vaccines, etc, are conspiracy theories, while the mainstream explanations are not.
The definition of a conspiracy theory is an explanation of events that traces them to a secret network, and when presented with contradictory evidence, simply enlarges the network of supposed conspirators rather than modifying the explanation.
LOL x 2. I think you're saying that the above is YOUR definition of "conspiracy theory", not to be confused with any real and accurate definition of "conspiracy theory".
• Replies: @biz No what I have put is the generally accepted definition used in journalistic and sociological works about conspiracy theory culture, e.g. this book . Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jacques Sheete says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 2:46 pm GMT • 100 Words
Superb article.
It's good to see that Mr. Beard is getting some well deserved good press. It's also good to have people put on alert about Leo Strauss; his name should be a household word, and that of derision.
I first learned of the fool at LewRockwell.com, and I feel it's worth investigating him as a source of the goofy neocon outlook that the world's been suffering under for decades.
"Strauss, who opposed the idea of individual rights, maintained that neither the ancient world nor the Christian envisioned strict, absolute limits on state power.
Straussian neoconservatism is not conservatism as it has ever been understood in America or anywhere else "
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2004/09/thomas-woods/the-neocon-godfather/
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- Paul Jolliffe says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 2:53 pm GMT • 100 Words
Mr. Unz,
Here is a link to Carl Bernstein's definitive 1977 Rolling Stone article "CIA and the Media" in which he addresses – and confirms – your worst fears. You are very right, and no less a figure than Bernstein has said so for nearly four decades . . .
http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
• Replies: @Ron UnzHere is a link to Carl Bernstein's definitive 1977 Rolling Stone article "CIA and the Media" in which he addresses – and confirms – your worst fears. You are very right, and no less a figure than Bernstein has said so for nearly four decades...Thanks so much for the excellent reference to the Bernstein article, of which I hadn't been aware. I found it fascinating, not least because of all the speculations floating around over the last decade or two that Bernstein's famed collaborator, Bob Woodward, had had an intelligence background, and perhaps Watergate represented a plot by elements of the CIA to remove Nixon from the White House. As for the 25,000 word article itself, I'd suggest that people read it. Since quite a lot of this comment-thread is already filled with debates about the supposed liberalism of Leo Strauss and an alleged Moon Landing Hoax, I might as well provide a few of the provocative extracts:http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
He was very eager, he loved to cooperate." On one occasion, according to several CIA officials, Sulzberger was given a briefing paper by the Agency which ran almost verbatim under the columnist's byline in the Times. "Cycame out and said, 'I'm thinking of doing a piece, can you give me some background?'" a CIA officer said. "We gave it to Cy as a background piece and Cy gave it to the printers and put his name on it." Sulzberger denies that any incident occurred. "A lot of baloney," he said.Stewart Alsop's relationship with the Agency was much more extensive than Sulzberger's. One official who served at the highest levels in the CIA said flatly: "Stew Alsop was a CIA agent." An equally senior official refused to define Alsop's relationship with the Agency except to say it was a formal one. Other sources said that Alsop was particularly helpful to the Agency in discussions with, officials of foreign governments-asking questions to which the CIA was seeking answers, planting misinformation advantageous to American policy, assessing opportunities for CIA recruitment of well‑placed foreigners.The New York Times. The Agency's relationship with the Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. From 1950 to 1966, about ten CIA employees were provided Times cover under arrangements approved by the newspaper's late publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. The cover arrangements were part of a general Times policy-set by Sulzberger-to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible.When Newsweek waspurchased by the Washington Post Company, publisher Philip L. Graham was informed by Agency officials that the CIA occasionally used the magazine for cover purposes, according to CIA sources. "It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from," said a former deputy director of the Agency. "Frank Wisner dealt with him." Wisner, deputy director of the CIA from 1950 until shortly before his suicide in 1965, was the Agency's premier orchestrator of "black" operations, including many in which journalists were involved. Wisner liked to boast of his "mighty Wurlitzer," a wondrous propaganda instrument he built, and played, with help from the press.) Phil Graham was probably Wisner's closest friend. But Graharn, who committed suicide in 1963, apparently knew little of the specifics of any cover arrangements with Newsweek, CIA sources said.The Agency played an intriguing numbers game with the committee. Those who prepared the material say it was physically impossible to produce all of the Agency's files on the use of journalists. "We gave them a broad, representative picture," said one agency official. "We never pretended it was a total description of the range of activities over 25 years, or of the number of journalists who have done things for us." A relatively small number of the summaries described the activities of foreign journalists-including those working as stringers for American publications. Those officials most knowledgeable about the subject say that a figure of 400 American journalists is on the low side of the actual number who maintained covert relationships and undertook clandestine tasks.From the twenty‑five files he got back, according to Senate sources and CIA officials, an unavoidable conclusion emerged: that to a degree never widely suspected, the CIA in the 1950s, '60s and even early '70s had concentrated its relationships with journalists in the most prominent sectors of the American press corps, including four or five of the largest newspapers in the country, the broadcast networks and the two major newsweekly magazines. Despite the omission of names and affiliations from the twenty‑five detailed files each was between three and eleven inches thick), the information was usually sufficient to tentatively identify either the newsman, his affiliation or both-particularly because so many of them were prominent in the profession., @LondonBob No coincidence that all the CIA agents involved in the JFK assassination are known to be experts in 'black ops' and news media specialists. Jim Angleton, Cord Meyer, David Atlee Phillips and E. Howard Hunt, who confessed his involvement, all made their names in black propaganda or news management. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Clearpoint says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 2:53 pm GMT • 100 Words
Popper and Strauss. Neoliberal thought unites with neoconservative thought. Explicitly different rationales, but the same goals and the same method of achieving those goals. Sounds like target marketing of the two biggest target markets of American exceptionalism – dumb and dumber. Apparently critical thinkers are a minority that they believe can be easily marginalized.
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- John Jeremiah Smith says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 2:58 pm GMT • 200 Words @JL Perhaps the media tried too hard, were too eager to be complicit, and now they've completely lost the plot. The rise of Trump, in the face of a completely and uniformly hostile media, suggests that a large part of the American public, consciously or not, now completely rejects entire media narratives and assumes the exact opposite to be true. And they're panicking. Not knowing what to do, they double and triple down on the same fail that got them into this mess. Truly interesting times.
Thanks, Mr. Unz, for your "small webzine".
The rise of Trump, in the face of a completely and uniformly hostile media, suggests that a large part of the American public, consciously or not, now completely rejects entire media narratives and assumes the exact opposite to be true. And they're panicking.
Are they? Or, have they simply fired the first few rounds of easily-dispatched, easily-targeted artillery? I do note that this is the most massive full-court press in support of the oligarchy that I have ever seen. But, I sense that political wars have moved from the court of public opinion and perception, into the courtyards of the moneyed elite. Inasmuch as no rich person has ever believed that he or she has enough money and power, the national political conflict is now composed solely of issues that affect the wealth and power of the 0.1%, which is itself segmented into areas of economic focus and varying forms of wealth acquisition. For example, if air transport systems threaten the wealth and power of ocean-based shipping, that competition between oligarchs will morph into politically-expressed contexts.
There is absolutely no concern, anywhere within the dominion of the 0.1%, with human values, human rights, or any of that sort of ethically-principled hoo-hoo.
• Agree: Jacques Sheete • Replies: @JL I suppose my comment came off somewhat like unbridled, naive optimism. Your points are unquestionably valid, however, and I am disinclined to argue. Of course Trump represents the interests of certain groups of elites and is not merely the essence of a popular movement. I'll be honest, though, I'm having a tough time determining who these groups are, exactly.Just like with Brexit, these events don't happen without powerful manipulation from somewhere within the 0.1%. Still, it's tough for me to imagine what a Trump presidency will even look like. Who will be in his cabinet, from what backgrounds will they come?
There is absolutely no concern, anywhere within the dominion of the 0.1%, with human values, human rights, or any of that sort of ethically-principled hoo-hoo.Certainly not. What are fundamentally important questions for us are merely means to an end for them. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- John Jeremiah Smith says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 3:05 pm GMT • 100 Words @SolontoCroesus
Stepping back from it all to get a long distance view one can see the patterns of deceit and manipulation all throughout American political life. It's not just incidental but rather is built in.Is this built-in deceit and manipulation unique to American life, or -- beyond the usual understandings about human nature -- is the systematic or institutionalized "deceit and manipulation" present in all cultures? in western cultures? in some but not all cultures? If the lattermost, in which cultures is "deceit and manipulation" less systematic and institutionalized?Was "deceit and manipulation" institutionalized into American life from the beginning -- by the Founders, or did USA deviate from its intended path at some point? If so, at what point? How did it happen?
Is there the possibility of redemption?
Is there the possibility of redemption?
Of what is "redemption" constituted? Considering that fewer than 20% of American residents during the Revolution were actually involved in the revolt, with an estimated 40% preferring to retain the colony under monarchy, and considering that the ethical and political awareness of the Average American and the Average Illegal Resident Alien have gone downhill from there, can it honestly be said that there's enough true flavor of human rights and equal access/opportunity to redeem?
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- biz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 3:10 pm GMT @John Jeremiah Smith
The definition of a conspiracy theory is an explanation of events that traces them to a secret network, and when presented with contradictory evidence, simply enlarges the network of supposed conspirators rather than modifying the explanation.LOL x 2. I think you're saying that the above is YOUR definition of "conspiracy theory", not to be confused with any real and accurate definition of "conspiracy theory".No what I have put is the generally accepted definition used in journalistic and sociological works about conspiracy theory culture, e.g. this book .
• Replies: @John Jeremiah SmithNo what I have put is the generally accepted definition used in journalistic and sociological works about conspiracy theory culture, e.g. this book.Journalism? Sociological works? You choose to quote even bigger liars as defining "conspiracy theory"?
"A conspiracy theory is a belief that a secret conspiracy has actually been decisive in producing a political event or evil outcome which the theorists strongly disapprove of. The conspiracy theory typically identifies the conspirators, provides evidence that supposedly links them together with an evil plan to harm the body politic, and may also point to a supposed cover up by authorities or media who should have stopped the conspiracy. The duty of the theorist is to pick from a myriad of facts and assumptions and reassemble them to form a picture of the conspiracy, as in a jigsaw puzzle. A theorist may publicly identify specific conspirators, and if they deny the allegations that is evidence they have been sworn to secrecy and are probably guilty."Similar, agreed, but with noteworthy differences. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- CanSpeccy says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 3:22 pm GMT • 200 Words
Good epistemological analysis.
The great flaw in the Western system of "democratic" government is that hardly anyone knows the meaning of the word "epistemology", let alone have any grasp of the underlying challenge of knowing what they know, or rather knowing how little they know beyond what they know from direct personal experience. This is a challenge made vastly more difficult in the modern age when almost everything we know is derived not from personal experience, or from other people of whose character and intellectual competence we have some personal knowledge, but from the arrangement of ink on paper or of pixels on a video screen. To this problem, there is probably no solution, although either a sharp restriction of the franchise to those of some maturity and education, or a division of the franchise according to what each particular individual could be expected to know something about, would be a step in the right direction.
As it is, we will, inevitably, continue to be the target of high powered manipulation by corporate owned media and other powerful interests.
Professor Lance Haven de Smith, whose book you mention is an expert on SCADS, or state crimes against democracy. An article by him on this topic is available here . There is some interesting academic material about SCADs here .
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- nsa says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 3:25 pm GMT • 100 Words
In spook circles, leaving clues is referred to as inoculation .refer to the work of Bill McGuire in the late 50s and early 60s. For example, we here in Langley and Ft. Meade have left intact on the internet the early picture of the 20′ entry hole left by the "757″ in the facade of the pentagon before the explosion and complete collapse of the exterior wall ..inviting the conspiratorial question " where are the wings, the mangled cadavers, the tail?". This is all just too easy
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- Alden says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 3:27 pm GMT • 100 Words
Highly reccomend Chris Buckley's book
"Little Green Men" The plot is that the entire UFO thing was set up after WW3 by the DOJ to keep the money flowing. Like all Buckley's books, it's a great read.I stopped believing in anything written in newspapers around 1966 because they were so pro black criminal and anti police
Have fun on Labor Day
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- John Jeremiah Smith says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 3:45 pm GMT • 200 Words @biz No what I have put is the generally accepted definition used in journalistic and sociological works about conspiracy theory culture, e.g. this book .
No what I have put is the generally accepted definition used in journalistic and sociological works about conspiracy theory culture, e.g. this book.
Journalism? Sociological works? You choose to quote even bigger liars as defining "conspiracy theory"?
"A conspiracy theory is a belief that a secret conspiracy has actually been decisive in producing a political event or evil outcome which the theorists strongly disapprove of. The conspiracy theory typically identifies the conspirators, provides evidence that supposedly links them together with an evil plan to harm the body politic, and may also point to a supposed cover up by authorities or media who should have stopped the conspiracy. The duty of the theorist is to pick from a myriad of facts and assumptions and reassemble them to form a picture of the conspiracy, as in a jigsaw puzzle. A theorist may publicly identify specific conspirators, and if they deny the allegations that is evidence they have been sworn to secrecy and are probably guilty."
Similar, agreed, but with noteworthy differences.
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- landlubber says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 4:10 pm GMT
journalistic and sociological works
Pravda.
And like your Pravda brethren, you are too quick to conflate 9/11 and the moon landings.
• Replies: @bizyou are too quick to conflate 9/11 and the moon landingsActually, it was Unz himself who stated a while back that if we admit that one of them is possible, then all are possible, or something more or less to that effect.In an case, the 9/11 controlled demolition / missile / flight 93 is in a hangar in Cleveland stuff is just as implausible as faking the moon landings. Too many people and organizations and countries needing to be in on it, etc. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- SolontoCroesus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 4:12 pm GMT • 100 Words @Decius Your characterization of Strauss on conspiracy has almost no basis in anything Strauss actually wrote. I would bet that you are presenting a dumbed -down and inaccurate version of Shadia Drury's books on Strauss, which are themselves abysmally inaccurate and libelous about Strauss.
The only place Strauss discusses conspiracy thematically that I can recall--and I have read all his books several times, and still read them; have/do you?--is on Thoughts on Machiavelli . Strauss does so, first and foremost, because conspiracy is a major theme of Machiavelli's and the subject of the two longest chapters of his two most important books ( Prince 19 and Discourses III 6). Strauss further develops the idea that modern philosophy begins as a conspiracy between Machiavelli and (some of) his readers. Strauss simply never said anything like this:
Meanwhile, Strauss, a founding figure in modern neo-conservative thought, was equally harsh in his attacks upon conspiracy analysis, but for polar-opposite reasons. In his mind, elite conspiracies were absolutely necessary and beneficial, a crucial social defense against anarchy or totalitarianism, but their effectiveness obviously depended upon keeping them hidden from the prying eyes of the ignorant masses. His main problem with "conspiracy theories" was not that they were always false, but they might often be true, and therefore their spread was potentially disruptive to the smooth functioning of society. So as a matter of self-defense, elites needed to actively suppress or otherwise undercut the unauthorized investigation of suspected conspiracies.As for his relationship with neoconservatism, you also overstate that considerably. Yes, there are many neoconservative Straussians. But there are also Straussian paleos, tradcons, liberatarians, liberals, and moderates. There are many who are apolitical and interested only in abstract philosophy. There are Straussian religious conservatives, agnostics and atheists. Christians, Jews and Muslim. Catholic, Protestants and Mormons. The neocons just get all the attention--owing again, in part to Drury and in part to one terrible 2003 article by James Atlas, which no one these days has read, but quickly became THE account of neocon Straussians controlling the Bush administration, which everyone today believes without having read, or even being aware of (have/are you?).If "neocon" has any meaning, it means, first, a former intellectual liberal who has drifted right. Second, a domestic policy scholar who focuses on data-driven social science. And third, a foreign policy hawk.
None of these really apply to Strauss, who spent his who career studying political philosophy, with an intense focus on the Greeks. He voted Dem in every election in which he could vote, until his last, 1972, when he voted for Nixon out of Cold War concerns. You might say that makes him a "hawk" but he never wrote any essays saying so. He simply told a few people privately that McGovern was too naïve about the Soviets. You might also say that is evidence that he "drifted right" but he didn't think so. He apparently considered himself a Cold War liberal until his death. As for data-driven social science, he famously attacked it in of the very few of his writings that ever got any attention in mainstream political science ("An Epilogue").
You may well be right about the CIA's role in popularizing the phrase "conspiracy theory." But Leo Strauss had nothing to do with it. Or, if he did, he hid his role exceptionally well, because there is no evidence of such in his writings.
C Bradley Thompson was educated/trained as a Straussian neoconservative, then got mugged by reality and started to re-assess his own philosophical orientation.
One of the most interesting points Thompson makes in this discussion of his book, Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea, occurs in the Q&A segment when he demonstrates that Strauss was, indeed, an acolyte of Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt
• Replies: @SolontoCroesus @ 12 min, Thompson asserts that "Leo Strauss was the most important influence on Irving Kristol's intellectual development. My book reveals for the first time the importance of Kristol's 1952 review of Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing . For me this is the Rosetta Stone . . .for understanding the deepest layer of neoconservative political philosophy."
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It should also be noted that Irving Kristol was sponsored by- on the payroll of - the CIA while still in Britain. Kristol has acknowledged that CIA support got his movement off the ground. , @Decius No. Strauss and Schmitt were friendly in the 1930s but Strauss was critical of Schmitt's work even then and said so. Schmitt himself said that Strauss had "seen right through" his arguments. Strauss was no acolyte of Schmitt's, he was a greater and deeper thinker and Schmitt--something Schmitt himself acknowledged. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
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- Laurel says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 4:22 pm GMT
The best strategy is to foster implausible conspiracy theories to create a cloud of disinformation. This technique was used very effectively after 9/11, such that it's very hard to discuss a coverup without being labeled a truther.
• Replies: @Old fogey Thank you for inserting the word "truther" into the conversation. It has always fascinated me that someone searching for the truth about a political issue is now automatically considered a conspiracy theorist. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- SolontoCroesus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 4:24 pm GMT • 100 Words @SolontoCroesus C Bradley Thompson was educated/trained as a Straussian neoconservative, then got mugged by reality and started to re-assess his own philosophical orientation.
One of the most interesting points Thompson makes in this discussion of his book, Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea, occurs in the Q&A segment when he demonstrates that Strauss was, indeed, an acolyte of Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Oh6DmjQaho
@ 12 min, Thompson asserts that "Leo Strauss was the most important influence on Irving Kristol's intellectual development. My book reveals for the first time the importance of Kristol's 1952 review of Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing . For me this is the Rosetta Stone . . .for understanding the deepest layer of neoconservative political philosophy."
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• Replies: @Decius So what? That's one guy. How do we even know Kristol interpreted Strauss correctly? Kristol's concerns--data-driven social science--were not Strauss's. And so on and on.
It should also be noted that Irving Kristol was sponsored by- on the payroll of – the CIA while still in Britain. Kristol has acknowledged that CIA support got his movement off the ground.But all that is a re-frame anyway. The charge from Unz is that Strauss is responsible, partly, for the way Americans think about conspiracy today because Strauss advocated for elite conspiracy. That's false and Unz can't back it up. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Decius says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 4:25 pm GMT • 100 Words @SolontoCroesus C Bradley Thompson was educated/trained as a Straussian neoconservative, then got mugged by reality and started to re-assess his own philosophical orientation.
One of the most interesting points Thompson makes in this discussion of his book, Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea, occurs in the Q&A segment when he demonstrates that Strauss was, indeed, an acolyte of Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Oh6DmjQaho
No. Strauss and Schmitt were friendly in the 1930s but Strauss was critical of Schmitt's work even then and said so. Schmitt himself said that Strauss had "seen right through" his arguments. Strauss was no acolyte of Schmitt's, he was a greater and deeper thinker and Schmitt–something Schmitt himself acknowledged.
• Replies: @5371 This is complete nonsense. Schmitt is a powerful and original thinker, Strauss a weak and derivative one whose real sweet spot was academic politics. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
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- Decius says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 4:42 pm GMT • 100 Words @SolontoCroesus @ 12 min, Thompson asserts that "Leo Strauss was the most important influence on Irving Kristol's intellectual development. My book reveals for the first time the importance of Kristol's 1952 review of Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing . For me this is the Rosetta Stone . . .for understanding the deepest layer of neoconservative political philosophy."
---
It should also be noted that Irving Kristol was sponsored by- on the payroll of - the CIA while still in Britain. Kristol has acknowledged that CIA support got his movement off the ground.So what? That's one guy. How do we even know Kristol interpreted Strauss correctly? Kristol's concerns–data-driven social science–were not Strauss's. And so on and on.
But all that is a re-frame anyway. The charge from Unz is that Strauss is responsible, partly, for the way Americans think about conspiracy today because Strauss advocated for elite conspiracy. That's false and Unz can't back it up.
• Replies: @SolontoCroesusThe charge from Unz is that Strauss is responsible, partly, for the way Americans think about conspiracy today because Strauss advocated for elite conspiracy. That's false and Unz can't back it up.Can't back it up or has not done so, so far?The day is young . . . the moon has not yet appeared in the eastern sky. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- 5371 says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 4:45 pm GMT @Decius No. Strauss and Schmitt were friendly in the 1930s but Strauss was critical of Schmitt's work even then and said so. Schmitt himself said that Strauss had "seen right through" his arguments. Strauss was no acolyte of Schmitt's, he was a greater and deeper thinker and Schmitt--something Schmitt himself acknowledged.
This is complete nonsense. Schmitt is a powerful and original thinker, Strauss a weak and derivative one whose real sweet spot was academic politics.
• Agree: SolontoCroesus • Replies: @Decius Schmitt disagreed with you. , @Decius At any rate it's sort of absurd to watch you people chase your tails. All that you "know" or think you know is that Strauss is bad. But Schmitt is good. But Strauss is derivative of Schmitt. Doesn't that make Strauss good, or Schmitt bad?Schmitt is famous for arguing in favor of the essential particularity of politics--i.e., against alleged neocon universalism. So if Strauss is derivative of Schmitt, how can he be a neocon universalist?
Strauss in fact agrees with Schmitt on the essential particularity of politics and says so, but finds a deeper source, with deeper arguments, in Plato. Schmitt admitted that his own attempt to fortify his particularism was build on the quick-sandy foundation of modern rationalism, which Strauss taught him to see through. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- The Alarmist says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 4:50 pm GMT @Wizard of Oz Are you presuming that it should be easy to travel over the entire moon surface and easily arrive at a precisely defined point - and that where the flags are is such a point?
I was having a little fun with the fact that a Congress Critter thought the Mars Rover could drive up to an American flag planted by the Astronauts on the Earth's Moon.
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- Decius says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 4:54 pm GMT @5371 This is complete nonsense. Schmitt is a powerful and original thinker, Strauss a weak and derivative one whose real sweet spot was academic politics.
Schmitt disagreed with you.
• Replies: @5371 This way of arguing, too, is redolent of an academic personality cult, not of actual scholarship. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Decius says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 4:59 pm GMT • 100 Words @5371 This is complete nonsense. Schmitt is a powerful and original thinker, Strauss a weak and derivative one whose real sweet spot was academic politics.
At any rate it's sort of absurd to watch you people chase your tails. All that you "know" or think you know is that Strauss is bad. But Schmitt is good. But Strauss is derivative of Schmitt. Doesn't that make Strauss good, or Schmitt bad?
Schmitt is famous for arguing in favor of the essential particularity of politics–i.e., against alleged neocon universalism. So if Strauss is derivative of Schmitt, how can he be a neocon universalist?
Strauss in fact agrees with Schmitt on the essential particularity of politics and says so, but finds a deeper source, with deeper arguments, in Plato. Schmitt admitted that his own attempt to fortify his particularism was build on the quick-sandy foundation of modern rationalism, which Strauss taught him to see through.
• Replies: @5371 When you can pin Strauss down to a definite meaning, it is false, banal or both. He is usually too obfuscatory to be pinned down. Schmitt is easy to understand and shows you true things you had not thought of before. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- The Alarmist says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 5:00 pm GMT @John Jeremiah Smith
This is a good piece which deserved an acceptable level of mental hygiene in the comment section. Unfortunately, two of the first nine comments are from morons spamming their "no lunar landing" drivel.Indeed, and absolute drivel. During the first two moon landings, I was working as an electronic technician, aligning and tuning the radio communications antennas at one of the monitor sites. Unless the physics of the electromagnetic Universe was altered by the conspirators, the origin of radio transmissions from the landing crew could only have come from the Moon. Either that, or space aliens operating a whole 'nuther conspiracy used "seekrut" technology to make it look like signals received at every monitor station were from the Moon. If so, kudos on a boss fake-out scheme."Unless the physics of the electromagnetic Universe was altered by the conspirators, the origin of radio transmissions from the landing crew could only have come from the Moon. "
I suppose NASA could have sent an S-Band repeater to the Moon.
• Replies: @John Jeremiah SmithI suppose NASA could have sent an S-Band repeater to the Moon.There's more than one scenario that can be assembled to explain any one or two conditions that would have to be "covered" in order to carry out a conspiracy of deception regarding the Moon landings. Considering the inferior level of video jiggering available at the time, it seems to me that providing full "evidence" of the low-gravity behavior of objects, and the absolute two-color light/shadow effects in an absence of atmosphere would be the most difficult.The principle of parsimony becomes ascendant at some point in that Hall of Mirrors. It was easier to go to the Moon than it was to fake it.
Not to be arch, but, even with the repeater on the moon, what about the bounce echo from the tight-beam signal coming from Earth carrying the deceptive info? ;-) Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Hibernian says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 5:02 pm GMT @anonymous Pearl Harbor (covered in "Day of Deceit") is good starting point. I strongly encourage Mr. Unz to read Robert Stinnet's book next before moving on.
FDR never intended that 2,400 Americans would die there. He just thought that if Japan "struck first", he could justify our entry into WWII to the public. What's really fascinating (and almost wholly unknown) is the sequence of events and headlines from December 8 to December 11, 1941, the date Hitler declared war on the USA.
While Pearl Harbor meant war with Japan, it did not necessarily guarantee war with Nazi Germany. For 72 hours, no one could be sure that Germany would declare war on us. Did FDR manipulate events post-Pearl Harbor to ensure it did happen?
"FDR never intended that 2,400 Americans would die there."
Did he think our forces at Pearl, lacking needed intelligence, would limit the losses to a lesser number?
• Replies: @anonymous So it would seem. That critical intelligence on the Japanese was deliberately kept from Admiral Kimmel and General Short by FDR and his closest military officials is indisputable.The question "why?" has never been answered in any meaningful sense.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/4742-pearl-harbor-scapegoating-kimmel-and-short Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- SolontoCroesus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 5:07 pm GMT • 100 Words @Decius So what? That's one guy. How do we even know Kristol interpreted Strauss correctly? Kristol's concerns--data-driven social science--were not Strauss's. And so on and on.
But all that is a re-frame anyway. The charge from Unz is that Strauss is responsible, partly, for the way Americans think about conspiracy today because Strauss advocated for elite conspiracy. That's false and Unz can't back it up.
The charge from Unz is that Strauss is responsible, partly, for the way Americans think about conspiracy today because Strauss advocated for elite conspiracy. That's false and Unz can't back it up.
Can't back it up or has not done so, so far?
The day is young . . . the moon has not yet appeared in the eastern sky.
• Replies: @Decius I know Strauss's books. I am guessing that Unz does not because if he did, he would not attribute to Strauss what he did. At any rate, even if Unz does know the books, I fail to see what passages he could cite to support the paragraph that I highlighted.As noted, the claim sounds vaguely derivative of Drury, who hates Strauss (and gets everything wrong) but even she doesn't quite say what Unz says. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Pat Casey says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 5:11 pm GMT • 200 Words @Wizard of Oz From my experience of actors, including amateur actors i have no problem believing Pat Casey's old guy talking about aliens was either a scripted gig maybe for a bet, maybe to see if he could get some money for his family or for medical treatment and the "tells" I totally discount though it might merely be evidence that he's been telling the story for yonks and no one bothers to pull him up on the one mentioned.
As to the demeanour of the one astronaut that I have now seen from below your comment it does invite questions but yyou seem to be wrong about it being an occasion for celebration. It seems to be much later when they are probably bored out of their minds and quite pissed off at being required to perform yet again as circus ponies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9Jw0pwTtus
Ok, what about that tell? You should really watch the whole thing here if you haven't:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NlJQJUUqR4
My friend knows the guy that interviewed the man about Eisenhower and area 51. He's supposed to be the steely-eyed vet in a field full of dupes. It's possible he's a charlatan employing an actor, but that's not what it sounds like. The one that I can't decide on is this disinformation agent Richard Doty from the film Mirage Men. That one is worth watching.
My education into the likelihood of extraterrestrials took a quantum leap when I watched The Pyramid Codes on netflix. Mind you that is not an idea the series puts forward-the footage of the Pyramid they don't take tourists to see is enough to know those folks had technology we do not have today.
For the record I believe we landed on the moon. But, the idea that we did not probably comes from the underbelly of our own government.
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- KA says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 5:19 pm GMT • 600 Words
"HANGZHOU, China - The image of a 5-year-old Syrian boy, dazed and bloodied after being rescued from an airstrike on rebel-held Aleppo, reverberated around the world last month, a harrowing reminder that five years after civil war broke out there, Syria remains a charnel house.
But the reaction was more muted in Washington, where Syria has become a distant disaster rather than an urgent crisis. President Obama's policy toward Syria has barely budged in the last year and shows no sign of change for the remainder of his term. The White House has faced little pressure over the issue,
That frustrates many analysts because they believe that a shift in policy will come only when Mr. Obama has left office. "Given the tone of this campaign, I doubt the electorate will be presented with realistic and intelligible options, with respect to Syria," said Frederic C. Hof, a former adviser on Syria in the administration."
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/05/world/middleeast/obama-syria-foreign-policy.html?action=click&contentCollection=Europe&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article&_r=0Spinning by NYT can and will form the base of a conspiracy .
The world we see are not festooned with the morbid pictures and the world has not one echo chamber among its 7 billions that are reverberating with his sad cry .
No American taxpayer is piling pressure on Obama.
Tone of the election doesn't and shouldn't provide option on Syria . Electorates are not asking to know what America should do.
Next president will introduce something that he wont share w and making them known before the voters will destroy his chances.Someone shared and was evisecrated by NYT and other as Putin's Trojan horse .NYT is lying . But this lies can help build the necessarry platform for future wars . Another Sarin gas? Another Harriri death? Another picture of beheadings ? Another story of North Korean supplying nukes ? Wrongful consequences from falsehood will not cost NYT excepting a correction years later somehere in the 5 th page. A conspiracy to hatch is something that has no consequences for the plotters .
If Dulles were hanged for role in all the illegal things he had done in Guatemala and Iran,may be Kennedy would have survived . But his earlier political escapades were also built on something that were way earlier . Conspiracy keeps on coming back begging for one more round ,for one more time .
NYT will be there claiming for the right to crow – how it has prepared the ground.All are done openly . When resistance is mounted, Bernie Sander supporters are sent home with flowers and a reminder to vote for Clinton because in this age all over the world America is the exception that has heard them . With that satisfaction they can go home and vote as expected. They are not allowed to know how the campaign marginalized Sander's chances from the get go.
Neither NYT explains how reckless Trump with nuclear code will start a nuclear war with Putin's Russia despite being his co conspirator .Chalabi s daughter exclaimed in early part of 2004 – We are heroes in mistakes. She won't say it now . Conspirators would love to get the credit and be recognized . It all depends on the success .
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First Iraq war,if went bad from begining, Lantos wouldn't have been reelected . But again who knows what media can deliver . They delivered Joe Liberman .
- Carlton Meyer says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 5:20 pm GMT • 200 Words
Some conspiracies are eventually acknowledged. For recent examples, our government finally admitted that our CIA overthrew the government of Iran in the 1950s. The sinking of the Lusitania because it carried tons of munitions and weapons during WW I has been mostly accepted since 1982, after the sunken ship was discovered and searched by divers. For example, Encyclopedia Britannica:
"The Lusitania was carrying a cargo of rifle ammunition and shells (together about 173 tons), and the Germans, who had circulated warnings that the ship would be sunk, felt themselves fully justified in attacking a vessel that was furthering the war aims of their enemy. The German government also felt that, in view of the vulnerability of U-boats while on the surface and the British announcement of intentions to arm merchant ships, prior warning of potential targets was impractical."
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Lusitania-British-ship
One of the newest has got little attention, the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich, who was a computer guy leaking info to Wikileaks.
If we truly had aggressive news competition in the USA, this story would remain in the headlines, but of course its implications are not acceptable. However, stories about Russian hackers persist with no hard evidence.
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- JL says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 5:27 pm GMT • 100 Words @John Jeremiah Smith
The rise of Trump, in the face of a completely and uniformly hostile media, suggests that a large part of the American public, consciously or not, now completely rejects entire media narratives and assumes the exact opposite to be true. And they're panicking.Are they? Or, have they simply fired the first few rounds of easily-dispatched, easily-targeted artillery? I do note that this is the most massive full-court press in support of the oligarchy that I have ever seen. But, I sense that political wars have moved from the court of public opinion and perception, into the courtyards of the moneyed elite. Inasmuch as no rich person has ever believed that he or she has enough money and power, the national political conflict is now composed solely of issues that affect the wealth and power of the 0.1%, which is itself segmented into areas of economic focus and varying forms of wealth acquisition. For example, if air transport systems threaten the wealth and power of ocean-based shipping, that competition between oligarchs will morph into politically-expressed contexts.There is absolutely no concern, anywhere within the dominion of the 0.1%, with human values, human rights, or any of that sort of ethically-principled hoo-hoo.
I suppose my comment came off somewhat like unbridled, naive optimism. Your points are unquestionably valid, however, and I am disinclined to argue. Of course Trump represents the interests of certain groups of elites and is not merely the essence of a popular movement. I'll be honest, though, I'm having a tough time determining who these groups are, exactly.
Just like with Brexit, these events don't happen without powerful manipulation from somewhere within the 0.1%. Still, it's tough for me to imagine what a Trump presidency will even look like. Who will be in his cabinet, from what backgrounds will they come?
There is absolutely no concern, anywhere within the dominion of the 0.1%, with human values, human rights, or any of that sort of ethically-principled hoo-hoo.
Certainly not. What are fundamentally important questions for us are merely means to an end for them.
• Replies: @John Jeremiah SmithOf course Trump represents the interests of certain groups of elites and is not merely the essence of a popular movement. I'll be honest, though, I'm having a tough time determining who these groups are, exactly.Yes, and how many players, each with what orientation and degree of focus? The 0.1% population contains 10,000 - 50,00o potential players, globally.It is my opinion that the extremely-high degree of corruption, within the mighty engine of resource consumption and bribery that is the US government, contributes greatly to the "big picture" of ongoing conflict among the members of the oligarchy. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jeffrey S. says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 5:31 pm GMT • 100 Words
Beard was an interesting guy, but's let's not forget that his central thesis regarding the founding of this country doesn't hold up to historical scrutiny:
http://www.libertylawsite.org/2014/10/10/charles-beard-living-legend-or-archaic-icon/
Meanwhile, I think it helps to think about conspiracies philosophically - rigorous thought can help clear up sloppy thinking (which is found in many such theories):
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2009/01/trouble-with-conspiracy-theories.html
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- Mulegino1 says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 5:35 pm GMT • 100 Words
With respect to conspiracies, there are two equally absurd extreme views which distract from reality: one is the childish rejection of all conspiracy theories and the other the childish belief that every appreciable newsworthy event with a political, economic or social impact is the result of a nefarious conspiracy. The truth, of course, is to be found in the middle.
Only a child – or its intellectual equivalent, i.e., a low information infotainment consumer – could believe in the official version of 9/11, or the Manichean narrative of the Second World War and the Myth of the 6 Million.
On the other hand, there is Hillary Clinton with her "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" and idiots like Glenn Beck who believe that Vladimir Putin is seeking to conquer the world.
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- Decius says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 5:43 pm GMT • 100 Words @SolontoCroesus
The charge from Unz is that Strauss is responsible, partly, for the way Americans think about conspiracy today because Strauss advocated for elite conspiracy. That's false and Unz can't back it up.Can't back it up or has not done so, so far?The day is young . . . the moon has not yet appeared in the eastern sky.
I know Strauss's books. I am guessing that Unz does not because if he did, he would not attribute to Strauss what he did. At any rate, even if Unz does know the books, I fail to see what passages he could cite to support the paragraph that I highlighted.
As noted, the claim sounds vaguely derivative of Drury, who hates Strauss (and gets everything wrong) but even she doesn't quite say what Unz says.
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- Ron Unz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 5:44 pm GMT • 300 Words NEW! @Decius Your characterization of Strauss on conspiracy has almost no basis in anything Strauss actually wrote. I would bet that you are presenting a dumbed -down and inaccurate version of Shadia Drury's books on Strauss, which are themselves abysmally inaccurate and libelous about Strauss.
The only place Strauss discusses conspiracy thematically that I can recall--and I have read all his books several times, and still read them; have/do you?--is on Thoughts on Machiavelli . Strauss does so, first and foremost, because conspiracy is a major theme of Machiavelli's and the subject of the two longest chapters of his two most important books ( Prince 19 and Discourses III 6). Strauss further develops the idea that modern philosophy begins as a conspiracy between Machiavelli and (some of) his readers. Strauss simply never said anything like this:
Meanwhile, Strauss, a founding figure in modern neo-conservative thought, was equally harsh in his attacks upon conspiracy analysis, but for polar-opposite reasons. In his mind, elite conspiracies were absolutely necessary and beneficial, a crucial social defense against anarchy or totalitarianism, but their effectiveness obviously depended upon keeping them hidden from the prying eyes of the ignorant masses. His main problem with "conspiracy theories" was not that they were always false, but they might often be true, and therefore their spread was potentially disruptive to the smooth functioning of society. So as a matter of self-defense, elites needed to actively suppress or otherwise undercut the unauthorized investigation of suspected conspiracies.As for his relationship with neoconservatism, you also overstate that considerably. Yes, there are many neoconservative Straussians. But there are also Straussian paleos, tradcons, liberatarians, liberals, and moderates. There are many who are apolitical and interested only in abstract philosophy. There are Straussian religious conservatives, agnostics and atheists. Christians, Jews and Muslim. Catholic, Protestants and Mormons. The neocons just get all the attention--owing again, in part to Drury and in part to one terrible 2003 article by James Atlas, which no one these days has read, but quickly became THE account of neocon Straussians controlling the Bush administration, which everyone today believes without having read, or even being aware of (have/are you?).If "neocon" has any meaning, it means, first, a former intellectual liberal who has drifted right. Second, a domestic policy scholar who focuses on data-driven social science. And third, a foreign policy hawk.
None of these really apply to Strauss, who spent his who career studying political philosophy, with an intense focus on the Greeks. He voted Dem in every election in which he could vote, until his last, 1972, when he voted for Nixon out of Cold War concerns. You might say that makes him a "hawk" but he never wrote any essays saying so. He simply told a few people privately that McGovern was too naïve about the Soviets. You might also say that is evidence that he "drifted right" but he didn't think so. He apparently considered himself a Cold War liberal until his death. As for data-driven social science, he famously attacked it in of the very few of his writings that ever got any attention in mainstream political science ("An Epilogue").
You may well be right about the CIA's role in popularizing the phrase "conspiracy theory." But Leo Strauss had nothing to do with it. Or, if he did, he hid his role exceptionally well, because there is no evidence of such in his writings.
Your characterization of Strauss on conspiracy has almost no basis in anything Strauss actually wrote. I would bet that you are presenting a dumbed -down and inaccurate version of Shadia Drury's books on Strauss, which are themselves abysmally inaccurate and libelous about Strauss. The only place Strauss discusses conspiracy thematically that I can recall–and I have read all his books several times, and still read them; have/do you? .The neocons just get all the attention–owing again, in part to Drury and in part to one terrible 2003 article by James Atlas, which no one these days has read, but quickly became THE account of neocon Straussians controlling the Bush administration He apparently considered himself a Cold War liberal until his death.
I'll candidly admit I haven't read a single one of Strauss's own books, nor even that very influential James Atlas article you dislike so intensely. Instead, I was merely summarizing the extensive arguments of Prof. deHaven-Smith, who, as a prominent political scientist, is presumably quite familiar with Strauss, though I don't doubt that his views might differ considerably from your own.
But on your second point, I do remember seeing a very amusing private letter of Strauss that came to light about a decade or so ago. Written shortly after his arrival in America, it was addressed to a fellow ultra-rightwing Jewish exile from Europe, and in it he praised fascism and (I think) Nazism to the skies, arguing that their regrettable deviation into "anti-Semitism" (which had precipitated his own personal exile from Germany) should in no way be considered a refutation of all the other wonderful aspects of those political doctrines. This leads me to wonder if Strauss was truly the "liberal" you suggest, or perhaps was instead engaging in exactly the sort of "ideological crypsis" that seems such an important part of his political philosophy
It's likely my faulty memory may have garbled important aspects of the letter I mention, and given your expertise on Straussian issues, I'm sure you should be able to locate it and easily correct me.
• Replies: @Decius The letter you are referring to is a letter to Karl Lowith from 1933. The most sustained--not to say serious--attempt to make it say that Strauss is coming out as a fascist has been the work of William Altman. I don't think he even comes close to making his case.The letter can more charitably and reasonably read as a frank acknowledgement of the failure of Weimar liberalism and of liberalism generally precisely to take into account nationalist sentiment but instead to "universalize" all particulars without due attention to differing conditions, circumstances, "matter," and so on. In other words, Strauss is defending the "concept of the political" both from liberal universalism and from the simple-minded identification of particularism (or nationalism) with fascism. Sound familiar? All nationalist sentiment is fascism, Trump is a Nazi, and so on. An "argument" as old as hills and which Strauss saw through immediately.
Once again, though, the tail is chased. How can Strauss be both a universalist neo-con and a particularist-nationalist-fascist at the same time? The only common thread is: Strauss is bad.
In my view, Strauss is good. More to the point, I find stronger intellectual support in Strauss for my own nationalist leanings and pro-Trump_vs_deep_state than I find in any other intellectual source of any depth. I am in the minority among Straussians in thinking so, but I am not alone. Morevoer, I think in open debate, I have a stronger case for Straussian particularism than others can make for Straussian universalism.
And, not incidentally, none of this points to any such views on conspiracy as you put into Strauss's mouth. , @Jacques Sheete While I've read nothing by Prof. deHaven-Smith, from what you've written, he and DiLorenzo would probably agree.
Here's a short but readable eval of Strauss' ideas, and DiLorenzo is one academician whom I somewhat trust.:
Moronic Intellectuals
By Thomas DiLorenzohttps://www.lewrockwell.com/2004/09/thomas-woods/the-neocon-godfather/ Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Mulegino1 says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 5:48 pm GMT • 100 Words @SolontoCroesus
Stepping back from it all to get a long distance view one can see the patterns of deceit and manipulation all throughout American political life. It's not just incidental but rather is built in.Is this built-in deceit and manipulation unique to American life, or -- beyond the usual understandings about human nature -- is the systematic or institutionalized "deceit and manipulation" present in all cultures? in western cultures? in some but not all cultures? If the lattermost, in which cultures is "deceit and manipulation" less systematic and institutionalized?Was "deceit and manipulation" institutionalized into American life from the beginning -- by the Founders, or did USA deviate from its intended path at some point? If so, at what point? How did it happen?
Is there the possibility of redemption?
To my mind, the real point of deviation in the history of the United States is the Spanish American War, and the transformation of America from a tellurocratic to a thallasocratic power. America's traditional role had been that of a vast, continental, land based power, eschewing intervention in the affairs of Europe and the rest of the world outside the Western Hemisphere. (This is largely the reason that the Russian Czar allied with the Union in the American Civil War).
Unfortunately, America's traditional tellurocratic role was abandonded – thanks to the likes of Admiral ("Victory through Sea Power") Mahan, John Hay, and the loopy Teddy Roosevelt, inter alia – and the nation went on to embrace the role of international arbiter and busybody, and became insatiable in the pursuit of empire, with catastrophic results for the world.
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- Sam Shama says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 5:59 pm GMT @5371 This is a good piece which deserved an acceptable level of mental hygiene in the comment section. Unfortunately, two of the first nine comments are from morons spamming their "no lunar landing" drivel. In all probability the "no nuclear weapons" clowns will also be here imminently. Oh well, a delicious sweet dish will attract a fly as much as a gourmet.
[Oh well, a delicious sweet dish will attract a fly as much as a gourmet.]
LOL. I'll compile a mental list of both. Aren't the comments missing someone btw?
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- Decius says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 6:00 pm GMT • 300 Words @Ron Unz
Your characterization of Strauss on conspiracy has almost no basis in anything Strauss actually wrote. I would bet that you are presenting a dumbed -down and inaccurate version of Shadia Drury's books on Strauss, which are themselves abysmally inaccurate and libelous about Strauss. The only place Strauss discusses conspiracy thematically that I can recall–and I have read all his books several times, and still read them; have/do you?....The neocons just get all the attention–owing again, in part to Drury and in part to one terrible 2003 article by James Atlas, which no one these days has read, but quickly became THE account of neocon Straussians controlling the Bush administration...He apparently considered himself a Cold War liberal until his death.I'll candidly admit I haven't read a single one of Strauss's own books, nor even that very influential James Atlas article you dislike so intensely. Instead, I was merely summarizing the extensive arguments of Prof. deHaven-Smith, who, as a prominent political scientist, is presumably quite familiar with Strauss, though I don't doubt that his views might differ considerably from your own.But on your second point, I do remember seeing a very amusing private letter of Strauss that came to light about a decade or so ago. Written shortly after his arrival in America, it was addressed to a fellow ultra-rightwing Jewish exile from Europe, and in it he praised fascism and (I think) Nazism to the skies, arguing that their regrettable deviation into "anti-Semitism" (which had precipitated his own personal exile from Germany) should in no way be considered a refutation of all the other wonderful aspects of those political doctrines. This leads me to wonder if Strauss was truly the "liberal" you suggest, or perhaps was instead engaging in exactly the sort of "ideological crypsis" that seems such an important part of his political philosophy...
It's likely my faulty memory may have garbled important aspects of the letter I mention, and given your expertise on Straussian issues, I'm sure you should be able to locate it and easily correct me.
The letter you are referring to is a letter to Karl Lowith from 1933. The most sustained–not to say serious–attempt to make it say that Strauss is coming out as a fascist has been the work of William Altman. I don't think he even comes close to making his case.
The letter can more charitably and reasonably read as a frank acknowledgement of the failure of Weimar liberalism and of liberalism generally precisely to take into account nationalist sentiment but instead to "universalize" all particulars without due attention to differing conditions, circumstances, "matter," and so on. In other words, Strauss is defending the "concept of the political" both from liberal universalism and from the simple-minded identification of particularism (or nationalism) with fascism. Sound familiar? All nationalist sentiment is fascism, Trump is a Nazi, and so on. An "argument" as old as hills and which Strauss saw through immediately.
Once again, though, the tail is chased. How can Strauss be both a universalist neo-con and a particularist-nationalist-fascist at the same time? The only common thread is: Strauss is bad.
In my view, Strauss is good. More to the point, I find stronger intellectual support in Strauss for my own nationalist leanings and pro-Trump_vs_deep_state than I find in any other intellectual source of any depth. I am in the minority among Straussians in thinking so, but I am not alone. Morevoer, I think in open debate, I have a stronger case for Straussian particularism than others can make for Straussian universalism.
And, not incidentally, none of this points to any such views on conspiracy as you put into Strauss's mouth.
• Replies: @Ron UnzThe letter you are referring to is a letter to Karl Lowith from 1933. The most sustained–not to say serious–attempt to make it say that Strauss is coming out as a fascist has been the work of William Altman.Well, I decided I might as well google up the letter, and found this extended discussion in Harpers by someone who clearly dislikes Strauss and the Neocons, with a link to a full translation of Strauss's controversial missive.http://harpers.org/blog/2008/01/will-the-real-leo-strauss-please-stand-up/
Offhand, it does indeed seem like I misremembered some of the details. Strauss apparently didn't seem to like the Nazis very much, but it certainly sounds like he had positive feelings towards the Fascists. In any event, the following excerpt makes me wonder whether he was actually a "liberal," or merely pretended to be since his income probably depended upon liberal donors and institutions...
And, what concerns this matter: the fact that the new right-wing Germany does not tolerate us says nothing against the principles of the right. To the contrary: only from the principles of the right, that is from fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles, is it possible with seemliness, that is, without resort to the ludicrous and despicable appeal to the droits imprescriptibles de l'homme(5) to protest against the shabby abomination...There is no reason to crawl to the cross, neither to the cross of liberalism, as long as somewhere in the world there is a glimmer of the spark of the Roman thought.Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Robard says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 6:04 pm GMT
If government doesn't believe in conspiracies, why have secret services in the first place? Either they want to thwart conspiracies or they are creating their own or both.
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- Lawrence Fitton says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 6:18 pm GMT • 200 Words
belief in the fantastic is way more entertainment than belief in the mundane. that why the history channel prefers clownish, ancient alien astronaut theorists to phd historians.
still, the unlimited universe of chance & probability assures rare events happen all the time. in other words, improbable events – because there is infinity of them – are bound to happen with regularity.for instance, the author highlights the improbability of a bunch of arabs with box cutters as the perpetrators of 9/11. he's right. taken in isolation, of all the things that might have happened, the occurrence is rare in indeed. but, today, something that's never happened before will happen. and tomorrow too and the day after that. but, because the occurrences may not be as spectacular as 9/11, few will learn about them.
we believe what we want to believe. we can't know everything about anything, so there will always be questions.
9/11, the kennedy assassination, the lunar landing, aliens built the pyramids.
what is real and what is not depends on a point of view.
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- •
- Jacques Sheete says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 6:24 pm GMT @Ron Unz
Your characterization of Strauss on conspiracy has almost no basis in anything Strauss actually wrote. I would bet that you are presenting a dumbed -down and inaccurate version of Shadia Drury's books on Strauss, which are themselves abysmally inaccurate and libelous about Strauss. The only place Strauss discusses conspiracy thematically that I can recall–and I have read all his books several times, and still read them; have/do you?....The neocons just get all the attention–owing again, in part to Drury and in part to one terrible 2003 article by James Atlas, which no one these days has read, but quickly became THE account of neocon Straussians controlling the Bush administration...He apparently considered himself a Cold War liberal until his death.I'll candidly admit I haven't read a single one of Strauss's own books, nor even that very influential James Atlas article you dislike so intensely. Instead, I was merely summarizing the extensive arguments of Prof. deHaven-Smith, who, as a prominent political scientist, is presumably quite familiar with Strauss, though I don't doubt that his views might differ considerably from your own.But on your second point, I do remember seeing a very amusing private letter of Strauss that came to light about a decade or so ago. Written shortly after his arrival in America, it was addressed to a fellow ultra-rightwing Jewish exile from Europe, and in it he praised fascism and (I think) Nazism to the skies, arguing that their regrettable deviation into "anti-Semitism" (which had precipitated his own personal exile from Germany) should in no way be considered a refutation of all the other wonderful aspects of those political doctrines. This leads me to wonder if Strauss was truly the "liberal" you suggest, or perhaps was instead engaging in exactly the sort of "ideological crypsis" that seems such an important part of his political philosophy...
It's likely my faulty memory may have garbled important aspects of the letter I mention, and given your expertise on Straussian issues, I'm sure you should be able to locate it and easily correct me.
While I've read nothing by Prof. deHaven-Smith, from what you've written, he and DiLorenzo would probably agree.
Here's a short but readable eval of Strauss' ideas, and DiLorenzo is one academician whom I somewhat trust.:
Moronic Intellectuals
By Thomas DiLorenzohttps://www.lewrockwell.com/2004/09/thomas-woods/the-neocon-godfather/
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- John Jeremiah Smith says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 6:29 pm GMT • 100 Words @JL I suppose my comment came off somewhat like unbridled, naive optimism. Your points are unquestionably valid, however, and I am disinclined to argue. Of course Trump represents the interests of certain groups of elites and is not merely the essence of a popular movement. I'll be honest, though, I'm having a tough time determining who these groups are, exactly.
Just like with Brexit, these events don't happen without powerful manipulation from somewhere within the 0.1%. Still, it's tough for me to imagine what a Trump presidency will even look like. Who will be in his cabinet, from what backgrounds will they come?
There is absolutely no concern, anywhere within the dominion of the 0.1%, with human values, human rights, or any of that sort of ethically-principled hoo-hoo.Certainly not. What are fundamentally important questions for us are merely means to an end for them.Of course Trump represents the interests of certain groups of elites and is not merely the essence of a popular movement. I'll be honest, though, I'm having a tough time determining who these groups are, exactly.
Yes, and how many players, each with what orientation and degree of focus? The 0.1% population contains 10,000 – 50,00o potential players, globally.
It is my opinion that the extremely-high degree of corruption, within the mighty engine of resource consumption and bribery that is the US government, contributes greatly to the "big picture" of ongoing conflict among the members of the oligarchy.
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- • Replies: @Anonymous
I was a boy watching those transmissions you helped bring us. Thank you, Sir!Sure, it's certainly possible that there's been a conspiracy to promote the notion that the moon landing was a hoax.Apollo is one of the greatest human achievements, my absolute favorite historical event. I consider myself lucky to have been alive and old enough to witness and understand it.
...
And I believe there has been in fact some conspiratorial effort over the years to promote their idiocy, a conspiracy on the part of those who would weaken American pride and reputation.
But it's also true that people with deep emotional attachments to things, especially inculcated in childhood, have trouble considering and questioning certain things. And it's well known that propaganda deliberately tries to inculcate these sort of emotional attachments in order to be more effective. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Pat Casey says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 6:31 pm GMT • 100 Words @Decius Your characterization of Strauss on conspiracy has almost no basis in anything Strauss actually wrote. I would bet that you are presenting a dumbed -down and inaccurate version of Shadia Drury's books on Strauss, which are themselves abysmally inaccurate and libelous about Strauss.
The only place Strauss discusses conspiracy thematically that I can recall--and I have read all his books several times, and still read them; have/do you?--is on Thoughts on Machiavelli . Strauss does so, first and foremost, because conspiracy is a major theme of Machiavelli's and the subject of the two longest chapters of his two most important books ( Prince 19 and Discourses III 6). Strauss further develops the idea that modern philosophy begins as a conspiracy between Machiavelli and (some of) his readers. Strauss simply never said anything like this:
Meanwhile, Strauss, a founding figure in modern neo-conservative thought, was equally harsh in his attacks upon conspiracy analysis, but for polar-opposite reasons. In his mind, elite conspiracies were absolutely necessary and beneficial, a crucial social defense against anarchy or totalitarianism, but their effectiveness obviously depended upon keeping them hidden from the prying eyes of the ignorant masses. His main problem with "conspiracy theories" was not that they were always false, but they might often be true, and therefore their spread was potentially disruptive to the smooth functioning of society. So as a matter of self-defense, elites needed to actively suppress or otherwise undercut the unauthorized investigation of suspected conspiracies.As for his relationship with neoconservatism, you also overstate that considerably. Yes, there are many neoconservative Straussians. But there are also Straussian paleos, tradcons, liberatarians, liberals, and moderates. There are many who are apolitical and interested only in abstract philosophy. There are Straussian religious conservatives, agnostics and atheists. Christians, Jews and Muslim. Catholic, Protestants and Mormons. The neocons just get all the attention--owing again, in part to Drury and in part to one terrible 2003 article by James Atlas, which no one these days has read, but quickly became THE account of neocon Straussians controlling the Bush administration, which everyone today believes without having read, or even being aware of (have/are you?).If "neocon" has any meaning, it means, first, a former intellectual liberal who has drifted right. Second, a domestic policy scholar who focuses on data-driven social science. And third, a foreign policy hawk.
None of these really apply to Strauss, who spent his who career studying political philosophy, with an intense focus on the Greeks. He voted Dem in every election in which he could vote, until his last, 1972, when he voted for Nixon out of Cold War concerns. You might say that makes him a "hawk" but he never wrote any essays saying so. He simply told a few people privately that McGovern was too naïve about the Soviets. You might also say that is evidence that he "drifted right" but he didn't think so. He apparently considered himself a Cold War liberal until his death. As for data-driven social science, he famously attacked it in of the very few of his writings that ever got any attention in mainstream political science ("An Epilogue").
You may well be right about the CIA's role in popularizing the phrase "conspiracy theory." But Leo Strauss had nothing to do with it. Or, if he did, he hid his role exceptionally well, because there is no evidence of such in his writings.
Actually I don't think Ron is so far off. And I think, at best, you must be overeducated. Strauss held that authentic philosophy is a conspiracy . From there, certain practical advice about how to carry out the philosophy of the true philosopher follows. Such advice would about seem to be how Ron said it was.
I have not read the essay by Atlas. But for the duration of the Bush Administration I did read the Weekly Standard. I recall in particular one time when the editors recommended what books to bring to the beach, and Bill Kristol said "anything by Leo Strauss." My impression is that the Weekly Standard's brazen propaganda back then was the way certain editors understood themselves to be acting like Strauss's true disciples.
And of course now Krystol is hocking a former spook to run against Trump in Utah.
• Replies: @Decius The reduction of Strauss and all his concerns to TWS is not serious. Yes, Bill K loves Strauss. That really doesn't prove much about Strauss either way. I believe, though of course cannot prove since Strauss can't speak, that Strauss would have opposed the Iraq War. He would have seen it as imprudent and prudence is the supreme virtue of the statesman.You are sort of right about philosophy being a conspiracy, but wrong in the second half. MODERN philosophy attempts to take the conspiracy public, so to speak, to act in the real world. Ancient philosophy did not, or did so in a very limited, mitigating way, always with caution, moderation, prudence, and a lack of messianic hopes or intentions. Strauss argued his whole life for the superiority of the ancients to the moderns on this point (and on other points). Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Ron Unz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 6:34 pm GMT • 200 Words NEW! @Decius The letter you are referring to is a letter to Karl Lowith from 1933. The most sustained--not to say serious--attempt to make it say that Strauss is coming out as a fascist has been the work of William Altman. I don't think he even comes close to making his case.
The letter can more charitably and reasonably read as a frank acknowledgement of the failure of Weimar liberalism and of liberalism generally precisely to take into account nationalist sentiment but instead to "universalize" all particulars without due attention to differing conditions, circumstances, "matter," and so on. In other words, Strauss is defending the "concept of the political" both from liberal universalism and from the simple-minded identification of particularism (or nationalism) with fascism. Sound familiar? All nationalist sentiment is fascism, Trump is a Nazi, and so on. An "argument" as old as hills and which Strauss saw through immediately.
Once again, though, the tail is chased. How can Strauss be both a universalist neo-con and a particularist-nationalist-fascist at the same time? The only common thread is: Strauss is bad.
In my view, Strauss is good. More to the point, I find stronger intellectual support in Strauss for my own nationalist leanings and pro-Trump_vs_deep_state than I find in any other intellectual source of any depth. I am in the minority among Straussians in thinking so, but I am not alone. Morevoer, I think in open debate, I have a stronger case for Straussian particularism than others can make for Straussian universalism.
And, not incidentally, none of this points to any such views on conspiracy as you put into Strauss's mouth.
The letter you are referring to is a letter to Karl Lowith from 1933. The most sustained–not to say serious–attempt to make it say that Strauss is coming out as a fascist has been the work of William Altman.
Well, I decided I might as well google up the letter, and found this extended discussion in Harpers by someone who clearly dislikes Strauss and the Neocons, with a link to a full translation of Strauss's controversial missive.
http://harpers.org/blog/2008/01/will-the-real-leo-strauss-please-stand-up/
Offhand, it does indeed seem like I misremembered some of the details. Strauss apparently didn't seem to like the Nazis very much, but it certainly sounds like he had positive feelings towards the Fascists. In any event, the following excerpt makes me wonder whether he was actually a "liberal," or merely pretended to be since his income probably depended upon liberal donors and institutions
• Replies: @Decius What is a liberal? That's not a troll question. Strauss was above all a Socratic and Socratic philosophy begins with "what is" questions. One of Strauss's books is entitled Liberalism Ancient and Modern .And, what concerns this matter: the fact that the new right-wing Germany does not tolerate us says nothing against the principles of the right. To the contrary: only from the principles of the right, that is from fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles, is it possible with seemliness, that is, without resort to the ludicrous and despicable appeal to the droits imprescriptibles de l'homme(5) to protest against the shabby abomination There is no reason to crawl to the cross, neither to the cross of liberalism, as long as somewhere in the world there is a glimmer of the spark of the Roman thought.
Strauss was apparently a liberal in the US context in that he mostly voted for Dems. He also wrote one acerbically critical letter to National Review.
However, a mid-20th-century American liberal may have been many things, but unpatriotic or nationalistic they were not. When liberalism turned with McGovern, Strauss looked elsewhere, and then died a year later, so we don't know how his political outlook would, or would not, have changed longer term. But at least in the 40s-60s, he was quite OK with Cold War American liberals. That's perfectly consistent with the nationalist sentiment expressed in the letter to Lowith. Also, Strauss was appalled by the dissoluteness of Weimar--and would become appalled by the dissoluteness of the late 1960s. But America prior was not yet dissolute. And he was appalled by Weimar's weakness. But America pre-Vietnam was not weak. Again, perfectly consistent with the letter.
Strauss supported the Cold War because he thought the USSR was a real threat in the near term and because he feared, on a higher plane, the imposition of "the universal and homogenous state." He was opposed to that, whereas those to his left were for it. So was he conservative?
Strauss transcends all these distinctions. That's not to say that they are meaningless. Indeed, he would be the first to say that they are meaningful. But, like Tocqueville, Strauss aimed to see not differently but further than the parties. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Buzz Mohawk says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 6:48 pm GMT • 100 Words
By reading Ron's American Pravda series of columns, I am learning things that otherwise I would not have known. I am developing a clearer understanding of the real truth . This is an important contribution to my understanding of of reality!
And I trust this because of the quality and earnestness of the source.
This is all very much appreciated.
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- Decius says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 6:50 pm GMT • 300 Words @Ron Unz
The letter you are referring to is a letter to Karl Lowith from 1933. The most sustained–not to say serious–attempt to make it say that Strauss is coming out as a fascist has been the work of William Altman.Well, I decided I might as well google up the letter, and found this extended discussion in Harpers by someone who clearly dislikes Strauss and the Neocons, with a link to a full translation of Strauss's controversial missive.http://harpers.org/blog/2008/01/will-the-real-leo-strauss-please-stand-up/
Offhand, it does indeed seem like I misremembered some of the details. Strauss apparently didn't seem to like the Nazis very much, but it certainly sounds like he had positive feelings towards the Fascists. In any event, the following excerpt makes me wonder whether he was actually a "liberal," or merely pretended to be since his income probably depended upon liberal donors and institutions...
And, what concerns this matter: the fact that the new right-wing Germany does not tolerate us says nothing against the principles of the right. To the contrary: only from the principles of the right, that is from fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles, is it possible with seemliness, that is, without resort to the ludicrous and despicable appeal to the droits imprescriptibles de l'homme(5) to protest against the shabby abomination...There is no reason to crawl to the cross, neither to the cross of liberalism, as long as somewhere in the world there is a glimmer of the spark of the Roman thought.What is a liberal? That's not a troll question. Strauss was above all a Socratic and Socratic philosophy begins with "what is" questions. One of Strauss's books is entitled Liberalism Ancient and Modern .
Strauss was apparently a liberal in the US context in that he mostly voted for Dems. He also wrote one acerbically critical letter to National Review.
However, a mid-20th-century American liberal may have been many things, but unpatriotic or nationalistic they were not. When liberalism turned with McGovern, Strauss looked elsewhere, and then died a year later, so we don't know how his political outlook would, or would not, have changed longer term. But at least in the 40s-60s, he was quite OK with Cold War American liberals. That's perfectly consistent with the nationalist sentiment expressed in the letter to Lowith. Also, Strauss was appalled by the dissoluteness of Weimar–and would become appalled by the dissoluteness of the late 1960s. But America prior was not yet dissolute. And he was appalled by Weimar's weakness. But America pre-Vietnam was not weak. Again, perfectly consistent with the letter.
Strauss supported the Cold War because he thought the USSR was a real threat in the near term and because he feared, on a higher plane, the imposition of "the universal and homogenous state." He was opposed to that, whereas those to his left were for it. So was he conservative?
Strauss transcends all these distinctions. That's not to say that they are meaningless. Indeed, he would be the first to say that they are meaningful. But, like Tocqueville, Strauss aimed to see not differently but further than the parties.
• Replies: @dahoit Liberals used to say,I might not agree with what you say,but I'll defend you right to say it.
Today they want to implant Citizenchips.
Moon landings a hoax?I doubt that,but does it matter to today's terrible times other than a sign of American dominance in space race propaganda?
Today we send up zionist satellites(when they don't explode) and fund their citizens efforts in militarization of space that threatens all,including US.
Unbelievable but true. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- anonymous says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 6:50 pm GMT @Hibernian "FDR never intended that 2,400 Americans would die there."
Did he think our forces at Pearl, lacking needed intelligence, would limit the losses to a lesser number?
So it would seem. That critical intelligence on the Japanese was deliberately kept from Admiral Kimmel and General Short by FDR and his closest military officials is indisputable.
The question "why?" has never been answered in any meaningful sense.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/4742-pearl-harbor-scapegoating-kimmel-and-short
• Replies: @Darin Yes, why?If you want to start a war, would you want to start with great defeat and loss of your fleet?
In the thirties, there were three cases of false flag attacks created to justify a war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukden_Incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelling_of_MainilaIn none of these cases the attacker actually killed thousands of his own soldiers, what would be the point? , @anonymous Here is Admiral Kimmel himself telling us that the FDR administration in Washington deliberately withheld vital intelligence from him, intelligence that would have saved countless lives:
https://youtu.be/Bo00IcRj_4Y Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Decius says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 6:54 pm GMT • 100 Words @Pat Casey Actually I don't think Ron is so far off. And I think, at best, you must be overeducated. Strauss held that authentic philosophy is a conspiracy . From there, certain practical advice about how to carry out the philosophy of the true philosopher follows. Such advice would about seem to be how Ron said it was.
I have not read the essay by Atlas. But for the duration of the Bush Administration I did read the Weekly Standard. I recall in particular one time when the editors recommended what books to bring to the beach, and Bill Kristol said "anything by Leo Strauss." My impression is that the Weekly Standard's brazen propaganda back then was the way certain editors understood themselves to be acting like Strauss's true disciples.
And of course now Krystol is hocking a former spook to run against Trump in Utah.
The reduction of Strauss and all his concerns to TWS is not serious. Yes, Bill K loves Strauss. That really doesn't prove much about Strauss either way. I believe, though of course cannot prove since Strauss can't speak, that Strauss would have opposed the Iraq War. He would have seen it as imprudent and prudence is the supreme virtue of the statesman.
You are sort of right about philosophy being a conspiracy, but wrong in the second half. MODERN philosophy attempts to take the conspiracy public, so to speak, to act in the real world. Ancient philosophy did not, or did so in a very limited, mitigating way, always with caution, moderation, prudence, and a lack of messianic hopes or intentions. Strauss argued his whole life for the superiority of the ancients to the moderns on this point (and on other points).
• Replies: @utu Unless you give some evidence that Strauss was a Reptilian or at least that he was a skeptic about the Moon landing there is no need for further discussion on Strauss here. , @Pat CaseyThe reduction of Strauss and all his concerns to TWS is not serious.That's not what I did. Don't do that. You seemed to be saying the neo-cons do not hail from the school of Strauss as this Atlas fellow said they did. I was saying they do, according to them.It was pretty obvious back then that the weekly standard was acting as an organ of the bush administration more than a member of the media. I remember there was even a tepid discussion about how we as journalist should feel about these fellas with one foot in the media and one foot in the politics. Does that have anything to do with the style Strauss bespoke? My understanding is that Strauss addressed his philosophy not to Princes but certain among the reading public. That turns out to first of all mean political journalists who will sacrifice the integrity of their profession for the sake of a particular kind of proud story about the USA polity and its villains. Yes I do think people like Bill Krystol and Michael Ledeen saw themselves in terms as dramatic as that.
You are sort of right about philosophy being a conspiracy, but wrong in the second half. MODERN philosophy attempts to take the conspiracy public, so to speak, to act in the real world. Ancient philosophy did not, or did so in a very limited, mitigating way, always with caution, moderation, prudence, and a lack of messianic hopes or intentions. Strauss argued his whole life for the superiority of the ancients to the moderns on this point (and on other points).You mean I was right about Strauss having a conspiracy theory of philosophy. I didn't say anything about the second half. I read Paul Gottfried and I agree Strauss was a ridiculous scholar. Of course I believe you when you say in so many words that Strauss did not like philosophies that license mass movements of true believers. Full stop right there. Now we can count back from all them and make this an exercise in splitting hairs. What audience to be precise did Strauss exactly have in mind? Actually I don't think he deserves that much credit; I don't think he really knew who he was writing for. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 6:59 pm GMT • 100 Words
So as a means of damage control, the CIA distributed a secret memo to all its field offices requesting that they enlist their media assets in efforts to ridicule and attack such critics as irrational supporters of "conspiracy theories."
And what do you know, the term "conspiracy theories" was non-existent in books before JFK's assassination but took off right after, according to Google's Ngram Viewer: https://is.gd/GYioQZ
• Replies: @Peripatetic commenter I see that someone has updated a document about that:https://infogalactic.com/info/Conspiracy_theory#Pejorative_meaning Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- • Replies: @Mr. Anon "Oleynik is Ukrainian."
The Ukrainians were, you know, part of the same Soviet Union which failed to put a man on the Moon.
"At any rate, attacking his ethnic background is just a cheap ad hominem argument."
No, it is pointing out what might be real motive for him to do what he is doing.
"Soros and his foundations funded, and still do presumably, scholarships and education grants in Eastern Europe following the Soviet collapse."
And what do you think of Soros? Do you think he is a manipulator of peoples, movements, entire governments? If so, what does it say that this guy was once on his payroll? Or do you simply temporarily suspend one part of your world-view when it becomes inconvenient for another part of it?
In any event, his purported photgraphic analysis is crap. He's talking about parallax exhibited in pairs of images taken from different bearings - but the pictures themselves were not even taken at the same locations, as can easily be seen from the details in the foreground. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Darin says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 7:30 pm GMT • 100 Words @anonymous So it would seem. That critical intelligence on the Japanese was deliberately kept from Admiral Kimmel and General Short by FDR and his closest military officials is indisputable.
The question "why?" has never been answered in any meaningful sense.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/4742-pearl-harbor-scapegoating-kimmel-and-short
Yes, why?
If you want to start a war, would you want to start with great defeat and loss of your fleet?
In the thirties, there were three cases of false flag attacks created to justify a war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukden_Incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelling_of_MainilaIn none of these cases the attacker actually killed thousands of his own soldiers, what would be the point?
• Replies: @exiled off mainstreet I didn't notice Gleiwitz was mentioned in another posting before I mentioned it. I tend go along with you and suspect incompetence rather than purpose was the cause of the Pearl Harbor disaster, though the incompetence may have included failure to adequately warn those on the ground at Pearl Harbor. Personally, I don't back the "truther" version of the twin towers because that would have required a broader conspiracy than I think could have succeeded. My guess is that the neighboring building was destroyed as part of the cleanup effort. I do think, however, that the authorities knew something was up, didn't believe it could ever succeed and used it as a sort of Reichstag Fire incident to brush aside constitutional democracy in the US. I also suspect that the Mossad knew more than they let on. My guess is that if Gore rather than Bush had been in power that history would have been far different. I suspect that the anthrax thing was more likely started by the yankee regime as a home-grown conspiracy. , @HippopotamusdromeThe fleet wasn't lost. The carriers were out at sea and not sunk. Eight battleships, three cruisers and three destroyers were damaged. Battleships were obsolete by that time in the face of aircraft. Battleships were mainly used as AA platforms to protect carriers and to bombard airfields. , @Jonathan Revusky
If you want to start a war, would you want to start with great defeat and loss of your fleet?
In none of these cases the attacker actually killed thousands of his own soldiers, what would be the point?Well, the answer should be obvious, no? You have an existing situation in which eat least 80% of the U.S. population is opposed to the war and you want to mobilize them. If you play chess, there are all these openings called "gambits" where you sacrifice a pawn or two to more rapidly mobilize your forces.3000 people is really just peanuts on a national level. If the result is that you get all this outrage and suddenly the majority of the population is screaming for war, well that could be well worth it. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Miro23 says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 7:35 pm GMT • 700 Words @Wizard of Oz I accept that your explanation of the attack on USS Liberty is relatively plausible but another which runs it close is that Israel had to ensure that there was no proof left of the true order of events which were not in accordance with the Israeli official version. So I ask what are your sources?
Likewise, if you are saying that suicidal hijackers flew planes into buildings on 9/11 but that it was organised by Mossad or other Israelis your story needs a lot of filling out and evidence to be credible. Or are you merely saying the Israelis knew what was going to
happen and let it go ahead because it could be turned to their advantage?[Sorry, long reply]
The basic fact about the USS Liberty is that an American navy ship was attacked with the aim of sinking it, which is an Act of War since the ship was clearly marked.
In contrast, the attacking Israeli jets and torpedo boats were unmarked (i.e. they wanted to hide their identity), so a question is why were they unmarked if this was a standard military interception?
Whether the Israelis wanted to trigger a US attack on Egypt or hide their communications with regard to their attack on Syria is a secondary question. The main concern of the United States surely had to be to rescue their seamen and respond to the aggression.
And, this is where the story turns really nasty.
At least two rescue attempts were launched from US aircraft carriers nearby, but after the (obligatory) communication to Washington, both rescue flights were cancelled within minutes on direct orders of Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara (source: 6th Fleet Rear Admiral Lawrence Geis speaking in confidence to the senior Liberty survivor, Naval Security Group officer, Lieutenant Commander David Lewis in a meeting requested by Geis).
Surviving personnel all received strict orders not say anything to anyone about the attack.
Eyewitness accounts say that 4 nuclear armed aircraft were simultaneously launched from the aircraft carrier America on the instructions of President Johnson only to be recalled when, presumably, the information came through that the Israelis had not succeeded in sinking the Liberty. Nuclear weapons were not needed to defend the Liberty.
Also there was an oral history report from the American Embassy in Cairo, (now in the LBJ Library), which notes that the Embassy received an urgent message from Washington warning that Cairo was about to be bombed by US forces.
An investigation led by Thomas Moorer, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff held the opinion that the Israeli motive was to draw the US into war against Egypt , through a false subterfuge of the same type as their King David Hotel bombing and Lavon Affair operations.
Any rational person has to conclude that Johnson was virtually following Israeli orders, which raises the question of why? Maybe they were blackmailing him with regard to something else that was more important to him than the destruction of Cairo?
9/11 had some of the same features as other Israeli False Flag attacks against Britain and the US, such as Israelis dressed as Arabs (framed Arabs) motivated towards tricking these countries into military action against Arab states. In fact the Israeli involvement in 9/11 was much deeper and more generalized as shown in investigative reporter Christopher Bollyn's book, "Solving 9-11: The Deception That Changed the World". https://www.amazon.com/Solving-9-11-Deception-Changed-World/dp/0985322586/ref=cm_cr-mr-title
15 years later his account is supported in multiple ways from investigations in Florida (they didn't sneak in unseen – they were highly visible and got red carpet treatment with regard to visas etc. and they were completely incapable of flying the 9/11 airliners at the speeds and on the trajectories seen on the day + everyone who had contact with them was visited by the F.B.I. and told to shut up) – Source, a detailed and very interesting investigation by Daniel Hopsicker in "Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta and the 9/11 Cover-Up in Florida. https://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Terrorland-Mohamed-Cover-up-Florida/dp/0975290673/ref=cm_cr-mr-title
High-rise buildings don't collapse due to fire (reason given by the US government). All high rise fire disasters have been examined in detail, with most of them much more intense than the WTC ones, and no building collapsed – let alone in 7 seconds and three on the same day.
These Arabs didn't fly the jets and it's now clear that the buildings were taken down by placed explosives – the aim being to trick the US into an Iraq and Iran war and possibly launch an "Emergency" Neo-con regime (dictatorship) in the US led by Cheney and enforced by the Patriot Act/ Homeland security.
The other aspect here is that a government (and media) which genuinely represented the American people would give top priority to revealing the truth about the USS Liberty and 9/11 rather than engage in the present obfuscation, blocking, threats, smears and hiding of the truth.
• Replies: @nsa We here in Ft. Meade and Langley, using our vast media assets, have successfully inoculated the public against these deviant 911 ideas. Game over....we have achieved full spectrum dominance and total information awareness throughout 99% of the planet. , @Wizard of Oz Thanks. I wonder what will happen to Israel's support if and when serious money and research and publicity is put into telling the whole Liberty story and making sure it is drummed in.Your 9/11 version I don't buy, not least because someone suicidal/murderous had to be controlling the planes. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- anonymous says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 7:38 pm GMT @anonymous So it would seem. That critical intelligence on the Japanese was deliberately kept from Admiral Kimmel and General Short by FDR and his closest military officials is indisputable.
The question "why?" has never been answered in any meaningful sense.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/4742-pearl-harbor-scapegoating-kimmel-and-short
Here is Admiral Kimmel himself telling us that the FDR administration in Washington deliberately withheld vital intelligence from him, intelligence that would have saved countless lives:
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- utu says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 7:38 pm GMT @Decius The reduction of Strauss and all his concerns to TWS is not serious. Yes, Bill K loves Strauss. That really doesn't prove much about Strauss either way. I believe, though of course cannot prove since Strauss can't speak, that Strauss would have opposed the Iraq War. He would have seen it as imprudent and prudence is the supreme virtue of the statesman.
You are sort of right about philosophy being a conspiracy, but wrong in the second half. MODERN philosophy attempts to take the conspiracy public, so to speak, to act in the real world. Ancient philosophy did not, or did so in a very limited, mitigating way, always with caution, moderation, prudence, and a lack of messianic hopes or intentions. Strauss argued his whole life for the superiority of the ancients to the moderns on this point (and on other points).
Unless you give some evidence that Strauss was a Reptilian or at least that he was a skeptic about the Moon landing there is no need for further discussion on Strauss here.
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- Erik Sieven says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 7:40 pm GMT @Kirt Conspiracy is simply a plan or agreement by more than one person to do something evil and then the pursuit of that plan. Secrecy may be needed for the success of a conspiracy, but it is not essential to the definition. Were it essential to the definition, you could never prove the existence of a conspiracy. Either secrecy would be maintained and there would be little or no evidence or secrecy would not be maintained and the plan would become known and by definition not be a conspiracy.
"Conspiracy is simply a plan or agreement by more than one person to do something evil and then the pursuit of that plan." but probably everything think that what he does is good, not evil
• Replies: @Kirt "probably everything think that what he does is good, not evil"Yeah, that's true. I think that it was Saint Thomas Aquinas who said that evil is always done under an aspect of good. Hence no one will consider himself a conspirator other than perhaps in a legal sense if he is aware that what he is doing is illegal. Apart from that the charge of conspiracy will always come from opponents; e.g. Hilly's charge of "a vast right-wing conspiracy". Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Darin says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 7:47 pm GMT • 100 Words
Another question to all conspirologists out there: what you think about Trump plant theory?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_plant_theory
https://www.facebook.com/ClintonTrumpConspiracy
Is Donald Trump paid by Clintons to let Hillary win? This need no big conspiracy, only Donald, Bill, Hill and few of their closest advisors would be on the plot, and it fits the character and modus operandi of the plotters. Any thoughts?
• Replies: @RobinG For a while I've wondered if Hillary funded Martin O'Malley, and also Lincoln Chaffee, just to give the illusion that there was some competition, and to give her an excuse to get media exposure in the primaries.(Hat-tip to a friend who posits that Virginia Independent Greens are a creation of Va. Repubs. for the same reasons.) Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Dave37 says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 8:01 pm GMT
Maybe the CIA used conspiracy theory but ordinary perverse humans invented it. If moon lander deniers (and other conspiracies) were proven wrong the rest of us would be happy to see them in public stocks and a ready supply of tomatoes.
• Replies: @Bill Jones So no freedom of speech in your little world then. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Conspiracy Theories Are True - PaulCraigRoberts.org says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 8:09 pm GMT • 100 Words
[ ] I described how the CIA flummoxed insouciant Americans. Ron Unz gives you the intellectual history behind of how two foreign intellectuals, Karl Popper and Leo Strauss, shoved aside the truth-telling American intellectual, Charles Beard, who, like our founding fathers, had his finger on government's propensity to deceive the people with conspiracies. Popper said that conspiracies couldn't happen, and Strauss said they were necessary so that the government could pursue its agendas despite the public's opposition. http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-how-the-cia-invented-conspiracy-theories/ [ ]
- art guerrilla says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 8:10 pm GMT • 100 Words @Chief Seattle So, a conspiracy theory is a theory without media backing. There's no better recent example of this than when the DNC emails were released by wikileaks during their convention. The story put forth was that Russian hackers were responsible, and were trying to throw the election to their buddy Trump. The evidence for this? Zero. And yet it became a plausible explanation in the media, overnight.
Maybe it's true, maybe not, but if the roles had been reversed, the media would be telling its proponents to take off their tin foil hats.
ahhh, but 'Russkie!/squirrel!' worked, didn't it ? ? ?
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virtually NOTHING about the actual content of the emails
what was hysterical, was a followup not too long afterwards, where pelosi 'warned' that there might be a whole raft of other emails which said bad stuff and stuff, and, um, they were -like- probably, um, all, uh, fake and stuff
it really is a funny tragi-comedy, isn't it ? ? ?
then why am i crying inside
- Alden says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 8:17 pm GMT • 100 Words @Wizard of Oz I accept that your explanation of the attack on USS Liberty is relatively plausible but another which runs it close is that Israel had to ensure that there was no proof left of the true order of events which were not in accordance with the Israeli official version. So I ask what are your sources?
Likewise, if you are saying that suicidal hijackers flew planes into buildings on 9/11 but that it was organised by Mossad or other Israelis your story needs a lot of filling out and evidence to be credible. Or are you merely saying the Israelis knew what was going to
happen and let it go ahead because it could be turned to their advantage?Re: your first question about the USS Liberty. The media covered it up completely. I was a young adult who read the newspaper every day plus Atlantic. new Republic and sometimes Newsweek.
And I never, never heard about it until 20 years later when I began reading books about ZionismI've read the book written by survivors. They were severely coerced to not say a word about it. I wouldn't be surprised if they were not threatened with death if they talked. They were in the navy remember and subject to the military code of Justice which means no ha rays corpus no access to attorneys until the trial and other nasty things.
I can't have an opinion about 9/11 because there is no way I can discover the truth. Silverstein's insurance payout is just a version of a standard insurance scam.
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- nsa says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 8:22 pm GMT @Miro23 [Sorry, long reply]
The basic fact about the USS Liberty is that an American navy ship was attacked with the aim of sinking it, which is an Act of War since the ship was clearly marked.
In contrast, the attacking Israeli jets and torpedo boats were unmarked (i.e. they wanted to hide their identity), so a question is why were they unmarked if this was a standard military interception?
Whether the Israelis wanted to trigger a US attack on Egypt or hide their communications with regard to their attack on Syria is a secondary question. The main concern of the United States surely had to be to rescue their seamen and respond to the aggression.
And, this is where the story turns really nasty.
At least two rescue attempts were launched from US aircraft carriers nearby, but after the (obligatory) communication to Washington, both rescue flights were cancelled within minutes on direct orders of Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara (source: 6th Fleet Rear Admiral Lawrence Geis speaking in confidence to the senior Liberty survivor, Naval Security Group officer, Lieutenant Commander David Lewis in a meeting requested by Geis).
Surviving personnel all received strict orders not say anything to anyone about the attack.
Eyewitness accounts say that 4 nuclear armed aircraft were simultaneously launched from the aircraft carrier America on the instructions of President Johnson only to be recalled when, presumably, the information came through that the Israelis had not succeeded in sinking the Liberty. Nuclear weapons were not needed to defend the Liberty.
Also there was an oral history report from the American Embassy in Cairo, (now in the LBJ Library), which notes that the Embassy received an urgent message from Washington warning that Cairo was about to be bombed by US forces.
An investigation led by Thomas Moorer, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff held the opinion that the Israeli motive was to draw the US into war against Egypt , through a false subterfuge of the same type as their King David Hotel bombing and Lavon Affair operations.
Any rational person has to conclude that Johnson was virtually following Israeli orders, which raises the question of why? Maybe they were blackmailing him with regard to something else that was more important to him than the destruction of Cairo?
9/11 had some of the same features as other Israeli False Flag attacks against Britain and the US, such as Israelis dressed as Arabs (framed Arabs) motivated towards tricking these countries into military action against Arab states. In fact the Israeli involvement in 9/11 was much deeper and more generalized as shown in investigative reporter Christopher Bollyn's book, "Solving 9-11: The Deception That Changed the World". https://www.amazon.com/Solving-9-11-Deception-Changed-World/dp/0985322586/ref=cm_cr-mr-title
15 years later his account is supported in multiple ways from investigations in Florida (they didn't sneak in unseen – they were highly visible and got red carpet treatment with regard to visas etc. and they were completely incapable of flying the 9/11 airliners at the speeds and on the trajectories seen on the day + everyone who had contact with them was visited by the F.B.I. and told to shut up) - Source, a detailed and very interesting investigation by Daniel Hopsicker in "Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta and the 9/11 Cover-Up in Florida. https://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Terrorland-Mohamed-Cover-up-Florida/dp/0975290673/ref=cm_cr-mr-title
High-rise buildings don't collapse due to fire (reason given by the US government). All high rise fire disasters have been examined in detail, with most of them much more intense than the WTC ones, and no building collapsed - let alone in 7 seconds and three on the same day.
These Arabs didn't fly the jets and it's now clear that the buildings were taken down by placed explosives - the aim being to trick the US into an Iraq and Iran war and possibly launch an "Emergency" Neo-con regime (dictatorship) in the US led by Cheney and enforced by the Patriot Act/ Homeland security.
The other aspect here is that a government (and media) which genuinely represented the American people would give top priority to revealing the truth about the USS Liberty and 9/11 rather than engage in the present obfuscation, blocking, threats, smears and hiding of the truth.
We here in Ft. Meade and Langley, using our vast media assets, have successfully inoculated the public against these deviant 911 ideas. Game over .we have achieved full spectrum dominance and total information awareness throughout 99% of the planet.
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- Pat Casey says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 8:35 pm GMT • 300 Words @Decius The reduction of Strauss and all his concerns to TWS is not serious. Yes, Bill K loves Strauss. That really doesn't prove much about Strauss either way. I believe, though of course cannot prove since Strauss can't speak, that Strauss would have opposed the Iraq War. He would have seen it as imprudent and prudence is the supreme virtue of the statesman.
You are sort of right about philosophy being a conspiracy, but wrong in the second half. MODERN philosophy attempts to take the conspiracy public, so to speak, to act in the real world. Ancient philosophy did not, or did so in a very limited, mitigating way, always with caution, moderation, prudence, and a lack of messianic hopes or intentions. Strauss argued his whole life for the superiority of the ancients to the moderns on this point (and on other points).
The reduction of Strauss and all his concerns to TWS is not serious.
That's not what I did. Don't do that. You seemed to be saying the neo-cons do not hail from the school of Strauss as this Atlas fellow said they did. I was saying they do, according to them.
It was pretty obvious back then that the weekly standard was acting as an organ of the bush administration more than a member of the media. I remember there was even a tepid discussion about how we as journalist should feel about these fellas with one foot in the media and one foot in the politics. Does that have anything to do with the style Strauss bespoke? My understanding is that Strauss addressed his philosophy not to Princes but certain among the reading public. That turns out to first of all mean political journalists who will sacrifice the integrity of their profession for the sake of a particular kind of proud story about the USA polity and its villains. Yes I do think people like Bill Krystol and Michael Ledeen saw themselves in terms as dramatic as that.
You are sort of right about philosophy being a conspiracy, but wrong in the second half. MODERN philosophy attempts to take the conspiracy public, so to speak, to act in the real world. Ancient philosophy did not, or did so in a very limited, mitigating way, always with caution, moderation, prudence, and a lack of messianic hopes or intentions. Strauss argued his whole life for the superiority of the ancients to the moderns on this point (and on other points).
You mean I was right about Strauss having a conspiracy theory of philosophy. I didn't say anything about the second half. I read Paul Gottfried and I agree Strauss was a ridiculous scholar. Of course I believe you when you say in so many words that Strauss did not like philosophies that license mass movements of true believers. Full stop right there. Now we can count back from all them and make this an exercise in splitting hairs. What audience to be precise did Strauss exactly have in mind? Actually I don't think he deserves that much credit; I don't think he really knew who he was writing for.
• Replies: @Jacques SheeteI don't think he really knew who he was writing for.Love it.My theory is that they basically wrote anything that came to mind so long as no one could pin 'em down to specifics, allowed them to keep paying the bills , afforded them a chance to sound "profound," and to be somebody.
Pretty much all of the type are frauds and only fools (especially the pompous quasi-scientific, pseudo intellectual, ones) take 'em seriously. I agree that the ancients were much more honest but even they were recognized as BSers of high degree by the likes of Aristophanes and Lucian of Samosata to name only two. (I named them because they make particularly entertaining reading.)
I think the 20th century should be known as the Age of Pathetic Charlatans and I'm glad it's over. May it and the endless gaggle of cheap morons it spawned never return. , @Decius Kristol is a Straussian because he got a PhD in PolPhil from Harvard under Mansfield, who is a Straussian. There is no necessary connection between Strauss's thought any of the main tenets of Neo-conservatism. I've said, and you've all ignored, that Strauss attacked data-driven social science, which is the original hallmark of neo-conservatism. A later hallmark (which emerged after Strauss's death) was foreign policy hawkism. Unless you want to say that Strauss's opposition to the USSR makes him a neo-con, in which case every Cold War liberal going back to Truman was a neo-con. At which point the term has no meaning.
Strauss addresses scholars and potential philosophers. He has almost nothing to say about the transient issues of his age. Based on his comments on what other thinkers had to say about war (Thucydides above all) I believe we can infer that Strauss was generally in favor of preparedness and wariness but otherwise anti-war in the general sense. If we may analogize the Iraq War to the Sicilian Expedition we may say that Strauss probably would have opposed the former as imprudent, just as he tacitly endorses T's judgement that the latter was imprudent.
Strauss openly characterizes Machiavelli's approach to philosophy as a conspiracy, using that word, but does not say it about any other thinker. However, his teaching that philosophy is an inherently elite and very small enterprise may be fairly characterized as a "conspiracy." however, before modernity, the nature of the conspiracy was to protect the conspirators and the philosophic life, not a reform campaign. that's what it becomes under modernity, which Strauss opposes. One of Strauss's aims in writing was to revive the ancient idea of philosophy, its proper scope, and its proper relationship to society, which he believed modernity had corrupted.
It is unfortunate that Strauss became a bogey-man to so many who have no idea what he said or why. It happened rather recently and based on some very thin scholarship. Most of the thing people try to pin on him are things that I and my friends oppose too. We just know they don't trace to Strauss. In fact, the opposite is often true. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Mr. Anon says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 9:19 pm GMT
"Only a child – or its intellectual equivalent, i.e., a low information infotainment consumer – could believe in the official version of 9/11."
That is clearly false, as plenty of people who are smart – smarter than you actually – do in fact believe just that.
• Replies: @Miro23 Being smart has nothing to do with it.For example the government says that WTC7 completely collapsed in 7 seconds due to fire. You don't need to be smart to see something is wrong here (hint: most of the structural pillars were untouched by fire). , @Miro23 Or maybe a lot of smart people pretend to believe the official 9/11 story because that's where their interest lies. MSM journalists know for sure that articles that deviate from the official line on 9/11 are career ending moves .
In simple terms, MSM owners have decided that 9/11 is a taboo subject (same as USS Liberty) and they decide what gets published. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Jacques Sheete says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 9:43 pm GMT • 100 Words @Pat Casey
The reduction of Strauss and all his concerns to TWS is not serious.That's not what I did. Don't do that. You seemed to be saying the neo-cons do not hail from the school of Strauss as this Atlas fellow said they did. I was saying they do, according to them.It was pretty obvious back then that the weekly standard was acting as an organ of the bush administration more than a member of the media. I remember there was even a tepid discussion about how we as journalist should feel about these fellas with one foot in the media and one foot in the politics. Does that have anything to do with the style Strauss bespoke? My understanding is that Strauss addressed his philosophy not to Princes but certain among the reading public. That turns out to first of all mean political journalists who will sacrifice the integrity of their profession for the sake of a particular kind of proud story about the USA polity and its villains. Yes I do think people like Bill Krystol and Michael Ledeen saw themselves in terms as dramatic as that.
You are sort of right about philosophy being a conspiracy, but wrong in the second half. MODERN philosophy attempts to take the conspiracy public, so to speak, to act in the real world. Ancient philosophy did not, or did so in a very limited, mitigating way, always with caution, moderation, prudence, and a lack of messianic hopes or intentions. Strauss argued his whole life for the superiority of the ancients to the moderns on this point (and on other points).You mean I was right about Strauss having a conspiracy theory of philosophy. I didn't say anything about the second half. I read Paul Gottfried and I agree Strauss was a ridiculous scholar. Of course I believe you when you say in so many words that Strauss did not like philosophies that license mass movements of true believers. Full stop right there. Now we can count back from all them and make this an exercise in splitting hairs. What audience to be precise did Strauss exactly have in mind? Actually I don't think he deserves that much credit; I don't think he really knew who he was writing for.I don't think he really knew who he was writing for.
Love it.
My theory is that they basically wrote anything that came to mind so long as no one could pin 'em down to specifics, allowed them to keep paying the bills , afforded them a chance to sound "profound," and to be somebody.
Pretty much all of the type are frauds and only fools (especially the pompous quasi-scientific, pseudo intellectual, ones) take 'em seriously. I agree that the ancients were much more honest but even they were recognized as BSers of high degree by the likes of Aristophanes and Lucian of Samosata to name only two. (I named them because they make particularly entertaining reading.)
I think the 20th century should be known as the Age of Pathetic Charlatans and I'm glad it's over. May it and the endless gaggle of cheap morons it spawned never return.
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- Miro23 says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 9:54 pm GMT @Mr. Anon "Only a child – or its intellectual equivalent, i.e., a low information infotainment consumer – could believe in the official version of 9/11."
That is clearly false, as plenty of people who are smart - smarter than you actually - do in fact believe just that.
Being smart has nothing to do with it.
For example the government says that WTC7 completely collapsed in 7 seconds due to fire. You don't need to be smart to see something is wrong here (hint: most of the structural pillars were untouched by fire).
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz I see the biggest problem about a conspiratorial explanation for the WTC 7 collapse is motive. How does it make sense for those who wanted the big splash that hitting buildings 1 and 2 would give? The other major difficulty is the video footage of fires burning all day which had to have heated the steel and therefore potentially weakened it to a critical point. Where's the mystery? , @Mr. Anon "Being smart has nothing to do with it."Being smart usually has everything to do with everything. But to people like you, ignorance opens up a world of possibilities, no matter how false or ludicrous they may be. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Decius says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 10:12 pm GMT • 400 Words @Pat Casey
The reduction of Strauss and all his concerns to TWS is not serious.That's not what I did. Don't do that. You seemed to be saying the neo-cons do not hail from the school of Strauss as this Atlas fellow said they did. I was saying they do, according to them.It was pretty obvious back then that the weekly standard was acting as an organ of the bush administration more than a member of the media. I remember there was even a tepid discussion about how we as journalist should feel about these fellas with one foot in the media and one foot in the politics. Does that have anything to do with the style Strauss bespoke? My understanding is that Strauss addressed his philosophy not to Princes but certain among the reading public. That turns out to first of all mean political journalists who will sacrifice the integrity of their profession for the sake of a particular kind of proud story about the USA polity and its villains. Yes I do think people like Bill Krystol and Michael Ledeen saw themselves in terms as dramatic as that.
You are sort of right about philosophy being a conspiracy, but wrong in the second half. MODERN philosophy attempts to take the conspiracy public, so to speak, to act in the real world. Ancient philosophy did not, or did so in a very limited, mitigating way, always with caution, moderation, prudence, and a lack of messianic hopes or intentions. Strauss argued his whole life for the superiority of the ancients to the moderns on this point (and on other points).You mean I was right about Strauss having a conspiracy theory of philosophy. I didn't say anything about the second half. I read Paul Gottfried and I agree Strauss was a ridiculous scholar. Of course I believe you when you say in so many words that Strauss did not like philosophies that license mass movements of true believers. Full stop right there. Now we can count back from all them and make this an exercise in splitting hairs. What audience to be precise did Strauss exactly have in mind? Actually I don't think he deserves that much credit; I don't think he really knew who he was writing for.Kristol is a Straussian because he got a PhD in PolPhil from Harvard under Mansfield, who is a Straussian. There is no necessary connection between Strauss's thought any of the main tenets of Neo-conservatism. I've said, and you've all ignored, that Strauss attacked data-driven social science, which is the original hallmark of neo-conservatism. A later hallmark (which emerged after Strauss's death) was foreign policy hawkism. Unless you want to say that Strauss's opposition to the USSR makes him a neo-con, in which case every Cold War liberal going back to Truman was a neo-con. At which point the term has no meaning.
Strauss addresses scholars and potential philosophers. He has almost nothing to say about the transient issues of his age. Based on his comments on what other thinkers had to say about war (Thucydides above all) I believe we can infer that Strauss was generally in favor of preparedness and wariness but otherwise anti-war in the general sense. If we may analogize the Iraq War to the Sicilian Expedition we may say that Strauss probably would have opposed the former as imprudent, just as he tacitly endorses T's judgement that the latter was imprudent.
Strauss openly characterizes Machiavelli's approach to philosophy as a conspiracy, using that word, but does not say it about any other thinker. However, his teaching that philosophy is an inherently elite and very small enterprise may be fairly characterized as a "conspiracy." however, before modernity, the nature of the conspiracy was to protect the conspirators and the philosophic life, not a reform campaign. that's what it becomes under modernity, which Strauss opposes. One of Strauss's aims in writing was to revive the ancient idea of philosophy, its proper scope, and its proper relationship to society, which he believed modernity had corrupted.
It is unfortunate that Strauss became a bogey-man to so many who have no idea what he said or why. It happened rather recently and based on some very thin scholarship. Most of the thing people try to pin on him are things that I and my friends oppose too. We just know they don't trace to Strauss. In fact, the opposite is often true.
• Replies: @Pat Casey Thanks for that response, gave me a better perspective of the man. I guess he did know who he was writing for. And I do think the way to write for history is to write history by disregarding topical preoccupations, except to damn them with faint praise. I have a master like that I always go back to on the topic I care about most.And actually the one work of Strauss's I have picked up, years ago, is his Machiavelli; it's one of the thousands of books I've read--- not though one of the few I finished. Brushing up just now by way of wikipedia, it doesn't look like Strauss staked his claim strong enough, if an original reading is what he was writing.
By the way, I know the Irishman John Toland was the first to publish on the esoteric-exoteric distinction, and coined the term pantheist on a related occasion when he named what new beast Spinoza had born. That was when an esoteric mode of writing was really needed, and you will hear The Ethics called esoteric or cryptic, but I know the work well, and it is no more esoteric than any work of genius that teaches you to read closely right at the start.
Is The Prince an esoteric work? Did it entertain a conspiracy with special readers? I suppose only if Machiavelli had individuals in mind who might wonder were they all the while in mind when he was writing about how to dispose of them. The point is, there's nothing profound about observing that, it's almost common sense if you take into account the first thing about Machiavelli's circumstance.
I won't be glib and write Strauss's method off as typically paranoid; it's creative, but bound to be too creative by half. I think it might lead readers to have more fun than's good for learning. , @Wizard of Oz Fascinating. A reminder that one should five lives lived to 120 so one can lots of stories right.... , @5371 You are right that Strauss's culpability for the neocons has been vastly exaggerated. You are wrong that he is worth reading. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Miro23 says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 10:15 pm GMT • 100 Words @Mr. Anon "Only a child – or its intellectual equivalent, i.e., a low information infotainment consumer – could believe in the official version of 9/11."
That is clearly false, as plenty of people who are smart - smarter than you actually - do in fact believe just that.
Or maybe a lot of smart people pretend to believe the official 9/11 story because that's where their interest lies. MSM journalists know for sure that articles that deviate from the official line on 9/11 are career ending moves .
In simple terms, MSM owners have decided that 9/11 is a taboo subject (same as USS Liberty) and they decide what gets published.
• Replies: @Ron UnzOr maybe a lot of smart people pretend to believe the official 9/11 story because that's where their interest lies. MSM journalists know for sure that articles that deviate from the official line on 9/11 are career ending moves .Well, I haven't read through all of this enormously long discussion-thread, but I happened to notice this particular comment. Not having been an MSM journalist myself, I can't say whether or not it's true, but a couple of interesting, possibly coincidental, examples come to mind...In simple terms, MSM owners have decided that 9/11 is a taboo subject (same as USS Liberty) and they decide what gets published.
In late July 2010, longtime Canadian journalist Eric Margolis was told his column would be dropped, and just a few weeks later he published a double-length piece expressing strong doubts about 9/11, the first time he'd articulated that position:
http://www.unz.com/article/911-the-mother-of-all-coincidences/
In 2007, the parent company of The Chicago Tribune announced it had accepted a leveraged-buyout takeover bid by investor Sam Zell, who planned a massive wave cost-cutting layoffs, which eventually wrecked the company. In late 2007, the Chicago Tribune suddenly ran a very long piece regarding the Liberty Attack, about the only time I've ever seen it discussed in the MSM.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/chi-liberty_tuesoct02-story.html Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Konga says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 10:17 pm GMT @Miro23 The British and Americans have been the victims of conspiracies (False Flag operations) for years.
For example:
The Irgun bombing of the King David Hotel (headquarters of the British Mandate Government of Palestine) in which Zionist activists dressed as Arabs placed milk churns filled with explosives against the main columns of the building killing 91 people and injuring 44. Israeli prime Minister Netanyahu, attended a celebration to commemorate the event.
Operation Susannah (Lavon Affair) where Israeli operatives impersonating Arabs bombed British and American cinemas, libraries and educational centers in Egypt to destabilize the country and keep British troops committed to the Middle East.
Or June 8, 1967, the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty with unmarked aircraft and torpedo boats. 34 men were killed and 171 wounded, with the attack in international waters following over nine hours of close surveillance. When the ship failed to sink, the Israeli government concocted an elaborate story to cover the crime. Original plan to blame the sinking with all lives lost on the Egyptians and draw the US into the war.
Or Israelis and U.S. Zionists appearing all over the most recent WTC 9/11 "Operation" with Israelis once again impersonating Arabs in a historic deception/terror action of a type that seems to carry a lot of kudos with old Israeli ex-terrorist Likudniks. Israeli agents were sent to film the historic day (as they later admitted on Israeli TV), with the celebrations including photos of themselves with a background of the burning towers where thousands of Americans were being incinerated.
Iraq was destroyed as a result of 9/11 but unfortunately for the conspirators, the momentum wasn't sufficient for a general war including Iran. Also the general war would have included the nuclear angle and justified the activation of a neo-con led Emergency Regime (dictatorship) in the US enforced with the newly printed Patriot Act and Homeland Security troops - or maybe that's just another Conspiracy Theory?
So true!
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But you forgot the two missiles shot from a NATO naval and HQ base in Spain towards Damascus, shot down by the Russians (two weeks before the "agreement" on chemical weapons, remember?) and then attributed to Israel's drills turned wrong
- Decius says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 10:17 pm GMT
A good book, BTW, is Robert Howse's Leo Strauss: Man of Peace . Howse is liberal, FWIW.
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- ten miles says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 10:20 pm GMT
One resents (first), and eventually hates whom they have to lie to. In what regard would our elites, in our electoral democracy, hold us voters in (by now)?
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Kinda answers itself doesn't it?
- nsa says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 10:32 pm GMT
How could the godfather of neocon jooies have written so many great waltzes .like the angelic Blue Danube? You see how easy disinfo is for us here in Ft. Meade and Langley?
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- Konga says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 10:35 pm GMT @Darin If moon landings were fake, why hadn't USSR or China revealed it? This would discredit USA before the whole world and won the Cold War in one stroke.
If USSR was also part of the plot, then whole Cold War was fake - and in this case there would be no need for the small Apollo fake.
Sometimes, stupid conspiracy theories are just stupid conspiracy theories - or smart fakes, designed to discredit conspirational thinking and distract them from the real conspiracies. Take your pick.
"Take your pick". I take your prick.
Do you think anyone would care/accept/believe if USSR did "reveal" the fakery? On the contrary, it would be a point in favour of the "reality" of the landing.
Sometimes "stupid conspiracy theories" deniers are just that: stupid deniers.
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- RobinG says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 10:45 pm GMT • 100 Words @Darin Another question to all conspirologists out there: what you think about Trump plant theory?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_plant_theory
https://www.facebook.com/ClintonTrumpConspiracy
Is Donald Trump paid by Clintons to let Hillary win? This need no big conspiracy, only Donald, Bill, Hill and few of their closest advisors would be on the plot, and it fits the character and modus operandi of the plotters. Any thoughts?
For a while I've wondered if Hillary funded Martin O'Malley, and also Lincoln Chaffee, just to give the illusion that there was some competition, and to give her an excuse to get media exposure in the primaries.
(Hat-tip to a friend who posits that Virginia Independent Greens are a creation of Va. Repubs. for the same reasons.)
• Replies: @iffen just to give the illusion that there was some competitionI think she funded Bernie as well. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- map says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 11:03 pm GMT • 100 Words
Popper's point about conspiracy theories really makes no sense. This is the assumption that a conspiracy is like a start-up, one that requires lots of transparency to work because of the need to recruit members for the conspiracy. As soon as one member disagrees, the conspiracy falls apart.
The problem is that a conspiracy is not like a start-up. The purpose of the start-up is the start-up itself. The purpose of the conspiracy is not the conspiracy itself. Conspiracies are simply vehicles by which like minded people actually find each other. The secrecy is built-in because they are like-minded.
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- Kirt says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 11:15 pm GMT • 100 Words @Erik Sieven "Conspiracy is simply a plan or agreement by more than one person to do something evil and then the pursuit of that plan." but probably everything think that what he does is good, not evil
"probably everything think that what he does is good, not evil"
Yeah, that's true. I think that it was Saint Thomas Aquinas who said that evil is always done under an aspect of good. Hence no one will consider himself a conspirator other than perhaps in a legal sense if he is aware that what he is doing is illegal. Apart from that the charge of conspiracy will always come from opponents; e.g. Hilly's charge of "a vast right-wing conspiracy".
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- Chuck says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 11:20 pm GMT @Darin If moon landings were fake, why hadn't USSR or China revealed it? This would discredit USA before the whole world and won the Cold War in one stroke.
If USSR was also part of the plot, then whole Cold War was fake - and in this case there would be no need for the small Apollo fake.
Sometimes, stupid conspiracy theories are just stupid conspiracy theories - or smart fakes, designed to discredit conspirational thinking and distract them from the real conspiracies. Take your pick.
Why did the USSR stop at the 38th parallel upon American request?
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- Ron Unz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 11:27 pm GMT • 800 Words NEW! @Paul Jolliffe Mr. Unz,
Here is a link to Carl Bernstein's definitive 1977 Rolling Stone article "CIA and the Media" in which he addresses - and confirms - your worst fears. You are very right, and no less a figure than Bernstein has said so for nearly four decades . . .
http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
Here is a link to Carl Bernstein's definitive 1977 Rolling Stone article "CIA and the Media" in which he addresses – and confirms – your worst fears. You are very right, and no less a figure than Bernstein has said so for nearly four decades
Thanks so much for the excellent reference to the Bernstein article, of which I hadn't been aware. I found it fascinating, not least because of all the speculations floating around over the last decade or two that Bernstein's famed collaborator, Bob Woodward, had had an intelligence background, and perhaps Watergate represented a plot by elements of the CIA to remove Nixon from the White House. As for the 25,000 word article itself, I'd suggest that people read it. Since quite a lot of this comment-thread is already filled with debates about the supposed liberalism of Leo Strauss and an alleged Moon Landing Hoax, I might as well provide a few of the provocative extracts:
http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
He was very eager, he loved to cooperate." On one occasion, according to several CIA officials, Sulzberger was given a briefing paper by the Agency which ran almost verbatim under the columnist's byline in the Times. "Cycame out and said, 'I'm thinking of doing a piece, can you give me some background?'" a CIA officer said. "We gave it to Cy as a background piece and Cy gave it to the printers and put his name on it." Sulzberger denies that any incident occurred. "A lot of baloney," he said.
[MORE]
Stewart Alsop's relationship with the Agency was much more extensive than Sulzberger's. One official who served at the highest levels in the CIA said flatly: "Stew Alsop was a CIA agent." An equally senior official refused to define Alsop's relationship with the Agency except to say it was a formal one. Other sources said that Alsop was particularly helpful to the Agency in discussions with, officials of foreign governments-asking questions to which the CIA was seeking answers, planting misinformation advantageous to American policy, assessing opportunities for CIA recruitment of well‑placed foreigners.
The New York Times. The Agency's relationship with the Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. From 1950 to 1966, about ten CIA employees were provided Times cover under arrangements approved by the newspaper's late publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. The cover arrangements were part of a general Times policy-set by Sulzberger-to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible.
When Newsweek waspurchased by the Washington Post Company, publisher Philip L. Graham was informed by Agency officials that the CIA occasionally used the magazine for cover purposes, according to CIA sources. "It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from," said a former deputy director of the Agency. "Frank Wisner dealt with him." Wisner, deputy director of the CIA from 1950 until shortly before his suicide in 1965, was the Agency's premier orchestrator of "black" operations, including many in which journalists were involved. Wisner liked to boast of his "mighty Wurlitzer," a wondrous propaganda instrument he built, and played, with help from the press.) Phil Graham was probably Wisner's closest friend. But Graharn, who committed suicide in 1963, apparently knew little of the specifics of any cover arrangements with Newsweek, CIA sources said.
The Agency played an intriguing numbers game with the committee. Those who prepared the material say it was physically impossible to produce all of the Agency's files on the use of journalists. "We gave them a broad, representative picture," said one agency official. "We never pretended it was a total description of the range of activities over 25 years, or of the number of journalists who have done things for us." A relatively small number of the summaries described the activities of foreign journalists-including those working as stringers for American publications. Those officials most knowledgeable about the subject say that a figure of 400 American journalists is on the low side of the actual number who maintained covert relationships and undertook clandestine tasks.
Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All CommentsFrom the twenty‑five files he got back, according to Senate sources and CIA officials, an unavoidable conclusion emerged: that to a degree never widely suspected, the CIA in the 1950s, '60s and even early '70s had concentrated its relationships with journalists in the most prominent sectors of the American press corps, including four or five of the largest newspapers in the country, the broadcast networks and the two major newsweekly magazines. Despite the omission of names and affiliations from the twenty‑five detailed files each was between three and eleven inches thick), the information was usually sufficient to tentatively identify either the newsman, his affiliation or both-particularly because so many of them were prominent in the profession.
- iffen says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 11:29 pm GMT @RobinG For a while I've wondered if Hillary funded Martin O'Malley, and also Lincoln Chaffee, just to give the illusion that there was some competition, and to give her an excuse to get media exposure in the primaries.
(Hat-tip to a friend who posits that Virginia Independent Greens are a creation of Va. Repubs. for the same reasons.)
just to give the illusion that there was some competition
I think she funded Bernie as well.
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- The Alarmist says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 11:36 pm GMT • 200 Words @John Jeremiah Smith
I suppose NASA could have sent an S-Band repeater to the Moon.There's more than one scenario that can be assembled to explain any one or two conditions that would have to be "covered" in order to carry out a conspiracy of deception regarding the Moon landings. Considering the inferior level of video jiggering available at the time, it seems to me that providing full "evidence" of the low-gravity behavior of objects, and the absolute two-color light/shadow effects in an absence of atmosphere would be the most difficult.The principle of parsimony becomes ascendant at some point in that Hall of Mirrors. It was easier to go to the Moon than it was to fake it.
Not to be arch, but, even with the repeater on the moon, what about the bounce echo from the tight-beam signal coming from Earth carrying the deceptive info? ;-)
I personally think they did land on the moon, but am paying devil's advocate here .
"Not to be arch, but, even with the repeater on the moon, what about the bounce echo from the tight-beam signal coming from Earth carrying the deceptive info? "
First, you could transvert from one range to another, so an interested party would have know where to look for the reflection. You could uplink in another range of S-Band, or go lower to L-band if you don't mind a little faraday rotation. Your link-budget would be just sufficient to get a signal from the lunar repeater to Earth, but that would most likely not be enough enough for a full round-trip of the terrestrial signal. Most of your tight beam would still pass fairly wide abeam the moon, and that which was reflected back to Earth would be further degraded by libration fading.
How do you get Astronauts bouncing and hammers falling in Slo-Mo? Film at 60fps, replay at 30. Ah, but you have to have a really good clean-room to keep dust off the film. Maybe that is why videotape technology took off in the early seventies
• Replies: @John Jeremiah Smith
How do you get Astronauts bouncing and hammers falling in Slo-Mo?Yeah, the gravity effects are a BIG job. Just slo-mo-ing won't do it, because you have different curvature of falling profile, and acceleration of gravity is different because moon-mass is less (and non-linear ref 30fps v. 60fps.)There would also be additive propagation delay in the radio signals. Pure delay, too -- no compensation would fix that in 1969. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
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- Pat Casey says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 5, 2016 at 11:48 pm GMT • 300 Words @Decius Kristol is a Straussian because he got a PhD in PolPhil from Harvard under Mansfield, who is a Straussian. There is no necessary connection between Strauss's thought any of the main tenets of Neo-conservatism. I've said, and you've all ignored, that Strauss attacked data-driven social science, which is the original hallmark of neo-conservatism. A later hallmark (which emerged after Strauss's death) was foreign policy hawkism. Unless you want to say that Strauss's opposition to the USSR makes him a neo-con, in which case every Cold War liberal going back to Truman was a neo-con. At which point the term has no meaning.
Strauss addresses scholars and potential philosophers. He has almost nothing to say about the transient issues of his age. Based on his comments on what other thinkers had to say about war (Thucydides above all) I believe we can infer that Strauss was generally in favor of preparedness and wariness but otherwise anti-war in the general sense. If we may analogize the Iraq War to the Sicilian Expedition we may say that Strauss probably would have opposed the former as imprudent, just as he tacitly endorses T's judgement that the latter was imprudent.
Strauss openly characterizes Machiavelli's approach to philosophy as a conspiracy, using that word, but does not say it about any other thinker. However, his teaching that philosophy is an inherently elite and very small enterprise may be fairly characterized as a "conspiracy." however, before modernity, the nature of the conspiracy was to protect the conspirators and the philosophic life, not a reform campaign. that's what it becomes under modernity, which Strauss opposes. One of Strauss's aims in writing was to revive the ancient idea of philosophy, its proper scope, and its proper relationship to society, which he believed modernity had corrupted.
It is unfortunate that Strauss became a bogey-man to so many who have no idea what he said or why. It happened rather recently and based on some very thin scholarship. Most of the thing people try to pin on him are things that I and my friends oppose too. We just know they don't trace to Strauss. In fact, the opposite is often true.
Thanks for that response, gave me a better perspective of the man. I guess he did know who he was writing for. And I do think the way to write for history is to write history by disregarding topical preoccupations, except to damn them with faint praise. I have a master like that I always go back to on the topic I care about most.
And actually the one work of Strauss's I have picked up, years ago, is his Machiavelli; it's one of the thousands of books I've read- not though one of the few I finished. Brushing up just now by way of wikipedia, it doesn't look like Strauss staked his claim strong enough, if an original reading is what he was writing.
By the way, I know the Irishman John Toland was the first to publish on the esoteric-exoteric distinction, and coined the term pantheist on a related occasion when he named what new beast Spinoza had born. That was when an esoteric mode of writing was really needed, and you will hear The Ethics called esoteric or cryptic, but I know the work well, and it is no more esoteric than any work of genius that teaches you to read closely right at the start.
Is The Prince an esoteric work? Did it entertain a conspiracy with special readers? I suppose only if Machiavelli had individuals in mind who might wonder were they all the while in mind when he was writing about how to dispose of them. The point is, there's nothing profound about observing that, it's almost common sense if you take into account the first thing about Machiavelli's circumstance.
I won't be glib and write Strauss's method off as typically paranoid; it's creative, but bound to be too creative by half. I think it might lead readers to have more fun than's good for learning.
• Replies: @Decius First, if you are at all interested in esotericism, I cannot recommend highly enough Philosophy Between the Lines by Meltzer. The only thing critical I can say about this book is that, if one is really an expert in one of the thinkers that Meltzer treats, one will read the passages on that thinker that Meltzer cites and say "So what? I've known that for years. He's shed no new light." Which is true. But irrelevant to what he's trying to do. The book presents an unassailable case that philosophy has been esoteric since Plato. Esotericism long predates Spinoza and has been discussed since ancient times. Strauss simply revived a concept that had been forgotten. Toland (who I am not that familiar with) wrote before esotericism as it were "lapsed." Strauss says that Goethe and Lessing were the last to write this way. When Strauss revived knowledge of esotericism in the late 1930s with the first Xenophon article, he was considered nuts.Strauss's Machiavelli book is my favorite and I think his best. It is totally "original" in the sense that he took a wildly new path from all previous scholarship. It has basically defined the debate to this day. All subsequent scholarship either follows him, opposes him, or tries to ignore him.
I would recommend in addition Strauss's book on Spinoza and especially the much later preface that he wrote when he felt he finally understood Spinoza's esotericism.
Yes, the Prince (and the Discourses , and Art of War , and Florentine Histories ) are esoteric. It's too complex to argue in a comment thread. Suffice it to say for now that the outrageous "kill that dude" teachings serve and exoteric purpose. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 12:11 am GMT • 100 Words @Miro23 [Sorry, long reply]
The basic fact about the USS Liberty is that an American navy ship was attacked with the aim of sinking it, which is an Act of War since the ship was clearly marked.
In contrast, the attacking Israeli jets and torpedo boats were unmarked (i.e. they wanted to hide their identity), so a question is why were they unmarked if this was a standard military interception?
Whether the Israelis wanted to trigger a US attack on Egypt or hide their communications with regard to their attack on Syria is a secondary question. The main concern of the United States surely had to be to rescue their seamen and respond to the aggression.
And, this is where the story turns really nasty.
At least two rescue attempts were launched from US aircraft carriers nearby, but after the (obligatory) communication to Washington, both rescue flights were cancelled within minutes on direct orders of Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara (source: 6th Fleet Rear Admiral Lawrence Geis speaking in confidence to the senior Liberty survivor, Naval Security Group officer, Lieutenant Commander David Lewis in a meeting requested by Geis).
Surviving personnel all received strict orders not say anything to anyone about the attack.
Eyewitness accounts say that 4 nuclear armed aircraft were simultaneously launched from the aircraft carrier America on the instructions of President Johnson only to be recalled when, presumably, the information came through that the Israelis had not succeeded in sinking the Liberty. Nuclear weapons were not needed to defend the Liberty.
Also there was an oral history report from the American Embassy in Cairo, (now in the LBJ Library), which notes that the Embassy received an urgent message from Washington warning that Cairo was about to be bombed by US forces.
An investigation led by Thomas Moorer, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff held the opinion that the Israeli motive was to draw the US into war against Egypt , through a false subterfuge of the same type as their King David Hotel bombing and Lavon Affair operations.
Any rational person has to conclude that Johnson was virtually following Israeli orders, which raises the question of why? Maybe they were blackmailing him with regard to something else that was more important to him than the destruction of Cairo?
9/11 had some of the same features as other Israeli False Flag attacks against Britain and the US, such as Israelis dressed as Arabs (framed Arabs) motivated towards tricking these countries into military action against Arab states. In fact the Israeli involvement in 9/11 was much deeper and more generalized as shown in investigative reporter Christopher Bollyn's book, "Solving 9-11: The Deception That Changed the World". https://www.amazon.com/Solving-9-11-Deception-Changed-World/dp/0985322586/ref=cm_cr-mr-title
15 years later his account is supported in multiple ways from investigations in Florida (they didn't sneak in unseen – they were highly visible and got red carpet treatment with regard to visas etc. and they were completely incapable of flying the 9/11 airliners at the speeds and on the trajectories seen on the day + everyone who had contact with them was visited by the F.B.I. and told to shut up) - Source, a detailed and very interesting investigation by Daniel Hopsicker in "Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta and the 9/11 Cover-Up in Florida. https://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Terrorland-Mohamed-Cover-up-Florida/dp/0975290673/ref=cm_cr-mr-title
High-rise buildings don't collapse due to fire (reason given by the US government). All high rise fire disasters have been examined in detail, with most of them much more intense than the WTC ones, and no building collapsed - let alone in 7 seconds and three on the same day.
These Arabs didn't fly the jets and it's now clear that the buildings were taken down by placed explosives - the aim being to trick the US into an Iraq and Iran war and possibly launch an "Emergency" Neo-con regime (dictatorship) in the US led by Cheney and enforced by the Patriot Act/ Homeland security.
The other aspect here is that a government (and media) which genuinely represented the American people would give top priority to revealing the truth about the USS Liberty and 9/11 rather than engage in the present obfuscation, blocking, threats, smears and hiding of the truth.
Thanks. I wonder what will happen to Israel's support if and when serious money and research and publicity is put into telling the whole Liberty story and making sure it is drummed in.
Your 9/11 version I don't buy, not least because someone suicidal/murderous had to be controlling the planes.
• Replies: @CalDre Your 9/11 version I don't buy, not least because someone suicidal/murderous had to be controlling the planes.Controlling, yes; but on-board, no. "Coincidentally", all of the planes hijacked on 9/11 were Boeing 767s, which have a sophisticated auto-pilot system and the ability to upload custom modules to control the auto-pilot. Just like a Predator or Reaper drone can be flown from halfway across the planet, a 767 can be flown remotely (and in the case of 9/11, since everything was known in advance, the entire flight pattern could have been pre-programmed into a module and uploaded in to the aircrafts' computers).
If you look into it you will find reports of a a "mystery" large white jet flying over Washington on the morning of 9/11. Some have identified it as a E-4B (a Boeing E-4 Advanced Airborne Command Post), a strategic command and control military aircraft operated by the United States Air Force. We know neither Bush nor Cheney was on that plane.
While perhaps not necessary, the cockpit could have been filled with a tranquilizing gas to incapacitate all the pilots and (stooge) hijackers so that they would not interfere with the remote-controlled operation of the planes.
Remember that these "deeply religious" Muslim "hijackers" went out drinking at a strip club the night of 9/10. Both are deep sins in Islam, not something someone is going to do when they are about to meet their Maker. Most likely they thought they were participating in a drill (since, in fact on the date of 9/11, a drill was taking place, having to do with - wait for it - airplanes being hijacked and flown into buildings).
The precision and extreme competence of the flying maneuvers is readily explained by the auto-pilot feature. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 12:15 am GMT @Decius Kristol is a Straussian because he got a PhD in PolPhil from Harvard under Mansfield, who is a Straussian. There is no necessary connection between Strauss's thought any of the main tenets of Neo-conservatism. I've said, and you've all ignored, that Strauss attacked data-driven social science, which is the original hallmark of neo-conservatism. A later hallmark (which emerged after Strauss's death) was foreign policy hawkism. Unless you want to say that Strauss's opposition to the USSR makes him a neo-con, in which case every Cold War liberal going back to Truman was a neo-con. At which point the term has no meaning.
Strauss addresses scholars and potential philosophers. He has almost nothing to say about the transient issues of his age. Based on his comments on what other thinkers had to say about war (Thucydides above all) I believe we can infer that Strauss was generally in favor of preparedness and wariness but otherwise anti-war in the general sense. If we may analogize the Iraq War to the Sicilian Expedition we may say that Strauss probably would have opposed the former as imprudent, just as he tacitly endorses T's judgement that the latter was imprudent.
Strauss openly characterizes Machiavelli's approach to philosophy as a conspiracy, using that word, but does not say it about any other thinker. However, his teaching that philosophy is an inherently elite and very small enterprise may be fairly characterized as a "conspiracy." however, before modernity, the nature of the conspiracy was to protect the conspirators and the philosophic life, not a reform campaign. that's what it becomes under modernity, which Strauss opposes. One of Strauss's aims in writing was to revive the ancient idea of philosophy, its proper scope, and its proper relationship to society, which he believed modernity had corrupted.
It is unfortunate that Strauss became a bogey-man to so many who have no idea what he said or why. It happened rather recently and based on some very thin scholarship. Most of the thing people try to pin on him are things that I and my friends oppose too. We just know they don't trace to Strauss. In fact, the opposite is often true.
Fascinating. A reminder that one should five lives lived to 120 so one can lots of stories right .
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz Oops! Sorry but I'm sure the typis were obvious. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- whorefinder says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 12:50 am GMT • 200 Words
No Oswald Hypothesis Denier has ever presented a falsifiable alternative hypothesis to Kennedy's murder.
The Oswald Hypothesis-as subtly admitted by Oliver Stone-passed the who, what, when, where, why, and how test. It answered all the questions and was plausible according to physics, motive, means, and opportunity. The Deniers try things like "the pristine bullet" and "magic bullet" nonsense, but those criticisms don't stand up to criticism (for example, the bullet was not pristine at all, and the bullet's tragectory was not magic at all, but followed a predictable downward path through the elevated Kennedy to Connolly).
But more tellingly-no alternative plausible falsifiable hypothesis has been offered. No who, what, when, where , why, and how. Lots of speculation and casting aspersions (LBJ! CIA! ), but no one offers a concrete hypothesis that could be tested or researched to see as plausible.
If you have a falsifiable alternative theory to the Oswald Hypothesis that satisfies the five w's and h, please offer it here. Until you do so, the only plausible hypothesis is that Oswald acted alone.
It's been more than 50 years people. Give us something besides that some people disliked Kennedy (all politicians have enemies) and "eye witnesses" who keep changing their stories.
*Oh, and the KGB worked to spread Kennedy Conspiracy theories because they undermined faith in the U.S. government and took the heat off communists for the killing. They funded some of the conspiracy theorists and promoted them.
• Replies: @CanSpeccy Hey Whorefinder, are you one of Cass Sunstein's boys , by any chance. , @Wizard of Oz I ask only because you may have the JFK assassination stuff well organised in your head and up to date. What do you make of the update by Colin McLaren on the humanly plausible conspiracy theory that the bullet which killed Kennedy was fired accidentally by a Secret Service man standing in the car behind? Are there any knock down arguments against it? Or big holes? , @Robbie Oswald never fired a shot! A hidden witness for over 35 years had proof positive that Oswald was never on the sixth floor, and therefore couldn't be a shooter. Barry Ernest has found Victoria Adams, a witness to Kennedy's murder, on the fourth floor back staircase of the TSBD. She testified to the Warren Commission that she and her co-worker, Sandra Styles saw nobody come down the stairs, after she heard the final shots. Also with them was her supervisor, Dorothy Garner, making three witnesses (or non-witnesses in this case) that totally destroy the lone nut idea that Oswald was doing any shooting there. Adams was badgered and she felt threatened by the Warren Commission and fearing for her life, vanished for decades until Barry Ernest found her.So, that ends and totally disproves for all time the formerly plausible hypothesis (theory) that Oswald killed Kennedy.
The Girl on the Stairs: The Search for a Missing Witness to the JFK Assassination by Barry Ernest (hardcover) April 2, 2013
https://www.amazon.com/Girl-Stairs-Missing-Witness-Assassination/dp/1455617830http://garyrevel.com/jfk/girlonstairs.html
"The Bob Wilson Interview with Author Barry Ernest 'The Girl on the Stairs: The Search for a Missing Witness to the JFK Assassination' "
Feb. 18, 2014 (New York, NY)#7
"There is no evidence that definitively places Oswald in the second-floor lunchroom as the shots were being fired. If you believe what Oswald is quoted as telling police during his interrogation sessions (12 hours that went unrecorded and without a stenographer being present), he was eating his lunch in the first-floor domino room when the shots occurred, and then went to the second floor to purchase a drink. This is perhaps why Vicki Adams did not see him on the stairs, why he was so calm during the lunchroom confrontation, and why [Officer Marrion] Baker first described Oswald as entering the lunchroom from a direction other than the back staircase. Certainly Vicki Adams saying she was on the stairs during this critical period presented an obvious problem to the Warren Commission's scenario, which might explain why she was the only person excluded from time tests regarding Oswald's escape, and why corroborating witnesses to her story were ignored."
#13"Lee Harvey Oswald was labeled as a loner, and malcontent. From what you have learned of him, can you describe a bit about who he seems to have actually been?
He was definitely an odd fellow. But he was also smart, capable, for instance, of beating others more advanced than he was at chess and, if you believe the official record, able to teach himself Russian, one of the most challenging languages to learn, especially on your own. He liked the opera and was a vociferous reader, knowledgeable in a lot of subjects. His actions in both his military and civilian lives seem consistent with someone having a far deeper complexity than what we have been told. Oh, and he was also a rather poor shot!"
As for the pejorative term conspiracy theory , that was conjured up by the CIA in 1964, to counter the growing threat to the insiders' desire to promote the sole assassin idea, discredit doubters, and shut off debate. https://projectunspeakable.com/conspiracy-theory-invention-of-cia and http://www.jfklancer.com/CIA.html
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0292757697"In 2013 Professor Lance Dehaven-Smith in a peer-reviewed book published by the University of Texas Press showed that the term "conspiracy theory" was developed by the CIA as a means of undercutting critics of the Warren Commission's report that President Kennedy was killed by Oswald. The use of this term was heavily promoted in the media by the CIA
It is ironic that the American left is a major enforcer of the CIA's strategy to shut up skeptics by branding them conspiracy theorists."
The public has never believed the official story that Oswald acted alone ever since the first Gallup Poll was taken in early Dec. 1963, and continuing to this very day.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/165893/majority-believe-jfk-killed-conspiracy.aspx
"Majority in U.S. Still Believe JFK Killed in a Conspiracy" by Art Swift (Nov. 15, 2013)Dec. 1963: 52% Conspiracy, 29% One man
1976: 81% Conspiracy, 11% One man
1983: 74% Conspiracy, 11% One man
1992: 77% Conspiracy, 10% One man
2001: 81% Conspiracy, 13% One man
2003: 75% Conspiracy, 19% One man
2013: 61% Conspiracy, 30% One man
http://22november1963.org.uk/lee-harvey-oswald-marksman-sharpshooter
"...According to his Marine score card (Commission Exhibit 239), Oswald was tested twice:
In December 1956, after "a very intensive 3 weeks' training period" (Warren Commission Hearings, vol.11, p.302), Oswald scored 212: two marks above the minimum for a 'sharpshooter'.
In May 1959, he scored 191: one mark above the minimum for a 'marksman'.
"...Colonel Allison Folsom interpreted the results for the Warren Commission:
"The Marine Corps consider that any reasonable application of the instructions given to Marines should permit them to become qualified at least as a marksman. To become qualified as a sharpshooter, the Marine Corps is of the opinion that most Marines with a reasonable amount of adaptability to weapons firing can become so qualified. Consequently, a low marksman qualification indicates a rather poor "shot" and a sharpshooter qualification indicates a fairly good "shot".(Warren Commission Hearings, vol.19, pp.17f)Folsom agreed with his (not her) questioner that Oswald "was not a particularly outstanding shot" (Warren Commission Hearings, vol.8, p.311)."
Phlilip F. Nelson's hardcover 2011 book, a fascinating insight into LBJ's warped and sociopathic (also suffering from bi-polar disorder) personality hidden from the public, 1960-2011,LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination
https://www.amazon.com/LBJ-Mastermind-Assassination-Phillip-Nelson/dp/1616083778His 2013 paperback update:
https://www.amazon.com/LBJ-Mastermind-Assassination-Phillip-Nelson/dp/1620876108 Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Bill Jones says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 1:04 am GMT @Gene Tuttle I've often used the argument myself that conspiracies inevitably have short shelf lives in the US because it was so difficult for Americans to keep secrets. The article makes a useful point in suggesting that secret plots, even after being revealed, may nevertheless remain widely ignored. Ideology, group-think, pack journalism etc. are powerful forces, often subconsciously at work, preventing alternative theories from developing legs.
Though long an admirer of Karl Popper, I hadn't strongly associated him with attacks on conspiracy theories per se. As an American "outsider" living abroad most of my adult life, I've all too often encountered those who assumed my background alone explained an argument of mine that they didn't like. Popper had hit the nail on the head when he wrote about
"a widespread and dangerous fashion of our time...of not taking arguments seriously, and at their face value, at least tentatively, but of seeing in them nothing but a way in which deeper irrational motives and tendencies express themselves." It was "the attitude of looking at once for the unconscious motives and determinants in the social habitat of the thinker, instead of first examining the validity of the argument itself."The powerful nazi and communist ideologies of his day assumed that one's " blood " or " class " precluded "correct" thinking. Those politically incorrect challengers to their own totalitarian weltanschauung were (to put it mildly) persecuted as conspirators. No doubt, as Ron Unz notes, Popper's personal experience "contributed the depth of his feelings" -- I would say skepticism – about conspiracy claims.But the author of the " Open Society " had an open mind and I suspect he'd find the thesis reasonable that real conspiracies can both be uncovered and largely ignored because so many simply opt to ignore them. In such cases, evidence and "not taking arguments seriously" often reflects "intellectual groupieism," emotions, professional insecurities as well as venal collective interests.
Nice try.
The Manhattan Project was successfully kept secret despite its scope and the fact that it consumed 17% of the electricity production of the entire US.
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz So, there is a counter example - an exception???Actually not such a good case. It was wartime in a pre Internet era and keeping their mouths shut was emphasised as a patriotic duty for everyone. The work was carried out at remote locations with vast resources behind it. The work was so new and esoteric that the best outsiders might have managed was that something was going on that they didn't understand. And of course it wasn't kept secret from our Soviet allies thanks to their spies. , @Gene Tuttle I did not say it was impossible for Americans to keep secrets, just "difficult."
The Manhattan Project was in a bygone era -- one in which near total war prevailed. Yet even in that case, the Soviets knew early on what was going on. And stories appeared in the US press early on posing prying questions about Los Alamos, a "forbidden city" where there were reports of "ordnance and explosives" being developed and "tremendous explosions have been heard."
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/1944-Cleveland-Press-Forbidden-City.pdfMain point however, is that even when conspiracies become obvious they are often largely ignored. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- exiled off mainstreet says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 1:14 am GMT @Miro23 The British and Americans have been the victims of conspiracies (False Flag operations) for years.
For example:
The Irgun bombing of the King David Hotel (headquarters of the British Mandate Government of Palestine) in which Zionist activists dressed as Arabs placed milk churns filled with explosives against the main columns of the building killing 91 people and injuring 44. Israeli prime Minister Netanyahu, attended a celebration to commemorate the event.
Operation Susannah (Lavon Affair) where Israeli operatives impersonating Arabs bombed British and American cinemas, libraries and educational centers in Egypt to destabilize the country and keep British troops committed to the Middle East.
Or June 8, 1967, the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty with unmarked aircraft and torpedo boats. 34 men were killed and 171 wounded, with the attack in international waters following over nine hours of close surveillance. When the ship failed to sink, the Israeli government concocted an elaborate story to cover the crime. Original plan to blame the sinking with all lives lost on the Egyptians and draw the US into the war.
Or Israelis and U.S. Zionists appearing all over the most recent WTC 9/11 "Operation" with Israelis once again impersonating Arabs in a historic deception/terror action of a type that seems to carry a lot of kudos with old Israeli ex-terrorist Likudniks. Israeli agents were sent to film the historic day (as they later admitted on Israeli TV), with the celebrations including photos of themselves with a background of the burning towers where thousands of Americans were being incinerated.
Iraq was destroyed as a result of 9/11 but unfortunately for the conspirators, the momentum wasn't sufficient for a general war including Iran. Also the general war would have included the nuclear angle and justified the activation of a neo-con led Emergency Regime (dictatorship) in the US enforced with the newly printed Patriot Act and Homeland Security troops - or maybe that's just another Conspiracy Theory?
The Israelis learned their false flag lesson from the Nazis, who used concentration camp inmates dressed as Polish soldiers as part of a phony attack on the frontier radio station "Sender Gleiwitz" a day or so before they invaded Poland.
• Replies: @anonymous If Nazis didn't exist zionists would have to invent them -- or maybe they did. Nuland's use of Nazis in Ukraine is sure making it look more and more likely that Hitler was an Osama bin-Laden like creation of Jews and/or the Roosevelt admin.1. The British were past masters of all sorts of dirty tricks. Moshe Dayan learned about house demolitions from the British when they were in charge of Mandate Palestine -- pre-1939. http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.657167
2. Jews in Poland were active participants in killing fellow Poles; from the late 1920s into the mid-1930s Jews in Soviet participated in serious numbers in Stalin's slaughter of several million Russians, Ukrainians, Poles. Some of the killed were Jewish. They didn't need Germans to teach them how to kill on a mass scale, Trotsky, Lenin & Stalin were able tutors.
3. By early in 1938 The Haganeh had created Mossad al Aliyeh-bet -- zionists planted in Germany and other European cities to shepherd Jews out of their home countries and into Palestine. Francis Nicosia writes about it in Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany , @LondonBob Not forgetting the Manchurian Incident, staging events to justify a war is nothing new. , @Hippopotamusdrome There is a conspiracy theory that it was really Poles. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Bill Jones says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 1:15 am GMT @Dave37 Maybe the CIA used conspiracy theory but ordinary perverse humans invented it. If moon lander deniers (and other conspiracies) were proven wrong the rest of us would be happy to see them in public stocks and a ready supply of tomatoes.
So no freedom of speech in your little world then.
• Replies: @Dave37 Sure, if I can have some revenge for annoying AHs. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- exiled off mainstreet says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 1:44 am GMT • 200 Words @Darin Yes, why?
If you want to start a war, would you want to start with great defeat and loss of your fleet?
In the thirties, there were three cases of false flag attacks created to justify a war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukden_Incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelling_of_MainilaIn none of these cases the attacker actually killed thousands of his own soldiers, what would be the point?
I didn't notice Gleiwitz was mentioned in another posting before I mentioned it. I tend go along with you and suspect incompetence rather than purpose was the cause of the Pearl Harbor disaster, though the incompetence may have included failure to adequately warn those on the ground at Pearl Harbor. Personally, I don't back the "truther" version of the twin towers because that would have required a broader conspiracy than I think could have succeeded. My guess is that the neighboring building was destroyed as part of the cleanup effort. I do think, however, that the authorities knew something was up, didn't believe it could ever succeed and used it as a sort of Reichstag Fire incident to brush aside constitutional democracy in the US. I also suspect that the Mossad knew more than they let on. My guess is that if Gore rather than Bush had been in power that history would have been far different. I suspect that the anthrax thing was more likely started by the yankee regime as a home-grown conspiracy.
• Replies: @anonymousMy guess is that if Gore rather than Bush had been in power that history would have been far different.Joe Lieberman was Gore's running mate.
Lieberman had the Patriot Act on a shelf waiting for an opportunity ---While holding the chair of the "Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs," Lieberman introduced on October 11, 2001, Senate Bill 1534, to establish the US Department of Homeland Security., @dahoit Gore chose a likudnik as VP.Anyone thinks the response to 9-11 would have significantly different under those 2 needs further education.Anticipating the bill's certain passage, Lieberman gave himself automatic chairmanship after he changed the name of his committee to, "The Senate Committee of Homeland Security and Government Affairs."
Since then, Lieberman has been the main force behind legislation such as:
-1- The USA Patriot Act
-2- Protect America Act
-3- National Emergency Centers Establishment Act
-4- The Enemy Belligerent Interrogation Act
-5- The Terrorist Expatriation Act, and the proposed
-6- Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act.
I notice the Wiz always deflects Israeli involvement.Of course they were aware,the dancing Israelis knew it was a terror attack by dancing before the 2nd plane hit.
And what govt has been the only beneficiary of 9-11?
If one can't see that answer,they have been ziocained and lobotomized. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- biz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 1:48 am GMT • 100 Words @landlubber
journalistic and sociological worksPravda.And like your Pravda brethren, you are too quick to conflate 9/11 and the moon landings.
you are too quick to conflate 9/11 and the moon landings
Actually, it was Unz himself who stated a while back that if we admit that one of them is possible, then all are possible, or something more or less to that effect.
In an case, the 9/11 controlled demolition / missile / flight 93 is in a hangar in Cleveland stuff is just as implausible as faking the moon landings. Too many people and organizations and countries needing to be in on it, etc.
• Replies: @CanSpeccy biz, you obviously missed it. Bill Jones, above , debunked your argument even before you made it. , @AnonCrimethink2016 Conflating the two is indeed absurd. Regarding 9/11, the government's own conspiracy theory, that the twin towers were demolished by office fires started by the two planes (not to mention Building 7, which fell without being struck by a plane later that day) does not hold up under any real scrutiny; any child with a decent high school education in chemistry and physics can see that those buildings did not and could not have collapsed due to the official explanation, but rather, they fell due to a prepared demolition. While it is not, and may never be clear exactly who was behind the event, the fact that key aspects of the government's narrative are demonstrably false, and many others unsupported by independent evidence, should give any thinking person considerable pause for thought about the events of that day, and all that has inexorably followed in U.S. foreign policy to this very day. It is a technique of distraction frequently used by supporters of the official conspiracy theory to raise all kinds of broad questions about "How could such a vast conspiracy ever be kept?" etc. (Well, look at the Manhattan Project for starters...) rather than engaging in the particulars of physical evidence and reliable eye witness accounts that attest to the utter nonsense of the lie we've been sold lo these many years. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Decius says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 1:51 am GMT • 300 Words @Pat Casey Thanks for that response, gave me a better perspective of the man. I guess he did know who he was writing for. And I do think the way to write for history is to write history by disregarding topical preoccupations, except to damn them with faint praise. I have a master like that I always go back to on the topic I care about most.
And actually the one work of Strauss's I have picked up, years ago, is his Machiavelli; it's one of the thousands of books I've read--- not though one of the few I finished. Brushing up just now by way of wikipedia, it doesn't look like Strauss staked his claim strong enough, if an original reading is what he was writing.
By the way, I know the Irishman John Toland was the first to publish on the esoteric-exoteric distinction, and coined the term pantheist on a related occasion when he named what new beast Spinoza had born. That was when an esoteric mode of writing was really needed, and you will hear The Ethics called esoteric or cryptic, but I know the work well, and it is no more esoteric than any work of genius that teaches you to read closely right at the start.
Is The Prince an esoteric work? Did it entertain a conspiracy with special readers? I suppose only if Machiavelli had individuals in mind who might wonder were they all the while in mind when he was writing about how to dispose of them. The point is, there's nothing profound about observing that, it's almost common sense if you take into account the first thing about Machiavelli's circumstance.
I won't be glib and write Strauss's method off as typically paranoid; it's creative, but bound to be too creative by half. I think it might lead readers to have more fun than's good for learning.
First, if you are at all interested in esotericism, I cannot recommend highly enough Philosophy Between the Lines by Meltzer. The only thing critical I can say about this book is that, if one is really an expert in one of the thinkers that Meltzer treats, one will read the passages on that thinker that Meltzer cites and say "So what? I've known that for years. He's shed no new light." Which is true. But irrelevant to what he's trying to do. The book presents an unassailable case that philosophy has been esoteric since Plato. Esotericism long predates Spinoza and has been discussed since ancient times. Strauss simply revived a concept that had been forgotten. Toland (who I am not that familiar with) wrote before esotericism as it were "lapsed." Strauss says that Goethe and Lessing were the last to write this way. When Strauss revived knowledge of esotericism in the late 1930s with the first Xenophon article, he was considered nuts.
Strauss's Machiavelli book is my favorite and I think his best. It is totally "original" in the sense that he took a wildly new path from all previous scholarship. It has basically defined the debate to this day. All subsequent scholarship either follows him, opposes him, or tries to ignore him.
I would recommend in addition Strauss's book on Spinoza and especially the much later preface that he wrote when he felt he finally understood Spinoza's esotericism.
Yes, the Prince (and the Discourses , and Art of War , and Florentine Histories ) are esoteric. It's too complex to argue in a comment thread. Suffice it to say for now that the outrageous "kill that dude" teachings serve and exoteric purpose.
• Replies: @SolontoCroesusStrauss's Machiavelli book is my favorite and I think his best. It is totally "original" in the sense that he took a wildly new path from all previous scholarship. It has basically defined the debate to this day. All subsequent scholarship either follows him, opposes him, or tries to ignore him.Nonsense.Maurizio Viroli has dedicated his life to scholarship on Machiavelli. He reads and understands The Prince (and Machiavelli's other works and life) in the context in which they were written, taking account of the finest details of Machiavelli's human, psychological, and spiritual evolution in the course of career and writing. Viroli walks in Niccolo's footsteps; like Machiavelli, he "puts on the garments" of 15th century Florence, and Rome, and the French and Germanic cities where Machiavelli traveled to represent Florence.
Strauss may satisfy those inclined to engage in exercise in Talmudic argument, but Machiavelli was Italian, Florentine, and Roman; Dante was his constant companion; he was also conversant in Old and New Testament literature and, less extensively, with the relatively newly rediscovered Greek philosophers.
Strauss does not understand Machiavelli's thoughts on religion because he fails to separate Niccolo's Christian, Danteian spirituality from his disgust with the corruption of the Roman Catholic papacy and institutional church.
If you want intellectual showmanship and hair-splitting, Strauss on Machiavelli's your man. If you want to understand the soul of Niccolo Machiavelli and the complexities of political life in the Florence, Italy he lived in and loved, you can't do better than Maurizio Viroli.
Machiavelli and Republicanism
http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/history-ideas-and-intellectual-history/machiavelli-and-republicanism?format=PBRedeeming the Prince
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/681223For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0198293585.001.0001/acprof-9780198293583(Strauss twists Machiavelli's love of country into an evil act because it is not universal. Yet, as one reviewer noted of Strauss, "I would make the case that the best defense of Strauss lies in an understanding of Aristotle and Israel." https://www.amazon.com/German-Stranger-Strauss-National-Socialism/dp/0739147382 ) , @Pat Casey Steve weighed in on this a while back and made the point that what we have, what has been handed down to us, that probably is the esoteric stuff. I don't think he even mentioned in the piece how interesting it is that what we have of Aristotle seem to be lecture notes. I suspect that is just because: Aristotle taught Alexander---the teacher knew no felt need to live on as a writer like Plato did. One thing we can say about those lecture notes, we can pretty well imagine they were not written in his prime, hence we're still learning how much good stuff is there; if you know your stuff, you know as late as the late Richard Taylor that the philosopher was yet outdoing us moderns in a point he makes like an afterthought but could not matter more. But so anyways, what we have is the distilled Aristotle probably from his golden years; if we also had it in any other form, it might read comparatively mercilessly for being too esoteric. As we know him it is impossible to imagine Aristotle writing dialogues, debating other voices ; one need not name rivals when one has none and he was the King's philosopher. What you can't say is no he was being disorganized on purpose to be esoteric, right?
But take Plato. I assume if you could read ancient Greek as well as Plato could, you would find many a double meaning at crucial turns but I really have no idea save the gut instinct that the man was an inspired writer when he wrote which is to say a poet. And what a poet does is let the muse speak and summon such nice lines as "The Beauty is not the Madness/ Though my errors and wrecks lie about me/and I am not a demigod, I cannot make it cohere." The errors that lie about him strewn about him as it were, they lie about how good he was when he was at his best. A tongue like a double-bladed sword says the Bible. I imagine some of Ezra Pound's radio rants need a second listen with less tense nerves; they say the Italians suspected he was transmitting code. Anyways. Imagine how much can be said for the stories we tell ourselves....how many former selves does any one wind up with? you have to ask your self.
Scholasticism, well you could almost say that's all about no secret handshake shit. Make sure them key words get nailed down and no tricks or to the tower you got cause to go.
Spinoza, oh we know exactly where his mystery lies. Edwin Curley said:
"In responding to this objection, I think I had best begin by confessing candidly that in spite of many years of study, I still do not feel that I understand this part of the Ethics at all adequately. I feel the freedom to confess that, of course, because I also believe that no one else understands it adequately either"What objection? The one that says, nothing of the mind should remain eternal after the body has been destroyed if there is only one substance! We could have gone to grad school on this paper is what the man said, but first pay respects to what that meant to him personally, cause he probably escaped with his life when he did, but he knew his disciples would keep his mind alive. But seriously I should touch this up and send it somewhere:It must be said that the elegance of this deduction is striking. God's idea of the human body corresponds with the mind's idea of the human body. The crucial move that turns the correspondence into a startling claim is that God's idea expresses the essence of the body, while the mind's idea expresses the essence of the mind. Through the initial correspondence, God's eternal essence expressed as an idea of the body adopts the essence of the mind. Thus, when the body dies, something of the essence of the mind remains eternal. With that, Spinoza culminates his masterpiece." Since what is conceived, with a certain eternal necessity, through God's essence itself, is nevertheless something, this something that pertains to the essence of the mind will necessarily be eternal." Besides being an Eternalist, Spinoza is also an Idealist. It fits then that he should leave something of the mind remaining eternally, rather than what a strict Eternalist would leave, that is, something of the mind and body. But recall that Spinoza's something that pertains to the essence of the mind is the idea of the body . In the final analysis, his system coheres.That's terribly poignant too, because it shows he went back to his roots in the end: "The soul will blame the body for its actions."Anyways I've spent myself and who wants to talk about Nietzsche, really. That guy was an antenna for a frequency that was broadcasting Noh drama directly into his soul while he wrote his Zarathustra, and I don't believe he ever came back from that---he had all the inside jokes he could tell to himself in perpetuity. But I gotta say, one time I ran into this guys blog who had let Nietzsche drive him insane, and he had comprehensively worked out to an absolute end the thesis his whole philosophy was to understand that a formal Matriarchy was what's good and here's why that's the necessity. If that is true its too hysterical to ever argue with no hint of mania. So I felt bad for the guy.
But what the other guy said rings truest to me. And I'd just add that Paul Gottfried's observation that Strauss winds up treating a text a lot like the Deconstructions do does not entirely fail Strauss for me. The fundamental truth to them is something every one of us around can understand: these words we type, the ain't alive on quick lips, which is what gets some of us into more trouble than others.
I definitely check out the book, but one must be cautious when resurrecting phantoms. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- anon says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 2:10 am GMT • 300 Words
deHaven Smith is not that impressive on several counts.
one example: book opens:
"Although most Americans today reject the official (lone gunman) account of the Kennedy assassination, they also have doubts about conspiracy theories and those who believe them.
This means the CIA program was successful, for its aim was not to sell the Warren Commission, but to sow uncertainty about the commission's critics. Today, people are not only uncertain, they have given up ever learning the truth. "At least one high-profile person and an entire community that supports him does not have doubts, has not given up.
Cyril Wecht blasted holes in Arlen Specter's "one bullet" theory in 1965. He's still at it. In 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of JFK's assassination,
"about 500 people gathered at Duquesne University for a JFK symposium sponsored by the university's Institute of Forensic Science and Law, which is named for Wecht. Appearances by Stone and a doctor who tended to Kennedy brought national attention.
People sneered when they mentioned Specter's name or the single-bullet theory.
Across the state, the Single Bullet exhibit opened on Oct. 21. It's the first exhibition in Philadelphia University's Arlen Specter Center for Public Policy. Willens, the former Kennedy aide, delivered a speech.
The center's coordinator, Karen Albert, said he was looking forward to defending his conclusion on the 50th anniversary. " http://triblive.com/news/allegheny/5017529-74/wecht-commission-specter
Smith did not even mention Wecht or Specter and the single-bullet theory in his book. The omission is important insofar as its inclusion would have demonstrated that for many years the populace has been aware of the dishonesty of the US government and some have been raising their voices against and continue to do so.
That knowledge should give encouragement to activists such as those who demand accountability for Israel's attack on the USS Liberty and the deliberate killing of 34 US sailors and other personnel.
(Specter has been useful to the deep state in other ways: he protected Zalman Shapiro, former head of NUMEC, from prosecution for his part in smuggling uranium to Israel. http://israellobby.org/numec/ 0
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- anonymous says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 2:18 am GMT • 100 Words @exiled off mainstreet I didn't notice Gleiwitz was mentioned in another posting before I mentioned it. I tend go along with you and suspect incompetence rather than purpose was the cause of the Pearl Harbor disaster, though the incompetence may have included failure to adequately warn those on the ground at Pearl Harbor. Personally, I don't back the "truther" version of the twin towers because that would have required a broader conspiracy than I think could have succeeded. My guess is that the neighboring building was destroyed as part of the cleanup effort. I do think, however, that the authorities knew something was up, didn't believe it could ever succeed and used it as a sort of Reichstag Fire incident to brush aside constitutional democracy in the US. I also suspect that the Mossad knew more than they let on. My guess is that if Gore rather than Bush had been in power that history would have been far different. I suspect that the anthrax thing was more likely started by the yankee regime as a home-grown conspiracy.
My guess is that if Gore rather than Bush had been in power that history would have been far different.
Joe Lieberman was Gore's running mate.
Lieberman had the Patriot Act on a shelf waiting for an opportunity -• Agree: Bill Jones Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All CommentsWhile holding the chair of the "Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs," Lieberman introduced on October 11, 2001, Senate Bill 1534, to establish the US Department of Homeland Security.
Anticipating the bill's certain passage, Lieberman gave himself automatic chairmanship after he changed the name of his committee to, "The Senate Committee of Homeland Security and Government Affairs."
Since then, Lieberman has been the main force behind legislation such as:
-1- The USA Patriot Act
-2- Protect America Act
-3- National Emergency Centers Establishment Act
-4- The Enemy Belligerent Interrogation Act
-5- The Terrorist Expatriation Act, and the proposed
-6- Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act.
- Bill Jones says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 2:40 am GMT • 100 Words @Wizard of Oz I have a problem with the idea of likeminded elites who all move in srep together.
They don't move in lockstep-(I assume you meant) together.
They do however have a series of identical interests:Lower taxes on Capital Gains and Dividends than on Earned Income.
No barriers to entry to low-wage unskilled workers for jobs that need to be performed in the US.
No barriers to goods produced from low-wage countries, no matter what the conditions they are produced in.
Control of the Federal Reserve.
Tax-payer bailouts of failing institutions.
etc, etc.
If you want to get into it, I'm happy to.
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz I think that is a more illuminating approach than talking about elites. As Lenin very likely said "Who? What?". The devil is indeed in the details and in details you see priorities and trade offs. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Rurik says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 2:40 am GMT • 400 Words
Thank you Mr. Unz, for this excellent- and circumspect and salient- article.
His main problem with "conspiracy theories" was not that they were always false, but they might often be true, and therefore their spread was potentially disruptive to the smooth functioning of society. So as a matter of self-defense, elites needed to actively suppress or otherwise undercut the unauthorized investigation of suspected conspiracies.
I'll just add that from what I've glimmered, (I'm definitely no expert on Leo Strauss), Strauss' philosophy contained more than just a careful consideration of 'conspiracy theories' and how they should be handled, but that what he advocated was a small group of highly motivated elite zealots (Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, et al) who would not just use power to control the narrative vis-a-vis conspiracy theories, but more to the point, would be the men who would conspire to alter the realities that required a mocking of "conspiracy theories" in the first place.
From what I understand, one of his motivating themes was that his acolytes would come to understand that they shouldn't be guided by trite, pedestrian notions of morality when being the agents of change in the world. And that rather, they should use his teachings as a way to see the world as exceptional men, who would boldly do things others might shrink from, out of hackneyed notions of probity.
Perhaps the best quote I know of to describe Straussianism (as I understand it) was made by a man who wasn't one of his actual students, but who certainly would have been well acquainted and worked closely with others who were; Karl Rove, when speaking to an aid:
"That's not the way the world really works anymore." He continued "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality-judiciously, as you will-we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."that quote for me, describes Straussianism to a T. And if so, certainty dovetails with what happened during the reign of Bush-the lesser. Especially with something as audacious as 911.
That at least, is how I've seen it
As for the control of the media, I think most of your readers are certainly aware of that particular conundrum and its consequences. It is literally impossible to be too cynical as regards our media and government and CIA and other shenanigans, IMHO.
Thanks again sir.
• Replies: @Pat Casey Nice job. You roped the quote that ran across my mind--- I swear these things are in the air. How do you say, the ghost of Leo Strauss was moving men to do what you can't pin on his memory? Well you said it and that settles it. Thank goodness. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- CanSpeccy says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 2:43 am GMT @whorefinder No Oswald Hypothesis Denier has ever presented a falsifiable alternative hypothesis to Kennedy's murder.
The Oswald Hypothesis---as subtly admitted by Oliver Stone---passed the who, what, when, where, why, and how test. It answered all the questions and was plausible according to physics, motive, means, and opportunity. The Deniers try things like "the pristine bullet" and "magic bullet" nonsense, but those criticisms don't stand up to criticism (for example, the bullet was not pristine at all, and the bullet's tragectory was not magic at all, but followed a predictable downward path through the elevated Kennedy to Connolly).
But more tellingly---no alternative plausible falsifiable hypothesis has been offered. No who, what, when, where , why, and how. Lots of speculation and casting aspersions (LBJ! CIA! ), but no one offers a concrete hypothesis that could be tested or researched to see as plausible.
If you have a falsifiable alternative theory to the Oswald Hypothesis that satisfies the five w's and h, please offer it here. Until you do so, the only plausible hypothesis is that Oswald acted alone.
It's been more than 50 years people. Give us something besides that some people disliked Kennedy (all politicians have enemies) and "eye witnesses" who keep changing their stories.
*Oh, and the KGB worked to spread Kennedy Conspiracy theories because they undermined faith in the U.S. government and took the heat off communists for the killing. They funded some of the conspiracy theorists and promoted them.
Hey Whorefinder, are you one of Cass Sunstein's boys , by any chance.
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- John Jeremiah Smith says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 2:43 am GMT • 100 Words @The Alarmist I personally think they did land on the moon, but am paying devil's advocate here ....
"Not to be arch, but, even with the repeater on the moon, what about the bounce echo from the tight-beam signal coming from Earth carrying the deceptive info? "First, you could transvert from one range to another, so an interested party would have know where to look for the reflection. You could uplink in another range of S-Band, or go lower to L-band if you don't mind a little faraday rotation. Your link-budget would be just sufficient to get a signal from the lunar repeater to Earth, but that would most likely not be enough enough for a full round-trip of the terrestrial signal. Most of your tight beam would still pass fairly wide abeam the moon, and that which was reflected back to Earth would be further degraded by libration fading.How do you get Astronauts bouncing and hammers falling in Slo-Mo? Film at 60fps, replay at 30. Ah, but you have to have a really good clean-room to keep dust off the film. Maybe that is why videotape technology took off in the early seventies ;)
How do you get Astronauts bouncing and hammers falling in Slo-Mo?
Yeah, the gravity effects are a BIG job. Just slo-mo-ing won't do it, because you have different curvature of falling profile, and acceleration of gravity is different because moon-mass is less (and non-linear ref 30fps v. 60fps.)
There would also be additive propagation delay in the radio signals. Pure delay, too - no compensation would fix that in 1969.
• Replies: @Anonymous https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdMvQTNLaUE Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- SolontoCroesus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 2:50 am GMT • 300 Words @Decius First, if you are at all interested in esotericism, I cannot recommend highly enough Philosophy Between the Lines by Meltzer. The only thing critical I can say about this book is that, if one is really an expert in one of the thinkers that Meltzer treats, one will read the passages on that thinker that Meltzer cites and say "So what? I've known that for years. He's shed no new light." Which is true. But irrelevant to what he's trying to do. The book presents an unassailable case that philosophy has been esoteric since Plato. Esotericism long predates Spinoza and has been discussed since ancient times. Strauss simply revived a concept that had been forgotten. Toland (who I am not that familiar with) wrote before esotericism as it were "lapsed." Strauss says that Goethe and Lessing were the last to write this way. When Strauss revived knowledge of esotericism in the late 1930s with the first Xenophon article, he was considered nuts.
Strauss's Machiavelli book is my favorite and I think his best. It is totally "original" in the sense that he took a wildly new path from all previous scholarship. It has basically defined the debate to this day. All subsequent scholarship either follows him, opposes him, or tries to ignore him.
I would recommend in addition Strauss's book on Spinoza and especially the much later preface that he wrote when he felt he finally understood Spinoza's esotericism.
Yes, the Prince (and the Discourses , and Art of War , and Florentine Histories ) are esoteric. It's too complex to argue in a comment thread. Suffice it to say for now that the outrageous "kill that dude" teachings serve and exoteric purpose.
Strauss's Machiavelli book is my favorite and I think his best. It is totally "original" in the sense that he took a wildly new path from all previous scholarship. It has basically defined the debate to this day. All subsequent scholarship either follows him, opposes him, or tries to ignore him.
Nonsense.
Maurizio Viroli has dedicated his life to scholarship on Machiavelli. He reads and understands The Prince (and Machiavelli's other works and life) in the context in which they were written, taking account of the finest details of Machiavelli's human, psychological, and spiritual evolution in the course of career and writing. Viroli walks in Niccolo's footsteps; like Machiavelli, he "puts on the garments" of 15th century Florence, and Rome, and the French and Germanic cities where Machiavelli traveled to represent Florence.
Strauss may satisfy those inclined to engage in exercise in Talmudic argument, but Machiavelli was Italian, Florentine, and Roman; Dante was his constant companion; he was also conversant in Old and New Testament literature and, less extensively, with the relatively newly rediscovered Greek philosophers.
Strauss does not understand Machiavelli's thoughts on religion because he fails to separate Niccolo's Christian, Danteian spirituality from his disgust with the corruption of the Roman Catholic papacy and institutional church.
If you want intellectual showmanship and hair-splitting, Strauss on Machiavelli's your man. If you want to understand the soul of Niccolo Machiavelli and the complexities of political life in the Florence, Italy he lived in and loved, you can't do better than Maurizio Viroli.
Machiavelli and Republicanism
http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/history-ideas-and-intellectual-history/machiavelli-and-republicanism?format=PBRedeeming the Prince
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/681223For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0198293585.001.0001/acprof-9780198293583(Strauss twists Machiavelli's love of country into an evil act because it is not universal. Yet, as one reviewer noted of Strauss, "I would make the case that the best defense of Strauss lies in an understanding of Aristotle and Israel." https://www.amazon.com/German-Stranger-Strauss-National-Socialism/dp/0739147382 )
• Replies: @Decius First, you are wrong that Strauss thinks Machiavelli's patriotism is in itself evil. Strauss says the exact opposite at several points. But he also says that recourse to patriotism does not in itself excuse Machiavelli's recommendations to do evil. Strauss himself comes up with the most persuasive justifications (which are higher than excuses) for Machiavelli's evil sayings. But to understand Strauss's arguments, you would have to read the book and spend a lot of time with it because it is hard.Viroli is a scholar I respect for a lot of reasons, but not for philosophic depth. The argument about "context" diminishes Machiavelli (and all great thinkers) by presupposing that their thought is time-bound or that they could not think past the horizon of their time. The greatest minds transcend their times and even create new times. There aren't very many such, but Nick was one. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- CanSpeccy says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 2:50 am GMT @biz
you are too quick to conflate 9/11 and the moon landingsActually, it was Unz himself who stated a while back that if we admit that one of them is possible, then all are possible, or something more or less to that effect.In an case, the 9/11 controlled demolition / missile / flight 93 is in a hangar in Cleveland stuff is just as implausible as faking the moon landings. Too many people and organizations and countries needing to be in on it, etc.
biz, you obviously missed it. Bill Jones, above , debunked your argument even before you made it.
• Replies: @biz lol, "The Mahattan Project was kept a secret."No it wasn't. Stalin knew about the Manhattan project before Truman did. Learn some history. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Pat Casey says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 3:31 am GMT • 100 Words @Rurik Thank you Mr. Unz, for this excellent- and circumspect and salient- article.
His main problem with "conspiracy theories" was not that they were always false, but they might often be true, and therefore their spread was potentially disruptive to the smooth functioning of society. So as a matter of self-defense, elites needed to actively suppress or otherwise undercut the unauthorized investigation of suspected conspiracies.I'll just add that from what I've glimmered, (I'm definitely no expert on Leo Strauss), Strauss' philosophy contained more than just a careful consideration of 'conspiracy theories' and how they should be handled, but that what he advocated was a small group of highly motivated elite zealots (Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, et al) who would not just use power to control the narrative vis-a-vis conspiracy theories, but more to the point, would be the men who would conspire to alter the realities that required a mocking of "conspiracy theories" in the first place.From what I understand, one of his motivating themes was that his acolytes would come to understand that they shouldn't be guided by trite, pedestrian notions of morality when being the agents of change in the world. And that rather, they should use his teachings as a way to see the world as exceptional men, who would boldly do things others might shrink from, out of hackneyed notions of probity.
Perhaps the best quote I know of to describe Straussianism (as I understand it) was made by a man who wasn't one of his actual students, but who certainly would have been well acquainted and worked closely with others who were; Karl Rove, when speaking to an aid:
"That's not the way the world really works anymore." He continued "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality-judiciously, as you will-we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."that quote for me, describes Straussianism to a T. And if so, certainty dovetails with what happened during the reign of Bush-the lesser. Especially with something as audacious as 911.
That at least, is how I've seen it...
As for the control of the media, I think most of your readers are certainly aware of that particular conundrum and its consequences. It is literally impossible to be too cynical as regards our media and government and CIA and other shenanigans, IMHO.
Thanks again sir.
Nice job. You roped the quote that ran across my mind- I swear these things are in the air. How do you say, the ghost of Leo Strauss was moving men to do what you can't pin on his memory? Well you said it and that settles it. Thank goodness.
• Replies: @Decius Wait, a quote from Rove that doesn't even mention Strauss explains everything about Strauss? Are you serious?I gather you just need a boogeyman and Strauss is the one you've selected. Or, more accurately, have allowed others to select for you. , @Rurik now this..
Now, however, Europhysics Magazine, the respected publication of the European physics community, has published a report by four experts who say "the evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that all three buildings were destroyed by controlled demolition."
http://www.wnd.com/2016/08/911-conspiracy-gets-support-from-physicists-study/.
.Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.
~ Buddha
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- Astuteobservor II says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 3:32 am GMT
after snowden, every conspiracy theory got a 99% boost in credibility. he confirmed the big bad boogeymen watching and spying on us all.
nothing else is impossible, nothing. every theory is now possible, everything.
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- Decius says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 3:55 am GMT @Pat Casey Nice job. You roped the quote that ran across my mind--- I swear these things are in the air. How do you say, the ghost of Leo Strauss was moving men to do what you can't pin on his memory? Well you said it and that settles it. Thank goodness.
Wait, a quote from Rove that doesn't even mention Strauss explains everything about Strauss? Are you serious?
I gather you just need a boogeyman and Strauss is the one you've selected. Or, more accurately, have allowed others to select for you.
• Replies: @Pat Casey Don't miss my longer reply, in the cue, plus this one, but put the boogeyman business to bed and put your defenses down.... I can't say it any other way: I think the spirit of Leo Strauss may well have moved men to move mountains and mountains otherwise called federal bureaucracies and divisions of armies. It might explain not "everything" about Strauss but indeed whats essential about Strauss, which is that you are right, I suspect he was special. Step back for a second and forget that those Bush bastards were bastards and just estimate the nerve it takes to pull off 9/11 and then go into Afghanistan and Iraq. We can all at least agree, that's somthin. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Decius says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 4:03 am GMT • 100 Words @SolontoCroesus
Strauss's Machiavelli book is my favorite and I think his best. It is totally "original" in the sense that he took a wildly new path from all previous scholarship. It has basically defined the debate to this day. All subsequent scholarship either follows him, opposes him, or tries to ignore him.Nonsense.Maurizio Viroli has dedicated his life to scholarship on Machiavelli. He reads and understands The Prince (and Machiavelli's other works and life) in the context in which they were written, taking account of the finest details of Machiavelli's human, psychological, and spiritual evolution in the course of career and writing. Viroli walks in Niccolo's footsteps; like Machiavelli, he "puts on the garments" of 15th century Florence, and Rome, and the French and Germanic cities where Machiavelli traveled to represent Florence.
Strauss may satisfy those inclined to engage in exercise in Talmudic argument, but Machiavelli was Italian, Florentine, and Roman; Dante was his constant companion; he was also conversant in Old and New Testament literature and, less extensively, with the relatively newly rediscovered Greek philosophers.
Strauss does not understand Machiavelli's thoughts on religion because he fails to separate Niccolo's Christian, Danteian spirituality from his disgust with the corruption of the Roman Catholic papacy and institutional church.
If you want intellectual showmanship and hair-splitting, Strauss on Machiavelli's your man. If you want to understand the soul of Niccolo Machiavelli and the complexities of political life in the Florence, Italy he lived in and loved, you can't do better than Maurizio Viroli.
Machiavelli and Republicanism
http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/history-ideas-and-intellectual-history/machiavelli-and-republicanism?format=PBRedeeming the Prince
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/681223For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0198293585.001.0001/acprof-9780198293583(Strauss twists Machiavelli's love of country into an evil act because it is not universal. Yet, as one reviewer noted of Strauss, "I would make the case that the best defense of Strauss lies in an understanding of Aristotle and Israel." https://www.amazon.com/German-Stranger-Strauss-National-Socialism/dp/0739147382 )
First, you are wrong that Strauss thinks Machiavelli's patriotism is in itself evil. Strauss says the exact opposite at several points. But he also says that recourse to patriotism does not in itself excuse Machiavelli's recommendations to do evil. Strauss himself comes up with the most persuasive justifications (which are higher than excuses) for Machiavelli's evil sayings. But to understand Strauss's arguments, you would have to read the book and spend a lot of time with it because it is hard.
Viroli is a scholar I respect for a lot of reasons, but not for philosophic depth. The argument about "context" diminishes Machiavelli (and all great thinkers) by presupposing that their thought is time-bound or that they could not think past the horizon of their time. The greatest minds transcend their times and even create new times. There aren't very many such, but Nick was one.
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- anonymous says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 4:07 am GMT • 200 Words @exiled off mainstreet The Israelis learned their false flag lesson from the Nazis, who used concentration camp inmates dressed as Polish soldiers as part of a phony attack on the frontier radio station "Sender Gleiwitz" a day or so before they invaded Poland.
If Nazis didn't exist zionists would have to invent them - or maybe they did. Nuland's use of Nazis in Ukraine is sure making it look more and more likely that Hitler was an Osama bin-Laden like creation of Jews and/or the Roosevelt admin.
1. The British were past masters of all sorts of dirty tricks. Moshe Dayan learned about house demolitions from the British when they were in charge of Mandate Palestine - pre-1939. http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.657167
2. Jews in Poland were active participants in killing fellow Poles; from the late 1920s into the mid-1930s Jews in Soviet participated in serious numbers in Stalin's slaughter of several million Russians, Ukrainians, Poles. Some of the killed were Jewish. They didn't need Germans to teach them how to kill on a mass scale, Trotsky, Lenin & Stalin were able tutors.
3. By early in 1938 The Haganeh had created Mossad al Aliyeh-bet - zionists planted in Germany and other European cities to shepherd Jews out of their home countries and into Palestine. Francis Nicosia writes about it in Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany
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- pyrrhus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 5:37 am GMT
The CIA's Project Mockingbird had all the network news anchors using the words "conspiracy theory" like the brainless parrots that they were. And Americans remain well brainwashed, although it's actually hard to get anything significant done without a "conspiracy."
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- Pat Casey says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 5:37 am GMT • 1,000 Words @Decius First, if you are at all interested in esotericism, I cannot recommend highly enough Philosophy Between the Lines by Meltzer. The only thing critical I can say about this book is that, if one is really an expert in one of the thinkers that Meltzer treats, one will read the passages on that thinker that Meltzer cites and say "So what? I've known that for years. He's shed no new light." Which is true. But irrelevant to what he's trying to do. The book presents an unassailable case that philosophy has been esoteric since Plato. Esotericism long predates Spinoza and has been discussed since ancient times. Strauss simply revived a concept that had been forgotten. Toland (who I am not that familiar with) wrote before esotericism as it were "lapsed." Strauss says that Goethe and Lessing were the last to write this way. When Strauss revived knowledge of esotericism in the late 1930s with the first Xenophon article, he was considered nuts.
Strauss's Machiavelli book is my favorite and I think his best. It is totally "original" in the sense that he took a wildly new path from all previous scholarship. It has basically defined the debate to this day. All subsequent scholarship either follows him, opposes him, or tries to ignore him.
I would recommend in addition Strauss's book on Spinoza and especially the much later preface that he wrote when he felt he finally understood Spinoza's esotericism.
Yes, the Prince (and the Discourses , and Art of War , and Florentine Histories ) are esoteric. It's too complex to argue in a comment thread. Suffice it to say for now that the outrageous "kill that dude" teachings serve and exoteric purpose.
Steve weighed in on this a while back and made the point that what we have, what has been handed down to us, that probably is the esoteric stuff. I don't think he even mentioned in the piece how interesting it is that what we have of Aristotle seem to be lecture notes. I suspect that is just because: Aristotle taught Alexander-the teacher knew no felt need to live on as a writer like Plato did. One thing we can say about those lecture notes, we can pretty well imagine they were not written in his prime, hence we're still learning how much good stuff is there; if you know your stuff, you know as late as the late Richard Taylor that the philosopher was yet outdoing us moderns in a point he makes like an afterthought but could not matter more. But so anyways, what we have is the distilled Aristotle probably from his golden years; if we also had it in any other form, it might read comparatively mercilessly for being too esoteric. As we know him it is impossible to imagine Aristotle writing dialogues, debating other voices ; one need not name rivals when one has none and he was the King's philosopher. What you can't say is no he was being disorganized on purpose to be esoteric, right?
But take Plato. I assume if you could read ancient Greek as well as Plato could, you would find many a double meaning at crucial turns but I really have no idea save the gut instinct that the man was an inspired writer when he wrote which is to say a poet. And what a poet does is let the muse speak and summon such nice lines as "The Beauty is not the Madness/ Though my errors and wrecks lie about me/and I am not a demigod, I cannot make it cohere." The errors that lie about him strewn about him as it were, they lie about how good he was when he was at his best. A tongue like a double-bladed sword says the Bible. I imagine some of Ezra Pound's radio rants need a second listen with less tense nerves; they say the Italians suspected he was transmitting code. Anyways. Imagine how much can be said for the stories we tell ourselves .how many former selves does any one wind up with? you have to ask your self.
Scholasticism, well you could almost say that's all about no secret handshake shit. Make sure them key words get nailed down and no tricks or to the tower you got cause to go.
Spinoza, oh we know exactly where his mystery lies. Edwin Curley said:
"In responding to this objection, I think I had best begin by confessing candidly that in spite of many years of study, I still do not feel that I understand this part of the Ethics at all adequately. I feel the freedom to confess that, of course, because I also believe that no one else understands it adequately either"
What objection? The one that says, nothing of the mind should remain eternal after the body has been destroyed if there is only one substance! We could have gone to grad school on this paper is what the man said, but first pay respects to what that meant to him personally, cause he probably escaped with his life when he did, but he knew his disciples would keep his mind alive. But seriously I should touch this up and send it somewhere:
It must be said that the elegance of this deduction is striking. God's idea of the human body corresponds with the mind's idea of the human body. The crucial move that turns the correspondence into a startling claim is that God's idea expresses the essence of the body, while the mind's idea expresses the essence of the mind. Through the initial correspondence, God's eternal essence expressed as an idea of the body adopts the essence of the mind. Thus, when the body dies, something of the essence of the mind remains eternal. With that, Spinoza culminates his masterpiece.
" Since what is conceived, with a certain eternal necessity, through God's essence itself, is nevertheless something, this something that pertains to the essence of the mind will necessarily be eternal." Besides being an Eternalist, Spinoza is also an Idealist. It fits then that he should leave something of the mind remaining eternally, rather than what a strict Eternalist would leave, that is, something of the mind and body. But recall that Spinoza's something that pertains to the essence of the mind is the idea of the body . In the final analysis, his system coheres.
That's terribly poignant too, because it shows he went back to his roots in the end: "The soul will blame the body for its actions."
Anyways I've spent myself and who wants to talk about Nietzsche, really. That guy was an antenna for a frequency that was broadcasting Noh drama directly into his soul while he wrote his Zarathustra, and I don't believe he ever came back from that-he had all the inside jokes he could tell to himself in perpetuity. But I gotta say, one time I ran into this guys blog who had let Nietzsche drive him insane, and he had comprehensively worked out to an absolute end the thesis his whole philosophy was to understand that a formal Matriarchy was what's good and here's why that's the necessity. If that is true its too hysterical to ever argue with no hint of mania. So I felt bad for the guy.
But what the other guy said rings truest to me. And I'd just add that Paul Gottfried's observation that Strauss winds up treating a text a lot like the Deconstructions do does not entirely fail Strauss for me. The fundamental truth to them is something every one of us around can understand: these words we type, the ain't alive on quick lips, which is what gets some of us into more trouble than others.
I definitely check out the book, but one must be cautious when resurrecting phantoms.
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- Pat Casey says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 6:18 am GMT • 100 Words @Decius Wait, a quote from Rove that doesn't even mention Strauss explains everything about Strauss? Are you serious?
I gather you just need a boogeyman and Strauss is the one you've selected. Or, more accurately, have allowed others to select for you.
Don't miss my longer reply, in the cue, plus this one, but put the boogeyman business to bed and put your defenses down . I can't say it any other way: I think the spirit of Leo Strauss may well have moved men to move mountains and mountains otherwise called federal bureaucracies and divisions of armies. It might explain not "everything" about Strauss but indeed whats essential about Strauss, which is that you are right, I suspect he was special. Step back for a second and forget that those Bush bastards were bastards and just estimate the nerve it takes to pull off 9/11 and then go into Afghanistan and Iraq. We can all at least agree, that's somthin.
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- 5371 says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 6:20 am GMT @Decius At any rate it's sort of absurd to watch you people chase your tails. All that you "know" or think you know is that Strauss is bad. But Schmitt is good. But Strauss is derivative of Schmitt. Doesn't that make Strauss good, or Schmitt bad?
Schmitt is famous for arguing in favor of the essential particularity of politics--i.e., against alleged neocon universalism. So if Strauss is derivative of Schmitt, how can he be a neocon universalist?
Strauss in fact agrees with Schmitt on the essential particularity of politics and says so, but finds a deeper source, with deeper arguments, in Plato. Schmitt admitted that his own attempt to fortify his particularism was build on the quick-sandy foundation of modern rationalism, which Strauss taught him to see through.
When you can pin Strauss down to a definite meaning, it is false, banal or both. He is usually too obfuscatory to be pinned down. Schmitt is easy to understand and shows you true things you had not thought of before.
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- dismasdolben says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 6:23 am GMT • 200 Words
My favourite historical conspiracy is the so-called "Gunpowder Plot," which is still, despite all of the evidence that has been discovered in more modern times, represented in history books, as being exclusively the work of disgruntled Catholic noblemen and their Jesuit confessors. It was actually a government projection of the Cecil ministry, completely riddled with moles who nurtured it along, right up until the point when it could be revealed to the public for maximum political effect, and to the King, so that he would become more terrorified, and, thus, more dependent upon the Cecils and their "constitutionalist" Puritan proteges. The "evidence" has, indeed, always been in plain sight, and it has been dealt with in numerous books, such as The Gunpowder Plot, Faith and Treason , by Antonia Fraser, and another book, entitled "God's Secret Agents,' but, still, to this day, the myth of conspiring priests is still propagated in atavistic anti-Catholic British history.
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- 5371 says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 6:31 am GMT @Decius Schmitt disagreed with you.
This way of arguing, too, is redolent of an academic personality cult, not of actual scholarship.
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- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 7:19 am GMT @Wizard of Oz Fascinating. A reminder that one should five lives lived to 120 so one can lots of stories right....
Oops! Sorry but I'm sure the typis were obvious.
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- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 7:27 am GMT • 100 Words @whorefinder No Oswald Hypothesis Denier has ever presented a falsifiable alternative hypothesis to Kennedy's murder.
The Oswald Hypothesis---as subtly admitted by Oliver Stone---passed the who, what, when, where, why, and how test. It answered all the questions and was plausible according to physics, motive, means, and opportunity. The Deniers try things like "the pristine bullet" and "magic bullet" nonsense, but those criticisms don't stand up to criticism (for example, the bullet was not pristine at all, and the bullet's tragectory was not magic at all, but followed a predictable downward path through the elevated Kennedy to Connolly).
But more tellingly---no alternative plausible falsifiable hypothesis has been offered. No who, what, when, where , why, and how. Lots of speculation and casting aspersions (LBJ! CIA! ), but no one offers a concrete hypothesis that could be tested or researched to see as plausible.
If you have a falsifiable alternative theory to the Oswald Hypothesis that satisfies the five w's and h, please offer it here. Until you do so, the only plausible hypothesis is that Oswald acted alone.
It's been more than 50 years people. Give us something besides that some people disliked Kennedy (all politicians have enemies) and "eye witnesses" who keep changing their stories.
*Oh, and the KGB worked to spread Kennedy Conspiracy theories because they undermined faith in the U.S. government and took the heat off communists for the killing. They funded some of the conspiracy theorists and promoted them.
I ask only because you may have the JFK assassination stuff well organised in your head and up to date. What do you make of the update by Colin McLaren on the humanly plausible conspiracy theory that the bullet which killed Kennedy was fired accidentally by a Secret Service man standing in the car behind? Are there any knock down arguments against it? Or big holes?
• Replies: @whorefinder The argument has surface plausibility merit, and would seem to resolve a lot of the problems Oswald Deniers have with Kennedy's head movement. However, I haven't heard the physics argument about it, or any other evidence. So I'm neutral.That said, it isn't a popular theory because it offers nothing nefarious---just the SS screwing up big time. So even if it were true---and I'm open to it being true---the Oswald Deniers are far too invested in making this a deliberate mass-government coverup to listen. , @CanSpeccy I love the idea that JFK was killed by a stray bullet accidentally fired by a secret service agent. It's so obvious once the truth has been pointed out.
Probably the same sort of balls-up explains 9/11. You know, missiles intended to shoot down simulated highjacked planes in a drill on 9/11 accidentally wamming into the Pentagon and Twin Towers.
Then Norad had to make up that stuff about 19 hijackers and Bin Laden to cover their arse. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 7:42 am GMT • 100 Words @Miro23 Being smart has nothing to do with it.
For example the government says that WTC7 completely collapsed in 7 seconds due to fire. You don't need to be smart to see something is wrong here (hint: most of the structural pillars were untouched by fire).
I see the biggest problem about a conspiratorial explanation for the WTC 7 collapse is motive. How does it make sense for those who wanted the big splash that hitting buildings 1 and 2 would give? The other major difficulty is the video footage of fires burning all day which had to have heated the steel and therefore potentially weakened it to a critical point. Where's the mystery?
• Replies: @CanSpeccy There must be hundreds of millions of words accessible on the Internet discussing the collapse of WTC Building 7. Why then foul up this discussion with the reiteration of arguments that anyone with an interest in the specifics of 9/11 will already know or can find out elsewhere? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- moneta says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 7:44 am GMT • 200 Words
The biggest conpiracy, which most fail understand, is that the reason that there is all of economic termoil and wars, is due to one reason and one reason only. There is no money and what we use for transactions is the invertion of money, created by an entry of a computer. Its main purpose is to make the issuers rich and everyone else in debt to them..Countries who don't want to go into their debt become enemies and are villified. This illusion is reinforced by films, media. Tax authorities. the government.
• Replies: @AnotherLover Agree.
THIS IS THE BIGGEST CONSPIRACY on which all of the others are constructed. Including the socialist satanist society built upon it. To make it work markets have to be manipulated, which they all are.
Get rid of money and you get rid of god. liberty, personal property and everything else of value because all values are based on nominal debt and this debt is not repayable because it has to be borrowed to be repayed and the method of repayment doesnt exist. Fereral reserve notes are counterfieted to create debt.Take that weird moderation quirk! Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 7:51 am GMT @Connecticut Famer "But the author of the "Open Society" had an open mind and I suspect he'd find the thesis reasonable that real conspiracies can both be uncovered and largely ignored because so many simply opt to ignore them. In such cases, evidence and "not taking arguments seriously" often reflects "intellectual groupieism," emotions, professional insecurities as well as venal collective interests."
Possibly as in the JFK case? I actually watched Lee Harvey Oswald get drilled by the man who was later identified as Jack Ruby (real surname "Rubenstein") live on television. The minute it happened and even at age 16 at the time I smelled a rat. Who was ultimately behind it all is something which I can't answer and care not to speculate upon, but to this day I remain suspicious about the circumstances surrounding Oswald's death and Ruby's subsequent dissembling.
I don't dismiss your intuitions as such but you hardly present a great case for affording them much weight. What you immediately felt at age 16 watching a screen? Nope. The fact that Jack Ruby dissembled?
• Replies: @AnotherLover I think dismissing intuition is for suckers. What successful businessman would offer such advice? Intuition assembles all the information available to the organism, and it is rarely wrong in my experience. I appreciate when people are willing to offer their gut reaction to an event, especially knowing they are doing so in a society which trains its members to pounce on them that would have the temerity to do so.Present company excluded, of course... Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 7:59 am GMT • 100 Words @Bill Jones Nice try.
The Manhattan Project was successfully kept secret despite its scope and the fact that it consumed 17% of the electricity production of the entire US.
So, there is a counter example – an exception???
Actually not such a good case. It was wartime in a pre Internet era and keeping their mouths shut was emphasised as a patriotic duty for everyone. The work was carried out at remote locations with vast resources behind it. The work was so new and esoteric that the best outsiders might have managed was that something was going on that they didn't understand. And of course it wasn't kept secret from our Soviet allies thanks to their spies.
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- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 8:20 am GMT @Bill Jones They don't move in lockstep-(I assume you meant) together.
They do however have a series of identical interests:Lower taxes on Capital Gains and Dividends than on Earned Income.
No barriers to entry to low-wage unskilled workers for jobs that need to be performed in the US.
No barriers to goods produced from low-wage countries, no matter what the conditions they are produced in.
Control of the Federal Reserve.
Tax-payer bailouts of failing institutions.
etc, etc.
If you want to get into it, I'm happy to.
I think that is a more illuminating approach than talking about elites. As Lenin very likely said "Who? What?". The devil is indeed in the details and in details you see priorities and trade offs.
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- Robbie says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 8:22 am GMT • 900 Words @whorefinder No Oswald Hypothesis Denier has ever presented a falsifiable alternative hypothesis to Kennedy's murder.
The Oswald Hypothesis---as subtly admitted by Oliver Stone---passed the who, what, when, where, why, and how test. It answered all the questions and was plausible according to physics, motive, means, and opportunity. The Deniers try things like "the pristine bullet" and "magic bullet" nonsense, but those criticisms don't stand up to criticism (for example, the bullet was not pristine at all, and the bullet's tragectory was not magic at all, but followed a predictable downward path through the elevated Kennedy to Connolly).
But more tellingly---no alternative plausible falsifiable hypothesis has been offered. No who, what, when, where , why, and how. Lots of speculation and casting aspersions (LBJ! CIA! ), but no one offers a concrete hypothesis that could be tested or researched to see as plausible.
If you have a falsifiable alternative theory to the Oswald Hypothesis that satisfies the five w's and h, please offer it here. Until you do so, the only plausible hypothesis is that Oswald acted alone.
It's been more than 50 years people. Give us something besides that some people disliked Kennedy (all politicians have enemies) and "eye witnesses" who keep changing their stories.
*Oh, and the KGB worked to spread Kennedy Conspiracy theories because they undermined faith in the U.S. government and took the heat off communists for the killing. They funded some of the conspiracy theorists and promoted them.
Oswald never fired a shot! A hidden witness for over 35 years had proof positive that Oswald was never on the sixth floor, and therefore couldn't be a shooter. Barry Ernest has found Victoria Adams, a witness to Kennedy's murder, on the fourth floor back staircase of the TSBD. She testified to the Warren Commission that she and her co-worker, Sandra Styles saw nobody come down the stairs, after she heard the final shots. Also with them was her supervisor, Dorothy Garner, making three witnesses (or non-witnesses in this case) that totally destroy the lone nut idea that Oswald was doing any shooting there. Adams was badgered and she felt threatened by the Warren Commission and fearing for her life, vanished for decades until Barry Ernest found her.
So, that ends and totally disproves for all time the formerly plausible hypothesis (theory) that Oswald killed Kennedy.
The Girl on the Stairs: The Search for a Missing Witness to the JFK Assassination by Barry Ernest (hardcover) April 2, 2013
https://www.amazon.com/Girl-Stairs-Missing-Witness-Assassination/dp/1455617830http://garyrevel.com/jfk/girlonstairs.html
"The Bob Wilson Interview with Author Barry Ernest 'The Girl on the Stairs: The Search for a Missing Witness to the JFK Assassination' "
Feb. 18, 2014 (New York, NY)#7
"There is no evidence that definitively places Oswald in the second-floor lunchroom as the shots were being fired. If you believe what Oswald is quoted as telling police during his interrogation sessions (12 hours that went unrecorded and without a stenographer being present), he was eating his lunch in the first-floor domino room when the shots occurred, and then went to the second floor to purchase a drink. This is perhaps why Vicki Adams did not see him on the stairs, why he was so calm during the lunchroom confrontation, and why [Officer Marrion] Baker first described Oswald as entering the lunchroom from a direction other than the back staircase. Certainly Vicki Adams saying she was on the stairs during this critical period presented an obvious problem to the Warren Commission's scenario, which might explain why she was the only person excluded from time tests regarding Oswald's escape, and why corroborating witnesses to her story were ignored."
#13
"Lee Harvey Oswald was labeled as a loner, and malcontent. From what you have learned of him, can you describe a bit about who he seems to have actually been?
He was definitely an odd fellow. But he was also smart, capable, for instance, of beating others more advanced than he was at chess and, if you believe the official record, able to teach himself Russian, one of the most challenging languages to learn, especially on your own. He liked the opera and was a vociferous reader, knowledgeable in a lot of subjects. His actions in both his military and civilian lives seem consistent with someone having a far deeper complexity than what we have been told. Oh, and he was also a rather poor shot!"
As for the pejorative term conspiracy theory , that was conjured up by the CIA in 1964, to counter the growing threat to the insiders' desire to promote the sole assassin idea, discredit doubters, and shut off debate. https://projectunspeakable.com/conspiracy-theory-invention-of-cia and http://www.jfklancer.com/CIA.html
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0292757697
"In 2013 Professor Lance Dehaven-Smith in a peer-reviewed book published by the University of Texas Press showed that the term "conspiracy theory" was developed by the CIA as a means of undercutting critics of the Warren Commission's report that President Kennedy was killed by Oswald. The use of this term was heavily promoted in the media by the CIA
It is ironic that the American left is a major enforcer of the CIA's strategy to shut up skeptics by branding them conspiracy theorists."
The public has never believed the official story that Oswald acted alone ever since the first Gallup Poll was taken in early Dec. 1963, and continuing to this very day.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/165893/majority-believe-jfk-killed-conspiracy.aspx
"Majority in U.S. Still Believe JFK Killed in a Conspiracy" by Art Swift (Nov. 15, 2013)Dec. 1963: 52% Conspiracy, 29% One man
1976: 81% Conspiracy, 11% One man
1983: 74% Conspiracy, 11% One man
1992: 77% Conspiracy, 10% One man
2001: 81% Conspiracy, 13% One man
2003: 75% Conspiracy, 19% One man
2013: 61% Conspiracy, 30% One manhttp://22november1963.org.uk/lee-harvey-oswald-marksman-sharpshooter
" According to his Marine score card (Commission Exhibit 239), Oswald was tested twice:
In December 1956, after "a very intensive 3 weeks' training period" (Warren Commission Hearings, vol.11, p.302), Oswald scored 212: two marks above the minimum for a 'sharpshooter'.
In May 1959, he scored 191: one mark above the minimum for a 'marksman'.
" Colonel Allison Folsom interpreted the results for the Warren Commission:
"The Marine Corps consider that any reasonable application of the instructions given to Marines should permit them to become qualified at least as a marksman. To become qualified as a sharpshooter, the Marine Corps is of the opinion that most Marines with a reasonable amount of adaptability to weapons firing can become so qualified. Consequently, a low marksman qualification indicates a rather poor "shot" and a sharpshooter qualification indicates a fairly good "shot".(Warren Commission Hearings, vol.19, pp.17f)Folsom agreed with his (not her) questioner that Oswald "was not a particularly outstanding shot" (Warren Commission Hearings, vol.8, p.311)."
Phlilip F. Nelson's hardcover 2011 book, a fascinating insight into LBJ's warped and sociopathic (also suffering from bi-polar disorder) personality hidden from the public, 1960-2011,
LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination
https://www.amazon.com/LBJ-Mastermind-Assassination-Phillip-Nelson/dp/1616083778His 2013 paperback update:
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https://www.amazon.com/LBJ-Mastermind-Assassination-Phillip-Nelson/dp/1620876108
- Old fogey says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 8:28 am GMT @Laurel The best strategy is to foster implausible conspiracy theories to create a cloud of disinformation. This technique was used very effectively after 9/11, such that it's very hard to discuss a coverup without being labeled a truther.
Thank you for inserting the word "truther" into the conversation. It has always fascinated me that someone searching for the truth about a political issue is now automatically considered a conspiracy theorist.
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- Gene Tuttle says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 9:29 am GMT • 100 Words @Bill Jones Nice try.
The Manhattan Project was successfully kept secret despite its scope and the fact that it consumed 17% of the electricity production of the entire US.
I did not say it was impossible for Americans to keep secrets, just "difficult."
The Manhattan Project was in a bygone era - one in which near total war prevailed. Yet even in that case, the Soviets knew early on what was going on. And stories appeared in the US press early on posing prying questions about Los Alamos, a "forbidden city" where there were reports of "ordnance and explosives" being developed and "tremendous explosions have been heard."
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/1944-Cleveland-Press-Forbidden-City.pdfMain point however, is that even when conspiracies become obvious they are often largely ignored.
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- biz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 12:11 pm GMT @CanSpeccy biz, you obviously missed it. Bill Jones, above , debunked your argument even before you made it.
lol, "The Mahattan Project was kept a secret."
No it wasn't. Stalin knew about the Manhattan project before Truman did. Learn some history.
• Replies: @CanSpeccylol, "The Mahattan Project was kept a secret."Your point misses the point. Putin probably knows as much or more about the mechanics of 9/11 than Stalin knew about the mechanics of the atom bomb and the Manhattan Project. But the issue is public knowledge, not what some individuals may know or have known. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All CommentsNo it wasn't. Stalin knew about the Manhattan project before Truman did. Learn some history.
- Moi says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 1:07 pm GMT • 100 Words @Rehmat There are more so-called "conspiracy theories" claimed by the US government, CIA, and organized Jewry than the Jews may have been killed by the Nazis. The "conspiracy theorists" like the "terrorists" are chosen by the Zionist-controlled mainstream media.
Like the September 11, 2001 attacks, the lie that Iran's president Ahmadinejad called, WIPE ISRAEL OFF THE MAP, is still kept alive by the Organized Jewry even though Israel's Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor admitted that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never said Iran wanted to "wipe Israel off the face of the map" in an interview with Al Jazeera in April 2012.
American investigative writer and author, Robert Parry, claimed on September 19, 2009 that Ahmadinejad never denied Holocaust. He just challenged Israel and the western powers to allow an open debate to find the truth behind the Zionist Holy Cow, "Six Million Died".
In reality, the only country that has been 'wiped off the map' is the 5,000-year-old Palestine by Europe's unwanted Jews.
Iran's current president Dr. Hassan Rouhani like Dr. Ahmadinejad, is also blamed for denying the Zionist Holy Holocaust as parroted by Wiesel, which he never did, saying it's up to historians to decide who's lying.
https://rehmat1.com/2013/09/28/holocaust-the-word-rouhani-never-uttered/
If the Zionists can lie so much about Israeli history (e.g. The Arabs encouraged Palestinians to flee, that the Arabs were about to attack Israel in 1967, land without a people for a people without a land, etc.), one can only wonder about the official holocaust narrative of 6M dead, gas chambers, etc.).
I've not read Elie Weisel's book Night, but I understand that no where does he mention gas chambers in Auschwitz .
• Replies: @Rehmat Without GAS CHAMBERS the SIX MILLION DIED Holy COW becomes a HOUSE OF CARDS.On June 29, 2016, Boston-based publishing company Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) announced that it will publish Adolf Hitler's 'antisemite' book Mein Kampf to fund needy Jewish survivors of Nazi era.
"The proceeds from sale of Mein Kampf will be donated to Jewish Family & Children's Service of Greater Boston," said Andrew Russell, the publisher's director of corporate social responsibility.
The publisher had been donating money to organizations that combat anti-Semitism since 2000. Since publication of Mein Kampf is banned in France, the job was given to HMH. The publication of the book was opposed by several Jewish groups as result of company's recent announcement that in the future, it will provide funds to some non-Jewish NGOs. HMH caved-in to Jewish pressure and decided to bribe them by donating proceeds from the book to the 'evergreen' Holocaust Industry.
In September 2001, the company filed a law suit in a New York court against Jews for Jesus, accusing the pro-Israel Evangelical group of infringing the company's copyright on its popular children's storybook character, Curious George, which the company had been publishing for 70 years.
Interestingly, HMH is a subsidiary of Vivendi Universal, a multinational mass media company in Paris, whose CEO is Arnaud de Puyfontaine (Jewish).
By now, hundreds of millions people around the world including some honest Jews know that Holocaust has become a tool of the Organized Jewry to rob western nations and individuals to nurse Israel's military machine. Germans and the 65 million American Evangelists are the biggest suckers of this Zionist Mafia. Organized Jewry has sucked over $93 billion from German taxpayers since the 1960s.
https://rehmat1.com/2016/07/02/hitlers-mein-kampf-to-fund-holocaust-industry/ Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Alfred1860 says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 1:51 pm GMT • 100 Words
I find it quite amusing how, in an article supporting of the existence of conspiracy theories, so many comments consist of hurling insults at people making skeptical comments about what are obviously very sacred cows.
People need to remember than by definition, the ratio of what you don't know to what you do know is infinity to one. Be more open minded.
• Replies: @NosytheDuke "They shall find it difficult, they who have taken authority as truth rather than truth for authority".Gerald Massey Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Some Important Historical Events Had Hidden Causes | We Seek the Truth! says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 2:41 pm GMT
[ ] Read the Whole Article [ ]
- dahoit says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 3:13 pm GMT • 100 Words @Rehmat There are more so-called "conspiracy theories" claimed by the US government, CIA, and organized Jewry than the Jews may have been killed by the Nazis. The "conspiracy theorists" like the "terrorists" are chosen by the Zionist-controlled mainstream media.
Like the September 11, 2001 attacks, the lie that Iran's president Ahmadinejad called, WIPE ISRAEL OFF THE MAP, is still kept alive by the Organized Jewry even though Israel's Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor admitted that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never said Iran wanted to "wipe Israel off the face of the map" in an interview with Al Jazeera in April 2012.
American investigative writer and author, Robert Parry, claimed on September 19, 2009 that Ahmadinejad never denied Holocaust. He just challenged Israel and the western powers to allow an open debate to find the truth behind the Zionist Holy Cow, "Six Million Died".
In reality, the only country that has been 'wiped off the map' is the 5,000-year-old Palestine by Europe's unwanted Jews.
Iran's current president Dr. Hassan Rouhani like Dr. Ahmadinejad, is also blamed for denying the Zionist Holy Holocaust as parroted by Wiesel, which he never did, saying it's up to historians to decide who's lying.
https://rehmat1.com/2013/09/28/holocaust-the-word-rouhani-never-uttered/
The only conspiracy with legs is the 70 year old Zionist one,and the only one that matters today.
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And only fellow travelers or their duped concern trolls disagree on that obvious truth.
Today's lying times says latent racism by the Danes is behind their resistance to their nation being inundated by the refugees of the zionists war of terror.
Coming from the malevolent racist scum in history,it sure wreaks of total hypocrisy,and another nail in divide and conquer.
Can one point out one synagogue or rabbinical statement condemning the 70 years of CCs and the imprisonment of Gaza?
The only Jewish opponents(outside of a few dissidents),the ultra Orthodox are considered self haters,as are the dissidents.
- dahoit says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 3:21 pm GMT @Connecticut Famer "But the author of the "Open Society" had an open mind and I suspect he'd find the thesis reasonable that real conspiracies can both be uncovered and largely ignored because so many simply opt to ignore them. In such cases, evidence and "not taking arguments seriously" often reflects "intellectual groupieism," emotions, professional insecurities as well as venal collective interests."
Possibly as in the JFK case? I actually watched Lee Harvey Oswald get drilled by the man who was later identified as Jack Ruby (real surname "Rubenstein") live on television. The minute it happened and even at age 16 at the time I smelled a rat. Who was ultimately behind it all is something which I can't answer and care not to speculate upon, but to this day I remain suspicious about the circumstances surrounding Oswald's death and Ruby's subsequent dissembling.
I was 12 and had the same feeling.
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Lanskys mob member shoots down any investigation into just what happened that day.
And remember Arlen Spector came up with the magic bullet theory,and was rewarded with Congress.
- CanSpeccy says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 3:22 pm GMT @Wizard of Oz I see the biggest problem about a conspiratorial explanation for the WTC 7 collapse is motive. How does it make sense for those who wanted the big splash that hitting buildings 1 and 2 would give? The other major difficulty is the video footage of fires burning all day which had to have heated the steel and therefore potentially weakened it to a critical point. Where's the mystery?
There must be hundreds of millions of words accessible on the Internet discussing the collapse of WTC Building 7. Why then foul up this discussion with the reiteration of arguments that anyone with an interest in the specifics of 9/11 will already know or can find out elsewhere?
• Replies: @CanSpeccy But if you really want a short, clear, definitive, irrefutable and conclusive debunking of 9/11 Truther theories here it is :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuC_4mGTs98 , @Wizard of Oz And why doesn't that apply precisely to just about everything you have posted and how come you can't see it - or think you can get away with others not noticing?
And where have you complained about the constant reiteration of the symmetrical fall alleged impossibility, the particles of thermite, the steel couldn't have been melted nonsense (it wasn't melting that was the point), the forewarning to the BBC and, not least, the failure to account for the videos of the fires burning all day in WTC 7 and what that could have resulted in.
My particular analysis of motive I have neither seen emphasised by anyone else nor answered on UR at all. Have you? Or seen it dealt with elsewhere as you imply?
As it happens there is now an exception. Just about the first UR commenter to doubt something like the official 9/11 story that has not only a respectably functioning intellect but has deployed it on the issue. See posts by CalDre on this thread and my conversation with him.
Acttually there is indeed a question of motive on WTC 7 (if it was demolished by explosives) left well unanswered by anything but the supposition that there was something within that needed to be destroyed of which there were no copies. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- CanSpeccy says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 3:29 pm GMT • 100 Words @biz lol, "The Mahattan Project was kept a secret."
No it wasn't. Stalin knew about the Manhattan project before Truman did. Learn some history.
lol, "The Mahattan Project was kept a secret."
No it wasn't. Stalin knew about the Manhattan project before Truman did. Learn some history.
Your point misses the point. Putin probably knows as much or more about the mechanics of 9/11 than Stalin knew about the mechanics of the atom bomb and the Manhattan Project. But the issue is public knowledge, not what some individuals may know or have known.
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- dahoit says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 4:05 pm GMT • 100 Words @Decius What is a liberal? That's not a troll question. Strauss was above all a Socratic and Socratic philosophy begins with "what is" questions. One of Strauss's books is entitled Liberalism Ancient and Modern .
Strauss was apparently a liberal in the US context in that he mostly voted for Dems. He also wrote one acerbically critical letter to National Review.
However, a mid-20th-century American liberal may have been many things, but unpatriotic or nationalistic they were not. When liberalism turned with McGovern, Strauss looked elsewhere, and then died a year later, so we don't know how his political outlook would, or would not, have changed longer term. But at least in the 40s-60s, he was quite OK with Cold War American liberals. That's perfectly consistent with the nationalist sentiment expressed in the letter to Lowith. Also, Strauss was appalled by the dissoluteness of Weimar--and would become appalled by the dissoluteness of the late 1960s. But America prior was not yet dissolute. And he was appalled by Weimar's weakness. But America pre-Vietnam was not weak. Again, perfectly consistent with the letter.
Strauss supported the Cold War because he thought the USSR was a real threat in the near term and because he feared, on a higher plane, the imposition of "the universal and homogenous state." He was opposed to that, whereas those to his left were for it. So was he conservative?
Strauss transcends all these distinctions. That's not to say that they are meaningless. Indeed, he would be the first to say that they are meaningful. But, like Tocqueville, Strauss aimed to see not differently but further than the parties.
Liberals used to say,I might not agree with what you say,but I'll defend you right to say it.
• Replies: @utu "Today we send up zionist satellites(when they don't explode) and fund their citizens efforts in militarization of space that threatens all,including US." - Few days before that failed launch Zuckerberg on NPR was talking much about FB in Africa and providing internet. I was wondering what else was on this payload? How many satellites Israel already has? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
Today they want to implant Citizenchips.
Moon landings a hoax?I doubt that,but does it matter to today's terrible times other than a sign of American dominance in space race propaganda?
Today we send up zionist satellites(when they don't explode) and fund their citizens efforts in militarization of space that threatens all,including US.
Unbelievable but true.
- whorefinder says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 4:45 pm GMT • 100 Words @Wizard of Oz I ask only because you may have the JFK assassination stuff well organised in your head and up to date. What do you make of the update by Colin McLaren on the humanly plausible conspiracy theory that the bullet which killed Kennedy was fired accidentally by a Secret Service man standing in the car behind? Are there any knock down arguments against it? Or big holes?
The argument has surface plausibility merit, and would seem to resolve a lot of the problems Oswald Deniers have with Kennedy's head movement. However, I haven't heard the physics argument about it, or any other evidence. So I'm neutral.
That said, it isn't a popular theory because it offers nothing nefarious-just the SS screwing up big time. So even if it were true-and I'm open to it being true-the Oswald Deniers are far too invested in making this a deliberate mass-government coverup to listen.
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- Rurik says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 4:51 pm GMT • 100 Words @Pat Casey Nice job. You roped the quote that ran across my mind--- I swear these things are in the air. How do you say, the ghost of Leo Strauss was moving men to do what you can't pin on his memory? Well you said it and that settles it. Thank goodness.
now this..
Now, however, Europhysics Magazine, the respected publication of the European physics community, has published a report by four experts who say "the evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that all three buildings were destroyed by controlled demolition."
http://www.wnd.com/2016/08/911-conspiracy-gets-support-from-physicists-study/
.
.Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.
~ Buddha
• Replies: @El Dato Pretty weird that 28 pages have had to be sat on. Maybe someone DIDN'T tell the Saudis that they didn't need to go all Allah Uakbar (as they were planning to since the lat 80s actually) as we were ready to blow shit up anyway? I dunno. Missing of memos can occur. , @CanSpeccyThree things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.That was before the mainstream media Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments~ Buddha
- dahoit says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 4:52 pm GMT • 100 Words @exiled off mainstreet I didn't notice Gleiwitz was mentioned in another posting before I mentioned it. I tend go along with you and suspect incompetence rather than purpose was the cause of the Pearl Harbor disaster, though the incompetence may have included failure to adequately warn those on the ground at Pearl Harbor. Personally, I don't back the "truther" version of the twin towers because that would have required a broader conspiracy than I think could have succeeded. My guess is that the neighboring building was destroyed as part of the cleanup effort. I do think, however, that the authorities knew something was up, didn't believe it could ever succeed and used it as a sort of Reichstag Fire incident to brush aside constitutional democracy in the US. I also suspect that the Mossad knew more than they let on. My guess is that if Gore rather than Bush had been in power that history would have been far different. I suspect that the anthrax thing was more likely started by the yankee regime as a home-grown conspiracy.
Gore chose a likudnik as VP.Anyone thinks the response to 9-11 would have significantly different under those 2 needs further education.
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I notice the Wiz always deflects Israeli involvement.Of course they were aware,the dancing Israelis knew it was a terror attack by dancing before the 2nd plane hit.
And what govt has been the only beneficiary of 9-11?
If one can't see that answer,they have been ziocained and lobotomized.
- CanSpeccy says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 5:32 pm GMT @CanSpeccy There must be hundreds of millions of words accessible on the Internet discussing the collapse of WTC Building 7. Why then foul up this discussion with the reiteration of arguments that anyone with an interest in the specifics of 9/11 will already know or can find out elsewhere?
But if you really want a short, clear, definitive, irrefutable and conclusive debunking of 9/11 Truther theories here it is :
• Replies: @Astuteobservor II wow, that video should be mandatory for every american. , @Wizard of Oz I love it! , @I. MALLIKARJUNA SHARMA What do you mean by debunking. It is in fact concisely and clearly explaining 9/11 Truth theories castigated as conspiracy theories by the criminal rulers. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- utu says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 5:35 pm GMT • 100 Words @dahoit Liberals used to say,I might not agree with what you say,but I'll defend you right to say it.
Today they want to implant Citizenchips.
Moon landings a hoax?I doubt that,but does it matter to today's terrible times other than a sign of American dominance in space race propaganda?
Today we send up zionist satellites(when they don't explode) and fund their citizens efforts in militarization of space that threatens all,including US.
Unbelievable but true."Today we send up zionist satellites(when they don't explode) and fund their citizens efforts in militarization of space that threatens all,including US." – Few days before that failed launch Zuckerberg on NPR was talking much about FB in Africa and providing internet. I was wondering what else was on this payload? How many satellites Israel already has?
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- LondonBob says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 5:39 pm GMT @Paul Jolliffe Mr. Unz,
Here is a link to Carl Bernstein's definitive 1977 Rolling Stone article "CIA and the Media" in which he addresses - and confirms - your worst fears. You are very right, and no less a figure than Bernstein has said so for nearly four decades . . .
http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
No coincidence that all the CIA agents involved in the JFK assassination are known to be experts in 'black ops' and news media specialists. Jim Angleton, Cord Meyer, David Atlee Phillips and E. Howard Hunt, who confessed his involvement, all made their names in black propaganda or news management.
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- LondonBob says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 5:51 pm GMT @exiled off mainstreet The Israelis learned their false flag lesson from the Nazis, who used concentration camp inmates dressed as Polish soldiers as part of a phony attack on the frontier radio station "Sender Gleiwitz" a day or so before they invaded Poland.
Not forgetting the Manchurian Incident, staging events to justify a war is nothing new.
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- Abraham says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 6:28 pm GMT • 100 Words @Lot Given how easy it is to create a conspiracy theory, most of them will be crazy.
Another problem with elite conspiracies is that elites usually do not have to act in secret because they already are in control. For Kennedy, a centrist cold warrior, his views already reflected those of elites, maybe even more so than Johnson.
The other problem is that actual criminal conspiracies by elites quite often are discovered, such as Watergate and Iran Contra.
Given how easy it is to create a conspiracy theory, most of them will be crazy.
A statement that appears straight out of the CIA's playbook.
Another problem with elite conspiracies is that elites usually do not have to act in secret because they already are in control.
Such control does not imply they have nothing to hide, particularly when exposure of the deed would have damaging repercussions for them.
For Kennedy, a centrist cold warrior, his views already reflected those of elites, maybe even more so than Johnson.
It didn't reflect that of Israel's elites.
After JFK's assassination, American foreign policy vis a vis Israel was completely reversed under Johnson, who hung the crew of the USS Liberty out to dry.
The other problem is that actual criminal conspiracies by elites quite often are discovered, such as Watergate and Iran Contra.
How is this a problem?
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- Astuteobservor II says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 6:37 pm GMT @CanSpeccy But if you really want a short, clear, definitive, irrefutable and conclusive debunking of 9/11 Truther theories here it is :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuC_4mGTs98
wow, that video should be mandatory for every american.
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- zib says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 7:34 pm GMT • 100 Words @biz Actually, there is no symmetry in conspiracy theories as you imply.
The definition of a conspiracy theory is an explanation of events that traces them to a secret network, and when presented with contradictory evidence, simply enlarges the network of supposed conspirators rather than modifying the explanation.
So, just to cite one example, all of the 9/11 controlled demolition stuff is a conspiracy theory because at first it had the government and maybe the property owners in on the secret, but then the circle of supposed conspirators was enlarged to include the editors of Popular Mechanics after they did their study. Or take the moon landing, which involved 'only' thousands of NASA people until you point out that the astronauts left mirrors on the surface of the moon in a precise location, for which astronomers around the world use laser ranging to determine the distance to the moon down to the centimeter level. So then the astronomers who claim to do this had to be added to the list of conspirators and liars for this theory to stand. Then of course the more you point out, the more people who have to get added to the conspiracy, which eventually becomes all of the television industry, and even the Soviets!
That is the reason why the so-called alternative explanations for 9/11, the moon landing, the various assassinations, the safety of vaccines, etc, are conspiracy theories, while the mainstream explanations are not.
but then the circle of supposed conspirators was enlarged to include the editors of Popular Mechanics after they did their study
Nice attempt to conflate the planners and executors of the 9/11 attacks with those who run interference for the "official" history of what happened that day. PM editors aren't "conspirators" of the deed, they're just a mouthpiece for NIST.
Here's a link to Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth's evisceration of Popular Mechanics hit piece against skeptics of the NIST whitewash:
Let's see how you rationalize this one. If you have the cajones, that is.
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- A
- El Dato says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 8:13 pm GMT • 100 Words @Rurik now this..
Now, however, Europhysics Magazine, the respected publication of the European physics community, has published a report by four experts who say "the evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that all three buildings were destroyed by controlled demolition."
http://www.wnd.com/2016/08/911-conspiracy-gets-support-from-physicists-study/.
.Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.
~ Buddha
Pretty weird that 28 pages have had to be sat on. Maybe someone DIDN'T tell the Saudis that they didn't need to go all Allah Uakbar (as they were planning to since the lat 80s actually) as we were ready to blow shit up anyway? I dunno. Missing of memos can occur.
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- 5371 says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 8:29 pm GMT @Decius Kristol is a Straussian because he got a PhD in PolPhil from Harvard under Mansfield, who is a Straussian. There is no necessary connection between Strauss's thought any of the main tenets of Neo-conservatism. I've said, and you've all ignored, that Strauss attacked data-driven social science, which is the original hallmark of neo-conservatism. A later hallmark (which emerged after Strauss's death) was foreign policy hawkism. Unless you want to say that Strauss's opposition to the USSR makes him a neo-con, in which case every Cold War liberal going back to Truman was a neo-con. At which point the term has no meaning.
Strauss addresses scholars and potential philosophers. He has almost nothing to say about the transient issues of his age. Based on his comments on what other thinkers had to say about war (Thucydides above all) I believe we can infer that Strauss was generally in favor of preparedness and wariness but otherwise anti-war in the general sense. If we may analogize the Iraq War to the Sicilian Expedition we may say that Strauss probably would have opposed the former as imprudent, just as he tacitly endorses T's judgement that the latter was imprudent.
Strauss openly characterizes Machiavelli's approach to philosophy as a conspiracy, using that word, but does not say it about any other thinker. However, his teaching that philosophy is an inherently elite and very small enterprise may be fairly characterized as a "conspiracy." however, before modernity, the nature of the conspiracy was to protect the conspirators and the philosophic life, not a reform campaign. that's what it becomes under modernity, which Strauss opposes. One of Strauss's aims in writing was to revive the ancient idea of philosophy, its proper scope, and its proper relationship to society, which he believed modernity had corrupted.
It is unfortunate that Strauss became a bogey-man to so many who have no idea what he said or why. It happened rather recently and based on some very thin scholarship. Most of the thing people try to pin on him are things that I and my friends oppose too. We just know they don't trace to Strauss. In fact, the opposite is often true.
You are right that Strauss's culpability for the neocons has been vastly exaggerated. You are wrong that he is worth reading.
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- Ron Unz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 8:33 pm GMT • 200 Words NEW! @Miro23 Or maybe a lot of smart people pretend to believe the official 9/11 story because that's where their interest lies. MSM journalists know for sure that articles that deviate from the official line on 9/11 are career ending moves .
In simple terms, MSM owners have decided that 9/11 is a taboo subject (same as USS Liberty) and they decide what gets published.
Or maybe a lot of smart people pretend to believe the official 9/11 story because that's where their interest lies. MSM journalists know for sure that articles that deviate from the official line on 9/11 are career ending moves .
In simple terms, MSM owners have decided that 9/11 is a taboo subject (same as USS Liberty) and they decide what gets published.
Well, I haven't read through all of this enormously long discussion-thread, but I happened to notice this particular comment. Not having been an MSM journalist myself, I can't say whether or not it's true, but a couple of interesting, possibly coincidental, examples come to mind
In late July 2010, longtime Canadian journalist Eric Margolis was told his column would be dropped, and just a few weeks later he published a double-length piece expressing strong doubts about 9/11, the first time he'd articulated that position:
http://www.unz.com/article/911-the-mother-of-all-coincidences/
In 2007, the parent company of The Chicago Tribune announced it had accepted a leveraged-buyout takeover bid by investor Sam Zell, who planned a massive wave cost-cutting layoffs, which eventually wrecked the company. In late 2007, the Chicago Tribune suddenly ran a very long piece regarding the Liberty Attack, about the only time I've ever seen it discussed in the MSM.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/chi-liberty_tuesoct02-story.html
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- CanSpeccy says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 8:47 pm GMT @Rurik now this..
Now, however, Europhysics Magazine, the respected publication of the European physics community, has published a report by four experts who say "the evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that all three buildings were destroyed by controlled demolition."
http://www.wnd.com/2016/08/911-conspiracy-gets-support-from-physicists-study/.
.Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.
~ Buddha
Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.
~ Buddha
That was before the mainstream media
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- SolontoCroesus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 8:49 pm GMT • 700 Words
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUJx1dVX45s
Jeff Gates, author Guilt by Association
(former legal counsel to US Senate finance committee)conspiracies Gates dabbled in: Who Killed Huey Long? (Long's death made FDR's presidency inevitable)
8 min: "I'm not comfortable calling it zionism; I'm trained as a lawyer; I call it a multigenerational criminal gang. . . conspiracies do not hold together, neither do
12 min: "Israelis planned the 1967 war and deliberately terrorized their own people . . . 'it was a put-up job . . . there was no attack on Israel; the Israelis took out the Egyptian air force."
14 min: "The war is being waged against the American public, they are the great victims . . . what you do is put your people in that 'in between space;' . . . if you have a democracy based on facts and the rule of law, then it's essential that you have access to facts in order to have informed consent . . . this criminal gang dominates media, an 'in between' domain; pop culture, politics, think tanks, education, to induce people to embrace a narrative that they themselves can't really penetrate because it's the frame through which they see their world."
17 min: "Narratives are pre-staged thru pop culture - music & entertainment/movies/TV. . ."
24 min: "Assets are people who have been profiled to sufficient depth so that if you put them into a time, place and circumstances over which you have enormous control, . . . then you know within an acceptable range of probabilities that they will perform consistent with their profile." Monica Lewisnky added to Bill Clinton - the outcome was predictable . . .
"Obama was identified & groomed by Betty Lou Saltzman, the dau of the UN ambassador, Pletnik . . . [related to Danielle Pletnik??] . . . I think initially he was an asset; I think he woke up & recognized that he was being used - I hope he woke up . . . it's a terrific challenge to confront those who are using you . . ."
28 min –> JFK and the Council of Jewish Presidents . . . if JFK had succeeded in his demands on Ben Gurion, we would live in a different world today; the USA & entire region would be different."
35 min: "When the 1967 war broke out [which gave rise to Israel attacking USS Liberty & killing 34 American servicemen] Matilda Krim was in the White House servicing our president. Is Wolf Blitzer going to report that? How many American know that? None."
Gates: "A lot of the support we've gotten for this book has been from the broader Jewish community who say Thank You for exposing this . . .Perhaps we can indict, prosecute, imprison or execute those criminals . . .and allowing us the avenue to be ourselves . . . "
Moderator: "Well, perhaps those people who feel that way and belong to the group should be more outspoken. I know a few but basically I can count them on one hand, from Gilad Atzmon to Israel Shamir and a couple of others. But if this is in their interest and they feel that their name is being misused, isn't that something which should be coming from this group, right?"
[Gates weasels a bit, then] "You have to come up with a definition of What is it to be Jewish? Likewise, this term zionism - what sort of notion is it we're fighting? ? In this book we try to show how the repetitive behavior patterns and the criminal templates by which this works: you displace facts with manipulated beliefs - that's a classic . . . But it's a challenge to break through that: people say, Well, I'm part of this community and I have a law practice, an accounting practice, and I have to be careful . . ."
38: MOD: "We have to define it: Is it an evolutionary survival strategy? Simply the expansion for Israel . . . If it's money and power alone . . . So it has to be defined by what is sought by the group, right?
usw
• Replies: @utu Thank you for the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUJx1dVX45s to Jeff Gates interview.He is really very good.
He has a book https://www.amazon.com/Guilt-Association-Deception-Self-Deceit-America/product-reviews/098213150X/ref=cm_cr_dp_see_all_btm?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=recent Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- CanSpeccy says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 8:57 pm GMT • 100 Words @Wizard of Oz I ask only because you may have the JFK assassination stuff well organised in your head and up to date. What do you make of the update by Colin McLaren on the humanly plausible conspiracy theory that the bullet which killed Kennedy was fired accidentally by a Secret Service man standing in the car behind? Are there any knock down arguments against it? Or big holes?
I love the idea that JFK was killed by a stray bullet accidentally fired by a secret service agent. It's so obvious once the truth has been pointed out.
Probably the same sort of balls-up explains 9/11. You know, missiles intended to shoot down simulated highjacked planes in a drill on 9/11 accidentally wamming into the Pentagon and Twin Towers.
Then Norad had to make up that stuff about 19 hijackers and Bin Laden to cover their arse.
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- WorkingClass says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 9:12 pm GMT
The CIA is the presidents private secret army. Nothing it does is legal.
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- Ron Unz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 9:53 pm GMT NEW!
For those without convenient access to a copy of the deHaven-Smith book, I've discovered there are some lengthy extracts available on the web:
https://off-guardian.org/2016/09/04/are-you-a-mind-controlled-cia-stooge/
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz RonYou may be aware that Daniel Pipes made a study of conspiracy theories and has written books on the subject - which I haven't read. I have however sampled his long list of articles which can be found here:
http://www.daniel.pipes.org/topics/4/conspiracy-theories , @Wizard of Oz International Pravda. My phone has just received from The Economist an article or editorial variously headed "Pepe and the Stormtroopers" and "The Normalisation of the Alt-Right". What is remarkable is the near unanimity of the hundreds of Comments in condemning TE for its condescending anti-Trump rant, even by those who won't vote for him. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 10:04 pm GMT • 200 Words
Such unfiltered speculation must surely be a source of considerable irritation and worry to government officials who have long relied upon the complicity of their tame media organs to allow their serious misdeeds to pass unnoticed and unpunished.
I doubt it. I would think the sheer volume of conspiracy theories would actually help to conceal actual conspiracies. For instance, InfoWars could do a brilliant series on some anti-Russian conspiracy–with impeccable reasoning and unassailable evidence. But no one in the mainstream would ever take it seriously because of all the obvious junk they publish about 9/11 and Jade Helm and Sandy Hook. The signal to noise ration is astonishingly small.
While, certainly, journalistic laziness or malfeasance could conceivably aid in concealing an actual conspiracy, the fact of the matter is that almost all "conspiracy theories" that I would identify as such are plagued by fairly obvious pathological reasoning. (9/11 truthers, for example proclaim that "burning jet fuel can't melt steel beams!" yet this mantra is irrelevant to the actual arguments being made by people who explain the mainstream theories.) Most conspiracies are ignored on that level. In other words, it's not that some particular conspiracy couldn't be true, it's that the conspiracy theory as argued by its believers is illogical or factually incorrect on its very face.
• Replies: @SolontoCroesus"burning jet fuel can't melt steel beams!"The bad news is that the Liberty Bridge will be closed to all traffic for at least the next week as a result of fire damage Friday to a steel beam critical to the bridge's stability.Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All CommentsThe good news is that the vital, 55,000-vehicle-a-day bridge spanning the Monongahela River didn't collapse Friday. That catastrophe may have been minutes away from occurring if the fire had not been quickly extinguished to prevent further damage, PennDOT officials said at a news conference Sunday.
"I can't tell you for sure [when a collapse might have occurred], I just know it was very tight," said PennDOT district bridge engineer Lou Ruzzi. "I can't tell you if it was 10 minutes, 15 minutes ... definitely less than 30 minutes."
He said temperatures exceeded 1,200 degrees from the fire that occurred early Friday afternoon. He said it was due to errant sparks from a welder's torch that ignited plastic piping, which then lit afire a tarp draping the bridge during its two-year, $80 million renovation project.
It took firefighters a half-hour or less to extinguish the blaze, but it already had severely damaged a 30-foot-long steel beam - a compression chord of the deck truss that is essential for the 88-year-old bridge's support. The fire shortened the beam and put it 6 inches out of place, putting added pressure on all of the other chords supporting the bridge, Mr. Ruzzi said.
"It buckled and moved over" in an S shape instead of straight, he said. "The effect of that is when you don't have a steel member like that that's straight, the forces [stabilizing the bridge] don't go through that member correctly the way it was designed, so [they] ended up going through other parts of the bridge. ... The worst-case scenario was the whole section could fall."
When asked how much would fall, Mr. Ruzzi responded, "Most of the bridge," maybe 2,000 feet of the 2,600-foot span. http://www.post-gazette.com/news/transportation/2016/09/04/Liberty-Bridge-to-be-closed-for-next-week-due-to-fire-damage/stories/201609050058
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 10:35 pm GMT • 100 Words
During the mid-1960s there had been increasing public skepticism about the Warren Commission findings that a lone gunman
The problem with this theory is that the term "conspiracy theory" had been increasing in popularity since 1957. I'm not sure why, but Google Ngram search shows the term skyrocketing before 1964 and actually leveling out (at a high level) in 1965.
The result was a huge spike in the pejorative use of the phrase, which spread throughout the American media, with the residual impact continueing right down to the present day.
I'm not sure what the evidence is for this, but even if true, the phrase in general was already surging in popularity. I have no doubt the CIA was trying to use the term for some end, but blaming the CIA for its pejorative use seems unfounded unless there is some other evidence.
• Replies: @utu The term "ground zero" was originally reserved for the center of nuclear explosion. After 9/11 it has changed. Dimitri Khalezow, the proponent of the nuclear demolition of WTC theoryhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUnjbCxhXh4
claimed that dictionary entries for "ground zero" were changed after 9/11 (some changes were done retroactively to earlier editions) to obscure the fact that term was reserved solely for the nuclear explosion. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- SolontoCroesus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 10:43 pm GMT • 300 Words @Boris
Such unfiltered speculation must surely be a source of considerable irritation and worry to government officials who have long relied upon the complicity of their tame media organs to allow their serious misdeeds to pass unnoticed and unpunished.I doubt it. I would think the sheer volume of conspiracy theories would actually help to conceal actual conspiracies. For instance, InfoWars could do a brilliant series on some anti-Russian conspiracy--with impeccable reasoning and unassailable evidence. But no one in the mainstream would ever take it seriously because of all the obvious junk they publish about 9/11 and Jade Helm and Sandy Hook. The signal to noise ration is astonishingly small.While, certainly, journalistic laziness or malfeasance could conceivably aid in concealing an actual conspiracy, the fact of the matter is that almost all "conspiracy theories" that I would identify as such are plagued by fairly obvious pathological reasoning. (9/11 truthers, for example proclaim that "burning jet fuel can't melt steel beams!" yet this mantra is irrelevant to the actual arguments being made by people who explain the mainstream theories.) Most conspiracies are ignored on that level. In other words, it's not that some particular conspiracy couldn't be true, it's that the conspiracy theory as argued by its believers is illogical or factually incorrect on its very face.
"burning jet fuel can't melt steel beams!"
Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All CommentsThe bad news is that the Liberty Bridge will be closed to all traffic for at least the next week as a result of fire damage Friday to a steel beam critical to the bridge's stability.
The good news is that the vital, 55,000-vehicle-a-day bridge spanning the Monongahela River didn't collapse Friday. That catastrophe may have been minutes away from occurring if the fire had not been quickly extinguished to prevent further damage, PennDOT officials said at a news conference Sunday.
"I can't tell you for sure [when a collapse might have occurred], I just know it was very tight," said PennDOT district bridge engineer Lou Ruzzi. "I can't tell you if it was 10 minutes, 15 minutes definitely less than 30 minutes."
He said temperatures exceeded 1,200 degrees from the fire that occurred early Friday afternoon. He said it was due to errant sparks from a welder's torch that ignited plastic piping, which then lit afire a tarp draping the bridge during its two-year, $80 million renovation project.
It took firefighters a half-hour or less to extinguish the blaze, but it already had severely damaged a 30-foot-long steel beam - a compression chord of the deck truss that is essential for the 88-year-old bridge's support. The fire shortened the beam and put it 6 inches out of place, putting added pressure on all of the other chords supporting the bridge, Mr. Ruzzi said.
"It buckled and moved over" in an S shape instead of straight, he said. "The effect of that is when you don't have a steel member like that that's straight, the forces [stabilizing the bridge] don't go through that member correctly the way it was designed, so [they] ended up going through other parts of the bridge. The worst-case scenario was the whole section could fall."
When asked how much would fall, Mr. Ruzzi responded, "Most of the bridge," maybe 2,000 feet of the 2,600-foot span. http://www.post-gazette.com/news/transportation/2016/09/04/Liberty-Bridge-to-be-closed-for-next-week-due-to-fire-damage/stories/201609050058
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 10:48 pm GMT • 100 Words @biz Actually, there is no symmetry in conspiracy theories as you imply.
The definition of a conspiracy theory is an explanation of events that traces them to a secret network, and when presented with contradictory evidence, simply enlarges the network of supposed conspirators rather than modifying the explanation.
So, just to cite one example, all of the 9/11 controlled demolition stuff is a conspiracy theory because at first it had the government and maybe the property owners in on the secret, but then the circle of supposed conspirators was enlarged to include the editors of Popular Mechanics after they did their study. Or take the moon landing, which involved 'only' thousands of NASA people until you point out that the astronauts left mirrors on the surface of the moon in a precise location, for which astronomers around the world use laser ranging to determine the distance to the moon down to the centimeter level. So then the astronomers who claim to do this had to be added to the list of conspirators and liars for this theory to stand. Then of course the more you point out, the more people who have to get added to the conspiracy, which eventually becomes all of the television industry, and even the Soviets!
That is the reason why the so-called alternative explanations for 9/11, the moon landing, the various assassinations, the safety of vaccines, etc, are conspiracy theories, while the mainstream explanations are not.
The definition of a conspiracy theory is an explanation of events that traces them to a secret network, and when presented with contradictory evidence, simply enlarges the network of supposed conspirators rather than modifying the explanation.
This is a fairly useful definition, and certainly highlights some of the pathological reasoning that is associated with conspiracy theories. However, not all conspiracy theories will exhibit this characteristic. Conspiracies like 9/11 that rely on scientific facts are sometimes rationalized this way, but other conspiracies are built on suspect witness testimony or a biased interpretation and don't require an ever-widening conspiracy.
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- Olorin says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 6, 2016 at 11:07 pm GMT • 200 Words @Anonymous The moon landings were likely faked. The Apollo footage was done through front screen projection. See Oleg Oleynik's work on this:
"A Stereoscopic method of verifying Apollo lunar surface images"
http://www.aulis.com/stereoparallax.htm
That's so 1990s.
Everybody knows that it's the MOON that's faked.
There isn't any. It's just a transverse parallax asynchronous stereoscopic projection onto the upper atmosphere by the Illuminati.
So-called lunar eclipses are their way of letting each other know there's going to be a pig roast on Jekyll Island.
Those so-called "stars" are just bits of light coming out of terrestrial volcanoes, shining off the troposphere.
We see more of them today because there are also lasers added. People realized something was up when some stars disappeared after Krakatoa blew up, so the powers that be had to work on an invention to replace the stars. They keep coming up with more and more of them–viz. Hubble Space Telescope. But in fact there is nothing but a void up there, and the earth is the center of it.
"Meteor showers" are just a clever animation. It's all just a ruse to hide the fact that there are underground polar military encampments.
There's also not really any such thing as penguins. They were genetically engineered to serve as diversions from the other stuff happening at the poles, because, for instance, people will watch cute penguin GIFs for an hour while the Illuminati move people and materiel in the polar background in plain view. But the "penguins" are an instrument of mind control that block perception.
http://imgur.com/gallery/Ebevb
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- utu says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 12:08 am GMT • 100 Words @Boris
During the mid-1960s there had been increasing public skepticism about the Warren Commission findings that a lone gunmanThe problem with this theory is that the term "conspiracy theory" had been increasing in popularity since 1957. I'm not sure why, but Google Ngram search shows the term skyrocketing before 1964 and actually leveling out (at a high level) in 1965.https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22conspiracy+theory%22&year_start=1940&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2C%22%20conspiracy%20theory%20%22%3B%2Cc0
The result was a huge spike in the pejorative use of the phrase, which spread throughout the American media, with the residual impact continueing right down to the present day.I'm not sure what the evidence is for this, but even if true, the phrase in general was already surging in popularity. I have no doubt the CIA was trying to use the term for some end, but blaming the CIA for its pejorative use seems unfounded unless there is some other evidence.The term "ground zero" was originally reserved for the center of nuclear explosion. After 9/11 it has changed. Dimitri Khalezow, the proponent of the nuclear demolition of WTC theory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUnjbCxhXh4
claimed that dictionary entries for "ground zero" were changed after 9/11 (some changes were done retroactively to earlier editions) to obscure the fact that term was reserved solely for the nuclear explosion.
• Replies: @Boris That is a good example of an aspect of a conspiracy theory that is totally wrong on its face. The phrase "Ground zero" was used metaphorically way before September 11th, 2001. Anyone who spent 10 minutes researching this could find prominent examples:1997 book GROUND ZERO The Gender Wars in the Military By Linda Bird Francke
1996 book VIRUS GROUND ZERO Stalking the Killer Viruses With the Centers for Disease Control. By Ed Regis. 244 pp. New York: Pocket Books.
TERROR IN OKLAHOMA: AT GROUND ZERO : A series of articles from the New York Times about the OKC bombing.
"Ground Zero" 1997 NYT book review: "James Meredith's forced admission was a milestone in upending the old order in America's most segregated state, a kind of race relations ground zero."
These come from the first few pages of results when I searched the Times. The claim that the term "ground zero" was "reserved solely for the nuclear explosion." is obviously wring. Even if it weren't wrong, it's silly to suggest that it couldn't have been used figuratively for the first time after 9/11 or that its use signifies that a nuclear blast must have occurred at the WTC. , @Mr. Anon So, the world trade centers were brought down with nuclear weapons? Were the particle beams fired from orbiting battle stations down for routine maintenance that day? There seems to be no idea so stupid that a (so-called) "truther" won't entertain it. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Anonymous says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 12:23 am GMT @John Jeremiah Smith
How do you get Astronauts bouncing and hammers falling in Slo-Mo?Yeah, the gravity effects are a BIG job. Just slo-mo-ing won't do it, because you have different curvature of falling profile, and acceleration of gravity is different because moon-mass is less (and non-linear ref 30fps v. 60fps.)There would also be additive propagation delay in the radio signals. Pure delay, too -- no compensation would fix that in 1969.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdMvQTNLaUE
• Replies: @John Jeremiah Smith@John Jeremiah SmithShucks, that isn't even good conspiracy theory evidence. The video showing the "fake" is just normal characteristics of a CCTV camera of 1969. They didn't handle spikes well, and their light-bandwidth range was small. The "wires" that rather funny "expert" points out are retrace flares from reflection.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdMvQTNLaUEFrankly, I've never seen ANY good "moon landing hoax" conspiracy theory, I suppose, for people who believe electronic devices work by magic, you can convince them of a lot of stuff. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- utu says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 12:38 am GMT @SolontoCroesus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUJx1dVX45s
Jeff Gates, author Guilt by Association
(former legal counsel to US Senate finance committee)conspiracies Gates dabbled in: Who Killed Huey Long? (Long's death made FDR's presidency inevitable)
8 min: "I'm not comfortable calling it zionism; I'm trained as a lawyer; I call it a multigenerational criminal gang. . . conspiracies do not hold together, neither do
12 min: "Israelis planned the 1967 war and deliberately terrorized their own people . . . 'it was a put-up job . . . there was no attack on Israel; the Israelis took out the Egyptian air force."
14 min: "The war is being waged against the American public, they are the great victims . . . what you do is put your people in that 'in between space;' . . . if you have a democracy based on facts and the rule of law, then it's essential that you have access to facts in order to have informed consent . . . this criminal gang dominates media, an 'in between' domain; pop culture, politics, think tanks, education, to induce people to embrace a narrative that they themselves can't really penetrate because it's the frame through which they see their world."
17 min: "Narratives are pre-staged thru pop culture -- music & entertainment/movies/TV. . ."
24 min: "Assets are people who have been profiled to sufficient depth so that if you put them into a time, place and circumstances over which you have enormous control, . . . then you know within an acceptable range of probabilities that they will perform consistent with their profile." Monica Lewisnky added to Bill Clinton -- the outcome was predictable . . .
"Obama was identified & groomed by Betty Lou Saltzman, the dau of the UN ambassador, Pletnik . . . [related to Danielle Pletnik??] . . . I think initially he was an asset; I think he woke up & recognized that he was being used -- I hope he woke up . . . it's a terrific challenge to confront those who are using you . . ."
28 min --> JFK and the Council of Jewish Presidents . . . if JFK had succeeded in his demands on Ben Gurion, we would live in a different world today; the USA & entire region would be different."
35 min: "When the 1967 war broke out [which gave rise to Israel attacking USS Liberty & killing 34 American servicemen] Matilda Krim was in the White House servicing our president. Is Wolf Blitzer going to report that? How many American know that? None."
Gates: "A lot of the support we've gotten for this book has been from the broader Jewish community who say Thank You for exposing this . . .Perhaps we can indict, prosecute, imprison or execute those criminals . . .and allowing us the avenue to be ourselves . . . "
Moderator: "Well, perhaps those people who feel that way and belong to the group should be more outspoken. I know a few but basically I can count them on one hand, from Gilad Atzmon to Israel Shamir and a couple of others. But if this is in their interest and they feel that their name is being misused, isn't that something which should be coming from this group, right?"
[Gates weasels a bit, then] "You have to come up with a definition of What is it to be Jewish? Likewise, this term zionism -- what sort of notion is it we're fighting? ? In this book we try to show how the repetitive behavior patterns and the criminal templates by which this works: you displace facts with manipulated beliefs -- that's a classic . . . But it's a challenge to break through that: people say, Well, I'm part of this community and I have a law practice, an accounting practice, and I have to be careful . . ."
38: MOD: "We have to define it: Is it an evolutionary survival strategy? Simply the expansion for Israel . . . If it's money and power alone . . . So it has to be defined by what is sought by the group, right?
usw
Thank you for the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUJx1dVX45s to Jeff Gates interview.
He is really very good.
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- anti_republocrat says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 1:48 am GMT • 100 Words @Chief Seattle So, a conspiracy theory is a theory without media backing. There's no better recent example of this than when the DNC emails were released by wikileaks during their convention. The story put forth was that Russian hackers were responsible, and were trying to throw the election to their buddy Trump. The evidence for this? Zero. And yet it became a plausible explanation in the media, overnight.
Maybe it's true, maybe not, but if the roles had been reversed, the media would be telling its proponents to take off their tin foil hats.
Note also that the allegations immediately become "fact" because they were reported by someone else. As Business Insider reported, "Amid mounting evidence of Russia's involvement in the hack of the Democratic National Committee ," without any specificity whatsoever as to what that "mounting evidence" was (most likely multiple reports in other media) never mind that the article goes on to quote James Clapper, " we are not quite ready yet to make a call on attribution." WTF! Here, read it yourself: http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-dnc-hack-black-propaganda-2016-7
Totally mindless. So not only is Russia hacking, but we know it's intention is to influence US elections!!! And now their hacking voter DBs and will likely hack our vote tabulating machines. You can't make this s ** t up.
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- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 2:33 am GMT • 200 Words @utu The term "ground zero" was originally reserved for the center of nuclear explosion. After 9/11 it has changed. Dimitri Khalezow, the proponent of the nuclear demolition of WTC theory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUnjbCxhXh4
claimed that dictionary entries for "ground zero" were changed after 9/11 (some changes were done retroactively to earlier editions) to obscure the fact that term was reserved solely for the nuclear explosion.
That is a good example of an aspect of a conspiracy theory that is totally wrong on its face. The phrase "Ground zero" was used metaphorically way before September 11th, 2001. Anyone who spent 10 minutes researching this could find prominent examples:
1997 book GROUND ZERO The Gender Wars in the Military By Linda Bird Francke
1996 book VIRUS GROUND ZERO Stalking the Killer Viruses With the Centers for Disease Control. By Ed Regis. 244 pp. New York: Pocket Books.
TERROR IN OKLAHOMA: AT GROUND ZERO : A series of articles from the New York Times about the OKC bombing.
"Ground Zero" 1997 NYT book review: "James Meredith's forced admission was a milestone in upending the old order in America's most segregated state, a kind of race relations ground zero."
These come from the first few pages of results when I searched the Times. The claim that the term "ground zero" was "reserved solely for the nuclear explosion." is obviously wring. Even if it weren't wrong, it's silly to suggest that it couldn't have been used figuratively for the first time after 9/11 or that its use signifies that a nuclear blast must have occurred at the WTC.
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- CalDre says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 3:16 am GMT • 200 Words @Wizard of Oz Thanks. I wonder what will happen to Israel's support if and when serious money and research and publicity is put into telling the whole Liberty story and making sure it is drummed in.
Your 9/11 version I don't buy, not least because someone suicidal/murderous had to be controlling the planes.
Your 9/11 version I don't buy, not least because someone suicidal/murderous had to be controlling the planes.
Controlling, yes; but on-board, no. "Coincidentally", all of the planes hijacked on 9/11 were Boeing 767s, which have a sophisticated auto-pilot system and the ability to upload custom modules to control the auto-pilot. Just like a Predator or Reaper drone can be flown from halfway across the planet, a 767 can be flown remotely (and in the case of 9/11, since everything was known in advance, the entire flight pattern could have been pre-programmed into a module and uploaded in to the aircrafts' computers).
If you look into it you will find reports of a a "mystery" large white jet flying over Washington on the morning of 9/11. Some have identified it as a E-4B (a Boeing E-4 Advanced Airborne Command Post), a strategic command and control military aircraft operated by the United States Air Force. We know neither Bush nor Cheney was on that plane.
While perhaps not necessary, the cockpit could have been filled with a tranquilizing gas to incapacitate all the pilots and (stooge) hijackers so that they would not interfere with the remote-controlled operation of the planes.
Remember that these "deeply religious" Muslim "hijackers" went out drinking at a strip club the night of 9/10. Both are deep sins in Islam, not something someone is going to do when they are about to meet their Maker. Most likely they thought they were participating in a drill (since, in fact on the date of 9/11, a drill was taking place, having to do with – wait for it – airplanes being hijacked and flown into buildings).
The precision and extreme competence of the flying maneuvers is readily explained by the auto-pilot feature.
• Replies: @Miro23 [all of the planes hijacked on 9/11 were Boeing 767s, which have a sophisticated auto-pilot system and the ability to upload custom modules to control the auto-pilot. Just like a Predator or Reaper drone can be flown from halfway across the planet, a 767 can be flown remotely]It was also very fast and accurate flying on difficult trajectories + the trainee Arab pilots down in Florida had problems with basic flying skills (see Daniel Hopsicker's book, https://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Terrorland-Mohamed-Cover-up-Florida/dp/0975290673/ref=cm_cr-mr-title to get a close up look at their feeble flying abilities).
This book also has an interesting account taken from the Longboat Observer, 9/26/2001 that a group of Arab looking men posing as journalists and claiming to have an interview appointment with George Bush tried to gain access to him on the morning of 9/11 at the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort. , @Wizard of Oz A nice change to receive a reply which is so coherent and precise. I'm glad I chose the word "controlling" in anticipation of the point you make. Now, with my limited time and interest, I look for the easy quibble and I might have said that there were plenty of reasons why one aircraft type was chosen..... but..... I Googled appropriately and came across the kind of problem that the very assertive sceptics/truthers throw up. Pilots for 9/11 Truth gave physical reasons why the WTC planes couldn't have been 767s. But a reliable seeming site said they were 767s but the other two were 757s.
I have no reason to doubt that remote control could have achieved the WTC impacts and I like the imagination which has gone into suggesting that the 19 were duped into thinking they were only rehearsing or reconnoitring, although that seems hard to reconcile with what is known about UA 175. I can't see why the undoubtedly suicidal Arabs shouldn't have knowingly acted as backup against either passenger or pilot interference and as partly trained pilots if the technology didn't work satisfactorily. I don't know enough about Islam or its institutions to have any reason to believe or deny that they would have lived it up in sinful ways on the eve of martyrdom which would deliver them to paradise. Do you?
I'm afraid this is leading me to Ockham's Razor which says that partly trained Arab pilots would do nicely as four planes flown by Al Qaeda connected jihadis would serve the plotters purposes adequately. Of course it doesn't tell us who the plotters were. The reasoning applies to false flag plotters who wanted a war in the ME though I don't accept that they would have been so sure of making the connection to Saddam Hussein that they would have plotted 911 to achieve a war against Iraq.If the plotters were Mossad or American it would have been vital to minimise risk of exposure and therefore failure - actually worse than failure - so it is absurd to suppose that they would take the risk of packing any buildings with explosives - let alone WTC 7! - or risk remnants being found in the debris. Why four planes if you are going to demolish the Twin Towers with the certainty of controlled demolitions?
Without the unexpected total destruction of the WTC towers it made sense to plan four spectacular but limited outrages.So we are back with just one question at most. Who plotted and planned the events of 9/11? , @Jett Rucker I seem to recall that two of the planes were B-757s and the two in New York were B-767s.
I believe that leaves your point about the planes' being remote-controllable quite intact, and it is a proposition I myself find very persuasive, though I'm by no means entirely persuaded that the vehicles at the scenes were commercial aircraft at all.
I believe the missing planes' controls were used to fly the aircraft out into the Atlantic (into Hurricane Erin) and carefully ditch them there in such fashion (and there IS such a fashion) as to leave no evidence on the surface whatsoever. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Mr. Anon says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 4:03 am GMT @Miro23 Being smart has nothing to do with it.
For example the government says that WTC7 completely collapsed in 7 seconds due to fire. You don't need to be smart to see something is wrong here (hint: most of the structural pillars were untouched by fire).
"Being smart has nothing to do with it."
Being smart usually has everything to do with everything. But to people like you, ignorance opens up a world of possibilities, no matter how false or ludicrous they may be.
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- Mr. Anon says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 4:07 am GMT @utu The term "ground zero" was originally reserved for the center of nuclear explosion. After 9/11 it has changed. Dimitri Khalezow, the proponent of the nuclear demolition of WTC theory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUnjbCxhXh4
claimed that dictionary entries for "ground zero" were changed after 9/11 (some changes were done retroactively to earlier editions) to obscure the fact that term was reserved solely for the nuclear explosion.
So, the world trade centers were brought down with nuclear weapons? Were the particle beams fired from orbiting battle stations down for routine maintenance that day? There seems to be no idea so stupid that a (so-called) "truther" won't entertain it.
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- Nathan Hale says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 4:12 am GMT • 100 Words @Jason Liu Kinda hinges on how people define conspiracy, doesn't it? Does a group of powerful people scheming constitute a conspiracy, or does it need to be lizard people in the White House?
The former assuredly happens all the time. And those conspiracies are likely quite boring.
Correct. Of course conspiracies are real.
Among the more famous ones include:
The Watergate break-in and the coverup.
Operation Valkyrie and other plots against Hitler.
The overthrow of the Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954.
In the corporate world, it often seems that upper management spends a bulk of their time conspiring against one another or entering into secret talks to sell the company to a rival, unbeknownst to the employees or shareholders.
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- NosytheDuke says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 4:32 am GMT @Alfred1860 I find it quite amusing how, in an article supporting of the existence of conspiracy theories, so many comments consist of hurling insults at people making skeptical comments about what are obviously very sacred cows.
People need to remember than by definition, the ratio of what you don't know to what you do know is infinity to one. Be more open minded.
"They shall find it difficult, they who have taken authority as truth rather than truth for authority".
Gerald Massey
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- Miro23 says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 5:49 am GMT • 100 Words @CalDre Your 9/11 version I don't buy, not least because someone suicidal/murderous had to be controlling the planes.
Controlling, yes; but on-board, no. "Coincidentally", all of the planes hijacked on 9/11 were Boeing 767s, which have a sophisticated auto-pilot system and the ability to upload custom modules to control the auto-pilot. Just like a Predator or Reaper drone can be flown from halfway across the planet, a 767 can be flown remotely (and in the case of 9/11, since everything was known in advance, the entire flight pattern could have been pre-programmed into a module and uploaded in to the aircrafts' computers).
If you look into it you will find reports of a a "mystery" large white jet flying over Washington on the morning of 9/11. Some have identified it as a E-4B (a Boeing E-4 Advanced Airborne Command Post), a strategic command and control military aircraft operated by the United States Air Force. We know neither Bush nor Cheney was on that plane.
While perhaps not necessary, the cockpit could have been filled with a tranquilizing gas to incapacitate all the pilots and (stooge) hijackers so that they would not interfere with the remote-controlled operation of the planes.
Remember that these "deeply religious" Muslim "hijackers" went out drinking at a strip club the night of 9/10. Both are deep sins in Islam, not something someone is going to do when they are about to meet their Maker. Most likely they thought they were participating in a drill (since, in fact on the date of 9/11, a drill was taking place, having to do with - wait for it - airplanes being hijacked and flown into buildings).
The precision and extreme competence of the flying maneuvers is readily explained by the auto-pilot feature.
[all of the planes hijacked on 9/11 were Boeing 767s, which have a sophisticated auto-pilot system and the ability to upload custom modules to control the auto-pilot. Just like a Predator or Reaper drone can be flown from halfway across the planet, a 767 can be flown remotely]
It was also very fast and accurate flying on difficult trajectories + the trainee Arab pilots down in Florida had problems with basic flying skills (see Daniel Hopsicker's book, https://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Terrorland-Mohamed-Cover-up-Florida/dp/0975290673/ref=cm_cr-mr-title to get a close up look at their feeble flying abilities).
This book also has an interesting account taken from the Longboat Observer, 9/26/2001 that a group of Arab looking men posing as journalists and claiming to have an interview appointment with George Bush tried to gain access to him on the morning of 9/11 at the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort.
• Replies: @John Jeremiah SmithIt was also very fast and accurate flying on difficult trajectories + the trainee Arab pilots down in Florida had problems with basic flying skillsLOL. No, it wasn't. It was pure VFR on a clear day, with no FAA restrictions being observed by the Arab pilots. A 12-year old Boy Scout could hit a tomato can with a 767 under those conditions. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 10:59 am GMT • 400 Words @CalDre Your 9/11 version I don't buy, not least because someone suicidal/murderous had to be controlling the planes.
Controlling, yes; but on-board, no. "Coincidentally", all of the planes hijacked on 9/11 were Boeing 767s, which have a sophisticated auto-pilot system and the ability to upload custom modules to control the auto-pilot. Just like a Predator or Reaper drone can be flown from halfway across the planet, a 767 can be flown remotely (and in the case of 9/11, since everything was known in advance, the entire flight pattern could have been pre-programmed into a module and uploaded in to the aircrafts' computers).
If you look into it you will find reports of a a "mystery" large white jet flying over Washington on the morning of 9/11. Some have identified it as a E-4B (a Boeing E-4 Advanced Airborne Command Post), a strategic command and control military aircraft operated by the United States Air Force. We know neither Bush nor Cheney was on that plane.
While perhaps not necessary, the cockpit could have been filled with a tranquilizing gas to incapacitate all the pilots and (stooge) hijackers so that they would not interfere with the remote-controlled operation of the planes.
Remember that these "deeply religious" Muslim "hijackers" went out drinking at a strip club the night of 9/10. Both are deep sins in Islam, not something someone is going to do when they are about to meet their Maker. Most likely they thought they were participating in a drill (since, in fact on the date of 9/11, a drill was taking place, having to do with - wait for it - airplanes being hijacked and flown into buildings).
The precision and extreme competence of the flying maneuvers is readily explained by the auto-pilot feature.
A nice change to receive a reply which is so coherent and precise. I'm glad I chose the word "controlling" in anticipation of the point you make. Now, with my limited time and interest, I look for the easy quibble and I might have said that there were plenty of reasons why one aircraft type was chosen .. but .. I Googled appropriately and came across the kind of problem that the very assertive sceptics/truthers throw up. Pilots for 9/11 Truth gave physical reasons why the WTC planes couldn't have been 767s. But a reliable seeming site said they were 767s but the other two were 757s.
I have no reason to doubt that remote control could have achieved the WTC impacts and I like the imagination which has gone into suggesting that the 19 were duped into thinking they were only rehearsing or reconnoitring, although that seems hard to reconcile with what is known about UA 175. I can't see why the undoubtedly suicidal Arabs shouldn't have knowingly acted as backup against either passenger or pilot interference and as partly trained pilots if the technology didn't work satisfactorily. I don't know enough about Islam or its institutions to have any reason to believe or deny that they would have lived it up in sinful ways on the eve of martyrdom which would deliver them to paradise. Do you?
I'm afraid this is leading me to Ockham's Razor which says that partly trained Arab pilots would do nicely as four planes flown by Al Qaeda connected jihadis would serve the plotters purposes adequately. Of course it doesn't tell us who the plotters were. The reasoning applies to false flag plotters who wanted a war in the ME though I don't accept that they would have been so sure of making the connection to Saddam Hussein that they would have plotted 911 to achieve a war against Iraq.
If the plotters were Mossad or American it would have been vital to minimise risk of exposure and therefore failure – actually worse than failure – so it is absurd to suppose that they would take the risk of packing any buildings with explosives – let alone WTC 7! – or risk remnants being found in the debris. Why four planes if you are going to demolish the Twin Towers with the certainty of controlled demolitions?
Without the unexpected total destruction of the WTC towers it made sense to plan four spectacular but limited outrages.So we are back with just one question at most. Who plotted and planned the events of 9/11?
• Replies: @CalDre Pilots for 9/11 Truth gave physical reasons why the WTC planes couldn't have been 767s. Their conclusion on this point has been disputed (e.g., see "Debunked: Pilots for 9/11 Truth WTC Speeds"). I don't know what planes were involved exactly but the official story says it was 767s and I have not yet been convinced otherwise. Regardless, a 757 is just as easily remote controlled.that seems hard to reconcile with what is known about UA 175 . And what is that? The supposed call from Amy Sweeney and Betty Ong to American Airlines on an Airfone? This could be easily faked. Bear in mind that, aside from the 19 cavedwellers, the other suspect is a CIA/Mossad joint op, meaning, the most sophisticated intelligence and black ops outfits in history. Thus, when exploring alternative explanations, you need to account for the capabilities of these agencies, not that of the proverbial Joe Shmoe.
I can't see why the undoubtedly suicidal Arabs shouldn't have knowingly acted as backup against either passenger or pilot interference and as partly trained pilots if the technology didn't work satisfactorily. It's certainly possible they engaged in a suicide attack, but IMO unlikely given their behavior leading up to their mission.
I don't know enough about Islam or its institutions to have any reason to believe or deny that they would have lived it up in sinful ways on the eve of martyrdom which would deliver them to paradise. Do you? There is a useful article entitled "The Concept of Martyrdom in Islam" on the al-Islam website. The idea of martyrdom involes complete submission and devotion to God. Engaging in major sins immediately before dieing for God is absolutely non-sensical. Both strip clubs and alcohol are strictly forbidden in Islam.
I'm afraid this is leading me to Ockham's Razor . Ockham's Razos is a somewhat useful tiebreaker in scientific theories; it is wholly inapplicable to solving crimes.
partly trained Arab pilots would do nicely as four planes flown by Al Qaeda connected jihadis would serve the plotters purposes adequately. This may be true in theory, but in practice, when one looks at the maneovers the planes underwent, it is questionable if even the most sophisticated pilots could have flown the planes as the official story requires. It is impossible that untrained civilians could have done so (and, of course, even if one were to apply Ockham's Razor, impossibile or exceedingly improbable theories are ruled out, the tiebreaker applies to multiple theories which equally explain the same phenomenon).
Of course it doesn't tell us who the plotters were. The reasoning applies to false flag plotters who wanted a war in the ME though I don't accept that they would have been so sure of making the connection to Saddam Hussein that they would have plotted 911 to achieve a war against Iraq. There was no connection to Saddam Hussein, it was entirely fabricated (and in a quite sophisticated manner). But if you read the PNAC (neo-cons) treatise "Rebuilding America's Defenses", they do make reference to a "Pearl-Harbor like attack" which would allow them to implement their agenda, which includes re-shaping the Middle East (for the benefit of Israel). These same PNAC authors, who wrote this treatise, were in power at the time of 9/11.
If the plotters were Mossad or American it would have been vital to minimise risk of exposure and therefore failure – actually worse than failure – so it is absurd to suppose that they would take the risk of packing any buildings with explosives – let alone WTC 7! – or risk remnants being found in the debris. I think it was important to their objective that the buildings collapse so that there was a large number of casualties as well as the desired "shock and awe" effect. And also I do not think pre-wiring the buildings was that risky: if they were caught (which they had no reason to believe, as they would have been responsible for the investigation, which they effectively managed to prevent - note that Cheney was one of the PNAC plotters/authors), they most likely have a backup story that the buildings were wired after the 1995 WTC bombing attack so that, if the building were at risk of collapse, they could bring it down safely, rather than risk the domino effect of having a large chunk of downtown Manhattan collapse.
So we are back with just one question at most. Who plotted and planned the events of 9/11? Clearly Israel and the Zionist neo-cons who took power 8 months before the event. Note also that control of the WTC was handed over to Zionist Jew Silverstein from the New York Port Authority only a few months before the event. During that time, there was a lot of nighttime work in the "elevator shafts" - IMO, Mossad agents planting the explosives (there is of course substantial evidence for this) - and Silverstein ended up making out like a bandit with his insurance proceeds. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- John Jeremiah Smith says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 12:51 pm GMT • 100 Words @Anonymous https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdMvQTNLaUE
Shucks, that isn't even good conspiracy theory evidence. The video showing the "fake" is just normal characteristics of a CCTV camera of 1969. They didn't handle spikes well, and their light-bandwidth range was small. The "wires" that rather funny "expert" points out are retrace flares from reflection.
Frankly, I've never seen ANY good "moon landing hoax" conspiracy theory, I suppose, for people who believe electronic devices work by magic, you can convince them of a lot of stuff.
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- John Jeremiah Smith says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 12:57 pm GMT • 100 Words @Miro23 [all of the planes hijacked on 9/11 were Boeing 767s, which have a sophisticated auto-pilot system and the ability to upload custom modules to control the auto-pilot. Just like a Predator or Reaper drone can be flown from halfway across the planet, a 767 can be flown remotely]
It was also very fast and accurate flying on difficult trajectories + the trainee Arab pilots down in Florida had problems with basic flying skills (see Daniel Hopsicker's book, https://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Terrorland-Mohamed-Cover-up-Florida/dp/0975290673/ref=cm_cr-mr-title to get a close up look at their feeble flying abilities).
This book also has an interesting account taken from the Longboat Observer, 9/26/2001 that a group of Arab looking men posing as journalists and claiming to have an interview appointment with George Bush tried to gain access to him on the morning of 9/11 at the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort.
It was also very fast and accurate flying on difficult trajectories + the trainee Arab pilots down in Florida had problems with basic flying skills
LOL. No, it wasn't. It was pure VFR on a clear day, with no FAA restrictions being observed by the Arab pilots. A 12-year old Boy Scout could hit a tomato can with a 767 under those conditions.
• Replies: @Miro23 There are always going to be differences of opinion on a thing like this, but Capt. Russ Wittenberg actually flew two of these aircraft doesn't have any doubts about it:"I flew the two actual aircraft which were involved in 9/11; the Fight number 175 and Flight 93, the 757 that allegedly went down in Shanksville and Flight 175 is the aircraft that's alleged to have hit the South Tower.
I don't believe it's possible for, like I said, for a terrorist, a so-called terrorist to train on a [Cessna] 172, then jump in a cockpit of a 757-767 class cockpit, and vertical navigate the aircraft, lateral navigate the aircraft, and fly the airplane at speeds exceeding it's design limit speed by well over 100 knots, make high-speed high-banked turns, exceeding - pulling probably 5, 6, 7 G's.
And the aircraft would literally fall out of the sky. I couldn't do it and I'm absolutely positive they couldn't do it." , @CalDre A 12-year old Boy Scout could hit a tomato can with a 767 under those conditions.You are severely misinformed. Even though one could make arguments about the second WTC impact (there was a super tight turn leading into the impact zone), the obvious flying miracle was the Pentagon strike.
First it is worth making some context for the Pentagon. The Pentagon has 5 sides. One side had been heavily reinforced and was largely empty, except for a small group of auditors who were searching for the missing $2 trillion from the Pentagon budget that Rumsfeld had mentioned on 9/10/01. Thus, if you wanted to do damage to the Pentagon, this was the worst place to hit in terms of inflicting damage (though a perfect place to hit to minimize damage but coverup the missing trillions).
Second, this side of the Pentagon was on the south side, whilst the plane was coming from the north. Moreover, this side was down an embankment from the road above. Thus, it was by far the most difficult part of the Pentagon to hit.
So, to recap: the side that was struck was the most protected, the least valuable, and the hardest to hit.
What the plane did in its approach was an absolute miracle. Without slowing down to landing speed, the plane came from the north, made a tight 180 degree turn, came down low over the road above the Pentagon at 500 mph (so low that it clipped the light posts), stayed low to the ground along the embankment, cruised exactly parallel to the ground once getting to the bottom of the embankment (this is known from the 5 frames of video released by the Pentagon about a year after 9/11, from the lack of any damage to the grass prior to the point of impact, and from the fact the impact point was only a few feet above the ground).
Experienced pilots who have many years flying military aircraft and a decade of flying Boeings have tried to simulate a flight path as this and were unsuccessful. Indeed some of the maneuvers exceed the flight parameters of the Boeing involved. Imagine flying a massive, slowly responsive plane at 500 mph down through an obstacle course and hitting an exact bullseye (pretty much akin to painting a line on a tarmac and, at full speed (NOT landing speed), landing the plane so the rear wheels first touch the ground on the line). For these alleged terrorists, who didn't even practice landing a Cessna (and had never even been in a Boeing 757 or 767 cockpit), it is entirely impossible . Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Buzz Cauldron says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 4:07 pm GMT • 300 Words
Almost all of our fake world has the truth hidden in a way that keeps everyone arguing over one of two lies. Did we go to the moon? Yes, of course, and other places too. Just not with the technology and probably even the people we were deceived into thinking we did. The folks that did go were not Japanese tourists, capturing nearly every possible moment in film. They were in the most extreme life threatening situation of anyone in history, they weren't there to take pictures. So they faked a few, ok nearly all. It is obvious. A grade school student can see that. The simple use of stereo parallax proves this quite easily with nearly all the common moon photos.
http://www.aulis.com/stereoparallax.htm
The government had no desire to show the Russians how we were getting there, or what we were doing there, nor did they want to show the public what could have and probably did turn into a horror story for many of the real astronauts. The secret space program was born, and it pretty quickly found that the moon is not what we think it is and has more in common with a star wars death star than a natural satellite. It was parked there, within human history. We suspected that all along. They were told to leave it alone, so they went to Mars. They can't even pretend to tell you or show you what is going on there, it would rip the foundational pillars out of from under all of human history and belief.We debate everything in this world with THIS or THAT, when the illusion is a cover for a horrifying truth, that even the few (people who the world doesn't even know are alive) who know the truth behind the curtain, truly, truly don't understand entirely. So what would you have them say?
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- Neil Sutherland says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 4:18 pm GMT • 100 Words
The American tradition of 'conspiracy theory', goes all the way back to America's founding, when the founding fathers wrote the Alien and Sedition Act, for fear of 'Jacobins' [jefferson and franklin would know, as they were in paris during and participants in the french revolution]. Jacobins were Masonic, or 'lluminati', and their continuous activities led to the 'Anti-Masonic' party. During Andrew Jackson's time, the Rothschild bankers continued to try to re-establish a 'central bank', and their non-stop conspiring eventually led to the Federal Reserve Act.
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- Jett Rucker says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 4:51 pm GMT
The mother of all conspiracy theories is the Gas Chamber Libel against the German People.
Vastly outdoes the Blood Libel against the Jews, and is literally a crime to express disbelief in in 19 countries today.
• Replies: @Rurikand is literally a crime to express disbelief in in 19 countries today.not just disbelief, but simply skepticism about any single tenet of that religions doctrinesome of which, are well known and universally repudiated lies; like the soap and lampshades blood libels. Today all scholars of that time know those were fabrications, and are not true, but if you say in Germany what everyone knows, that there were no human skin lampshades, they'll still send you to prison. They've already determined that "the truth is no defense"
even if you don't doubt any single tenet of the holy doctrine, but only fail to give it sufficient sacred status in your own heart- as being of great personal significance to you, and you say that 'to me, it's only a detail of history', why that's illegal too and you'll be punished and fined, at the very least.
it's as if they have a lot to lose if people stop genuflecting to the Jews every time someone say "Holocaust". So much so that they're willing to demand on pain of prison that you believe it all, or else!
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/11/14/nazi-grandma/75773774/ Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Jett Rucker says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 4:59 pm GMT • 100 Words @CalDre Your 9/11 version I don't buy, not least because someone suicidal/murderous had to be controlling the planes.
Controlling, yes; but on-board, no. "Coincidentally", all of the planes hijacked on 9/11 were Boeing 767s, which have a sophisticated auto-pilot system and the ability to upload custom modules to control the auto-pilot. Just like a Predator or Reaper drone can be flown from halfway across the planet, a 767 can be flown remotely (and in the case of 9/11, since everything was known in advance, the entire flight pattern could have been pre-programmed into a module and uploaded in to the aircrafts' computers).
If you look into it you will find reports of a a "mystery" large white jet flying over Washington on the morning of 9/11. Some have identified it as a E-4B (a Boeing E-4 Advanced Airborne Command Post), a strategic command and control military aircraft operated by the United States Air Force. We know neither Bush nor Cheney was on that plane.
While perhaps not necessary, the cockpit could have been filled with a tranquilizing gas to incapacitate all the pilots and (stooge) hijackers so that they would not interfere with the remote-controlled operation of the planes.
Remember that these "deeply religious" Muslim "hijackers" went out drinking at a strip club the night of 9/10. Both are deep sins in Islam, not something someone is going to do when they are about to meet their Maker. Most likely they thought they were participating in a drill (since, in fact on the date of 9/11, a drill was taking place, having to do with - wait for it - airplanes being hijacked and flown into buildings).
The precision and extreme competence of the flying maneuvers is readily explained by the auto-pilot feature.
I seem to recall that two of the planes were B-757s and the two in New York were B-767s.
I believe that leaves your point about the planes' being remote-controllable quite intact, and it is a proposition I myself find very persuasive, though I'm by no means entirely persuaded that the vehicles at the scenes were commercial aircraft at all.
I believe the missing planes' controls were used to fly the aircraft out into the Atlantic (into Hurricane Erin) and carefully ditch them there in such fashion (and there IS such a fashion) as to leave no evidence on the surface whatsoever.
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- Miro23 says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 5:10 pm GMT • 200 Words @John Jeremiah Smith
It was also very fast and accurate flying on difficult trajectories + the trainee Arab pilots down in Florida had problems with basic flying skillsLOL. No, it wasn't. It was pure VFR on a clear day, with no FAA restrictions being observed by the Arab pilots. A 12-year old Boy Scout could hit a tomato can with a 767 under those conditions.There are always going to be differences of opinion on a thing like this, but Capt. Russ Wittenberg actually flew two of these aircraft doesn't have any doubts about it:
"I flew the two actual aircraft which were involved in 9/11; the Fight number 175 and Flight 93, the 757 that allegedly went down in Shanksville and Flight 175 is the aircraft that's alleged to have hit the South Tower.
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I don't believe it's possible for, like I said, for a terrorist, a so-called terrorist to train on a [Cessna] 172, then jump in a cockpit of a 757-767 class cockpit, and vertical navigate the aircraft, lateral navigate the aircraft, and fly the airplane at speeds exceeding it's design limit speed by well over 100 knots, make high-speed high-banked turns, exceeding - pulling probably 5, 6, 7 G's.
And the aircraft would literally fall out of the sky. I couldn't do it and I'm absolutely positive they couldn't do it."
- CalDre says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 5:19 pm GMT • 400 Words @John Jeremiah Smith
It was also very fast and accurate flying on difficult trajectories + the trainee Arab pilots down in Florida had problems with basic flying skillsLOL. No, it wasn't. It was pure VFR on a clear day, with no FAA restrictions being observed by the Arab pilots. A 12-year old Boy Scout could hit a tomato can with a 767 under those conditions.A 12-year old Boy Scout could hit a tomato can with a 767 under those conditions.
You are severely misinformed. Even though one could make arguments about the second WTC impact (there was a super tight turn leading into the impact zone), the obvious flying miracle was the Pentagon strike.
First it is worth making some context for the Pentagon. The Pentagon has 5 sides. One side had been heavily reinforced and was largely empty, except for a small group of auditors who were searching for the missing $2 trillion from the Pentagon budget that Rumsfeld had mentioned on 9/10/01. Thus, if you wanted to do damage to the Pentagon, this was the worst place to hit in terms of inflicting damage (though a perfect place to hit to minimize damage but coverup the missing trillions).
Second, this side of the Pentagon was on the south side, whilst the plane was coming from the north. Moreover, this side was down an embankment from the road above. Thus, it was by far the most difficult part of the Pentagon to hit.
So, to recap: the side that was struck was the most protected, the least valuable, and the hardest to hit.
What the plane did in its approach was an absolute miracle. Without slowing down to landing speed, the plane came from the north, made a tight 180 degree turn, came down low over the road above the Pentagon at 500 mph (so low that it clipped the light posts), stayed low to the ground along the embankment, cruised exactly parallel to the ground once getting to the bottom of the embankment (this is known from the 5 frames of video released by the Pentagon about a year after 9/11, from the lack of any damage to the grass prior to the point of impact, and from the fact the impact point was only a few feet above the ground).
Experienced pilots who have many years flying military aircraft and a decade of flying Boeings have tried to simulate a flight path as this and were unsuccessful. Indeed some of the maneuvers exceed the flight parameters of the Boeing involved. Imagine flying a massive, slowly responsive plane at 500 mph down through an obstacle course and hitting an exact bullseye (pretty much akin to painting a line on a tarmac and, at full speed (NOT landing speed), landing the plane so the rear wheels first touch the ground on the line). For these alleged terrorists, who didn't even practice landing a Cessna (and had never even been in a Boeing 757 or 767 cockpit), it is entirely impossible .
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- CalDre says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 6:05 pm GMT • 800 Words @Wizard of Oz A nice change to receive a reply which is so coherent and precise. I'm glad I chose the word "controlling" in anticipation of the point you make. Now, with my limited time and interest, I look for the easy quibble and I might have said that there were plenty of reasons why one aircraft type was chosen..... but..... I Googled appropriately and came across the kind of problem that the very assertive sceptics/truthers throw up. Pilots for 9/11 Truth gave physical reasons why the WTC planes couldn't have been 767s. But a reliable seeming site said they were 767s but the other two were 757s.
I have no reason to doubt that remote control could have achieved the WTC impacts and I like the imagination which has gone into suggesting that the 19 were duped into thinking they were only rehearsing or reconnoitring, although that seems hard to reconcile with what is known about UA 175. I can't see why the undoubtedly suicidal Arabs shouldn't have knowingly acted as backup against either passenger or pilot interference and as partly trained pilots if the technology didn't work satisfactorily. I don't know enough about Islam or its institutions to have any reason to believe or deny that they would have lived it up in sinful ways on the eve of martyrdom which would deliver them to paradise. Do you?
I'm afraid this is leading me to Ockham's Razor which says that partly trained Arab pilots would do nicely as four planes flown by Al Qaeda connected jihadis would serve the plotters purposes adequately. Of course it doesn't tell us who the plotters were. The reasoning applies to false flag plotters who wanted a war in the ME though I don't accept that they would have been so sure of making the connection to Saddam Hussein that they would have plotted 911 to achieve a war against Iraq.If the plotters were Mossad or American it would have been vital to minimise risk of exposure and therefore failure - actually worse than failure - so it is absurd to suppose that they would take the risk of packing any buildings with explosives - let alone WTC 7! - or risk remnants being found in the debris. Why four planes if you are going to demolish the Twin Towers with the certainty of controlled demolitions?
Without the unexpected total destruction of the WTC towers it made sense to plan four spectacular but limited outrages.So we are back with just one question at most. Who plotted and planned the events of 9/11?
Pilots for 9/11 Truth gave physical reasons why the WTC planes couldn't have been 767s. Their conclusion on this point has been disputed (e.g., see "Debunked: Pilots for 9/11 Truth WTC Speeds"). I don't know what planes were involved exactly but the official story says it was 767s and I have not yet been convinced otherwise. Regardless, a 757 is just as easily remote controlled.
that seems hard to reconcile with what is known about UA 175 . And what is that? The supposed call from Amy Sweeney and Betty Ong to American Airlines on an Airfone? This could be easily faked. Bear in mind that, aside from the 19 cavedwellers, the other suspect is a CIA/Mossad joint op, meaning, the most sophisticated intelligence and black ops outfits in history. Thus, when exploring alternative explanations, you need to account for the capabilities of these agencies, not that of the proverbial Joe Shmoe.
I can't see why the undoubtedly suicidal Arabs shouldn't have knowingly acted as backup against either passenger or pilot interference and as partly trained pilots if the technology didn't work satisfactorily. It's certainly possible they engaged in a suicide attack, but IMO unlikely given their behavior leading up to their mission.
I don't know enough about Islam or its institutions to have any reason to believe or deny that they would have lived it up in sinful ways on the eve of martyrdom which would deliver them to paradise. Do you? There is a useful article entitled "The Concept of Martyrdom in Islam" on the al-Islam website. The idea of martyrdom involes complete submission and devotion to God. Engaging in major sins immediately before dieing for God is absolutely non-sensical. Both strip clubs and alcohol are strictly forbidden in Islam.
I'm afraid this is leading me to Ockham's Razor . Ockham's Razos is a somewhat useful tiebreaker in scientific theories; it is wholly inapplicable to solving crimes.
partly trained Arab pilots would do nicely as four planes flown by Al Qaeda connected jihadis would serve the plotters purposes adequately. This may be true in theory, but in practice, when one looks at the maneovers the planes underwent, it is questionable if even the most sophisticated pilots could have flown the planes as the official story requires. It is impossible that untrained civilians could have done so (and, of course, even if one were to apply Ockham's Razor, impossibile or exceedingly improbable theories are ruled out, the tiebreaker applies to multiple theories which equally explain the same phenomenon).
Of course it doesn't tell us who the plotters were. The reasoning applies to false flag plotters who wanted a war in the ME though I don't accept that they would have been so sure of making the connection to Saddam Hussein that they would have plotted 911 to achieve a war against Iraq. There was no connection to Saddam Hussein, it was entirely fabricated (and in a quite sophisticated manner). But if you read the PNAC (neo-cons) treatise "Rebuilding America's Defenses", they do make reference to a "Pearl-Harbor like attack" which would allow them to implement their agenda, which includes re-shaping the Middle East (for the benefit of Israel). These same PNAC authors, who wrote this treatise, were in power at the time of 9/11.
If the plotters were Mossad or American it would have been vital to minimise risk of exposure and therefore failure – actually worse than failure – so it is absurd to suppose that they would take the risk of packing any buildings with explosives – let alone WTC 7! – or risk remnants being found in the debris. I think it was important to their objective that the buildings collapse so that there was a large number of casualties as well as the desired "shock and awe" effect. And also I do not think pre-wiring the buildings was that risky: if they were caught (which they had no reason to believe, as they would have been responsible for the investigation, which they effectively managed to prevent – note that Cheney was one of the PNAC plotters/authors), they most likely have a backup story that the buildings were wired after the 1995 WTC bombing attack so that, if the building were at risk of collapse, they could bring it down safely, rather than risk the domino effect of having a large chunk of downtown Manhattan collapse.
So we are back with just one question at most. Who plotted and planned the events of 9/11? Clearly Israel and the Zionist neo-cons who took power 8 months before the event. Note also that control of the WTC was handed over to Zionist Jew Silverstein from the New York Port Authority only a few months before the event. During that time, there was a lot of nighttime work in the "elevator shafts" – IMO, Mossad agents planting the explosives (there is of course substantial evidence for this) – and Silverstein ended up making out like a bandit with his insurance proceeds.
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz I am amazed. I can't immediately see any obvious flaws and BS! That's a first.Where does WTC 7 fit into that. Just a chance bonus? , @Wizard of Oz I was back on UA 175 difficulties and reflecting on the fakeability of a lot of calls (said by some to have been technically impossible I recall) when I saw how the most plausible version of your version must work out.
UA 175 was always meant to crash somewhere after a real or apparent fight with the terrorists. (But how do you get up that fight to cover the diversion?) It's exactly the kind of distraction I would have planned into that op. Maybe the devout Islamists on that flight - or just one or two of them - knew that they were going to die (check night club CCTV:-) ) and maybe even knew that UA175 was a diversion in a bigger plan.
Wow I think I have a new career for my next lifetime. Would you care to buy some shares in my FakeMarsLanding Inc float? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Rehmat says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 6:15 pm GMT • 300 Words @Moi If the Zionists can lie so much about Israeli history (e.g. The Arabs encouraged Palestinians to flee, that the Arabs were about to attack Israel in 1967, land without a people for a people without a land, etc.), one can only wonder about the official holocaust narrative of 6M dead, gas chambers, etc.).
I've not read Elie Weisel's book Night, but I understand that no where does he mention gas chambers in Auschwitz....
Without GAS CHAMBERS the SIX MILLION DIED Holy COW becomes a HOUSE OF CARDS.
On June 29, 2016, Boston-based publishing company Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) announced that it will publish Adolf Hitler's 'antisemite' book Mein Kampf to fund needy Jewish survivors of Nazi era.
"The proceeds from sale of Mein Kampf will be donated to Jewish Family & Children's Service of Greater Boston," said Andrew Russell, the publisher's director of corporate social responsibility.
The publisher had been donating money to organizations that combat anti-Semitism since 2000. Since publication of Mein Kampf is banned in France, the job was given to HMH. The publication of the book was opposed by several Jewish groups as result of company's recent announcement that in the future, it will provide funds to some non-Jewish NGOs. HMH caved-in to Jewish pressure and decided to bribe them by donating proceeds from the book to the 'evergreen' Holocaust Industry.
In September 2001, the company filed a law suit in a New York court against Jews for Jesus, accusing the pro-Israel Evangelical group of infringing the company's copyright on its popular children's storybook character, Curious George, which the company had been publishing for 70 years.
Interestingly, HMH is a subsidiary of Vivendi Universal, a multinational mass media company in Paris, whose CEO is Arnaud de Puyfontaine (Jewish).
By now, hundreds of millions people around the world including some honest Jews know that Holocaust has become a tool of the Organized Jewry to rob western nations and individuals to nurse Israel's military machine. Germans and the 65 million American Evangelists are the biggest suckers of this Zionist Mafia. Organized Jewry has sucked over $93 billion from German taxpayers since the 1960s.
https://rehmat1.com/2016/07/02/hitlers-mein-kampf-to-fund-holocaust-industry/
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- AnotherLover says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 6:56 pm GMT • 200 Words @Pat Casey
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."You can read the context of that quote according to the person who claims to be its original source here:--William Casey, CIA Director, from a first staff meeting in 1981
https://www.quora.com/Did-William-Casey-CIA-Director-really-say-Well-know-our-disinformation-program-is-complete-when-everything-the-American-public-believes-is-false
I think it's worth pointing out what I've never seen explained about that quote, a quote with as much currency in the conspiracy theory fever swamps as any single quote has ever had. The point of the disinformation campaign was not to manipulate the public but to manipulate the soviets. Because our CIA analysts spent so much time unriddling the soviet media, we figured their CIA analysts were doing the same thing with ours.
People dismiss obviousness and redundancy, yet often both are necessary to fully paint the picture. Where you wrote:
"The point of the disinformation campaign was not to manipulate the public but to manipulate the soviets"
you could have been more accurate by continuing:
"by manipulating the public."
Ah, redundant and obvious to be sure, but more complete, no? Should it pacify the average prole to know that not even their acquiescence is desired of them, but that they are useful as a disinformation tool? Have things changed since then? Is less intelligence publicly available today? Or more? And what lessons did the CIA learn in manipulating public opinion by domestic propaganda operations in the meantime?
Sure, the context of the quote adds the realism it's clearly lacking as it floats by itself surrounded by quotation marks, yet the takeaway is the same, is it not? A massive intelligence operation designed to confuse the public with the media is what we've got on the table. Let that sink in good and hard.
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- AnotherLover says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 7:08 pm GMT @moneta The biggest conpiracy, which most fail understand, is that the reason that there is all of economic termoil and wars, is due to one reason and one reason only. There is no money and what we use for transactions is the invertion of money, created by an entry of a computer. Its main purpose is to make the issuers rich and everyone else in debt to them..Countries who don't want to go into their debt become enemies and are villified. This illusion is reinforced by films, media. Tax authorities. the government.
THIS IS THE BIGGEST CONSPIRACY on which all of the others are constructed. Including the socialist satanist society built upon it. To make it work markets have to be manipulated, which they all are.
Get rid of money and you get rid of god. liberty, personal property and everything else of value because all values are based on nominal debt and this debt is not repayable because it has to be borrowed to be repayed and the method of repayment doesnt exist. Fereral reserve notes are counterfieted to create debt.Agree.
Take that weird moderation quirk!
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- AnotherLover says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 7:15 pm GMT • 100 Words @Wizard of Oz I don't dismiss your intuitions as such but you hardly present a great case for affording them much weight. What you immediately felt at age 16 watching a screen? Nope. The fact that Jack Ruby dissembled?
I think dismissing intuition is for suckers. What successful businessman would offer such advice? Intuition assembles all the information available to the organism, and it is rarely wrong in my experience. I appreciate when people are willing to offer their gut reaction to an event, especially knowing they are doing so in a society which trains its members to pounce on them that would have the temerity to do so.
Present company excluded, of course
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- Rurik says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 7:23 pm GMT • 200 Words @Jett Rucker The mother of all conspiracy theories is the Gas Chamber Libel against the German People.
Vastly outdoes the Blood Libel against the Jews, and is literally a crime to express disbelief in in 19 countries today.
and is literally a crime to express disbelief in in 19 countries today.
not just disbelief, but simply skepticism about any single tenet of that religions doctrine
some of which, are well known and universally repudiated lies; like the soap and lampshades blood libels. Today all scholars of that time know those were fabrications, and are not true, but if you say in Germany what everyone knows, that there were no human skin lampshades, they'll still send you to prison. They've already determined that "the truth is no defense"
even if you don't doubt any single tenet of the holy doctrine, but only fail to give it sufficient sacred status in your own heart- as being of great personal significance to you, and you say that 'to me, it's only a detail of history', why that's illegal too and you'll be punished and fined, at the very least.
it's as if they have a lot to lose if people stop genuflecting to the Jews every time someone say "Holocaust". So much so that they're willing to demand on pain of prison that you believe it all, or else!
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/11/14/nazi-grandma/75773774/
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- Ed Rankin says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 8:42 pm GMT • 300 Words
In Dispatch 1035-960 mailed to station chiefs on April 1, 1967, the CIA laid out a series of "talking points" in its memo addressing the "conspiracy theorists" who were questioning the Warren Commission's findings on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. They include the following:
Claim that it "would be impossible to conceal" such a large-scale conspiracy.
Claim that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition.
Claim that "no significant new evidence has emerged"
Accuse theorists of falling in love with their theories.
Claimed conspiracy theorists are wedded to their theories before the evidence was in.
Accuse theorists of being politically motivated.
Accuse theorists of being financially motivated.
I have found numerous examples of these exact points being made in televised news segments, newspapers, magazines and even some academic articles and scholarly books.
Additionally, some of the most influential and frequently-cited authors who are the most critical of "conspiracy theorists", both academic and lay people, have very direct ties to government, foundations and other institutions of authority.
While we can't know if the CIA was primarily responsible for the creation of the pejorative, but what we do know from the Church Committee hearings, was that the Agency did have paid operatives working inside major media organizations as late as the 1970s. In fact, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper has acknowledged ties to the CIA
With recent lifting of restrictions on the government's use of domestic propaganda with the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, which passed as part of the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, I think reasonable people would expect this type of pejorative construction to resume if in fact, it ever ceased.
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- Bill Jones says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 9:47 pm GMT
A nice little piece on one of the players in the big conspiracy:
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https://www.corbettreport.com/911-suspects-philip-zelikow/
- Buzz Mohawk says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 10:29 pm GMT • 200 Words @Anonymous
I was a boy watching those transmissions you helped bring us. Thank you, Sir!Sure, it's certainly possible that there's been a conspiracy to promote the notion that the moon landing was a hoax.Apollo is one of the greatest human achievements, my absolute favorite historical event. I consider myself lucky to have been alive and old enough to witness and understand it.
...
And I believe there has been in fact some conspiratorial effort over the years to promote their idiocy, a conspiracy on the part of those who would weaken American pride and reputation.
But it's also true that people with deep emotional attachments to things, especially inculcated in childhood, have trouble considering and questioning certain things. And it's well known that propaganda deliberately tries to inculcate these sort of emotional attachments in order to be more effective.
You apparently have trouble accepting an accomplished fact that contradicts your pathetic, childish idea of what is possible or was possible at that time.
You must not have much aptitude for physics or engineering or any hard science. I grasped it when I was age ten in ways you still can't. It wasn't childhood wonder, as you assume. It was a real understanding of what was being done. It was, at age ten, beyond what you even possess now.
No one who has an understanding of physics and engineering principles thinks as you do. Yet you write such an insightful sounding piece of armchair psychology.
The Apollo program was so far beyond your comprehension that you just have to write crap like what you wrote to me. We are now half a century after the fact, and fools like you fall for this garbage.
Pathetic.
For whatever reason, maybe ones Ron describes here, a conspiracy theory about Apollo has been floated for decades. Scientifically illiterate fools fall for it.
Yes, as Ron implies, these things might be created just to drag more probable conspiracies into the same mental swamp in the public mind.
This one conspiracy theory you fell for lies squarely in the category of the blindingly stupid.
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz Unless I have missed relevant prolegomena from this Anonymous I think you have grossly overreacted to what he/she actually wrote. In a tellingly emotional way in fact. QED? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 10:40 pm GMT @CalDre Pilots for 9/11 Truth gave physical reasons why the WTC planes couldn't have been 767s. Their conclusion on this point has been disputed (e.g., see "Debunked: Pilots for 9/11 Truth WTC Speeds"). I don't know what planes were involved exactly but the official story says it was 767s and I have not yet been convinced otherwise. Regardless, a 757 is just as easily remote controlled.
that seems hard to reconcile with what is known about UA 175 . And what is that? The supposed call from Amy Sweeney and Betty Ong to American Airlines on an Airfone? This could be easily faked. Bear in mind that, aside from the 19 cavedwellers, the other suspect is a CIA/Mossad joint op, meaning, the most sophisticated intelligence and black ops outfits in history. Thus, when exploring alternative explanations, you need to account for the capabilities of these agencies, not that of the proverbial Joe Shmoe.
I can't see why the undoubtedly suicidal Arabs shouldn't have knowingly acted as backup against either passenger or pilot interference and as partly trained pilots if the technology didn't work satisfactorily. It's certainly possible they engaged in a suicide attack, but IMO unlikely given their behavior leading up to their mission.
I don't know enough about Islam or its institutions to have any reason to believe or deny that they would have lived it up in sinful ways on the eve of martyrdom which would deliver them to paradise. Do you? There is a useful article entitled "The Concept of Martyrdom in Islam" on the al-Islam website. The idea of martyrdom involes complete submission and devotion to God. Engaging in major sins immediately before dieing for God is absolutely non-sensical. Both strip clubs and alcohol are strictly forbidden in Islam.
I'm afraid this is leading me to Ockham's Razor . Ockham's Razos is a somewhat useful tiebreaker in scientific theories; it is wholly inapplicable to solving crimes.
partly trained Arab pilots would do nicely as four planes flown by Al Qaeda connected jihadis would serve the plotters purposes adequately. This may be true in theory, but in practice, when one looks at the maneovers the planes underwent, it is questionable if even the most sophisticated pilots could have flown the planes as the official story requires. It is impossible that untrained civilians could have done so (and, of course, even if one were to apply Ockham's Razor, impossibile or exceedingly improbable theories are ruled out, the tiebreaker applies to multiple theories which equally explain the same phenomenon).
Of course it doesn't tell us who the plotters were. The reasoning applies to false flag plotters who wanted a war in the ME though I don't accept that they would have been so sure of making the connection to Saddam Hussein that they would have plotted 911 to achieve a war against Iraq. There was no connection to Saddam Hussein, it was entirely fabricated (and in a quite sophisticated manner). But if you read the PNAC (neo-cons) treatise "Rebuilding America's Defenses", they do make reference to a "Pearl-Harbor like attack" which would allow them to implement their agenda, which includes re-shaping the Middle East (for the benefit of Israel). These same PNAC authors, who wrote this treatise, were in power at the time of 9/11.
If the plotters were Mossad or American it would have been vital to minimise risk of exposure and therefore failure – actually worse than failure – so it is absurd to suppose that they would take the risk of packing any buildings with explosives – let alone WTC 7! – or risk remnants being found in the debris. I think it was important to their objective that the buildings collapse so that there was a large number of casualties as well as the desired "shock and awe" effect. And also I do not think pre-wiring the buildings was that risky: if they were caught (which they had no reason to believe, as they would have been responsible for the investigation, which they effectively managed to prevent - note that Cheney was one of the PNAC plotters/authors), they most likely have a backup story that the buildings were wired after the 1995 WTC bombing attack so that, if the building were at risk of collapse, they could bring it down safely, rather than risk the domino effect of having a large chunk of downtown Manhattan collapse.
So we are back with just one question at most. Who plotted and planned the events of 9/11? Clearly Israel and the Zionist neo-cons who took power 8 months before the event. Note also that control of the WTC was handed over to Zionist Jew Silverstein from the New York Port Authority only a few months before the event. During that time, there was a lot of nighttime work in the "elevator shafts" - IMO, Mossad agents planting the explosives (there is of course substantial evidence for this) - and Silverstein ended up making out like a bandit with his insurance proceeds.
I am amazed. I can't immediately see any obvious flaws and BS! That's a first.
Where does WTC 7 fit into that. Just a chance bonus?
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- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 11:12 pm GMT • 100 Words @CalDre Pilots for 9/11 Truth gave physical reasons why the WTC planes couldn't have been 767s. Their conclusion on this point has been disputed (e.g., see "Debunked: Pilots for 9/11 Truth WTC Speeds"). I don't know what planes were involved exactly but the official story says it was 767s and I have not yet been convinced otherwise. Regardless, a 757 is just as easily remote controlled.
that seems hard to reconcile with what is known about UA 175 . And what is that? The supposed call from Amy Sweeney and Betty Ong to American Airlines on an Airfone? This could be easily faked. Bear in mind that, aside from the 19 cavedwellers, the other suspect is a CIA/Mossad joint op, meaning, the most sophisticated intelligence and black ops outfits in history. Thus, when exploring alternative explanations, you need to account for the capabilities of these agencies, not that of the proverbial Joe Shmoe.
I can't see why the undoubtedly suicidal Arabs shouldn't have knowingly acted as backup against either passenger or pilot interference and as partly trained pilots if the technology didn't work satisfactorily. It's certainly possible they engaged in a suicide attack, but IMO unlikely given their behavior leading up to their mission.
I don't know enough about Islam or its institutions to have any reason to believe or deny that they would have lived it up in sinful ways on the eve of martyrdom which would deliver them to paradise. Do you? There is a useful article entitled "The Concept of Martyrdom in Islam" on the al-Islam website. The idea of martyrdom involes complete submission and devotion to God. Engaging in major sins immediately before dieing for God is absolutely non-sensical. Both strip clubs and alcohol are strictly forbidden in Islam.
I'm afraid this is leading me to Ockham's Razor . Ockham's Razos is a somewhat useful tiebreaker in scientific theories; it is wholly inapplicable to solving crimes.
partly trained Arab pilots would do nicely as four planes flown by Al Qaeda connected jihadis would serve the plotters purposes adequately. This may be true in theory, but in practice, when one looks at the maneovers the planes underwent, it is questionable if even the most sophisticated pilots could have flown the planes as the official story requires. It is impossible that untrained civilians could have done so (and, of course, even if one were to apply Ockham's Razor, impossibile or exceedingly improbable theories are ruled out, the tiebreaker applies to multiple theories which equally explain the same phenomenon).
Of course it doesn't tell us who the plotters were. The reasoning applies to false flag plotters who wanted a war in the ME though I don't accept that they would have been so sure of making the connection to Saddam Hussein that they would have plotted 911 to achieve a war against Iraq. There was no connection to Saddam Hussein, it was entirely fabricated (and in a quite sophisticated manner). But if you read the PNAC (neo-cons) treatise "Rebuilding America's Defenses", they do make reference to a "Pearl-Harbor like attack" which would allow them to implement their agenda, which includes re-shaping the Middle East (for the benefit of Israel). These same PNAC authors, who wrote this treatise, were in power at the time of 9/11.
If the plotters were Mossad or American it would have been vital to minimise risk of exposure and therefore failure – actually worse than failure – so it is absurd to suppose that they would take the risk of packing any buildings with explosives – let alone WTC 7! – or risk remnants being found in the debris. I think it was important to their objective that the buildings collapse so that there was a large number of casualties as well as the desired "shock and awe" effect. And also I do not think pre-wiring the buildings was that risky: if they were caught (which they had no reason to believe, as they would have been responsible for the investigation, which they effectively managed to prevent - note that Cheney was one of the PNAC plotters/authors), they most likely have a backup story that the buildings were wired after the 1995 WTC bombing attack so that, if the building were at risk of collapse, they could bring it down safely, rather than risk the domino effect of having a large chunk of downtown Manhattan collapse.
So we are back with just one question at most. Who plotted and planned the events of 9/11? Clearly Israel and the Zionist neo-cons who took power 8 months before the event. Note also that control of the WTC was handed over to Zionist Jew Silverstein from the New York Port Authority only a few months before the event. During that time, there was a lot of nighttime work in the "elevator shafts" - IMO, Mossad agents planting the explosives (there is of course substantial evidence for this) - and Silverstein ended up making out like a bandit with his insurance proceeds.
I was back on UA 175 difficulties and reflecting on the fakeability of a lot of calls (said by some to have been technically impossible I recall) when I saw how the most plausible version of your version must work out.
UA 175 was always meant to crash somewhere after a real or apparent fight with the terrorists. (But how do you get up that fight to cover the diversion?) It's exactly the kind of distraction I would have planned into that op. Maybe the devout Islamists on that flight – or just one or two of them – knew that they were going to die (check night club CCTV:-) ) and maybe even knew that UA175 was a diversion in a bigger plan.
Wow I think I have a new career for my next lifetime. Would you care to buy some shares in my FakeMarsLanding Inc float?
• Replies: @CalDre I was back on UA 175 difficulties . Again I'm not sure what you are referring to. UA 175 was the one that crashed into the South Tower. Did you mean the one that crashed in Pennsylvania, UA 93?As to the phone calls, I would note, they are also entirely consistent with the stewardesses believing they were partaking in a drill. It is known a drill of planes being hijacked and flown into buildings was being conducted that day. In part this drill explanation is supported by the contention that the pilots, too, were forced to the back of a plane by a small man holding a box cutter. The pilot was a huge ex-military guy and a pilot should never leave the cockpit, particularly not to terrorists.
As to WTC 7, it's anyone's guess what happened there. My guess is that UA 93 was meant to crash into that tower, but since it crashed in Pennsylvania, WTC 7 was left standing, but they hit the "Boom" button anyway, perhaps to hide the fact that it was pre-wired, perhaps because there was something in it they wanted destroyed, I don't have the answer, in large part because no proper investigation was ever conducted.
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- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 11:19 pm GMT @Buzz Mohawk You apparently have trouble accepting an accomplished fact that contradicts your pathetic, childish idea of what is possible or was possible at that time.
You must not have much aptitude for physics or engineering or any hard science. I grasped it when I was age ten in ways you still can't. It wasn't childhood wonder, as you assume. It was a real understanding of what was being done. It was, at age ten, beyond what you even possess now.
No one who has an understanding of physics and engineering principles thinks as you do. Yet you write such an insightful sounding piece of armchair psychology.
The Apollo program was so far beyond your comprehension that you just have to write crap like what you wrote to me. We are now half a century after the fact, and fools like you fall for this garbage.
Pathetic.
For whatever reason, maybe ones Ron describes here, a conspiracy theory about Apollo has been floated for decades. Scientifically illiterate fools fall for it.
Yes, as Ron implies, these things might be created just to drag more probable conspiracies into the same mental swamp in the public mind.
This one conspiracy theory you fell for lies squarely in the category of the blindingly stupid.
Unless I have missed relevant prolegomena from this Anonymous I think you have grossly overreacted to what he/she actually wrote. In a tellingly emotional way in fact. QED?
• Replies: @Buzz Mohawk No, no overreaction, and no QED. The "prolegomena" is all the mediocrity over the years making it obvious that humanity is neither aware of nor worthy of its own greatest accomplishments.I'm not just talking about Apollo now. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- CalDre says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 7, 2016 at 11:44 pm GMT • 200 Words @Wizard of Oz I was back on UA 175 difficulties and reflecting on the fakeability of a lot of calls (said by some to have been technically impossible I recall) when I saw how the most plausible version of your version must work out.
UA 175 was always meant to crash somewhere after a real or apparent fight with the terrorists. (But how do you get up that fight to cover the diversion?) It's exactly the kind of distraction I would have planned into that op. Maybe the devout Islamists on that flight - or just one or two of them - knew that they were going to die (check night club CCTV:-) ) and maybe even knew that UA175 was a diversion in a bigger plan.
Wow I think I have a new career for my next lifetime. Would you care to buy some shares in my FakeMarsLanding Inc float?
I was back on UA 175 difficulties . Again I'm not sure what you are referring to. UA 175 was the one that crashed into the South Tower. Did you mean the one that crashed in Pennsylvania, UA 93?
As to the phone calls, I would note, they are also entirely consistent with the stewardesses believing they were partaking in a drill. It is known a drill of planes being hijacked and flown into buildings was being conducted that day. In part this drill explanation is supported by the contention that the pilots, too, were forced to the back of a plane by a small man holding a box cutter. The pilot was a huge ex-military guy and a pilot should never leave the cockpit, particularly not to terrorists.
As to WTC 7, it's anyone's guess what happened there. My guess is that UA 93 was meant to crash into that tower, but since it crashed in Pennsylvania, WTC 7 was left standing, but they hit the "Boom" button anyway, perhaps to hide the fact that it was pre-wired, perhaps because there was something in it they wanted destroyed, I don't have the answer, in large part because no proper investigation was ever conducted.
Cheers
• Replies: @NosytheDuke SEC evidence concerning massive fraud has been reported as having been destroyed in WTC7 , @Wizard of Oz Sorry did I get that wrong? Yes you guessed right about which plane I meant.Your answer that the charges had to be set off in WTC 7 to conceal the wiring is certainly not crazy but not very satisfactory. Ah, but yes, the fire that burned all day was set opportunistically after Flight 93 went AWOL.
That leaves motive for including WTC 7 in the plot at all unless there was indeed something that had to hidden by destruction. Proof? Evidence?
There were a lot of passenger calls from Flight 93 that I was referring to. Are you amongst those who deny the technical feasibility? One way or another there seems to be a problem there with the conspiracy versions.
And what's the explanation for UA 93 not being adequately controlled by computer or remotely if it was intended for WTC 7. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Dave37 says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 1:13 am GMT @Bill Jones So no freedom of speech in your little world then.
Sure, if I can have some revenge for annoying AHs.
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- NosytheDuke says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 2:27 am GMT @CalDre I was back on UA 175 difficulties . Again I'm not sure what you are referring to. UA 175 was the one that crashed into the South Tower. Did you mean the one that crashed in Pennsylvania, UA 93?
As to the phone calls, I would note, they are also entirely consistent with the stewardesses believing they were partaking in a drill. It is known a drill of planes being hijacked and flown into buildings was being conducted that day. In part this drill explanation is supported by the contention that the pilots, too, were forced to the back of a plane by a small man holding a box cutter. The pilot was a huge ex-military guy and a pilot should never leave the cockpit, particularly not to terrorists.
As to WTC 7, it's anyone's guess what happened there. My guess is that UA 93 was meant to crash into that tower, but since it crashed in Pennsylvania, WTC 7 was left standing, but they hit the "Boom" button anyway, perhaps to hide the fact that it was pre-wired, perhaps because there was something in it they wanted destroyed, I don't have the answer, in large part because no proper investigation was ever conducted.
Cheers
SEC evidence concerning massive fraud has been reported as having been destroyed in WTC7
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz That needs a lot of fleshing out. All the evidence - originals, copies, backups - in one place? Maybe there is someone with proof quietly living off the pay offs for his blackmail. What would be really unlikely however is that no one has come out with anything like "I wondered why AB, the bossof the evidence management division was ordering all outside copies and backups to be destroyed and found his reasons to be very unsatisfactory". Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Buzz Mohawk says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 3:22 am GMT @Wizard of Oz Unless I have missed relevant prolegomena from this Anonymous I think you have grossly overreacted to what he/she actually wrote. In a tellingly emotional way in fact. QED?
No, no overreaction, and no QED. The "prolegomena" is all the mediocrity over the years making it obvious that humanity is neither aware of nor worthy of its own greatest accomplishments.
I'm not just talking about Apollo now.
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz Another amazing experience of finding something in UR which one might agree with - and you didn't even assault my slightly dodgy use of "prolegomena" with, for example, a sneering accusation that I seemed to think it meant "things previously said". Mind you I would have shown confident insouciance with the Humpty Dumpty response and diverted attention to the misuse of "protagonist". As to which I have long been hoping to say straight-faced to an actor "I loved your role as Deuteragonist/Tritoganist in......[The Erotic Adventures of Mickey Mouse or some other famous recovered masterpiece]". Where does one put the accent on protagonist do you think to further the pretence that one is a classical scholar? (Bonus question for 0 marks). Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Marie says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 4:01 am GMT • 100 Words
Literally every article I've ever read about conservatives and/or the conservative movement within the pages of the New Yorker – and I've read going back decades, unfortunately – has judiciously referenced 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics'.
I mean, EVERY SINGLE article regarding Republicans, conservatives and/or opposition to leftism has the Hofstadter quote somewhere – it must be a staple on the J-School syllabi.
It seems Prof. Hofstadter was something of an adherent to the Frankfurt School nonsense – Marxism-meets-dime-store-Freud being every New Yorker writer's stock in trade, of course
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- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 5:15 am GMT • 100 Words @Buzz Mohawk No, no overreaction, and no QED. The "prolegomena" is all the mediocrity over the years making it obvious that humanity is neither aware of nor worthy of its own greatest accomplishments.
I'm not just talking about Apollo now.
Another amazing experience of finding something in UR which one might agree with – and you didn't even assault my slightly dodgy use of "prolegomena" with, for example, a sneering accusation that I seemed to think it meant "things previously said". Mind you I would have shown confident insouciance with the Humpty Dumpty response and diverted attention to the misuse of "protagonist". As to which I have long been hoping to say straight-faced to an actor "I loved your role as Deuteragonist/Tritoganist in [The Erotic Adventures of Mickey Mouse or some other famous recovered masterpiece]". Where does one put the accent on protagonist do you think to further the pretence that one is a classical scholar? (Bonus question for 0 marks).
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- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 5:38 am GMT • 100 Words @CalDre I was back on UA 175 difficulties . Again I'm not sure what you are referring to. UA 175 was the one that crashed into the South Tower. Did you mean the one that crashed in Pennsylvania, UA 93?
As to the phone calls, I would note, they are also entirely consistent with the stewardesses believing they were partaking in a drill. It is known a drill of planes being hijacked and flown into buildings was being conducted that day. In part this drill explanation is supported by the contention that the pilots, too, were forced to the back of a plane by a small man holding a box cutter. The pilot was a huge ex-military guy and a pilot should never leave the cockpit, particularly not to terrorists.
As to WTC 7, it's anyone's guess what happened there. My guess is that UA 93 was meant to crash into that tower, but since it crashed in Pennsylvania, WTC 7 was left standing, but they hit the "Boom" button anyway, perhaps to hide the fact that it was pre-wired, perhaps because there was something in it they wanted destroyed, I don't have the answer, in large part because no proper investigation was ever conducted.
Cheers
Sorry did I get that wrong? Yes you guessed right about which plane I meant.
Your answer that the charges had to be set off in WTC 7 to conceal the wiring is certainly not crazy but not very satisfactory. Ah, but yes, the fire that burned all day was set opportunistically after Flight 93 went AWOL.
That leaves motive for including WTC 7 in the plot at all unless there was indeed something that had to hidden by destruction. Proof? Evidence?
There were a lot of passenger calls from Flight 93 that I was referring to. Are you amongst those who deny the technical feasibility? One way or another there seems to be a problem there with the conspiracy versions.
And what's the explanation for UA 93 not being adequately controlled by computer or remotely if it was intended for WTC 7.
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyProof? Evidence?Excuse me, under the previous American Pravda articles by Ron, I specifically asked you to outline the strongest evidence available that the government story on 9/11 is substantially true, i.e. Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda etcetera.In response, you wrote a long series of twaddles, idiotic non-sequitirs interspersed with vile ad hominem and never produced a single piece of evidence.
NOTHING. There is a clear electronic record of this:`
Here: http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-did-the-us-plan-a-nuclear-first-strike-against-russia-in-the-early-1960s/#comment-1532488
and here: http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-alexander-cockburn-and-the-british-spies/#comment-1550686
I continually ask the shit eaters such as yourself what is the evidence for this government story. You never ever every provide any! In general, you end up falling back on the ridiculous position that the government story being the government story is proof!
Well, eventually, I always corner you on this. Always. You end up having to walk away, but never have the minimal honesty to simply admit that you cannot produce any evidence because you have none.
And then within a few days or so after that, you are back, quibbling with some other person asking them to produce evidence of something or other.
I will reiterate. If you want to turn over a new leaf and be an honest, decent person, you should do one of two things:
1. Outline what you think the strongest evidence for the government story is.
2. Admit that you have no evidence.There are no other logical possibilities. What is it? 1. or 2.? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 5:53 am GMT • 100 Words @NosytheDuke SEC evidence concerning massive fraud has been reported as having been destroyed in WTC7
That needs a lot of fleshing out. All the evidence – originals, copies, backups – in one place? Maybe there is someone with proof quietly living off the pay offs for his blackmail. What would be really unlikely however is that no one has come out with anything like "I wondered why AB, the bossof the evidence management division was ordering all outside copies and backups to be destroyed and found his reasons to be very unsatisfactory".
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- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 8:11 am GMT • 200 Words @CanSpeccy There must be hundreds of millions of words accessible on the Internet discussing the collapse of WTC Building 7. Why then foul up this discussion with the reiteration of arguments that anyone with an interest in the specifics of 9/11 will already know or can find out elsewhere?
And why doesn't that apply precisely to just about everything you have posted and how come you can't see it – or think you can get away with others not noticing?
And where have you complained about the constant reiteration of the symmetrical fall alleged impossibility, the particles of thermite, the steel couldn't have been melted nonsense (it wasn't melting that was the point), the forewarning to the BBC and, not least, the failure to account for the videos of the fires burning all day in WTC 7 and what that could have resulted in.
My particular analysis of motive I have neither seen emphasised by anyone else nor answered on UR at all. Have you? Or seen it dealt with elsewhere as you imply?
As it happens there is now an exception. Just about the first UR commenter to doubt something like the official 9/11 story that has not only a respectably functioning intellect but has deployed it on the issue. See posts by CalDre on this thread and my conversation with him.
Acttually there is indeed a question of motive on WTC 7 (if it was demolished by explosives) left well unanswered by anything but the supposition that there was something within that needed to be destroyed of which there were no copies.
• Replies: @CanSpeccy WizOz, what are you on about? I've read your comment twice and can make no sense of it.But here's a question about 9/11 from esteemed Unz Review contributor Paul Craig Roberts:
Who are the real conspiracy kooks, the majority who disbelieve the official lies or the minority who believe the official lies?True, his designation of the official story as lies is question begging, but it fairly places the onus of responsibility for establishing what happened on 9/11 with those who uphold the official conspiracy theory, which is now widely disbelieved.Time, in other words, for a real, competent, and open, forensic investigation. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 8:45 am GMT • 200 Words @Wizard of Oz Sorry did I get that wrong? Yes you guessed right about which plane I meant.
Your answer that the charges had to be set off in WTC 7 to conceal the wiring is certainly not crazy but not very satisfactory. Ah, but yes, the fire that burned all day was set opportunistically after Flight 93 went AWOL.
That leaves motive for including WTC 7 in the plot at all unless there was indeed something that had to hidden by destruction. Proof? Evidence?
There were a lot of passenger calls from Flight 93 that I was referring to. Are you amongst those who deny the technical feasibility? One way or another there seems to be a problem there with the conspiracy versions.
And what's the explanation for UA 93 not being adequately controlled by computer or remotely if it was intended for WTC 7.
Proof? Evidence?
Excuse me, under the previous American Pravda articles by Ron, I specifically asked you to outline the strongest evidence available that the government story on 9/11 is substantially true, i.e. Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda etcetera.
In response, you wrote a long series of twaddles, idiotic non-sequitirs interspersed with vile ad hominem and never produced a single piece of evidence.
NOTHING. There is a clear electronic record of this:`
and here: http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-alexander-cockburn-and-the-british-spies/#comment-1550686
I continually ask the shit eaters such as yourself what is the evidence for this government story. You never ever every provide any! In general, you end up falling back on the ridiculous position that the government story being the government story is proof!
Well, eventually, I always corner you on this. Always. You end up having to walk away, but never have the minimal honesty to simply admit that you cannot produce any evidence because you have none.
And then within a few days or so after that, you are back, quibbling with some other person asking them to produce evidence of something or other.
I will reiterate. If you want to turn over a new leaf and be an honest, decent person, you should do one of two things:
1. Outline what you think the strongest evidence for the government story is.
2. Admit that you have no evidence.There are no other logical possibilities. What is it? 1. or 2.?
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz Fortunately I have missed most of your agitated comments directed at me, including the repetitious stuff which, contrary to what the preceding paragraphs led me to expect, proved to be just you quoting yourself.In the meantime I have come across someone who is almost unique in my experience of those whose reaction to the official reports [note that it is or ought to be plural] on 9/11 matters is to respond with scepticism as a minimum. CalDre with whom I have exchanged comments writes with intelligence and civility that makes rational conversation not only possible but agreeable.
Your performances are, by contrast, a case for diagnosis. Are they attempts at persuasion by rational argument, or at persuasion at all? On the face of it the insulting language would rule that out unless it is understood as the kind of persuasion-by-bullying practised in the Gulag or Lubyanka.
Well I don't get very excited by 9/11 matters and I get even less out of contemplating the frothings of those who do, so I shall take my leave of whoever or what "Jonathan Revusky" may be and confine any discussion of 9/11 matters to those who have demostrated at least a modicum of rational intelligence and civility. , @Wizard of Oz And BTW my querying reference to proof and evidence which you used as a hook for a generalised rant was about what might have been stored in WTC 7, without copies or backup, that needed to be destroyed. As I pointed out there were otherwise serious problems of motive raised by supposing WTC 7 was part of the plot. Do you condescend to detail? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 2:53 pm GMT
By the looks of thsee incredibly stupid comments on 9/11 and the Holocaust, it seems doubtful that the CIA would need to do anything more than accurately describe the fringe theories currently in circulation.
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- CanSpeccy says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 3:00 pm GMT • 100 Words @Wizard of Oz And why doesn't that apply precisely to just about everything you have posted and how come you can't see it - or think you can get away with others not noticing?
And where have you complained about the constant reiteration of the symmetrical fall alleged impossibility, the particles of thermite, the steel couldn't have been melted nonsense (it wasn't melting that was the point), the forewarning to the BBC and, not least, the failure to account for the videos of the fires burning all day in WTC 7 and what that could have resulted in.
My particular analysis of motive I have neither seen emphasised by anyone else nor answered on UR at all. Have you? Or seen it dealt with elsewhere as you imply?
As it happens there is now an exception. Just about the first UR commenter to doubt something like the official 9/11 story that has not only a respectably functioning intellect but has deployed it on the issue. See posts by CalDre on this thread and my conversation with him.
Acttually there is indeed a question of motive on WTC 7 (if it was demolished by explosives) left well unanswered by anything but the supposition that there was something within that needed to be destroyed of which there were no copies.
WizOz, what are you on about? I've read your comment twice and can make no sense of it.
But here's a question about 9/11 from esteemed Unz Review contributor Paul Craig Roberts:
Who are the real conspiracy kooks, the majority who disbelieve the official lies or the minority who believe the official lies?
True, his designation of the official story as lies is question begging, but it fairly places the onus of responsibility for establishing what happened on 9/11 with those who uphold the official conspiracy theory, which is now widely disbelieved.
Time, in other words, for a real, competent, and open, forensic investigation.
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz I hope you understood at least that I was saying your #174 comment was at best a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Beyond that i can't help beyond suggesting you have a good sleep, a cold shower, and try again.It's no use quoting PCR to me. Indeed calling him esteemed casts doubt on our sharing the same planet as I read quite a few of his effusions and eventually joined those who had written him down as a crank, and not even one from whom one could pick up useful or interesting facts or stimulating cogently reasoned ideas. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 3:10 pm GMT • 200 Words
1. Outline what you think the strongest evidence for the government story is.
All of it. What kind of nonsense question is this? You can read the evidence in multiple places. And we already know what your response is to every single bit of evidence: "The Government faked it!"
So if someone were to say "Osama Bin Laden admitted to planinng the attack on video," you would say "Bin Laden was a robot created by the CIA" or whatever your moronic theory is.
If someone said "We know that Atta and the other hijackers were taking flight training and that they had meetings in Afghanistan planning the attacks," then you would say "They were rehearsing a play!" or something that is actually somewhat dumber than that.
"There are no other logical possibilities. What is it? 1. or 2.?"
Allow me to present a third alternative:
3. Arguing with conspiracy theorists is a huge waste of time because they have no idea what they are talking about and are so ideologically blinded that they will never accept any evidence no matter how convincing and authoritative.
See? Even in the meta-discussion of this conspiracy, your logic is flawed.
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyHey, shit eater, can't you read? I didn't say "all of it". I said outline the strongest evidence available. I worded it that way because I anticipate the shit eater response that... oh, there is just so much evidence that you can't possibly outline it all! So I just said, "outline the strongest evidence". NOT all of it .1. Outline what you think the strongest evidence for the government story is.All of it. What kind of nonsense question is this?What is the strongest evidence available, in your opinion that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated from Afghanistan by a bearded religious fanatic named Osama bin Laden?
Anyway, asking for the evidence is not a "nonsense question". Well, it is if you're a shit eater, because if you're a shit eater, you eat up whatever bullshit they throw in your general direction, so they said it on the TV so it's true, and there is no need for any actual evidence.
I understand the shit eater mentality.
Okay, is that your answer? Is that the strongest evidence available?
So if someone were to say "Osama Bin Laden admitted to planinng the attack on video,"
If someone said "We know that Atta and the other hijackers were taking flight training and that they had meetings in Afghanistan planning the attacks,"Okay, that they were at the flight school is proof that they flew buildings in to skyscrapers. That's what you're saying? Okay, is that the strongest evidence available or is it the aforementioned videos?As for the meetings in Afghanistan, uhh, that is claimed. What is the proof of that? They took minutes of the meeting and we have the records? There's a recording? Or is it just that they claimed that these meetings took place and it's just an unsubstantiated claim?
Well, that's not what's happening in these exchanges. What keeps happening is that I keep asking what the evidence is and nobody provides any.
3. Arguing with conspiracy theorists is a huge waste of time because they have no idea what they are talking about and are so ideologically blinded that they will never accept any evidence no matter how convincing and authoritative.You say the evidence is the video of Bin Laden? Well, there's expert opinion that the videos are fake. But, in any case, if a plane flies into a building tomorrow on the other side of the world, in China say, I could immediately put up a video claiming that I made this happen. Would that be hard proof?
And pointing to some guys who were in a flight school, therefore they hijacked the planes... this is not strong proof. In general, the proof cannot be equally consistent with the people people being patsies. It's like claiming that Oswald was in the vicinity there when the thing went down. Well, of course he was, he had to be because he was the patsy, so they could frame him. He couldn't be off in Timbuktu at the time, because then he'd have an alibi!
You have to be able to claim the guys went to a flight school, and thus knew how to fly the plane, because otherwise the whole story is a non-starter.
There is no proof of the story that withstands the laugh test. Anybody who has seriously looked into this knows that.
Arguing with a shit eater is a waste of time, because when you ask them for the evidence for whatever bullshit they have gobbled up, they never concede that THEY SIMPLY HAVE NONE. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- bunga says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 3:11 pm GMT • 100 Words
The turning point was the beheadings last month of two US journalists by members of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or Isis. Once videos of their killings were posted on the internet by Isis, their deaths amounted to virtual public executions.
Bill McInturff, a Republican-aligned pollster who along with a Democratic colleague conducts the closely watched Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, said the change in public opinion had been "sudden". That poll showed 61 per cent of respondents thought military action against Isis was in America's national interest." – See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2014/09/arabs-rouhani-matthews/#sthash.xX4Cnzub.dpufDo American warmongers need a theory? Anything will do. The sheeple will pass flatulence and think they are clearing the air .
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- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 4:38 pm GMT • 100 Words @CanSpeccy WizOz, what are you on about? I've read your comment twice and can make no sense of it.
But here's a question about 9/11 from esteemed Unz Review contributor Paul Craig Roberts:
Who are the real conspiracy kooks, the majority who disbelieve the official lies or the minority who believe the official lies?True, his designation of the official story as lies is question begging, but it fairly places the onus of responsibility for establishing what happened on 9/11 with those who uphold the official conspiracy theory, which is now widely disbelieved.Time, in other words, for a real, competent, and open, forensic investigation.
I hope you understood at least that I was saying your #174 comment was at best a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Beyond that i can't help beyond suggesting you have a good sleep, a cold shower, and try again.
It's no use quoting PCR to me. Indeed calling him esteemed casts doubt on our sharing the same planet as I read quite a few of his effusions and eventually joined those who had written him down as a crank, and not even one from whom one could pick up useful or interesting facts or stimulating cogently reasoned ideas.
• Replies: @CanSpeccyI was saying your #174 comment was at best a case of the pot calling the kettle blackBut you said it in five unintelligible paragraphs instead, perhaps to conceal that there was no logical basis to your claim.As for your contempt for Unz Review contributor, PCR, it makes one wonder why you hang around here so much. Are you, perhaps, one of Cass Sunstein's boys ? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 5:12 pm GMT • 200 Words @Jonathan Revusky
Proof? Evidence?Excuse me, under the previous American Pravda articles by Ron, I specifically asked you to outline the strongest evidence available that the government story on 9/11 is substantially true, i.e. Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda etcetera.In response, you wrote a long series of twaddles, idiotic non-sequitirs interspersed with vile ad hominem and never produced a single piece of evidence.
NOTHING. There is a clear electronic record of this:`
Here: http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-did-the-us-plan-a-nuclear-first-strike-against-russia-in-the-early-1960s/#comment-1532488
and here: http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-alexander-cockburn-and-the-british-spies/#comment-1550686
I continually ask the shit eaters such as yourself what is the evidence for this government story. You never ever every provide any! In general, you end up falling back on the ridiculous position that the government story being the government story is proof!
Well, eventually, I always corner you on this. Always. You end up having to walk away, but never have the minimal honesty to simply admit that you cannot produce any evidence because you have none.
And then within a few days or so after that, you are back, quibbling with some other person asking them to produce evidence of something or other.
I will reiterate. If you want to turn over a new leaf and be an honest, decent person, you should do one of two things:
1. Outline what you think the strongest evidence for the government story is.
2. Admit that you have no evidence.There are no other logical possibilities. What is it? 1. or 2.?
Fortunately I have missed most of your agitated comments directed at me, including the repetitious stuff which, contrary to what the preceding paragraphs led me to expect, proved to be just you quoting yourself.
In the meantime I have come across someone who is almost unique in my experience of those whose reaction to the official reports [note that it is or ought to be plural] on 9/11 matters is to respond with scepticism as a minimum. CalDre with whom I have exchanged comments writes with intelligence and civility that makes rational conversation not only possible but agreeable.
Your performances are, by contrast, a case for diagnosis. Are they attempts at persuasion by rational argument, or at persuasion at all? On the face of it the insulting language would rule that out unless it is understood as the kind of persuasion-by-bullying practised in the Gulag or Lubyanka.
Well I don't get very excited by 9/11 matters and I get even less out of contemplating the frothings of those who do, so I shall take my leave of whoever or what "Jonathan Revusky" may be and confine any discussion of 9/11 matters to those who have demostrated at least a modicum of rational intelligence and civility.
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyFortunately I have missed most of your agitated comments directed at me,Uh huh, yeah right, except there is a problem with what you are saying. The problem is this: YOU ARE LYING YOUR ASS OFF.You did not fail to respond to my last posts because you "missed" my "agitated comments". You failed to respond because you were cornered and had no response. Everybody who was reading the exchange (possibly nobody or many people, I dunno...) knows this.
Specifically, you tried the sophomoric trick of trying to claim that the proof of the government's story was that it was the government's story.
I said no dice, you can't do that and you were out of bullets and walked away. That was here:
http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-alexander-cockburn-and-the-british-spies/#comment-1550686
The reason that this comment went with no reply from you was because you were cornered and could not reply.
Or, if you can, fine. So it's just back to where were were at. Please outline the best available evidence for the US govt story (Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda etc.) or admit that there is no real evidence.
so I shall take my leave of whoever or what "Jonathan Revusky" may be and confine any discussion of 9/11 matters to those who have demonstrated at least a modicum of rational intelligence and civility.TRANSLATION: "I will only debate with people who let me get away with murder in the debate. this "Jonathan Revusky" doesn't let me get away with this shit, like that the government's story is proof of the government's story so obviously I can't debate with him. Oh, I'll pretend that I don't debate with him because of his horrible personality, though, not because I am incapable of it..."
The issue is obviously not my deplorable personality. The issue is that I posed the completely legitimate question of what is the best evidence available of the US govt story on 9/11. You obviously cannot reply because there is no evidence for the story and you are trying to blow smoke to avoid conceding that point. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 5:31 pm GMT • 100 Words @Jonathan Revusky
Proof? Evidence?Excuse me, under the previous American Pravda articles by Ron, I specifically asked you to outline the strongest evidence available that the government story on 9/11 is substantially true, i.e. Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda etcetera.In response, you wrote a long series of twaddles, idiotic non-sequitirs interspersed with vile ad hominem and never produced a single piece of evidence.
NOTHING. There is a clear electronic record of this:`
Here: http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-did-the-us-plan-a-nuclear-first-strike-against-russia-in-the-early-1960s/#comment-1532488
and here: http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-alexander-cockburn-and-the-british-spies/#comment-1550686
I continually ask the shit eaters such as yourself what is the evidence for this government story. You never ever every provide any! In general, you end up falling back on the ridiculous position that the government story being the government story is proof!
Well, eventually, I always corner you on this. Always. You end up having to walk away, but never have the minimal honesty to simply admit that you cannot produce any evidence because you have none.
And then within a few days or so after that, you are back, quibbling with some other person asking them to produce evidence of something or other.
I will reiterate. If you want to turn over a new leaf and be an honest, decent person, you should do one of two things:
1. Outline what you think the strongest evidence for the government story is.
2. Admit that you have no evidence.There are no other logical possibilities. What is it? 1. or 2.?
And BTW my querying reference to proof and evidence which you used as a hook for a generalised rant was about what might have been stored in WTC 7, without copies or backup, that needed to be destroyed. As I pointed out there were otherwise serious problems of motive raised by supposing WTC 7 was part of the plot. Do you condescend to detail?
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- CanSpeccy says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 5:43 pm GMT • 100 Words @Wizard of Oz I hope you understood at least that I was saying your #174 comment was at best a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Beyond that i can't help beyond suggesting you have a good sleep, a cold shower, and try again.
It's no use quoting PCR to me. Indeed calling him esteemed casts doubt on our sharing the same planet as I read quite a few of his effusions and eventually joined those who had written him down as a crank, and not even one from whom one could pick up useful or interesting facts or stimulating cogently reasoned ideas.
I was saying your #174 comment was at best a case of the pot calling the kettle black
But you said it in five unintelligible paragraphs instead, perhaps to conceal that there was no logical basis to your claim.
As for your contempt for Unz Review contributor, PCR, it makes one wonder why you hang around here so much. Are you, perhaps, one of Cass Sunstein's boys ?
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyAre you, perhaps, one of Cass Sunstein's boys?As best I understand, this Wizard of Oz creep is some kind of elderly lawyer down in Australia. A real sleazebag shyster type lawyer, perhaps the Aussie equivalent of Alan Dershowitz.He has a certain bag of tricks that he uses to blow smoke. This guy is an absolutely disgusting individual and it's really nauseating to interact with him. Maybe it's just a waste of time because surely most everybody sees through this guy's charlatanry by now.
My approach has just been to try to corner him into admitting that he has no evidence for the official 9/11 story. By now, he has tried every sophomoric trick, like claiming that the onus on me to prove something to him, or then claiming that the proof of the government story is the government story. Now, he is claiming that he won't respond because of my deplorable personality.
It's like he has a bag of tricks that he goes through. "Oh, that one didn't work, so now I'll try this one..."
The guy really is just disgusting. A real piece of shit. But regarding your Cass Sunstein allusion, I have no idea. It is hard to see why somebody would do what Wizard does here just on his own dime, with this level of persistence, if there was nothing in it for him. But I dunno. It's hard to fathom the psychology of some people. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 6:59 pm GMT @CanSpeccy But if you really want a short, clear, definitive, irrefutable and conclusive debunking of 9/11 Truther theories here it is :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuC_4mGTs98
I love it!
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- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 8:29 pm GMT • 300 Words @Wizard of Oz Fortunately I have missed most of your agitated comments directed at me, including the repetitious stuff which, contrary to what the preceding paragraphs led me to expect, proved to be just you quoting yourself.
In the meantime I have come across someone who is almost unique in my experience of those whose reaction to the official reports [note that it is or ought to be plural] on 9/11 matters is to respond with scepticism as a minimum. CalDre with whom I have exchanged comments writes with intelligence and civility that makes rational conversation not only possible but agreeable.
Your performances are, by contrast, a case for diagnosis. Are they attempts at persuasion by rational argument, or at persuasion at all? On the face of it the insulting language would rule that out unless it is understood as the kind of persuasion-by-bullying practised in the Gulag or Lubyanka.
Well I don't get very excited by 9/11 matters and I get even less out of contemplating the frothings of those who do, so I shall take my leave of whoever or what "Jonathan Revusky" may be and confine any discussion of 9/11 matters to those who have demostrated at least a modicum of rational intelligence and civility.
Fortunately I have missed most of your agitated comments directed at me,
Uh huh, yeah right, except there is a problem with what you are saying. The problem is this: YOU ARE LYING YOUR ASS OFF.
You did not fail to respond to my last posts because you "missed" my "agitated comments". You failed to respond because you were cornered and had no response. Everybody who was reading the exchange (possibly nobody or many people, I dunno ) knows this.
Specifically, you tried the sophomoric trick of trying to claim that the proof of the government's story was that it was the government's story.
I said no dice, you can't do that and you were out of bullets and walked away. That was here:
http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-alexander-cockburn-and-the-british-spies/#comment-1550686
The reason that this comment went with no reply from you was because you were cornered and could not reply.
Or, if you can, fine. So it's just back to where were were at. Please outline the best available evidence for the US govt story (Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda etc.) or admit that there is no real evidence.
so I shall take my leave of whoever or what "Jonathan Revusky" may be and confine any discussion of 9/11 matters to those who have demonstrated at least a modicum of rational intelligence and civility.
TRANSLATION: "I will only debate with people who let me get away with murder in the debate. this "Jonathan Revusky" doesn't let me get away with this shit, like that the government's story is proof of the government's story so obviously I can't debate with him. Oh, I'll pretend that I don't debate with him because of his horrible personality, though, not because I am incapable of it "
The issue is obviously not my deplorable personality. The issue is that I posed the completely legitimate question of what is the best evidence available of the US govt story on 9/11. You obviously cannot reply because there is no evidence for the story and you are trying to blow smoke to avoid conceding that point.
• Replies: @CanSpeccy Actually, Jonathan, WizOz is absolutely correct in identifying you - a critic of the official 9/11 story - as a crackpot conspiracy theorist. This is simply a matter of definition, as Ron Unz explains. CIA-inspired media usage has defined the questioning of official history as crackpot conspiracy theorizing.A crackpot conspiracy theory, so defined, may, of course, be entirely correct and it may be obviously correct to a normally intelligent person presented with the relevant evidence. But it is still consistent with current media usage to call it a crackpot conspiracy theory.
Likewise, in accordance with current media usage, any official theory is correct because it is official, although at the same time it may be total bollocks.
In fact, any theory that is quite consistently labelled a crackpot conspiracy theory by the media is almost certainly at least in part true, since otherwise failing institutions such as the New York Times and the PuffHo would not waste their diminishing capital of credibility by mocking it. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 8:45 pm GMT • 600 Words @Boris
1. Outline what you think the strongest evidence for the government story is.All of it. What kind of nonsense question is this? You can read the evidence in multiple places. And we already know what your response is to every single bit of evidence: "The Government faked it!"So if someone were to say "Osama Bin Laden admitted to planinng the attack on video," you would say "Bin Laden was a robot created by the CIA" or whatever your moronic theory is.
If someone said "We know that Atta and the other hijackers were taking flight training and that they had meetings in Afghanistan planning the attacks," then you would say "They were rehearsing a play!" or something that is actually somewhat dumber than that.
"There are no other logical possibilities. What is it? 1. or 2.?"
Allow me to present a third alternative:
3. Arguing with conspiracy theorists is a huge waste of time because they have no idea what they are talking about and are so ideologically blinded that they will never accept any evidence no matter how convincing and authoritative.
See? Even in the meta-discussion of this conspiracy, your logic is flawed.
1. Outline what you think the strongest evidence for the government story is.
All of it. What kind of nonsense question is this?
Hey, shit eater, can't you read? I didn't say "all of it". I said outline the strongest evidence available. I worded it that way because I anticipate the shit eater response that oh, there is just so much evidence that you can't possibly outline it all! So I just said, "outline the strongest evidence". NOT all of it .
What is the strongest evidence available, in your opinion that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated from Afghanistan by a bearded religious fanatic named Osama bin Laden?
Anyway, asking for the evidence is not a "nonsense question". Well, it is if you're a shit eater, because if you're a shit eater, you eat up whatever bullshit they throw in your general direction, so they said it on the TV so it's true, and there is no need for any actual evidence.
I understand the shit eater mentality.
So if someone were to say "Osama Bin Laden admitted to planinng the attack on video,"
Okay, is that your answer? Is that the strongest evidence available?
[MORE]
If someone said "We know that Atta and the other hijackers were taking flight training and that they had meetings in Afghanistan planning the attacks,"
Okay, that they were at the flight school is proof that they flew buildings in to skyscrapers. That's what you're saying? Okay, is that the strongest evidence available or is it the aforementioned videos?
As for the meetings in Afghanistan, uhh, that is claimed. What is the proof of that? They took minutes of the meeting and we have the records? There's a recording? Or is it just that they claimed that these meetings took place and it's just an unsubstantiated claim?
3. Arguing with conspiracy theorists is a huge waste of time because they have no idea what they are talking about and are so ideologically blinded that they will never accept any evidence no matter how convincing and authoritative.
Well, that's not what's happening in these exchanges. What keeps happening is that I keep asking what the evidence is and nobody provides any.
You say the evidence is the video of Bin Laden? Well, there's expert opinion that the videos are fake. But, in any case, if a plane flies into a building tomorrow on the other side of the world, in China say, I could immediately put up a video claiming that I made this happen. Would that be hard proof?
And pointing to some guys who were in a flight school, therefore they hijacked the planes this is not strong proof. In general, the proof cannot be equally consistent with the people people being patsies. It's like claiming that Oswald was in the vicinity there when the thing went down. Well, of course he was, he had to be because he was the patsy, so they could frame him. He couldn't be off in Timbuktu at the time, because then he'd have an alibi!
You have to be able to claim the guys went to a flight school, and thus knew how to fly the plane, because otherwise the whole story is a non-starter.
There is no proof of the story that withstands the laugh test. Anybody who has seriously looked into this knows that.
Arguing with a shit eater is a waste of time, because when you ask them for the evidence for whatever bullshit they have gobbled up, they never concede that THEY SIMPLY HAVE NONE. • Replies: @Boris
What is the strongest evidence available, in your opinion that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated from Afghanistan by a bearded religious fanatic named Osama bin Laden?9/11 was a complicated plot so asking for the "strongest evidnce" doesn't even make sense.
We have video and records of guys in an organization that wanted to commit terrorism in America arriving in America, researching how to fly commercial airplanes, showing up at the airport on 9/11 and boarding the flights. We have recordings of the hijackers picked up by ATC. We have recordings of flight attendants calling and describing stabbings on board, and lots more calls from passengers in flight describing what is happening. We have video of the Twin Towers being hit by airplanes. Then the guy in charge of everything puts out a video about how great a job they did.
Yes, it would be possible to fake all of that (well, not the planes hitting the buildings). And yet no one has ever put forth any convincing evidence that it was. Hm.
You say the evidence is the video of Bin Laden? Well, there's expert opinion that the videos are fake.Far more experts think it's real. I guess they are in on it?Well, of course he was, he had to be because he was the patsy, so they could frame him.Well now you want to argue your stupid conspiracy theory. See, any evidence that is presented can be made into fit into some alternate theory. But those alternate theories never seem to have any evidence backing them up.I'm looking forward* to your discussion of the phone calls from the plane and how they were made by CIA actors and the family members of the dead are really lizard replicants and holograms and nukes and on and on and on.
*I am not actually looking forward to this. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 9:05 pm GMT • 200 Words @CanSpeccy
I was saying your #174 comment was at best a case of the pot calling the kettle blackBut you said it in five unintelligible paragraphs instead, perhaps to conceal that there was no logical basis to your claim.As for your contempt for Unz Review contributor, PCR, it makes one wonder why you hang around here so much. Are you, perhaps, one of Cass Sunstein's boys ?
Are you, perhaps, one of Cass Sunstein's boys?
As best I understand, this Wizard of Oz creep is some kind of elderly lawyer down in Australia. A real sleazebag shyster type lawyer, perhaps the Aussie equivalent of Alan Dershowitz.
He has a certain bag of tricks that he uses to blow smoke. This guy is an absolutely disgusting individual and it's really nauseating to interact with him. Maybe it's just a waste of time because surely most everybody sees through this guy's charlatanry by now.
My approach has just been to try to corner him into admitting that he has no evidence for the official 9/11 story. By now, he has tried every sophomoric trick, like claiming that the onus on me to prove something to him, or then claiming that the proof of the government story is the government story. Now, he is claiming that he won't respond because of my deplorable personality.
It's like he has a bag of tricks that he goes through. "Oh, that one didn't work, so now I'll try this one "
The guy really is just disgusting. A real piece of shit. But regarding your Cass Sunstein allusion, I have no idea. It is hard to see why somebody would do what Wizard does here just on his own dime, with this level of persistence, if there was nothing in it for him. But I dunno. It's hard to fathom the psychology of some people.
• Replies: @CanSpeccy Oh come'n. The Wiz isn't as bad as Dershowitz.Thing is though, there's probably not much difference between a lawyer and a professional troll.
Both are annoying and mostly a waste of time. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- CanSpeccy says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 9:23 pm GMT • 200 Words @Jonathan Revusky
Fortunately I have missed most of your agitated comments directed at me,Uh huh, yeah right, except there is a problem with what you are saying. The problem is this: YOU ARE LYING YOUR ASS OFF.You did not fail to respond to my last posts because you "missed" my "agitated comments". You failed to respond because you were cornered and had no response. Everybody who was reading the exchange (possibly nobody or many people, I dunno...) knows this.
Specifically, you tried the sophomoric trick of trying to claim that the proof of the government's story was that it was the government's story.
I said no dice, you can't do that and you were out of bullets and walked away. That was here:
http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-alexander-cockburn-and-the-british-spies/#comment-1550686
The reason that this comment went with no reply from you was because you were cornered and could not reply.
Or, if you can, fine. So it's just back to where were were at. Please outline the best available evidence for the US govt story (Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda etc.) or admit that there is no real evidence.
so I shall take my leave of whoever or what "Jonathan Revusky" may be and confine any discussion of 9/11 matters to those who have demonstrated at least a modicum of rational intelligence and civility.TRANSLATION: "I will only debate with people who let me get away with murder in the debate. this "Jonathan Revusky" doesn't let me get away with this shit, like that the government's story is proof of the government's story so obviously I can't debate with him. Oh, I'll pretend that I don't debate with him because of his horrible personality, though, not because I am incapable of it..."
The issue is obviously not my deplorable personality. The issue is that I posed the completely legitimate question of what is the best evidence available of the US govt story on 9/11. You obviously cannot reply because there is no evidence for the story and you are trying to blow smoke to avoid conceding that point.
Actually, Jonathan, WizOz is absolutely correct in identifying you - a critic of the official 9/11 story - as a crackpot conspiracy theorist. This is simply a matter of definition, as Ron Unz explains. CIA-inspired media usage has defined the questioning of official history as crackpot conspiracy theorizing.
A crackpot conspiracy theory, so defined, may, of course, be entirely correct and it may be obviously correct to a normally intelligent person presented with the relevant evidence. But it is still consistent with current media usage to call it a crackpot conspiracy theory.
Likewise, in accordance with current media usage, any official theory is correct because it is official, although at the same time it may be total bollocks.
In fact, any theory that is quite consistently labelled a crackpot conspiracy theory by the media is almost certainly at least in part true, since otherwise failing institutions such as the New York Times and the PuffHo would not waste their diminishing capital of credibility by mocking it.
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz Well you don't rave like the frothing Revusky so I shall mention here an interesting link to follow and that is Wikipedia on thermite. I don't remember anything about thermite reactions at least as such from 6th form Chemistry and now realise that aluminium is frequently at the core of thermite reactions, thereby lending support to the recently expounded theories of heating, and explosions, which would correct the official versions. (There was about 30 tons of aluminium in each plane from memory). I couldn't see anything about a thermite connection to demolitions. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Conspiracy Theories Are True | Bill Totten's Weblog says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 9:53 pm GMT
[ ] {2} http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-how-the-cia-invented-conspiracy-theories/ [ ]
- ogunsiron says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 9:54 pm GMT @5371 This is a good piece which deserved an acceptable level of mental hygiene in the comment section. Unfortunately, two of the first nine comments are from morons spamming their "no lunar landing" drivel. In all probability the "no nuclear weapons" clowns will also be here imminently. Oh well, a delicious sweet dish will attract a fly as much as a gourmet.
In all probability the "no nuclear weapons" clowns will also be here imminently
Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
--
The flat earth guys might beat them to it.
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 11:12 pm GMT • 300 Words @Jonathan Revusky
Hey, shit eater, can't you read? I didn't say "all of it". I said outline the strongest evidence available. I worded it that way because I anticipate the shit eater response that... oh, there is just so much evidence that you can't possibly outline it all! So I just said, "outline the strongest evidence". NOT all of it .1. Outline what you think the strongest evidence for the government story is.All of it. What kind of nonsense question is this?What is the strongest evidence available, in your opinion that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated from Afghanistan by a bearded religious fanatic named Osama bin Laden?
Anyway, asking for the evidence is not a "nonsense question". Well, it is if you're a shit eater, because if you're a shit eater, you eat up whatever bullshit they throw in your general direction, so they said it on the TV so it's true, and there is no need for any actual evidence.
I understand the shit eater mentality.
Okay, is that your answer? Is that the strongest evidence available?
So if someone were to say "Osama Bin Laden admitted to planinng the attack on video,"
If someone said "We know that Atta and the other hijackers were taking flight training and that they had meetings in Afghanistan planning the attacks,"Okay, that they were at the flight school is proof that they flew buildings in to skyscrapers. That's what you're saying? Okay, is that the strongest evidence available or is it the aforementioned videos?As for the meetings in Afghanistan, uhh, that is claimed. What is the proof of that? They took minutes of the meeting and we have the records? There's a recording? Or is it just that they claimed that these meetings took place and it's just an unsubstantiated claim?
Well, that's not what's happening in these exchanges. What keeps happening is that I keep asking what the evidence is and nobody provides any.
3. Arguing with conspiracy theorists is a huge waste of time because they have no idea what they are talking about and are so ideologically blinded that they will never accept any evidence no matter how convincing and authoritative.You say the evidence is the video of Bin Laden? Well, there's expert opinion that the videos are fake. But, in any case, if a plane flies into a building tomorrow on the other side of the world, in China say, I could immediately put up a video claiming that I made this happen. Would that be hard proof?
And pointing to some guys who were in a flight school, therefore they hijacked the planes... this is not strong proof. In general, the proof cannot be equally consistent with the people people being patsies. It's like claiming that Oswald was in the vicinity there when the thing went down. Well, of course he was, he had to be because he was the patsy, so they could frame him. He couldn't be off in Timbuktu at the time, because then he'd have an alibi!
You have to be able to claim the guys went to a flight school, and thus knew how to fly the plane, because otherwise the whole story is a non-starter.
There is no proof of the story that withstands the laugh test. Anybody who has seriously looked into this knows that.
Arguing with a shit eater is a waste of time, because when you ask them for the evidence for whatever bullshit they have gobbled up, they never concede that THEY SIMPLY HAVE NONE.
What is the strongest evidence available, in your opinion that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated from Afghanistan by a bearded religious fanatic named Osama bin Laden?
9/11 was a complicated plot so asking for the "strongest evidnce" doesn't even make sense.
We have video and records of guys in an organization that wanted to commit terrorism in America arriving in America, researching how to fly commercial airplanes, showing up at the airport on 9/11 and boarding the flights. We have recordings of the hijackers picked up by ATC. We have recordings of flight attendants calling and describing stabbings on board, and lots more calls from passengers in flight describing what is happening. We have video of the Twin Towers being hit by airplanes. Then the guy in charge of everything puts out a video about how great a job they did.
Yes, it would be possible to fake all of that (well, not the planes hitting the buildings). And yet no one has ever put forth any convincing evidence that it was. Hm.
You say the evidence is the video of Bin Laden? Well, there's expert opinion that the videos are fake.
Far more experts think it's real. I guess they are in on it?
Well, of course he was, he had to be because he was the patsy, so they could frame him.
Well now you want to argue your stupid conspiracy theory. See, any evidence that is presented can be made into fit into some alternate theory. But those alternate theories never seem to have any evidence backing them up.
I'm looking forward* to your discussion of the phone calls from the plane and how they were made by CIA actors and the family members of the dead are really lizard replicants and holograms and nukes and on and on and on.
[MORE]
*I am not actually looking forward to this.• Replies: @Jonathan Revusky
9/11 was a complicated plot so asking for the "strongest evidnce" doesn't even make sense.TRANSLATION OF SHIT-EATER SPEAK: "I have no real evidence so I'm going to pretend that the other person is being unreasonable when he asks for some.We have video and records of guys in an organization that wanted to commit terrorism in America...Hey, shit eater, you ever heard of the "beg the question fallacy"? What that means is that you can't assume the thing that you are trying to prove in your proof.Anyway, what "videos" and "records" are you referring to specifically? It seems to me that you're just repeating the story as proof of the story, which is, of course, what shit eaters do when you ask them for proof of whatever bullshit.
Oh, you no one has ever put forth any convincing evidence that any of this is fake. Look, at this point, there is a vast literature on this. And, yes, they have put forward VERY convincing evidence that basically ALL OF IT is fake! In particular, the alleged phone calls from the planes that detail the official narrative, these are very problematic, not technically possible even.
Yes, it would be possible to fake all of that (well, not the planes hitting the buildings). And yet no one has ever put forth any convincing evidence that it was. Hm.In any case, a video of a plane hitting a building is not proof that some bearded guy in Afghanistan caused it to happen. By that reasoning, the Zapruder film of Kennedy being shot is proof that Oswald did it. It is not.
Also, the video of a plane hitting a building is not proof that this is the cause of the building's subsequent implosion. Particularly problematic is the third building WTC 7, which was not hit by a plane, yet imploded in a perfectly symmetrical straight-down fashion that can only be achieved via controlled demolition.
Which experts think that the Bin Laden "confession videos" are real? Can you name any of these "experts"?You say the evidence is the video of Bin Laden? Well, there's expert opinion that the videos are fake.Far more experts think it's real. I guess they are in on it?In any case, anybody can say anything on a video. It's not very strong proof. I can put up a video on youtube saying I did it.
The main alternative theory is that the buildings were prewired with explosives for a controlled demolition. As regards WTC7, there is no reasonable doubt of this really, because the building was not hit by a plane even. But, obviously, once you recognize that one building was pre-rigged for controlled demolition, it becomes fairly obvious that all three were.
Well now you want to argue your stupid conspiracy theory. See, any evidence that is presented can be made into fit into some alternate theory. But those alternate theories never seem to have any evidence backing them up.In any case, I did not actually propose any alternative story. I requested that you and whatever other shit eaters tell me what they think the strongest evidence for the official story is.
There simply is not very much. It's stuff like somebody says they got a phone call from a plane in which the person told them that such-and-such had happened. Fine, I could say I got a phone call. There are people who will say anything for a few bucks.I could put up a video saying I did it.
When you look at what you are presenting as evidence, it's very very weak. There's basically nothing there.
Meanwhile, the physical evidence, that the collision of a single airliner with a building the size of WTC1 or WTC2 is simply not going to cause what then happened. A 90-ton aluminum tube crashing into 100,000 tons of structural steel, is simply not going to cause the latter to disintegrate.
And why a third building that is not even hit by a plane should disintegrate as a result, this really only has one explanation, which is that the building in question was prerigged with explosives.
And that is why there are over 2000 professional architects and engineers who have signed the Architechts and Engineers for 9/11 Truth petition calling for a new investigation. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 8, 2016 at 11:49 pm GMT
1. Demand evidence.
Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
2. Call people "shit eaters" until they get sick of you and leave.
3. Declare victory!
- CanSpeccy says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 12:05 am GMT @Jonathan Revusky
Are you, perhaps, one of Cass Sunstein's boys?As best I understand, this Wizard of Oz creep is some kind of elderly lawyer down in Australia. A real sleazebag shyster type lawyer, perhaps the Aussie equivalent of Alan Dershowitz.He has a certain bag of tricks that he uses to blow smoke. This guy is an absolutely disgusting individual and it's really nauseating to interact with him. Maybe it's just a waste of time because surely most everybody sees through this guy's charlatanry by now.
My approach has just been to try to corner him into admitting that he has no evidence for the official 9/11 story. By now, he has tried every sophomoric trick, like claiming that the onus on me to prove something to him, or then claiming that the proof of the government story is the government story. Now, he is claiming that he won't respond because of my deplorable personality.
It's like he has a bag of tricks that he goes through. "Oh, that one didn't work, so now I'll try this one..."
The guy really is just disgusting. A real piece of shit. But regarding your Cass Sunstein allusion, I have no idea. It is hard to see why somebody would do what Wizard does here just on his own dime, with this level of persistence, if there was nothing in it for him. But I dunno. It's hard to fathom the psychology of some people.
Oh come'n. The Wiz isn't as bad as Dershowitz.
Thing is though, there's probably not much difference between a lawyer and a professional troll.
Both are annoying and mostly a waste of time.
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyOh come'n. The Wiz isn't as bad as Dershowitz.Well, probably not, but that would mostly be because he lacks the talent.I mean one thing that is clear about this Wizard is that this guy is really really stupid. I mean, you ask him for proof of the government story and he tells you that the government story is proof of the government story.
Of course, Alan Dershowitz would make the same argument basically, but it would be masked in a more clever way. The Wizard just openly tells you that the proof of the government story is that it's the government story. Sheesh, what a moron...
Thing is though, there's probably not much difference between a lawyer and a professional troll.Well, he apparently really is a lawyer down in Australia. That is what he has said, and I believe it is true. , @NosytheDuke The Wiz is a fraud and a troll. All puffery and no pastry. Not worth your time. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- BobFromTheHills says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 12:31 am GMT • 300 Words
We accept the principle of cross examination when the government charges someone with a crime and the case goes to court. What about if the case never makes it court? A crime occurs, but the life of the accused is snatched away before a trial can commence. In those situations, if the crime is serious enough, the government usually undertakes an investigation and issues a report which contains the same evidence that would have been used in court.
We saw that with president Kennedys assassination, and we saw that with 911 attacks. In both cases, the accused were dead before a trial ever started. No accused, no trial. No trial, no cross examination. Just a report.
And we're supposed to trust the report. Believe the report. The report knows all.
But why?
Just because there's no trial doesn't mean there can't be a cross examination of the states evidence. The only difference is that the evidence has been released in a report instead of a court trial. Why is this evidence not a fit target for cross examination, especially by people possessing relevant competencies? Why is that delegated to crazy, conspiracy thinking?
Without cross examination, the government has not legitimately proven it's case. Without that challenge, we only have half the story. Criminal trials, the Constitution, and justice itself becomes a farce. If the accused were to conveniently die before the trial, that also conveniently negates the need to share the evidence with anyone. The government can then frame the case and generate the proper presentation, to fix the light in order to cast the shadows and manufacture the perceptions it wants.
Conspiracy Theorists are simply people who have the temerity to point this out and follow through with a cross examination.
If the government itself committed a crime (or a cabal within it), how would you know?
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyWe accept the principle of cross examination when the government charges someone with a crime and the case goes to court.Yeah, this is a very important point you make actually. For example, as far as I can tell, none of the testimony provided that established the official government story on 9/11 was ever subjected to any sort of adversarial cross-examination. Somebody says they got a phone call from a plane and therefore it's true.Or for example, somebody in this thread says that there are all these "experts" who say that whatever Bin Laden video is authentic. But, as far as I can tell, these are just CIA connected "experts" saying: "Yep, the video is real." And they're not saying it under oath, under penalty of perjury or anything. And again, no cross-examination....
So, some guy who looks vaguely like Bin Laden is in a video chortling with glee, saying he made this happen.
Or somebody says that there was a meeting in Afghanistan in which the attacks were discussed. How do we know this? Oh, that's in the report... It always boils down to the notion that the government story is true because it's the government story.
I'm not a lawyer but I think the technical term in jurisprudence for all this level of "evidence" is that it's just "hearsay". Statements that aren't under oath and not subjected to any cross-examination... just hearsay...
And on the basis of this, we launched a war on the other side of the world and caused the deaths of so many people. Just some cock-and-bull story for which there is no evidence whatsoever. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.
If the accused were to conveniently die before the trial, that also conveniently negates the need to share the evidence with anyoneWell, yeah... actually, in these Deep State operations, the patsies are pretty much invariably killed. And then, of course, the government can claim whatever it wants basically. That's how it works... Of course... Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 12:49 am GMT • 100 Words @CanSpeccy Actually, Jonathan, WizOz is absolutely correct in identifying you - a critic of the official 9/11 story - as a crackpot conspiracy theorist. This is simply a matter of definition, as Ron Unz explains. CIA-inspired media usage has defined the questioning of official history as crackpot conspiracy theorizing.
A crackpot conspiracy theory, so defined, may, of course, be entirely correct and it may be obviously correct to a normally intelligent person presented with the relevant evidence. But it is still consistent with current media usage to call it a crackpot conspiracy theory.
Likewise, in accordance with current media usage, any official theory is correct because it is official, although at the same time it may be total bollocks.
In fact, any theory that is quite consistently labelled a crackpot conspiracy theory by the media is almost certainly at least in part true, since otherwise failing institutions such as the New York Times and the PuffHo would not waste their diminishing capital of credibility by mocking it.
Well you don't rave like the frothing Revusky so I shall mention here an interesting link to follow and that is Wikipedia on thermite. I don't remember anything about thermite reactions at least as such from 6th form Chemistry and now realise that aluminium is frequently at the core of thermite reactions, thereby lending support to the recently expounded theories of heating, and explosions, which would correct the official versions. (There was about 30 tons of aluminium in each plane from memory). I couldn't see anything about a thermite connection to demolitions.
• Replies: @CanSpeccyI don't remember anything about thermite reactions at least as such from 6th form Chemistry and now realise that aluminium is frequently at the core of thermite reactions, thereby lending support to the recently expounded theories of heating, and explosions, which would correct the official versions.Yes, either your ignorance is profound, or your intent to divert the discussion into a nonsensical channel is exposed.Bulk aluminum doesn't ignite in a building fire. According to one source, aluminum must be vaporized before it will burn and the boiling point of aluminum is 3,986 Farenheit, whereas the adiabatic flame temperature of Kerosene in air, at around 3597 Farenheit, is 400 degrees lower. Moreover, the jet fuel fires in the Twin Towers would likely have burned at considerably lower temperatures due to oxygen supply limitations.
Aluminum burns readily in a thermitic compound comprising aluminum in a finely divided form intimately mixed with an oxidizer, usually iron oxide. In the process of combustion aluminum is oxidized, while the iron oxide is reduced to pure molten iron, which will be found in the reaction residue in the form of iron microspheres, just as were abundant in the ash collected in the vicinity of the Twin Towers.
Among the best authorities on thermite is the National Institute of Standards, or NIST, the non-governmental body hired to "explain" the collapse of the Twin Towers and WTC 7. In the past, NIST worked closely with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on the development of explosive nanothermites .
Oddly, it apparently never occurred to the NIST investigators of the collapse of three WTC buildings that explosives such as thermite, a material long used in controlled building demolitions , might have been involved in the perfect implosion of three WTC buildings. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 1:06 am GMT • 700 Words @Boris
What is the strongest evidence available, in your opinion that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated from Afghanistan by a bearded religious fanatic named Osama bin Laden?9/11 was a complicated plot so asking for the "strongest evidnce" doesn't even make sense.
We have video and records of guys in an organization that wanted to commit terrorism in America arriving in America, researching how to fly commercial airplanes, showing up at the airport on 9/11 and boarding the flights. We have recordings of the hijackers picked up by ATC. We have recordings of flight attendants calling and describing stabbings on board, and lots more calls from passengers in flight describing what is happening. We have video of the Twin Towers being hit by airplanes. Then the guy in charge of everything puts out a video about how great a job they did.
Yes, it would be possible to fake all of that (well, not the planes hitting the buildings). And yet no one has ever put forth any convincing evidence that it was. Hm.
You say the evidence is the video of Bin Laden? Well, there's expert opinion that the videos are fake.Far more experts think it's real. I guess they are in on it?Well, of course he was, he had to be because he was the patsy, so they could frame him.Well now you want to argue your stupid conspiracy theory. See, any evidence that is presented can be made into fit into some alternate theory. But those alternate theories never seem to have any evidence backing them up.I'm looking forward* to your discussion of the phone calls from the plane and how they were made by CIA actors and the family members of the dead are really lizard replicants and holograms and nukes and on and on and on.
*I am not actually looking forward to this.9/11 was a complicated plot so asking for the "strongest evidnce" doesn't even make sense.
TRANSLATION OF SHIT-EATER SPEAK: "I have no real evidence so I'm going to pretend that the other person is being unreasonable when he asks for some.
We have video and records of guys in an organization that wanted to commit terrorism in America
Hey, shit eater, you ever heard of the "beg the question fallacy"? What that means is that you can't assume the thing that you are trying to prove in your proof.
Anyway, what "videos" and "records" are you referring to specifically? It seems to me that you're just repeating the story as proof of the story, which is, of course, what shit eaters do when you ask them for proof of whatever bullshit.
Yes, it would be possible to fake all of that (well, not the planes hitting the buildings). And yet no one has ever put forth any convincing evidence that it was. Hm.
Oh, you no one has ever put forth any convincing evidence that any of this is fake. Look, at this point, there is a vast literature on this. And, yes, they have put forward VERY convincing evidence that basically ALL OF IT is fake! In particular, the alleged phone calls from the planes that detail the official narrative, these are very problematic, not technically possible even.
In any case, a video of a plane hitting a building is not proof that some bearded guy in Afghanistan caused it to happen. By that reasoning, the Zapruder film of Kennedy being shot is proof that Oswald did it. It is not.
Also, the video of a plane hitting a building is not proof that this is the cause of the building's subsequent implosion. Particularly problematic is the third building WTC 7, which was not hit by a plane, yet imploded in a perfectly symmetrical straight-down fashion that can only be achieved via controlled demolition.
You say the evidence is the video of Bin Laden? Well, there's expert opinion that the videos are fake.
Far more experts think it's real. I guess they are in on it?
Which experts think that the Bin Laden "confession videos" are real? Can you name any of these "experts"?
In any case, anybody can say anything on a video. It's not very strong proof. I can put up a video on youtube saying I did it.
Well now you want to argue your stupid conspiracy theory. See, any evidence that is presented can be made into fit into some alternate theory. But those alternate theories never seem to have any evidence backing them up.
The main alternative theory is that the buildings were prewired with explosives for a controlled demolition. As regards WTC7, there is no reasonable doubt of this really, because the building was not hit by a plane even. But, obviously, once you recognize that one building was pre-rigged for controlled demolition, it becomes fairly obvious that all three were.
In any case, I did not actually propose any alternative story. I requested that you and whatever other shit eaters tell me what they think the strongest evidence for the official story is.
There simply is not very much. It's stuff like somebody says they got a phone call from a plane in which the person told them that such-and-such had happened. Fine, I could say I got a phone call. There are people who will say anything for a few bucks.I could put up a video saying I did it.
When you look at what you are presenting as evidence, it's very very weak. There's basically nothing there.
Meanwhile, the physical evidence, that the collision of a single airliner with a building the size of WTC1 or WTC2 is simply not going to cause what then happened. A 90-ton aluminum tube crashing into 100,000 tons of structural steel, is simply not going to cause the latter to disintegrate.
And why a third building that is not even hit by a plane should disintegrate as a result, this really only has one explanation, which is that the building in question was prerigged with explosives.
And that is why there are over 2000 professional architects and engineers who have signed the Architechts and Engineers for 9/11 Truth petition calling for a new investigation.
• Replies: @BorisHey, shit eater, you ever heard of the "beg the question fallacy"? What that means is that you can't assume the thing that you are trying to prove in your proof.I am aware of that particular fallacy, fuckface.Anyway, what "videos" and "records" are you referring to specifically?Video surveillance of Atta at the airport. His purchase of the tickets. Money trails. And etc. etc. etc.Yes, there is a vast circle jerk of conspiracy theorists.
Look, at this point, there is a vast literature on this.Not technically possible? So the whole Airfone ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airfone ) business was faked for years in anticipation of the deception? Our government overlords have a great deal of foresight. And what evidence is there that the calls were faked? The Fake Calls theory is one of the dumbest of those associated with truthers, so it doesn't surprise me to find that you are an adherent.
In particular, the alleged phone calls from the planes that detail the official narrative, these are very problematic, not technically possible even.Aside from various non-experts claiming that the collapse "looked like a controlled demolition" there is no evidence for this theory. No explosives found. No wires found. Nothing. But you are already at the "no reasonable doubt" stage? What a deep thinker you are!
The main alternative theory is that the buildings were prewired with explosives for a controlled demolition. As regards WTC7, there is no reasonable doubt of this really, because the building was not hit by a plane even.A 90-ton aluminum tube crashing into 100,000 tons of structural steel, is simply not going to cause the latter to disintegrate.Evidence for this statement? Your feelings? Not very scientific, fuckface. , @Incitatus "The main alternative theory is that the buildings were prewired with explosives for a controlled demolition. As regards WTC7, there is no reasonable doubt of this really, because the building was not hit by a plane even. But, obviously, once you recognize that one building was pre-rigged for controlled demolition, it becomes fairly obvious that all three were."None dispute 9/11 was a conspiracy, but who was in it? Nineteen hijackers trained in Afghanistan and funded by Gulf money (the govt story)? The Bush administration? Some other govt? Why?
You've obviously done a great deal of research and conclude (as you say) all WTC towers were intentionally demolished. Please share your theory. If it was a scripted event:
• Why did WT 1 (the first tower hit) fall after WT 2? Did conspirators mix up demo timing?
• Why did they bother to take down WT 7? Wouldn't the lack of aerial impact reveal demo and conspiracy?
• How did conspirators mine 240 exterior columns on each office floor of WT 1 & 2 (±50,000 locations) without detection? Central core columns? Freestanding columns in public view at grade? How was it concealed from building tenants, management, maintenance staff, visitors, CoNY building inspectors, supply services, etc? And the same in WTC 7?
• Architects and engineers from Minoru Yamasaki & Associates, Emery Roth & Sons, Worthington Skilling Helle & Jackson, Joseph R. Loring & Assoc, Jaros Blum & Bolles, and the numerous other firms responsible for the WTC don't appear to be part of ae911truth. Are they part of the conspiracy? Are WTC building contractors and subcontractors part of the conspiracy? Building tenants?
• How could the same administration that ignored 9/11 warnings, bungled Katrina and screwed-up Iraq 2003 pull off such a complex, faultless conspiracy? Why have no insiders spilled the tale?I'm on the fence. I'd really like to know. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 2:05 am GMT • 300 Words @Jonathan Revusky
9/11 was a complicated plot so asking for the "strongest evidnce" doesn't even make sense.TRANSLATION OF SHIT-EATER SPEAK: "I have no real evidence so I'm going to pretend that the other person is being unreasonable when he asks for some.We have video and records of guys in an organization that wanted to commit terrorism in America...Hey, shit eater, you ever heard of the "beg the question fallacy"? What that means is that you can't assume the thing that you are trying to prove in your proof.Anyway, what "videos" and "records" are you referring to specifically? It seems to me that you're just repeating the story as proof of the story, which is, of course, what shit eaters do when you ask them for proof of whatever bullshit.
Oh, you no one has ever put forth any convincing evidence that any of this is fake. Look, at this point, there is a vast literature on this. And, yes, they have put forward VERY convincing evidence that basically ALL OF IT is fake! In particular, the alleged phone calls from the planes that detail the official narrative, these are very problematic, not technically possible even.
Yes, it would be possible to fake all of that (well, not the planes hitting the buildings). And yet no one has ever put forth any convincing evidence that it was. Hm.In any case, a video of a plane hitting a building is not proof that some bearded guy in Afghanistan caused it to happen. By that reasoning, the Zapruder film of Kennedy being shot is proof that Oswald did it. It is not.
Also, the video of a plane hitting a building is not proof that this is the cause of the building's subsequent implosion. Particularly problematic is the third building WTC 7, which was not hit by a plane, yet imploded in a perfectly symmetrical straight-down fashion that can only be achieved via controlled demolition.
Which experts think that the Bin Laden "confession videos" are real? Can you name any of these "experts"?You say the evidence is the video of Bin Laden? Well, there's expert opinion that the videos are fake.Far more experts think it's real. I guess they are in on it?In any case, anybody can say anything on a video. It's not very strong proof. I can put up a video on youtube saying I did it.
The main alternative theory is that the buildings were prewired with explosives for a controlled demolition. As regards WTC7, there is no reasonable doubt of this really, because the building was not hit by a plane even. But, obviously, once you recognize that one building was pre-rigged for controlled demolition, it becomes fairly obvious that all three were.
Well now you want to argue your stupid conspiracy theory. See, any evidence that is presented can be made into fit into some alternate theory. But those alternate theories never seem to have any evidence backing them up.In any case, I did not actually propose any alternative story. I requested that you and whatever other shit eaters tell me what they think the strongest evidence for the official story is.
There simply is not very much. It's stuff like somebody says they got a phone call from a plane in which the person told them that such-and-such had happened. Fine, I could say I got a phone call. There are people who will say anything for a few bucks.I could put up a video saying I did it.
When you look at what you are presenting as evidence, it's very very weak. There's basically nothing there.
Meanwhile, the physical evidence, that the collision of a single airliner with a building the size of WTC1 or WTC2 is simply not going to cause what then happened. A 90-ton aluminum tube crashing into 100,000 tons of structural steel, is simply not going to cause the latter to disintegrate.
And why a third building that is not even hit by a plane should disintegrate as a result, this really only has one explanation, which is that the building in question was prerigged with explosives.
And that is why there are over 2000 professional architects and engineers who have signed the Architechts and Engineers for 9/11 Truth petition calling for a new investigation.
Hey, shit eater, you ever heard of the "beg the question fallacy"? What that means is that you can't assume the thing that you are trying to prove in your proof.
I am aware of that particular fallacy, fuckface.
Anyway, what "videos" and "records" are you referring to specifically?
Video surveillance of Atta at the airport. His purchase of the tickets. Money trails. And etc. etc. etc.
Look, at this point, there is a vast literature on this.
Yes, there is a vast circle jerk of conspiracy theorists.
In particular, the alleged phone calls from the planes that detail the official narrative, these are very problematic, not technically possible even.
Not technically possible? So the whole Airfone ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airfone ) business was faked for years in anticipation of the deception? Our government overlords have a great deal of foresight. And what evidence is there that the calls were faked? The Fake Calls theory is one of the dumbest of those associated with truthers, so it doesn't surprise me to find that you are an adherent.
The main alternative theory is that the buildings were prewired with explosives for a controlled demolition. As regards WTC7, there is no reasonable doubt of this really, because the building was not hit by a plane even.
Aside from various non-experts claiming that the collapse "looked like a controlled demolition" there is no evidence for this theory. No explosives found. No wires found. Nothing. But you are already at the "no reasonable doubt" stage? What a deep thinker you are!
A 90-ton aluminum tube crashing into 100,000 tons of structural steel, is simply not going to cause the latter to disintegrate.
Evidence for this statement? Your feelings? Not very scientific, fuckface.
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskySo you say, but there is actually no sign at all that you are aware of that fallacy.Hey, shit eater, you ever heard of the "beg the question fallacy"? What that means is that you can't assume the thing that you are trying to prove in your proof.I am aware of that particular fallacy, fuckface.In general, I've debated with shit eaters enough to know that, as a general rule, they do not understand the "beg the question" fallacy. Because they always, always, end up telling you that the government story is proof of the government story. They always do. It never fails.
Well, you see, you don't even understand the basic parameters of the debate. You have to come up with "proof" that is not equally consistent with the person being a patsy. You know, it's like if you say that Lee Harvey Oswald was in the schoolbook depository building at the time of the assassination. Well, that's just as consistent with him being a patsy as being the killer! He has to be in approximately the right place at the right time so that you can frame him for the crime! And the same applies here.
Video surveillance of Atta at the airport. His purchase of the tickets. Money trails. And etc. etc. etc.But you don't understand that apparently!
So, that there is a record of Atta, or somebody representing that he's Atta, purchasing the tickets, this is just as consistent with Atta being a patsy as actually being a perpetrator. You're presenting this as proof but it is not proof of anything. Or it's stuff like there's a video of some guy who looks like Bin Laden saying he made this happen. I could put up a video making the same claim. These are just airy fairy things that are not real proof of anything. And you apparently think that it's normal that you can just launch some war and kill so many thousands of innocents based on some story with this level of proof. It's just ridiculous.
Hmm, well, have you read any of of the authors in question? David Ray Griffin, for example? Or Webster Tarpley? Have you looked at any of the material on the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth website.Look, at this point, there is a vast literature on this.Yes, there is a vast circle jerk of conspiracy theorists.
I kind of doubt it. Officialdom just tells you what to think of this stuff and you've almost certainly never checked for yourself.
Well, I know this. You're not the first shit eater I've debated with.
The Fake Calls theory is one of the dumbest of those associated with truthers, so it doesn't surprise me to find that you are an adherent.I simply asked you what the proof of the story was. Okay, so somebody says they got a phone call. And that's proof. For you. Or they say that there were meetings in Afghanistan in which the attacks were discussed. What is the proof of that? It's just the story they tell and the story is proof of the story. You actually clearly do not understand the "beg the question" fallacy.Now, even if the phone calls were technically possible, which I do doubt, it hardly is proof. And certainly it is not proof of the central thesis of the government, that all of this was orchestrated by people in faroff Afghanistan. That was the basis for the subsequent war that was launched.
Aside from various non-experts claiming that the collapse "looked like a controlled demolition" there is no evidence for this theory. No explosives found.Well, now it's becoming clear that you just don't know anything about this topic. Go to http://ae911truth.org/ and you'll see that the people saying this have very high levels of expertise.As for there being no evidence for the "theory" that WTC7 was a controlled demolition, the case is in fact overwhelming. This is simply because there is no building collapse that looks exactly like a controlled demolition that is not, in fact, a controlled demolition. Something that symmetrical obviously has to be engineered.
As for no proof of explosives being found, this is because they specifically did not look for any.
Well, go to http://ae911truth.org/ and get educated. Anybody with, let's say, a decent high school education, who spends as much as a half day on the internet contrasting different sources, will see that the ae911truth people are simply telling the truth. And that means that the government story of what happened is simply impossible.A 90-ton aluminum tube crashing into 100,000 tons of structural steel, is simply not going to cause the latter to disintegrate.Evidence for this statement? Your feelings? Not very scientific, fuckface.
This is most absolutely clear with the WTC7, since that building was not even hit by a plane. They are trying to claim that a building can implode in a perfectly symmetrical way from uncontrolled fires. The building has 40-odd steel support columns that would all have to give way within the same split second. That has to be engineered. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 2:22 am GMT • 300 Words @BobFromTheHills We accept the principle of cross examination when the government charges someone with a crime and the case goes to court. What about if the case never makes it court? A crime occurs, but the life of the accused is snatched away before a trial can commence. In those situations, if the crime is serious enough, the government usually undertakes an investigation and issues a report which contains the same evidence that would have been used in court.
We saw that with president Kennedys assassination, and we saw that with 911 attacks. In both cases, the accused were dead before a trial ever started. No accused, no trial. No trial, no cross examination. Just a report.
And we're supposed to trust the report. Believe the report. The report knows all.
But why?
Just because there's no trial doesn't mean there can't be a cross examination of the states evidence. The only difference is that the evidence has been released in a report instead of a court trial. Why is this evidence not a fit target for cross examination, especially by people possessing relevant competencies? Why is that delegated to crazy, conspiracy thinking?
Without cross examination, the government has not legitimately proven it's case. Without that challenge, we only have half the story. Criminal trials, the Constitution, and justice itself becomes a farce. If the accused were to conveniently die before the trial, that also conveniently negates the need to share the evidence with anyone. The government can then frame the case and generate the proper presentation, to fix the light in order to cast the shadows and manufacture the perceptions it wants.
Conspiracy Theorists are simply people who have the temerity to point this out and follow through with a cross examination.
If the government itself committed a crime (or a cabal within it), how would you know?
We accept the principle of cross examination when the government charges someone with a crime and the case goes to court.
Yeah, this is a very important point you make actually. For example, as far as I can tell, none of the testimony provided that established the official government story on 9/11 was ever subjected to any sort of adversarial cross-examination. Somebody says they got a phone call from a plane and therefore it's true.
Or for example, somebody in this thread says that there are all these "experts" who say that whatever Bin Laden video is authentic. But, as far as I can tell, these are just CIA connected "experts" saying: "Yep, the video is real." And they're not saying it under oath, under penalty of perjury or anything. And again, no cross-examination .
So, some guy who looks vaguely like Bin Laden is in a video chortling with glee, saying he made this happen.
Or somebody says that there was a meeting in Afghanistan in which the attacks were discussed. How do we know this? Oh, that's in the report It always boils down to the notion that the government story is true because it's the government story.
I'm not a lawyer but I think the technical term in jurisprudence for all this level of "evidence" is that it's just "hearsay". Statements that aren't under oath and not subjected to any cross-examination just hearsay
And on the basis of this, we launched a war on the other side of the world and caused the deaths of so many people. Just some cock-and-bull story for which there is no evidence whatsoever. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.
If the accused were to conveniently die before the trial, that also conveniently negates the need to share the evidence with anyone
Well, yeah actually, in these Deep State operations, the patsies are pretty much invariably killed. And then, of course, the government can claim whatever it wants basically. That's how it works Of course
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- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 2:36 am GMT • 100 Words @CanSpeccy Oh come'n. The Wiz isn't as bad as Dershowitz.
Thing is though, there's probably not much difference between a lawyer and a professional troll.
Both are annoying and mostly a waste of time.
Oh come'n. The Wiz isn't as bad as Dershowitz.
Well, probably not, but that would mostly be because he lacks the talent.
I mean one thing that is clear about this Wizard is that this guy is really really stupid. I mean, you ask him for proof of the government story and he tells you that the government story is proof of the government story.
Of course, Alan Dershowitz would make the same argument basically, but it would be masked in a more clever way. The Wizard just openly tells you that the proof of the government story is that it's the government story. Sheesh, what a moron
Thing is though, there's probably not much difference between a lawyer and a professional troll.
Well, he apparently really is a lawyer down in Australia. That is what he has said, and I believe it is true.
• Replies: @CanSpeccyI mean one thing that is clear about this Wizard is that this guy is really really stupid. I mean, you ask him for proof of the government story and he tells you that the government story is proof of the government story.But that's the thing. That's how truth is defined in this politically correct age. So it's by definition, the government story is proof of the government story.George Orwell unfortunately mis-dated his book 1984 , he was about 20 years too soon. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 4:01 am GMT • 900 Words @Boris
Hey, shit eater, you ever heard of the "beg the question fallacy"? What that means is that you can't assume the thing that you are trying to prove in your proof.I am aware of that particular fallacy, fuckface.Anyway, what "videos" and "records" are you referring to specifically?Video surveillance of Atta at the airport. His purchase of the tickets. Money trails. And etc. etc. etc.Yes, there is a vast circle jerk of conspiracy theorists.
Look, at this point, there is a vast literature on this.Not technically possible? So the whole Airfone ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airfone ) business was faked for years in anticipation of the deception? Our government overlords have a great deal of foresight. And what evidence is there that the calls were faked? The Fake Calls theory is one of the dumbest of those associated with truthers, so it doesn't surprise me to find that you are an adherent.
In particular, the alleged phone calls from the planes that detail the official narrative, these are very problematic, not technically possible even.Aside from various non-experts claiming that the collapse "looked like a controlled demolition" there is no evidence for this theory. No explosives found. No wires found. Nothing. But you are already at the "no reasonable doubt" stage? What a deep thinker you are!
The main alternative theory is that the buildings were prewired with explosives for a controlled demolition. As regards WTC7, there is no reasonable doubt of this really, because the building was not hit by a plane even.A 90-ton aluminum tube crashing into 100,000 tons of structural steel, is simply not going to cause the latter to disintegrate.Evidence for this statement? Your feelings? Not very scientific, fuckface.Hey, shit eater, you ever heard of the "beg the question fallacy"? What that means is that you can't assume the thing that you are trying to prove in your proof.
I am aware of that particular fallacy, fuckface.
So you say, but there is actually no sign at all that you are aware of that fallacy.
In general, I've debated with shit eaters enough to know that, as a general rule, they do not understand the "beg the question" fallacy. Because they always, always, end up telling you that the government story is proof of the government story. They always do. It never fails.
Video surveillance of Atta at the airport. His purchase of the tickets. Money trails. And etc. etc. etc.
Well, you see, you don't even understand the basic parameters of the debate. You have to come up with "proof" that is not equally consistent with the person being a patsy. You know, it's like if you say that Lee Harvey Oswald was in the schoolbook depository building at the time of the assassination. Well, that's just as consistent with him being a patsy as being the killer! He has to be in approximately the right place at the right time so that you can frame him for the crime! And the same applies here.
But you don't understand that apparently!
So, that there is a record of Atta, or somebody representing that he's Atta, purchasing the tickets, this is just as consistent with Atta being a patsy as actually being a perpetrator. You're presenting this as proof but it is not proof of anything. Or it's stuff like there's a video of some guy who looks like Bin Laden saying he made this happen. I could put up a video making the same claim. These are just airy fairy things that are not real proof of anything. And you apparently think that it's normal that you can just launch some war and kill so many thousands of innocents based on some story with this level of proof. It's just ridiculous.
Look, at this point, there is a vast literature on this.
Yes, there is a vast circle jerk of conspiracy theorists.
Hmm, well, have you read any of of the authors in question? David Ray Griffin, for example? Or Webster Tarpley? Have you looked at any of the material on the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth website.
I kind of doubt it. Officialdom just tells you what to think of this stuff and you've almost certainly never checked for yourself.
Well, I know this. You're not the first shit eater I've debated with.
The Fake Calls theory is one of the dumbest of those associated with truthers, so it doesn't surprise me to find that you are an adherent.
I simply asked you what the proof of the story was. Okay, so somebody says they got a phone call. And that's proof. For you. Or they say that there were meetings in Afghanistan in which the attacks were discussed. What is the proof of that? It's just the story they tell and the story is proof of the story. You actually clearly do not understand the "beg the question" fallacy.
Now, even if the phone calls were technically possible, which I do doubt, it hardly is proof. And certainly it is not proof of the central thesis of the government, that all of this was orchestrated by people in faroff Afghanistan. That was the basis for the subsequent war that was launched.
Aside from various non-experts claiming that the collapse "looked like a controlled demolition" there is no evidence for this theory. No explosives found.
Well, now it's becoming clear that you just don't know anything about this topic. Go to http://ae911truth.org/ and you'll see that the people saying this have very high levels of expertise.
As for there being no evidence for the "theory" that WTC7 was a controlled demolition, the case is in fact overwhelming. This is simply because there is no building collapse that looks exactly like a controlled demolition that is not, in fact, a controlled demolition. Something that symmetrical obviously has to be engineered.
As for no proof of explosives being found, this is because they specifically did not look for any.
A 90-ton aluminum tube crashing into 100,000 tons of structural steel, is simply not going to cause the latter to disintegrate.
Evidence for this statement? Your feelings? Not very scientific, fuckface.
Well, go to http://ae911truth.org/ and get educated. Anybody with, let's say, a decent high school education, who spends as much as a half day on the internet contrasting different sources, will see that the ae911truth people are simply telling the truth. And that means that the government story of what happened is simply impossible.
This is most absolutely clear with the WTC7, since that building was not even hit by a plane. They are trying to claim that a building can implode in a perfectly symmetrical way from uncontrolled fires. The building has 40-odd steel support columns that would all have to give way within the same split second. That has to be engineered.
• Replies: @BorisYou have to come up with "proof" that is not equally consistent with the person being a patsy.This is not how evidence works. YOU have to come up with proof that the hijackers were patsies. I mean, your whole line is breathtakingly stupid. Now you prove that Muhammad Atta was not a shape-shifting alien. Well, he MUST be a shape-shifting alien because you have NO evidence that he isn't one!So, that there is a record of Atta, or somebody representing that he's Atta, purchasing the ticketsAnd now you are basically admitting my shape-shifting alien theory is true!
it's normal that you can just launch some war and kill so many thousands of innocents based on some story with this level of proof.The war was incredibly stupid. But people do stupid things based on real-life events ALL THE TIME. 9/11 doesn't have to be fake for the war to be a horrendous idea.I simply asked you what the proof of the story was. Okay, so somebody says they got a phone call. And that's proof. For you.Here there is lots of evidence. Yes, we have multiple people who say they received phone calls from loved ones. We have multiple recordings of these phone calls. We have the phone records of these phone calls. And we have zero evidence that any of those things are fraudulent or incorrect.Now, even if the phone calls were technically possible, which I do doubt, it hardly is proof.Your "doubt" just shows your ignorance. Air phones actually existed. I know my only proof is the experience of tens of thousands of people who made calls from airplanes and the decade long existence of two competing companies who manufactured, installed and maintained those devices. But sure, maybe the shape-shifters did all that.Anybody with, let's say, a decent high school education, who spends as much as a half day on the internet contrasting different sources, will see that the ae911truth people are simply telling the truth.Oh, yeah, why spend years getting a degree in structural engineering when you can spend an afternoon and have it all figured out? Look, you still think the phone calls were fake and impossible, and you expect me to believe that you understand the nuances of a complex, dynamic process like a building collapse? The fact is that you really, really WANT a conspiracy to exist, so you will believe literally anything that confirms that conclusion. It makes you feel special and smart--for once.I know conspiracy sites exist, but for someone who shrilly demands "proof" at every turn, your posts are extremely light on evidence. , @Rurik Hey JR,
I see you're having your fun with the shit eaters.
are their any who are sincerely duped?
or are they all cynical liars (like the 'wizard') desperately trying to defend the bullshit official narrative in order to protect the real criminals and continue using that singular crime as a pretext for destroying all of Israel's neighbors?
I recently posted a story of an 87 year old German lady who Germany has sent to prison for questioning some of the holy and sacred tenets of the Holocaust.
when I read what you wrote here, it reminds me of her queries to the authorities for some proof of what they claim vis-à-vis the Holocaust.
Because they always, always, end up telling you that the government story is proof of the government story. They always do. It never fails.
"You know about it [Auschwitz] only through the grapevine-like me." This spurred Bjoern Joensson, the presiding judge, to retort, "It is pointless holding a debate with someone who can't accept any facts," adding: "Neither do I have to prove to you that the world is round."
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/11/14/nazi-grandma/75773774/her inquisitors are demanding that their official narrative, because it's the official narrative , is prima facia proof that it's all true, because those in power say it is, sans actual evidence. To doubt them and their narrative is literally the same as questioning if the world is round (except that they won't put you in prison for that). No proof or evidence is necessary. Its like a modern day Galileo where the authorities are simply able to tell everyone what is true, and we're all supposed to fall in line. Or else. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- NosytheDuke says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 5:38 am GMT @CanSpeccy Oh come'n. The Wiz isn't as bad as Dershowitz.
Thing is though, there's probably not much difference between a lawyer and a professional troll.
Both are annoying and mostly a waste of time.
The Wiz is a fraud and a troll. All puffery and no pastry. Not worth your time.
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- Hippopotamusdrome says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 7:22 am GMT @exiled off mainstreet The Israelis learned their false flag lesson from the Nazis, who used concentration camp inmates dressed as Polish soldiers as part of a phony attack on the frontier radio station "Sender Gleiwitz" a day or so before they invaded Poland.
There is a conspiracy theory that it was really Poles.
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- Hippopotamusdrome says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 8:01 am GMT • 100 Words @Darin Yes, why?
If you want to start a war, would you want to start with great defeat and loss of your fleet?
In the thirties, there were three cases of false flag attacks created to justify a war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukden_Incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelling_of_MainilaIn none of these cases the attacker actually killed thousands of his own soldiers, what would be the point?
If you want to start a war, would you want to start with great defeat and loss of your fleet?
The fleet wasn't lost. The carriers were out at sea and not sunk. Eight battleships, three cruisers and three destroyers were damaged. Battleships were obsolete by that time in the face of aircraft. Battleships were mainly used as AA platforms to protect carriers and to bombard airfields.
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- James Charles says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 8:16 am GMT @Pat Casey
Nothing is more convincing though than the clear discomfort of the three astronauts on what would normally be an occasion to celebrate.I know what you mean. I can but believe that you can always trust a tell. For example, this is a hell of a story:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2FyONXh22M
If that guy is lying, he deserves an academy award. At one point he mentions Ft. Belvoir "in Maryland." Well Ft. Belvoir is in Virginia, and that small mistake strikes me as one he would only make if he was telling the truth. The guy has lots of tells like that that you can trust, I trust.
Is this a conspiracy?
U.F.O DISCLOSURE PROJECT -FULL VERSION
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkswXVmG4xM
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- Hippopotamusdrome says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 8:21 am GMT @biz Actually, there is no symmetry in conspiracy theories as you imply.
The definition of a conspiracy theory is an explanation of events that traces them to a secret network, and when presented with contradictory evidence, simply enlarges the network of supposed conspirators rather than modifying the explanation.
So, just to cite one example, all of the 9/11 controlled demolition stuff is a conspiracy theory because at first it had the government and maybe the property owners in on the secret, but then the circle of supposed conspirators was enlarged to include the editors of Popular Mechanics after they did their study. Or take the moon landing, which involved 'only' thousands of NASA people until you point out that the astronauts left mirrors on the surface of the moon in a precise location, for which astronomers around the world use laser ranging to determine the distance to the moon down to the centimeter level. So then the astronomers who claim to do this had to be added to the list of conspirators and liars for this theory to stand. Then of course the more you point out, the more people who have to get added to the conspiracy, which eventually becomes all of the television industry, and even the Soviets!
That is the reason why the so-called alternative explanations for 9/11, the moon landing, the various assassinations, the safety of vaccines, etc, are conspiracy theories, while the mainstream explanations are not.
the astronauts left mirrors on the surface of the moon
It could also be a mirror on the roof of an unmanned probe.
• Replies: @biz No it couldn't. If so, it would be orbiting the moon and its location, not to mention the measured distance to it, would be changing constantly. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- American Pravda: How the CIA Invented "Conspiracy Theories" – The Unz Review | The Center of the Decentralized says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 8:34 am GMT
[ ] Source: American Pravda: How the CIA Invented "Conspiracy Theories" – The Unz Review [ ]
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 1:27 pm GMT • 400 Words @Jonathan Revusky
So you say, but there is actually no sign at all that you are aware of that fallacy.Hey, shit eater, you ever heard of the "beg the question fallacy"? What that means is that you can't assume the thing that you are trying to prove in your proof.I am aware of that particular fallacy, fuckface.In general, I've debated with shit eaters enough to know that, as a general rule, they do not understand the "beg the question" fallacy. Because they always, always, end up telling you that the government story is proof of the government story. They always do. It never fails.
Well, you see, you don't even understand the basic parameters of the debate. You have to come up with "proof" that is not equally consistent with the person being a patsy. You know, it's like if you say that Lee Harvey Oswald was in the schoolbook depository building at the time of the assassination. Well, that's just as consistent with him being a patsy as being the killer! He has to be in approximately the right place at the right time so that you can frame him for the crime! And the same applies here.
Video surveillance of Atta at the airport. His purchase of the tickets. Money trails. And etc. etc. etc.But you don't understand that apparently!
So, that there is a record of Atta, or somebody representing that he's Atta, purchasing the tickets, this is just as consistent with Atta being a patsy as actually being a perpetrator. You're presenting this as proof but it is not proof of anything. Or it's stuff like there's a video of some guy who looks like Bin Laden saying he made this happen. I could put up a video making the same claim. These are just airy fairy things that are not real proof of anything. And you apparently think that it's normal that you can just launch some war and kill so many thousands of innocents based on some story with this level of proof. It's just ridiculous.
Hmm, well, have you read any of of the authors in question? David Ray Griffin, for example? Or Webster Tarpley? Have you looked at any of the material on the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth website.Look, at this point, there is a vast literature on this.Yes, there is a vast circle jerk of conspiracy theorists.
I kind of doubt it. Officialdom just tells you what to think of this stuff and you've almost certainly never checked for yourself.
Well, I know this. You're not the first shit eater I've debated with.
The Fake Calls theory is one of the dumbest of those associated with truthers, so it doesn't surprise me to find that you are an adherent.I simply asked you what the proof of the story was. Okay, so somebody says they got a phone call. And that's proof. For you. Or they say that there were meetings in Afghanistan in which the attacks were discussed. What is the proof of that? It's just the story they tell and the story is proof of the story. You actually clearly do not understand the "beg the question" fallacy.Now, even if the phone calls were technically possible, which I do doubt, it hardly is proof. And certainly it is not proof of the central thesis of the government, that all of this was orchestrated by people in faroff Afghanistan. That was the basis for the subsequent war that was launched.
Aside from various non-experts claiming that the collapse "looked like a controlled demolition" there is no evidence for this theory. No explosives found.Well, now it's becoming clear that you just don't know anything about this topic. Go to http://ae911truth.org/ and you'll see that the people saying this have very high levels of expertise.As for there being no evidence for the "theory" that WTC7 was a controlled demolition, the case is in fact overwhelming. This is simply because there is no building collapse that looks exactly like a controlled demolition that is not, in fact, a controlled demolition. Something that symmetrical obviously has to be engineered.
As for no proof of explosives being found, this is because they specifically did not look for any.
Well, go to http://ae911truth.org/ and get educated. Anybody with, let's say, a decent high school education, who spends as much as a half day on the internet contrasting different sources, will see that the ae911truth people are simply telling the truth. And that means that the government story of what happened is simply impossible.A 90-ton aluminum tube crashing into 100,000 tons of structural steel, is simply not going to cause the latter to disintegrate.Evidence for this statement? Your feelings? Not very scientific, fuckface.
This is most absolutely clear with the WTC7, since that building was not even hit by a plane. They are trying to claim that a building can implode in a perfectly symmetrical way from uncontrolled fires. The building has 40-odd steel support columns that would all have to give way within the same split second. That has to be engineered.
You have to come up with "proof" that is not equally consistent with the person being a patsy.
This is not how evidence works. YOU have to come up with proof that the hijackers were patsies. I mean, your whole line is breathtakingly stupid. Now you prove that Muhammad Atta was not a shape-shifting alien. Well, he MUST be a shape-shifting alien because you have NO evidence that he isn't one!
So, that there is a record of Atta, or somebody representing that he's Atta, purchasing the tickets
And now you are basically admitting my shape-shifting alien theory is true!
it's normal that you can just launch some war and kill so many thousands of innocents based on some story with this level of proof.
The war was incredibly stupid. But people do stupid things based on real-life events ALL THE TIME. 9/11 doesn't have to be fake for the war to be a horrendous idea.
I simply asked you what the proof of the story was. Okay, so somebody says they got a phone call. And that's proof. For you.
Here there is lots of evidence. Yes, we have multiple people who say they received phone calls from loved ones. We have multiple recordings of these phone calls. We have the phone records of these phone calls. And we have zero evidence that any of those things are fraudulent or incorrect.
Now, even if the phone calls were technically possible, which I do doubt, it hardly is proof.
Your "doubt" just shows your ignorance. Air phones actually existed. I know my only proof is the experience of tens of thousands of people who made calls from airplanes and the decade long existence of two competing companies who manufactured, installed and maintained those devices. But sure, maybe the shape-shifters did all that.
Anybody with, let's say, a decent high school education, who spends as much as a half day on the internet contrasting different sources, will see that the ae911truth people are simply telling the truth.
Oh, yeah, why spend years getting a degree in structural engineering when you can spend an afternoon and have it all figured out? Look, you still think the phone calls were fake and impossible, and you expect me to believe that you understand the nuances of a complex, dynamic process like a building collapse? The fact is that you really, really WANT a conspiracy to exist, so you will believe literally anything that confirms that conclusion. It makes you feel special and smart–for once.
I know conspiracy sites exist, but for someone who shrilly demands "proof" at every turn, your posts are extremely light on evidence.
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyThis is not how evidence works. YOU have to come up with proof that the hijackers were patsies.No, that is 180 degrees from the way things do work. If you say these guys committed the crime, the onus is on you to say what the evidence is. In a trial, it is the prosecution that must prove its case. All a defense lawyer has to do is show that the prosecution has not proven the guilt of his client. That's it.But I've been there and done that and this is just typical shit eater stuff. The shit eater always tells you that the onus is on you to prove something to him. No, if you say these guys committed this crime, OBVIOUSLY the onus is on you to prove it.
So, okay then you start waving your hands saying that the official story is so self-evidently correct that anybody who questions it is just obviously crazy. So, logically, there's no getting around this: you're tacitly saying that there is overwhelming evidence for the story. There must be, because you're saying that the people who doubt the story are obviously crazy.
So, obviously, I ask you, like I ask any of the shit eaters, what is the evidence. Then you try to tell me that asking for the evidence is an illegitimate trick! It's so ridiculous it's hilarious, but you're not even the first person to say that to me. At least two or three other shit eaters have told me over the past year that my asking for evidence is a "cheap debating trick" or something like that! LOL.
Finally, what you've come up with as "evidence"is just such an amazing bunch of crap, frankly. Like saying that Mohammed Atta bought a plane ticket. Well, the other passengers bought a plane ticket, didn't they? So they must have hijacked the plane, no?
But the thing is that you don't even understand that the evidence you produce cannot be equally consistent with the person being a patsy as actually having done it! That a plane ticket was purchased in somebody's name. Well, that's totally consistent with an attempt to frame the person for the crime. In any case, it's not even proof that the person even boarded the plane! I could go online and buy a plane ticket in anybody's name to frame the person for a crime....
Just like I could put out a video saying I somehow made the planes fly into the buildings...
This is the kind of pathetic crap that you are coming up with when I ask you to outline the strongest evidence available!
Here there is lots of evidence. Yes, we have multiple people who say they received phone calls from loved ones.As I said before, it's just hearsay. Besides, check this out: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/sep/02/september11.usaMohammed Atta's father says he got a phone call from his son the a day AFTER 9/11.
"My son called me the day after the attacks on September 12 at around midday. We spoke for two minutes about this and that."I guess you don't think that is true Well, Mohammed Atta Sr says he got a phone call, so by your reasoning, he got a phone call, no?
Your "doubt" just shows your ignorance. Air phones actually existed.Goof grief. It is such a waste of time to debate with a shit eater. You guys always try to lower the bar to a ridiculously level. Like now, your argument is that those Airfones "existed". Nothing more. They existed! Guns existed in 1963. Therefore Oswald got a gun and shot Kennedy.Anyway, the problem here is that they first tried to claim that the calls were made from cell phones and then, when it seemed apparent that the calls were not technically possible, said it came from the seat-back phones. Except apparently, the models of plane in question did not have the seat back phones at that point in time. This is all under dispute somewhat and is murky. Regardless, even if the seat-back phones were there on all the planes in question, and thus, the calls were technically possible, that certainly does not prove that the story is true. You're so many degrees away from providing anything that resembles proof of the story!
Look, you still think the phone calls were fake and impossible,Hey, shit eater, you should read what I wrote. I said that I doubted that they were possible. That means I don't know for absolutely sure. Simply demonstrating that the phone calls were possible is not proof that they really happened. A good reference on this is an article by David Ray Griffin from a few years back on this phone calls topic:http://www.globalresearch.ca/phone-calls-from-the-9-11-airliners/16924
DRG studies the various claims and the way the story changed and all the problems with it, and based on what DRG outlines, I think a reasonable person would have very great doubts that this whole story of the phone calls from the planes is really true. Obviously, they would need to claim that these phone calls happened in order to establish the official story. So we're really just about back to the notion that the official story is proof of the official story.
and you expect me to believe that you understand the nuances of a complex, dynamic process like a building collapse?Well, the reason you say that is because, of course, you've never studied the question. No, in fact, there is really very little "nuance" to the question. What they are saying happened is simply physically impossible. All you have to understand is that the steel skeleton of each steel framed high-rise building is made up of 40-odd massive structural steel columns and the only way the thing can fall straight down vertically is for all the columns to fail at precisely the same instant. There is no way that this can result from fires spreading in an uncontrolled manner. At best, you would get very asymmetrical damage. The straight-down implosion that you see with WTC7 must be engineered. It does not take more than half a day on the internet contrasting the various arguments and considering them to realize this. It really just does not.I pointedly asked you what 9/11 Truth material you were familiar with. I specifically asked you whether you had ever read anything by David Ray Griffin or Webster Tarpley, or looked at any of the material on http://ae911truth.org
You did not answer the question. I infer that this means the answer is no. It's an easy to conclusion to draw because you just don't really know what you're talking about. You don't even know what the basic parameters of the debate are.
This is a point that one always reaches when debating with a shit eater. It begins to dawn on the shit eater that he really does not know WTF he is talking about and that he is out of his depth intellectually. So you have a fork in the road at this point. You can amp up all the insults, "conspiracy theorist nya nya". Or you can just walk away. Whatever. But go get educated. Seriously. Everybody can see that you don't know what you're talking. You've never studied the question and you're just making an ass of yourself. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Rurik says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 2:53 pm GMT • 300 Words @Jonathan Revusky
So you say, but there is actually no sign at all that you are aware of that fallacy.Hey, shit eater, you ever heard of the "beg the question fallacy"? What that means is that you can't assume the thing that you are trying to prove in your proof.I am aware of that particular fallacy, fuckface.In general, I've debated with shit eaters enough to know that, as a general rule, they do not understand the "beg the question" fallacy. Because they always, always, end up telling you that the government story is proof of the government story. They always do. It never fails.
Well, you see, you don't even understand the basic parameters of the debate. You have to come up with "proof" that is not equally consistent with the person being a patsy. You know, it's like if you say that Lee Harvey Oswald was in the schoolbook depository building at the time of the assassination. Well, that's just as consistent with him being a patsy as being the killer! He has to be in approximately the right place at the right time so that you can frame him for the crime! And the same applies here.
Video surveillance of Atta at the airport. His purchase of the tickets. Money trails. And etc. etc. etc.But you don't understand that apparently!
So, that there is a record of Atta, or somebody representing that he's Atta, purchasing the tickets, this is just as consistent with Atta being a patsy as actually being a perpetrator. You're presenting this as proof but it is not proof of anything. Or it's stuff like there's a video of some guy who looks like Bin Laden saying he made this happen. I could put up a video making the same claim. These are just airy fairy things that are not real proof of anything. And you apparently think that it's normal that you can just launch some war and kill so many thousands of innocents based on some story with this level of proof. It's just ridiculous.
Hmm, well, have you read any of of the authors in question? David Ray Griffin, for example? Or Webster Tarpley? Have you looked at any of the material on the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth website.Look, at this point, there is a vast literature on this.Yes, there is a vast circle jerk of conspiracy theorists.
I kind of doubt it. Officialdom just tells you what to think of this stuff and you've almost certainly never checked for yourself.
Well, I know this. You're not the first shit eater I've debated with.
The Fake Calls theory is one of the dumbest of those associated with truthers, so it doesn't surprise me to find that you are an adherent.I simply asked you what the proof of the story was. Okay, so somebody says they got a phone call. And that's proof. For you. Or they say that there were meetings in Afghanistan in which the attacks were discussed. What is the proof of that? It's just the story they tell and the story is proof of the story. You actually clearly do not understand the "beg the question" fallacy.Now, even if the phone calls were technically possible, which I do doubt, it hardly is proof. And certainly it is not proof of the central thesis of the government, that all of this was orchestrated by people in faroff Afghanistan. That was the basis for the subsequent war that was launched.
Aside from various non-experts claiming that the collapse "looked like a controlled demolition" there is no evidence for this theory. No explosives found.Well, now it's becoming clear that you just don't know anything about this topic. Go to http://ae911truth.org/ and you'll see that the people saying this have very high levels of expertise.As for there being no evidence for the "theory" that WTC7 was a controlled demolition, the case is in fact overwhelming. This is simply because there is no building collapse that looks exactly like a controlled demolition that is not, in fact, a controlled demolition. Something that symmetrical obviously has to be engineered.
As for no proof of explosives being found, this is because they specifically did not look for any.
Well, go to http://ae911truth.org/ and get educated. Anybody with, let's say, a decent high school education, who spends as much as a half day on the internet contrasting different sources, will see that the ae911truth people are simply telling the truth. And that means that the government story of what happened is simply impossible.A 90-ton aluminum tube crashing into 100,000 tons of structural steel, is simply not going to cause the latter to disintegrate.Evidence for this statement? Your feelings? Not very scientific, fuckface.
This is most absolutely clear with the WTC7, since that building was not even hit by a plane. They are trying to claim that a building can implode in a perfectly symmetrical way from uncontrolled fires. The building has 40-odd steel support columns that would all have to give way within the same split second. That has to be engineered.
Hey JR,
I see you're having your fun with the shit eaters.
are their any who are sincerely duped?
or are they all cynical liars (like the 'wizard') desperately trying to defend the bullshit official narrative in order to protect the real criminals and continue using that singular crime as a pretext for destroying all of Israel's neighbors?
I recently posted a story of an 87 year old German lady who Germany has sent to prison for questioning some of the holy and sacred tenets of the Holocaust.
when I read what you wrote here, it reminds me of her queries to the authorities for some proof of what they claim vis-à-vis the Holocaust.
Because they always, always, end up telling you that the government story is proof of the government story. They always do. It never fails.
"You know about it [Auschwitz] only through the grapevine-like me." This spurred Bjoern Joensson, the presiding judge, to retort, "It is pointless holding a debate with someone who can't accept any facts," adding: "Neither do I have to prove to you that the world is round."
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/11/14/nazi-grandma/75773774/her inquisitors are demanding that their official narrative, because it's the official narrative , is prima facia proof that it's all true, because those in power say it is, sans actual evidence. To doubt them and their narrative is literally the same as questioning if the world is round (except that they won't put you in prison for that). No proof or evidence is necessary. Its like a modern day Galileo where the authorities are simply able to tell everyone what is true, and we're all supposed to fall in line. Or else.
• Replies: @CanSpeccyTo doubt them and their narrative is literally the same as questioning if the world is round (except that they won't put you in prison for that).Well if you're earnest enough about it, they'll probably put you in a mental hospital, which, as the US Government converges on the Stalinist model during the forthcoming Hillary Administration, is likely how they'll deal with 9/11 Truthers - to the sound of cheerful cackling from the likes of the Wiz. , @Jonathan RevuskyI see you're having your fun with the shit eaters.I honestly don't know. At times, it seems like they're working from a basic playbook. Because they always try the same basic tricks. They almost always end up claiming that the proof of the government story is the government story. And then when you point out that it isn't, they then turn around and say that somehow the evidence is on you to prove something.are their any who are sincerely duped?
And then if you further demand some real evidence, they'll usually just walk away. But then if they offer evidence, then it does get hilarious. They'll invariably say that there are these videos and Bin Laden admitted it. I could make a video saying I did it.
This Boris shit eater claimed that Mohammed Atta buying a plane ticket was proof. He also claimed that there was video of Atta going through airport security. I looked for that and this is the only thing I could find:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ilffe-4Tuw
I was trying to figure out how many degrees away this is from proving what needs to be proven.
Is that even Atta? Or is it just some vaguely middle eastern looking guy. Which airport is this at? Okay, suppose it is him in the airport in question. How do we know he even got on the plane after that? He coulda just gone to starbucks, had a coffee and then left the airport. Well, okay, let's suppose he got on the plane. How do we know he hijacked it? And if he did hijack the plane, how do we know that this was planned by OBL off in Afghanistan?
The number of leaps you have to make to think that this is proof of the official story is... When you think about how they presented this whole story almost immediately and then it was off to war. Based on this kind of thing, how could they have investigated so quickly and figured out that the origin of the attacks was in Afghanistan?
The whole thing is such an obvious stitch-up when you look at it. , @Jonathan Revusky
I recently posted a story of an 87 year old German lady who Germany has sent to prison for questioning some of the holy and sacred tenets of the Holocaust.Yeah, it's the same kind of thing. I'm actually writing an essay about these sorts of issues because it finally occurred to me that this is exactly like religious fundamentalism. You ask somebody what the proof of some bible story is and the answer is that it's in the bible.Well, what's the difference between the two things in essence? As far as I can see, the important difference is that it doesn't really matter whether Moses shook a stick and caused the Red Sea to part. Who cares whether somebody believes this really happened or not? But believing that uncontrolled fires can cause a steel-framed building to collapse in a perfectly symmetrical manner -- this is just as crazy and has far more dangerous consequence when people believe this kind of shit.
But as regards this Ursula Haverbeck matter, the German people must really be so mentally colonized at this point to put up with this shit, putting 87 year old ladies in prison for thought crimes.
There is some really weird shit going on, you know. Have you seen this whole "burkini" business in France? There are all these localities on the Mediterranean coast in France that are fining Muslim women for NOT showing enough skin on the beach!
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/28/french-mayors-burkini-ban-court-ruling
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- CanSpeccy says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 3:27 pm GMT • 100 Words @Jonathan Revusky
Oh come'n. The Wiz isn't as bad as Dershowitz.Well, probably not, but that would mostly be because he lacks the talent.I mean one thing that is clear about this Wizard is that this guy is really really stupid. I mean, you ask him for proof of the government story and he tells you that the government story is proof of the government story.
Of course, Alan Dershowitz would make the same argument basically, but it would be masked in a more clever way. The Wizard just openly tells you that the proof of the government story is that it's the government story. Sheesh, what a moron...
Thing is though, there's probably not much difference between a lawyer and a professional troll.Well, he apparently really is a lawyer down in Australia. That is what he has said, and I believe it is true.I mean one thing that is clear about this Wizard is that this guy is really really stupid. I mean, you ask him for proof of the government story and he tells you that the government story is proof of the government story.
But that's the thing. That's how truth is defined in this politically correct age. So it's by definition, the government story is proof of the government story.
George Orwell unfortunately mis-dated his book 1984 , he was about 20 years too soon.
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- CanSpeccy says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 4:44 pm GMT • 300 Words @Wizard of Oz Well you don't rave like the frothing Revusky so I shall mention here an interesting link to follow and that is Wikipedia on thermite. I don't remember anything about thermite reactions at least as such from 6th form Chemistry and now realise that aluminium is frequently at the core of thermite reactions, thereby lending support to the recently expounded theories of heating, and explosions, which would correct the official versions. (There was about 30 tons of aluminium in each plane from memory). I couldn't see anything about a thermite connection to demolitions.
I don't remember anything about thermite reactions at least as such from 6th form Chemistry and now realise that aluminium is frequently at the core of thermite reactions, thereby lending support to the recently expounded theories of heating, and explosions, which would correct the official versions.
Yes, either your ignorance is profound, or your intent to divert the discussion into a nonsensical channel is exposed.
Bulk aluminum doesn't ignite in a building fire. According to one source, aluminum must be vaporized before it will burn and the boiling point of aluminum is 3,986 Farenheit, whereas the adiabatic flame temperature of Kerosene in air, at around 3597 Farenheit, is 400 degrees lower. Moreover, the jet fuel fires in the Twin Towers would likely have burned at considerably lower temperatures due to oxygen supply limitations.
Aluminum burns readily in a thermitic compound comprising aluminum in a finely divided form intimately mixed with an oxidizer, usually iron oxide. In the process of combustion aluminum is oxidized, while the iron oxide is reduced to pure molten iron, which will be found in the reaction residue in the form of iron microspheres, just as were abundant in the ash collected in the vicinity of the Twin Towers.
Among the best authorities on thermite is the National Institute of Standards, or NIST, the non-governmental body hired to "explain" the collapse of the Twin Towers and WTC 7. In the past, NIST worked closely with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on the development of explosive nanothermites .
Oddly, it apparently never occurred to the NIST investigators of the collapse of three WTC buildings that explosives such as thermite, a material long used in controlled building demolitions , might have been involved in the perfect implosion of three WTC buildings.
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz The recent doco about the American chemist and Norwegian metallurgist who sought to correct the official version by reference to aluminium as sn explosive hypothesised that it was molten aluminium flowing down into pools of water that explained the reported explosive sounds. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- CanSpeccy says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 4:52 pm GMT • 100 Words @Rurik Hey JR,
I see you're having your fun with the shit eaters.
are their any who are sincerely duped?
or are they all cynical liars (like the 'wizard') desperately trying to defend the bullshit official narrative in order to protect the real criminals and continue using that singular crime as a pretext for destroying all of Israel's neighbors?
I recently posted a story of an 87 year old German lady who Germany has sent to prison for questioning some of the holy and sacred tenets of the Holocaust.
when I read what you wrote here, it reminds me of her queries to the authorities for some proof of what they claim vis-à-vis the Holocaust.
Because they always, always, end up telling you that the government story is proof of the government story. They always do. It never fails.
"You know about it [Auschwitz] only through the grapevine-like me." This spurred Bjoern Joensson, the presiding judge, to retort, "It is pointless holding a debate with someone who can't accept any facts," adding: "Neither do I have to prove to you that the world is round."
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/11/14/nazi-grandma/75773774/her inquisitors are demanding that their official narrative, because it's the official narrative , is prima facia proof that it's all true, because those in power say it is, sans actual evidence. To doubt them and their narrative is literally the same as questioning if the world is round (except that they won't put you in prison for that). No proof or evidence is necessary. Its like a modern day Galileo where the authorities are simply able to tell everyone what is true, and we're all supposed to fall in line. Or else.
To doubt them and their narrative is literally the same as questioning if the world is round (except that they won't put you in prison for that).
Well if you're earnest enough about it, they'll probably put you in a mental hospital, which, as the US Government converges on the Stalinist model during the forthcoming Hillary Administration, is likely how they'll deal with 9/11 Truthers - to the sound of cheerful cackling from the likes of the Wiz.
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- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 6:46 pm GMT • 1,200 Words @Boris
You have to come up with "proof" that is not equally consistent with the person being a patsy.This is not how evidence works. YOU have to come up with proof that the hijackers were patsies. I mean, your whole line is breathtakingly stupid. Now you prove that Muhammad Atta was not a shape-shifting alien. Well, he MUST be a shape-shifting alien because you have NO evidence that he isn't one!So, that there is a record of Atta, or somebody representing that he's Atta, purchasing the ticketsAnd now you are basically admitting my shape-shifting alien theory is true!
it's normal that you can just launch some war and kill so many thousands of innocents based on some story with this level of proof.The war was incredibly stupid. But people do stupid things based on real-life events ALL THE TIME. 9/11 doesn't have to be fake for the war to be a horrendous idea.I simply asked you what the proof of the story was. Okay, so somebody says they got a phone call. And that's proof. For you.Here there is lots of evidence. Yes, we have multiple people who say they received phone calls from loved ones. We have multiple recordings of these phone calls. We have the phone records of these phone calls. And we have zero evidence that any of those things are fraudulent or incorrect.Now, even if the phone calls were technically possible, which I do doubt, it hardly is proof.Your "doubt" just shows your ignorance. Air phones actually existed. I know my only proof is the experience of tens of thousands of people who made calls from airplanes and the decade long existence of two competing companies who manufactured, installed and maintained those devices. But sure, maybe the shape-shifters did all that.Anybody with, let's say, a decent high school education, who spends as much as a half day on the internet contrasting different sources, will see that the ae911truth people are simply telling the truth.Oh, yeah, why spend years getting a degree in structural engineering when you can spend an afternoon and have it all figured out? Look, you still think the phone calls were fake and impossible, and you expect me to believe that you understand the nuances of a complex, dynamic process like a building collapse? The fact is that you really, really WANT a conspiracy to exist, so you will believe literally anything that confirms that conclusion. It makes you feel special and smart--for once.I know conspiracy sites exist, but for someone who shrilly demands "proof" at every turn, your posts are extremely light on evidence.
This is not how evidence works. YOU have to come up with proof that the hijackers were patsies.
No, that is 180 degrees from the way things do work. If you say these guys committed the crime, the onus is on you to say what the evidence is. In a trial, it is the prosecution that must prove its case. All a defense lawyer has to do is show that the prosecution has not proven the guilt of his client. That's it.
But I've been there and done that and this is just typical shit eater stuff. The shit eater always tells you that the onus is on you to prove something to him. No, if you say these guys committed this crime, OBVIOUSLY the onus is on you to prove it.
So, okay then you start waving your hands saying that the official story is so self-evidently correct that anybody who questions it is just obviously crazy. So, logically, there's no getting around this: you're tacitly saying that there is overwhelming evidence for the story. There must be, because you're saying that the people who doubt the story are obviously crazy.
So, obviously, I ask you, like I ask any of the shit eaters, what is the evidence. Then you try to tell me that asking for the evidence is an illegitimate trick! It's so ridiculous it's hilarious, but you're not even the first person to say that to me. At least two or three other shit eaters have told me over the past year that my asking for evidence is a "cheap debating trick" or something like that! LOL.
Finally, what you've come up with as "evidence"is just such an amazing bunch of crap, frankly. Like saying that Mohammed Atta bought a plane ticket. Well, the other passengers bought a plane ticket, didn't they? So they must have hijacked the plane, no?
But the thing is that you don't even understand that the evidence you produce cannot be equally consistent with the person being a patsy as actually having done it! That a plane ticket was purchased in somebody's name. Well, that's totally consistent with an attempt to frame the person for the crime. In any case, it's not even proof that the person even boarded the plane! I could go online and buy a plane ticket in anybody's name to frame the person for a crime .
Just like I could put out a video saying I somehow made the planes fly into the buildings
This is the kind of pathetic crap that you are coming up with when I ask you to outline the strongest evidence available!
Here there is lots of evidence. Yes, we have multiple people who say they received phone calls from loved ones.
As I said before, it's just hearsay. Besides, check this out: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/sep/02/september11.usa
Mohammed Atta's father says he got a phone call from his son the a day AFTER 9/11.
"My son called me the day after the attacks on September 12 at around midday. We spoke for two minutes about this and that."
I guess you don't think that is true Well, Mohammed Atta Sr says he got a phone call, so by your reasoning, he got a phone call, no?
Your "doubt" just shows your ignorance. Air phones actually existed.
Goof grief. It is such a waste of time to debate with a shit eater. You guys always try to lower the bar to a ridiculously level. Like now, your argument is that those Airfones "existed". Nothing more. They existed! Guns existed in 1963. Therefore Oswald got a gun and shot Kennedy.
Anyway, the problem here is that they first tried to claim that the calls were made from cell phones and then, when it seemed apparent that the calls were not technically possible, said it came from the seat-back phones. Except apparently, the models of plane in question did not have the seat back phones at that point in time. This is all under dispute somewhat and is murky. Regardless, even if the seat-back phones were there on all the planes in question, and thus, the calls were technically possible, that certainly does not prove that the story is true. You're so many degrees away from providing anything that resembles proof of the story!
Look, you still think the phone calls were fake and impossible,
Hey, shit eater, you should read what I wrote. I said that I doubted that they were possible. That means I don't know for absolutely sure. Simply demonstrating that the phone calls were possible is not proof that they really happened. A good reference on this is an article by David Ray Griffin from a few years back on this phone calls topic:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/phone-calls-from-the-9-11-airliners/16924
DRG studies the various claims and the way the story changed and all the problems with it, and based on what DRG outlines, I think a reasonable person would have very great doubts that this whole story of the phone calls from the planes is really true. Obviously, they would need to claim that these phone calls happened in order to establish the official story. So we're really just about back to the notion that the official story is proof of the official story.
and you expect me to believe that you understand the nuances of a complex, dynamic process like a building collapse?
Well, the reason you say that is because, of course, you've never studied the question. No, in fact, there is really very little "nuance" to the question. What they are saying happened is simply physically impossible. All you have to understand is that the steel skeleton of each steel framed high-rise building is made up of 40-odd massive structural steel columns and the only way the thing can fall straight down vertically is for all the columns to fail at precisely the same instant. There is no way that this can result from fires spreading in an uncontrolled manner. At best, you would get very asymmetrical damage. The straight-down implosion that you see with WTC7 must be engineered. It does not take more than half a day on the internet contrasting the various arguments and considering them to realize this. It really just does not.
I pointedly asked you what 9/11 Truth material you were familiar with. I specifically asked you whether you had ever read anything by David Ray Griffin or Webster Tarpley, or looked at any of the material on http://ae911truth.org
You did not answer the question. I infer that this means the answer is no. It's an easy to conclusion to draw because you just don't really know what you're talking about. You don't even know what the basic parameters of the debate are.
This is a point that one always reaches when debating with a shit eater. It begins to dawn on the shit eater that he really does not know WTF he is talking about and that he is out of his depth intellectually. So you have a fork in the road at this point. You can amp up all the insults, "conspiracy theorist nya nya". Or you can just walk away. Whatever. But go get educated. Seriously. Everybody can see that you don't know what you're talking. You've never studied the question and you're just making an ass of yourself.
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- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 6:59 pm GMT • 400 Words @Rurik Hey JR,
I see you're having your fun with the shit eaters.
are their any who are sincerely duped?
or are they all cynical liars (like the 'wizard') desperately trying to defend the bullshit official narrative in order to protect the real criminals and continue using that singular crime as a pretext for destroying all of Israel's neighbors?
I recently posted a story of an 87 year old German lady who Germany has sent to prison for questioning some of the holy and sacred tenets of the Holocaust.
when I read what you wrote here, it reminds me of her queries to the authorities for some proof of what they claim vis-à-vis the Holocaust.
Because they always, always, end up telling you that the government story is proof of the government story. They always do. It never fails.
"You know about it [Auschwitz] only through the grapevine-like me." This spurred Bjoern Joensson, the presiding judge, to retort, "It is pointless holding a debate with someone who can't accept any facts," adding: "Neither do I have to prove to you that the world is round."
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/11/14/nazi-grandma/75773774/her inquisitors are demanding that their official narrative, because it's the official narrative , is prima facia proof that it's all true, because those in power say it is, sans actual evidence. To doubt them and their narrative is literally the same as questioning if the world is round (except that they won't put you in prison for that). No proof or evidence is necessary. Its like a modern day Galileo where the authorities are simply able to tell everyone what is true, and we're all supposed to fall in line. Or else.
I see you're having your fun with the shit eaters.
are their any who are sincerely duped?
I honestly don't know. At times, it seems like they're working from a basic playbook. Because they always try the same basic tricks. They almost always end up claiming that the proof of the government story is the government story. And then when you point out that it isn't, they then turn around and say that somehow the evidence is on you to prove something.
And then if you further demand some real evidence, they'll usually just walk away. But then if they offer evidence, then it does get hilarious. They'll invariably say that there are these videos and Bin Laden admitted it. I could make a video saying I did it.
This Boris shit eater claimed that Mohammed Atta buying a plane ticket was proof. He also claimed that there was video of Atta going through airport security. I looked for that and this is the only thing I could find:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ilffe-4Tuw
I was trying to figure out how many degrees away this is from proving what needs to be proven.
Is that even Atta? Or is it just some vaguely middle eastern looking guy. Which airport is this at? Okay, suppose it is him in the airport in question. How do we know he even got on the plane after that? He coulda just gone to starbucks, had a coffee and then left the airport. Well, okay, let's suppose he got on the plane. How do we know he hijacked it? And if he did hijack the plane, how do we know that this was planned by OBL off in Afghanistan?
The number of leaps you have to make to think that this is proof of the official story is When you think about how they presented this whole story almost immediately and then it was off to war. Based on this kind of thing, how could they have investigated so quickly and figured out that the origin of the attacks was in Afghanistan?
The whole thing is such an obvious stitch-up when you look at it.
• Replies: @Jonathan Revuskythe evidence is on you to prove something.I meant: the onus is on you to prove something. Finally, I guess they go through all these various sophomoric debating tricks because that's what they've got. There is no "proof" of the official 9/11 story that withstands the laugh test, so they always end up falling back on the same BS, the story is proof of the story, the onus is on you to prove something to them blah blah... Same old, same old. It's a waste of time to debate with a shit eater. , @BorisThis Boris shit eater claimed that Mohammed Atta buying a plane ticket was proof.This is an obvious fucking lie.You asked:"Anyway, what "videos" and "records" are you referring to specifically?"
I said: "Video surveillance of Atta at the airport. His purchase of the tickets. Money trails. And etc. etc. etc."Nowhere did I say Atta buying a plane ticket was proof, or anything similar.
Dishonest or stupid? My answer--both.
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- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 7:07 pm GMT • 200 Words @Rurik Hey JR,
I see you're having your fun with the shit eaters.
are their any who are sincerely duped?
or are they all cynical liars (like the 'wizard') desperately trying to defend the bullshit official narrative in order to protect the real criminals and continue using that singular crime as a pretext for destroying all of Israel's neighbors?
I recently posted a story of an 87 year old German lady who Germany has sent to prison for questioning some of the holy and sacred tenets of the Holocaust.
when I read what you wrote here, it reminds me of her queries to the authorities for some proof of what they claim vis-à-vis the Holocaust.
Because they always, always, end up telling you that the government story is proof of the government story. They always do. It never fails.
"You know about it [Auschwitz] only through the grapevine-like me." This spurred Bjoern Joensson, the presiding judge, to retort, "It is pointless holding a debate with someone who can't accept any facts," adding: "Neither do I have to prove to you that the world is round."
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/11/14/nazi-grandma/75773774/her inquisitors are demanding that their official narrative, because it's the official narrative , is prima facia proof that it's all true, because those in power say it is, sans actual evidence. To doubt them and their narrative is literally the same as questioning if the world is round (except that they won't put you in prison for that). No proof or evidence is necessary. Its like a modern day Galileo where the authorities are simply able to tell everyone what is true, and we're all supposed to fall in line. Or else.
I recently posted a story of an 87 year old German lady who Germany has sent to prison for questioning some of the holy and sacred tenets of the Holocaust.
Yeah, it's the same kind of thing. I'm actually writing an essay about these sorts of issues because it finally occurred to me that this is exactly like religious fundamentalism. You ask somebody what the proof of some bible story is and the answer is that it's in the bible.
Well, what's the difference between the two things in essence? As far as I can see, the important difference is that it doesn't really matter whether Moses shook a stick and caused the Red Sea to part. Who cares whether somebody believes this really happened or not? But believing that uncontrolled fires can cause a steel-framed building to collapse in a perfectly symmetrical manner - this is just as crazy and has far more dangerous consequence when people believe this kind of shit.
But as regards this Ursula Haverbeck matter, the German people must really be so mentally colonized at this point to put up with this shit, putting 87 year old ladies in prison for thought crimes.
There is some really weird shit going on, you know. Have you seen this whole "burkini" business in France? There are all these localities on the Mediterranean coast in France that are fining Muslim women for NOT showing enough skin on the beach!
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/28/french-mayors-burkini-ban-court-ruling
Think about that
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- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 7:12 pm GMT • 100 Words @Jonathan Revusky
I see you're having your fun with the shit eaters.I honestly don't know. At times, it seems like they're working from a basic playbook. Because they always try the same basic tricks. They almost always end up claiming that the proof of the government story is the government story. And then when you point out that it isn't, they then turn around and say that somehow the evidence is on you to prove something.are their any who are sincerely duped?
And then if you further demand some real evidence, they'll usually just walk away. But then if they offer evidence, then it does get hilarious. They'll invariably say that there are these videos and Bin Laden admitted it. I could make a video saying I did it.
This Boris shit eater claimed that Mohammed Atta buying a plane ticket was proof. He also claimed that there was video of Atta going through airport security. I looked for that and this is the only thing I could find:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ilffe-4Tuw
I was trying to figure out how many degrees away this is from proving what needs to be proven.
Is that even Atta? Or is it just some vaguely middle eastern looking guy. Which airport is this at? Okay, suppose it is him in the airport in question. How do we know he even got on the plane after that? He coulda just gone to starbucks, had a coffee and then left the airport. Well, okay, let's suppose he got on the plane. How do we know he hijacked it? And if he did hijack the plane, how do we know that this was planned by OBL off in Afghanistan?
The number of leaps you have to make to think that this is proof of the official story is... When you think about how they presented this whole story almost immediately and then it was off to war. Based on this kind of thing, how could they have investigated so quickly and figured out that the origin of the attacks was in Afghanistan?
The whole thing is such an obvious stitch-up when you look at it.
the evidence is on you to prove something.
I meant: the onus is on you to prove something. Finally, I guess they go through all these various sophomoric debating tricks because that's what they've got. There is no "proof" of the official 9/11 story that withstands the laugh test, so they always end up falling back on the same BS, the story is proof of the story, the onus is on you to prove something to them blah blah Same old, same old. It's a waste of time to debate with a shit eater.
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- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 7:21 pm GMT • 100 Words @Darin Yes, why?
If you want to start a war, would you want to start with great defeat and loss of your fleet?
In the thirties, there were three cases of false flag attacks created to justify a war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukden_Incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelling_of_MainilaIn none of these cases the attacker actually killed thousands of his own soldiers, what would be the point?
In none of these cases the attacker actually killed thousands of his own soldiers, what would be the point?
Well, the answer should be obvious, no? You have an existing situation in which eat least 80% of the U.S. population is opposed to the war and you want to mobilize them. If you play chess, there are all these openings called "gambits" where you sacrifice a pawn or two to more rapidly mobilize your forces.
3000 people is really just peanuts on a national level. If the result is that you get all this outrage and suddenly the majority of the population is screaming for war, well that could be well worth it.
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- biz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 8:07 pm GMT @Hippopotamusdrome
It could also be a mirror on the roof of an unmanned probe.
the astronauts left mirrors on the surface of the moon
No it couldn't. If so, it would be orbiting the moon and its location, not to mention the measured distance to it, would be changing constantly.
• Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome It would be a probe that would land on the surface, like the russian Luna. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 9:35 pm GMT • 700 Words
So, okay then you start waving your hands saying that the official story is so self-evidently correct that anybody who questions it is just obviously crazy.
I never said this. Being skeptical of the official story is fine. But you aren't just skeptical. You are absolutely positive that the official story is false. You are so sure that the official story is wrong that you heap abuse on people who haven't decided the same. For that level of certitude, you need some actual evidence, not just your feelings about things.
So, obviously, I ask you, like I ask any of the shit eaters, what is the evidence.
Are you an actual child? You can start by reading the Wiki page and go from there. Why are you whining that no one will show you the evidence when it is easily available? It's bizarre.
Like saying that Mohammed Atta bought a plane ticket. Well, the other passengers bought a plane ticket, didn't they? So they must have hijacked the plane, no?
What? You make no sense at all. Obviously the plane ticket is a necessary but not sufficient piece of evidence. No one ever argued that it was the only piece of evidence.
Well, that's totally consistent with an attempt to frame the person for the crime.
It's totally consistent with my alien shape-shifter theory too. So what? It doesn't magically become evidence for YOUR theory.
As I said before, it's just hearsay.
It isn't hearsay. Witnesses are on the record. Recordings exist. It is backed up by documentation. Here's one example:
http://www.911myths.com/index.php?title=Renee_May_calls
Well, Mohammed Atta Sr says he got a phone call, so by your reasoning, he got a phone call, no?
Um, no, dipshit. Atta's dad has a reason to lie–to protect his son's memory. What reason would a dozen family members have to lie? There are also records. And recordings of some of the calls.
[MORE]
Like now, your argument is that those Airfones "existed". Nothing more. They existed!
Holy shit, you've reached a new level of stupid. The fact that Airfones existed means that your "doubt" that it is technically possible to make a call from an airplane is absolutely wrong. Hey, you don't want obvious pieces of evidence explained to you? Then don't make idiotic claims.
Except apparently, the models of plane in question did not have the seat back phones at that point in time. This is all under dispute somewhat and is murky.
It's only murky to people like you. The fact that you doubt the phone calls when there is so much clear evidence for them just illustrates what a huge fucking idiot you are.
based on what DRG outlines, I think a reasonable person would have very great doubts that this whole story of the phone calls from the planes is really true.
Amazing. You swallow that article without questioning it at all. I'm sure the first reports were of "cell phones"–since that's what people would be familiar with. The documentation is clear.
All you have to understand is that the steel skeleton of each steel framed high-rise building is made up of 40-odd massive structural steel columns and the only way the thing can fall straight down vertically is for all the columns to fail at precisely the same instant.
The NIST describes the process:
The fires burned out of control during the afternoon, causing floor beams near column 79 to expand and push a key girder off its seat, triggering the floors to fail around column 79 on Floors 8 to 14. With a loss of lateral support across nine floors, column 79 buckled – pulling the east penthouse and nearby columns down with it. With the buckling of these critical columns, the collapse then progressed east-to-west across the core, ultimately overloading the perimeter support, which buckled between Floors 7 and 17, causing the remaining portion of the building above to fall downward as a single unit.
Sounds plausible to me.
No I know that your supersmart buddies have written gobs of text about how this is impossible and how all the families of the dead who got phone calls on 9/11 were lying liars who eat babies, but no one is listening. Do you understand that? You truthers will always be reviled in polite society. You think it's because everyone else is a lizard person, but it's you. • Replies: @Jonathan Revusky
I never said this. Being skeptical of the official story is fine. But you aren't just skeptical. You are absolutely positive that the official story is false.Hold on, let me get this straight. What you object to is not that I disbelieve the story, but that I express certainty . But I thought you were expressing certainty that the official story was true, no? Or maybe you're not certain... could you clarify your position now? You're starting to sound really wishy washy.Well, if you're saying there is strong proof for the official story, then that's basically saying you're certain, no? Though I'm still trying to figure out what you think the proof is... it's these alleged phone calls? That's the strongest proof you've got?
Well, there is a mountain of evidence that the official story is untrue. The strongest single piece of physical evidence is that they claim that building 7 imploded in a perfectly symmetrical way from office fires basically. So NIST and FEMA are clearly claiming that something happened that is physically impossible. That is the strongest proof. And you have 2700 or so architects and engineers who have been willing to put their name on a petition calling for a new investigation on this basis -- that the official story is simply not physically possible.
You are so sure that the official story is wrong that you heap abuse on people who haven't decided the same. For that level of certitude, you need some actual evidence, not just your feelings about things.But there is also the issue of expert testimony from pilots who state that the feat of flying that these people allegedly pulled off is simply impossible for neophyte pilots. There is also testimony that the civilian Boeing airliners that allegedly flew into the towers cannot even fly at that speed at sea level. There are huge problems with the story.
There is also the problem that all the testimony about Al Qaeda's planning of the attacks came from torturing one individual who was probably not even an Al Qaeda member. See this article: http://www.voltairenet.org/article177178.html
Independent researchers have uncovered so many problems with the official story on so many levels that, I think one can say pretty objectively that there is basically zero possibility that the official story is truthful.
The only way to maintain one's status as a shit eater, and to continue believing the official bullshit, is by being wilfully ignorant of just about every hard factual aspect of what is known!
You can start by reading the Wiki page and go from there.What Wiki page? Oh, you mean Wikipedia? Well, I guess you don't realize that all that Wikipedia ever does with these sorts of events, whether it's JFK or 9/11 or Charlie Hebdo or whatever, is that the wikipedia page is just a synopsis of whatever the official story is.Earlier, you indignantly said that you know what the "beg the question" fallacy is, but obviously you don't. The Wikipedia page is just a synopsis of the official story. In any case, being a shit eater basically requires you to have a very weak grasp of what "question begging" is. Because that's what being a shit eater is. You ask a shit eater what the proof of whatever official story is and they just repeat the official story. Or they point you to a summary of the official story that is on wikipedia or somewhere else. It's always just self-referential question-begging.
Dude, I can pick up a phone and call somebody and say that I'm in a plane and we're being hijacked. It's really just not very strong evidence. It's like saying that some guy put up a video saying he did it. I can put up a video on youtube saying I did it.
It isn't hearsay. Witnesses are on the record. Recordings exist.It is backed up by documentation. Here's one example:Yeah, this rings a bell. A few years ago I looked through this stuff and it's really quite murky. There's a pretty detailed analysis of those phone calls from that flight here:http://www.911myths.com/index.php?title=Renee_May_calls
http://www.globalresearch.ca/9-11-what-the-telephone-records-reveal-about-calls-from-aa-flight-77-did-barbara-olson-attempt-any-calls-at-all/26594
It's all pretty much irrelevant really anyway, because it looks pretty clear that no passenger airline hit the pentagon anyway! There just isn't the debris that you would expect to see, for example. And the guy they say flew the plane, Hani Hanjour, lacked the skills to fly a single-engine Cessna. It was a missile or some sort of drone, it appears. And, of course, all that is a far bigger problem with that flight 77 than even these screwy phone records! I mean, if the flight didn't even take place, to talk about their being proof that somebody made a call from the flight in question...
Well, I concede that point. But the fact remains that Atta's dad may be telling the truth and he may be lying. And the same applies to the people who say they got a phone call from somebody on a plane. They could be telling the truth and they could be lying. And they could have plenty strong reasons to lie too!
Um, no, dipshit. Atta's dad has a reason to lie–to protect his son's memory.It's just not very strong evidence. If this is the strongest evidence that you have, I think the debate is basically over.
Well, the only reason you believe in the phone calls so firmly is because it supports what you want to believe. You don't believe in the Atta Sr. phone call on 9/12, because it doesn't support what you want to believe. Look at the article I linked. As evidence, it just is not very clear at all. Generally speaking, anybody can make a phone call and claim that they are in a plane getting hijacked.
It's only murky to people like you. The fact that you doubt the phone calls when there is so much clear evidence for them just illustrates what a huge fucking idiot you are.Anybody can say they got a phone call too. And we all know that there are people who will say anything for a few bucks. This is not hard evidence.
Uhh, no, because not all the planes had the Airfones on them, you see. At this point in time, for example, some flights have Wifi on them, but most don't. DRG made the point that the American Airlines 767's in question did not have Airfones installed on them until 2002 or something like that. But then I think somebody from the company claimed that they did, but I suspect that DRG was right the first time, but as I said, I'm simply not sure about that. I don't know if the planes in question had airfones on them or not. But this other problem, the expert testimony that a Boeing 767 can't even fly that fast at sea level anyway, this a much bigger problem that would trump the whole issue of whether there were Airfones or not!
The fact that Airfones existed means that your "doubt" that it is technically possible to make a call from an airplane is absolutely wrong.Again, in the case of Flight 77 that flew into the Pentagon, there is the bigger problem that it does not look like any civil jet airliner flew into the Pentagon in the first place, and that is a much bigger first order problem!
But look, as I said, unfortunately, you are a shit eater and it's a waste of time to debate with shit eaters. I have done it enough that I can see what you do. You will automatically discount any evidence that doesn't support the official bullshit, and then the evidence that does support it, you'll claim that it's rock solid. So, for example, if the Atta Sr. phone call supported what you want to believe, you'd be saying: "Oh, there's a witness and blah blah." But since it doesn't support what you want to believe, then.
Again, you're in a very bad position if the strongest evidence you have is these phone calls!
So, do you have some piece of evidence that you think is stronger than the alleged phone calls or is that your answer to the question I posed. "The strongest evidence for the official is these phone calls."
Oh, and even then, how that gets you to the bearded guy in Afghanistan.... Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 9:46 pm GMT • 100 Words @Jonathan Revusky
I see you're having your fun with the shit eaters.I honestly don't know. At times, it seems like they're working from a basic playbook. Because they always try the same basic tricks. They almost always end up claiming that the proof of the government story is the government story. And then when you point out that it isn't, they then turn around and say that somehow the evidence is on you to prove something.are their any who are sincerely duped?
And then if you further demand some real evidence, they'll usually just walk away. But then if they offer evidence, then it does get hilarious. They'll invariably say that there are these videos and Bin Laden admitted it. I could make a video saying I did it.
This Boris shit eater claimed that Mohammed Atta buying a plane ticket was proof. He also claimed that there was video of Atta going through airport security. I looked for that and this is the only thing I could find:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ilffe-4Tuw
I was trying to figure out how many degrees away this is from proving what needs to be proven.
Is that even Atta? Or is it just some vaguely middle eastern looking guy. Which airport is this at? Okay, suppose it is him in the airport in question. How do we know he even got on the plane after that? He coulda just gone to starbucks, had a coffee and then left the airport. Well, okay, let's suppose he got on the plane. How do we know he hijacked it? And if he did hijack the plane, how do we know that this was planned by OBL off in Afghanistan?
The number of leaps you have to make to think that this is proof of the official story is... When you think about how they presented this whole story almost immediately and then it was off to war. Based on this kind of thing, how could they have investigated so quickly and figured out that the origin of the attacks was in Afghanistan?
The whole thing is such an obvious stitch-up when you look at it.
This Boris shit eater claimed that Mohammed Atta buying a plane ticket was proof.
This is an obvious fucking lie.
You asked:"Anyway, what "videos" and "records" are you referring to specifically?"
I said: "Video surveillance of Atta at the airport. His purchase of the tickets. Money trails. And etc. etc. etc."Nowhere did I say Atta buying a plane ticket was proof, or anything similar.
Dishonest or stupid? My answer–both.
(I see you have literal Nazi cheerleaders. Congrats.)
• Replies: @Jonathan Revusky(I see you have literal Nazi cheerleaders. Congrats.)Hi, shit eater. I initially glossed over this last bit about my having "Nazi cheerleaders". I suppose you're calling Rurik here a "Nazi".Rurik was referring to this Ursula Haverbeck case where, last year, an 87-year-old German woman was sentenced to 10 months prison for asking questions about the Holocaust, which is a crime in Germany, France and at least another dozen countries. Rurik (like myself) sees this as a travesty, and thus, in your mental shit eater world, is therefore a "Nazi".
It doesn't occur to you that anybody could support Ursula Haverbeck (and others like her) simply because they believe in free speech. If I say that it is utterly wrong to imprison somebody for expressing certain views, does that mean logically that I share those views? No, I might share those views or not. Or I might partially share them. The issue is the State terrorizing little old ladies in their eighties for simply asking questions.
But, again, your approach to the question is typical of the shit eater. A shit eater always accepts the dominant framing of any question and never thinks for himself. Occasionally people do wise up. I myself did, but it is the exception, not the rule.
Besides, I don't think I was ever as bad a case as you are. I don't think that I was ever saying stuff like: "Oh, we know that Mohammed Atta flew a plane into a building. He had a plane ticket! What more proof do you need?"
You're such a hard case, it's probably incurable. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 11:08 pm GMT • 500 Words
This Boris shit eater claimed that Mohammed Atta buying a plane ticket was proof.
This is an obvious fucking lie.
Look, there is a clear electronic record here of what was said. I never said that you were presenting Atta's purchase of a plane ticket as the sole proof, no. But you did offer it as an element of proof.
You asked:"Anyway, what "videos" and "records" are you referring to specifically?"
I said: "Video surveillance of Atta at the airport. His purchase of the tickets. Money trails. And etc. etc. etc."Well, you were offering this as an element of proof, among other things, but NONE of the things that you are as offering as proof really constitute a shred of evidence that Atta hijacked any plane. It just doesn't.
Everything you are offering as proof is exactly as consistent with him being a patsy who was framed as being an actual hijacker.
Now, as for accusing other people of dishonesty, you have said all these disparaging things about "conspiracy theorists" and it being a "circle jerk" among other pejorative labels. At this point, I have asked you a couple of times what 9/11 Truth literature you have actually read - David Ray Griffin? Tarpley? The material from AE911Truth? The fact that you never answer the question is basically an answer.
Clearly, you have not read any of it! You talk disparagingly about these "crazy conspiracy theorists" but you don't even know what arguments any of them have made, because you have not read any of it! I can tell you haven't. And that is really just completely deplorable and dishonest.
But I am kinda used to it. It's just typical shit eater behavior.
Nowhere did I say Atta buying a plane ticket was proof, or anything similar.
I requested proof and that was one of various elements of proof that you presented. Okay, I guess now you realize that was a brain fart and want to retract the claim that this is proof of any sort. Fine. Look, I'll throw you a bone. I'll even pretend that you never said that this was proof. Okay, fine, what do I care? You never said that.
But I asked you: What is the strongest evidence available for the U.S. government story? I mean, specifically, within a few weeks of the 9/11 event, a whole theater of war was launched in Central Asia based on this whole tale that this was a terrorist plot that somehow originated in Afghanistan. Fifteen years later and there are still G.I.'s in Afghanistan and they're spending billions of dollars there every month probably. We really need to know what is the proof for this story that was the basis for all this! Despite your claims otherwise, this is a perfectly legitimate question. Can you shed any light on this?
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- Incitatus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 9, 2016 at 11:14 pm GMT • 300 Words @Jonathan Revusky
9/11 was a complicated plot so asking for the "strongest evidnce" doesn't even make sense.TRANSLATION OF SHIT-EATER SPEAK: "I have no real evidence so I'm going to pretend that the other person is being unreasonable when he asks for some.We have video and records of guys in an organization that wanted to commit terrorism in America...Hey, shit eater, you ever heard of the "beg the question fallacy"? What that means is that you can't assume the thing that you are trying to prove in your proof.Anyway, what "videos" and "records" are you referring to specifically? It seems to me that you're just repeating the story as proof of the story, which is, of course, what shit eaters do when you ask them for proof of whatever bullshit.
Oh, you no one has ever put forth any convincing evidence that any of this is fake. Look, at this point, there is a vast literature on this. And, yes, they have put forward VERY convincing evidence that basically ALL OF IT is fake! In particular, the alleged phone calls from the planes that detail the official narrative, these are very problematic, not technically possible even.
Yes, it would be possible to fake all of that (well, not the planes hitting the buildings). And yet no one has ever put forth any convincing evidence that it was. Hm.In any case, a video of a plane hitting a building is not proof that some bearded guy in Afghanistan caused it to happen. By that reasoning, the Zapruder film of Kennedy being shot is proof that Oswald did it. It is not.
Also, the video of a plane hitting a building is not proof that this is the cause of the building's subsequent implosion. Particularly problematic is the third building WTC 7, which was not hit by a plane, yet imploded in a perfectly symmetrical straight-down fashion that can only be achieved via controlled demolition.
Which experts think that the Bin Laden "confession videos" are real? Can you name any of these "experts"?You say the evidence is the video of Bin Laden? Well, there's expert opinion that the videos are fake.Far more experts think it's real. I guess they are in on it?In any case, anybody can say anything on a video. It's not very strong proof. I can put up a video on youtube saying I did it.
The main alternative theory is that the buildings were prewired with explosives for a controlled demolition. As regards WTC7, there is no reasonable doubt of this really, because the building was not hit by a plane even. But, obviously, once you recognize that one building was pre-rigged for controlled demolition, it becomes fairly obvious that all three were.
Well now you want to argue your stupid conspiracy theory. See, any evidence that is presented can be made into fit into some alternate theory. But those alternate theories never seem to have any evidence backing them up.In any case, I did not actually propose any alternative story. I requested that you and whatever other shit eaters tell me what they think the strongest evidence for the official story is.
There simply is not very much. It's stuff like somebody says they got a phone call from a plane in which the person told them that such-and-such had happened. Fine, I could say I got a phone call. There are people who will say anything for a few bucks.I could put up a video saying I did it.
When you look at what you are presenting as evidence, it's very very weak. There's basically nothing there.
Meanwhile, the physical evidence, that the collision of a single airliner with a building the size of WTC1 or WTC2 is simply not going to cause what then happened. A 90-ton aluminum tube crashing into 100,000 tons of structural steel, is simply not going to cause the latter to disintegrate.
And why a third building that is not even hit by a plane should disintegrate as a result, this really only has one explanation, which is that the building in question was prerigged with explosives.
And that is why there are over 2000 professional architects and engineers who have signed the Architechts and Engineers for 9/11 Truth petition calling for a new investigation.
"The main alternative theory is that the buildings were prewired with explosives for a controlled demolition. As regards WTC7, there is no reasonable doubt of this really, because the building was not hit by a plane even. But, obviously, once you recognize that one building was pre-rigged for controlled demolition, it becomes fairly obvious that all three were."
None dispute 9/11 was a conspiracy, but who was in it? Nineteen hijackers trained in Afghanistan and funded by Gulf money (the govt story)? The Bush administration? Some other govt? Why?
You've obviously done a great deal of research and conclude (as you say) all WTC towers were intentionally demolished. Please share your theory. If it was a scripted event:
• Why did WT 1 (the first tower hit) fall after WT 2? Did conspirators mix up demo timing?
• Why did they bother to take down WT 7? Wouldn't the lack of aerial impact reveal demo and conspiracy?
• How did conspirators mine 240 exterior columns on each office floor of WT 1 & 2 (±50,000 locations) without detection? Central core columns? Freestanding columns in public view at grade? How was it concealed from building tenants, management, maintenance staff, visitors, CoNY building inspectors, supply services, etc? And the same in WTC 7?
• Architects and engineers from Minoru Yamasaki & Associates, Emery Roth & Sons, Worthington Skilling Helle & Jackson, Joseph R. Loring & Assoc, Jaros Blum & Bolles, and the numerous other firms responsible for the WTC don't appear to be part of ae911truth. Are they part of the conspiracy? Are WTC building contractors and subcontractors part of the conspiracy? Building tenants?
• How could the same administration that ignored 9/11 warnings, bungled Katrina and screwed-up Iraq 2003 pull off such a complex, faultless conspiracy? Why have no insiders spilled the tale?I'm on the fence. I'd really like to know.
• Replies: @RurikI'm on the fence. I'd really like to know.you can start herehttp://www.europhysicsnews.org/articles/epn/pdf/2016/04/epn2016-47-4.pdf
go to the featured article on page 21
only the people that pulled this thing off know the exact whys and hows, and it certainly wasn't faultless, or we all wouldn't know by now that it was an obvious inside job
what we are certain of is that the official story is a pack of lies, and that building seven didn't implode into its basement because of office fires.
from there, you go down the rabbit hole
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1VtozvvG4c Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 12:13 am GMT • 100 Words
Look, there is a clear electronic record here of what was said. I never said that you were presenting Atta's purchase of a plane ticket as the sole proof, no. But you did offer it as an element of proof.
It's a piece of evidence. One of many. You keep asking "What's the strongest evidence?" but that is a stupid question. It's all strong. The mastermind admitting it on tape isn't good enough by itself, but combined with the money trail, the movements of the hijackers, the witnesses and everything else the case is pretty clear.
Yes, they could have been patsies. Or aliens. When evidence that they are comes up, let me know.
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyOh, I see, here we are, the Monty Python argument shop skit approach to a discussion now. "No, that's not evidence." "It is." "It's not."I never said that you were presenting Atta's purchase of a plane ticket as the sole proof, no. But you did offer it as an element of proof.It's a piece of evidence.
You always reach this point when you debate with a shit eater. They just start adamantly repeating whatever bullshit. It's like you have to tell them for the umpteenth time: " No, this turd you have just regurgitated yet again is not chocolate mousse. "
And no, the "purchase of a plane ticket" is not proof of anything!
Basically, you're saying that there is some paper record that a plane ticket was purchased in Atta's name. Yeah, okay, so what? This is not even proof that Atta himself purchased the ticket. I could purchase a plane ticket in somebody's name without them even knowing about it. That a person possesses a valid ticket, that a ticket was issued in somebody's name, that's not proof that they ever got on the plane. And even then, that somebody was on the plane is not proof that he hijacked it.
The purchase of the ticket is something that is so many degrees removed from being hard evidence of anything, it is hard to see how somebody could try to make that claim. But this really brings us to the core of the shit eater mentality.
You see, the reason that you present this kind of thing as evidence is that you've never really thought about this question -- I mean the question what would constitute evidence. You never thought about it because you see no need. "It's the official story, I heard it on the TeeVee, therefore it's true."
That is how a shit eater reasons.
So it's a waste of time to try to have a "debate" with a shit eater because the shit eater does not even understand the basic parameters of a debate, what would constitute evidence and so forth.
You keep asking "What's the strongest evidence?" but that is a stupid question.Well, a shit eater basically believes that asking for the evidence for any official story is stupid because... well, it's the official story, therefore it's true. That's how a shit eater thinks. "Hey, this is the official bullshit. Yum yum."
Of course, if you're not a shit eater, then if they tell you that somebody committed whatever crime, the natural question is what is the strongest evidence available. And you have to think about whether what they are presenting to you as "evidence" really is, or how strong it is.
Well, this is all beg the question stuff. The shit eater's "proof" of the story invariably is based on assuming the story. "The mastermind, the hijackers..." You assume that which needs to be demonstrated.
The mastermind admitting it on tape isn't good enough by itself, but combined with the money trail, the movements of the hijackers, the witnesses and everything else the case is pretty clear.Most of this Al Qaeda narrative was established by torturing people, in particular, one poor wretch by the name of Abu Zubaydah, in Guantanamo bay. I referenced one article that is, I think, a must-read (if you really are interested in the topic, that is) here:
http://www.voltairenet.org/article177178.html
Now, regarding for example, the record of the "movements" of an alleged hijacker, like Atta, I looked for the airport surveillance video you mentioned and it's just a joke:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F249r7TaBo
That's a minute and a half and the narrator analyzes what is being presented as "proof" here. It's just a total joke.
Yes, they could have been patsies. Or aliens. When evidence that they are comes up, let me know.Well, what would be the point? You would just continue to believe the official story anyway. Face it, dude, you're a shit eater. A clinical case.The evidence that these people were patsies is really pretty glaring. Take the case of Hani Hanjour, who supposedly flew some sort of 270 degree sloping descent maneuver to hit the Pentagon, some feat of flying that professional pilots have said they could not execute. This guy Hani was up in some single-engine plane with a flight instructor once and the guy was so terrible (probably mostly because he didn't really know English and didn't understand anything the instructor was saying) that they got back on the ground and the instructor said never again!
There is a pattern here where anybody who really had any contact with any of these people saw that they were bumbling incompetents who couldn't carry out an operation like this. When you do minimal research on this and other similar events, the fact that the people they are pinning this on are just patsies -- this is just glaring, it's right in your face. Lee Harvey Oswald back when, or more recently, these Arab ethnics in France that they say did these various things.... the fact that these people are patsies is just right in front of one's nose when you study these events even minimally.
But when you talk with a shit eater, it's just like: "Oh, but that's the official story. It must be true! You're a conspiracy theorist, nya nya!"
"Of course Atta flew a plane into a building. He had a ticket, dammit!!! What more proof do you need???!!!!""
This is where you always end up when you debate a shit eater. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 12:19 am GMT • 1,400 Words @Boris
So, okay then you start waving your hands saying that the official story is so self-evidently correct that anybody who questions it is just obviously crazy.I never said this. Being skeptical of the official story is fine. But you aren't just skeptical. You are absolutely positive that the official story is false. You are so sure that the official story is wrong that you heap abuse on people who haven't decided the same. For that level of certitude, you need some actual evidence, not just your feelings about things.So, obviously, I ask you, like I ask any of the shit eaters, what is the evidence.Are you an actual child? You can start by reading the Wiki page and go from there. Why are you whining that no one will show you the evidence when it is easily available? It's bizarre.
Like saying that Mohammed Atta bought a plane ticket. Well, the other passengers bought a plane ticket, didn't they? So they must have hijacked the plane, no?What? You make no sense at all. Obviously the plane ticket is a necessary but not sufficient piece of evidence. No one ever argued that it was the only piece of evidence.Well, that's totally consistent with an attempt to frame the person for the crime.It's totally consistent with my alien shape-shifter theory too. So what? It doesn't magically become evidence for YOUR theory.As I said before, it's just hearsay.It isn't hearsay. Witnesses are on the record. Recordings exist. It is backed up by documentation. Here's one example:http://www.911myths.com/index.php?title=Renee_May_calls
Well, Mohammed Atta Sr says he got a phone call, so by your reasoning, he got a phone call, no?Um, no, dipshit. Atta's dad has a reason to lie--to protect his son's memory. What reason would a dozen family members have to lie? There are also records. And recordings of some of the calls.
Like now, your argument is that those Airfones "existed". Nothing more. They existed!Holy shit, you've reached a new level of stupid. The fact that Airfones existed means that your "doubt" that it is technically possible to make a call from an airplane is absolutely wrong. Hey, you don't want obvious pieces of evidence explained to you? Then don't make idiotic claims.Except apparently, the models of plane in question did not have the seat back phones at that point in time. This is all under dispute somewhat and is murky.It's only murky to people like you. The fact that you doubt the phone calls when there is so much clear evidence for them just illustrates what a huge fucking idiot you are.based on what DRG outlines, I think a reasonable person would have very great doubts that this whole story of the phone calls from the planes is really true.Amazing. You swallow that article without questioning it at all. I'm sure the first reports were of "cell phones"--since that's what people would be familiar with. The documentation is clear.All you have to understand is that the steel skeleton of each steel framed high-rise building is made up of 40-odd massive structural steel columns and the only way the thing can fall straight down vertically is for all the columns to fail at precisely the same instant.The NIST describes the process:The fires burned out of control during the afternoon, causing floor beams near column 79 to expand and push a key girder off its seat, triggering the floors to fail around column 79 on Floors 8 to 14. With a loss of lateral support across nine floors, column 79 buckled – pulling the east penthouse and nearby columns down with it. With the buckling of these critical columns, the collapse then progressed east-to-west across the core, ultimately overloading the perimeter support, which buckled between Floors 7 and 17, causing the remaining portion of the building above to fall downward as a single unit.Sounds plausible to me.No I know that your supersmart buddies have written gobs of text about how this is impossible and how all the families of the dead who got phone calls on 9/11 were lying liars who eat babies, but no one is listening. Do you understand that? You truthers will always be reviled in polite society. You think it's because everyone else is a lizard person, but it's you.
I never said this. Being skeptical of the official story is fine. But you aren't just skeptical. You are absolutely positive that the official story is false.
Hold on, let me get this straight. What you object to is not that I disbelieve the story, but that I express certainty . But I thought you were expressing certainty that the official story was true, no? Or maybe you're not certain could you clarify your position now? You're starting to sound really wishy washy.
Well, if you're saying there is strong proof for the official story, then that's basically saying you're certain, no? Though I'm still trying to figure out what you think the proof is it's these alleged phone calls? That's the strongest proof you've got?
You are so sure that the official story is wrong that you heap abuse on people who haven't decided the same. For that level of certitude, you need some actual evidence, not just your feelings about things.
Well, there is a mountain of evidence that the official story is untrue. The strongest single piece of physical evidence is that they claim that building 7 imploded in a perfectly symmetrical way from office fires basically. So NIST and FEMA are clearly claiming that something happened that is physically impossible. That is the strongest proof. And you have 2700 or so architects and engineers who have been willing to put their name on a petition calling for a new investigation on this basis - that the official story is simply not physically possible.
But there is also the issue of expert testimony from pilots who state that the feat of flying that these people allegedly pulled off is simply impossible for neophyte pilots. There is also testimony that the civilian Boeing airliners that allegedly flew into the towers cannot even fly at that speed at sea level. There are huge problems with the story.
There is also the problem that all the testimony about Al Qaeda's planning of the attacks came from torturing one individual who was probably not even an Al Qaeda member. See this article: http://www.voltairenet.org/article177178.html
Independent researchers have uncovered so many problems with the official story on so many levels that, I think one can say pretty objectively that there is basically zero possibility that the official story is truthful.
The only way to maintain one's status as a shit eater, and to continue believing the official bullshit, is by being wilfully ignorant of just about every hard factual aspect of what is known!
You can start by reading the Wiki page and go from there.
What Wiki page? Oh, you mean Wikipedia? Well, I guess you don't realize that all that Wikipedia ever does with these sorts of events, whether it's JFK or 9/11 or Charlie Hebdo or whatever, is that the wikipedia page is just a synopsis of whatever the official story is.
Earlier, you indignantly said that you know what the "beg the question" fallacy is, but obviously you don't. The Wikipedia page is just a synopsis of the official story. In any case, being a shit eater basically requires you to have a very weak grasp of what "question begging" is. Because that's what being a shit eater is. You ask a shit eater what the proof of whatever official story is and they just repeat the official story. Or they point you to a summary of the official story that is on wikipedia or somewhere else. It's always just self-referential question-begging.
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It isn't hearsay. Witnesses are on the record. Recordings exist.
Dude, I can pick up a phone and call somebody and say that I'm in a plane and we're being hijacked. It's really just not very strong evidence. It's like saying that some guy put up a video saying he did it. I can put up a video on youtube saying I did it.
It is backed up by documentation. Here's one example:
Yeah, this rings a bell. A few years ago I looked through this stuff and it's really quite murky. There's a pretty detailed analysis of those phone calls from that flight here:
It's all pretty much irrelevant really anyway, because it looks pretty clear that no passenger airline hit the pentagon anyway! There just isn't the debris that you would expect to see, for example. And the guy they say flew the plane, Hani Hanjour, lacked the skills to fly a single-engine Cessna. It was a missile or some sort of drone, it appears. And, of course, all that is a far bigger problem with that flight 77 than even these screwy phone records! I mean, if the flight didn't even take place, to talk about their being proof that somebody made a call from the flight in question
Um, no, dipshit. Atta's dad has a reason to lie–to protect his son's memory.
Well, I concede that point. But the fact remains that Atta's dad may be telling the truth and he may be lying. And the same applies to the people who say they got a phone call from somebody on a plane. They could be telling the truth and they could be lying. And they could have plenty strong reasons to lie too!
It's just not very strong evidence. If this is the strongest evidence that you have, I think the debate is basically over.
It's only murky to people like you. The fact that you doubt the phone calls when there is so much clear evidence for them just illustrates what a huge fucking idiot you are.
Well, the only reason you believe in the phone calls so firmly is because it supports what you want to believe. You don't believe in the Atta Sr. phone call on 9/12, because it doesn't support what you want to believe. Look at the article I linked. As evidence, it just is not very clear at all. Generally speaking, anybody can make a phone call and claim that they are in a plane getting hijacked.
Anybody can say they got a phone call too. And we all know that there are people who will say anything for a few bucks. This is not hard evidence.
The fact that Airfones existed means that your "doubt" that it is technically possible to make a call from an airplane is absolutely wrong.
Uhh, no, because not all the planes had the Airfones on them, you see. At this point in time, for example, some flights have Wifi on them, but most don't. DRG made the point that the American Airlines 767′s in question did not have Airfones installed on them until 2002 or something like that. But then I think somebody from the company claimed that they did, but I suspect that DRG was right the first time, but as I said, I'm simply not sure about that. I don't know if the planes in question had airfones on them or not. But this other problem, the expert testimony that a Boeing 767 can't even fly that fast at sea level anyway, this a much bigger problem that would trump the whole issue of whether there were Airfones or not!
Again, in the case of Flight 77 that flew into the Pentagon, there is the bigger problem that it does not look like any civil jet airliner flew into the Pentagon in the first place, and that is a much bigger first order problem!
But look, as I said, unfortunately, you are a shit eater and it's a waste of time to debate with shit eaters. I have done it enough that I can see what you do. You will automatically discount any evidence that doesn't support the official bullshit, and then the evidence that does support it, you'll claim that it's rock solid. So, for example, if the Atta Sr. phone call supported what you want to believe, you'd be saying: "Oh, there's a witness and blah blah." But since it doesn't support what you want to believe, then.
Again, you're in a very bad position if the strongest evidence you have is these phone calls!
So, do you have some piece of evidence that you think is stronger than the alleged phone calls or is that your answer to the question I posed. "The strongest evidence for the official is these phone calls."
Oh, and even then, how that gets you to the bearded guy in Afghanistan . • Replies: @Incitatus "...you have 2700 or so architects and engineers who have been willing to put their name on a petition calling for a new investigation on this basis - that the official story is simply not physically possible."
Great point! 2700! Something must be fishy.
But how many licensed architects and engineers are there in the US? Turns out there's 105,042 + 822,575 = 927,617 (source: AIA & NCEES). 2,700 represents 0.29% of the total number of US architects and engineers. That means 99.71% haven't called for a new investigation.
But wait! Turns out Mr. Gage's petition is signed not only by licensed US architects and engineers, but also by the 'degreed' (without licenses they're not legally able to call themselves architects or engineers). It gets even better - many of the signatories are foreign (UK. Sri Lanka, Canada, Bolivia, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Colombia, etc). Nothing wrong with that, of course. The more, the merrier
But the base increases yet again. Linkedin estimates 3,600,000 licensed architects on earth. If the proportion of architects to engineers is similar to the US ratio 28,191,295 engineers exist, bringing the combined total to 31,791,295 architects and engineers worldwide.
2,700 is 0.0085% of 31,791,295. In other words, 99.9915% of worldwide architects and engineers haven't called for a new investigation. Are they part of a conspiracy?
ae911truth? Maybe Richard Gage enjoys having a nice tax-exempt slush fund for travel and lecture fees. Maybe he enjoys gadfly celebrity his practice never delivered. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Hugh Steadman says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 12:39 am GMT • 100 Words
This article which I read this morning was perfectly in accord with the blog I posted on http://www.khakispecs.com this morning. http://www.khakispecs.com/?p=2593
I have a friend and business partner in NZ, Harmon Wilfred, who is stateless as a result of blowing the whistle on the Clintons. His information, available in this blog, could blow the Clinton Foundation out of the water – but no one dare touch such a true conspiracy theory.
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- Rurik says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 12:58 am GMT • 100 Words @Incitatus "The main alternative theory is that the buildings were prewired with explosives for a controlled demolition. As regards WTC7, there is no reasonable doubt of this really, because the building was not hit by a plane even. But, obviously, once you recognize that one building was pre-rigged for controlled demolition, it becomes fairly obvious that all three were."
None dispute 9/11 was a conspiracy, but who was in it? Nineteen hijackers trained in Afghanistan and funded by Gulf money (the govt story)? The Bush administration? Some other govt? Why?
You've obviously done a great deal of research and conclude (as you say) all WTC towers were intentionally demolished. Please share your theory. If it was a scripted event:
• Why did WT 1 (the first tower hit) fall after WT 2? Did conspirators mix up demo timing?
• Why did they bother to take down WT 7? Wouldn't the lack of aerial impact reveal demo and conspiracy?
• How did conspirators mine 240 exterior columns on each office floor of WT 1 & 2 (±50,000 locations) without detection? Central core columns? Freestanding columns in public view at grade? How was it concealed from building tenants, management, maintenance staff, visitors, CoNY building inspectors, supply services, etc? And the same in WTC 7?
• Architects and engineers from Minoru Yamasaki & Associates, Emery Roth & Sons, Worthington Skilling Helle & Jackson, Joseph R. Loring & Assoc, Jaros Blum & Bolles, and the numerous other firms responsible for the WTC don't appear to be part of ae911truth. Are they part of the conspiracy? Are WTC building contractors and subcontractors part of the conspiracy? Building tenants?
• How could the same administration that ignored 9/11 warnings, bungled Katrina and screwed-up Iraq 2003 pull off such a complex, faultless conspiracy? Why have no insiders spilled the tale?I'm on the fence. I'd really like to know.
I'm on the fence. I'd really like to know.
you can start here
http://www.europhysicsnews.org/articles/epn/pdf/2016/04/epn2016-47-4.pdf
go to the featured article on page 21
only the people that pulled this thing off know the exact whys and hows, and it certainly wasn't faultless, or we all wouldn't know by now that it was an obvious inside job
what we are certain of is that the official story is a pack of lies, and that building seven didn't implode into its basement because of office fires.
from there, you go down the rabbit hole
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1VtozvvG4c
• Replies: @Incitatus I've read quite a few studies over the years, and have seen several films (ae911truth etc). Skeptical by nature, I ask specific questions. Most who doubt the NIST scenario seem unable to venture any guess on responsible parties, motives or exact means. 'Controlled demolition' is all very well, but how would one go about it without betraying the conspiracy?Two observations. The government story, however improbable, is explained in detail. One need not believe it, but at least there's meat on the bones. The none-of-the-above crowd, however, coughs up vague notions in lieu of any real motives, means, and methodology. Usually they offer YouTube, ae911truth, and similar sites as the answer. Which is to say, they have no real answers at all. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Sam Shama says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 1:16 am GMT • 200 Words
Boris and Incitatus,
I want you to know that Revusky loves you both, owing to your kind extension to him, the opportunity to partake of his daily bread – 9/11 "truth". Poor chap's been through a bit of a lean period lately; breadwise that is.I'd suggest a little caution nevertheless . You see, he repeatedly calls his interlocutors, "shit-eaters", a term he intends entirely as a fraternal invitation to a select club, of which, the dinner menu is limited, noxious and, -not to put too fine a point on it – unnatural. But of course he is entitled to his preferences, this being the day and age of inclusiveness and all that, I say to each his own.
Btw he adores infinite reduction loops, and hopes one day to set foot on the moon. In the meantime do remind him – the dosage is twice daily, ideally on an empty stomach.
• Replies: @Incitatus Sam,Enjoyed your advice, which I take to heart.
I too noted JR's fixation with coprophagia. I put it down to ecological pragmatism on his part. He produces such immense quantities of the product, he suggestively hopes others will consume it. He must be in constant danger of exploding.
Honoré de Balzac had a great observation on conspracists:
"[they] passed sovereign judgment on society the more readily because of the inferiority of their own status, for unappreciated men make up for their lowly position by the disdainful eye they cast upon the world." Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- WowJustWow says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 2:20 am GMT • 100 Words @Miro23 The British and Americans have been the victims of conspiracies (False Flag operations) for years.
For example:
The Irgun bombing of the King David Hotel (headquarters of the British Mandate Government of Palestine) in which Zionist activists dressed as Arabs placed milk churns filled with explosives against the main columns of the building killing 91 people and injuring 44. Israeli prime Minister Netanyahu, attended a celebration to commemorate the event.
Operation Susannah (Lavon Affair) where Israeli operatives impersonating Arabs bombed British and American cinemas, libraries and educational centers in Egypt to destabilize the country and keep British troops committed to the Middle East.
Or June 8, 1967, the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty with unmarked aircraft and torpedo boats. 34 men were killed and 171 wounded, with the attack in international waters following over nine hours of close surveillance. When the ship failed to sink, the Israeli government concocted an elaborate story to cover the crime. Original plan to blame the sinking with all lives lost on the Egyptians and draw the US into the war.
Or Israelis and U.S. Zionists appearing all over the most recent WTC 9/11 "Operation" with Israelis once again impersonating Arabs in a historic deception/terror action of a type that seems to carry a lot of kudos with old Israeli ex-terrorist Likudniks. Israeli agents were sent to film the historic day (as they later admitted on Israeli TV), with the celebrations including photos of themselves with a background of the burning towers where thousands of Americans were being incinerated.
Iraq was destroyed as a result of 9/11 but unfortunately for the conspirators, the momentum wasn't sufficient for a general war including Iran. Also the general war would have included the nuclear angle and justified the activation of a neo-con led Emergency Regime (dictatorship) in the US enforced with the newly printed Patriot Act and Homeland Security troops - or maybe that's just another Conspiracy Theory?
Come on. If you're going to false-flag 9/11, you hijack one plane. Hijacking four planes is exactly the kind of plan that has too many moving parts to be sensible. And it didn't go according to plan! Only three out of four planes hit their targets. If the hijackers on United 93 had been fully subdued and found to be Israelis in funny clothes, the other three planes would have been for nothing.
I can see the USS Liberty one though. I've never heard a plausible explanation for it.
• Replies: @ErebusIf you're going to false-flag 9/11, you hijack one plane. Hijacking four planes is exactly the kind of plan that has too many moving parts to be sensible.Type "no planes 9/11" into youtube for hints on how hijacking no planes at all is even more sensible. Some of the videos make better cases than others, but a half dozen or so appear conclusive. So sensible is the no planes theory, that one wonders why the plotters wouldn't have thought of it.
In any case, only one plane ever made it to prime time and much of the footage exhibits disturbing anomalies readily explained by CGI. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Hippopotamusdrome says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 3:36 am GMT @biz No it couldn't. If so, it would be orbiting the moon and its location, not to mention the measured distance to it, would be changing constantly.
It would be a probe that would land on the surface, like the russian Luna.
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- utu says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 3:42 am GMT
NOT A SHRED OF EVIDENCE THAT ANY 9/11 'HIJACKERS' BOARDED ANY PLANES
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https://truthandshadows.wordpress.com/2015/03/19/hijackers-did-not-board-planes/
- Zzz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 4:04 am GMT • 100 Words @Wizard of Oz Are you presuming that it should be easy to travel over the entire moon surface and easily arrive at a precisely defined point - and that where the flags are is such a point?
Actually it is. Relatively easy. Time and money consuming but not hard, at least compare to put robot on mars. And you not need to travel over entire surface, you can just land robot at about same place. But such experiment is pointless because have little science value and any evidence from it can be called fake(or be faked)
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- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 7:03 am GMT • 900 Words @Boris
Look, there is a clear electronic record here of what was said. I never said that you were presenting Atta's purchase of a plane ticket as the sole proof, no. But you did offer it as an element of proof.It's a piece of evidence. One of many. You keep asking "What's the strongest evidence?" but that is a stupid question. It's all strong. The mastermind admitting it on tape isn't good enough by itself, but combined with the money trail, the movements of the hijackers, the witnesses and everything else the case is pretty clear.Yes, they could have been patsies. Or aliens. When evidence that they are comes up, let me know.
I never said that you were presenting Atta's purchase of a plane ticket as the sole proof, no. But you did offer it as an element of proof.
It's a piece of evidence.
Oh, I see, here we are, the Monty Python argument shop skit approach to a discussion now. "No, that's not evidence." "It is." "It's not."
You always reach this point when you debate with a shit eater. They just start adamantly repeating whatever bullshit. It's like you have to tell them for the umpteenth time: " No, this turd you have just regurgitated yet again is not chocolate mousse. "
And no, the "purchase of a plane ticket" is not proof of anything!
Basically, you're saying that there is some paper record that a plane ticket was purchased in Atta's name. Yeah, okay, so what? This is not even proof that Atta himself purchased the ticket. I could purchase a plane ticket in somebody's name without them even knowing about it. That a person possesses a valid ticket, that a ticket was issued in somebody's name, that's not proof that they ever got on the plane. And even then, that somebody was on the plane is not proof that he hijacked it.
The purchase of the ticket is something that is so many degrees removed from being hard evidence of anything, it is hard to see how somebody could try to make that claim. But this really brings us to the core of the shit eater mentality.
You see, the reason that you present this kind of thing as evidence is that you've never really thought about this question - I mean the question what would constitute evidence. You never thought about it because you see no need. "It's the official story, I heard it on the TeeVee, therefore it's true."
That is how a shit eater reasons.
So it's a waste of time to try to have a "debate" with a shit eater because the shit eater does not even understand the basic parameters of a debate, what would constitute evidence and so forth.
You keep asking "What's the strongest evidence?" but that is a stupid question.
Well, a shit eater basically believes that asking for the evidence for any official story is stupid because well, it's the official story, therefore it's true. That's how a shit eater thinks. "Hey, this is the official bullshit. Yum yum."
Of course, if you're not a shit eater, then if they tell you that somebody committed whatever crime, the natural question is what is the strongest evidence available. And you have to think about whether what they are presenting to you as "evidence" really is, or how strong it is.
The mastermind admitting it on tape isn't good enough by itself, but combined with the money trail, the movements of the hijackers, the witnesses and everything else the case is pretty clear.
Well, this is all beg the question stuff. The shit eater's "proof" of the story invariably is based on assuming the story. "The mastermind, the hijackers " You assume that which needs to be demonstrated.
Most of this Al Qaeda narrative was established by torturing people, in particular, one poor wretch by the name of Abu Zubaydah, in Guantanamo bay. I referenced one article that is, I think, a must-read (if you really are interested in the topic, that is) here:
http://www.voltairenet.org/article177178.html
Now, regarding for example, the record of the "movements" of an alleged hijacker, like Atta, I looked for the airport surveillance video you mentioned and it's just a joke:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F249r7TaBo
That's a minute and a half and the narrator analyzes what is being presented as "proof" here. It's just a total joke.
Yes, they could have been patsies. Or aliens. When evidence that they are comes up, let me know.
Well, what would be the point? You would just continue to believe the official story anyway. Face it, dude, you're a shit eater. A clinical case.
The evidence that these people were patsies is really pretty glaring. Take the case of Hani Hanjour, who supposedly flew some sort of 270 degree sloping descent maneuver to hit the Pentagon, some feat of flying that professional pilots have said they could not execute. This guy Hani was up in some single-engine plane with a flight instructor once and the guy was so terrible (probably mostly because he didn't really know English and didn't understand anything the instructor was saying) that they got back on the ground and the instructor said never again!
There is a pattern here where anybody who really had any contact with any of these people saw that they were bumbling incompetents who couldn't carry out an operation like this. When you do minimal research on this and other similar events, the fact that the people they are pinning this on are just patsies - this is just glaring, it's right in your face. Lee Harvey Oswald back when, or more recently, these Arab ethnics in France that they say did these various things . the fact that these people are patsies is just right in front of one's nose when you study these events even minimally.
But when you talk with a shit eater, it's just like: "Oh, but that's the official story. It must be true! You're a conspiracy theorist, nya nya!"
"Of course Atta flew a plane into a building. He had a ticket, dammit!!! What more proof do you need???!!!!""
This is where you always end up when you debate a shit eater.
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- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 7:33 am GMT • 300 Words @Boris
This Boris shit eater claimed that Mohammed Atta buying a plane ticket was proof.This is an obvious fucking lie.You asked:"Anyway, what "videos" and "records" are you referring to specifically?"
I said: "Video surveillance of Atta at the airport. His purchase of the tickets. Money trails. And etc. etc. etc."Nowhere did I say Atta buying a plane ticket was proof, or anything similar.
Dishonest or stupid? My answer--both.
(I see you have literal Nazi cheerleaders. Congrats.)
(I see you have literal Nazi cheerleaders. Congrats.)
Hi, shit eater. I initially glossed over this last bit about my having "Nazi cheerleaders". I suppose you're calling Rurik here a "Nazi".
Rurik was referring to this Ursula Haverbeck case where, last year, an 87-year-old German woman was sentenced to 10 months prison for asking questions about the Holocaust, which is a crime in Germany, France and at least another dozen countries. Rurik (like myself) sees this as a travesty, and thus, in your mental shit eater world, is therefore a "Nazi".
It doesn't occur to you that anybody could support Ursula Haverbeck (and others like her) simply because they believe in free speech. If I say that it is utterly wrong to imprison somebody for expressing certain views, does that mean logically that I share those views? No, I might share those views or not. Or I might partially share them. The issue is the State terrorizing little old ladies in their eighties for simply asking questions.
But, again, your approach to the question is typical of the shit eater. A shit eater always accepts the dominant framing of any question and never thinks for himself. Occasionally people do wise up. I myself did, but it is the exception, not the rule.
Besides, I don't think I was ever as bad a case as you are. I don't think that I was ever saying stuff like: "Oh, we know that Mohammed Atta flew a plane into a building. He had a plane ticket! What more proof do you need?"
You're such a hard case, it's probably incurable.
• Replies: @RurikUrsula Haverbeck ... ..., an 87-year-old German woman was sentenced to 10 months prison for asking questions about the Holocaust, which is a crime in Germany, ... .... Rurik (like myself) sees this as a travesty,That's exactly true JR, I consider something like that an obvious travesty at the very least, and an abomination of human reason and compassion and simple decency. She may be wrong, but by what right do they have to tell her she's not allowed to ask questions? Fuck that shit. And fuck the people who put her in prison. What are they so afraid of, eh? Is what I'd like to know.He had a plane ticket! What more proof do you need?"ahh, but JR, you're forgetting the other, shocking proof that this was Osama and his 19 henchmen.. the passport!the magical passport that flew out of the terrorist's pocket or carry on, and through the carnage of the plane's explosion and through the fireball and all that glass and concrete and then gently glided down t0 the New York street, where it was quickly found before the dust fell on it and handed to the FBI and then rushed to the MSM, where upon they all let us all know that it had been found! so that we could all know who was responsible for this heinous attack!
I suppose Boris forgot about that unassailable evidence and proof or he would have surely mentioned it by now. And that's not all! They found Korans in the terrorist's rental car! Did you know that?
and they caught some of the terrorists actually filming the first plane hitting the tower, and these slimy bastards were all happy and celebrating the horrors, while the people who saw them were aghast, at how anyone could be happy at all that death of innocent people.
err, um, wait, no, those weren't the terrorists come to think of it. Never mind that last part.
But the passport!!
that was undeniable physical evidence! Proof!
and then there was the witness, right there on the spot, to explain how the buildings collapsed
"mostly due to structural failure, because the fire was just too intense"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5y8PtfKA14
all these things were explained to us all right away. They knew it was Bin Laden within hours. And they knew right away how the buildings fell, and had planted that "knowledge" into us all, with videos like the Harley guy, who planted that seed in our collective conscieness. for how hundreds of thousands of tons of steel and concrete was going to >>poof<< into so much powder..
"mostly due to structural failure, because the fire was just too intense" , @Incitatus Of course we all grieve for Ursula. Ten months in prison. Pity. But look on the bright side. Perhaps she'll be able to knit a few flags and armbands? Sweaters for the Eastern Front? Thermal underpants for the SS? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Erebus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 7:58 am GMT • 100 Words @WowJustWow Come on. If you're going to false-flag 9/11, you hijack one plane. Hijacking four planes is exactly the kind of plan that has too many moving parts to be sensible. And it didn't go according to plan! Only three out of four planes hit their targets. If the hijackers on United 93 had been fully subdued and found to be Israelis in funny clothes, the other three planes would have been for nothing.
I can see the USS Liberty one though. I've never heard a plausible explanation for it.
If you're going to false-flag 9/11, you hijack one plane. Hijacking four planes is exactly the kind of plan that has too many moving parts to be sensible.
Type "no planes 9/11″ into youtube for hints on how hijacking no planes at all is even more sensible. Some of the videos make better cases than others, but a half dozen or so appear conclusive. So sensible is the no planes theory, that one wonders why the plotters wouldn't have thought of it.
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In any case, only one plane ever made it to prime time and much of the footage exhibits disturbing anomalies readily explained by CGI.
- Erebus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 9:37 am GMT • 600 Words
Not to answer for The Great Revusky, I'll offer some suggestions of my own:
• Why did WT 1 (the first tower hit) fall after WT 2? Did conspirators mix up demo timing?
- The 2nd tower hit failed to ignite properly. The fires were clearly in danger of going out entirely on their own soon after being "hit". It either got brought down immediately, or would stand as a testament to what happened.
- They may have screwed up the timing, but I doubt it. To me it looks like they made a decision on the fly.• Why did they bother to take down WT 7? Wouldn't the lack of aerial impact reveal demo and conspiracy?
There were a variety of good political reasons to bring down WTC7. Let Google be your friend on this. There's a couple of easily made guesses as to what may have happened, such as:
- It was to be brought down using the chaos of the WTC1 & 2 collapses as smokescreen, but something went wrong with the countdown and the demolition was aborted pending repairs.
- I have a hard time believing any planes were involved at all, so your 2nd question is moot for me, but if my guess immediately above is right, then there would have been an explosion cueing the point of impact. Perhaps that failed to go off, leaving any CGI plane simply disappearing into the building without leaving a trace. That would look rather weird, so they opted to bring it down in broad daylight hoping few would notice.• How did conspirators mine 240 exterior columns on each office floor of WT 1 & 2 (±50,000 locations) without detection? Central core columns? Freestanding columns in public view at grade? How was it concealed from building tenants, management, maintenance staff, visitors, CoNY building inspectors, supply services, etc? And the same in WTC 7?
They didn't, simply because there was no need to. Bringing down the central core would be all that's needed to bring the building down. They did however, conscientiously cut the outer columns to manageable lengths.
• Architects and engineers from Minoru Yamasaki & Associates, Emery Roth & Sons, Worthington Skilling Helle & Jackson, Joseph R. Loring & Assoc, Jaros Blum & Bolles, and the numerous other firms responsible for the WTC don't appear to be part of ae911truth. Are they part of the conspiracy? Are WTC building contractors and subcontractors part of the conspiracy? Building tenants?
No, no, & (for the most part) no. There was that group of apparently Israeli "artists" that camped out in the WTC for 4 years immediately prior to 9/11, but I don't recall whether they were rent paying tenants. Incidentally, they had 24/7, construction access to the buildings and were ensconced in both impact zones.
• How could the same administration that ignored 9/11 warnings, bungled Katrina and screwed-up Iraq 2003 pull off such a complex, faultless conspiracy? Why have no insiders spilled the tale?
I don't believe the "same administration" was necessarily involved. I would posit that, for the most part, an entirely different administration pulled it off.
Parenthetically, I'm not at all sure the "same administration bungled Katrina and screwed-up Iraq". A case can be made that at least some segments of the Administration got exactly the results they were looking for in both cases, but that's a different thread.
• Replies: @Incitatus But surely those who can set up and stage-manage such a complex event without detection wouldn't screw up? I'm unable to find much of any value stored in WTC 7. Giuliani's crisis control center, yes, but that's hardly a reason to risk uncovering the conspiracy hours after the fall of WTC 1 & 2..If WTC 1 & 2 central core columns were, as you suggest, the only mining required, how was it done without detection? Four years effort by Israeli 'artists'? Undetected? What was their motive?
You posit the exterior 14x14" steel 'cage' columns (240/floor) need not be mined but were instead "cut...to manageable lengths." What lengths? How was it done without detection?
"- I have a hard time believing any planes were involved at all, so your 2nd question is moot for me, but if my guess immediately above is right, then there would have been an explosion cueing the point of impact. Perhaps that failed to go off, leaving any CGI plane simply disappearing into the building without leaving a trace. That would look rather weird, so they opted to bring it down in broad daylight hoping few would notice."
CGI = computer-generated-imagery? So the planes were an illusion? Did they hypnotize eyewitnesses who saw the planes? The news crews? Etc?
Still, that's great news! Where do you suggest two friends of mine, parents of a stewardess on American Flight 11, find their daughter? , @Jonathan Revusky
Not to answer for The Great Revusky,LOL. Hi, don't worry that you are encroaching on my territory. It actually gets very very tiresome to argue with these shit eaters. So if you want to lend a hand, that's just great.I don't suppose it's lost on you that this "Incitatus" is some sort of professional disinfo agent. He's coming in to pick up the slack because "Boris" started seriously self-destructing. He's got some basic troll act that he's open-minded and so forth and just wants to know the truth...
But, of course, the whole thing is ridiculous. Here we are, 15 years after the event, and the guy is representing that he really wants to get at the truth. Well, why didn't he read a single book on the topic in the last decade plus? Or why didn't he ever look at any of the material on http://ae911truth.org ?
His alleged fence-sitting position makes no sense 15 years after the event.
But if you look at his questions, it's all misdirection. Squid ink strategy. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 11:40 am GMT
But I thought you were expressing certainty that the official story was true, no?
I am not absolutely certain. New evidence could sway my opinion. You don't have any.
And no, the "purchase of a plane ticket" is not proof of anything!
Imagine if there were no records that Atta had bought the tickets. Dipshits like you would be going crazy repeating this fact from coast to coast, right? It's like you haven't done ANY real thinking your whole life.
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyImagine if there were no records that Atta had bought the tickets. Dipshits like you would be going crazy repeating this fact from coast to coast, right?Well, of course. What's your point?Oh,... hold on... I see... you don't understand the difference between a necessary and a sufficient condition.
Sheesh. I guess I should explain it to you....
Look... For example... for Lee Harvey Oswald to have assassinated JFK, he had to be in Dallas on 11/22/1963, right? That's a necessary condition. So if you could show that he was in New York or Miami on that day, it would be all over. Obviously he didn't do it in that case. But no, he was in Dallas on that day. The problem is that this is a necessary condition for him being guilty, but is certainly not sufficient .
Mohamed Atta, like anybody, could not even board the flight if he didn't have a ticket, so if it was shown that he never had a ticket, that would be game over, like if Oswald was not even in Dallas.
But no, Atta did have a plane ticket apparently. I assume he did. And of course, Oswald was in Dallas at the time of the JFK assassination. The problem is that these things are simply not proof of any sort of what needs to be proven in either case. It's a necessary , but not a sufficient condition.
So what is going on here, Mr. Boris Shit-Eater, is that it is becoming increasingly clear that you don't even understand the most basic things in logic, like a necessary versus a sufficient condition. But, of course, in the shit eater mental universe, there is no need for any of that. The MSM tells you something so therefore it's true. That's how shit eaters operate.
It's like you haven't done ANY real thinking your whole life.LOL. Project much? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 11:52 am GMT • 100 Words
Well, a shit eater basically believes that asking for the evidence for any official story is stupid
I told you where to find the evidence. You seem to be getting dumber.
Well, what would be the point? You would just continue to believe the official story anyway.
You have zero evidence for your beliefs. Zero.
Hani Hanjour
So one flight instructor saying he was bad years before means he couldn't have gotten better? And, of course, many pilots say that what he did was possible. Do you see how you don't apply the same scrutiny to things that you WANT to believe?
This is how conspiracy theorists behave. Video evidence? Fake! Some pilots told me it was impossible, so it was!
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyI told you where to find the evidence.Oh, you did, huh?But anyway, this is getting nonsensical. How could you even tell me where to find evidence if you don't even know what evidence is? I mean, you obviously don't understand the difference between a necessary and a sufficient condition.
You have zero evidence for your beliefs. Zero.You're just projecting. You are the one with no evidence for your beliefs. This is quite obvious. Somebody asks you what the evidence is and your "evidence" is stuff like "Mohammed Atta had a plane ticket". When you are asked for evidence (and I specifically said "the strongest evidence available") and you're coming up with worthless crap like that, it obviously means you have no evidence. Surely everybody sees that, no?Years before??? Uhh, look, the incident in question was in August 2001, less than a month before he allegedly did his top gun maneuver with a passenger jet into the Pentagon.
So one flight instructor saying he was bad years before means he couldn't have gotten better?Hanjour began making cross-country flights in August to test security, and tried to rent a plane from Freeway Airport in Maryland; though he was declined after exhibiting difficulty controlling and landing a single-engine Cessna 172.[25]The above is from the Wikipedia page devoted to Hani Hanjour, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hani_Hanjour#2001He was not competent to fly a small Cessna in August of 2001. It was not YEARS before. You see, you're just making up shit now.
This is like some guy who can't even pass a basic driving test in a regular car and three or four weeks later, he is competing successfully in the Indy 500. Or driving the Grand Prix circuit.
If this was the only problem in the overall story, but it's like plot glitch #174 or something. I mean, the whole narrative is just shot through with ridiculous stuff like this.
Some pilots told me it was impossible, so it was!Well, as a matter of fact, I take expert testimony on questions seriously. If a professional pilot with thousands of hours of experience flying Boeing passenger jets tells you that he himself could not execute the maneuver, it does not take a bloody genius to realize that Hani Hanjour certainly could not do it!If a controlled demolition specialist in Holland, Danny Jowenko, when shown the footage of WTC 7 imploding says that this is definitely a controlled demolition, it stands to reason that it is a controlled demolition! I don't presume to know more about flying airplanes than seasoned professional pilots or more about building implosions than a professional demolitions expert.
Now, it's true that you have high level experts claiming the opposite, but you can generally see that these are people who are pretty beholden to the power structure, and will feel obliged to go along with whatever the official line is, such as the people at NIST who claim that building 7 imploded perfectly symmetrically from uncontrolled fires. These people say that because they have to. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 2:33 pm GMT • 100 Words
It doesn't occur to you that anybody could support Ursula Haverbeck (and others like her) simply because they believe in free speech.
Rurik denies the Holocaust and whines that Germans have been maligned because history was written down. You are probably stupid enough to agree with him.
"Oh, we know that Mohammed Atta flew a plane into a building. He had a plane ticket! What more proof do you need?"
You keep repeating this lie. I wonder why? Oh, you're a fucking moron. That's right.
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- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 3:56 pm GMT • 300 Words @Boris
But I thought you were expressing certainty that the official story was true, no?I am not absolutely certain. New evidence could sway my opinion. You don't have any.And no, the "purchase of a plane ticket" is not proof of anything!Imagine if there were no records that Atta had bought the tickets. Dipshits like you would be going crazy repeating this fact from coast to coast, right? It's like you haven't done ANY real thinking your whole life.Imagine if there were no records that Atta had bought the tickets. Dipshits like you would be going crazy repeating this fact from coast to coast, right?
Well, of course. What's your point?
Oh, hold on I see you don't understand the difference between a necessary and a sufficient condition.
Sheesh. I guess I should explain it to you .
Look For example for Lee Harvey Oswald to have assassinated JFK, he had to be in Dallas on 11/22/1963, right? That's a necessary condition. So if you could show that he was in New York or Miami on that day, it would be all over. Obviously he didn't do it in that case. But no, he was in Dallas on that day. The problem is that this is a necessary condition for him being guilty, but is certainly not sufficient .
Mohamed Atta, like anybody, could not even board the flight if he didn't have a ticket, so if it was shown that he never had a ticket, that would be game over, like if Oswald was not even in Dallas.
But no, Atta did have a plane ticket apparently. I assume he did. And of course, Oswald was in Dallas at the time of the JFK assassination. The problem is that these things are simply not proof of any sort of what needs to be proven in either case. It's a necessary , but not a sufficient condition.
So what is going on here, Mr. Boris Shit-Eater, is that it is becoming increasingly clear that you don't even understand the most basic things in logic, like a necessary versus a sufficient condition. But, of course, in the shit eater mental universe, there is no need for any of that. The MSM tells you something so therefore it's true. That's how shit eaters operate.
It's like you haven't done ANY real thinking your whole life.
LOL. Project much?
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- Incitatus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 4:35 pm GMT • 100 Words @Rurik
I'm on the fence. I'd really like to know.you can start herehttp://www.europhysicsnews.org/articles/epn/pdf/2016/04/epn2016-47-4.pdf
go to the featured article on page 21
only the people that pulled this thing off know the exact whys and hows, and it certainly wasn't faultless, or we all wouldn't know by now that it was an obvious inside job
what we are certain of is that the official story is a pack of lies, and that building seven didn't implode into its basement because of office fires.
from there, you go down the rabbit hole
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1VtozvvG4c
I've read quite a few studies over the years, and have seen several films (ae911truth etc). Skeptical by nature, I ask specific questions. Most who doubt the NIST scenario seem unable to venture any guess on responsible parties, motives or exact means. 'Controlled demolition' is all very well, but how would one go about it without betraying the conspiracy?
Two observations. The government story, however improbable, is explained in detail. One need not believe it, but at least there's meat on the bones. The none-of-the-above crowd, however, coughs up vague notions in lieu of any real motives, means, and methodology. Usually they offer YouTube, ae911truth, and similar sites as the answer. Which is to say, they have no real answers at all.
• Replies: @RurikI ask specific questions.that's fine Incitatus, but all too often those roads lead down to obfuscation and conjecture. Like why did they implode building seven? The answer is we don't know. Probably because it was the control center for the whole operation, and they wanted to 'pull it' to erase all the evidence. Flight 92 was probably intended to hit building seven, as the pretext for its collapse, but then when it was shot down over Pennsylvania, they had to wing it.But that is all conjecture. Like asking someone who doesn't buy the Warren commission's findings, OK then 'why did they kill JFK'? Only the assassins know the answer to that question, just as only the people responsible for 911 could answer all the detailed queries.
How did they rig the buildings surreptitiously? That is a whole gigantic side discussion, and people are having it, and we could spend hours debating all the minutia, but to what end?
This we know. We know that building seven fell in a way that is incomprehensible based on simple physics. Indeed, impossible. We know that right away all the authorities set about having all the steel beams and forensic evidence of this stupendous and monumental and historic engineering failure, shipped off to China to be melted down and destroyed before any examination could be done by professionals. We're all supposed to just take the authorities word for it, even tho it appears even they conducted no investigation. Building seven wasn't even mentioned in the 911 commission report. Isn't that something?!
But even more to the point Incitatus, is that several news organizations reported on the collapse of building seven before it happened. Did you know that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOVnvFl5jZo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M26-B44qQIs
now how could they have known this event was about to happen when even now no one can explain how or why that building came down. It's as if a news organization had reported that the first plane had hit the WTC tower 20 minutes before it did. Don't you think there'd be some legitimate curiosity as to how this news organization knew the first plane was going to hit, before it did? No?
The collapse of building seven is a mystery, at the very least. An anomaly to all known laws of physics and structural engineering, even today no one can explain it any better than the magic bullet, that goes through Kennedy and then turns and hits Connelly a couple different times and then ends up pristine. But now imagine if a news organization had reported on the assassination of JFK 20 minutes before it happened. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 4:55 pm GMT • 500 Words @Boris
Well, a shit eater basically believes that asking for the evidence for any official story is stupidI told you where to find the evidence. You seem to be getting dumber.Well, what would be the point? You would just continue to believe the official story anyway.You have zero evidence for your beliefs. Zero.So one flight instructor saying he was bad years before means he couldn't have gotten better? And, of course, many pilots say that what he did was possible. Do you see how you don't apply the same scrutiny to things that you WANT to believe?
Hani HanjourThis is how conspiracy theorists behave. Video evidence? Fake! Some pilots told me it was impossible, so it was!
I told you where to find the evidence.
Oh, you did, huh?
But anyway, this is getting nonsensical. How could you even tell me where to find evidence if you don't even know what evidence is? I mean, you obviously don't understand the difference between a necessary and a sufficient condition.
You have zero evidence for your beliefs. Zero.
You're just projecting. You are the one with no evidence for your beliefs. This is quite obvious. Somebody asks you what the evidence is and your "evidence" is stuff like "Mohammed Atta had a plane ticket". When you are asked for evidence (and I specifically said "the strongest evidence available") and you're coming up with worthless crap like that, it obviously means you have no evidence. Surely everybody sees that, no?
So one flight instructor saying he was bad years before means he couldn't have gotten better?
Years before??? Uhh, look, the incident in question was in August 2001, less than a month before he allegedly did his top gun maneuver with a passenger jet into the Pentagon.
Hanjour began making cross-country flights in August to test security, and tried to rent a plane from Freeway Airport in Maryland; though he was declined after exhibiting difficulty controlling and landing a single-engine Cessna 172.[25]
The above is from the Wikipedia page devoted to Hani Hanjour, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hani_Hanjour#2001
He was not competent to fly a small Cessna in August of 2001. It was not YEARS before. You see, you're just making up shit now.
This is like some guy who can't even pass a basic driving test in a regular car and three or four weeks later, he is competing successfully in the Indy 500. Or driving the Grand Prix circuit.
If this was the only problem in the overall story, but it's like plot glitch #174 or something. I mean, the whole narrative is just shot through with ridiculous stuff like this.
Some pilots told me it was impossible, so it was!
Well, as a matter of fact, I take expert testimony on questions seriously. If a professional pilot with thousands of hours of experience flying Boeing passenger jets tells you that he himself could not execute the maneuver, it does not take a bloody genius to realize that Hani Hanjour certainly could not do it!
If a controlled demolition specialist in Holland, Danny Jowenko, when shown the footage of WTC 7 imploding says that this is definitely a controlled demolition, it stands to reason that it is a controlled demolition! I don't presume to know more about flying airplanes than seasoned professional pilots or more about building implosions than a professional demolitions expert.
Now, it's true that you have high level experts claiming the opposite, but you can generally see that these are people who are pretty beholden to the power structure, and will feel obliged to go along with whatever the official line is, such as the people at NIST who claim that building 7 imploded perfectly symmetrically from uncontrolled fires. These people say that because they have to.
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- Incitatus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 4:57 pm GMT • 200 Words @Erebus Not to answer for The Great Revusky, I'll offer some suggestions of my own:
• Why did WT 1 (the first tower hit) fall after WT 2? Did conspirators mix up demo timing?- The 2nd tower hit failed to ignite properly. The fires were clearly in danger of going out entirely on their own soon after being "hit". It either got brought down immediately, or would stand as a testament to what happened.
- They may have screwed up the timing, but I doubt it. To me it looks like they made a decision on the fly.• Why did they bother to take down WT 7? Wouldn't the lack of aerial impact reveal demo and conspiracy?There were a variety of good political reasons to bring down WTC7. Let Google be your friend on this. There's a couple of easily made guesses as to what may have happened, such as:
- It was to be brought down using the chaos of the WTC1 & 2 collapses as smokescreen, but something went wrong with the countdown and the demolition was aborted pending repairs.
- I have a hard time believing any planes were involved at all, so your 2nd question is moot for me, but if my guess immediately above is right, then there would have been an explosion cueing the point of impact. Perhaps that failed to go off, leaving any CGI plane simply disappearing into the building without leaving a trace. That would look rather weird, so they opted to bring it down in broad daylight hoping few would notice.• How did conspirators mine 240 exterior columns on each office floor of WT 1 & 2 (±50,000 locations) without detection? Central core columns? Freestanding columns in public view at grade? How was it concealed from building tenants, management, maintenance staff, visitors, CoNY building inspectors, supply services, etc? And the same in WTC 7?They didn't, simply because there was no need to. Bringing down the central core would be all that's needed to bring the building down. They did however, conscientiously cut the outer columns to manageable lengths.No, no, & (for the most part) no. There was that group of apparently Israeli "artists" that camped out in the WTC for 4 years immediately prior to 9/11, but I don't recall whether they were rent paying tenants. Incidentally, they had 24/7, construction access to the buildings and were ensconced in both impact zones.
• Architects and engineers from Minoru Yamasaki & Associates, Emery Roth & Sons, Worthington Skilling Helle & Jackson, Joseph R. Loring & Assoc, Jaros Blum & Bolles, and the numerous other firms responsible for the WTC don't appear to be part of ae911truth. Are they part of the conspiracy? Are WTC building contractors and subcontractors part of the conspiracy? Building tenants?• How could the same administration that ignored 9/11 warnings, bungled Katrina and screwed-up Iraq 2003 pull off such a complex, faultless conspiracy? Why have no insiders spilled the tale?I don't believe the "same administration" was necessarily involved. I would posit that, for the most part, an entirely different administration pulled it off.Parenthetically, I'm not at all sure the "same administration... bungled Katrina and screwed-up Iraq". A case can be made that at least some segments of the Administration got exactly the results they were looking for in both cases, but that's a different thread.
But surely those who can set up and stage-manage such a complex event without detection wouldn't screw up? I'm unable to find much of any value stored in WTC 7. Giuliani's crisis control center, yes, but that's hardly a reason to risk uncovering the conspiracy hours after the fall of WTC 1 & 2..
If WTC 1 & 2 central core columns were, as you suggest, the only mining required, how was it done without detection? Four years effort by Israeli 'artists'? Undetected? What was their motive?
You posit the exterior 14×14" steel 'cage' columns (240/floor) need not be mined but were instead "cut to manageable lengths." What lengths? How was it done without detection?
"- I have a hard time believing any planes were involved at all, so your 2nd question is moot for me, but if my guess immediately above is right, then there would have been an explosion cueing the point of impact. Perhaps that failed to go off, leaving any CGI plane simply disappearing into the building without leaving a trace. That would look rather weird, so they opted to bring it down in broad daylight hoping few would notice."
CGI = computer-generated-imagery? So the planes were an illusion? Did they hypnotize eyewitnesses who saw the planes? The news crews? Etc?
Still, that's great news! Where do you suggest two friends of mine, parents of a stewardess on American Flight 11, find their daughter?
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- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 5:02 pm GMT • 100 Words
Oh, hold on I see you don't understand the difference between a necessary and a sufficient condition.
You are so stupid. I already wrote this:
Obviously the plane ticket is a necessary but not sufficient piece of evidence.
See? You can't even fucking read.
I never said it was the only piece of evidence, and said explicitly that it was not sufficient. You took it out of a list of evidence and pretended I said it was "proof," when I never even used the word. Because you are too stupid to argue honestly.
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyOh, hold on I see you don't understand the difference between a necessary and a sufficient condition.(Shrug.) Little children are always using big words that they have overheard adults using. It doesn't really mean that they understand what they are saying.
But okay, look, a shit eater like you could, in the appropriate context, understand what a necessary versus a sufficient condition is. Or you could understand what the beg the question fallacy is. But the problem remains that, at the key moment, you are able to NOT understand it.
Because, at the key moment, the shit eater always ends up telling you (either directly or circuitously) that the official story is proof of the official story. Never fails. Earlier you told me to go read the page on wikipedia. Well, the page on wikipedia is just a synopsis of the official story. I asked you for proof so you were just telling me that the official story is proof of the official story.
I never said it was the only piece of evidence, and said explicitly that it was not sufficient. You took it out of a list of evidence and pretended I said it was "proof,"Well, that's a mischaracterization. The fact remains, you said that Mohammed Atta having a plane ticket was evidence. It was in your list of evidence.AND NO, the fact remains: THAT IS NOT EVIDENCE OF ANYTHING!
I'll tell you what it is. It is SHIT. Because that is all a shit eater ever comes up with in a debate.
Just shit. Like... the guy bought a plane ticket so he's the hijacker ... The government story is proof of the government story ...
You're not the first shit eater I've debated with. All you guys ever come up with is SHIT. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Incitatus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 5:10 pm GMT • 100 Words @Sam Shama Boris and Incitatus,
I want you to know that Revusky loves you both, owing to your kind extension to him, the opportunity to partake of his daily bread - 9/11 "truth". Poor chap's been through a bit of a lean period lately; breadwise that is.I'd suggest a little caution nevertheless . You see, he repeatedly calls his interlocutors, "shit-eaters", a term he intends entirely as a fraternal invitation to a select club, of which, the dinner menu is limited, noxious and, -not to put too fine a point on it - unnatural. But of course he is entitled to his preferences, this being the day and age of inclusiveness and all that, I say to each his own.
Btw he adores infinite reduction loops, and hopes one day to set foot on the moon. In the meantime do remind him - the dosage is twice daily, ideally on an empty stomach.
Sam,
Enjoyed your advice, which I take to heart.
I too noted JR's fixation with coprophagia. I put it down to ecological pragmatism on his part. He produces such immense quantities of the product, he suggestively hopes others will consume it. He must be in constant danger of exploding.
Honoré de Balzac had a great observation on conspracists:
"[they] passed sovereign judgment on society the more readily because of the inferiority of their own status, for unappreciated men make up for their lowly position by the disdainful eye they cast upon the world."
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- Rurik says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 5:49 pm GMT • 400 Words @Jonathan Revusky
(I see you have literal Nazi cheerleaders. Congrats.)Hi, shit eater. I initially glossed over this last bit about my having "Nazi cheerleaders". I suppose you're calling Rurik here a "Nazi".Rurik was referring to this Ursula Haverbeck case where, last year, an 87-year-old German woman was sentenced to 10 months prison for asking questions about the Holocaust, which is a crime in Germany, France and at least another dozen countries. Rurik (like myself) sees this as a travesty, and thus, in your mental shit eater world, is therefore a "Nazi".
It doesn't occur to you that anybody could support Ursula Haverbeck (and others like her) simply because they believe in free speech. If I say that it is utterly wrong to imprison somebody for expressing certain views, does that mean logically that I share those views? No, I might share those views or not. Or I might partially share them. The issue is the State terrorizing little old ladies in their eighties for simply asking questions.
But, again, your approach to the question is typical of the shit eater. A shit eater always accepts the dominant framing of any question and never thinks for himself. Occasionally people do wise up. I myself did, but it is the exception, not the rule.
Besides, I don't think I was ever as bad a case as you are. I don't think that I was ever saying stuff like: "Oh, we know that Mohammed Atta flew a plane into a building. He had a plane ticket! What more proof do you need?"
You're such a hard case, it's probably incurable.
Ursula Haverbeck , an 87-year-old German woman was sentenced to 10 months prison for asking questions about the Holocaust, which is a crime in Germany, . Rurik (like myself) sees this as a travesty,
That's exactly true JR, I consider something like that an obvious travesty at the very least, and an abomination of human reason and compassion and simple decency. She may be wrong, but by what right do they have to tell her she's not allowed to ask questions? Fuck that shit. And fuck the people who put her in prison. What are they so afraid of, eh? Is what I'd like to know.
He had a plane ticket! What more proof do you need?"
ahh, but JR, you're forgetting the other, shocking proof that this was Osama and his 19 henchmen.. the passport!
the magical passport that flew out of the terrorist's pocket or carry on, and through the carnage of the plane's explosion and through the fireball and all that glass and concrete and then gently glided down t0 the New York street, where it was quickly found before the dust fell on it and handed to the FBI and then rushed to the MSM, where upon they all let us all know that it had been found! so that we could all know who was responsible for this heinous attack!
I suppose Boris forgot about that unassailable evidence and proof or he would have surely mentioned it by now. And that's not all! They found Korans in the terrorist's rental car! Did you know that?
and they caught some of the terrorists actually filming the first plane hitting the tower, and these slimy bastards were all happy and celebrating the horrors, while the people who saw them were aghast, at how anyone could be happy at all that death of innocent people.
err, um, wait, no, those weren't the terrorists come to think of it. Never mind that last part.
But the passport!!
that was undeniable physical evidence! Proof!
and then there was the witness, right there on the spot, to explain how the buildings collapsed
"mostly due to structural failure, because the fire was just too intense"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5y8PtfKA14
all these things were explained to us all right away. They knew it was Bin Laden within hours. And they knew right away how the buildings fell, and had planted that "knowledge" into us all, with videos like the Harley guy, who planted that seed in our collective conscieness. for how hundreds of thousands of tons of steel and concrete was going to >>poof<< into so much powder..
"mostly due to structural failure, because the fire was just too intense"
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- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 6:03 pm GMT • 300 Words
I mean, you obviously don't understand the difference between a necessary and a sufficient condition.
Still embarrassing yourself.
he was declined after exhibiting difficulty controlling and landing a single-engine Cessna 172.[25]
Here's the citation for that claim:
https://web.archive.org/web/20020405020924/http://www.newsday.com/ny-usflight232380680sep23.story
The guy that wouldn't let Hanjour rent a plane w/o more lessons also said this:
Despite Hanjour's poor reviews, he did have some ability as a pilot, said Bernard of Freeway Airport. "There's no doubt in my mind that once that [hijacked jet] got going, he could have pointed that plane at a building and hit it," he said.
So your theory collapses. Unless the guy lied about this part, but told the truth about Hanjour not being able to control the Cessna with much skill? You are dumb enough to believe that, so
Well, as a matter of fact, I take expert testimony on questions seriously.
Well, so you take Bernard seriously then? Or, wait, he's a government stooge who accidentally told the truth once? Shape-shifter?
If a controlled demolition specialist in Holland, Danny Jowenko, when shown the footage of WTC 7 imploding says that this is definitely a controlled demolition, it stands to reason that it is a controlled demolition!
Here's a different expert's view–an expert who actually examined the evidence:
http://www.implosionworld.com/Article-WTC%20STUDY%208-06%20w%20clarif%20as%20of%209-8-06%20.pdf
So is he (Circle one^):
Government stooge
Shapeshifter
Lizard man
Hologramsuch as the people at NIST who claim that building 7 imploded perfectly symmetrically from uncontrolled fires
This is another lie. I already posted a summary of what they said.
I really don't care what your response is. I know it will probably be more insanely stupid than the last.
[MORE]
^Disclaimer for morons: Don't actually circle it on your monitor.• Replies: @Jonathan Revusky
Well, so you take Bernard seriously then?Look, I wasn't there, but the incident, as recounted, seems to be true and it happened 3 weeks before 9/11, NOT years before, as you were trying to claim. To recap...Hani Hanjour tried to rent a single-engine Cessna and a flight instructor went up with him and said the guy did not have the skill to fly that plane. The single-engine Cessna.
Now, it is claimed that 3 weeks later and Hani can fly the big Boeing in a maneuver that professional pilots with thousands of hours have said they could not do. Just to focus this, here is what the cockpit of a Boeing 757 looks like:
https://www.google.es/search?q=boeing+757+cockpit&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiA-8bMu4XPAhVLuBQKHaXbA_oQ_AUICCgB&biw=1024&bih=483
The guy that wouldn't let Hanjour rent a plane w/o more lessons also said this:Well, c'mon, the guy doubtless came under pressure to say that the guy could have done what they said he did. But look, obviously, if he evaluated the guy as unable to control a Cessna in August, the guy couldn't suddenly fly a big Boeing in September! And this business that he "pointed that plane at a building and hit it", that is not what allegedly happened with the Pentagon flight. The plane allegedly flew this really incredible 270 degree descending loop and, in the final stretch flew at treetop level into the exact part of the Pentagon that was hit. And as I said, you can look at the Pilots for 9/11 Truth and see that there are professional pilots with thousands of hours flying these Boeing airliners who say they could not fly that maneuver. So the guy supposedly was flying one of these big planes for the first (and last) time in his life and successfully carried off this maneuver. It's completely ridiculous bullshit, but when you're a shit eater, it's like "mmm, yum, yum".Despite Hanjour's poor reviews, he did have some ability as a pilot, said Bernard of Freeway Airport. "There's no doubt in my mind that once that [hijacked jet] got going, he could have pointed that plane at a building and hit it," he said.And really, you know, this is such an absurd argument to be having. Okay, it's obvious that if somebody can't really control a Cessna in August of 2001, he can't do some top gun maneuver in a big Boeing in September of 2001. But it doesn't even matter. The flight didn't even take place! Or certainly, at the very least, there is not a shred of evidence that any Boeing airliner crashed into the Pentagon anyway.
So, finally, whether Hani Hanjour could have flown the plane in that maneuver or not hardly matters. The overall narrative just has so many problems in it that, even if you concede a given point just for the sake of argument, like assume that Hani Hanjour really could fly a Boeing 757 in this elaborate maneuver only 3 weeks after demonstrating an inability to control a Cessna, it still doesn't matter because there is very strong reason to believe that the flight did not even take place.
Here's a different expert's view–an expert who actually examined the evidence:I hadn't seen that one before, but a quick googling shows that there are at least a couple of extensive rebuttals to this article. For example, here:http://www.implosionworld.com/Article-WTC%20STUDY%208-06%20w%20clarif%20as%20of%209-8-06%20.pdf
http://www.911research.wtc7.net/reviews/blanchard/index.html
and here:
http://pilotsfor911truth.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=5126
Now, I lack the expertise to be certain about these things, but I would just make the point that if you googled up this Blanchard stuff, then you would easily find the above-linked rebuttals as well. But since the rebuttals don't support what you want to believe, you just don't mention them.
It's like there are phone calls, I mean testimony that somebody got a phone call, and then that supports the official story, you say that is strong proof but if I point to testimony where Atta's father got a phone call the day after 9/11 from his son, you immediately say Atta's father was lying.
Your whole thing is just always going to be to cherry pick things based on what you want to believe. That's a completely corrupted intellectual process.
The reason I am quite certain that the official narrative is untrue is that there just really is such an accumulation of problems with the story that it really just can't be true. The Hani Hanjour thing is like just one of literally hundreds of glitches in the story, that the guy they say flew that plane obviously did not have the skills. That the flight instructor in question, the Bernard guy then claimed that he did, you can see that he must have been pressured to say that. If you can't fly a Cessna, you can't fly a Boeing 757. And besides, the conditions under which this supposedly happened, where the guy had just murdered the pilot and taken over the plane and his adrenaline would be sky high and he sits down and, flying this plane for the very first time, calmly maneuvers the plane in this 270 degree looping descent.
This just didn't happen. There is no photographic or video evidence at the alleged crash site that is consistent with a Boeing 757 having crashed there! This is all just a constructed fiction. Anybody who studies this in any kind of intellectually honest way surely comes to that conclusion.
The only way you can believe this stuff is if you have this kind of intense emotional need to believe it. You look at what they are saying happened cold-bloodedly and it is really just glaringly obviously that it's all total bullshit. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Incitatus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 6:05 pm GMT @Jonathan Revusky
(I see you have literal Nazi cheerleaders. Congrats.)Hi, shit eater. I initially glossed over this last bit about my having "Nazi cheerleaders". I suppose you're calling Rurik here a "Nazi".Rurik was referring to this Ursula Haverbeck case where, last year, an 87-year-old German woman was sentenced to 10 months prison for asking questions about the Holocaust, which is a crime in Germany, France and at least another dozen countries. Rurik (like myself) sees this as a travesty, and thus, in your mental shit eater world, is therefore a "Nazi".
It doesn't occur to you that anybody could support Ursula Haverbeck (and others like her) simply because they believe in free speech. If I say that it is utterly wrong to imprison somebody for expressing certain views, does that mean logically that I share those views? No, I might share those views or not. Or I might partially share them. The issue is the State terrorizing little old ladies in their eighties for simply asking questions.
But, again, your approach to the question is typical of the shit eater. A shit eater always accepts the dominant framing of any question and never thinks for himself. Occasionally people do wise up. I myself did, but it is the exception, not the rule.
Besides, I don't think I was ever as bad a case as you are. I don't think that I was ever saying stuff like: "Oh, we know that Mohammed Atta flew a plane into a building. He had a plane ticket! What more proof do you need?"
You're such a hard case, it's probably incurable.
Of course we all grieve for Ursula. Ten months in prison. Pity. But look on the bright side. Perhaps she'll be able to knit a few flags and armbands? Sweaters for the Eastern Front? Thermal underpants for the SS?
• Replies: @RurikOf course we all grieve for Ursula.it's not about Ursulayou can hate her guts and her viewpoint all you want, but do you really want people put in prison for expressing opinions you find abhorrent?
for asking questions you don't want asked?
perhaps so, if I get the tone of your comment
free speech is intended to protect the speech we all most dislike, or it's not free speech at all, is it? It's just speech that you or I consider acceptable, and I for one don't want anyone being the arbiter of acceptable speech or questions. Fuck no! Not Jews, not Nazis, not rightwing religious nuts or politically correct SJWs or anyone else, thankyouverymuch.
as for her questions about the Holocaust, we already know there were no human soap factories or human tattoo skin lampshades. These were blood libels spread against the German people to try to justify the genocidal horrors that were visited upon millions of German civilians after the war was over. They were an evil people are deserved it all. Exactly like what the Nazis were saying about the Jews.
My agenda is the truth. If it's true that the Germans were running extermination camps, like Eisenhower ran for German POWs after the war was over, then I want to know about them, and their scope and purpose. I want to know the truth about it all, come what may, and I certainly don't want little old ladies put in prison, (no matter what their views are), under any circumstances. I can't even comprehend the moral cowardice of a society (or individuals) that would tolerate such a thing.
Germany is suffering women being raped in the streets by savages, but they save their prison space for her
http://carolynyeager.net/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/ursula%20haverbeck.jpg?itok=GI4bbz9C
and why? Because she's asking questions they don't want people asking Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Rurik says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 6:13 pm GMT • 400 Words @Incitatus I've read quite a few studies over the years, and have seen several films (ae911truth etc). Skeptical by nature, I ask specific questions. Most who doubt the NIST scenario seem unable to venture any guess on responsible parties, motives or exact means. 'Controlled demolition' is all very well, but how would one go about it without betraying the conspiracy?
Two observations. The government story, however improbable, is explained in detail. One need not believe it, but at least there's meat on the bones. The none-of-the-above crowd, however, coughs up vague notions in lieu of any real motives, means, and methodology. Usually they offer YouTube, ae911truth, and similar sites as the answer. Which is to say, they have no real answers at all.
I ask specific questions.
that's fine Incitatus, but all too often those roads lead down to obfuscation and conjecture. Like why did they implode building seven? The answer is we don't know. Probably because it was the control center for the whole operation, and they wanted to 'pull it' to erase all the evidence. Flight 92 was probably intended to hit building seven, as the pretext for its collapse, but then when it was shot down over Pennsylvania, they had to wing it.
But that is all conjecture. Like asking someone who doesn't buy the Warren commission's findings, OK then 'why did they kill JFK'? Only the assassins know the answer to that question, just as only the people responsible for 911 could answer all the detailed queries.
How did they rig the buildings surreptitiously? That is a whole gigantic side discussion, and people are having it, and we could spend hours debating all the minutia, but to what end?
This we know. We know that building seven fell in a way that is incomprehensible based on simple physics. Indeed, impossible. We know that right away all the authorities set about having all the steel beams and forensic evidence of this stupendous and monumental and historic engineering failure, shipped off to China to be melted down and destroyed before any examination could be done by professionals. We're all supposed to just take the authorities word for it, even tho it appears even they conducted no investigation. Building seven wasn't even mentioned in the 911 commission report. Isn't that something?!
But even more to the point Incitatus, is that several news organizations reported on the collapse of building seven before it happened. Did you know that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOVnvFl5jZo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M26-B44qQIs
now how could they have known this event was about to happen when even now no one can explain how or why that building came down. It's as if a news organization had reported that the first plane had hit the WTC tower 20 minutes before it did. Don't you think there'd be some legitimate curiosity as to how this news organization knew the first plane was going to hit, before it did? No?
The collapse of building seven is a mystery, at the very least. An anomaly to all known laws of physics and structural engineering, even today no one can explain it any better than the magic bullet, that goes through Kennedy and then turns and hits Connelly a couple different times and then ends up pristine. But now imagine if a news organization had reported on the assassination of JFK 20 minutes before it happened.
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz I ask you as just the latest person to assert on UR that something - in this case the collapse of WTC 7 - is "an anomaly to all known laws of physics and structural engineering" or similar wotds which plainly mean that such laws make the collapse without deliberate demolition impossible....*what are your qualifations to be taken seriously on the implications of the laws of physics and structural engineering*? I have dealt with a lot of expert witnesse and you don't sound like one of them,not even the dodgy ones that have to be exposed and evaluated in court every day. Indeed do you consider yourself competent to evaluate expert evidence on physics and structural engineering like a judge assisted by the questions of counsel? If so why? Try persuading your readers. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Rurik says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 6:50 pm GMT • 300 Words @Incitatus Of course we all grieve for Ursula. Ten months in prison. Pity. But look on the bright side. Perhaps she'll be able to knit a few flags and armbands? Sweaters for the Eastern Front? Thermal underpants for the SS?
Of course we all grieve for Ursula.
it's not about Ursula
you can hate her guts and her viewpoint all you want, but do you really want people put in prison for expressing opinions you find abhorrent?
for asking questions you don't want asked?
perhaps so, if I get the tone of your comment
free speech is intended to protect the speech we all most dislike, or it's not free speech at all, is it? It's just speech that you or I consider acceptable, and I for one don't want anyone being the arbiter of acceptable speech or questions. Fuck no! Not Jews, not Nazis, not rightwing religious nuts or politically correct SJWs or anyone else, thankyouverymuch.
as for her questions about the Holocaust, we already know there were no human soap factories or human tattoo skin lampshades. These were blood libels spread against the German people to try to justify the genocidal horrors that were visited upon millions of German civilians after the war was over. They were an evil people are deserved it all. Exactly like what the Nazis were saying about the Jews.
My agenda is the truth. If it's true that the Germans were running extermination camps, like Eisenhower ran for German POWs after the war was over, then I want to know about them, and their scope and purpose. I want to know the truth about it all, come what may, and I certainly don't want little old ladies put in prison, (no matter what their views are), under any circumstances. I can't even comprehend the moral cowardice of a society (or individuals) that would tolerate such a thing.
Germany is suffering women being raped in the streets by savages, but they save their prison space for her
and why? Because she's asking questions they don't want people asking
• Replies: @Jonathan Revuskyyou can hate her guts and her viewpoint all you want, but do you really want people put in prison for expressing opinions you find abhorrent?That's a rhetorical question, isn't it? The guy you're addressing is a vicious Zio-fascist scumbag. He takes delight in somebody like Ursula Haverbeck being imprisoned for challenging Zionist power. Look at what he wrote.It's funny, because in his role here as professional disinfo agent, it would probably make more sense for him to express sympathy with Ursula Haverbeck and agree with us that her imprisonment is unjust and so on, in order to build a rapport and try to come across as even somewhat reasonable. But the thing is that the morally degenerate zio scumbag can't help gloating over the fact that the Zionist power structure manage to imprison this little old lady.
Scumbags will be scumbags.
This kind of thing does remind one of the kind of people you're dealing with here. That little degenerate bastard Sam Shama is exactly like this too, you know. , @Incitatus I cherish free speech. But I don't live in a country that twice experienced the catastrophic results of demagogic incitement. I trust Germans know what they're doing, but I note your concern. And your angst over suffering. But isn't it a very selective angst?
"...even if you take them at their word, the Holocaust was done as humanely as it's was humanly possible to kill people. Sort of like the Soylent Green euthanasia scene the violins were playing as they were handed a towel to take a 'shower', and then the death was as benign as could be arranged under the circumstances. And that was their worst case scenario of the gas chambers as I remember them being shown to us as children. Compare that to Dresden, which is undisputed and was as calculatedly cruel and sadistic as it was possible to imagine. And then some."Why, like most who mourn Dresden 1944, don't you ever mention Warsaw Sep 1939? The same number of civilians - 20,000-25,000 - were killed. Or how about Warsaw Aug 1944 (150,000-200,000 civilians killed)? In fact, you could say Germans pioneered civilian killing (shelling of Paris 1870-71, bombing London in 1915, the Condor Legion and Guernica 1937, etc). They were very good at it. You never mention it. Does only German blood count? Or do you simply want to use Dresden to legitimize Nazi aggression?"...and yet it's the Germans who everyone condemns for inhumanity."
-Rurik 28dec15 #205
http://www.unz.com/article/no-matter-who-becomes-president-israel-wins/#comments
I confess I'm also puzzled by your preoccupation for the Lebensborn - most unusual for a Norseman.
btw. You aren't by any chance Anders Behring Brevik blogging away in your prison cell? , @L.K Well, Rurik,
You are discussing these issues with an obvious troll, 'incitatus', a piece of filth who is here to spread disinformation & propaganda & who obviously does not care one bit about truth or free speech. Remember that other scumbag, 'iffen', who hoped for European style censorship to be applied in the US?
These cretins are so obvious.
No, Rurik, the National Socialists did NOT run extermination camps.
Do u still have doubts?
As Prof.Faurisson said, on the intellectual level, the revisionists have already won.
It is just that people ain't allowed to know it... in fact, people are not allowed to even know there is a debate on the holohoax.Why, Rurik, do I say the holocau$t is a monstrous Hoax?
As Prof.T.Dalton wrote:
There are, in fact, three essential elements to the event called the Holocaust:Most people are led to believe - I was one of them - in regards to the 'holocau$t', that there is abundant proof of the alleged crime, as described above.
(1) intention to mass murder the Jews, by Hitler and the Nazi elite;
(2) the use of gas chambers(the extermination camps & gas vans); and
(3) the 6 million deaths.If any one of these three should undergo substantial revision, then, technically speaking, we no longer have "The Holocaust"-at least, not in any meaningful sense. (Broadly speaking, of course, any mass fatality is a holocaust.) Holocaust revisionism contends that, not one, but all three of these points are grossly in error, and thus that "The Holocaust," as such, did not occur. Obviously, this is not to deny that a tragedy happened to the Jews, nor that many thousands died, directly and indirectly, as a result of the war. But the conventional account is an extreme exaggeration.
This is absolutely NOT THE CASE.In fact, many holocaust 'historians', I call them quacks, have actually admitted the near total lack of material and documentary evidence.
There is, as the revisionist side has shown, an abundance of evidence refuting the official dossier, which is basically atrocity propaganda on steroids.One good book that covers all bases in a more accessible format is "Lectures on the Holocaust
Controversial Issues Cross Examined" by Germar Rudolf.
http://holocausthandbooks.com/dl/15-loth.pdfhttp://holocausthandbooks.com/index.php?main_page=1 Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Incitatus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 7:00 pm GMT • 200 Words @Jonathan Revusky
I never said this. Being skeptical of the official story is fine. But you aren't just skeptical. You are absolutely positive that the official story is false.Hold on, let me get this straight. What you object to is not that I disbelieve the story, but that I express certainty . But I thought you were expressing certainty that the official story was true, no? Or maybe you're not certain... could you clarify your position now? You're starting to sound really wishy washy.Well, if you're saying there is strong proof for the official story, then that's basically saying you're certain, no? Though I'm still trying to figure out what you think the proof is... it's these alleged phone calls? That's the strongest proof you've got?
Well, there is a mountain of evidence that the official story is untrue. The strongest single piece of physical evidence is that they claim that building 7 imploded in a perfectly symmetrical way from office fires basically. So NIST and FEMA are clearly claiming that something happened that is physically impossible. That is the strongest proof. And you have 2700 or so architects and engineers who have been willing to put their name on a petition calling for a new investigation on this basis -- that the official story is simply not physically possible.
You are so sure that the official story is wrong that you heap abuse on people who haven't decided the same. For that level of certitude, you need some actual evidence, not just your feelings about things.But there is also the issue of expert testimony from pilots who state that the feat of flying that these people allegedly pulled off is simply impossible for neophyte pilots. There is also testimony that the civilian Boeing airliners that allegedly flew into the towers cannot even fly at that speed at sea level. There are huge problems with the story.
There is also the problem that all the testimony about Al Qaeda's planning of the attacks came from torturing one individual who was probably not even an Al Qaeda member. See this article: http://www.voltairenet.org/article177178.html
Independent researchers have uncovered so many problems with the official story on so many levels that, I think one can say pretty objectively that there is basically zero possibility that the official story is truthful.
The only way to maintain one's status as a shit eater, and to continue believing the official bullshit, is by being wilfully ignorant of just about every hard factual aspect of what is known!
You can start by reading the Wiki page and go from there.What Wiki page? Oh, you mean Wikipedia? Well, I guess you don't realize that all that Wikipedia ever does with these sorts of events, whether it's JFK or 9/11 or Charlie Hebdo or whatever, is that the wikipedia page is just a synopsis of whatever the official story is.Earlier, you indignantly said that you know what the "beg the question" fallacy is, but obviously you don't. The Wikipedia page is just a synopsis of the official story. In any case, being a shit eater basically requires you to have a very weak grasp of what "question begging" is. Because that's what being a shit eater is. You ask a shit eater what the proof of whatever official story is and they just repeat the official story. Or they point you to a summary of the official story that is on wikipedia or somewhere else. It's always just self-referential question-begging.
Dude, I can pick up a phone and call somebody and say that I'm in a plane and we're being hijacked. It's really just not very strong evidence. It's like saying that some guy put up a video saying he did it. I can put up a video on youtube saying I did it.
It isn't hearsay. Witnesses are on the record. Recordings exist.It is backed up by documentation. Here's one example:Yeah, this rings a bell. A few years ago I looked through this stuff and it's really quite murky. There's a pretty detailed analysis of those phone calls from that flight here:http://www.911myths.com/index.php?title=Renee_May_calls
http://www.globalresearch.ca/9-11-what-the-telephone-records-reveal-about-calls-from-aa-flight-77-did-barbara-olson-attempt-any-calls-at-all/26594
It's all pretty much irrelevant really anyway, because it looks pretty clear that no passenger airline hit the pentagon anyway! There just isn't the debris that you would expect to see, for example. And the guy they say flew the plane, Hani Hanjour, lacked the skills to fly a single-engine Cessna. It was a missile or some sort of drone, it appears. And, of course, all that is a far bigger problem with that flight 77 than even these screwy phone records! I mean, if the flight didn't even take place, to talk about their being proof that somebody made a call from the flight in question...
Well, I concede that point. But the fact remains that Atta's dad may be telling the truth and he may be lying. And the same applies to the people who say they got a phone call from somebody on a plane. They could be telling the truth and they could be lying. And they could have plenty strong reasons to lie too!
Um, no, dipshit. Atta's dad has a reason to lie–to protect his son's memory.It's just not very strong evidence. If this is the strongest evidence that you have, I think the debate is basically over.
Well, the only reason you believe in the phone calls so firmly is because it supports what you want to believe. You don't believe in the Atta Sr. phone call on 9/12, because it doesn't support what you want to believe. Look at the article I linked. As evidence, it just is not very clear at all. Generally speaking, anybody can make a phone call and claim that they are in a plane getting hijacked.
It's only murky to people like you. The fact that you doubt the phone calls when there is so much clear evidence for them just illustrates what a huge fucking idiot you are.Anybody can say they got a phone call too. And we all know that there are people who will say anything for a few bucks. This is not hard evidence.
Uhh, no, because not all the planes had the Airfones on them, you see. At this point in time, for example, some flights have Wifi on them, but most don't. DRG made the point that the American Airlines 767's in question did not have Airfones installed on them until 2002 or something like that. But then I think somebody from the company claimed that they did, but I suspect that DRG was right the first time, but as I said, I'm simply not sure about that. I don't know if the planes in question had airfones on them or not. But this other problem, the expert testimony that a Boeing 767 can't even fly that fast at sea level anyway, this a much bigger problem that would trump the whole issue of whether there were Airfones or not!
The fact that Airfones existed means that your "doubt" that it is technically possible to make a call from an airplane is absolutely wrong.Again, in the case of Flight 77 that flew into the Pentagon, there is the bigger problem that it does not look like any civil jet airliner flew into the Pentagon in the first place, and that is a much bigger first order problem!
But look, as I said, unfortunately, you are a shit eater and it's a waste of time to debate with shit eaters. I have done it enough that I can see what you do. You will automatically discount any evidence that doesn't support the official bullshit, and then the evidence that does support it, you'll claim that it's rock solid. So, for example, if the Atta Sr. phone call supported what you want to believe, you'd be saying: "Oh, there's a witness and blah blah." But since it doesn't support what you want to believe, then.
Again, you're in a very bad position if the strongest evidence you have is these phone calls!
So, do you have some piece of evidence that you think is stronger than the alleged phone calls or is that your answer to the question I posed. "The strongest evidence for the official is these phone calls."
Oh, and even then, how that gets you to the bearded guy in Afghanistan....
" you have 2700 or so architects and engineers who have been willing to put their name on a petition calling for a new investigation on this basis - that the official story is simply not physically possible."
Great point! 2700! Something must be fishy.
But how many licensed architects and engineers are there in the US? Turns out there's 105,042 + 822,575 = 927,617 (source: AIA & NCEES). 2,700 represents 0.29% of the total number of US architects and engineers. That means 99.71% haven't called for a new investigation.
But wait! Turns out Mr. Gage's petition is signed not only by licensed US architects and engineers, but also by the 'degreed' (without licenses they're not legally able to call themselves architects or engineers). It gets even better – many of the signatories are foreign (UK. Sri Lanka, Canada, Bolivia, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Colombia, etc). Nothing wrong with that, of course. The more, the merrier
But the base increases yet again. Linkedin estimates 3,600,000 licensed architects on earth. If the proportion of architects to engineers is similar to the US ratio 28,191,295 engineers exist, bringing the combined total to 31,791,295 architects and engineers worldwide.
2,700 is 0.0085% of 31,791,295. In other words, 99.9915% of worldwide architects and engineers haven't called for a new investigation. Are they part of a conspiracy?
ae911truth? Maybe Richard Gage enjoys having a nice tax-exempt slush fund for travel and lecture fees. Maybe he enjoys gadfly celebrity his practice never delivered.
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyBut how many licensed architects and engineers are there in the US? Turns out there's 105,042 + 822,575 = 927,617 (source: AIA & NCEES). 2,700 represents 0.29% of the total number of US architects and engineers. That means 99.71% haven't called for a new investigation.Ah, the nostalgia, I haven't heard this particular shit eater argument for a while. Yeah, 99.71% of the architects and engineers in the USA DID NOT sign the petition so therefore they all believe the official story.So, if a million people march on Washington tomorrow demanding the end to all the wars, that doesn't mean anything either, because 300+ million did not march, and therefore, they are in favor of all the wars! Obviously!
Hey, how's the weather in Tel Aviv? Hot as hell, eh? Have they put air conditioning in your office yet? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 7:01 pm GMT • 200 Words @Erebus Not to answer for The Great Revusky, I'll offer some suggestions of my own:
• Why did WT 1 (the first tower hit) fall after WT 2? Did conspirators mix up demo timing?- The 2nd tower hit failed to ignite properly. The fires were clearly in danger of going out entirely on their own soon after being "hit". It either got brought down immediately, or would stand as a testament to what happened.
- They may have screwed up the timing, but I doubt it. To me it looks like they made a decision on the fly.• Why did they bother to take down WT 7? Wouldn't the lack of aerial impact reveal demo and conspiracy?There were a variety of good political reasons to bring down WTC7. Let Google be your friend on this. There's a couple of easily made guesses as to what may have happened, such as:
- It was to be brought down using the chaos of the WTC1 & 2 collapses as smokescreen, but something went wrong with the countdown and the demolition was aborted pending repairs.
- I have a hard time believing any planes were involved at all, so your 2nd question is moot for me, but if my guess immediately above is right, then there would have been an explosion cueing the point of impact. Perhaps that failed to go off, leaving any CGI plane simply disappearing into the building without leaving a trace. That would look rather weird, so they opted to bring it down in broad daylight hoping few would notice.• How did conspirators mine 240 exterior columns on each office floor of WT 1 & 2 (±50,000 locations) without detection? Central core columns? Freestanding columns in public view at grade? How was it concealed from building tenants, management, maintenance staff, visitors, CoNY building inspectors, supply services, etc? And the same in WTC 7?They didn't, simply because there was no need to. Bringing down the central core would be all that's needed to bring the building down. They did however, conscientiously cut the outer columns to manageable lengths.No, no, & (for the most part) no. There was that group of apparently Israeli "artists" that camped out in the WTC for 4 years immediately prior to 9/11, but I don't recall whether they were rent paying tenants. Incidentally, they had 24/7, construction access to the buildings and were ensconced in both impact zones.
• Architects and engineers from Minoru Yamasaki & Associates, Emery Roth & Sons, Worthington Skilling Helle & Jackson, Joseph R. Loring & Assoc, Jaros Blum & Bolles, and the numerous other firms responsible for the WTC don't appear to be part of ae911truth. Are they part of the conspiracy? Are WTC building contractors and subcontractors part of the conspiracy? Building tenants?• How could the same administration that ignored 9/11 warnings, bungled Katrina and screwed-up Iraq 2003 pull off such a complex, faultless conspiracy? Why have no insiders spilled the tale?I don't believe the "same administration" was necessarily involved. I would posit that, for the most part, an entirely different administration pulled it off.Parenthetically, I'm not at all sure the "same administration... bungled Katrina and screwed-up Iraq". A case can be made that at least some segments of the Administration got exactly the results they were looking for in both cases, but that's a different thread.
Not to answer for The Great Revusky,
LOL. Hi, don't worry that you are encroaching on my territory. It actually gets very very tiresome to argue with these shit eaters. So if you want to lend a hand, that's just great.
I don't suppose it's lost on you that this "Incitatus" is some sort of professional disinfo agent. He's coming in to pick up the slack because "Boris" started seriously self-destructing. He's got some basic troll act that he's open-minded and so forth and just wants to know the truth
But, of course, the whole thing is ridiculous. Here we are, 15 years after the event, and the guy is representing that he really wants to get at the truth. Well, why didn't he read a single book on the topic in the last decade plus? Or why didn't he ever look at any of the material on http://ae911truth.org ?
His alleged fence-sitting position makes no sense 15 years after the event.
But if you look at his questions, it's all misdirection. Squid ink strategy.
• Replies: @Erebus Hi,Well, quite a few people I know spent the first dozen or so of those believing that the official story is broadly true. Propaganda works. You can fool most of the people most of the time, so giving someone the benefit of the doubt has been my practice.
His alleged fence-sitting position makes no sense 15 years after the event.But if you look at his questions, it's all misdirection. Squid ink strategy.Yeah, his response to me made that plain, but I really liked the touch that he's apparently friends with the ephemeral Betty Ong's dead parents! I'm guessing, of course, that he's alluding to the mysterious Betty-with-zero-life-history-Ong. He may have been referring to the parents of Madeline Sweeney, who's "phone call" from the same flight so contradicted Ong's that it makes one wonder if they were on the same flight, or to one of the other (stabbed) attendants.Uno absurdo dato, infinita sequuntur
One absurdity being given, an infinite number follow.I'm dismayed to see this sort of stupidity serving to obscure the important theme Mr. Unz is exploring in his American Pravda series. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 7:09 pm GMT • 200 Words @Rurik
Of course we all grieve for Ursula.it's not about Ursulayou can hate her guts and her viewpoint all you want, but do you really want people put in prison for expressing opinions you find abhorrent?
for asking questions you don't want asked?
perhaps so, if I get the tone of your comment
free speech is intended to protect the speech we all most dislike, or it's not free speech at all, is it? It's just speech that you or I consider acceptable, and I for one don't want anyone being the arbiter of acceptable speech or questions. Fuck no! Not Jews, not Nazis, not rightwing religious nuts or politically correct SJWs or anyone else, thankyouverymuch.
as for her questions about the Holocaust, we already know there were no human soap factories or human tattoo skin lampshades. These were blood libels spread against the German people to try to justify the genocidal horrors that were visited upon millions of German civilians after the war was over. They were an evil people are deserved it all. Exactly like what the Nazis were saying about the Jews.
My agenda is the truth. If it's true that the Germans were running extermination camps, like Eisenhower ran for German POWs after the war was over, then I want to know about them, and their scope and purpose. I want to know the truth about it all, come what may, and I certainly don't want little old ladies put in prison, (no matter what their views are), under any circumstances. I can't even comprehend the moral cowardice of a society (or individuals) that would tolerate such a thing.
Germany is suffering women being raped in the streets by savages, but they save their prison space for her
http://carolynyeager.net/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/ursula%20haverbeck.jpg?itok=GI4bbz9C
and why? Because she's asking questions they don't want people asking
you can hate her guts and her viewpoint all you want, but do you really want people put in prison for expressing opinions you find abhorrent?
That's a rhetorical question, isn't it? The guy you're addressing is a vicious Zio-fascist scumbag. He takes delight in somebody like Ursula Haverbeck being imprisoned for challenging Zionist power. Look at what he wrote.
It's funny, because in his role here as professional disinfo agent, it would probably make more sense for him to express sympathy with Ursula Haverbeck and agree with us that her imprisonment is unjust and so on, in order to build a rapport and try to come across as even somewhat reasonable. But the thing is that the morally degenerate zio scumbag can't help gloating over the fact that the Zionist power structure manage to imprison this little old lady.
Scumbags will be scumbags.
This kind of thing does remind one of the kind of people you're dealing with here. That little degenerate bastard Sam Shama is exactly like this too, you know.
• Replies: @RurikThat's a rhetorical question, isn't it?;)It's funny, because in his role here as professional disinfo agent, it would probably make more sense for him to express sympathy with Ursula Haverbeck and agree with us that her imprisonment is unjust and so on, in order to build a rapport and try to come across as even somewhat reasonable. But the thing is that the morally degenerate zio scumbag can't help gloating over the fact that the Zionist power structure manage to imprison this little old lady.extremely salient insight JRScumbags will be scumbags.I confess I (of all people!) sometimes wince at your colorful language, but then sometimes there's just no other way to put it!That little degenerate bastard Sam Shama is exactly like this too, you know.well, I try to hold out hope for our pal Sam, but then a while back it was abundantly clear that Sam wanted some kind of harm to come to me when I expressed sympathy for this same little old grandma who the PTB were crushing with an iron Zio-boot for her plucky temerityRemember that Sam? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 7:22 pm GMT • 100 Words @Incitatus "...you have 2700 or so architects and engineers who have been willing to put their name on a petition calling for a new investigation on this basis - that the official story is simply not physically possible."
Great point! 2700! Something must be fishy.
But how many licensed architects and engineers are there in the US? Turns out there's 105,042 + 822,575 = 927,617 (source: AIA & NCEES). 2,700 represents 0.29% of the total number of US architects and engineers. That means 99.71% haven't called for a new investigation.
But wait! Turns out Mr. Gage's petition is signed not only by licensed US architects and engineers, but also by the 'degreed' (without licenses they're not legally able to call themselves architects or engineers). It gets even better - many of the signatories are foreign (UK. Sri Lanka, Canada, Bolivia, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Colombia, etc). Nothing wrong with that, of course. The more, the merrier
But the base increases yet again. Linkedin estimates 3,600,000 licensed architects on earth. If the proportion of architects to engineers is similar to the US ratio 28,191,295 engineers exist, bringing the combined total to 31,791,295 architects and engineers worldwide.
2,700 is 0.0085% of 31,791,295. In other words, 99.9915% of worldwide architects and engineers haven't called for a new investigation. Are they part of a conspiracy?
ae911truth? Maybe Richard Gage enjoys having a nice tax-exempt slush fund for travel and lecture fees. Maybe he enjoys gadfly celebrity his practice never delivered.
But how many licensed architects and engineers are there in the US? Turns out there's 105,042 + 822,575 = 927,617 (source: AIA & NCEES). 2,700 represents 0.29% of the total number of US architects and engineers. That means 99.71% haven't called for a new investigation.
Ah, the nostalgia, I haven't heard this particular shit eater argument for a while. Yeah, 99.71% of the architects and engineers in the USA DID NOT sign the petition so therefore they all believe the official story.
So, if a million people march on Washington tomorrow demanding the end to all the wars, that doesn't mean anything either, because 300+ million did not march, and therefore, they are in favor of all the wars! Obviously!
Hey, how's the weather in Tel Aviv? Hot as hell, eh? Have they put air conditioning in your office yet?
• Replies: @Incitatus How do you type confined in a straightjacket - do you hold a pen in your mouth and peck letters one-by-one? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Rurik says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 7:38 pm GMT • 200 Words @Jonathan Revusky
you can hate her guts and her viewpoint all you want, but do you really want people put in prison for expressing opinions you find abhorrent?That's a rhetorical question, isn't it? The guy you're addressing is a vicious Zio-fascist scumbag. He takes delight in somebody like Ursula Haverbeck being imprisoned for challenging Zionist power. Look at what he wrote.It's funny, because in his role here as professional disinfo agent, it would probably make more sense for him to express sympathy with Ursula Haverbeck and agree with us that her imprisonment is unjust and so on, in order to build a rapport and try to come across as even somewhat reasonable. But the thing is that the morally degenerate zio scumbag can't help gloating over the fact that the Zionist power structure manage to imprison this little old lady.
Scumbags will be scumbags.
This kind of thing does remind one of the kind of people you're dealing with here. That little degenerate bastard Sam Shama is exactly like this too, you know.
That's a rhetorical question, isn't it?
It's funny, because in his role here as professional disinfo agent, it would probably make more sense for him to express sympathy with Ursula Haverbeck and agree with us that her imprisonment is unjust and so on, in order to build a rapport and try to come across as even somewhat reasonable. But the thing is that the morally degenerate zio scumbag can't help gloating over the fact that the Zionist power structure manage to imprison this little old lady.
extremely salient insight JR
Scumbags will be scumbags.
I confess I (of all people!) sometimes wince at your colorful language, but then sometimes there's just no other way to put it!
That little degenerate bastard Sam Shama is exactly like this too, you know.
well, I try to hold out hope for our pal Sam, but then a while back it was abundantly clear that Sam wanted some kind of harm to come to me when I expressed sympathy for this same little old grandma who the PTB were crushing with an iron Zio-boot for her plucky temerity
Remember that Sam?
• Replies: @Sam Shama Oh Hello Rurik
Ursula Haverbeck, the lovely little granny which has a rap sheet longer than your arm?The Zio-boot? You mean this one?
According to Agence France-PresseHaverbeck is a notorious extremist who was once chaired a far-right training center shut down in 2008 for spreading Nazi propaganda, according to AFP. She has a rap sheet and a suspended sentence for sedition.
http://www.unz.com/article/what-obama-should-have-told-bibi/#comment-1239335btw I see Revusky getting into his usual foamy-mouth-eyeballs-spinning routine.
Jonathan,
fear not your hunger, it will be sated; coprophagic services are sought after at Upper Manhattan's recycling plant. What hour shall I ask them to contact you? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Incitatus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 7:43 pm GMT • 300 Words @Rurik
Of course we all grieve for Ursula.it's not about Ursulayou can hate her guts and her viewpoint all you want, but do you really want people put in prison for expressing opinions you find abhorrent?
for asking questions you don't want asked?
perhaps so, if I get the tone of your comment
free speech is intended to protect the speech we all most dislike, or it's not free speech at all, is it? It's just speech that you or I consider acceptable, and I for one don't want anyone being the arbiter of acceptable speech or questions. Fuck no! Not Jews, not Nazis, not rightwing religious nuts or politically correct SJWs or anyone else, thankyouverymuch.
as for her questions about the Holocaust, we already know there were no human soap factories or human tattoo skin lampshades. These were blood libels spread against the German people to try to justify the genocidal horrors that were visited upon millions of German civilians after the war was over. They were an evil people are deserved it all. Exactly like what the Nazis were saying about the Jews.
My agenda is the truth. If it's true that the Germans were running extermination camps, like Eisenhower ran for German POWs after the war was over, then I want to know about them, and their scope and purpose. I want to know the truth about it all, come what may, and I certainly don't want little old ladies put in prison, (no matter what their views are), under any circumstances. I can't even comprehend the moral cowardice of a society (or individuals) that would tolerate such a thing.
Germany is suffering women being raped in the streets by savages, but they save their prison space for her
http://carolynyeager.net/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/ursula%20haverbeck.jpg?itok=GI4bbz9C
and why? Because she's asking questions they don't want people asking
I cherish free speech. But I don't live in a country that twice experienced the catastrophic results of demagogic incitement. I trust Germans know what they're doing, but I note your concern. And your angst over suffering. But isn't it a very selective angst?
" even if you take them at their word, the Holocaust was done as humanely as it's was humanly possible to kill people. Sort of like the Soylent Green euthanasia scene the violins were playing as they were handed a towel to take a 'shower', and then the death was as benign as could be arranged under the circumstances. And that was their worst case scenario of the gas chambers as I remember them being shown to us as children. Compare that to Dresden, which is undisputed and was as calculatedly cruel and sadistic as it was possible to imagine. And then some."
" and yet it's the Germans who everyone condemns for inhumanity."
-Rurik 28dec15 #205
http://www.unz.com/article/no-matter-who-becomes-president-israel-wins/#comments
Why, like most who mourn Dresden 1944, don't you ever mention Warsaw Sep 1939? The same number of civilians – 20,000-25,000 – were killed. Or how about Warsaw Aug 1944 (150,000-200,000 civilians killed)? In fact, you could say Germans pioneered civilian killing (shelling of Paris 1870-71, bombing London in 1915, the Condor Legion and Guernica 1937, etc). They were very good at it. You never mention it. Does only German blood count? Or do you simply want to use Dresden to legitimize Nazi aggression?
I confess I'm also puzzled by your preoccupation for the Lebensborn – most unusual for a Norseman.
btw. You aren't by any chance Anders Behring Brevik blogging away in your prison cell?
• Replies: @Rurik I was reading your quote and thinking to myself, wow, what insight and pure, raw humanity from this mystery writer..until I saw it sourced ;)
Does only German blood count?no sir, but you see for me, even German blood counts, especially when it's women and children, who're being burned alive to sate the insatiable hatred of a monsteranyone who burns women and children alive for the fun of it and out of sheer tribal hatred, rather than as a military and existential imperative, is a monster in my book
if the Nazis burned women and children alive for the fun of it, then by God I tell you I would condemn them with all of my breath, I swear it. But they didn't do that. It was the Zio-West that did that, (just as they did at Waco, TX) and I find that difficult to live with. Sort of the way the Norwegians treated the children of Lebensborn; monstrous and impossible to justify. So yes, every single German soldier who considered the women of the occupied countries as their rightful booty deserved to die, and happily, many of them did. But then to blame the children of these trysts for the crimes of their fathers, is a stain that will besmirch the character of the Norwegian people for generations. , @SolontoCroesus
Why . . . don't you ever mention Warsaw Sep 1939? The same number of civilians – 20,000-25,000 – were killed. Or how about Warsaw Aug 1944 (150,000-200,000 civilians killed)?1. estimates of Dresden dead are tendentious
2. not all those killed in Warsaw were Jews: only Jews count. If non-Jews swell the kill-count, that diverts attention from teh eternal victim ©
3. Real he-man Jews deride Warsaw Jews for not being sufficiently he-man. Best not to talk about it.
4. Auschwitz has a more established brand.
5. No gas chambers in Warsaw. Epic fail. , @Jonathan Revusky Hi, Ziofascist scumbag.I cherish free speech.LOL. "I'm not a vindictive person but the old bitch does deserve to rot in prison. And I hope she dies and burns in hell."But I don't live in a country that twice experienced the catastrophic results of demagogic incitement. I trust Germans know what they're doingAh, I see you've thought about this and realize that imprisoning 87-year-old ladies is absolutely necessary to prevent the rise of the 4th Reich, eh?But I wonder about this.... is imprisoning little old ladies like this likely to reduce antisemitism? Or is it more likely to increase it?
Also, wouldn't you be concerned that imprisoning somebody for saying something, with absolutely no attempt to rebut what the person is saying, might cause people to think that the person is being imprisoned for telling the truth?
What do you think? Have you thought about any of this at all?
Well, of course not. You're a shit eater. You never actually think about anything! But you could start.... it's not illegal... YET! , @utu If 20,000-25,000 civilians were killed during siege of Warsaw in 1939 then it is easy to believe that 100,000-125,000 were killed in Dresden in 1945. It suffices to scale up the Warsaw number by the number of sorties and payload Allies had over Dresden in comparison to what Germany had over Warsaw in 1939. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Incitatus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 7:52 pm GMT @Jonathan Revusky
But how many licensed architects and engineers are there in the US? Turns out there's 105,042 + 822,575 = 927,617 (source: AIA & NCEES). 2,700 represents 0.29% of the total number of US architects and engineers. That means 99.71% haven't called for a new investigation.Ah, the nostalgia, I haven't heard this particular shit eater argument for a while. Yeah, 99.71% of the architects and engineers in the USA DID NOT sign the petition so therefore they all believe the official story.So, if a million people march on Washington tomorrow demanding the end to all the wars, that doesn't mean anything either, because 300+ million did not march, and therefore, they are in favor of all the wars! Obviously!
Hey, how's the weather in Tel Aviv? Hot as hell, eh? Have they put air conditioning in your office yet?
How do you type confined in a straightjacket – do you hold a pen in your mouth and peck letters one-by-one?
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- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 7:59 pm GMT • 900 Words @Boris
I mean, you obviously don't understand the difference between a necessary and a sufficient condition.Still embarrassing yourself.he was declined after exhibiting difficulty controlling and landing a single-engine Cessna 172.[25]Here's the citation for that claim:https://web.archive.org/web/20020405020924/http://www.newsday.com/ny-usflight232380680sep23.story
The guy that wouldn't let Hanjour rent a plane w/o more lessons also said this:
Despite Hanjour's poor reviews, he did have some ability as a pilot, said Bernard of Freeway Airport. "There's no doubt in my mind that once that [hijacked jet] got going, he could have pointed that plane at a building and hit it," he said.So your theory collapses. Unless the guy lied about this part, but told the truth about Hanjour not being able to control the Cessna with much skill? You are dumb enough to believe that, so...Well, so you take Bernard seriously then? Or, wait, he's a government stooge who accidentally told the truth once? Shape-shifter?
Well, as a matter of fact, I take expert testimony on questions seriously.If a controlled demolition specialist in Holland, Danny Jowenko, when shown the footage of WTC 7 imploding says that this is definitely a controlled demolition, it stands to reason that it is a controlled demolition!Here's a different expert's view--an expert who actually examined the evidence:http://www.implosionworld.com/Article-WTC%20STUDY%208-06%20w%20clarif%20as%20of%209-8-06%20.pdf
So is he (Circle one^):
Government stooge
Shapeshifter
Lizard man
Hologramsuch as the people at NIST who claim that building 7 imploded perfectly symmetrically from uncontrolled firesThis is another lie. I already posted a summary of what they said.I really don't care what your response is. I know it will probably be more insanely stupid than the last.
^Disclaimer for morons: Don't actually circle it on your monitor.Well, so you take Bernard seriously then?
Look, I wasn't there, but the incident, as recounted, seems to be true and it happened 3 weeks before 9/11, NOT years before, as you were trying to claim. To recap
Hani Hanjour tried to rent a single-engine Cessna and a flight instructor went up with him and said the guy did not have the skill to fly that plane. The single-engine Cessna.
Now, it is claimed that 3 weeks later and Hani can fly the big Boeing in a maneuver that professional pilots with thousands of hours have said they could not do. Just to focus this, here is what the cockpit of a Boeing 757 looks like:
The guy that wouldn't let Hanjour rent a plane w/o more lessons also said this:
Despite Hanjour's poor reviews, he did have some ability as a pilot, said Bernard of Freeway Airport. "There's no doubt in my mind that once that [hijacked jet] got going, he could have pointed that plane at a building and hit it," he said.
Well, c'mon, the guy doubtless came under pressure to say that the guy could have done what they said he did. But look, obviously, if he evaluated the guy as unable to control a Cessna in August, the guy couldn't suddenly fly a big Boeing in September! And this business that he "pointed that plane at a building and hit it", that is not what allegedly happened with the Pentagon flight. The plane allegedly flew this really incredible 270 degree descending loop and, in the final stretch flew at treetop level into the exact part of the Pentagon that was hit. And as I said, you can look at the Pilots for 9/11 Truth and see that there are professional pilots with thousands of hours flying these Boeing airliners who say they could not fly that maneuver. So the guy supposedly was flying one of these big planes for the first (and last) time in his life and successfully carried off this maneuver. It's completely ridiculous bullshit, but when you're a shit eater, it's like "mmm, yum, yum".
And really, you know, this is such an absurd argument to be having. Okay, it's obvious that if somebody can't really control a Cessna in August of 2001, he can't do some top gun maneuver in a big Boeing in September of 2001. But it doesn't even matter. The flight didn't even take place! Or certainly, at the very least, there is not a shred of evidence that any Boeing airliner crashed into the Pentagon anyway.
So, finally, whether Hani Hanjour could have flown the plane in that maneuver or not hardly matters. The overall narrative just has so many problems in it that, even if you concede a given point just for the sake of argument, like assume that Hani Hanjour really could fly a Boeing 757 in this elaborate maneuver only 3 weeks after demonstrating an inability to control a Cessna, it still doesn't matter because there is very strong reason to believe that the flight did not even take place.
Here's a different expert's view–an expert who actually examined the evidence:
http://www.implosionworld.com/Article-WTC%20STUDY%208-06%20w%20clarif%20as%20of%209-8-06%20.pdf
I hadn't seen that one before, but a quick googling shows that there are at least a couple of extensive rebuttals to this article. For example, here:
http://www.911research.wtc7.net/reviews/blanchard/index.html
and here:
http://pilotsfor911truth.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=5126
Now, I lack the expertise to be certain about these things, but I would just make the point that if you googled up this Blanchard stuff, then you would easily find the above-linked rebuttals as well. But since the rebuttals don't support what you want to believe, you just don't mention them.
It's like there are phone calls, I mean testimony that somebody got a phone call, and then that supports the official story, you say that is strong proof but if I point to testimony where Atta's father got a phone call the day after 9/11 from his son, you immediately say Atta's father was lying.
Your whole thing is just always going to be to cherry pick things based on what you want to believe. That's a completely corrupted intellectual process.
The reason I am quite certain that the official narrative is untrue is that there just really is such an accumulation of problems with the story that it really just can't be true. The Hani Hanjour thing is like just one of literally hundreds of glitches in the story, that the guy they say flew that plane obviously did not have the skills. That the flight instructor in question, the Bernard guy then claimed that he did, you can see that he must have been pressured to say that. If you can't fly a Cessna, you can't fly a Boeing 757. And besides, the conditions under which this supposedly happened, where the guy had just murdered the pilot and taken over the plane and his adrenaline would be sky high and he sits down and, flying this plane for the very first time, calmly maneuvers the plane in this 270 degree looping descent.
This just didn't happen. There is no photographic or video evidence at the alleged crash site that is consistent with a Boeing 757 having crashed there! This is all just a constructed fiction. Anybody who studies this in any kind of intellectually honest way surely comes to that conclusion.
The only way you can believe this stuff is if you have this kind of intense emotional need to believe it. You look at what they are saying happened cold-bloodedly and it is really just glaringly obviously that it's all total bullshit.
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- Rurik says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 8:17 pm GMT • 200 Words @Incitatus I cherish free speech. But I don't live in a country that twice experienced the catastrophic results of demagogic incitement. I trust Germans know what they're doing, but I note your concern. And your angst over suffering. But isn't it a very selective angst?
"...even if you take them at their word, the Holocaust was done as humanely as it's was humanly possible to kill people. Sort of like the Soylent Green euthanasia scene the violins were playing as they were handed a towel to take a 'shower', and then the death was as benign as could be arranged under the circumstances. And that was their worst case scenario of the gas chambers as I remember them being shown to us as children. Compare that to Dresden, which is undisputed and was as calculatedly cruel and sadistic as it was possible to imagine. And then some."Why, like most who mourn Dresden 1944, don't you ever mention Warsaw Sep 1939? The same number of civilians - 20,000-25,000 - were killed. Or how about Warsaw Aug 1944 (150,000-200,000 civilians killed)? In fact, you could say Germans pioneered civilian killing (shelling of Paris 1870-71, bombing London in 1915, the Condor Legion and Guernica 1937, etc). They were very good at it. You never mention it. Does only German blood count? Or do you simply want to use Dresden to legitimize Nazi aggression?"...and yet it's the Germans who everyone condemns for inhumanity."
-Rurik 28dec15 #205
http://www.unz.com/article/no-matter-who-becomes-president-israel-wins/#comments
I confess I'm also puzzled by your preoccupation for the Lebensborn - most unusual for a Norseman.
btw. You aren't by any chance Anders Behring Brevik blogging away in your prison cell?
I was reading your quote and thinking to myself, wow, what insight and pure, raw humanity from this mystery writer..
until I saw it sourced
Does only German blood count?
no sir, but you see for me, even German blood counts, especially when it's women and children, who're being burned alive to sate the insatiable hatred of a monster
anyone who burns women and children alive for the fun of it and out of sheer tribal hatred, rather than as a military and existential imperative, is a monster in my book
if the Nazis burned women and children alive for the fun of it, then by God I tell you I would condemn them with all of my breath, I swear it. But they didn't do that. It was the Zio-West that did that, (just as they did at Waco, TX) and I find that difficult to live with. Sort of the way the Norwegians treated the children of Lebensborn; monstrous and impossible to justify. So yes, every single German soldier who considered the women of the occupied countries as their rightful booty deserved to die, and happily, many of them did. But then to blame the children of these trysts for the crimes of their fathers, is a stain that will besmirch the character of the Norwegian people for generations.
• Replies: @Incitatus"if the Nazis burned women and children alive for the fun of it, then by God I tell you I would condemn them with all of my breath, I swear it. But they didn't do that."Well, Rurik, here's your chance to condemn them:"...starting at 0800 on 25 September [1939], Luftwaffe bombers under the command of Major Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen conducted the largest air raid ever seen by that time, dropping 560 tons of high explosive bombs and 72 tons of incendiary bombs, in coordination with heavy artillery shelling by Army units."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Warsaw_in_World_War_IINote the "72 tons of incendiary bombs." 20,000-25,000 civilians died. Surprised? Later on, beginning August 1944 the Nazis really got busy. By January 1945 they'd leveled 85% of the city and killed another 150,000-200,000 civilians.
How about Rotterdam May 1940? 884 civilians killed, 85,000 left homeless:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotterdam_BlitzHow about Guernica April 1937? They bombed it on market day, when packed with civilians. They used incendiaries. 170-300 civilians died. The city was largely destroyed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_GuernicaHow about Lidice June 1942? 173 men executed on the spot. 203 women and 105 children taken to concentration camps (four pregnant women were first forced to have abortions). The village was leveled. The Nazis killed all the animals and even dug up the remains in the cemetery!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacreHow about Oradour-sur-Glane Jun 1944? 642 civilians murdered and -wait for it - women and children deliberately burned to death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane_massacreThere are other examples. Oh those poor, poor Nazis.
Don't forget your promise to "condemn them [Nazis] with all of my breath." Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 8:42 pm GMT
Oh, man, you guys are way too close to figuring it out. You are so getting chemtrailed this weekend.
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- Anonymous says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 9:39 pm GMT
I've at least skimmed through every comment on this post, and have to lament the huge drop in quality as the thread progressed. The last 100 or so comments are embarrassing and likely to put off anyone with an interest in the subject at hand.
• Replies: @Boris Stupid conspiracies are par for the course for Unz.com. , @Jonathan RevuskyI've at least skimmed through every comment on this post, and have to lament the huge drop in quality as the thread progressed.Well, what to do? There is some amazing stuff here. This Boris shit eater, I asked him to outline the strongest evidence available for the official story on 9/11. He told me, among a few other things, that Mohammed Atta had a plane ticket!Of course he hijacked a plane and flew it into a building at the behest of a bearded religious fanatic in Afghanistan! HE HAD A PLANE TICKET, DAMMIT!!!! Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Erebus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 9:47 pm GMT • 200 Words @Jonathan Revusky
Not to answer for The Great Revusky,LOL. Hi, don't worry that you are encroaching on my territory. It actually gets very very tiresome to argue with these shit eaters. So if you want to lend a hand, that's just great.I don't suppose it's lost on you that this "Incitatus" is some sort of professional disinfo agent. He's coming in to pick up the slack because "Boris" started seriously self-destructing. He's got some basic troll act that he's open-minded and so forth and just wants to know the truth...
But, of course, the whole thing is ridiculous. Here we are, 15 years after the event, and the guy is representing that he really wants to get at the truth. Well, why didn't he read a single book on the topic in the last decade plus? Or why didn't he ever look at any of the material on http://ae911truth.org ?
His alleged fence-sitting position makes no sense 15 years after the event.
But if you look at his questions, it's all misdirection. Squid ink strategy.
Hi,
His alleged fence-sitting position makes no sense 15 years after the event.
Well, quite a few people I know spent the first dozen or so of those believing that the official story is broadly true. Propaganda works. You can fool most of the people most of the time, so giving someone the benefit of the doubt has been my practice.
But if you look at his questions, it's all misdirection. Squid ink strategy.
Yeah, his response to me made that plain, but I really liked the touch that he's apparently friends with the ephemeral Betty Ong's dead parents! I'm guessing, of course, that he's alluding to the mysterious Betty-with-zero-life-history-Ong. He may have been referring to the parents of Madeline Sweeney, who's "phone call" from the same flight so contradicted Ong's that it makes one wonder if they were on the same flight, or to one of the other (stabbed) attendants.
Uno absurdo dato, infinita sequuntur
One absurdity being given, an infinite number follow.I'm dismayed to see this sort of stupidity serving to obscure the important theme Mr. Unz is exploring in his American Pravda series.
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyWell, quite a few people I know spent the first dozen or so of those believing that the official story is broadly true. Propaganda works. You can fool most of the people most of the time, so giving someone the benefit of the doubt has been my practice.Yes, that's a good point. It actually took me about a decade to get to the point of just saying openly that the official 9/11 story was total crap.So you make a correct point. A correct general point. But in this specific case, I think there were warning signs from the get-go that this "Incitatus" is not some honest person seeking the truth. These guys show up and it's like they've got their schtick. They start saying they are open-minded and seeking the truth but then it becomes apparent that they have a list of talking points that they are trying to put out there just to confuse the matter.
There is a great piece by the Saker today. I suppose you've likely read it.
Yeah, his response to me made that plain, but I really liked the touch that he's apparently friends with the ephemeral Betty Ong's dead parents! I'm guessing, of course, that he's alluding to the mysterious Betty-with-zero-life-history-Ong. He may have been referring to the parents of Madeline Sweeney,It's actually more likely that he's acquainted with the person who invented all these characters! , @Incitatus"I really liked the touch that he's apparently friends with the ephemeral Betty Ong's dead parents!"Nice try. Try Thomas Roger, father of twenty-four year old Jean D. Roger."I'm guessing, of course..."You seem to do a lot of that. No answers to simple questions. Just crackpot web-links and looney-tune CGI plane theories you can't explain. "The Great Revusky" seems equally barren. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 10:42 pm GMT • 400 Words
Well, c'mon, the guy doubtless came under pressure to say that the guy could have done what they said he did.
You keep making things up.
if he evaluated the guy as unable to control a Cessna in August, the guy couldn't suddenly fly a big Boeing in September!
Huh? His evaluation included landing. But yeah, sure they guy is lying about the part you hate but telling the truth about the part you like. Is there any better evidence that you are a complete moronic hack?
The plane allegedly flew this really incredible 270 degree descending loop
Yeah, professional pilots think Hanjour could have done it:
http://www.salon.com/2006/05/19/askthepilot186/
Reality: As I've explained in at least one prior column, Hani Hanjour's flying was hardly the show-quality demonstration often described. It was exceptional only in its recklessness. If anything, his loops and turns and spirals above the nation's capital revealed him to be exactly the shitty pilot he by all accounts was. To hit the Pentagon squarely he needed only a bit of luck, and he got it, possibly with help from the 757's autopilot. Striking a stationary object - even a large one like the Pentagon - at high speed and from a steep angle is very difficult. To make the job easier, he came in obliquely, tearing down light poles as he roared across the Pentagon's lawn.
"The hijackers required only the shallow understanding of the aircraft," agrees Ken Hertz, an airline pilot rated on the 757/767. "In much the same way that a person needn't be an experienced physician in order to perform CPR or set a broken bone."
That sentiment is echoed by Joe d'Eon, airline pilot and host of the "Fly With Me" podcast series. "It's the difference between a doctor and a butcher," says d'Eon.
There is no photographic or video evidence at the alleged crash site that is consistent with a Boeing 757 having crashed there!
lol you are one of the idiots who think a missile hit the Pentagon? I should have seen that coming. Do you believe the CGI people too? And the nuke guys?
What's really galling is that fuckers like you malign the victims and suggest they are in on the conspiracy. It's not bad enough that they get their lives cut short, nope. You guys have to take a shit on their ashes too.
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyDid you come up with this yourself or is this some talking point that was just handed to you? YOu can read what was said, but the problem was not solely that Hani Hanjour could not land the plane. He could not really control the plane in flight. I'm not a pilot myself, but looking at this as a generalist, the upshot of it clearly seems to be that that Hani Hanjour did not possess even elementary plane flying skills for a small plane in August of 2001. And then in September of 2001 carried out a maneuver in a big Boeing jet that would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for someone with years of experience.if he evaluated the guy as unable to control a Cessna in August, the guy couldn't suddenly fly a big Boeing in September!Huh? His evaluation included landing.But I was thinking about this... there were four or five Arab hijackers in the plane according to the story. How would they even know which one of them flew the plane? Anybody who made a phone call wouldn't know the names of the various hijackers, would they? So they just tell a story and there's no proof whatsoever of the story anyway... And then a shit eater like you, rather than just admit the obvious, that there isn't any proof of this aspect of the story, you just start making up shit to back up the story. Like you start by trying to claim that the incident where he couldn't fly a Cessna was years before 9/11. No, it was 3 weeks before 9/11!
lol you are one of the idiots who think a missile hit the Pentagon?Well, I don't know. What would be idiotic about thinking that? All I said was that there is not a shred of evidence that a Boeing airliner really hit the Pentagon. At least I've never seen any.
What's really galling is that fuckers like you malign the victimsOh, I'm maligning the victims, am I? And that really bothers you.... Wanting to get at the truth of what really happened is to disrespect the victims...I can't believe you came up with that shit yourself. You've got a list of talking points that you're running through, right? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- L.K says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 10:45 pm GMT • 400 Words @Rurik
Of course we all grieve for Ursula.it's not about Ursulayou can hate her guts and her viewpoint all you want, but do you really want people put in prison for expressing opinions you find abhorrent?
for asking questions you don't want asked?
perhaps so, if I get the tone of your comment
free speech is intended to protect the speech we all most dislike, or it's not free speech at all, is it? It's just speech that you or I consider acceptable, and I for one don't want anyone being the arbiter of acceptable speech or questions. Fuck no! Not Jews, not Nazis, not rightwing religious nuts or politically correct SJWs or anyone else, thankyouverymuch.
as for her questions about the Holocaust, we already know there were no human soap factories or human tattoo skin lampshades. These were blood libels spread against the German people to try to justify the genocidal horrors that were visited upon millions of German civilians after the war was over. They were an evil people are deserved it all. Exactly like what the Nazis were saying about the Jews.
My agenda is the truth. If it's true that the Germans were running extermination camps, like Eisenhower ran for German POWs after the war was over, then I want to know about them, and their scope and purpose. I want to know the truth about it all, come what may, and I certainly don't want little old ladies put in prison, (no matter what their views are), under any circumstances. I can't even comprehend the moral cowardice of a society (or individuals) that would tolerate such a thing.
Germany is suffering women being raped in the streets by savages, but they save their prison space for her
http://carolynyeager.net/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/ursula%20haverbeck.jpg?itok=GI4bbz9C
and why? Because she's asking questions they don't want people asking
Well, Rurik,
You are discussing these issues with an obvious troll, 'incitatus', a piece of filth who is here to spread disinformation & propaganda & who obviously does not care one bit about truth or free speech. Remember that other scumbag, 'iffen', who hoped for European style censorship to be applied in the US?
These cretins are so obvious.
No, Rurik, the National Socialists did NOT run extermination camps.
Do u still have doubts?
As Prof.Faurisson said, on the intellectual level, the revisionists have already won.
It is just that people ain't allowed to know it in fact, people are not allowed to even know there is a debate on the holohoax.Why, Rurik, do I say the holocau$t is a monstrous Hoax?
As Prof.T.Dalton wrote:
There are, in fact, three essential elements to the event called the Holocaust:
(1) intention to mass murder the Jews, by Hitler and the Nazi elite;
(2) the use of gas chambers(the extermination camps & gas vans); and
(3) the 6 million deaths.If any one of these three should undergo substantial revision, then, technically speaking, we no longer have "The Holocaust"-at least, not in any meaningful sense. (Broadly speaking, of course, any mass fatality is a holocaust.) Holocaust revisionism contends that, not one, but all three of these points are grossly in error, and thus that "The Holocaust," as such, did not occur. Obviously, this is not to deny that a tragedy happened to the Jews, nor that many thousands died, directly and indirectly, as a result of the war. But the conventional account is an extreme exaggeration.
Most people are led to believe – I was one of them – in regards to the 'holocau$t', that there is abundant proof of the alleged crime, as described above.
This is absolutely NOT THE CASE.In fact, many holocaust 'historians', I call them quacks, have actually admitted the near total lack of material and documentary evidence.
There is, as the revisionist side has shown, an abundance of evidence refuting the official dossier, which is basically atrocity propaganda on steroids.One good book that covers all bases in a more accessible format is "Lectures on the Holocaust
Controversial Issues Cross Examined" by Germar Rudolf.
http://holocausthandbooks.com/dl/15-loth.pdfhttp://holocausthandbooks.com/index.php?main_page=1
• Replies: @Rurik Hey L.K.,holocau$t is a monstrous Hoax?I think you're right about some of the trolls here, or so it seems to mebut this is the thing vis-a-vis the Holocau$t. I don't like calling the whole thing a hoax, because then it sort of looks like you're suggesting that NONE of any of that stuff happened, when I believe that it's clear that Jews (and many others) were systematically persecuted by the Nazis for being Jews, and not necessarily for any crimes they committed. Just like the Japanese in the US during the war. If they Japanese claimed there were gas chambers at the camps where they were held, then I think it would be fair and prudent to examine those claims for veracity, just as in the case of the Holocaust- where I don't think they had homicidal gas chambers for human extermination purposes. But that doesn't change the fact that many people perished in those camps, and many of them were innocent Jews, and if the Jews want to call that particular suffering a name to commemorate it, just like what the Japanese went through, then I don't see what's wrong with that per se.
That it has become this momentous blood libel against the German people in particular and all Gentiles in general is just another testament to the power of the lobby.
Controlling the world's banks and money supply and therefor all the media of consequence and all the major politicians (and publishing houses and courts and universities, etc..) has had an effect on things. The Eternal WarsⓊ being perhaps the most troublesome for the moment. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 10:50 pm GMT @Anonymous I've at least skimmed through every comment on this post, and have to lament the huge drop in quality as the thread progressed. The last 100 or so comments are embarrassing and likely to put off anyone with an interest in the subject at hand.
Stupid conspiracies are par for the course for Unz.com.
• Replies: @Anonymous It's not the conspiracies that are in themselves objectionable. I'm perfectly happy reading odd or otherwise rarely heard takes and refutations of varying quality, but when the comment section devolves into character swipes and cursing each other out in long, near-indecipherable diatribes, something of real value is lost.Make The Comment Section Great Again. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- SolontoCroesus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 10, 2016 at 10:57 pm GMT • 100 Words @Incitatus I cherish free speech. But I don't live in a country that twice experienced the catastrophic results of demagogic incitement. I trust Germans know what they're doing, but I note your concern. And your angst over suffering. But isn't it a very selective angst?
"...even if you take them at their word, the Holocaust was done as humanely as it's was humanly possible to kill people. Sort of like the Soylent Green euthanasia scene the violins were playing as they were handed a towel to take a 'shower', and then the death was as benign as could be arranged under the circumstances. And that was their worst case scenario of the gas chambers as I remember them being shown to us as children. Compare that to Dresden, which is undisputed and was as calculatedly cruel and sadistic as it was possible to imagine. And then some."Why, like most who mourn Dresden 1944, don't you ever mention Warsaw Sep 1939? The same number of civilians - 20,000-25,000 - were killed. Or how about Warsaw Aug 1944 (150,000-200,000 civilians killed)? In fact, you could say Germans pioneered civilian killing (shelling of Paris 1870-71, bombing London in 1915, the Condor Legion and Guernica 1937, etc). They were very good at it. You never mention it. Does only German blood count? Or do you simply want to use Dresden to legitimize Nazi aggression?"...and yet it's the Germans who everyone condemns for inhumanity."
-Rurik 28dec15 #205
http://www.unz.com/article/no-matter-who-becomes-president-israel-wins/#comments
I confess I'm also puzzled by your preoccupation for the Lebensborn - most unusual for a Norseman.
btw. You aren't by any chance Anders Behring Brevik blogging away in your prison cell?
Why . . . don't you ever mention Warsaw Sep 1939? The same number of civilians – 20,000-25,000 – were killed. Or how about Warsaw Aug 1944 (150,000-200,000 civilians killed)?
1. estimates of Dresden dead are tendentious
• Replies: @James Kabala I think you misunderstood his points in every respect. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
2. not all those killed in Warsaw were Jews: only Jews count. If non-Jews swell the kill-count, that diverts attention from teh eternal victim ©
3. Real he-man Jews deride Warsaw Jews for not being sufficiently he-man. Best not to talk about it.
4. Auschwitz has a more established brand.
5. No gas chambers in Warsaw. Epic fail.
- Anonymous says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 12:24 am GMT • 100 Words @Boris Stupid conspiracies are par for the course for Unz.com.
It's not the conspiracies that are in themselves objectionable. I'm perfectly happy reading odd or otherwise rarely heard takes and refutations of varying quality, but when the comment section devolves into character swipes and cursing each other out in long, near-indecipherable diatribes, something of real value is lost.
Make The Comment Section Great Again.
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz Your #335 Comment has a ihick yellow-brown rectangular frame around it. How did you achieve that? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- I. MALLIKARJUNA SHARMA says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 4:57 am GMT @CanSpeccy But if you really want a short, clear, definitive, irrefutable and conclusive debunking of 9/11 Truther theories here it is :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuC_4mGTs98
What do you mean by debunking. It is in fact concisely and clearly explaining 9/11 Truth theories castigated as conspiracy theories by the criminal rulers.
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- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 8:50 am GMT • 100 Words @Rurik
I ask specific questions.that's fine Incitatus, but all too often those roads lead down to obfuscation and conjecture. Like why did they implode building seven? The answer is we don't know. Probably because it was the control center for the whole operation, and they wanted to 'pull it' to erase all the evidence. Flight 92 was probably intended to hit building seven, as the pretext for its collapse, but then when it was shot down over Pennsylvania, they had to wing it.But that is all conjecture. Like asking someone who doesn't buy the Warren commission's findings, OK then 'why did they kill JFK'? Only the assassins know the answer to that question, just as only the people responsible for 911 could answer all the detailed queries.
How did they rig the buildings surreptitiously? That is a whole gigantic side discussion, and people are having it, and we could spend hours debating all the minutia, but to what end?
This we know. We know that building seven fell in a way that is incomprehensible based on simple physics. Indeed, impossible. We know that right away all the authorities set about having all the steel beams and forensic evidence of this stupendous and monumental and historic engineering failure, shipped off to China to be melted down and destroyed before any examination could be done by professionals. We're all supposed to just take the authorities word for it, even tho it appears even they conducted no investigation. Building seven wasn't even mentioned in the 911 commission report. Isn't that something?!
But even more to the point Incitatus, is that several news organizations reported on the collapse of building seven before it happened. Did you know that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOVnvFl5jZo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M26-B44qQIs
now how could they have known this event was about to happen when even now no one can explain how or why that building came down. It's as if a news organization had reported that the first plane had hit the WTC tower 20 minutes before it did. Don't you think there'd be some legitimate curiosity as to how this news organization knew the first plane was going to hit, before it did? No?
The collapse of building seven is a mystery, at the very least. An anomaly to all known laws of physics and structural engineering, even today no one can explain it any better than the magic bullet, that goes through Kennedy and then turns and hits Connelly a couple different times and then ends up pristine. But now imagine if a news organization had reported on the assassination of JFK 20 minutes before it happened.
I ask you as just the latest person to assert on UR that something – in this case the collapse of WTC 7 – is "an anomaly to all known laws of physics and structural engineering" or similar wotds which plainly mean that such laws make the collapse without deliberate demolition impossible .*what are your qualifations to be taken seriously on the implications of the laws of physics and structural engineering*? I have dealt with a lot of expert witnesse and you don't sound like one of them,not even the dodgy ones that have to be exposed and evaluated in court every day. Indeed do you consider yourself competent to evaluate expert evidence on physics and structural engineering like a judge assisted by the questions of counsel? If so why? Try persuading your readers.
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyI have dealt with a lot of expert witnesse and you don't sound like one of them,not even the dodgy ones that have to be exposed and evaluated in court every day.Hey, Wizard, I earlier asked you to outline the strongest available evidence for the official government story. You never provided any.Well, you claimed that the official story was proof of the official story. Your specific words were:
Normally the onus of proof would be on those who dispute the findings of a well funded official inquiry to displace the presumption that it is substantially correct.In other words, the official story is simply presumed to be correct. That was here: http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-alexander-cockburn-and-the-british-spies/#comment-1549520So that tells us that your grasp of what constitutes evidence is actually fairly weak, but since you want to flaunt your lawyerly credentials, I thought to a question...
Since your failure to outline any evidence for the official story, a commenter Boris has actualy tried to outline some. Among other things, he claims that the fact that Mohammed Atta had a plane ticket is evidence for the official story.
In your professional opinion, as a lawyer, do you agree that this constitutes evidence for the official story? Yes or no? , @Rurik
.*what are your qualifations to be taken seriously on the implications of the laws of physics and structural engineering*?I rest on my laurels wizwe've both participated on this site for some time now. In my case clearly and obviously in an attempt to get at the truth in all things. In your case, -to obfuscate the truth- about any issue you find inconvenient to the status quo- vis-a-vis the PTB. I believe this is obvious to everyone here who's been paying attention at all.
What you do wiz, is scan these pages for any signs of some ingenuousness, and then you proceed to reel them into your web, with innocent sounding queries, and then when they're engaged in an exchange with you, you drop a manure wagon of legerdemain on their heads, obviously finding amusement in your own 'cleverness and artfulness'. I suppose you imagine you're being cagey, but to the rest of us you just come across as a mean-spirited, sadistic little prick.
Now why, I ask you, would I ever feel the inclination so qualify myself to the likes of you, eh? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 8:56 am GMT @Anonymous It's not the conspiracies that are in themselves objectionable. I'm perfectly happy reading odd or otherwise rarely heard takes and refutations of varying quality, but when the comment section devolves into character swipes and cursing each other out in long, near-indecipherable diatribes, something of real value is lost.
Make The Comment Section Great Again.
Your #335 Comment has a ihick yellow-brown rectangular frame around it. How did you achieve that?
• Replies: @Anonymous Can't speak with 100% certainty, but I believe it's a mark of distinction from the comment moderator. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 9:16 am GMT @CanSpeccy
I don't remember anything about thermite reactions at least as such from 6th form Chemistry and now realise that aluminium is frequently at the core of thermite reactions, thereby lending support to the recently expounded theories of heating, and explosions, which would correct the official versions.Yes, either your ignorance is profound, or your intent to divert the discussion into a nonsensical channel is exposed.Bulk aluminum doesn't ignite in a building fire. According to one source, aluminum must be vaporized before it will burn and the boiling point of aluminum is 3,986 Farenheit, whereas the adiabatic flame temperature of Kerosene in air, at around 3597 Farenheit, is 400 degrees lower. Moreover, the jet fuel fires in the Twin Towers would likely have burned at considerably lower temperatures due to oxygen supply limitations.
Aluminum burns readily in a thermitic compound comprising aluminum in a finely divided form intimately mixed with an oxidizer, usually iron oxide. In the process of combustion aluminum is oxidized, while the iron oxide is reduced to pure molten iron, which will be found in the reaction residue in the form of iron microspheres, just as were abundant in the ash collected in the vicinity of the Twin Towers.
Among the best authorities on thermite is the National Institute of Standards, or NIST, the non-governmental body hired to "explain" the collapse of the Twin Towers and WTC 7. In the past, NIST worked closely with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on the development of explosive nanothermites .
Oddly, it apparently never occurred to the NIST investigators of the collapse of three WTC buildings that explosives such as thermite, a material long used in controlled building demolitions , might have been involved in the perfect implosion of three WTC buildings.
The recent doco about the American chemist and Norwegian metallurgist who sought to correct the official version by reference to aluminium as sn explosive hypothesised that it was molten aluminium flowing down into pools of water that explained the reported explosive sounds.
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- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 9:27 am GMT @Ron Unz For those without convenient access to a copy of the deHaven-Smith book, I've discovered there are some lengthy extracts available on the web:
https://off-guardian.org/2016/09/04/are-you-a-mind-controlled-cia-stooge/
Ron
You may be aware that Daniel Pipes made a study of conspiracy theories and has written books on the subject – which I haven't read. I have however sampled his long list of articles which can be found here:
http://www.daniel.pipes.org/topics/4/conspiracy-theories
• Replies: @NosytheDuke A bit like reviewing or recommending a movie, that you haven't watched.I must admit though that you have a decided flair for the consistently proud display of your ignorance. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 11:09 am GMT • 200 Words @Erebus Hi,
Well, quite a few people I know spent the first dozen or so of those believing that the official story is broadly true. Propaganda works. You can fool most of the people most of the time, so giving someone the benefit of the doubt has been my practice.
His alleged fence-sitting position makes no sense 15 years after the event.But if you look at his questions, it's all misdirection. Squid ink strategy.Yeah, his response to me made that plain, but I really liked the touch that he's apparently friends with the ephemeral Betty Ong's dead parents! I'm guessing, of course, that he's alluding to the mysterious Betty-with-zero-life-history-Ong. He may have been referring to the parents of Madeline Sweeney, who's "phone call" from the same flight so contradicted Ong's that it makes one wonder if they were on the same flight, or to one of the other (stabbed) attendants.Uno absurdo dato, infinita sequuntur
One absurdity being given, an infinite number follow.I'm dismayed to see this sort of stupidity serving to obscure the important theme Mr. Unz is exploring in his American Pravda series.
Well, quite a few people I know spent the first dozen or so of those believing that the official story is broadly true. Propaganda works. You can fool most of the people most of the time, so giving someone the benefit of the doubt has been my practice.
Yes, that's a good point. It actually took me about a decade to get to the point of just saying openly that the official 9/11 story was total crap.
So you make a correct point. A correct general point. But in this specific case, I think there were warning signs from the get-go that this "Incitatus" is not some honest person seeking the truth. These guys show up and it's like they've got their schtick. They start saying they are open-minded and seeking the truth but then it becomes apparent that they have a list of talking points that they are trying to put out there just to confuse the matter.
There is a great piece by the Saker today. I suppose you've likely read it.
Yeah, his response to me made that plain, but I really liked the touch that he's apparently friends with the ephemeral Betty Ong's dead parents! I'm guessing, of course, that he's alluding to the mysterious Betty-with-zero-life-history-Ong. He may have been referring to the parents of Madeline Sweeney,
It's actually more likely that he's acquainted with the person who invented all these characters!
• Replies: @BorisBetty-with-zero-life-history-OngIt's odious how the victims become "invented characters" to fools like you based on zero evidence.
It's actually more likely that he's acquainted with the person who invented all these characters!Here are some pictures of the dead woman whose memory you tarnish:
http://www.bettyong.org/photos.htm Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 11:17 am GMT • 200 Words @Wizard of Oz I ask you as just the latest person to assert on UR that something - in this case the collapse of WTC 7 - is "an anomaly to all known laws of physics and structural engineering" or similar wotds which plainly mean that such laws make the collapse without deliberate demolition impossible....*what are your qualifations to be taken seriously on the implications of the laws of physics and structural engineering*? I have dealt with a lot of expert witnesse and you don't sound like one of them,not even the dodgy ones that have to be exposed and evaluated in court every day. Indeed do you consider yourself competent to evaluate expert evidence on physics and structural engineering like a judge assisted by the questions of counsel? If so why? Try persuading your readers.
I have dealt with a lot of expert witnesse and you don't sound like one of them,not even the dodgy ones that have to be exposed and evaluated in court every day.
Hey, Wizard, I earlier asked you to outline the strongest available evidence for the official government story. You never provided any.
Well, you claimed that the official story was proof of the official story. Your specific words were:
Normally the onus of proof would be on those who dispute the findings of a well funded official inquiry to displace the presumption that it is substantially correct.
In other words, the official story is simply presumed to be correct. That was here: http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-alexander-cockburn-and-the-british-spies/#comment-1549520
So that tells us that your grasp of what constitutes evidence is actually fairly weak, but since you want to flaunt your lawyerly credentials, I thought to a question
Since your failure to outline any evidence for the official story, a commenter Boris has actualy tried to outline some. Among other things, he claims that the fact that Mohammed Atta had a plane ticket is evidence for the official story.
In your professional opinion, as a lawyer, do you agree that this constitutes evidence for the official story? Yes or no?
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz I am content to wait on Rurik answering me without your participation. In the meantime I am close to concluding that The Saker has included some pretty dodgy stuff in his new contribution on 9/11 which I wasn't aware he claimed any special knowledge of. , @ErebusNormally the onus of proof would be on those who dispute the findings of a well funded official inquiry to displace the presumption that it is substantially correct.Thanks for that Jonathan.
The Wiz, notwithstanding his loathsome obfuscation and word mincing, can occasionally cut to the heart of the matter.
Namely, at this level of criminality, there's no such thing as a free truth. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 11:31 am GMT • 200 Words @Incitatus I cherish free speech. But I don't live in a country that twice experienced the catastrophic results of demagogic incitement. I trust Germans know what they're doing, but I note your concern. And your angst over suffering. But isn't it a very selective angst?
"...even if you take them at their word, the Holocaust was done as humanely as it's was humanly possible to kill people. Sort of like the Soylent Green euthanasia scene the violins were playing as they were handed a towel to take a 'shower', and then the death was as benign as could be arranged under the circumstances. And that was their worst case scenario of the gas chambers as I remember them being shown to us as children. Compare that to Dresden, which is undisputed and was as calculatedly cruel and sadistic as it was possible to imagine. And then some."Why, like most who mourn Dresden 1944, don't you ever mention Warsaw Sep 1939? The same number of civilians - 20,000-25,000 - were killed. Or how about Warsaw Aug 1944 (150,000-200,000 civilians killed)? In fact, you could say Germans pioneered civilian killing (shelling of Paris 1870-71, bombing London in 1915, the Condor Legion and Guernica 1937, etc). They were very good at it. You never mention it. Does only German blood count? Or do you simply want to use Dresden to legitimize Nazi aggression?"...and yet it's the Germans who everyone condemns for inhumanity."
-Rurik 28dec15 #205
http://www.unz.com/article/no-matter-who-becomes-president-israel-wins/#comments
I confess I'm also puzzled by your preoccupation for the Lebensborn - most unusual for a Norseman.
btw. You aren't by any chance Anders Behring Brevik blogging away in your prison cell?
Hi, Ziofascist scumbag.
I cherish free speech.
LOL. "I'm not a vindictive person but the old bitch does deserve to rot in prison. And I hope she dies and burns in hell."
But I don't live in a country that twice experienced the catastrophic results of demagogic incitement. I trust Germans know what they're doing
Ah, I see you've thought about this and realize that imprisoning 87-year-old ladies is absolutely necessary to prevent the rise of the 4th Reich, eh?
But I wonder about this . is imprisoning little old ladies like this likely to reduce antisemitism? Or is it more likely to increase it?
Also, wouldn't you be concerned that imprisoning somebody for saying something, with absolutely no attempt to rebut what the person is saying, might cause people to think that the person is being imprisoned for telling the truth?
What do you think? Have you thought about any of this at all?
Well, of course not. You're a shit eater. You never actually think about anything! But you could start . it's not illegal YET!
• Replies: @Incitatus No comment on the 20,000-25,000 killed in Warsaw Sep 1939? Silence on the 150,000-200,000 killed in Aug 1944? What a surprise!Instead, more angry tears for poor Nazi granny Ursula. What a "great" champion of freedom you are!
I tried to be helpful. She'll probably love knitting (red, white, and black yarn only, please). And, since Adolf forgot the winter coats - well, you get the idea.
You really should do something about your bad case of potty mouth. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 11:33 am GMT @Jonathan Revusky
I have dealt with a lot of expert witnesse and you don't sound like one of them,not even the dodgy ones that have to be exposed and evaluated in court every day.Hey, Wizard, I earlier asked you to outline the strongest available evidence for the official government story. You never provided any.Well, you claimed that the official story was proof of the official story. Your specific words were:
Normally the onus of proof would be on those who dispute the findings of a well funded official inquiry to displace the presumption that it is substantially correct.In other words, the official story is simply presumed to be correct. That was here: http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-alexander-cockburn-and-the-british-spies/#comment-1549520So that tells us that your grasp of what constitutes evidence is actually fairly weak, but since you want to flaunt your lawyerly credentials, I thought to a question...
Since your failure to outline any evidence for the official story, a commenter Boris has actualy tried to outline some. Among other things, he claims that the fact that Mohammed Atta had a plane ticket is evidence for the official story.
In your professional opinion, as a lawyer, do you agree that this constitutes evidence for the official story? Yes or no?
I am content to wait on Rurik answering me without your participation. In the meantime I am close to concluding that The Saker has included some pretty dodgy stuff in his new contribution on 9/11 which I wasn't aware he claimed any special knowledge of.
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- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 11:47 am GMT • 100 Words @Anonymous I've at least skimmed through every comment on this post, and have to lament the huge drop in quality as the thread progressed. The last 100 or so comments are embarrassing and likely to put off anyone with an interest in the subject at hand.
I've at least skimmed through every comment on this post, and have to lament the huge drop in quality as the thread progressed.
Well, what to do? There is some amazing stuff here. This Boris shit eater, I asked him to outline the strongest evidence available for the official story on 9/11. He told me, among a few other things, that Mohammed Atta had a plane ticket!
Of course he hijacked a plane and flew it into a building at the behest of a bearded religious fanatic in Afghanistan! HE HAD A PLANE TICKET, DAMMIT!!!!
• Replies: @BorisOf course he hijacked a plane and flew it into a building at the behest of a bearded religious fanatic in Afghanistan! HE HAD A PLANE TICKET, DAMMIT!!!!No one made this argument. You're such a delicate genius on 9/11, yet you keep flogging this straw man. What a coward. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 12:04 pm GMT • 400 Words @Boris
Well, c'mon, the guy doubtless came under pressure to say that the guy could have done what they said he did.You keep making things up.Huh? His evaluation included landing. But yeah, sure they guy is lying about the part you hate but telling the truth about the part you like. Is there any better evidence that you are a complete moronic hack?
if he evaluated the guy as unable to control a Cessna in August, the guy couldn't suddenly fly a big Boeing in September!The plane allegedly flew this really incredible 270 degree descending loopYeah, professional pilots think Hanjour could have done it:http://www.salon.com/2006/05/19/askthepilot186/
Reality: As I've explained in at least one prior column, Hani Hanjour's flying was hardly the show-quality demonstration often described. It was exceptional only in its recklessness. If anything, his loops and turns and spirals above the nation's capital revealed him to be exactly the shitty pilot he by all accounts was. To hit the Pentagon squarely he needed only a bit of luck, and he got it, possibly with help from the 757's autopilot. Striking a stationary object - even a large one like the Pentagon - at high speed and from a steep angle is very difficult. To make the job easier, he came in obliquely, tearing down light poles as he roared across the Pentagon's lawn.
...
"The hijackers required only the shallow understanding of the aircraft," agrees Ken Hertz, an airline pilot rated on the 757/767. "In much the same way that a person needn't be an experienced physician in order to perform CPR or set a broken bone."That sentiment is echoed by Joe d'Eon, airline pilot and host of the "Fly With Me" podcast series. "It's the difference between a doctor and a butcher," says d'Eon.
There is no photographic or video evidence at the alleged crash site that is consistent with a Boeing 757 having crashed there!lol you are one of the idiots who think a missile hit the Pentagon? I should have seen that coming. Do you believe the CGI people too? And the nuke guys?What's really galling is that fuckers like you malign the victims and suggest they are in on the conspiracy. It's not bad enough that they get their lives cut short, nope. You guys have to take a shit on their ashes too.
if he evaluated the guy as unable to control a Cessna in August, the guy couldn't suddenly fly a big Boeing in September!
Huh? His evaluation included landing.
Did you come up with this yourself or is this some talking point that was just handed to you? YOu can read what was said, but the problem was not solely that Hani Hanjour could not land the plane. He could not really control the plane in flight. I'm not a pilot myself, but looking at this as a generalist, the upshot of it clearly seems to be that that Hani Hanjour did not possess even elementary plane flying skills for a small plane in August of 2001. And then in September of 2001 carried out a maneuver in a big Boeing jet that would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for someone with years of experience.
But I was thinking about this there were four or five Arab hijackers in the plane according to the story. How would they even know which one of them flew the plane? Anybody who made a phone call wouldn't know the names of the various hijackers, would they? So they just tell a story and there's no proof whatsoever of the story anyway And then a shit eater like you, rather than just admit the obvious, that there isn't any proof of this aspect of the story, you just start making up shit to back up the story. Like you start by trying to claim that the incident where he couldn't fly a Cessna was years before 9/11. No, it was 3 weeks before 9/11!
lol you are one of the idiots who think a missile hit the Pentagon?
Well, I don't know. What would be idiotic about thinking that? All I said was that there is not a shred of evidence that a Boeing airliner really hit the Pentagon. At least I've never seen any.
What's really galling is that fuckers like you malign the victims
Oh, I'm maligning the victims, am I? And that really bothers you . Wanting to get at the truth of what really happened is to disrespect the victims
I can't believe you came up with that shit yourself. You've got a list of talking points that you're running through, right?
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- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 12:45 pm GMT • 300 Words @Boris
Oh, hold on I see you don't understand the difference between a necessary and a sufficient condition.You are so stupid. I already wrote this:Obviously the plane ticket is a necessary but not sufficient piece of evidence.See? You can't even fucking read.I never said it was the only piece of evidence, and said explicitly that it was not sufficient. You took it out of a list of evidence and pretended I said it was "proof," when I never even used the word. Because you are too stupid to argue honestly.
Oh, hold on I see you don't understand the difference between a necessary and a sufficient condition.
(Shrug.) Little children are always using big words that they have overheard adults using. It doesn't really mean that they understand what they are saying.
But okay, look, a shit eater like you could, in the appropriate context, understand what a necessary versus a sufficient condition is. Or you could understand what the beg the question fallacy is. But the problem remains that, at the key moment, you are able to NOT understand it.
Because, at the key moment, the shit eater always ends up telling you (either directly or circuitously) that the official story is proof of the official story. Never fails. Earlier you told me to go read the page on wikipedia. Well, the page on wikipedia is just a synopsis of the official story. I asked you for proof so you were just telling me that the official story is proof of the official story.
I never said it was the only piece of evidence, and said explicitly that it was not sufficient. You took it out of a list of evidence and pretended I said it was "proof,"
Well, that's a mischaracterization. The fact remains, you said that Mohammed Atta having a plane ticket was evidence. It was in your list of evidence.
AND NO, the fact remains: THAT IS NOT EVIDENCE OF ANYTHING!
I'll tell you what it is. It is SHIT. Because that is all a shit eater ever comes up with in a debate.
Just shit. Like the guy bought a plane ticket so he's the hijacker The government story is proof of the government story
You're not the first shit eater I've debated with. All you guys ever come up with is SHIT.
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- Erebus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 1:21 pm GMT • 100 Words @Jonathan Revusky
I have dealt with a lot of expert witnesse and you don't sound like one of them,not even the dodgy ones that have to be exposed and evaluated in court every day.Hey, Wizard, I earlier asked you to outline the strongest available evidence for the official government story. You never provided any.Well, you claimed that the official story was proof of the official story. Your specific words were:
Normally the onus of proof would be on those who dispute the findings of a well funded official inquiry to displace the presumption that it is substantially correct.In other words, the official story is simply presumed to be correct. That was here: http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-alexander-cockburn-and-the-british-spies/#comment-1549520So that tells us that your grasp of what constitutes evidence is actually fairly weak, but since you want to flaunt your lawyerly credentials, I thought to a question...
Since your failure to outline any evidence for the official story, a commenter Boris has actualy tried to outline some. Among other things, he claims that the fact that Mohammed Atta had a plane ticket is evidence for the official story.
In your professional opinion, as a lawyer, do you agree that this constitutes evidence for the official story? Yes or no?
Normally the onus of proof would be on those who dispute the findings of a well funded official inquiry to displace the presumption that it is substantially correct.
Thanks for that Jonathan.
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The Wiz, notwithstanding his loathsome obfuscation and word mincing, can occasionally cut to the heart of the matter.
Namely, at this level of criminality, there's no such thing as a free truth.
- Sam Shama says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 1:51 pm GMT • 100 Words @Rurik
That's a rhetorical question, isn't it?;)It's funny, because in his role here as professional disinfo agent, it would probably make more sense for him to express sympathy with Ursula Haverbeck and agree with us that her imprisonment is unjust and so on, in order to build a rapport and try to come across as even somewhat reasonable. But the thing is that the morally degenerate zio scumbag can't help gloating over the fact that the Zionist power structure manage to imprison this little old lady.extremely salient insight JRScumbags will be scumbags.I confess I (of all people!) sometimes wince at your colorful language, but then sometimes there's just no other way to put it!That little degenerate bastard Sam Shama is exactly like this too, you know.well, I try to hold out hope for our pal Sam, but then a while back it was abundantly clear that Sam wanted some kind of harm to come to me when I expressed sympathy for this same little old grandma who the PTB were crushing with an iron Zio-boot for her plucky temerityRemember that Sam?
Oh Hello Rurik
Ursula Haverbeck, the lovely little granny which has a rap sheet longer than your arm?According to Agence France-Presse
Haverbeck is a notorious extremist who was once chaired a far-right training center shut down in 2008 for spreading Nazi propaganda, according to AFP. She has a rap sheet and a suspended sentence for sedition.
The Zio-boot? You mean this one?
http://www.unz.com/article/what-obama-should-have-told-bibi/#comment-1239335btw I see Revusky getting into his usual foamy-mouth-eyeballs-spinning routine.
Jonathan,
fear not your hunger, it will be sated; coprophagic services are sought after at Upper Manhattan's recycling plant. What hour shall I ask them to contact you?
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- Incitatus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 2:09 pm GMT • 300 Words @Rurik I was reading your quote and thinking to myself, wow, what insight and pure, raw humanity from this mystery writer..
until I saw it sourced ;)
Does only German blood count?no sir, but you see for me, even German blood counts, especially when it's women and children, who're being burned alive to sate the insatiable hatred of a monsteranyone who burns women and children alive for the fun of it and out of sheer tribal hatred, rather than as a military and existential imperative, is a monster in my book
if the Nazis burned women and children alive for the fun of it, then by God I tell you I would condemn them with all of my breath, I swear it. But they didn't do that. It was the Zio-West that did that, (just as they did at Waco, TX) and I find that difficult to live with. Sort of the way the Norwegians treated the children of Lebensborn; monstrous and impossible to justify. So yes, every single German soldier who considered the women of the occupied countries as their rightful booty deserved to die, and happily, many of them did. But then to blame the children of these trysts for the crimes of their fathers, is a stain that will besmirch the character of the Norwegian people for generations.
"if the Nazis burned women and children alive for the fun of it, then by God I tell you I would condemn them with all of my breath, I swear it. But they didn't do that."
Well, Rurik, here's your chance to condemn them:
" starting at 0800 on 25 September [1939], Luftwaffe bombers under the command of Major Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen conducted the largest air raid ever seen by that time, dropping 560 tons of high explosive bombs and 72 tons of incendiary bombs, in coordination with heavy artillery shelling by Army units."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Warsaw_in_World_War_IINote the "72 tons of incendiary bombs." 20,000-25,000 civilians died. Surprised? Later on, beginning August 1944 the Nazis really got busy. By January 1945 they'd leveled 85% of the city and killed another 150,000-200,000 civilians.
How about Rotterdam May 1940? 884 civilians killed, 85,000 left homeless:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotterdam_BlitzHow about Guernica April 1937? They bombed it on market day, when packed with civilians. They used incendiaries. 170-300 civilians died. The city was largely destroyed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_GuernicaHow about Lidice June 1942? 173 men executed on the spot. 203 women and 105 children taken to concentration camps (four pregnant women were first forced to have abortions). The village was leveled. The Nazis killed all the animals and even dug up the remains in the cemetery!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacreHow about Oradour-sur-Glane Jun 1944? 642 civilians murdered and -wait for it – women and children deliberately burned to death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane_massacreThere are other examples. Oh those poor, poor Nazis.
Don't forget your promise to "condemn them [Nazis] with all of my breath."
• Replies: @Rurik OK, I checked out the first of your links, (and admittedly from the obviously biased Wikipedia)this is the kind of thing I found out
The Polish Army surrendered nearly 140,000 troops and during the siege around 18,000 civilians of Warsaw perished. As a result of the air bombardments 10% of the city's buildings were entirely destroyed and further 40% were heavily damaged.[1]:78now this is what I said:
"anyone who burns women and children alive for the fun of it and out of sheer tribal hatred, rather than as a military and existential imperative, is a monster in my book"
so what you have was strategic bombing of a city (a war crime in my book but then I never said the Nazis were boy scouts) for a clear military objective. That's not what I'm talking about.
Imagine if Germany had already defeated the Poles, and Poland was on the brink, and had effectively lost the war, and Warsaw was turned into a refugee city with tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of refugees huddling there as their last sanctuary. There would have been no military age men there, as they would have all died in the war by now, and the city was overflowing with women and children (and POW camps and such). OK? And then imagine the kind of people that would plan, not just an attack in order to break the moral of the enemy, (it had already long been broken), but rather as a calculated act of sheer inhuman cruelty, intended to burn alive every single old man, woman and child until there was nothing left of either the people or the (beautiful, ancient Baroque architecture and art of the) city. It was a true holocaust, intended as an act of sadistic vengeance upon harmless people to sate an insatiable need to inflict unimaginable suffering and cruelty for cruelties' sake. Just like Waco. And for the same reason, - they defied the power of their 'masters', and for that, they would be made to pay.
Did the Nazis ever do anything like that? Did they ever deliberately burn hundreds of thousands of civilians alive for no military purpose whatsoever? But just to be as cruel as possible?
I guess that's the word I'm really thinking of there. Cruelty. Because as that quote you posted showed, the Nazis at their worst were trying to murder people as humanely as possible, whereas the allies wanted to inflict the most suffering on the most innocent and vulnerable women and children as possible. They wanted to burn women and children alive who were no threat and at the virtual end of the war. What kind of people do something like that?
Reading the Old Testament, I get an idea of where they get their demonic hate from.
One on my mantras Incitatus, is that a lot of the raw hate in the world today (and certainly yesterday) comes from religious ignorance and a cartoon version of the world that says the followers of this religion are pure good, and the followers of that religion are pure evil. I sort of wonder what things would be like if we'd finally lay to rest these pernicious and stone age codified ignorance down, and joined the 21st century as rational actors... Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Incitatus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 2:16 pm GMT • 100 Words @Erebus Hi,
Well, quite a few people I know spent the first dozen or so of those believing that the official story is broadly true. Propaganda works. You can fool most of the people most of the time, so giving someone the benefit of the doubt has been my practice.
His alleged fence-sitting position makes no sense 15 years after the event.But if you look at his questions, it's all misdirection. Squid ink strategy.Yeah, his response to me made that plain, but I really liked the touch that he's apparently friends with the ephemeral Betty Ong's dead parents! I'm guessing, of course, that he's alluding to the mysterious Betty-with-zero-life-history-Ong. He may have been referring to the parents of Madeline Sweeney, who's "phone call" from the same flight so contradicted Ong's that it makes one wonder if they were on the same flight, or to one of the other (stabbed) attendants.Uno absurdo dato, infinita sequuntur
One absurdity being given, an infinite number follow.I'm dismayed to see this sort of stupidity serving to obscure the important theme Mr. Unz is exploring in his American Pravda series.
"I really liked the touch that he's apparently friends with the ephemeral Betty Ong's dead parents!"
Nice try. Try Thomas Roger, father of twenty-four year old Jean D. Roger.
"I'm guessing, of course "
You seem to do a lot of that. No answers to simple questions. Just crackpot web-links and looney-tune CGI plane theories you can't explain. "The Great Revusky" seems equally barren.
• Replies: @ErebusNice try. Try Thomas Roger, father of twenty-four year old Jean D. Roger.I wasn't trying. You realize, of course, that your comment was utterly meaningless. I could claim to be the pilot Ogonowski's alter ego but it would mean nothing at all in the context of this debate. Nothing - at - all. Get it? No? Oh well.(re: guessing) You seem to do a lot of that.In the case mentioned, I was mocking the silliness of your question. Do you have another example?No answers to simple questions.Guilty as charged. I ignore simpleton level questions. That's for, well, simpletons to exercise themselves over. Are there any non-simpleton level questions you asked that I missed? If you have one, I'll be pleased to entertain it.Just crackpot web-links and looney-tune CGI plane theories you can't explain.Hmm, you're either hallucinating or suffering some difficulty understanding the written word.
I didn't provide any web-links (crack-pot or otherwise) and I didn't try to "explain" any "CGI theories".
Perhaps you got confused when I did say that we have "evidence" of but one of the planes, and said evidence is full of anomalies best explicated by referring to CGI techniques. What "CGI theories" should I have tried to explain? Are there any that would be useful here?I think Revusky has you all wrong. You're not a real shit-eater at all. You're either a running algorithm (however primitive) or pretending to be one. I'm guessing (!) the latter, as real algorithms are expensive, and effective ones aren't much more expensive than ineffective ones. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 2:43 pm GMT • 100 Words @Jonathan Revusky
I've at least skimmed through every comment on this post, and have to lament the huge drop in quality as the thread progressed.Well, what to do? There is some amazing stuff here. This Boris shit eater, I asked him to outline the strongest evidence available for the official story on 9/11. He told me, among a few other things, that Mohammed Atta had a plane ticket!Of course he hijacked a plane and flew it into a building at the behest of a bearded religious fanatic in Afghanistan! HE HAD A PLANE TICKET, DAMMIT!!!!
Of course he hijacked a plane and flew it into a building at the behest of a bearded religious fanatic in Afghanistan! HE HAD A PLANE TICKET, DAMMIT!!!!
No one made this argument. You're such a delicate genius on 9/11, yet you keep flogging this straw man. What a coward.
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- Anonymous says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 2:44 pm GMT @Wizard of Oz Your #335 Comment has a ihick yellow-brown rectangular frame around it. How did you achieve that?
Can't speak with 100% certainty, but I believe it's a mark of distinction from the comment moderator.
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- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 2:49 pm GMT • 100 Words
But okay, look, a shit eater like you could, in the appropriate context, understand what a necessary versus a sufficient condition is.
lol. I mentioned "necessary vs. sufficient," then you read it and somehow thought you came up with it on your own and it would be a huge win for you. I'd be embarrassed and mad, too. You are all over the place, man.
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- Incitatus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 2:49 pm GMT • 100 Words @Jonathan Revusky Hi, Ziofascist scumbag.
I cherish free speech.LOL. "I'm not a vindictive person but the old bitch does deserve to rot in prison. And I hope she dies and burns in hell."But I don't live in a country that twice experienced the catastrophic results of demagogic incitement. I trust Germans know what they're doingAh, I see you've thought about this and realize that imprisoning 87-year-old ladies is absolutely necessary to prevent the rise of the 4th Reich, eh?But I wonder about this.... is imprisoning little old ladies like this likely to reduce antisemitism? Or is it more likely to increase it?
Also, wouldn't you be concerned that imprisoning somebody for saying something, with absolutely no attempt to rebut what the person is saying, might cause people to think that the person is being imprisoned for telling the truth?
What do you think? Have you thought about any of this at all?
Well, of course not. You're a shit eater. You never actually think about anything! But you could start.... it's not illegal... YET!
No comment on the 20,000-25,000 killed in Warsaw Sep 1939? Silence on the 150,000-200,000 killed in Aug 1944? What a surprise!
Instead, more angry tears for poor Nazi granny Ursula. What a "great" champion of freedom you are!
I tried to be helpful. She'll probably love knitting (red, white, and black yarn only, please). And, since Adolf forgot the winter coats – well, you get the idea.
You really should do something about your bad case of potty mouth.
• Replies: @utu Where did you get this "20,000-25,000 killed in Warsaw"? Polish Wiki states that the number of dead due to aerial bombardment is impossible to establish because it cannot be separated from number of dead due to artillery shelling. English Wiki gives the number of 20-25k as total number of dead of 3 week siege. It also states that 10% of building were destroyed and 40% were damaged. In Dresden over 90% of city center was destroyed. The bottom line is that Warsaw and Dresden cannot be compared in effect, in intent and in legal terms. What happened in Warsaw was legally not a war crime. What happened in Dresden was not the war crime only because Germany lost the war. As Gen. LeMay said to McNamara "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." The first bombing of cities with intent to kill civilians in WWII was done by RAF in the end of August 1940 during the Battle of Britain when Churchill ordered attack on Berlin which eventually lead to Luftwaffe retaliation which diverted their effort from destroying RAF. This is why that Battle of Britain was won by Brits. , @Jonathan RevuskyNo comment on the 20,000-25,000 killed in Warsaw Sep 1939?WTF!!??? Why would I have any comment on that? It has nothing to do with anything we were talking about! Why would I have a comment about those people as opposed to some other tens of thousands who were killed in another battle? Anyway, something like 50 million people died in WW2, so you're suddenly asking me why I don't have a comment specifically on those people?Instead, more angry tears for poor Nazi granny Ursula. What a "great" champion of freedom you are!What are you even trying to argue? That it doesn't matter that Mrs. Haverbeck is unjustly persecuted because 20,000 Poles died 77 years ago? What does one thing have to do with the other?Anyway, I've been thinking.... I think we should establish some regular awards for trolls.
For example, "Shit eater of the week". I think Boris has "Shit eater of the week" wrapped up. I mean this kind of shit, like saying that the fact that Atta had a plane ticket is proof of the official story (AND HE DID SAY IT!) this probably can't be surpassed. At least not easily.
But you deserve a prize too. I think the prize you can win is "Ziofascist scumbag of the week". You win this for gloating over the imprisonment of an 87-year-old woman, basically just for having opinions you don't like.
That, and insinuating that Germany has to imprison 87-year-old grannies to prevent the rise of the Fourth Reich....
So, yes, you get a prize. You are the Ziofascist scumbag of the week. Congratulations.
By the way, though Boris is this week's shit eater of the week, I think if we make this a regular event, the Wizard of Oz will just dominate too much. I think he should be hors concours . we can't have the same guy winning all the time. It gets monotonous.
I think we should just give the Wizard a lifetime achievement award. Just for general shit eating and scumbaggery and mendacity. Let's face it. The man is great, he's a champion. He deserves the recognition.
So, congratulations. There's the question of prizes. I'm thinking...
First prize could be the book of your choice by Elie Wiesel.
Second prize will be two books by Elie Wiesel.
Third prize is the complete works of Elie Wiesel.
Thank you and good night. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- utu says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 2:55 pm GMT • 100 Words @Incitatus I cherish free speech. But I don't live in a country that twice experienced the catastrophic results of demagogic incitement. I trust Germans know what they're doing, but I note your concern. And your angst over suffering. But isn't it a very selective angst?
"...even if you take them at their word, the Holocaust was done as humanely as it's was humanly possible to kill people. Sort of like the Soylent Green euthanasia scene the violins were playing as they were handed a towel to take a 'shower', and then the death was as benign as could be arranged under the circumstances. And that was their worst case scenario of the gas chambers as I remember them being shown to us as children. Compare that to Dresden, which is undisputed and was as calculatedly cruel and sadistic as it was possible to imagine. And then some."Why, like most who mourn Dresden 1944, don't you ever mention Warsaw Sep 1939? The same number of civilians - 20,000-25,000 - were killed. Or how about Warsaw Aug 1944 (150,000-200,000 civilians killed)? In fact, you could say Germans pioneered civilian killing (shelling of Paris 1870-71, bombing London in 1915, the Condor Legion and Guernica 1937, etc). They were very good at it. You never mention it. Does only German blood count? Or do you simply want to use Dresden to legitimize Nazi aggression?"...and yet it's the Germans who everyone condemns for inhumanity."
-Rurik 28dec15 #205
http://www.unz.com/article/no-matter-who-becomes-president-israel-wins/#comments
I confess I'm also puzzled by your preoccupation for the Lebensborn - most unusual for a Norseman.
btw. You aren't by any chance Anders Behring Brevik blogging away in your prison cell?
If 20,000-25,000 civilians were killed during siege of Warsaw in 1939 then it is easy to believe that 100,000-125,000 were killed in Dresden in 1945. It suffices to scale up the Warsaw number by the number of sorties and payload Allies had over Dresden in comparison to what Germany had over Warsaw in 1939.
• Replies: @Incitatus "If 20,000-25,000 civilians were killed during siege of Warsaw in 1939 then it is easy to believe that 100,000-125,000 were killed in Dresden in 1945."So the death toll in Warsaw '39 is reason to increase Dresden '45 dead by 4-5 times? I think you're overestimating Allied efficiency and malice.
The Nazis published claims of 200,000 in March '45. At the very same time, city officials estimated "no more than 25,000, a figure that subsequent investigations supported."
The death of any, Warsaw and Dresden, was tragic. My remarks to Rurik intended to highlight his neglect of one case and habitual celebration of the other. See also #350. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Incitatus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 4:38 pm GMT • 100 Words @utu If 20,000-25,000 civilians were killed during siege of Warsaw in 1939 then it is easy to believe that 100,000-125,000 were killed in Dresden in 1945. It suffices to scale up the Warsaw number by the number of sorties and payload Allies had over Dresden in comparison to what Germany had over Warsaw in 1939.
"If 20,000-25,000 civilians were killed during siege of Warsaw in 1939 then it is easy to believe that 100,000-125,000 were killed in Dresden in 1945."
So the death toll in Warsaw '39 is reason to increase Dresden '45 dead by 4-5 times? I think you're overestimating Allied efficiency and malice.
The Nazis published claims of 200,000 in March '45. At the very same time, city officials estimated "no more than 25,000, a figure that subsequent investigations supported."
The death of any, Warsaw and Dresden, was tragic. My remarks to Rurik intended to highlight his neglect of one case and habitual celebration of the other. See also #350.
• Replies: @utu "So the death toll in Warsaw '39 is reason to increase Dresden '45 dead by 4-5 times? " - I do not believe that current figures for the number of dead in Dresden. I think that the initial German estimates (>100,000) are closer to the truth than the current (≈25,000) estimates. Warsaw and Dresden are two completely different events with different goals, strategy and tactics. The goals in Dresden was to maximize the death toll of civilians. Part of the tactics was to start the fire storm. While Germans in Warsaw occasionally targeted civilians but chiefly they targeted soldiers who were defending the city, so some many civilians were killed as a result collateral damage (the euphemism invented by allies). I do not think it is possible to overestimate the malice that guided many actions by allies. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Erebus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 4:53 pm GMT • 300 Words @Incitatus
"I really liked the touch that he's apparently friends with the ephemeral Betty Ong's dead parents!"Nice try. Try Thomas Roger, father of twenty-four year old Jean D. Roger."I'm guessing, of course..."You seem to do a lot of that. No answers to simple questions. Just crackpot web-links and looney-tune CGI plane theories you can't explain. "The Great Revusky" seems equally barren.Nice try. Try Thomas Roger, father of twenty-four year old Jean D. Roger.
I wasn't trying. You realize, of course, that your comment was utterly meaningless. I could claim to be the pilot Ogonowski's alter ego but it would mean nothing at all in the context of this debate. Nothing – at – all. Get it? No? Oh well.
(re: guessing) You seem to do a lot of that.
In the case mentioned, I was mocking the silliness of your question. Do you have another example?
No answers to simple questions.
Guilty as charged. I ignore simpleton level questions. That's for, well, simpletons to exercise themselves over. Are there any non-simpleton level questions you asked that I missed? If you have one, I'll be pleased to entertain it.
Just crackpot web-links and looney-tune CGI plane theories you can't explain.
Hmm, you're either hallucinating or suffering some difficulty understanding the written word.
I didn't provide any web-links (crack-pot or otherwise) and I didn't try to "explain" any "CGI theories".
Perhaps you got confused when I did say that we have "evidence" of but one of the planes, and said evidence is full of anomalies best explicated by referring to CGI techniques. What "CGI theories" should I have tried to explain? Are there any that would be useful here?I think Revusky has you all wrong. You're not a real shit-eater at all. You're either a running algorithm (however primitive) or pretending to be one. I'm guessing (!) the latter, as real algorithms are expensive, and effective ones aren't much more expensive than ineffective ones.
• Replies: @Sam Shama Did you not write this?In any case, only one plane ever made it to prime time and much of the footage exhibits disturbing anomalies readily explained by CGI.In #303
http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-how-the-cia-invented-conspiracy-theories/#comment-1563891
??
You did. So isn't one supposed to understand from that statement that you favour CGI expalining what people saw, including those who viewed an impact from street level? , @Incitatus"I wasn't trying."No truer words were ever uttered. You don't really put much effort into anything, do you? Except, of course, preening like a chicken in heat."You realize, of course, that your comment was utterly meaningless. I could claim to be the pilot Ogonowski's alter ego but it would mean nothing at all in the context of this debate. Nothing – at – all. Get it? No? Oh well."But you claimed (#304) the planes were CGI - and than no genuine planes flew into the towers. Well (I'm afraid to ask) what happened to the crew and passengers? You said they probably screwed up the plane image on WTC 7, as well as the demo sequence of WTC 2 & WTC 1. You avoided answering why WTC 7 was taken down, urging us to "let Google be your friend." Then you couldn't explain how eyewitnesses saw your 'computer generated image' planes."I ignore simpleton level questions."Why? Because you don't have any answers. QED you're not as intellegent as a simpleton."I didn't try to "explain" any "CGI theories"."Let me refresh your memory (#304):"- I have a hard time believing any planes were involved at all, so your 2nd question is moot for me, but if my guess immediately above is right, then there would have been an explosion cueing the point of impact. Perhaps that failed to go off, leaving any CGI plane simply disappearing into the building without leaving a trace. That would look rather weird, so they opted to bring it down in broad daylight hoping few would notice."Not trying is one thing. Lying is quite another. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Sam Shama says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 5:09 pm GMT • 100 Words
An undeniable condition, on any comments section, of any article published here, has to be the Jonathan Revusky effect : a rapid devolvement into scatology.
Why Jonathan?
Your basic reading skills are suffering as well; as evident in your your awfully retarded, repetitious replies to Boris.
Has the quality of your special diet declined?P.S. : [btw Jonathan, thanks for mentioning that my approach is similar to Incitatus'. ]
• Replies: @Incitatus Prof. Graf Alexander Parsifal von Kleve would, with little doubt, diagnose the "Great Revusky" as suffering from an acute case of PPP: "The typical case is mild and limited in duration. In extraordinary instances the condition deepens and persists for years, manifested in uncontrolled anger, paranoia, infantile illusion and, of course, nearly constant confrontational obscenity."Sadly, there are no cures to PPP (Painfully Prolonged Puberty). Like me, you've probably contributed to sponsored walks raising money for research. Alas, as Revusky demonstrates, it's a long way away.
We're all rooting for you, JR. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Sam Shama says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 5:14 pm GMT @Erebus
Nice try. Try Thomas Roger, father of twenty-four year old Jean D. Roger.I wasn't trying. You realize, of course, that your comment was utterly meaningless. I could claim to be the pilot Ogonowski's alter ego but it would mean nothing at all in the context of this debate. Nothing - at - all. Get it? No? Oh well.(re: guessing) You seem to do a lot of that.In the case mentioned, I was mocking the silliness of your question. Do you have another example?No answers to simple questions.Guilty as charged. I ignore simpleton level questions. That's for, well, simpletons to exercise themselves over. Are there any non-simpleton level questions you asked that I missed? If you have one, I'll be pleased to entertain it.Just crackpot web-links and looney-tune CGI plane theories you can't explain.Hmm, you're either hallucinating or suffering some difficulty understanding the written word.
I didn't provide any web-links (crack-pot or otherwise) and I didn't try to "explain" any "CGI theories".
Perhaps you got confused when I did say that we have "evidence" of but one of the planes, and said evidence is full of anomalies best explicated by referring to CGI techniques. What "CGI theories" should I have tried to explain? Are there any that would be useful here?I think Revusky has you all wrong. You're not a real shit-eater at all. You're either a running algorithm (however primitive) or pretending to be one. I'm guessing (!) the latter, as real algorithms are expensive, and effective ones aren't much more expensive than ineffective ones.
Did you not write this?
In any case, only one plane ever made it to prime time and much of the footage exhibits disturbing anomalies readily explained by CGI.
In #303
http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-how-the-cia-invented-conspiracy-theories/#comment-1563891
??You did. So isn't one supposed to understand from that statement that you favour CGI expalining what people saw, including those who viewed an impact from street level?
• Replies: @ErebusSo isn't one supposed to understand from that statement that you favour CGI expalining what people saw, including those who viewed an impact from street level?No, one is supposed to understand what the statement says, and nothing besides. What eyewitnesses on the street may or may not have seen would not normally be covered by the word "footage".There appear to be serious problems with the available videos - FRP nose cones emerging intact on the other side of buildings, wings disappearing behind buildings, bright flashes just prior to impact marking the impact point, the lack of camera jitter in the plane's flight path. And so on. These are all readily explained with reference to CGI, but difficult otherwise. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 5:21 pm GMT • 100 Words
Perhaps you got confused when I did say that we have "evidence" of but one of the planes, and said evidence is full of anomalies best explicated by referring to CGI techniques.
The "CGI planes" hypothesis is one of the dumbest ever. Lizard people don't know how to do CGI! lol at you.
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- utu says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 5:31 pm GMT • 100 Words @Incitatus "If 20,000-25,000 civilians were killed during siege of Warsaw in 1939 then it is easy to believe that 100,000-125,000 were killed in Dresden in 1945."
So the death toll in Warsaw '39 is reason to increase Dresden '45 dead by 4-5 times? I think you're overestimating Allied efficiency and malice.
The Nazis published claims of 200,000 in March '45. At the very same time, city officials estimated "no more than 25,000, a figure that subsequent investigations supported."
The death of any, Warsaw and Dresden, was tragic. My remarks to Rurik intended to highlight his neglect of one case and habitual celebration of the other. See also #350.
"So the death toll in Warsaw '39 is reason to increase Dresden '45 dead by 4-5 times? " – I do not believe that current figures for the number of dead in Dresden. I think that the initial German estimates (>100,000) are closer to the truth than the current (≈25,000) estimates. Warsaw and Dresden are two completely different events with different goals, strategy and tactics. The goals in Dresden was to maximize the death toll of civilians. Part of the tactics was to start the fire storm. While Germans in Warsaw occasionally targeted civilians but chiefly they targeted soldiers who were defending the city, so some many civilians were killed as a result collateral damage (the euphemism invented by allies). I do not think it is possible to overestimate the malice that guided many actions by allies.
• Replies: @Incitatus The initial city estimate was no more than 25,000. See Müller, Rolf-Dieter; Schönherr, Nicole; Widera, Thomas, eds. (2010), Die Zerstörung Dresdens: 13. bis 15. Februar 1945. But believe what you wish. I'm sure many would say the Warsaw '39 and '44 estimates are also too low.There may well have been Allied malice on the part of some. But you're remiss in not recognizing the earlier Nazi cancer. Trust Adolf on the eve of Case White:
"Close your hearts to pity! Act brutally!..Be harsh and remorseless! Be steeled against all signs of compassion! ...[I want] the physical annihilation of the enemy...I have put my Death's Head formations at the lead with the command to send man, woman, and child of Polish descent and language to their deaths, pitilessly and remorselessly." -Adolf Hitler, address to military commanders 21 Aug 1939
I don't he cared about 'collateral damage." In fact, he seems to want it. Find a similar quote from an allied leader of similar rank and you may have a case. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Incitatus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 6:07 pm GMT • 300 Words @Erebus
Nice try. Try Thomas Roger, father of twenty-four year old Jean D. Roger.I wasn't trying. You realize, of course, that your comment was utterly meaningless. I could claim to be the pilot Ogonowski's alter ego but it would mean nothing at all in the context of this debate. Nothing - at - all. Get it? No? Oh well.(re: guessing) You seem to do a lot of that.In the case mentioned, I was mocking the silliness of your question. Do you have another example?No answers to simple questions.Guilty as charged. I ignore simpleton level questions. That's for, well, simpletons to exercise themselves over. Are there any non-simpleton level questions you asked that I missed? If you have one, I'll be pleased to entertain it.Just crackpot web-links and looney-tune CGI plane theories you can't explain.Hmm, you're either hallucinating or suffering some difficulty understanding the written word.
I didn't provide any web-links (crack-pot or otherwise) and I didn't try to "explain" any "CGI theories".
Perhaps you got confused when I did say that we have "evidence" of but one of the planes, and said evidence is full of anomalies best explicated by referring to CGI techniques. What "CGI theories" should I have tried to explain? Are there any that would be useful here?I think Revusky has you all wrong. You're not a real shit-eater at all. You're either a running algorithm (however primitive) or pretending to be one. I'm guessing (!) the latter, as real algorithms are expensive, and effective ones aren't much more expensive than ineffective ones.
"I wasn't trying."
No truer words were ever uttered. You don't really put much effort into anything, do you? Except, of course, preening like a chicken in heat.
"You realize, of course, that your comment was utterly meaningless. I could claim to be the pilot Ogonowski's alter ego but it would mean nothing at all in the context of this debate. Nothing – at – all. Get it? No? Oh well."
But you claimed (#304) the planes were CGI – and than no genuine planes flew into the towers. Well (I'm afraid to ask) what happened to the crew and passengers? You said they probably screwed up the plane image on WTC 7, as well as the demo sequence of WTC 2 & WTC 1. You avoided answering why WTC 7 was taken down, urging us to "let Google be your friend." Then you couldn't explain how eyewitnesses saw your 'computer generated image' planes.
"I ignore simpleton level questions."
Why? Because you don't have any answers. QED you're not as intellegent as a simpleton.
"I didn't try to "explain" any "CGI theories"."
Let me refresh your memory (#304):
"- I have a hard time believing any planes were involved at all, so your 2nd question is moot for me, but if my guess immediately above is right, then there would have been an explosion cueing the point of impact. Perhaps that failed to go off, leaving any CGI plane simply disappearing into the building without leaving a trace. That would look rather weird, so they opted to bring it down in broad daylight hoping few would notice."
Not trying is one thing. Lying is quite another.
• Replies: @ErebusYou don't really put much effort into anything, do you?I put my effort in 15-13 years ago. Today, indeed, I am putting less effort in. Much less in fact, but that's because the case has effectively closed.Well (I'm afraid to ask) what happened to the crew and passengers?To be sure, I have no reliable information on this, though one need not overexercise their imagination to come up with several possibilities - from sipping MaiTais in their villas in the S. Pacific, to entombed at the bottom of the N. Atlantic, and everything in between.But you claimed (#304) the planes were CGI – and than no genuine planes flew into the towers.You seem to have the same reading comprehension problems as Sharma. (See my comment to him above)Put another way, explaining a theory is not the same as using a theory to explain what you see.
Anyhow, obviously you have no material points to make. You're using, word for word, the same arguments I've been hearing for 15 yrs. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- utu says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 6:10 pm GMT • 200 Words @Incitatus No comment on the 20,000-25,000 killed in Warsaw Sep 1939? Silence on the 150,000-200,000 killed in Aug 1944? What a surprise!
Instead, more angry tears for poor Nazi granny Ursula. What a "great" champion of freedom you are!
I tried to be helpful. She'll probably love knitting (red, white, and black yarn only, please). And, since Adolf forgot the winter coats - well, you get the idea.
You really should do something about your bad case of potty mouth.
Where did you get this "20,000-25,000 killed in Warsaw"? Polish Wiki states that the number of dead due to aerial bombardment is impossible to establish because it cannot be separated from number of dead due to artillery shelling. English Wiki gives the number of 20-25k as total number of dead of 3 week siege. It also states that 10% of building were destroyed and 40% were damaged. In Dresden over 90% of city center was destroyed. The bottom line is that Warsaw and Dresden cannot be compared in effect, in intent and in legal terms. What happened in Warsaw was legally not a war crime. What happened in Dresden was not the war crime only because Germany lost the war. As Gen. LeMay said to McNamara "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." The first bombing of cities with intent to kill civilians in WWII was done by RAF in the end of August 1940 during the Battle of Britain when Churchill ordered attack on Berlin which eventually lead to Luftwaffe retaliation which diverted their effort from destroying RAF. This is why that Battle of Britain was won by Brits.
• Replies: @Incitatus"Polish Wiki states that the number of dead due to aerial bombardment is impossible to establish because it cannot be separated from number of dead due to artillery shelling."See #365. Your concern is that a some died from shelling rather than aerial bombing? Was their death somehow more pleasant? Refer to my quote in #350: "560 tons of high explosive bombs and 72 tons of incendiary bombs, in coordination with heavy artillery shelling by Army units." Let the "in coordination with heavy artillery shelling by Army units" percolate in your mind."In Dresden over 90% of city center was destroyed."How about Warsaw '44? Nazis leveled 85% of the entire city (not just the center) and killed another 150,000-200,000 civilians. Maybe more, if I permit myself the same wishful thinking to which you seem addicted. Forget about them? Oh, that's right. Probably most were humane "collateral damage" from ground launched fire and thus unworthy of comparison.No doubt victorious Nazis would have put LeMay & company in the dock. And a great many more. Roland Freisler was very good at executions (21 year old student Sophie Scholl comes to mind - she was guillotined). Pity poor Roly was killed by - you guessed it - a nasty Allied bomb 3 Feb 1945. Life's a bitch.
I have tragic news for you. The Nazis lost. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Incitatus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 6:35 pm GMT • 200 Words @utu "So the death toll in Warsaw '39 is reason to increase Dresden '45 dead by 4-5 times? " - I do not believe that current figures for the number of dead in Dresden. I think that the initial German estimates (>100,000) are closer to the truth than the current (≈25,000) estimates. Warsaw and Dresden are two completely different events with different goals, strategy and tactics. The goals in Dresden was to maximize the death toll of civilians. Part of the tactics was to start the fire storm. While Germans in Warsaw occasionally targeted civilians but chiefly they targeted soldiers who were defending the city, so some many civilians were killed as a result collateral damage (the euphemism invented by allies). I do not think it is possible to overestimate the malice that guided many actions by allies.
The initial city estimate was no more than 25,000. See Müller, Rolf-Dieter; Schönherr, Nicole; Widera, Thomas, eds. (2010), Die Zerstörung Dresdens: 13. bis 15. Februar 1945. But believe what you wish. I'm sure many would say the Warsaw '39 and '44 estimates are also too low.
There may well have been Allied malice on the part of some. But you're remiss in not recognizing the earlier Nazi cancer. Trust Adolf on the eve of Case White:
"Close your hearts to pity! Act brutally!..Be harsh and remorseless! Be steeled against all signs of compassion! [I want] the physical annihilation of the enemy I have put my Death's Head formations at the lead with the command to send man, woman, and child of Polish descent and language to their deaths, pitilessly and remorselessly." -Adolf Hitler, address to military commanders 21 Aug 1939
I don't he cared about 'collateral damage." In fact, he seems to want it. Find a similar quote from an allied leader of similar rank and you may have a case.
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- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 6:37 pm GMT • 400 Words @Incitatus No comment on the 20,000-25,000 killed in Warsaw Sep 1939? Silence on the 150,000-200,000 killed in Aug 1944? What a surprise!
Instead, more angry tears for poor Nazi granny Ursula. What a "great" champion of freedom you are!
I tried to be helpful. She'll probably love knitting (red, white, and black yarn only, please). And, since Adolf forgot the winter coats - well, you get the idea.
You really should do something about your bad case of potty mouth.
No comment on the 20,000-25,000 killed in Warsaw Sep 1939?
WTF!!??? Why would I have any comment on that? It has nothing to do with anything we were talking about! Why would I have a comment about those people as opposed to some other tens of thousands who were killed in another battle? Anyway, something like 50 million people died in WW2, so you're suddenly asking me why I don't have a comment specifically on those people?
Instead, more angry tears for poor Nazi granny Ursula. What a "great" champion of freedom you are!
What are you even trying to argue? That it doesn't matter that Mrs. Haverbeck is unjustly persecuted because 20,000 Poles died 77 years ago? What does one thing have to do with the other?
Anyway, I've been thinking . I think we should establish some regular awards for trolls.
For example, "Shit eater of the week". I think Boris has "Shit eater of the week" wrapped up. I mean this kind of shit, like saying that the fact that Atta had a plane ticket is proof of the official story (AND HE DID SAY IT!) this probably can't be surpassed. At least not easily.
But you deserve a prize too. I think the prize you can win is "Ziofascist scumbag of the week". You win this for gloating over the imprisonment of an 87-year-old woman, basically just for having opinions you don't like.
That, and insinuating that Germany has to imprison 87-year-old grannies to prevent the rise of the Fourth Reich .
So, yes, you get a prize. You are the Ziofascist scumbag of the week. Congratulations.
By the way, though Boris is this week's shit eater of the week, I think if we make this a regular event, the Wizard of Oz will just dominate too much. I think he should be hors concours . we can't have the same guy winning all the time. It gets monotonous.
I think we should just give the Wizard a lifetime achievement award. Just for general shit eating and scumbaggery and mendacity. Let's face it. The man is great, he's a champion. He deserves the recognition.
So, congratulations. There's the question of prizes. I'm thinking
First prize could be the book of your choice by Elie Wiesel.
Second prize will be two books by Elie Wiesel.
Third prize is the complete works of Elie Wiesel.
Thank you and good night.
• Replies: @Incitatus Again, tears for Ursula stream uncontrollably down my face. What injustice! What perfidy! That an old hate monger is called to account for breaking laws she clearly knew and willingly violated - well , it's unthinkable!I'm crushed at the thought that you see me complicit as the "Ziofascist scumbag of the week." But I'm equally humbled by your favor. If I must wear the badge you've awarded me, dare I ask who you've targeted for next weeks prize? Please be sure they measure up (you've made me feel responsible for a tradition).
PS. To make sure of a wise choice maybe you can rent a motel room and invite servile flatterer Erebus, nordic üntermensch Rurik, and reptilian L.K to join you in judging candidates. Arrange your chairs in a circle. No doubt you know the rest of the drill (don't forget your Vaseline). , @Sam Shama Just a reminder: morning dosage on an empty stomach, prior to personal recycling.
wish you a good night now. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 7:08 pm GMT @Jonathan Revusky
Well, quite a few people I know spent the first dozen or so of those believing that the official story is broadly true. Propaganda works. You can fool most of the people most of the time, so giving someone the benefit of the doubt has been my practice.Yes, that's a good point. It actually took me about a decade to get to the point of just saying openly that the official 9/11 story was total crap.So you make a correct point. A correct general point. But in this specific case, I think there were warning signs from the get-go that this "Incitatus" is not some honest person seeking the truth. These guys show up and it's like they've got their schtick. They start saying they are open-minded and seeking the truth but then it becomes apparent that they have a list of talking points that they are trying to put out there just to confuse the matter.
There is a great piece by the Saker today. I suppose you've likely read it.
Yeah, his response to me made that plain, but I really liked the touch that he's apparently friends with the ephemeral Betty Ong's dead parents! I'm guessing, of course, that he's alluding to the mysterious Betty-with-zero-life-history-Ong. He may have been referring to the parents of Madeline Sweeney,It's actually more likely that he's acquainted with the person who invented all these characters!Betty-with-zero-life-history-Ong
It's actually more likely that he's acquainted with the person who invented all these characters!
It's odious how the victims become "invented characters" to fools like you based on zero evidence.
Here are some pictures of the dead woman whose memory you tarnish:
http://www.bettyong.org/photos.htm
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- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 7:11 pm GMT
saying that the fact that Atta had a plane ticket is proof of the official story (AND HE DID SAY IT!)
Then you should have no problem producing the quote.
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- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 9:00 pm GMT • 100 Words
saying that the fact that Atta had a plane ticket is proof of the official story (AND HE DID SAY IT!)
Then you should have no problem producing the quote.
Dude, in comment #267 above, after my asking you what the strongest evidence available for the official story, you said (among a couple of other things that are of zero evidentiary value) "His purchase of the tickets".
You were clearly offering that as evidence. It somehow escaped your notice that everybody else on the flight had presumably purchased tickets as well! LOL.
But I don't get it. Don't you want your "shit eater of the week" prize? Oh, I forgot to tell you. This week's prize for shit eater of the week is a 2017 Golda Meir nude pictorial calendar!
That's destined to be a prized collector's item.
Surely you wouldn't want to miss out on that, would you?
• Replies: @utu JR, what do you think of this:'It's been a bottomless pit': Airport worker who checked in Pentagon 9/11 hijackers despite the fact they were running late reveals his 15 years of guilt and how he became a pariah among colleagues
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3783981/Vaughn-Allex-airport-worker-checked-Pentagon-9-11-hijackers-reveals-15-years-guilt.html , @Boris
after my asking you what the strongest evidence available for the official storyAs I've already shown, you asked me "what records?" The ticket is among the records that support the official story. It is sad that you keep lying about this. We both agree--and have from the beginning--that the ticket is necessary, but not sufficient. You keep pretending otherwise for some reason. Your behavior is downright weird. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Incitatus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 9:27 pm GMT • 100 Words @Sam Shama An undeniable condition, on any comments section, of any article published here, has to be the Jonathan Revusky effect : a rapid devolvement into scatology.
Why Jonathan?
Your basic reading skills are suffering as well; as evident in your your awfully retarded, repetitious replies to Boris.
Has the quality of your special diet declined?P.S. : [btw Jonathan, thanks for mentioning that my approach is similar to Incitatus'. ]
Prof. Graf Alexander Parsifal von Kleve would, with little doubt, diagnose the "Great Revusky" as suffering from an acute case of PPP: "The typical case is mild and limited in duration. In extraordinary instances the condition deepens and persists for years, manifested in uncontrolled anger, paranoia, infantile illusion and, of course, nearly constant confrontational obscenity."
Sadly, there are no cures to PPP (Painfully Prolonged Puberty). Like me, you've probably contributed to sponsored walks raising money for research. Alas, as Revusky demonstrates, it's a long way away.
We're all rooting for you, JR.
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- Incitatus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 10:19 pm GMT • 200 Words @utu Where did you get this "20,000-25,000 killed in Warsaw"? Polish Wiki states that the number of dead due to aerial bombardment is impossible to establish because it cannot be separated from number of dead due to artillery shelling. English Wiki gives the number of 20-25k as total number of dead of 3 week siege. It also states that 10% of building were destroyed and 40% were damaged. In Dresden over 90% of city center was destroyed. The bottom line is that Warsaw and Dresden cannot be compared in effect, in intent and in legal terms. What happened in Warsaw was legally not a war crime. What happened in Dresden was not the war crime only because Germany lost the war. As Gen. LeMay said to McNamara "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." The first bombing of cities with intent to kill civilians in WWII was done by RAF in the end of August 1940 during the Battle of Britain when Churchill ordered attack on Berlin which eventually lead to Luftwaffe retaliation which diverted their effort from destroying RAF. This is why that Battle of Britain was won by Brits.
"Polish Wiki states that the number of dead due to aerial bombardment is impossible to establish because it cannot be separated from number of dead due to artillery shelling."
See #365. Your concern is that a some died from shelling rather than aerial bombing? Was their death somehow more pleasant? Refer to my quote in #350: "560 tons of high explosive bombs and 72 tons of incendiary bombs, in coordination with heavy artillery shelling by Army units." Let the "in coordination with heavy artillery shelling by Army units" percolate in your mind.
"In Dresden over 90% of city center was destroyed."
How about Warsaw '44? Nazis leveled 85% of the entire city (not just the center) and killed another 150,000-200,000 civilians. Maybe more, if I permit myself the same wishful thinking to which you seem addicted. Forget about them? Oh, that's right. Probably most were humane "collateral damage" from ground launched fire and thus unworthy of comparison.
No doubt victorious Nazis would have put LeMay & company in the dock. And a great many more. Roland Freisler was very good at executions (21 year old student Sophie Scholl comes to mind – she was guillotined). Pity poor Roly was killed by – you guessed it – a nasty Allied bomb 3 Feb 1945. Life's a bitch.
I have tragic news for you. The Nazis lost.
• Replies: @Sam Shama Hi Incitatus,
At about 40% still on Shirer; something that struck me was the methodical and unemotional manner in which Hitler and Goering went about purging their own ranks in the SA, when they became a hindrance in their path to winning the Wehrmacht's support. At least Rohm, perverted though he was, had the courage to defy his executioners to the very end. , @utu "How about Warsaw '44? Nazis leveled 85% of the entire city (not just the center) and killed another 150,000-200,000 civilians." - It was the other way around. People were killed during 2 months of uprising. In the early stage of uprising there were many people in some quarters (like Wola) of Warsaw massacred. But the majority of destruction of the real estate was done by looting and demolition teams after the whole population of Warsaw was evacuated in the beginning of October 1944. The fighting and aerial and artillery bombardment are responsible for about half of that 85% number. Certainly treatment given to Warsaw, an abandoned city was a sure sign of Hitler's madness in the finals stages of the III Reich.It is claimed that 50,000 people of Wola were executed in the first days (August 1944) of uprising by Russian Kaminski's SS brigade and Dirlewanger SS brigade consisting of criminals (dirty many dozens in Americanese). There were also executions in the course of fighting but not on the mass scale of Wola massacre. Majority of deaths were collateral damage in Americanese.
The example of Warsaw (both 1939 and 1944) can be a very strong argument for much higher casualty rate in Dresden. The current number of 25,000 arrived by collusion of British and German historians is too low probably by factor of five. The history of history never ends. Perhaps after Brexit German historians will not have to be so accommodating to their British counterparts who would really like to reduce the casualty rate in Dresden to that of Coventry.
It was RAF that started bombing cities with civilians being their primary targets (August 1940). Not w/o reason V in V-1 and V-2 stands for retaliation/reprisal. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Incitatus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 11, 2016 at 11:59 pm GMT • 100 Words @Jonathan Revusky
No comment on the 20,000-25,000 killed in Warsaw Sep 1939?WTF!!??? Why would I have any comment on that? It has nothing to do with anything we were talking about! Why would I have a comment about those people as opposed to some other tens of thousands who were killed in another battle? Anyway, something like 50 million people died in WW2, so you're suddenly asking me why I don't have a comment specifically on those people?Instead, more angry tears for poor Nazi granny Ursula. What a "great" champion of freedom you are!What are you even trying to argue? That it doesn't matter that Mrs. Haverbeck is unjustly persecuted because 20,000 Poles died 77 years ago? What does one thing have to do with the other?Anyway, I've been thinking.... I think we should establish some regular awards for trolls.
For example, "Shit eater of the week". I think Boris has "Shit eater of the week" wrapped up. I mean this kind of shit, like saying that the fact that Atta had a plane ticket is proof of the official story (AND HE DID SAY IT!) this probably can't be surpassed. At least not easily.
But you deserve a prize too. I think the prize you can win is "Ziofascist scumbag of the week". You win this for gloating over the imprisonment of an 87-year-old woman, basically just for having opinions you don't like.
That, and insinuating that Germany has to imprison 87-year-old grannies to prevent the rise of the Fourth Reich....
So, yes, you get a prize. You are the Ziofascist scumbag of the week. Congratulations.
By the way, though Boris is this week's shit eater of the week, I think if we make this a regular event, the Wizard of Oz will just dominate too much. I think he should be hors concours . we can't have the same guy winning all the time. It gets monotonous.
I think we should just give the Wizard a lifetime achievement award. Just for general shit eating and scumbaggery and mendacity. Let's face it. The man is great, he's a champion. He deserves the recognition.
So, congratulations. There's the question of prizes. I'm thinking...
First prize could be the book of your choice by Elie Wiesel.
Second prize will be two books by Elie Wiesel.
Third prize is the complete works of Elie Wiesel.
Thank you and good night.
Again, tears for Ursula stream uncontrollably down my face. What injustice! What perfidy! That an old hate monger is called to account for breaking laws she clearly knew and willingly violated – well , it's unthinkable!
I'm crushed at the thought that you see me complicit as the "Ziofascist scumbag of the week." But I'm equally humbled by your favor. If I must wear the badge you've awarded me, dare I ask who you've targeted for next weeks prize? Please be sure they measure up (you've made me feel responsible for a tradition).
PS. To make sure of a wise choice maybe you can rent a motel room and invite servile flatterer Erebus, nordic üntermensch Rurik, and reptilian L.K to join you in judging candidates. Arrange your chairs in a circle. No doubt you know the rest of the drill (don't forget your Vaseline).
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyAgain, tears for Ursula stream uncontrollably down my face. What injustice! What perfidy! That an old hate monger is called to account for breaking laws she clearly knew and willingly violated – well , it's unthinkable!Uhh, look, shit eater, here's the situation. You're a shit eater. You're surely in competition for this week's shit eater of the week. You could dislodge Boris, who is the current reigning shit eater of the week.What this means, the fact that you're a shit eater, is that you NEVER think for yourself. Whatever they tell you on the TV is the truth. That's what it means to be a shit eater. Like if you read the Orwell novel 1984, you have the 2 minutes hate. They show a picture of the person you're supposed to hate and all the brainwashed shit eaters scream how much they hate the person.
Like many other things in 1984, this was quite prescient. They tell you that you are supposed to hate somebody, like Gaddafi or Saddam, or whoever, or now it's Vladimir Putin... and all the shit eaters like you will scream how much you hate the person. Am I wrong? You are not the first A-1-A shit eater I have interacted with. I understand the shit eater mentality.
So they show you a picture of some old lady that you are supposed to hate and so you dutifuly hate her. And you gloat that she was sentenced to prison. Note the projection here. You say Ursula Haverbeck is a hate monger, but of course, you are the hater. They tell you who you're supposed to hate and you hate that person.
Because you're a shit eater. A Ziofascist shit eater, of the same sort who would gloat that Rachel Corrie was killed for trying to helping a Palestinian family.
The other aspect of this is that, as a shit eater, you don't really value freedom of speech at all, because you never had an idea in your head that runs counter to the established power structure paradigm. So when you are told that somebody is a criminal for saying something that the current power structure doesn't like, that doesn't bother you, since you never had a dissenting idea in your head. And probably never will have one.
I mean, as a champion shit eater, you've never actually thought for yourself about anything. You've never expressed an original or dissenting idea in your entire life. Never. If they tell you that two planes took down three steel framed buildings, you believe it and get angry if somebody says that is impossible.
The third aspect of this is that you are not just a shit eater. You are a Ziofascist shit eater. So you feel this great identification with this Zionist power structure and you gloat over their ability to imprison this old lady. You guys are drunk on your power. Of course, you yourself have no particular power, but you have this vicarious identification with that power structure. This is the fascist mentality. You worship a power structure because it makes you, a total worthless nobody, feel like you're sombody.
Now, on one point, you are correct, Ursula Haverbeck is not herself that big a deal in the overall scheme of things. I mean, the Ziofascist power structure that you adore and feel identification with, it has caused the destruction of entire countries, like Iraq or Afghanistan, and so on. Hundreds of thousands of deaths with millions of lives destroyed. So one little old lady in a jail cell unjustly isn't that big a deal compared to that.
It's that she's a symbol nonetheless.
The problem that people like you have, I mean the typical Ziofascist scumbag shit eater, is that you don't really understand that other people are not as vicious and vindictive as you are, so you guys make these psychopathic wisecracks about this or about Rachel Corrie and you don't quite understand how much disgust you elicit in decent, ordinary people. You just don't comprehend it.
And then, when there eventually is a pretty severe backlash against your Ziofascist scumbag behavior, which I think is getting inevitable, you're going to be there with this: "Oy vey, why do they always hate us.... we're such sweet wonderful people..." Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- James Kabala says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 12:48 am GMT @SolontoCroesus
Why . . . don't you ever mention Warsaw Sep 1939? The same number of civilians – 20,000-25,000 – were killed. Or how about Warsaw Aug 1944 (150,000-200,000 civilians killed)?1. estimates of Dresden dead are tendentious
2. not all those killed in Warsaw were Jews: only Jews count. If non-Jews swell the kill-count, that diverts attention from teh eternal victim ©
3. Real he-man Jews deride Warsaw Jews for not being sufficiently he-man. Best not to talk about it.
4. Auschwitz has a more established brand.
5. No gas chambers in Warsaw. Epic fail.I think you misunderstood his points in every respect.
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- Sam Shama says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 1:29 am GMT • 100 Words @Incitatus
"Polish Wiki states that the number of dead due to aerial bombardment is impossible to establish because it cannot be separated from number of dead due to artillery shelling."See #365. Your concern is that a some died from shelling rather than aerial bombing? Was their death somehow more pleasant? Refer to my quote in #350: "560 tons of high explosive bombs and 72 tons of incendiary bombs, in coordination with heavy artillery shelling by Army units." Let the "in coordination with heavy artillery shelling by Army units" percolate in your mind."In Dresden over 90% of city center was destroyed."How about Warsaw '44? Nazis leveled 85% of the entire city (not just the center) and killed another 150,000-200,000 civilians. Maybe more, if I permit myself the same wishful thinking to which you seem addicted. Forget about them? Oh, that's right. Probably most were humane "collateral damage" from ground launched fire and thus unworthy of comparison.No doubt victorious Nazis would have put LeMay & company in the dock. And a great many more. Roland Freisler was very good at executions (21 year old student Sophie Scholl comes to mind - she was guillotined). Pity poor Roly was killed by - you guessed it - a nasty Allied bomb 3 Feb 1945. Life's a bitch.
I have tragic news for you. The Nazis lost.
Hi Incitatus,
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At about 40% still on Shirer; something that struck me was the methodical and unemotional manner in which Hitler and Goering went about purging their own ranks in the SA, when they became a hindrance in their path to winning the Wehrmacht's support. At least Rohm, perverted though he was, had the courage to defy his executioners to the very end.
- Sam Shama says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 1:37 am GMT @Jonathan Revusky
No comment on the 20,000-25,000 killed in Warsaw Sep 1939?WTF!!??? Why would I have any comment on that? It has nothing to do with anything we were talking about! Why would I have a comment about those people as opposed to some other tens of thousands who were killed in another battle? Anyway, something like 50 million people died in WW2, so you're suddenly asking me why I don't have a comment specifically on those people?Instead, more angry tears for poor Nazi granny Ursula. What a "great" champion of freedom you are!What are you even trying to argue? That it doesn't matter that Mrs. Haverbeck is unjustly persecuted because 20,000 Poles died 77 years ago? What does one thing have to do with the other?Anyway, I've been thinking.... I think we should establish some regular awards for trolls.
For example, "Shit eater of the week". I think Boris has "Shit eater of the week" wrapped up. I mean this kind of shit, like saying that the fact that Atta had a plane ticket is proof of the official story (AND HE DID SAY IT!) this probably can't be surpassed. At least not easily.
But you deserve a prize too. I think the prize you can win is "Ziofascist scumbag of the week". You win this for gloating over the imprisonment of an 87-year-old woman, basically just for having opinions you don't like.
That, and insinuating that Germany has to imprison 87-year-old grannies to prevent the rise of the Fourth Reich....
So, yes, you get a prize. You are the Ziofascist scumbag of the week. Congratulations.
By the way, though Boris is this week's shit eater of the week, I think if we make this a regular event, the Wizard of Oz will just dominate too much. I think he should be hors concours . we can't have the same guy winning all the time. It gets monotonous.
I think we should just give the Wizard a lifetime achievement award. Just for general shit eating and scumbaggery and mendacity. Let's face it. The man is great, he's a champion. He deserves the recognition.
So, congratulations. There's the question of prizes. I'm thinking...
First prize could be the book of your choice by Elie Wiesel.
Second prize will be two books by Elie Wiesel.
Third prize is the complete works of Elie Wiesel.
Thank you and good night.
Just a reminder: morning dosage on an empty stomach, prior to personal recycling.
wish you a good night now.
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- utu says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 2:01 am GMT • 300 Words @Incitatus
"Polish Wiki states that the number of dead due to aerial bombardment is impossible to establish because it cannot be separated from number of dead due to artillery shelling."See #365. Your concern is that a some died from shelling rather than aerial bombing? Was their death somehow more pleasant? Refer to my quote in #350: "560 tons of high explosive bombs and 72 tons of incendiary bombs, in coordination with heavy artillery shelling by Army units." Let the "in coordination with heavy artillery shelling by Army units" percolate in your mind."In Dresden over 90% of city center was destroyed."How about Warsaw '44? Nazis leveled 85% of the entire city (not just the center) and killed another 150,000-200,000 civilians. Maybe more, if I permit myself the same wishful thinking to which you seem addicted. Forget about them? Oh, that's right. Probably most were humane "collateral damage" from ground launched fire and thus unworthy of comparison.No doubt victorious Nazis would have put LeMay & company in the dock. And a great many more. Roland Freisler was very good at executions (21 year old student Sophie Scholl comes to mind - she was guillotined). Pity poor Roly was killed by - you guessed it - a nasty Allied bomb 3 Feb 1945. Life's a bitch.
I have tragic news for you. The Nazis lost.
"How about Warsaw '44? Nazis leveled 85% of the entire city (not just the center) and killed another 150,000-200,000 civilians." – It was the other way around. People were killed during 2 months of uprising. In the early stage of uprising there were many people in some quarters (like Wola) of Warsaw massacred. But the majority of destruction of the real estate was done by looting and demolition teams after the whole population of Warsaw was evacuated in the beginning of October 1944. The fighting and aerial and artillery bombardment are responsible for about half of that 85% number. Certainly treatment given to Warsaw, an abandoned city was a sure sign of Hitler's madness in the finals stages of the III Reich.
It is claimed that 50,000 people of Wola were executed in the first days (August 1944) of uprising by Russian Kaminski's SS brigade and Dirlewanger SS brigade consisting of criminals (dirty many dozens in Americanese). There were also executions in the course of fighting but not on the mass scale of Wola massacre. Majority of deaths were collateral damage in Americanese.
The example of Warsaw (both 1939 and 1944) can be a very strong argument for much higher casualty rate in Dresden. The current number of 25,000 arrived by collusion of British and German historians is too low probably by factor of five. The history of history never ends. Perhaps after Brexit German historians will not have to be so accommodating to their British counterparts who would really like to reduce the casualty rate in Dresden to that of Coventry.
It was RAF that started bombing cities with civilians being their primary targets (August 1940). Not w/o reason V in V-1 and V-2 stands for retaliation/reprisal.
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- NosytheDuke says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 2:18 am GMT @Wizard of Oz Ron
You may be aware that Daniel Pipes made a study of conspiracy theories and has written books on the subject - which I haven't read. I have however sampled his long list of articles which can be found here:
http://www.daniel.pipes.org/topics/4/conspiracy-theories
A bit like reviewing or recommending a movie, that you haven't watched.
I must admit though that you have a decided flair for the consistently proud display of your ignorance.
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz Not at all. It is much more like telling someone who is about to start research on his doctoral thesis or is already under way on what he regards as a promising reading list "here is another body of research and writing on the subject that you may not have considered" (and Daniel Pipes is not a scholar that RU would be likely to have near the top of his go to list). Moreover, if you read what I wrote before emitting you would have understood that I was saying that, whereas I couldn't assess the merits of the books, to which I merely drew attention, I had read some of his work in article form. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- utu says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 2:27 am GMT @Jonathan Revusky
Dude, in comment #267 above, after my asking you what the strongest evidence available for the official story, you said (among a couple of other things that are of zero evidentiary value) "His purchase of the tickets".saying that the fact that Atta had a plane ticket is proof of the official story (AND HE DID SAY IT!)Then you should have no problem producing the quote.You were clearly offering that as evidence. It somehow escaped your notice that everybody else on the flight had presumably purchased tickets as well! LOL.
But I don't get it. Don't you want your "shit eater of the week" prize? Oh, I forgot to tell you. This week's prize for shit eater of the week is a 2017 Golda Meir nude pictorial calendar!
That's destined to be a prized collector's item.
Surely you wouldn't want to miss out on that, would you?
JR, what do you think of this:
'It's been a bottomless pit': Airport worker who checked in Pentagon 9/11 hijackers despite the fact they were running late reveals his 15 years of guilt and how he became a pariah among colleagues
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyJR, what do you think of this:LOL. That's just bullshit.They plant these stories to convince us that these hijacked flights actually took place. Certainly the plane that was hijacked and flew into the Pentagon is simply a phantom flight that never took place.
Actually, I vaguely remembered another story in the same vein, where a check-in counter guy was wracked with guilt over having checked in Mohammed Atta (who, thanks to Boris, we know for sure hijacked a plane because he had a plane ticket).
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/9/11/245388/-
This guy, Michael Tuohey, was on Oprah apparently all teary eyed, saying that he sees Mohammed Atta's face peering at him everywhere, he's haunted by it. And also that his female colleague had already committed suicide (!) she was so wracked with guilt about having checked in Mohammed Atta on the flight.
The story makes no damned sense, does it? In the one you cite, the guy was "ostracized" by co-workers because he checked these guys in. WTF? What was he supposed to do? They had tickets, didn't they? "Oh, you Ay-rabs look just like the B movie villains in yesterday's late night movie on TV, so I'm not letting you on the flight you paid money to travel on...."
He was supposed to know that these guys were going to fly a plane into the Pentagon, a totally unprecedented event, and therefore, his coworkers subsequently ostracize him.
These are just synthetic narratives planted to make you think all this really happened. I should try to fish up the Michael Tuohey thing on Oprah to see if the guy is an obvious crisis actor.
Another one they do is that there are all these celebrities who claim that they were booked on the flight but somehow missed the flight. Or some story like that. The whole idea is, again, just to convince the public that the flights actually occurred.
Anyway, to answer your question (again) this kind of stuff is all bullshit. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Erebus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 2:31 am GMT • 100 Words @Sam Shama Did you not write this?
In any case, only one plane ever made it to prime time and much of the footage exhibits disturbing anomalies readily explained by CGI.In #303
http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-how-the-cia-invented-conspiracy-theories/#comment-1563891
??
You did. So isn't one supposed to understand from that statement that you favour CGI expalining what people saw, including those who viewed an impact from street level?So isn't one supposed to understand from that statement that you favour CGI expalining what people saw, including those who viewed an impact from street level?
No, one is supposed to understand what the statement says, and nothing besides. What eyewitnesses on the street may or may not have seen would not normally be covered by the word "footage".
There appear to be serious problems with the available videos – FRP nose cones emerging intact on the other side of buildings, wings disappearing behind buildings, bright flashes just prior to impact marking the impact point, the lack of camera jitter in the plane's flight path. And so on. These are all readily explained with reference to CGI, but difficult otherwise.
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- KA says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 2:50 am GMT • 200 Words
The biggest hoax evererpetrated is the gradual evolution of the alleged threat from Islam . Its a multilayered multi focal interconnected open production of a vast conspiracy – achieved without any shred of evidence or even plausible reason for the existence of any such threat .
This is a quote from an article published in 1992 and quotes 90 sources .
" In addition, think tanks studies and op-ed pieces add momentum to the official spin. Their publication is followed by congressional hearings, policy conferences, and public press briefings. A governmental policy debate ensues, producing studies, working papers, and eventually doctrines and policies that become part of the media's spin. The new villain is now ready to be integrated into the popular culture to help to mobilize public support for a new crusade. In the case of the Green Peril, that process has been under way for several months.(13)
THE GREEN PERIL
Creating the Islamic Fundamentalist Threat
Leon T Hadar ,a former bureau chief for Jerusalem Post.http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-177.html
• Replies: @utu "The biggest hoax ever perpetrated is the gradual evolution of the alleged threat from Islam." - Excellent point. Recently I watched few videos with Jeff Gates in which he mention influences on Samuel Huntington and mechanism how his articles and book became bestsellers. BTW, where is Jeff Gates? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
"
WaPo, NYT, WSJ, Washington Times, ABC news and Economist all gathered the Islamic expert out of the same offices that used to house the Soviet expert ,painted them green removed the red markings and asked them to follow the direction . ( Well I made this up But that's exactly what happened .)
- Erebus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 3:27 am GMT • 200 Words @Incitatus
"I wasn't trying."No truer words were ever uttered. You don't really put much effort into anything, do you? Except, of course, preening like a chicken in heat."You realize, of course, that your comment was utterly meaningless. I could claim to be the pilot Ogonowski's alter ego but it would mean nothing at all in the context of this debate. Nothing – at – all. Get it? No? Oh well."But you claimed (#304) the planes were CGI - and than no genuine planes flew into the towers. Well (I'm afraid to ask) what happened to the crew and passengers? You said they probably screwed up the plane image on WTC 7, as well as the demo sequence of WTC 2 & WTC 1. You avoided answering why WTC 7 was taken down, urging us to "let Google be your friend." Then you couldn't explain how eyewitnesses saw your 'computer generated image' planes."I ignore simpleton level questions."Why? Because you don't have any answers. QED you're not as intellegent as a simpleton."I didn't try to "explain" any "CGI theories"."Let me refresh your memory (#304):"- I have a hard time believing any planes were involved at all, so your 2nd question is moot for me, but if my guess immediately above is right, then there would have been an explosion cueing the point of impact. Perhaps that failed to go off, leaving any CGI plane simply disappearing into the building without leaving a trace. That would look rather weird, so they opted to bring it down in broad daylight hoping few would notice."Not trying is one thing. Lying is quite another.You don't really put much effort into anything, do you?
I put my effort in 15-13 years ago. Today, indeed, I am putting less effort in. Much less in fact, but that's because the case has effectively closed.
Well (I'm afraid to ask) what happened to the crew and passengers?
To be sure, I have no reliable information on this, though one need not overexercise their imagination to come up with several possibilities – from sipping MaiTais in their villas in the S. Pacific, to entombed at the bottom of the N. Atlantic, and everything in between.
But you claimed (#304) the planes were CGI – and than no genuine planes flew into the towers.
You seem to have the same reading comprehension problems as Sharma. (See my comment to him above)
Put another way, explaining a theory is not the same as using a theory to explain what you see.
Anyhow, obviously you have no material points to make. You're using, word for word, the same arguments I've been hearing for 15 yrs.
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- utu says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 4:22 am GMT @KA The biggest hoax evererpetrated is the gradual evolution of the alleged threat from Islam . Its a multilayered multi focal interconnected open production of a vast conspiracy - achieved without any shred of evidence or even plausible reason for the existence of any such threat .
This is a quote from an article published in 1992 and quotes 90 sources .
" In addition, think tanks studies and op-ed pieces add momentum to the official spin. Their publication is followed by congressional hearings, policy conferences, and public press briefings. A governmental policy debate ensues, producing studies, working papers, and eventually doctrines and policies that become part of the media's spin. The new villain is now ready to be integrated into the popular culture to help to mobilize public support for a new crusade. In the case of the Green Peril, that process has been under way for several months.(13)
THE GREEN PERIL
Creating the Islamic Fundamentalist Threat
Leon T Hadar ,a former bureau chief for Jerusalem Post.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-177.html
"
WaPo, NYT, WSJ, Washington Times, ABC news and Economist all gathered the Islamic expert out of the same offices that used to house the Soviet expert ,painted them green removed the red markings and asked them to follow the direction . ( Well I made this up But that's exactly what happened .)"The biggest hoax ever perpetrated is the gradual evolution of the alleged threat from Islam." – Excellent point. Recently I watched few videos with Jeff Gates in which he mention influences on Samuel Huntington and mechanism how his articles and book became bestsellers. BTW, where is Jeff Gates?
• Replies: @KA Thanks Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 7:36 am GMT • 100 Words @NosytheDuke A bit like reviewing or recommending a movie, that you haven't watched.
I must admit though that you have a decided flair for the consistently proud display of your ignorance.
Not at all. It is much more like telling someone who is about to start research on his doctoral thesis or is already under way on what he regards as a promising reading list "here is another body of research and writing on the subject that you may not have considered" (and Daniel Pipes is not a scholar that RU would be likely to have near the top of his go to list). Moreover, if you read what I wrote before emitting you would have understood that I was saying that, whereas I couldn't assess the merits of the books, to which I merely drew attention, I had read some of his work in article form.
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- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 9:35 am GMT • 300 Words @utu JR, what do you think of this:
'It's been a bottomless pit': Airport worker who checked in Pentagon 9/11 hijackers despite the fact they were running late reveals his 15 years of guilt and how he became a pariah among colleagues
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3783981/Vaughn-Allex-airport-worker-checked-Pentagon-9-11-hijackers-reveals-15-years-guilt.html
JR, what do you think of this:
LOL. That's just bullshit.
They plant these stories to convince us that these hijacked flights actually took place. Certainly the plane that was hijacked and flew into the Pentagon is simply a phantom flight that never took place.
Actually, I vaguely remembered another story in the same vein, where a check-in counter guy was wracked with guilt over having checked in Mohammed Atta (who, thanks to Boris, we know for sure hijacked a plane because he had a plane ticket).
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/9/11/245388/-
This guy, Michael Tuohey, was on Oprah apparently all teary eyed, saying that he sees Mohammed Atta's face peering at him everywhere, he's haunted by it. And also that his female colleague had already committed suicide (!) she was so wracked with guilt about having checked in Mohammed Atta on the flight.
The story makes no damned sense, does it? In the one you cite, the guy was "ostracized" by co-workers because he checked these guys in. WTF? What was he supposed to do? They had tickets, didn't they? "Oh, you Ay-rabs look just like the B movie villains in yesterday's late night movie on TV, so I'm not letting you on the flight you paid money to travel on ."
He was supposed to know that these guys were going to fly a plane into the Pentagon, a totally unprecedented event, and therefore, his coworkers subsequently ostracize him.
These are just synthetic narratives planted to make you think all this really happened. I should try to fish up the Michael Tuohey thing on Oprah to see if the guy is an obvious crisis actor.
Another one they do is that there are all these celebrities who claim that they were booked on the flight but somehow missed the flight. Or some story like that. The whole idea is, again, just to convince the public that the flights actually occurred.
Anyway, to answer your question (again) this kind of stuff is all bullshit.
• Replies: @Boris Of course everyone else is lying according to the person who has lied brazenly multiple times about comments written on this very page.I look forward to jonny's next Unz.com article "The Shitting Shit-Eaters and the Shitty Shit They Eat: How Boris Thinks a Plane Ticket Proves That Atta Wasn't a Hologram-Lizard, LOL!"
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- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 10:04 am GMT • 700 Words @Incitatus Again, tears for Ursula stream uncontrollably down my face. What injustice! What perfidy! That an old hate monger is called to account for breaking laws she clearly knew and willingly violated - well , it's unthinkable!
I'm crushed at the thought that you see me complicit as the "Ziofascist scumbag of the week." But I'm equally humbled by your favor. If I must wear the badge you've awarded me, dare I ask who you've targeted for next weeks prize? Please be sure they measure up (you've made me feel responsible for a tradition).
PS. To make sure of a wise choice maybe you can rent a motel room and invite servile flatterer Erebus, nordic üntermensch Rurik, and reptilian L.K to join you in judging candidates. Arrange your chairs in a circle. No doubt you know the rest of the drill (don't forget your Vaseline).
Again, tears for Ursula stream uncontrollably down my face. What injustice! What perfidy! That an old hate monger is called to account for breaking laws she clearly knew and willingly violated – well , it's unthinkable!
Uhh, look, shit eater, here's the situation. You're a shit eater. You're surely in competition for this week's shit eater of the week. You could dislodge Boris, who is the current reigning shit eater of the week.
What this means, the fact that you're a shit eater, is that you NEVER think for yourself. Whatever they tell you on the TV is the truth. That's what it means to be a shit eater. Like if you read the Orwell novel 1984, you have the 2 minutes hate. They show a picture of the person you're supposed to hate and all the brainwashed shit eaters scream how much they hate the person.
Like many other things in 1984, this was quite prescient. They tell you that you are supposed to hate somebody, like Gaddafi or Saddam, or whoever, or now it's Vladimir Putin and all the shit eaters like you will scream how much you hate the person. Am I wrong? You are not the first A-1-A shit eater I have interacted with. I understand the shit eater mentality.
So they show you a picture of some old lady that you are supposed to hate and so you dutifuly hate her. And you gloat that she was sentenced to prison. Note the projection here. You say Ursula Haverbeck is a hate monger, but of course, you are the hater. They tell you who you're supposed to hate and you hate that person.
Because you're a shit eater. A Ziofascist shit eater, of the same sort who would gloat that Rachel Corrie was killed for trying to helping a Palestinian family.
The other aspect of this is that, as a shit eater, you don't really value freedom of speech at all, because you never had an idea in your head that runs counter to the established power structure paradigm. So when you are told that somebody is a criminal for saying something that the current power structure doesn't like, that doesn't bother you, since you never had a dissenting idea in your head. And probably never will have one.
I mean, as a champion shit eater, you've never actually thought for yourself about anything. You've never expressed an original or dissenting idea in your entire life. Never. If they tell you that two planes took down three steel framed buildings, you believe it and get angry if somebody says that is impossible.
The third aspect of this is that you are not just a shit eater. You are a Ziofascist shit eater. So you feel this great identification with this Zionist power structure and you gloat over their ability to imprison this old lady. You guys are drunk on your power. Of course, you yourself have no particular power, but you have this vicarious identification with that power structure. This is the fascist mentality. You worship a power structure because it makes you, a total worthless nobody, feel like you're sombody.
Now, on one point, you are correct, Ursula Haverbeck is not herself that big a deal in the overall scheme of things. I mean, the Ziofascist power structure that you adore and feel identification with, it has caused the destruction of entire countries, like Iraq or Afghanistan, and so on. Hundreds of thousands of deaths with millions of lives destroyed. So one little old lady in a jail cell unjustly isn't that big a deal compared to that.
It's that she's a symbol nonetheless.
The problem that people like you have, I mean the typical Ziofascist scumbag shit eater, is that you don't really understand that other people are not as vicious and vindictive as you are, so you guys make these psychopathic wisecracks about this or about Rachel Corrie and you don't quite understand how much disgust you elicit in decent, ordinary people. You just don't comprehend it.
And then, when there eventually is a pretty severe backlash against your Ziofascist scumbag behavior, which I think is getting inevitable, you're going to be there with this: "Oy vey, why do they always hate us . we're such sweet wonderful people "
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- KA says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 12:37 pm GMT @utu "The biggest hoax ever perpetrated is the gradual evolution of the alleged threat from Islam." - Excellent point. Recently I watched few videos with Jeff Gates in which he mention influences on Samuel Huntington and mechanism how his articles and book became bestsellers. BTW, where is Jeff Gates?
Thanks
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- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 1:20 pm GMT • 100 Words @Jonathan Revusky
Dude, in comment #267 above, after my asking you what the strongest evidence available for the official story, you said (among a couple of other things that are of zero evidentiary value) "His purchase of the tickets".saying that the fact that Atta had a plane ticket is proof of the official story (AND HE DID SAY IT!)Then you should have no problem producing the quote.You were clearly offering that as evidence. It somehow escaped your notice that everybody else on the flight had presumably purchased tickets as well! LOL.
But I don't get it. Don't you want your "shit eater of the week" prize? Oh, I forgot to tell you. This week's prize for shit eater of the week is a 2017 Golda Meir nude pictorial calendar!
That's destined to be a prized collector's item.
Surely you wouldn't want to miss out on that, would you?
after my asking you what the strongest evidence available for the official story
As I've already shown, you asked me "what records?" The ticket is among the records that support the official story. It is sad that you keep lying about this. We both agree–and have from the beginning–that the ticket is necessary, but not sufficient. You keep pretending otherwise for some reason. Your behavior is downright weird.
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyAs I've already shown, you asked me "what records?"WTF is your point? What was said is perfectly clear. I asked you what the strongest available evidence was for the official story and you said there were records blah blah and I asked what records are you talking about. OBVIOUSLY that meant what records are you talking about that constitute proof of the official story ?And then, among a few other equally worthless things, you said "His purchase of the tickets."
The ticket is among the records that support the official story.Well, you see, there you go again...Look, you are great, you are a champion shit eater and you are the reigning shit eater of the week. BUT... let me make something clear to you, champ....
This idea that Atta having a plane ticket constitutes proof of anything really is a breathtaking piece of bullshit. My hat is off to you. You are great. But still, you have to come up with some new bullshit to win this week's shit eater of the week award. You cannot use the same bullshit to win that won you last week's prize to win this week. You have to come up with some new bullshit.
I know you're up to it. You have the makings of a great champion. , @KA "The creation of a peril usually starts with mysterious "sources" and unnamed officials who leak information, float trial balloons, and warn about the coming threat. Those sources reflect debates and discussions taking place within government. Their information is then augmented by colorful intelligence reports that finger exotic and conspiratorial terrorists and military advisers. Journalists then search for the named and other villains. The media end up finding corroboration from foreign sources who form an informal coalition with the sources in the U.S. government and help the press uncover further information substantiating the threat coming from the new bad guys.
A series of leaks, signals, and trial balloons is already beginning to shape U.S. agenda and policy. Congress is about to conduct several hearings on the global threat of Islamic fundamentalism.(14) The Bush administration has been trying to devise policies and establish new alliances to counter Iranian influence: building up Islamic but secular and pro-Western Turkey as a countervailing force in Central Asia, expanding U.S. commitments to Saudi Arabia, warning Sudan that it faces grave consequences as a result of its policies, and even shoring up a socialist military dictatorship in Algeria.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-177Printing a ticket and getting a Pasport ,if all that you have,then you are in the right league . Join those in NYT,WaPo,Hoover Institue and speak to George Will, Jim Hoagland , because following the collapse of Soviet,they have been looking for an enemy that they were finding raising its heads in Algeria, Iran, Sudan,and even in Malayasia back in 1992.
Conspiracy theory- is absolutely commonplace but rendered a bogus term . It is common and practiced by the government all the time . It is used by people who have agenda and find resistance to agenda . The moment they use false narrative,weird scenario, create unknown fear and offer solution abusing the authorities,abusing the institutional but previous records and inserting propangada preaching journalist ( CIA had more than 400 in 1975 per Bernstein) , they are engaging in conspiracy . It follows a script. So it has a theory to follow . It is a conspiracy theory. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Rurik says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 1:23 pm GMT • 200 Words @Wizard of Oz I ask you as just the latest person to assert on UR that something - in this case the collapse of WTC 7 - is "an anomaly to all known laws of physics and structural engineering" or similar wotds which plainly mean that such laws make the collapse without deliberate demolition impossible....*what are your qualifations to be taken seriously on the implications of the laws of physics and structural engineering*? I have dealt with a lot of expert witnesse and you don't sound like one of them,not even the dodgy ones that have to be exposed and evaluated in court every day. Indeed do you consider yourself competent to evaluate expert evidence on physics and structural engineering like a judge assisted by the questions of counsel? If so why? Try persuading your readers.
.*what are your qualifations to be taken seriously on the implications of the laws of physics and structural engineering*?
I rest on my laurels wiz
we've both participated on this site for some time now. In my case clearly and obviously in an attempt to get at the truth in all things. In your case, -to obfuscate the truth- about any issue you find inconvenient to the status quo- vis-a-vis the PTB. I believe this is obvious to everyone here who's been paying attention at all.
What you do wiz, is scan these pages for any signs of some ingenuousness, and then you proceed to reel them into your web, with innocent sounding queries, and then when they're engaged in an exchange with you, you drop a manure wagon of legerdemain on their heads, obviously finding amusement in your own 'cleverness and artfulness'. I suppose you imagine you're being cagey, but to the rest of us you just come across as a mean-spirited, sadistic little prick.
Now why, I ask you, would I ever feel the inclination so qualify myself to the likes of you, eh?
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz Unfofortunately your resting on your laurels means we've never seen them.I could say that I was merely trying to draw out of you some positive reason for your readers to be persuaded by the authority of your assertions. But someone might have a case for calling me disingenuousness. After all I am 99 per cent sure that you have absolutely no qualifications either in knowledge or reasoning power to give any authority to your confident assertions about physics or structural engineering. So I now put THAT forward as my contribution to your readers' ability to assess your comments in the absence of your willingness to display your professional laurels. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 1:34 pm GMT • 100 Words @Jonathan Revusky
JR, what do you think of this:LOL. That's just bullshit.They plant these stories to convince us that these hijacked flights actually took place. Certainly the plane that was hijacked and flew into the Pentagon is simply a phantom flight that never took place.
Actually, I vaguely remembered another story in the same vein, where a check-in counter guy was wracked with guilt over having checked in Mohammed Atta (who, thanks to Boris, we know for sure hijacked a plane because he had a plane ticket).
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/9/11/245388/-
This guy, Michael Tuohey, was on Oprah apparently all teary eyed, saying that he sees Mohammed Atta's face peering at him everywhere, he's haunted by it. And also that his female colleague had already committed suicide (!) she was so wracked with guilt about having checked in Mohammed Atta on the flight.
The story makes no damned sense, does it? In the one you cite, the guy was "ostracized" by co-workers because he checked these guys in. WTF? What was he supposed to do? They had tickets, didn't they? "Oh, you Ay-rabs look just like the B movie villains in yesterday's late night movie on TV, so I'm not letting you on the flight you paid money to travel on...."
He was supposed to know that these guys were going to fly a plane into the Pentagon, a totally unprecedented event, and therefore, his coworkers subsequently ostracize him.
These are just synthetic narratives planted to make you think all this really happened. I should try to fish up the Michael Tuohey thing on Oprah to see if the guy is an obvious crisis actor.
Another one they do is that there are all these celebrities who claim that they were booked on the flight but somehow missed the flight. Or some story like that. The whole idea is, again, just to convince the public that the flights actually occurred.
Anyway, to answer your question (again) this kind of stuff is all bullshit.
Of course everyone else is lying according to the person who has lied brazenly multiple times about comments written on this very page.
I look forward to jonny's next Unz.com article "The Shitting Shit-Eaters and the Shitty Shit They Eat: How Boris Thinks a Plane Ticket Proves That Atta Wasn't a Hologram-Lizard, LOL!"
Professional.
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- Rurik says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 2:26 pm GMT • 500 Words @Incitatus
"if the Nazis burned women and children alive for the fun of it, then by God I tell you I would condemn them with all of my breath, I swear it. But they didn't do that."Well, Rurik, here's your chance to condemn them:"...starting at 0800 on 25 September [1939], Luftwaffe bombers under the command of Major Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen conducted the largest air raid ever seen by that time, dropping 560 tons of high explosive bombs and 72 tons of incendiary bombs, in coordination with heavy artillery shelling by Army units."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Warsaw_in_World_War_IINote the "72 tons of incendiary bombs." 20,000-25,000 civilians died. Surprised? Later on, beginning August 1944 the Nazis really got busy. By January 1945 they'd leveled 85% of the city and killed another 150,000-200,000 civilians.
How about Rotterdam May 1940? 884 civilians killed, 85,000 left homeless:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotterdam_BlitzHow about Guernica April 1937? They bombed it on market day, when packed with civilians. They used incendiaries. 170-300 civilians died. The city was largely destroyed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_GuernicaHow about Lidice June 1942? 173 men executed on the spot. 203 women and 105 children taken to concentration camps (four pregnant women were first forced to have abortions). The village was leveled. The Nazis killed all the animals and even dug up the remains in the cemetery!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacreHow about Oradour-sur-Glane Jun 1944? 642 civilians murdered and -wait for it - women and children deliberately burned to death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane_massacreThere are other examples. Oh those poor, poor Nazis.
Don't forget your promise to "condemn them [Nazis] with all of my breath."
OK, I checked out the first of your links, (and admittedly from the obviously biased Wikipedia)
this is the kind of thing I found out
The Polish Army surrendered nearly 140,000 troops and during the siege around 18,000 civilians of Warsaw perished. As a result of the air bombardments 10% of the city's buildings were entirely destroyed and further 40% were heavily damaged.[1]:78now this is what I said:
"anyone who burns women and children alive for the fun of it and out of sheer tribal hatred, rather than as a military and existential imperative, is a monster in my book"
so what you have was strategic bombing of a city (a war crime in my book but then I never said the Nazis were boy scouts) for a clear military objective. That's not what I'm talking about.
Imagine if Germany had already defeated the Poles, and Poland was on the brink, and had effectively lost the war, and Warsaw was turned into a refugee city with tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of refugees huddling there as their last sanctuary. There would have been no military age men there, as they would have all died in the war by now, and the city was overflowing with women and children (and POW camps and such). OK? And then imagine the kind of people that would plan, not just an attack in order to break the moral of the enemy, (it had already long been broken), but rather as a calculated act of sheer inhuman cruelty, intended to burn alive every single old man, woman and child until there was nothing left of either the people or the (beautiful, ancient Baroque architecture and art of the) city. It was a true holocaust, intended as an act of sadistic vengeance upon harmless people to sate an insatiable need to inflict unimaginable suffering and cruelty for cruelties' sake. Just like Waco. And for the same reason, – they defied the power of their 'masters', and for that, they would be made to pay.
Did the Nazis ever do anything like that? Did they ever deliberately burn hundreds of thousands of civilians alive for no military purpose whatsoever? But just to be as cruel as possible?
I guess that's the word I'm really thinking of there. Cruelty. Because as that quote you posted showed, the Nazis at their worst were trying to murder people as humanely as possible, whereas the allies wanted to inflict the most suffering on the most innocent and vulnerable women and children as possible. They wanted to burn women and children alive who were no threat and at the virtual end of the war. What kind of people do something like that?
Reading the Old Testament, I get an idea of where they get their demonic hate from.
One on my mantras Incitatus, is that a lot of the raw hate in the world today (and certainly yesterday) comes from religious ignorance and a cartoon version of the world that says the followers of this religion are pure good, and the followers of that religion are pure evil. I sort of wonder what things would be like if we'd finally lay to rest these pernicious and stone age codified ignorance down, and joined the 21st century as rational actors
• Agree: SolontoCroesus • Replies: @utu Very good comment. , @SolontoCroesusa lot of the raw hate in the world today (and certainly yesterday) comes from religious ignorance and a cartoon version of the world that says the followers of this religion are pure good, and the followers of that religion are pure evil. I sort of wonder what things would be like if we'd finally lay to rest these pernicious and stone age codified ignorance down, and joined the 21st century as rational actorshttp://rappnews.com/2016/05/19/as-the-world-turns-and-the-stones-speak/148387/(Max Blumenthal played Adam, aka "guys just wanna have fun" in a recent presentation of John Henry's play.) Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All CommentsJohn Henry's "Arguing with God." . . . reenacts Old Testament stories to confront uncomfortable truths about human nature and explores the psychology of how empires are built by "Chosen People," "good guys" who believe they have the moral right to use military force against "bad guys." Produced in the dramatic outdoor setting of hand-laid stone, which Henry built himself, "Arguing with God" depicts the inevitable conflict between power and justice.
The cast is 50-actor strong, with many of the leading roles played by [Henry's neighbors and friends]. .
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 2:33 pm GMT • 200 Words @Boris
after my asking you what the strongest evidence available for the official storyAs I've already shown, you asked me "what records?" The ticket is among the records that support the official story. It is sad that you keep lying about this. We both agree--and have from the beginning--that the ticket is necessary, but not sufficient. You keep pretending otherwise for some reason. Your behavior is downright weird.As I've already shown, you asked me "what records?"
WTF is your point? What was said is perfectly clear. I asked you what the strongest available evidence was for the official story and you said there were records blah blah and I asked what records are you talking about. OBVIOUSLY that meant what records are you talking about that constitute proof of the official story ?
And then, among a few other equally worthless things, you said "His purchase of the tickets."
The ticket is among the records that support the official story.
Well, you see, there you go again
Look, you are great, you are a champion shit eater and you are the reigning shit eater of the week. BUT let me make something clear to you, champ .
This idea that Atta having a plane ticket constitutes proof of anything really is a breathtaking piece of bullshit. My hat is off to you. You are great. But still, you have to come up with some new bullshit to win this week's shit eater of the week award. You cannot use the same bullshit to win that won you last week's prize to win this week. You have to come up with some new bullshit.
I know you're up to it. You have the makings of a great champion.
• Replies: @Boris Well, obviously the ticket disproves your CGI planes theory. I've never seen a ticket for a CGI plane. Have you? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Rurik says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 2:47 pm GMT • 300 Words @L.K Well, Rurik,
You are discussing these issues with an obvious troll, 'incitatus', a piece of filth who is here to spread disinformation & propaganda & who obviously does not care one bit about truth or free speech. Remember that other scumbag, 'iffen', who hoped for European style censorship to be applied in the US?
These cretins are so obvious.
No, Rurik, the National Socialists did NOT run extermination camps.
Do u still have doubts?
As Prof.Faurisson said, on the intellectual level, the revisionists have already won.
It is just that people ain't allowed to know it... in fact, people are not allowed to even know there is a debate on the holohoax.Why, Rurik, do I say the holocau$t is a monstrous Hoax?
As Prof.T.Dalton wrote:
There are, in fact, three essential elements to the event called the Holocaust:Most people are led to believe - I was one of them - in regards to the 'holocau$t', that there is abundant proof of the alleged crime, as described above.
(1) intention to mass murder the Jews, by Hitler and the Nazi elite;
(2) the use of gas chambers(the extermination camps & gas vans); and
(3) the 6 million deaths.If any one of these three should undergo substantial revision, then, technically speaking, we no longer have "The Holocaust"-at least, not in any meaningful sense. (Broadly speaking, of course, any mass fatality is a holocaust.) Holocaust revisionism contends that, not one, but all three of these points are grossly in error, and thus that "The Holocaust," as such, did not occur. Obviously, this is not to deny that a tragedy happened to the Jews, nor that many thousands died, directly and indirectly, as a result of the war. But the conventional account is an extreme exaggeration.
This is absolutely NOT THE CASE.In fact, many holocaust 'historians', I call them quacks, have actually admitted the near total lack of material and documentary evidence.
There is, as the revisionist side has shown, an abundance of evidence refuting the official dossier, which is basically atrocity propaganda on steroids.One good book that covers all bases in a more accessible format is "Lectures on the Holocaust
Controversial Issues Cross Examined" by Germar Rudolf.
http://holocausthandbooks.com/dl/15-loth.pdfhttp://holocausthandbooks.com/index.php?main_page=1
Hey L.K.,
holocau$t is a monstrous Hoax?
I think you're right about some of the trolls here, or so it seems to me
but this is the thing vis-a-vis the Holocau$t. I don't like calling the whole thing a hoax, because then it sort of looks like you're suggesting that NONE of any of that stuff happened, when I believe that it's clear that Jews (and many others) were systematically persecuted by the Nazis for being Jews, and not necessarily for any crimes they committed. Just like the Japanese in the US during the war. If they Japanese claimed there were gas chambers at the camps where they were held, then I think it would be fair and prudent to examine those claims for veracity, just as in the case of the Holocaust- where I don't think they had homicidal gas chambers for human extermination purposes. But that doesn't change the fact that many people perished in those camps, and many of them were innocent Jews, and if the Jews want to call that particular suffering a name to commemorate it, just like what the Japanese went through, then I don't see what's wrong with that per se.
That it has become this momentous blood libel against the German people in particular and all Gentiles in general is just another testament to the power of the lobby.
Controlling the world's banks and money supply and therefor all the media of consequence and all the major politicians (and publishing houses and courts and universities, etc..) has had an effect on things. The Eternal WarsⓊ being perhaps the most troublesome for the moment.
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz I wouldn't be inclined to question an assertion that there are many Jews in senior positions in investment banks but in the commercial banking sphere which I understand to have much more to do with the money supply than the entrepreneurial investment or merchant bankers do I am unaware of any great Jewish presence. Should I be? Who and where are they? I note that Goldman Sachs was only an investment bank until 2009. , @Sam ShamaI believe that it's clear that Jews (and many others) were systematically persecuted by the Nazis for being Jews, and not necessarily for any crimes they committed.Rurik,
[...]
But that doesn't change the fact that many people perished in those camps, and many of them were innocent Jews, and if the Jews want to call that particular suffering a name to commemorate it, just like what the Japanese went through, then I don't see what's wrong with that per se.
As I've said in some previous posts, you have an admirable capacity for gleaning the essence of some important subjects. The aforementioned, more or less my own feelings about the Holocaust, was an event which occurred in the midst of a period that saw tens of millions slaughtered. They were certainly not just Jews. To be frank I never dwelt on the subject too much in my adult life, [even though the real experience of what happened to my kin is very close to me - my granny, whom I spare the ordeal these days of retelling her life events; and she holds no grudge, none at all] i.e., until I stumbled upon the Unz Review last year. This publication seems to be rife with discussions, of which, the ultimate goals are clear; and I needn't explicate the obvious. So again, I am completely unfamiliar with this charge of people exploiting the Holocaust for personal gains. I really don't know any.Furthermore there is no blood libel on Germans. Nazis, on the other hand were 'no boy scouts' indeed! We all relate to personal experiences. So in my case, my work brings me in contact with a large number of Europeans and Germans. I can tell you nothing but positive things about my contacts [on a lighter note I've dated German girls and they are a fun loving lot].
There is perhaps a grain of truth in what you say regarding what has become verboten in polite society, and by extension in the media. I hardly think any decent, educated person would use the 'n' word e.g. Its an assault on basic humanity. So is calling an Asian, A Jew, an Arab, A muslim, A White man or a woman by derogatory terms. Its simply not done in this day an age [more generally I am revolted by some of the verbal obscenity that goes on here, led by Revusky, a man I lament to admit a co-religionist] . More specifically, I am against any laws that stifle free speech and expression. So if certain laws are oppressive, the majoritarian system that created those in the first place, ought to be utilised to render them null and void post partum. [In the case of Ursula H., there is more to her story than meets the eye. She had been held in contempt of court on a few occasions, having used her age and the fragility associated with it, to provoke the legal/judicial system, when the judges finally threw the book at her. They will brook defiance of the law up to a certain extent and no more. Still, I understand it is galling to witness a granny thrown in gaol for nothing more than revisionist activism. Who made those laws?]
Jews don't control the world's money supply. A person like you ought to rid yourself of this risible notion. [Its a discussion we've had often and let's avoid it this time shall we? btw I commented on Mike Whitney's piece apropos, and we might continue on this subject there if you so wish]
cheers. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- KA says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 2:58 pm GMT • 400 Words @Boris
after my asking you what the strongest evidence available for the official storyAs I've already shown, you asked me "what records?" The ticket is among the records that support the official story. It is sad that you keep lying about this. We both agree--and have from the beginning--that the ticket is necessary, but not sufficient. You keep pretending otherwise for some reason. Your behavior is downright weird."The creation of a peril usually starts with mysterious "sources" and unnamed officials who leak information, float trial balloons, and warn about the coming threat. Those sources reflect debates and discussions taking place within government. Their information is then augmented by colorful intelligence reports that finger exotic and conspiratorial terrorists and military advisers. Journalists then search for the named and other villains. The media end up finding corroboration from foreign sources who form an informal coalition with the sources in the U.S. government and help the press uncover further information substantiating the threat coming from the new bad guys.
A series of leaks, signals, and trial balloons is already beginning to shape U.S. agenda and policy. Congress is about to conduct several hearings on the global threat of Islamic fundamentalism.(14) The Bush administration has been trying to devise policies and establish new alliances to counter Iranian influence: building up Islamic but secular and pro-Western Turkey as a countervailing force in Central Asia, expanding U.S. commitments to Saudi Arabia, warning Sudan that it faces grave consequences as a result of its policies, and even shoring up a socialist military dictatorship in Algeria.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-177
Printing a ticket and getting a Pasport ,if all that you have,then you are in the right league . Join those in NYT,WaPo,Hoover Institue and speak to George Will, Jim Hoagland , because following the collapse of Soviet,they have been looking for an enemy that they were finding raising its heads in Algeria, Iran, Sudan,and even in Malayasia back in 1992.
Conspiracy theory- is absolutely commonplace but rendered a bogus term . It is common and practiced by the government all the time . It is used by people who have agenda and find resistance to agenda . The moment they use false narrative,weird scenario, create unknown fear and offer solution abusing the authorities,abusing the institutional but previous records and inserting propangada preaching journalist ( CIA had more than 400 in 1975 per Bernstein) , they are engaging in conspiracy . It follows a script. So it has a theory to follow . It is a conspiracy theory.
• Replies: @BorisPrinting a ticket and getting a Pasport ,if all that you have,then you are in the right leagueYou are falling for Jonny's schtick:Here are some lengthy bits from Atta's Wiki page:
A bit more than a ticket, right? You can follow the sources as you see fit. From what I've seen, the evidence is pretty good. I always keep an open mind to new evidence, though. Keep in mind that saying "But that could have been faked!" is not evidence. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
On April 11, 1996, Atta signed his last will and testament at the mosque, officially declaring his Muslim beliefs and giving 18 instructions regarding his burial.[9][40] This was the day that Israel attacked Lebanon in Operation Grapes of Wrath, which outraged Atta. Signing the will, "offering his life" was Atta's response.[41] The instructions in his last will and testament reflect both Sunni funeral practices, along with some more puritanical demands from Salafism, including asking people not "to weep and cry" or show emotion. The will was signed by el-Motassadeq and a second individual at the mosque.[42]After leaving Plankontor in the summer of 1997, Atta disappeared again and did not return until 1998. Atta phoned his graduate advisor in 1998, after a year of doing nothing for his thesis, telling Machule that he had family problems at home and said, "Please understand, I don't want to talk about this."[43][44] At the winter break in 1997, Atta left and did not return to Hamburg for three months. He said that he went on pilgrimage to Mecca again, just 18 months after his first time. Terry McDermott explained in Perfect Soldiers that it is highly unusual and unlikely for someone, especially a young student, to go on Hajj again that soon. Also, three months is an exceptionally long time, much longer than what Hajj requires. When Atta returned, he claimed that his passport was lost and got a new one, which is a common tactic to erase evidence of travel to places such as Afghanistan.[45] When he returned in spring 1998, after disappearing for several months, he had grown a thick long beard, and "seemed more serious and aloof" to those who knew him.[28]
In mid-1998, Atta worked alongside Shehhi, bin al-Shibh, and Belfas, at a warehouse, packing computers in crates for shipping.[46] The Hamburg group did not stay in Wilhelmsburg for long. The next winter, they moved into an apartment at Marienstrasse 54 in the borough of Harburg, near the Technical University of Hamburg,[47] at which they enrolled. It was here that the Hamburg cell developed and acted more as a group.[48] They met three or four times a week to discuss their anti-American feelings and to plot possible attacks. Many al-Qaeda members lived in this apartment at various times, including hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi, Zakariya Essabar, and others.
In late 1999, Atta, Shehhi, Jarrah, Bahaji, and bin al-Shibh decided to travel to Chechnya to fight against the Russians, but were convinced by Khalid al-Masri and Mohamedou Ould Slahi at the last minute to change their plans. They instead traveled to Afghanistan over a two-week period in late November. On November 29, 1999, Mohamed Atta boarded Turkish Airlines Flight TK1662 from Hamburg to Istanbul, where he changed to flight TK1056 to Karachi, Pakistan.[3] After they arrived, they were selected by Al Qaeda leader Abu Hafs as suitable candidates for the "planes operation" plot. They were all well-educated, had experience of living in western society, along with some English skills, and would be able to obtain visas.[41] Even before bin al-Shibh had arrived, Atta, Shehhi, and Jarrah were sent to the House of Ghamdi near bin Laden's home in Kandahar, where he was waiting to meet them. Bin Laden asked them to pledge loyalty and commit to suicide missions, which Atta and the other three Hamburg men all accepted. Bin Laden sent them to see Mohammed Atef to get a general overview of the mission, and then they were sent to Karachi to see Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to go over specifics.[49]
German investigators said that they had evidence that Mohamed Atta trained at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan from late 1999 to early 2000. The timing of the Afghanistan training was outlined on August 23, 2002 by a senior investigator. The investigator, Klaus Ulrich Kersten, director of Germany's federal anticrime agency, the Bundeskriminalamt, provided the first official confirmation that Atta and two other pilots had been in Afghanistan and the first dates of the training. Kersten said in an interview at the agency's headquarters in Wiesbaden, Germany, that Atta was in Afghanistan from late 1999 until early 2000,[50][51] and that there was evidence that Atta met with Osama bin Laden there.[52]
A video surfaced in October 2006 which showed bin Laden at Tarnak Farms on January 8, 2000, and also showed Atta together with Ziad Jarrah reading their wills ten days later on January 18, 2000.[3][53]
According to official reports, Atta arrived on June 3, 2000, at Newark International Airport from Prague. That month, Atta and Shehhi stayed in hotels and rented rooms in New York City on a short-term basis. They continued to inquire about flight schools and personally visited some, including Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma, which they visited on July 3, 2000. Days later, Shehhi and Atta ended up in Venice, Florida (On the Gulf Coast of South Florida).[15] Atta and Shehhi established accounts at SunTrust Bank and received wire transfers from Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew in the United Arab Emirates.[15][57] On July 6, 2000, Atta and Shehhi enrolled at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida, where they entered the Accelerated Pilot Program, while Ziad Jarrah took flight training from a different school also based in Venice.[15] When Atta and Shehhi arrived in Florida, they initially stayed with Huffman's bookkeeper and his wife in a spare room of their house. After a week, they were asked to leave because they were rude. Atta and Shehhi then moved into a small house nearby in Nokomis where they stayed for six months.[63][64]
Atta's flight record from HuffmanAtta began flight training on July 7, 2000, and continued training nearly every day. By the end of July, both Atta and Shehhi did solo flights. Atta earned his private pilot certificate in September, and then he and Shehhi decided to switch flight schools. Both enrolled at Jones Aviation in Sarasota and took training there for a brief time. They had problems following instructions and were both very upset when they failed their Stage 1 exam at Jones Aviation. They inquired about multi-engine planes and told the instructor that "they wanted to move quickly, because they had a job waiting in their country upon completion of their training in the U.S." In mid-October, Atta and Shehhi returned to Huffman Aviation to continue training. In November 2000, Atta earned his instrument rating, and then a commercial pilot's license in December from the Federal Aviation Administration.[15]
Atta continued with flight training, including solo flights and simulator time. On December 22, Atta and Shehhi applied to Eagle International for large jet and simulator training for McDonnell Douglas DC-9 and Boeing 737–300 models. On December 26, Atta and Shehhi needed a tow for their rented Piper Cherokee on a taxiway of Miami International Airport after the engine shut down. On December 29 and 30, Atta and Marwan went to the Opa-locka Airport where they practiced on a Boeing 727 simulator, and they obtained Boeing 767 simulator training from Pan Am International on December 31. Atta purchased flight deck videos for Boeing 747–200, Boeing 757–200, Airbus A320 and Boeing 767-300ER models via mail-order from Sporty's Pilot Shop in Batavia, Ohio in November and December 2000.[15]
On July 22, 2001, Mohamed Atta rented a Mitsubishi Galant from Alamo Rent A Car, putting 3,836 miles on the vehicle before returning it on July 26. On July 25, Atta dropped Ziad Jarrah off at Miami International Airport for a flight back to Germany. On July 26, Atta traveled via Continental Airlines to Newark, New Jersey, checked into the Kings Inn Hotel in Wayne, New Jersey and stayed there until July 30 when he took a flight from Newark back to Fort Lauderdale.[15]
On August 4, Atta is believed to have been at Orlando International Airport waiting to pick up suspected "20th Hijacker" Mohammed al-Qahtani from Dubai, who ended up being held by immigration as "suspicious." Atta was believed to have used a payphone at the airport to phone a number "linked to al-Qaeda" after Qahtani was denied entry.[75]
On August 6, Atta and Shehhi rented a 1995 white, four door Ford Escort from Warrick's Rent-A-Car, which was returned on August 13. On August 6, Atta booked a flight on Spirit Airlines from Fort Lauderdale to Newark, leaving on August 7 and returning on August 9. The reservation was not used and canceled on August 9 with the reason "Family Medical Emergency". Instead, he went to Central Office & Travel in Pompano Beach to purchase a ticket for a flight to Newark, leaving on the evening of August 7 and schedule to return in the evening on August 9. Atta did not take the return flight. On August 7, Atta checked into the Wayne Inn in Wayne, New Jersey and checked out on August 9. The same day, he booked a one-way first class ticket via the Internet on America West Flight 244 from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport to Las Vegas.[15] Atta traveled twice to Las Vegas on "surveillance flights" rehearsing how the 9/11 attacks would be carried out. Other hijackers traveled to Las Vegas at different times in the summer of 2001.
Throughout the summer, Atta met with Nawaf al-Hazmi to discuss the status of the operation on a monthly basis.[76]
On August 23, Atta's driver license was revoked in absentia after he failed to show up in traffic court to answer the earlier citation for driving without a license.[77] On the same day, Israeli Mossad reportedly gave his name to the CIA as part of a list of 19 names they said were planning an attack in the near future. Only four of the names are known for certain, the others being Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.[78]
On September 10, 2001, Atta picked up Omari from the Milner Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts, and the two drove their rented Nissan Altima to a Comfort Inn in South Portland, Maine; on the way they were seen getting gasoline at an Exxon Gas Station. They arrived at 5:43 pm and spent the night in room 232. While in South Portland, they were seen making two ATM withdrawals, and stopping at Wal-Mart. FBI also reported that "two middle-eastern men" were seen in the parking lot of a Pizza Hut, where Atta is known to have eaten that day.[79][80][81]
Atta and Omari arrived early the next morning, at 5:40 am, at the Portland International Jetport, where they left their rental car in the parking lot and boarded a 6:00 am Colgan Air (US Airways Express) BE-1900C flight to Boston's Logan International Airport.[82] In Portland, Mohamed Atta was selected by the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS), which required his checked bags to undergo extra screening for explosives but involved no extra screening at the passenger security checkpoint.[83]
The connection between the two flights at Logan International Airport was within Terminal B, but the two gates were not connected within security. Passengers must leave the secured area, go outdoors, cross a covered roadway, and enter another building before going through security once again. There are two separate concourses in Terminal B; the south concourse is mainly used by US Airways and the north one is mostly used by American Airlines. It had been overlooked that there would still be a security screen to pass in Boston because of this distinct detail of the terminal's arrangement. At 6:45 am, while at the Boston airport, Atta took a call from Flight 175 hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi. This call was apparently to confirm that the attacks were ready to begin. Atta checked in for American Airlines Flight 11, passed through security again, and boarded the flight. Atta was seated in business class, in seat 8D. At 7:59 am, the plane departed from Boston, carrying 81 passengers.[82]
The hijacking began at 8:14 am-15 minutes after the flight departed-when beverage service would be starting. At this time, the pilots stopped responding to air traffic control, and the aircraft began deviating from the planned route.[6]
Because the flight from Portland to Boston had been delayed,[85] his bags did not make it onto Flight 11. Atta's bags were later recovered in Logan International Airport, and they contained airline uniforms, flight manuals, and other items. The luggage included a copy of Atta's will, written in Arabic, as well as a list of instructions, also in Arabic, such as "make an oath to die and renew your intentions", "you should feel complete tranquility, because the time between you and your marriage in heaven is very short", and "check your weapon before you leave and long before you leave. You must make your knife sharp and you must not discomfort your animal during the slaughter".[86]
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 3:02 pm GMT @Jonathan Revusky
As I've already shown, you asked me "what records?"WTF is your point? What was said is perfectly clear. I asked you what the strongest available evidence was for the official story and you said there were records blah blah and I asked what records are you talking about. OBVIOUSLY that meant what records are you talking about that constitute proof of the official story ?And then, among a few other equally worthless things, you said "His purchase of the tickets."
The ticket is among the records that support the official story.Well, you see, there you go again...Look, you are great, you are a champion shit eater and you are the reigning shit eater of the week. BUT... let me make something clear to you, champ....
This idea that Atta having a plane ticket constitutes proof of anything really is a breathtaking piece of bullshit. My hat is off to you. You are great. But still, you have to come up with some new bullshit to win this week's shit eater of the week award. You cannot use the same bullshit to win that won you last week's prize to win this week. You have to come up with some new bullshit.
I know you're up to it. You have the makings of a great champion.
Well, obviously the ticket disproves your CGI planes theory. I've never seen a ticket for a CGI plane. Have you?
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyWell, obviously the ticket disproves your CGI planes theory.Well, it's not my theory specifically. However, as a matter of fact, I consider it pretty likely that what we were shown on the TV on 9/11 was largely video fakery, including the collision of the planes with the buildings.Now, regarding Mohammed Atta's plane ticket (which I actually have never seen anyway) disproving the video fakery theory, the answer is... NO! Atta having a plane ticket does not prove or disprove anything in this regard.
I've done a lot of air travel, you know. The fact that you have a ticket to fly on a plane at a certain time does not absolutely mean that you are on the plane and it takes off at that time. Sometimes you go to the airport for a 8:00 flight and they tell you it's delayed an hour and then they tell you it's delayed another hour. Sometimes they even cancel the flight and a representative of the airline says they'll take care of you, putting you on a different flight to your destination. (They'll usually give you a meal voucher to eat some shitty food in the airport to compensate you... been there, done that.... )
Last year, I flew to Lithuania. I had a cheapo ticket from Barcelona to Vilnius. The flight was very delayed, and then an hour before landing, they said we weren't landing in Vilnius, but in Kaunas, and they put us all on a bus to go to Vilnius afterwards. True story. That kind of stuff happens all the time.
The idea that, because Mohammed Atta had a ticket (so they say) this proves that the video fo the plane hitting the tower is not fake -- this is another shit eater brain fart on your part for sure. Each plane has like millions of parts, and each part has a unique serial number apparently. So there ought to be quite hard proof about which specific aircraft collided with each building, no? Yet I don't think there is any such hard proof. Like, with the Pentagon, they never show you any recognizable plane parts. And the Shanksville crash site is ridiculous. There's really just nothing there!
So, anyway, just for the sake of argument, even if we did conclude finally that (a) a plane definitely hit the building, and (b) Mohammed Atta not only had a ticket but was also definitely on a plane, there still wouldn't be hard proof that the plane that hit the building is the one Mohammed Atta was on. If a plane did a hit a building, it could have been a completely different plane. And it still wouldn't be proof that Mohammed Atta hijacked any plane.
Now, I'm sorry to inform you that this latest idiocy from you cannot really qualify to win this week's shit eater of the week award. You see, it's just a variant on last week's idiocy. You say: "He purchased a ticket" when asked for evidence for the official story. Now, when you want to prove that the video of the plane hitting the tower is authentic, you say: "Atta purchased a ticket."
Okay, it is idiotic as well, but I think it's too derivative from the previous idiotic shit eater statement. I think you have to come up with some entirely new idiotic shit eater statement if you want to win this week's shit eater of the week prize.
That's my tentative judgment anyway. Others are free to weigh in on that... Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 3:25 pm GMT • 100 Words @Rurik Hey L.K.,
holocau$t is a monstrous Hoax?I think you're right about some of the trolls here, or so it seems to mebut this is the thing vis-a-vis the Holocau$t. I don't like calling the whole thing a hoax, because then it sort of looks like you're suggesting that NONE of any of that stuff happened, when I believe that it's clear that Jews (and many others) were systematically persecuted by the Nazis for being Jews, and not necessarily for any crimes they committed. Just like the Japanese in the US during the war. If they Japanese claimed there were gas chambers at the camps where they were held, then I think it would be fair and prudent to examine those claims for veracity, just as in the case of the Holocaust- where I don't think they had homicidal gas chambers for human extermination purposes. But that doesn't change the fact that many people perished in those camps, and many of them were innocent Jews, and if the Jews want to call that particular suffering a name to commemorate it, just like what the Japanese went through, then I don't see what's wrong with that per se.
That it has become this momentous blood libel against the German people in particular and all Gentiles in general is just another testament to the power of the lobby.
Controlling the world's banks and money supply and therefor all the media of consequence and all the major politicians (and publishing houses and courts and universities, etc..) has had an effect on things. The Eternal WarsⓊ being perhaps the most troublesome for the moment.
I wouldn't be inclined to question an assertion that there are many Jews in senior positions in investment banks but in the commercial banking sphere which I understand to have much more to do with the money supply than the entrepreneurial investment or merchant bankers do I am unaware of any great Jewish presence. Should I be? Who and where are they? I note that Goldman Sachs was only an investment bank until 2009.
• Replies: @Rurik Ok, I'll play..but in the commercial banking sphere which I understand to have much more to do with the money supply than the entrepreneurial investment or merchant bankers do I am unaware of any great Jewish presence. Should I be? Who and where are they?well wiz, you see the money supply is determined by the Fed, and that is owned and controlled by Jews (for Jews ; )there used to be a distinction between investment banks and the ones whose deposits were guaranteed by the FDIC. It was called Glass Steagall and they made that law after the Fed created the Great Depression. But then what happened is a couple of tenacious Jews (Rubin, Summers, et al) got Bubba to cancel out Glass and handed over the keys to our Treasury to the world's greediest swindlers.
here they are
http://propertypak.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/53-1.jpeg
I don't see Rubin in the pic but he was the main architect Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 3:51 pm GMT • 100 Words @Rurik
.*what are your qualifations to be taken seriously on the implications of the laws of physics and structural engineering*?I rest on my laurels wizwe've both participated on this site for some time now. In my case clearly and obviously in an attempt to get at the truth in all things. In your case, -to obfuscate the truth- about any issue you find inconvenient to the status quo- vis-a-vis the PTB. I believe this is obvious to everyone here who's been paying attention at all.
What you do wiz, is scan these pages for any signs of some ingenuousness, and then you proceed to reel them into your web, with innocent sounding queries, and then when they're engaged in an exchange with you, you drop a manure wagon of legerdemain on their heads, obviously finding amusement in your own 'cleverness and artfulness'. I suppose you imagine you're being cagey, but to the rest of us you just come across as a mean-spirited, sadistic little prick.
Now why, I ask you, would I ever feel the inclination so qualify myself to the likes of you, eh?
Unfofortunately your resting on your laurels means we've never seen them.
I could say that I was merely trying to draw out of you some positive reason for your readers to be persuaded by the authority of your assertions. But someone might have a case for calling me disingenuousness. After all I am 99 per cent sure that you have absolutely no qualifications either in knowledge or reasoning power to give any authority to your confident assertions about physics or structural engineering. So I now put THAT forward as my contribution to your readers' ability to assess your comments in the absence of your willingness to display your professional laurels.
• Replies: @RurikAfter all I am 99 per cent sure that you have absolutely no qualifications either in knowledge or reasoning power to give any authority ...you don't need a degree in engineering to see that building seven was brought down by controlled demolition. Duhand I have no such degree, but I am a successful businessman who builds things out of metal (and concrete among other materials), and I understand their properties intimately. - If I didn't, then the things I built wouldn't last and function properly and I wouldn't have managed to be successful enough that I would waste time bantering around inanities with someone like you on the Internet. ;) Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Rurik says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 4:58 pm GMT • 200 Words @Wizard of Oz I wouldn't be inclined to question an assertion that there are many Jews in senior positions in investment banks but in the commercial banking sphere which I understand to have much more to do with the money supply than the entrepreneurial investment or merchant bankers do I am unaware of any great Jewish presence. Should I be? Who and where are they? I note that Goldman Sachs was only an investment bank until 2009.
Ok, I'll play..
but in the commercial banking sphere which I understand to have much more to do with the money supply than the entrepreneurial investment or merchant bankers do I am unaware of any great Jewish presence. Should I be? Who and where are they?
well wiz, you see the money supply is determined by the Fed, and that is owned and controlled by Jews (for Jews ; )
there used to be a distinction between investment banks and the ones whose deposits were guaranteed by the FDIC. It was called Glass Steagall and they made that law after the Fed created the Great Depression. But then what happened is a couple of tenacious Jews (Rubin, Summers, et al) got Bubba to cancel out Glass and handed over the keys to our Treasury to the world's greediest swindlers.
here they are
http://propertypak.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/53-1.jpeg
I don't see Rubin in the pic but he was the main architect
• Replies: @Borisyou see the money supply is determined by the Fed, and that is owned and controlled by Jews (for Jews ; )The federal reserve is owned by Jews? The more you know... Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Rurik says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 5:05 pm GMT • 100 Words @Wizard of Oz Unfofortunately your resting on your laurels means we've never seen them.
I could say that I was merely trying to draw out of you some positive reason for your readers to be persuaded by the authority of your assertions. But someone might have a case for calling me disingenuousness. After all I am 99 per cent sure that you have absolutely no qualifications either in knowledge or reasoning power to give any authority to your confident assertions about physics or structural engineering. So I now put THAT forward as my contribution to your readers' ability to assess your comments in the absence of your willingness to display your professional laurels.
After all I am 99 per cent sure that you have absolutely no qualifications either in knowledge or reasoning power to give any authority
you don't need a degree in engineering to see that building seven was brought down by controlled demolition. Duh
and I have no such degree, but I am a successful businessman who builds things out of metal (and concrete among other materials), and I understand their properties intimately. – If I didn't, then the things I built wouldn't last and function properly and I wouldn't have managed to be successful enough that I would waste time bantering around inanities with someone like you on the Internet.
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz I almost pay you a compliment at #201 on The Saker's 9/11 thread :-) Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 5:13 pm GMT • 2,200 Words @KA "The creation of a peril usually starts with mysterious "sources" and unnamed officials who leak information, float trial balloons, and warn about the coming threat. Those sources reflect debates and discussions taking place within government. Their information is then augmented by colorful intelligence reports that finger exotic and conspiratorial terrorists and military advisers. Journalists then search for the named and other villains. The media end up finding corroboration from foreign sources who form an informal coalition with the sources in the U.S. government and help the press uncover further information substantiating the threat coming from the new bad guys.
A series of leaks, signals, and trial balloons is already beginning to shape U.S. agenda and policy. Congress is about to conduct several hearings on the global threat of Islamic fundamentalism.(14) The Bush administration has been trying to devise policies and establish new alliances to counter Iranian influence: building up Islamic but secular and pro-Western Turkey as a countervailing force in Central Asia, expanding U.S. commitments to Saudi Arabia, warning Sudan that it faces grave consequences as a result of its policies, and even shoring up a socialist military dictatorship in Algeria.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-177Printing a ticket and getting a Pasport ,if all that you have,then you are in the right league . Join those in NYT,WaPo,Hoover Institue and speak to George Will, Jim Hoagland , because following the collapse of Soviet,they have been looking for an enemy that they were finding raising its heads in Algeria, Iran, Sudan,and even in Malayasia back in 1992.
Conspiracy theory- is absolutely commonplace but rendered a bogus term . It is common and practiced by the government all the time . It is used by people who have agenda and find resistance to agenda . The moment they use false narrative,weird scenario, create unknown fear and offer solution abusing the authorities,abusing the institutional but previous records and inserting propangada preaching journalist ( CIA had more than 400 in 1975 per Bernstein) , they are engaging in conspiracy . It follows a script. So it has a theory to follow . It is a conspiracy theory.Printing a ticket and getting a Pasport ,if all that you have,then you are in the right league
You are falling for Jonny's schtick:
Here are some lengthy bits from Atta's Wiki page:
[MORE]
On April 11, 1996, Atta signed his last will and testament at the mosque, officially declaring his Muslim beliefs and giving 18 instructions regarding his burial.[9][40] This was the day that Israel attacked Lebanon in Operation Grapes of Wrath, which outraged Atta. Signing the will, "offering his life" was Atta's response.[41] The instructions in his last will and testament reflect both Sunni funeral practices, along with some more puritanical demands from Salafism, including asking people not "to weep and cry" or show emotion. The will was signed by el-Motassadeq and a second individual at the mosque.[42]
After leaving Plankontor in the summer of 1997, Atta disappeared again and did not return until 1998. Atta phoned his graduate advisor in 1998, after a year of doing nothing for his thesis, telling Machule that he had family problems at home and said, "Please understand, I don't want to talk about this."[43][44] At the winter break in 1997, Atta left and did not return to Hamburg for three months. He said that he went on pilgrimage to Mecca again, just 18 months after his first time. Terry McDermott explained in Perfect Soldiers that it is highly unusual and unlikely for someone, especially a young student, to go on Hajj again that soon. Also, three months is an exceptionally long time, much longer than what Hajj requires. When Atta returned, he claimed that his passport was lost and got a new one, which is a common tactic to erase evidence of travel to places such as Afghanistan.[45] When he returned in spring 1998, after disappearing for several months, he had grown a thick long beard, and "seemed more serious and aloof" to those who knew him.[28]
In mid-1998, Atta worked alongside Shehhi, bin al-Shibh, and Belfas, at a warehouse, packing computers in crates for shipping.[46] The Hamburg group did not stay in Wilhelmsburg for long. The next winter, they moved into an apartment at Marienstrasse 54 in the borough of Harburg, near the Technical University of Hamburg,[47] at which they enrolled. It was here that the Hamburg cell developed and acted more as a group.[48] They met three or four times a week to discuss their anti-American feelings and to plot possible attacks. Many al-Qaeda members lived in this apartment at various times, including hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi, Zakariya Essabar, and others.
In late 1999, Atta, Shehhi, Jarrah, Bahaji, and bin al-Shibh decided to travel to Chechnya to fight against the Russians, but were convinced by Khalid al-Masri and Mohamedou Ould Slahi at the last minute to change their plans. They instead traveled to Afghanistan over a two-week period in late November. On November 29, 1999, Mohamed Atta boarded Turkish Airlines Flight TK1662 from Hamburg to Istanbul, where he changed to flight TK1056 to Karachi, Pakistan.[3] After they arrived, they were selected by Al Qaeda leader Abu Hafs as suitable candidates for the "planes operation" plot. They were all well-educated, had experience of living in western society, along with some English skills, and would be able to obtain visas.[41] Even before bin al-Shibh had arrived, Atta, Shehhi, and Jarrah were sent to the House of Ghamdi near bin Laden's home in Kandahar, where he was waiting to meet them. Bin Laden asked them to pledge loyalty and commit to suicide missions, which Atta and the other three Hamburg men all accepted. Bin Laden sent them to see Mohammed Atef to get a general overview of the mission, and then they were sent to Karachi to see Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to go over specifics.[49]
German investigators said that they had evidence that Mohamed Atta trained at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan from late 1999 to early 2000. The timing of the Afghanistan training was outlined on August 23, 2002 by a senior investigator. The investigator, Klaus Ulrich Kersten, director of Germany's federal anticrime agency, the Bundeskriminalamt, provided the first official confirmation that Atta and two other pilots had been in Afghanistan and the first dates of the training. Kersten said in an interview at the agency's headquarters in Wiesbaden, Germany, that Atta was in Afghanistan from late 1999 until early 2000,[50][51] and that there was evidence that Atta met with Osama bin Laden there.[52]
A video surfaced in October 2006 which showed bin Laden at Tarnak Farms on January 8, 2000, and also showed Atta together with Ziad Jarrah reading their wills ten days later on January 18, 2000.[3][53]
According to official reports, Atta arrived on June 3, 2000, at Newark International Airport from Prague. That month, Atta and Shehhi stayed in hotels and rented rooms in New York City on a short-term basis. They continued to inquire about flight schools and personally visited some, including Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma, which they visited on July 3, 2000. Days later, Shehhi and Atta ended up in Venice, Florida (On the Gulf Coast of South Florida).[15] Atta and Shehhi established accounts at SunTrust Bank and received wire transfers from Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew in the United Arab Emirates.[15][57] On July 6, 2000, Atta and Shehhi enrolled at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida, where they entered the Accelerated Pilot Program, while Ziad Jarrah took flight training from a different school also based in Venice.[15] When Atta and Shehhi arrived in Florida, they initially stayed with Huffman's bookkeeper and his wife in a spare room of their house. After a week, they were asked to leave because they were rude. Atta and Shehhi then moved into a small house nearby in Nokomis where they stayed for six months.[63][64]
Atta's flight record from HuffmanAtta began flight training on July 7, 2000, and continued training nearly every day. By the end of July, both Atta and Shehhi did solo flights. Atta earned his private pilot certificate in September, and then he and Shehhi decided to switch flight schools. Both enrolled at Jones Aviation in Sarasota and took training there for a brief time. They had problems following instructions and were both very upset when they failed their Stage 1 exam at Jones Aviation. They inquired about multi-engine planes and told the instructor that "they wanted to move quickly, because they had a job waiting in their country upon completion of their training in the U.S." In mid-October, Atta and Shehhi returned to Huffman Aviation to continue training. In November 2000, Atta earned his instrument rating, and then a commercial pilot's license in December from the Federal Aviation Administration.[15]
Atta continued with flight training, including solo flights and simulator time. On December 22, Atta and Shehhi applied to Eagle International for large jet and simulator training for McDonnell Douglas DC-9 and Boeing 737–300 models. On December 26, Atta and Shehhi needed a tow for their rented Piper Cherokee on a taxiway of Miami International Airport after the engine shut down. On December 29 and 30, Atta and Marwan went to the Opa-locka Airport where they practiced on a Boeing 727 simulator, and they obtained Boeing 767 simulator training from Pan Am International on December 31. Atta purchased flight deck videos for Boeing 747–200, Boeing 757–200, Airbus A320 and Boeing 767-300ER models via mail-order from Sporty's Pilot Shop in Batavia, Ohio in November and December 2000.[15]
On July 22, 2001, Mohamed Atta rented a Mitsubishi Galant from Alamo Rent A Car, putting 3,836 miles on the vehicle before returning it on July 26. On July 25, Atta dropped Ziad Jarrah off at Miami International Airport for a flight back to Germany. On July 26, Atta traveled via Continental Airlines to Newark, New Jersey, checked into the Kings Inn Hotel in Wayne, New Jersey and stayed there until July 30 when he took a flight from Newark back to Fort Lauderdale.[15]
On August 4, Atta is believed to have been at Orlando International Airport waiting to pick up suspected "20th Hijacker" Mohammed al-Qahtani from Dubai, who ended up being held by immigration as "suspicious." Atta was believed to have used a payphone at the airport to phone a number "linked to al-Qaeda" after Qahtani was denied entry.[75]
On August 6, Atta and Shehhi rented a 1995 white, four door Ford Escort from Warrick's Rent-A-Car, which was returned on August 13. On August 6, Atta booked a flight on Spirit Airlines from Fort Lauderdale to Newark, leaving on August 7 and returning on August 9. The reservation was not used and canceled on August 9 with the reason "Family Medical Emergency". Instead, he went to Central Office & Travel in Pompano Beach to purchase a ticket for a flight to Newark, leaving on the evening of August 7 and schedule to return in the evening on August 9. Atta did not take the return flight. On August 7, Atta checked into the Wayne Inn in Wayne, New Jersey and checked out on August 9. The same day, he booked a one-way first class ticket via the Internet on America West Flight 244 from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport to Las Vegas.[15] Atta traveled twice to Las Vegas on "surveillance flights" rehearsing how the 9/11 attacks would be carried out. Other hijackers traveled to Las Vegas at different times in the summer of 2001.
Throughout the summer, Atta met with Nawaf al-Hazmi to discuss the status of the operation on a monthly basis.[76]
On August 23, Atta's driver license was revoked in absentia after he failed to show up in traffic court to answer the earlier citation for driving without a license.[77] On the same day, Israeli Mossad reportedly gave his name to the CIA as part of a list of 19 names they said were planning an attack in the near future. Only four of the names are known for certain, the others being Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.[78]
On September 10, 2001, Atta picked up Omari from the Milner Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts, and the two drove their rented Nissan Altima to a Comfort Inn in South Portland, Maine; on the way they were seen getting gasoline at an Exxon Gas Station. They arrived at 5:43 pm and spent the night in room 232. While in South Portland, they were seen making two ATM withdrawals, and stopping at Wal-Mart. FBI also reported that "two middle-eastern men" were seen in the parking lot of a Pizza Hut, where Atta is known to have eaten that day.[79][80][81]
Atta and Omari arrived early the next morning, at 5:40 am, at the Portland International Jetport, where they left their rental car in the parking lot and boarded a 6:00 am Colgan Air (US Airways Express) BE-1900C flight to Boston's Logan International Airport.[82] In Portland, Mohamed Atta was selected by the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS), which required his checked bags to undergo extra screening for explosives but involved no extra screening at the passenger security checkpoint.[83]
The connection between the two flights at Logan International Airport was within Terminal B, but the two gates were not connected within security. Passengers must leave the secured area, go outdoors, cross a covered roadway, and enter another building before going through security once again. There are two separate concourses in Terminal B; the south concourse is mainly used by US Airways and the north one is mostly used by American Airlines. It had been overlooked that there would still be a security screen to pass in Boston because of this distinct detail of the terminal's arrangement. At 6:45 am, while at the Boston airport, Atta took a call from Flight 175 hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi. This call was apparently to confirm that the attacks were ready to begin. Atta checked in for American Airlines Flight 11, passed through security again, and boarded the flight. Atta was seated in business class, in seat 8D. At 7:59 am, the plane departed from Boston, carrying 81 passengers.[82]
The hijacking began at 8:14 am-15 minutes after the flight departed-when beverage service would be starting. At this time, the pilots stopped responding to air traffic control, and the aircraft began deviating from the planned route.[6]
Because the flight from Portland to Boston had been delayed,[85] his bags did not make it onto Flight 11. Atta's bags were later recovered in Logan International Airport, and they contained airline uniforms, flight manuals, and other items. The luggage included a copy of Atta's will, written in Arabic, as well as a list of instructions, also in Arabic, such as "make an oath to die and renew your intentions", "you should feel complete tranquility, because the time between you and your marriage in heaven is very short", and "check your weapon before you leave and long before you leave. You must make your knife sharp and you must not discomfort your animal during the slaughter".[86]
A bit more than a ticket, right? You can follow the sources as you see fit. From what I've seen, the evidence is pretty good. I always keep an open mind to new evidence, though. Keep in mind that saying "But that could have been faked!" is not evidence. • Replies: @Jonathan Revusky
Here are some lengthy bits from Atta's Wiki page:I'm sorry. I don't think this is good enough to win this week's shit eater of the week. It's very uninspired, this long copy-paste from the wikipedia page.I mean, the wikipedia page is just a summary of the official story. So you're basically just offering a copy-paste of the official story as proof of the official story. This is of course absolutely typical shit eater behavior, but to win shit eater of the week, it has to be standout stuff.
Like, when I asked you what the proof of the official story and you said that Atta had purchased a ticket, that was champion class shit eater material. This long copy-paste.... Mehh..... Nah....
You'll really have to do better.
From what I've seen, the evidence is pretty good.What evidence are you referring to specifically? I have no idea what you're referring to... Let's just grab something more or less randomly from all the verbiage you copy-pasted:On August 6, Atta and Shehhi rented a 1995 white, four door Ford Escort from Warrick's Rent-A-Car, which was returned on August 13.I mean, look at the detail. It is very detailed evidence. He rented a 1995 Ford Escort. It wasn't a 1994 Ford Escort. And it wasn't a 1996 Ford Escort.Rented not from Hertz or Avis, but from "Warrick's Rent-a-car". WTF? Sounds like the people behind this mighta been on a tight budget... rented the cheapest shitbox car, a Ford Escort, from the most cheap-ass rental company there was...
But, okay, this is all nitpicking. The guy was a bona fide terrorist.
" He rented a 1995 Ford Escort, Godammit!!! WHAT MORE PROOF DO YOU CRAZY CONSPIRACY THEORISTS NEED!!!!???? " Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 5:31 pm GMT • 600 Words @Boris Well, obviously the ticket disproves your CGI planes theory. I've never seen a ticket for a CGI plane. Have you?
Well, obviously the ticket disproves your CGI planes theory.
Well, it's not my theory specifically. However, as a matter of fact, I consider it pretty likely that what we were shown on the TV on 9/11 was largely video fakery, including the collision of the planes with the buildings.
Now, regarding Mohammed Atta's plane ticket (which I actually have never seen anyway) disproving the video fakery theory, the answer is NO! Atta having a plane ticket does not prove or disprove anything in this regard.
I've done a lot of air travel, you know. The fact that you have a ticket to fly on a plane at a certain time does not absolutely mean that you are on the plane and it takes off at that time. Sometimes you go to the airport for a 8:00 flight and they tell you it's delayed an hour and then they tell you it's delayed another hour. Sometimes they even cancel the flight and a representative of the airline says they'll take care of you, putting you on a different flight to your destination. (They'll usually give you a meal voucher to eat some shitty food in the airport to compensate you been there, done that . )
Last year, I flew to Lithuania. I had a cheapo ticket from Barcelona to Vilnius. The flight was very delayed, and then an hour before landing, they said we weren't landing in Vilnius, but in Kaunas, and they put us all on a bus to go to Vilnius afterwards. True story. That kind of stuff happens all the time.
The idea that, because Mohammed Atta had a ticket (so they say) this proves that the video fo the plane hitting the tower is not fake - this is another shit eater brain fart on your part for sure. Each plane has like millions of parts, and each part has a unique serial number apparently. So there ought to be quite hard proof about which specific aircraft collided with each building, no? Yet I don't think there is any such hard proof. Like, with the Pentagon, they never show you any recognizable plane parts. And the Shanksville crash site is ridiculous. There's really just nothing there!
So, anyway, just for the sake of argument, even if we did conclude finally that (a) a plane definitely hit the building, and (b) Mohammed Atta not only had a ticket but was also definitely on a plane, there still wouldn't be hard proof that the plane that hit the building is the one Mohammed Atta was on. If a plane did a hit a building, it could have been a completely different plane. And it still wouldn't be proof that Mohammed Atta hijacked any plane.
Now, I'm sorry to inform you that this latest idiocy from you cannot really qualify to win this week's shit eater of the week award. You see, it's just a variant on last week's idiocy. You say: "He purchased a ticket" when asked for evidence for the official story. Now, when you want to prove that the video of the plane hitting the tower is authentic, you say: "Atta purchased a ticket."
Okay, it is idiotic as well, but I think it's too derivative from the previous idiotic shit eater statement. I think you have to come up with some entirely new idiotic shit eater statement if you want to win this week's shit eater of the week prize.
That's my tentative judgment anyway. Others are free to weigh in on that
• Replies: @BorisHowever, as a matter of fact, I consider it pretty likely that what we were shown on the TV on 9/11 was largely video fakeryYeah, well that's completely stupid and contradicted by hundreds of witnesses. Is there any stupid conspiracy you DON'T believe? Let's try to keep the lengths of these posts manageable. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- utu says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 5:34 pm GMT @Rurik OK, I checked out the first of your links, (and admittedly from the obviously biased Wikipedia)
this is the kind of thing I found out
The Polish Army surrendered nearly 140,000 troops and during the siege around 18,000 civilians of Warsaw perished. As a result of the air bombardments 10% of the city's buildings were entirely destroyed and further 40% were heavily damaged.[1]:78now this is what I said:
"anyone who burns women and children alive for the fun of it and out of sheer tribal hatred, rather than as a military and existential imperative, is a monster in my book"
so what you have was strategic bombing of a city (a war crime in my book but then I never said the Nazis were boy scouts) for a clear military objective. That's not what I'm talking about.
Imagine if Germany had already defeated the Poles, and Poland was on the brink, and had effectively lost the war, and Warsaw was turned into a refugee city with tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of refugees huddling there as their last sanctuary. There would have been no military age men there, as they would have all died in the war by now, and the city was overflowing with women and children (and POW camps and such). OK? And then imagine the kind of people that would plan, not just an attack in order to break the moral of the enemy, (it had already long been broken), but rather as a calculated act of sheer inhuman cruelty, intended to burn alive every single old man, woman and child until there was nothing left of either the people or the (beautiful, ancient Baroque architecture and art of the) city. It was a true holocaust, intended as an act of sadistic vengeance upon harmless people to sate an insatiable need to inflict unimaginable suffering and cruelty for cruelties' sake. Just like Waco. And for the same reason, - they defied the power of their 'masters', and for that, they would be made to pay.
Did the Nazis ever do anything like that? Did they ever deliberately burn hundreds of thousands of civilians alive for no military purpose whatsoever? But just to be as cruel as possible?
I guess that's the word I'm really thinking of there. Cruelty. Because as that quote you posted showed, the Nazis at their worst were trying to murder people as humanely as possible, whereas the allies wanted to inflict the most suffering on the most innocent and vulnerable women and children as possible. They wanted to burn women and children alive who were no threat and at the virtual end of the war. What kind of people do something like that?
Reading the Old Testament, I get an idea of where they get their demonic hate from.
One on my mantras Incitatus, is that a lot of the raw hate in the world today (and certainly yesterday) comes from religious ignorance and a cartoon version of the world that says the followers of this religion are pure good, and the followers of that religion are pure evil. I sort of wonder what things would be like if we'd finally lay to rest these pernicious and stone age codified ignorance down, and joined the 21st century as rational actors...
Very good comment.
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- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 5:47 pm GMT • 300 Words @Boris
Printing a ticket and getting a Pasport ,if all that you have,then you are in the right leagueYou are falling for Jonny's schtick:Here are some lengthy bits from Atta's Wiki page:
A bit more than a ticket, right? You can follow the sources as you see fit. From what I've seen, the evidence is pretty good. I always keep an open mind to new evidence, though. Keep in mind that saying "But that could have been faked!" is not evidence.
On April 11, 1996, Atta signed his last will and testament at the mosque, officially declaring his Muslim beliefs and giving 18 instructions regarding his burial.[9][40] This was the day that Israel attacked Lebanon in Operation Grapes of Wrath, which outraged Atta. Signing the will, "offering his life" was Atta's response.[41] The instructions in his last will and testament reflect both Sunni funeral practices, along with some more puritanical demands from Salafism, including asking people not "to weep and cry" or show emotion. The will was signed by el-Motassadeq and a second individual at the mosque.[42]After leaving Plankontor in the summer of 1997, Atta disappeared again and did not return until 1998. Atta phoned his graduate advisor in 1998, after a year of doing nothing for his thesis, telling Machule that he had family problems at home and said, "Please understand, I don't want to talk about this."[43][44] At the winter break in 1997, Atta left and did not return to Hamburg for three months. He said that he went on pilgrimage to Mecca again, just 18 months after his first time. Terry McDermott explained in Perfect Soldiers that it is highly unusual and unlikely for someone, especially a young student, to go on Hajj again that soon. Also, three months is an exceptionally long time, much longer than what Hajj requires. When Atta returned, he claimed that his passport was lost and got a new one, which is a common tactic to erase evidence of travel to places such as Afghanistan.[45] When he returned in spring 1998, after disappearing for several months, he had grown a thick long beard, and "seemed more serious and aloof" to those who knew him.[28]
In mid-1998, Atta worked alongside Shehhi, bin al-Shibh, and Belfas, at a warehouse, packing computers in crates for shipping.[46] The Hamburg group did not stay in Wilhelmsburg for long. The next winter, they moved into an apartment at Marienstrasse 54 in the borough of Harburg, near the Technical University of Hamburg,[47] at which they enrolled. It was here that the Hamburg cell developed and acted more as a group.[48] They met three or four times a week to discuss their anti-American feelings and to plot possible attacks. Many al-Qaeda members lived in this apartment at various times, including hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi, Zakariya Essabar, and others.
In late 1999, Atta, Shehhi, Jarrah, Bahaji, and bin al-Shibh decided to travel to Chechnya to fight against the Russians, but were convinced by Khalid al-Masri and Mohamedou Ould Slahi at the last minute to change their plans. They instead traveled to Afghanistan over a two-week period in late November. On November 29, 1999, Mohamed Atta boarded Turkish Airlines Flight TK1662 from Hamburg to Istanbul, where he changed to flight TK1056 to Karachi, Pakistan.[3] After they arrived, they were selected by Al Qaeda leader Abu Hafs as suitable candidates for the "planes operation" plot. They were all well-educated, had experience of living in western society, along with some English skills, and would be able to obtain visas.[41] Even before bin al-Shibh had arrived, Atta, Shehhi, and Jarrah were sent to the House of Ghamdi near bin Laden's home in Kandahar, where he was waiting to meet them. Bin Laden asked them to pledge loyalty and commit to suicide missions, which Atta and the other three Hamburg men all accepted. Bin Laden sent them to see Mohammed Atef to get a general overview of the mission, and then they were sent to Karachi to see Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to go over specifics.[49]
German investigators said that they had evidence that Mohamed Atta trained at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan from late 1999 to early 2000. The timing of the Afghanistan training was outlined on August 23, 2002 by a senior investigator. The investigator, Klaus Ulrich Kersten, director of Germany's federal anticrime agency, the Bundeskriminalamt, provided the first official confirmation that Atta and two other pilots had been in Afghanistan and the first dates of the training. Kersten said in an interview at the agency's headquarters in Wiesbaden, Germany, that Atta was in Afghanistan from late 1999 until early 2000,[50][51] and that there was evidence that Atta met with Osama bin Laden there.[52]
A video surfaced in October 2006 which showed bin Laden at Tarnak Farms on January 8, 2000, and also showed Atta together with Ziad Jarrah reading their wills ten days later on January 18, 2000.[3][53]
According to official reports, Atta arrived on June 3, 2000, at Newark International Airport from Prague. That month, Atta and Shehhi stayed in hotels and rented rooms in New York City on a short-term basis. They continued to inquire about flight schools and personally visited some, including Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma, which they visited on July 3, 2000. Days later, Shehhi and Atta ended up in Venice, Florida (On the Gulf Coast of South Florida).[15] Atta and Shehhi established accounts at SunTrust Bank and received wire transfers from Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew in the United Arab Emirates.[15][57] On July 6, 2000, Atta and Shehhi enrolled at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida, where they entered the Accelerated Pilot Program, while Ziad Jarrah took flight training from a different school also based in Venice.[15] When Atta and Shehhi arrived in Florida, they initially stayed with Huffman's bookkeeper and his wife in a spare room of their house. After a week, they were asked to leave because they were rude. Atta and Shehhi then moved into a small house nearby in Nokomis where they stayed for six months.[63][64]
Atta's flight record from HuffmanAtta began flight training on July 7, 2000, and continued training nearly every day. By the end of July, both Atta and Shehhi did solo flights. Atta earned his private pilot certificate in September, and then he and Shehhi decided to switch flight schools. Both enrolled at Jones Aviation in Sarasota and took training there for a brief time. They had problems following instructions and were both very upset when they failed their Stage 1 exam at Jones Aviation. They inquired about multi-engine planes and told the instructor that "they wanted to move quickly, because they had a job waiting in their country upon completion of their training in the U.S." In mid-October, Atta and Shehhi returned to Huffman Aviation to continue training. In November 2000, Atta earned his instrument rating, and then a commercial pilot's license in December from the Federal Aviation Administration.[15]
Atta continued with flight training, including solo flights and simulator time. On December 22, Atta and Shehhi applied to Eagle International for large jet and simulator training for McDonnell Douglas DC-9 and Boeing 737–300 models. On December 26, Atta and Shehhi needed a tow for their rented Piper Cherokee on a taxiway of Miami International Airport after the engine shut down. On December 29 and 30, Atta and Marwan went to the Opa-locka Airport where they practiced on a Boeing 727 simulator, and they obtained Boeing 767 simulator training from Pan Am International on December 31. Atta purchased flight deck videos for Boeing 747–200, Boeing 757–200, Airbus A320 and Boeing 767-300ER models via mail-order from Sporty's Pilot Shop in Batavia, Ohio in November and December 2000.[15]
On July 22, 2001, Mohamed Atta rented a Mitsubishi Galant from Alamo Rent A Car, putting 3,836 miles on the vehicle before returning it on July 26. On July 25, Atta dropped Ziad Jarrah off at Miami International Airport for a flight back to Germany. On July 26, Atta traveled via Continental Airlines to Newark, New Jersey, checked into the Kings Inn Hotel in Wayne, New Jersey and stayed there until July 30 when he took a flight from Newark back to Fort Lauderdale.[15]
On August 4, Atta is believed to have been at Orlando International Airport waiting to pick up suspected "20th Hijacker" Mohammed al-Qahtani from Dubai, who ended up being held by immigration as "suspicious." Atta was believed to have used a payphone at the airport to phone a number "linked to al-Qaeda" after Qahtani was denied entry.[75]
On August 6, Atta and Shehhi rented a 1995 white, four door Ford Escort from Warrick's Rent-A-Car, which was returned on August 13. On August 6, Atta booked a flight on Spirit Airlines from Fort Lauderdale to Newark, leaving on August 7 and returning on August 9. The reservation was not used and canceled on August 9 with the reason "Family Medical Emergency". Instead, he went to Central Office & Travel in Pompano Beach to purchase a ticket for a flight to Newark, leaving on the evening of August 7 and schedule to return in the evening on August 9. Atta did not take the return flight. On August 7, Atta checked into the Wayne Inn in Wayne, New Jersey and checked out on August 9. The same day, he booked a one-way first class ticket via the Internet on America West Flight 244 from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport to Las Vegas.[15] Atta traveled twice to Las Vegas on "surveillance flights" rehearsing how the 9/11 attacks would be carried out. Other hijackers traveled to Las Vegas at different times in the summer of 2001.
Throughout the summer, Atta met with Nawaf al-Hazmi to discuss the status of the operation on a monthly basis.[76]
On August 23, Atta's driver license was revoked in absentia after he failed to show up in traffic court to answer the earlier citation for driving without a license.[77] On the same day, Israeli Mossad reportedly gave his name to the CIA as part of a list of 19 names they said were planning an attack in the near future. Only four of the names are known for certain, the others being Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.[78]
On September 10, 2001, Atta picked up Omari from the Milner Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts, and the two drove their rented Nissan Altima to a Comfort Inn in South Portland, Maine; on the way they were seen getting gasoline at an Exxon Gas Station. They arrived at 5:43 pm and spent the night in room 232. While in South Portland, they were seen making two ATM withdrawals, and stopping at Wal-Mart. FBI also reported that "two middle-eastern men" were seen in the parking lot of a Pizza Hut, where Atta is known to have eaten that day.[79][80][81]
Atta and Omari arrived early the next morning, at 5:40 am, at the Portland International Jetport, where they left their rental car in the parking lot and boarded a 6:00 am Colgan Air (US Airways Express) BE-1900C flight to Boston's Logan International Airport.[82] In Portland, Mohamed Atta was selected by the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS), which required his checked bags to undergo extra screening for explosives but involved no extra screening at the passenger security checkpoint.[83]
The connection between the two flights at Logan International Airport was within Terminal B, but the two gates were not connected within security. Passengers must leave the secured area, go outdoors, cross a covered roadway, and enter another building before going through security once again. There are two separate concourses in Terminal B; the south concourse is mainly used by US Airways and the north one is mostly used by American Airlines. It had been overlooked that there would still be a security screen to pass in Boston because of this distinct detail of the terminal's arrangement. At 6:45 am, while at the Boston airport, Atta took a call from Flight 175 hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi. This call was apparently to confirm that the attacks were ready to begin. Atta checked in for American Airlines Flight 11, passed through security again, and boarded the flight. Atta was seated in business class, in seat 8D. At 7:59 am, the plane departed from Boston, carrying 81 passengers.[82]
The hijacking began at 8:14 am-15 minutes after the flight departed-when beverage service would be starting. At this time, the pilots stopped responding to air traffic control, and the aircraft began deviating from the planned route.[6]
Because the flight from Portland to Boston had been delayed,[85] his bags did not make it onto Flight 11. Atta's bags were later recovered in Logan International Airport, and they contained airline uniforms, flight manuals, and other items. The luggage included a copy of Atta's will, written in Arabic, as well as a list of instructions, also in Arabic, such as "make an oath to die and renew your intentions", "you should feel complete tranquility, because the time between you and your marriage in heaven is very short", and "check your weapon before you leave and long before you leave. You must make your knife sharp and you must not discomfort your animal during the slaughter".[86]
Here are some lengthy bits from Atta's Wiki page:
I'm sorry. I don't think this is good enough to win this week's shit eater of the week. It's very uninspired, this long copy-paste from the wikipedia page.
I mean, the wikipedia page is just a summary of the official story. So you're basically just offering a copy-paste of the official story as proof of the official story. This is of course absolutely typical shit eater behavior, but to win shit eater of the week, it has to be standout stuff.
Like, when I asked you what the proof of the official story and you said that Atta had purchased a ticket, that was champion class shit eater material. This long copy-paste . Mehh .. Nah .
You'll really have to do better.
From what I've seen, the evidence is pretty good.
What evidence are you referring to specifically? I have no idea what you're referring to Let's just grab something more or less randomly from all the verbiage you copy-pasted:
On August 6, Atta and Shehhi rented a 1995 white, four door Ford Escort from Warrick's Rent-A-Car, which was returned on August 13.
I mean, look at the detail. It is very detailed evidence. He rented a 1995 Ford Escort. It wasn't a 1994 Ford Escort. And it wasn't a 1996 Ford Escort.
Rented not from Hertz or Avis, but from "Warrick's Rent-a-car". WTF? Sounds like the people behind this mighta been on a tight budget rented the cheapest shitbox car, a Ford Escort, from the most cheap-ass rental company there was
But, okay, this is all nitpicking. The guy was a bona fide terrorist.
" He rented a 1995 Ford Escort, Godammit!!! WHAT MORE PROOF DO YOU CRAZY CONSPIRACY THEORISTS NEED!!!!???? "
• Replies: @Boris"He rented a 1995 Ford Escort, Godammit!!! WHAT MORE PROOF DO YOU CRAZY CONSPIRACY THEORISTS NEED!!!!????"You think the planes were CGI. Your opinion is worthless. I shall now only respond to you with dismissive YouTube clips.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN9LdTkR85Q Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- SolontoCroesus says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 6:03 pm GMT • 200 Words @Rurik OK, I checked out the first of your links, (and admittedly from the obviously biased Wikipedia)
this is the kind of thing I found out
The Polish Army surrendered nearly 140,000 troops and during the siege around 18,000 civilians of Warsaw perished. As a result of the air bombardments 10% of the city's buildings were entirely destroyed and further 40% were heavily damaged.[1]:78now this is what I said:
"anyone who burns women and children alive for the fun of it and out of sheer tribal hatred, rather than as a military and existential imperative, is a monster in my book"
so what you have was strategic bombing of a city (a war crime in my book but then I never said the Nazis were boy scouts) for a clear military objective. That's not what I'm talking about.
Imagine if Germany had already defeated the Poles, and Poland was on the brink, and had effectively lost the war, and Warsaw was turned into a refugee city with tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of refugees huddling there as their last sanctuary. There would have been no military age men there, as they would have all died in the war by now, and the city was overflowing with women and children (and POW camps and such). OK? And then imagine the kind of people that would plan, not just an attack in order to break the moral of the enemy, (it had already long been broken), but rather as a calculated act of sheer inhuman cruelty, intended to burn alive every single old man, woman and child until there was nothing left of either the people or the (beautiful, ancient Baroque architecture and art of the) city. It was a true holocaust, intended as an act of sadistic vengeance upon harmless people to sate an insatiable need to inflict unimaginable suffering and cruelty for cruelties' sake. Just like Waco. And for the same reason, - they defied the power of their 'masters', and for that, they would be made to pay.
Did the Nazis ever do anything like that? Did they ever deliberately burn hundreds of thousands of civilians alive for no military purpose whatsoever? But just to be as cruel as possible?
I guess that's the word I'm really thinking of there. Cruelty. Because as that quote you posted showed, the Nazis at their worst were trying to murder people as humanely as possible, whereas the allies wanted to inflict the most suffering on the most innocent and vulnerable women and children as possible. They wanted to burn women and children alive who were no threat and at the virtual end of the war. What kind of people do something like that?
Reading the Old Testament, I get an idea of where they get their demonic hate from.
One on my mantras Incitatus, is that a lot of the raw hate in the world today (and certainly yesterday) comes from religious ignorance and a cartoon version of the world that says the followers of this religion are pure good, and the followers of that religion are pure evil. I sort of wonder what things would be like if we'd finally lay to rest these pernicious and stone age codified ignorance down, and joined the 21st century as rational actors...
a lot of the raw hate in the world today (and certainly yesterday) comes from religious ignorance and a cartoon version of the world that says the followers of this religion are pure good, and the followers of that religion are pure evil. I sort of wonder what things would be like if we'd finally lay to rest these pernicious and stone age codified ignorance down, and joined the 21st century as rational actors
http://rappnews.com/2016/05/19/as-the-world-turns-and-the-stones-speak/148387/
John Henry's "Arguing with God." . . . reenacts Old Testament stories to confront uncomfortable truths about human nature and explores the psychology of how empires are built by "Chosen People," "good guys" who believe they have the moral right to use military force against "bad guys." Produced in the dramatic outdoor setting of hand-laid stone, which Henry built himself, "Arguing with God" depicts the inevitable conflict between power and justice.
The cast is 50-actor strong, with many of the leading roles played by [Henry's neighbors and friends]. .
(Max Blumenthal played Adam, aka "guys just wanna have fun" in a recent presentation of John Henry's play.)
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- American Pravda: How the CIA Invented "Conspiracy Theories" (MUST-READ) :: News From Underground says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 6:04 pm GMT
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- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 6:36 pm GMT @Rurik Ok, I'll play..
but in the commercial banking sphere which I understand to have much more to do with the money supply than the entrepreneurial investment or merchant bankers do I am unaware of any great Jewish presence. Should I be? Who and where are they?well wiz, you see the money supply is determined by the Fed, and that is owned and controlled by Jews (for Jews ; )there used to be a distinction between investment banks and the ones whose deposits were guaranteed by the FDIC. It was called Glass Steagall and they made that law after the Fed created the Great Depression. But then what happened is a couple of tenacious Jews (Rubin, Summers, et al) got Bubba to cancel out Glass and handed over the keys to our Treasury to the world's greediest swindlers.
here they are
http://propertypak.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/53-1.jpeg
I don't see Rubin in the pic but he was the main architect
you see the money supply is determined by the Fed, and that is owned and controlled by Jews (for Jews ; )
The federal reserve is owned by Jews? The more you know
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- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 6:53 pm GMT • 100 Words @Jonathan Revusky
Well, obviously the ticket disproves your CGI planes theory.Well, it's not my theory specifically. However, as a matter of fact, I consider it pretty likely that what we were shown on the TV on 9/11 was largely video fakery, including the collision of the planes with the buildings.Now, regarding Mohammed Atta's plane ticket (which I actually have never seen anyway) disproving the video fakery theory, the answer is... NO! Atta having a plane ticket does not prove or disprove anything in this regard.
I've done a lot of air travel, you know. The fact that you have a ticket to fly on a plane at a certain time does not absolutely mean that you are on the plane and it takes off at that time. Sometimes you go to the airport for a 8:00 flight and they tell you it's delayed an hour and then they tell you it's delayed another hour. Sometimes they even cancel the flight and a representative of the airline says they'll take care of you, putting you on a different flight to your destination. (They'll usually give you a meal voucher to eat some shitty food in the airport to compensate you... been there, done that.... )
Last year, I flew to Lithuania. I had a cheapo ticket from Barcelona to Vilnius. The flight was very delayed, and then an hour before landing, they said we weren't landing in Vilnius, but in Kaunas, and they put us all on a bus to go to Vilnius afterwards. True story. That kind of stuff happens all the time.
The idea that, because Mohammed Atta had a ticket (so they say) this proves that the video fo the plane hitting the tower is not fake -- this is another shit eater brain fart on your part for sure. Each plane has like millions of parts, and each part has a unique serial number apparently. So there ought to be quite hard proof about which specific aircraft collided with each building, no? Yet I don't think there is any such hard proof. Like, with the Pentagon, they never show you any recognizable plane parts. And the Shanksville crash site is ridiculous. There's really just nothing there!
So, anyway, just for the sake of argument, even if we did conclude finally that (a) a plane definitely hit the building, and (b) Mohammed Atta not only had a ticket but was also definitely on a plane, there still wouldn't be hard proof that the plane that hit the building is the one Mohammed Atta was on. If a plane did a hit a building, it could have been a completely different plane. And it still wouldn't be proof that Mohammed Atta hijacked any plane.
Now, I'm sorry to inform you that this latest idiocy from you cannot really qualify to win this week's shit eater of the week award. You see, it's just a variant on last week's idiocy. You say: "He purchased a ticket" when asked for evidence for the official story. Now, when you want to prove that the video of the plane hitting the tower is authentic, you say: "Atta purchased a ticket."
Okay, it is idiotic as well, but I think it's too derivative from the previous idiotic shit eater statement. I think you have to come up with some entirely new idiotic shit eater statement if you want to win this week's shit eater of the week prize.
That's my tentative judgment anyway. Others are free to weigh in on that...
However, as a matter of fact, I consider it pretty likely that what we were shown on the TV on 9/11 was largely video fakery
Yeah, well that's completely stupid and contradicted by hundreds of witnesses. Is there any stupid conspiracy you DON'T believe? Let's try to keep the lengths of these posts manageable.
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyYeah, well that's completely stupid and contradicted by hundreds of witnesses.Hundreds of people? Really? You mean, hundreds of people saw one or more planes fly into a building with their own two eyes, i.e. NOT on the TV like the rest of us?Is that true? I doubt it but I cannot prove that it is untrue.
However, the onus is logically on you to present some evidence for this. Do you have any? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 7:05 pm GMT @Jonathan Revusky
Here are some lengthy bits from Atta's Wiki page:I'm sorry. I don't think this is good enough to win this week's shit eater of the week. It's very uninspired, this long copy-paste from the wikipedia page.I mean, the wikipedia page is just a summary of the official story. So you're basically just offering a copy-paste of the official story as proof of the official story. This is of course absolutely typical shit eater behavior, but to win shit eater of the week, it has to be standout stuff.
Like, when I asked you what the proof of the official story and you said that Atta had purchased a ticket, that was champion class shit eater material. This long copy-paste.... Mehh..... Nah....
You'll really have to do better.
From what I've seen, the evidence is pretty good.What evidence are you referring to specifically? I have no idea what you're referring to... Let's just grab something more or less randomly from all the verbiage you copy-pasted:On August 6, Atta and Shehhi rented a 1995 white, four door Ford Escort from Warrick's Rent-A-Car, which was returned on August 13.I mean, look at the detail. It is very detailed evidence. He rented a 1995 Ford Escort. It wasn't a 1994 Ford Escort. And it wasn't a 1996 Ford Escort.Rented not from Hertz or Avis, but from "Warrick's Rent-a-car". WTF? Sounds like the people behind this mighta been on a tight budget... rented the cheapest shitbox car, a Ford Escort, from the most cheap-ass rental company there was...
But, okay, this is all nitpicking. The guy was a bona fide terrorist.
" He rented a 1995 Ford Escort, Godammit!!! WHAT MORE PROOF DO YOU CRAZY CONSPIRACY THEORISTS NEED!!!!???? "
"He rented a 1995 Ford Escort, Godammit!!! WHAT MORE PROOF DO YOU CRAZY CONSPIRACY THEORISTS NEED!!!!????"
You think the planes were CGI. Your opinion is worthless. I shall now only respond to you with dismissive YouTube clips.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN9LdTkR85Q
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyYou think the planes were CGI.Well, you get all testy because supposedly I'm misquoting you (though I don't see where) and you call me a liar and all that. No possibility in your mind that I misread what you said. No, I must be willfully lying. Except I'm not. If I misquoted something you said, I can tell you it was an honest mistake'.Anyway, I never stated that I was certain the planes were pure CGI. Neither did Erebus. What I said was that I was fairly certain that no hijacked Boeing airliners hit any buildings. Possibly some other aircraft did, like a military drone. I'm just not sure.
So when you say above that I think the planes were CGI, you are saying something that I never said exactly.
But, look, this is where we're at. You say the official story is a correct version of what happened. The natural question is what the best evidence for this is. You claimed that this was a stupid question! But that, of course, was champion shit eater nonsense.
Asking what the best evidence is, that's the most natural question there is. It's not a stupid thing to ask. So, if you admit (and I think you have tacitly admitted it) that Atta possessing a plane ticket is not really of any evidentiary value, then what have you got?
Again: what is the strongest evidence available, in your opinion, that the official US government story is truthful?
In particular, a key part of the story is that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, and that was used as the cassus belli for a war that was launched. What specifically is the best evidence available that 9/11 had anything to do with faroff Afghanistan?
We're still in Afghanistan. So it's still a very relevant, topical question and quoting long extracts of.... SHIT.... from wikipedia telling us that Mohammed Atta rented a Ford Escort or whatever other irrelevant crap they are trying to snow us with... -- that doesn't cut it man, that is decidedly unserious, dude. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 7:33 pm GMT • 100 Words @Boris
However, as a matter of fact, I consider it pretty likely that what we were shown on the TV on 9/11 was largely video fakeryYeah, well that's completely stupid and contradicted by hundreds of witnesses. Is there any stupid conspiracy you DON'T believe? Let's try to keep the lengths of these posts manageable.Yeah, well that's completely stupid and contradicted by hundreds of witnesses.
Hundreds of people? Really? You mean, hundreds of people saw one or more planes fly into a building with their own two eyes, i.e. NOT on the TV like the rest of us?
Is that true? I doubt it but I cannot prove that it is untrue.
However, the onus is logically on you to present some evidence for this. Do you have any?
• Replies: @BorisHundreds of people? Really? You mean, hundreds of people saw one or more planes fly into a building with their own two eyes, i.e. NOT on the TV like the rest of us?Millions of people live in New York.Look, you know what's easier than faking 40-odd videos with CGI and paying/planting lots of witnesses and praying that no one squeals and hoping no one finds your planes and hoping that no one videotaped the non-plane crash, and dropping a bunch of airplane debris from...somewhere? It's just crashing a plane into a building. That is so easy compared to your ludicrous scenario. The reason that you find whatever 9/11 CGI video you've seen convincing is because you just don't understand much about the evidence you're watching. And you show this behavior with the other evidence too, focusing in on car rentals. I don't know why that's in his Wiki page, but no one says it's important or vital.
I mean, I fully intended to just keep mocking you because your persona is so grating, but...I'm just out of juice here. I mean, honestly, you're probably a nice guy. I don't know. I think you're confused on some things, but we're all confused about some things, and I understand you don't trust the government. I don't either--it just seems like there's this disconnect, that you let your distrust carry you away. I don't know, it just feels sad piling onto you at this point. And not in a sense that you're pathetic, but just in the sense that there's no common language here at all. We see logic and evidence in very different ways, at least when it comes to these topics.
And you are not alone, lots of people believe these things. From my point of view, that's terrifying not because of 9/11 but because if people give in to their own biases when evaluating the world, then that has massive implications. That's one of the reasons I seek out places like Unz: to always challenge my own thinking. That's why I'm sitting here, slowing down and thinking about things you've written.
If you said Bush and Cheney knew exactly what the hijackers were going to do, I might, at times, share that suspicion. But that's an unproveable conjecture with only a bit of evidence hinting at the possibility. I'm okay with never knowing. It sucks, but here we are.
Anyway, I hereby retract all the nasty things I've said to you and wish you the best. Sure I could be lying, but I hope you'll consider that it's sincere. Unless you ARE an actual Nazi, in which case I meant every word. :) Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 7:41 pm GMT • 200 Words @Boris
"He rented a 1995 Ford Escort, Godammit!!! WHAT MORE PROOF DO YOU CRAZY CONSPIRACY THEORISTS NEED!!!!????"You think the planes were CGI. Your opinion is worthless. I shall now only respond to you with dismissive YouTube clips.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN9LdTkR85Q
You think the planes were CGI.
Well, you get all testy because supposedly I'm misquoting you (though I don't see where) and you call me a liar and all that. No possibility in your mind that I misread what you said. No, I must be willfully lying. Except I'm not. If I misquoted something you said, I can tell you it was an honest mistake'.
Anyway, I never stated that I was certain the planes were pure CGI. Neither did Erebus. What I said was that I was fairly certain that no hijacked Boeing airliners hit any buildings. Possibly some other aircraft did, like a military drone. I'm just not sure.
So when you say above that I think the planes were CGI, you are saying something that I never said exactly.
But, look, this is where we're at. You say the official story is a correct version of what happened. The natural question is what the best evidence for this is. You claimed that this was a stupid question! But that, of course, was champion shit eater nonsense.
Asking what the best evidence is, that's the most natural question there is. It's not a stupid thing to ask. So, if you admit (and I think you have tacitly admitted it) that Atta possessing a plane ticket is not really of any evidentiary value, then what have you got?
Again: what is the strongest evidence available, in your opinion, that the official US government story is truthful?
In particular, a key part of the story is that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, and that was used as the cassus belli for a war that was launched. What specifically is the best evidence available that 9/11 had anything to do with faroff Afghanistan?
We're still in Afghanistan. So it's still a very relevant, topical question and quoting long extracts of . SHIT . from wikipedia telling us that Mohammed Atta rented a Ford Escort or whatever other irrelevant crap they are trying to snow us with - that doesn't cut it man, that is decidedly unserious, dude.
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- Boris says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 12, 2016 at 9:09 pm GMT • 400 Words @Jonathan Revusky
Yeah, well that's completely stupid and contradicted by hundreds of witnesses.Hundreds of people? Really? You mean, hundreds of people saw one or more planes fly into a building with their own two eyes, i.e. NOT on the TV like the rest of us?Is that true? I doubt it but I cannot prove that it is untrue.
However, the onus is logically on you to present some evidence for this. Do you have any?
Hundreds of people? Really? You mean, hundreds of people saw one or more planes fly into a building with their own two eyes, i.e. NOT on the TV like the rest of us?
Millions of people live in New York.
Look, you know what's easier than faking 40-odd videos with CGI and paying/planting lots of witnesses and praying that no one squeals and hoping no one finds your planes and hoping that no one videotaped the non-plane crash, and dropping a bunch of airplane debris from somewhere? It's just crashing a plane into a building. That is so easy compared to your ludicrous scenario. The reason that you find whatever 9/11 CGI video you've seen convincing is because you just don't understand much about the evidence you're watching. And you show this behavior with the other evidence too, focusing in on car rentals. I don't know why that's in his Wiki page, but no one says it's important or vital.
I mean, I fully intended to just keep mocking you because your persona is so grating, but I'm just out of juice here. I mean, honestly, you're probably a nice guy. I don't know. I think you're confused on some things, but we're all confused about some things, and I understand you don't trust the government. I don't either–it just seems like there's this disconnect, that you let your distrust carry you away. I don't know, it just feels sad piling onto you at this point. And not in a sense that you're pathetic, but just in the sense that there's no common language here at all. We see logic and evidence in very different ways, at least when it comes to these topics.
And you are not alone, lots of people believe these things. From my point of view, that's terrifying not because of 9/11 but because if people give in to their own biases when evaluating the world, then that has massive implications. That's one of the reasons I seek out places like Unz: to always challenge my own thinking. That's why I'm sitting here, slowing down and thinking about things you've written.
If you said Bush and Cheney knew exactly what the hijackers were going to do, I might, at times, share that suspicion. But that's an unproveable conjecture with only a bit of evidence hinting at the possibility. I'm okay with never knowing. It sucks, but here we are.
Anyway, I hereby retract all the nasty things I've said to you and wish you the best. Sure I could be lying, but I hope you'll consider that it's sincere. Unless you ARE an actual Nazi, in which case I meant every word.
• Replies: @KA Israeli did warn about potential attack by terrorist on US soil. But Israel packaged the entire information mixing with Saddam Hussen and likely terrorism from Iraqi administration. against US .That made sure that the entire information would be treated as disinformation ,because no one in intelligence ever believed
that Saddam would attack US on its soil or anywhere .
"The Telegraph has learnt that two senior experts with Mossad, the Israeli military intelligence service, were sent to Washington in August to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation.
"ISRAELI intelligence officials say that they warned their counterparts in the United States last month that large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible targets on the American mainland were imminent.
""They had no specific information about what was being planned but linked the plot to Osama bin Laden and told the Americans that there were strong grounds for suspecting Iraqi involvement," said a senior Israeli security official."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1340698/Israeli-security-issued-urgent-warning-to-CIA-of-large-scale-terror-attacks.htmlStill it should not have been ignored . Why was it ignored? , @Jonathan Revusky
(Sigh....)Hundreds of people? Really? You mean, hundreds of people saw one or more planes fly into a building with their own two eyes, i.e. NOT on the TV like the rest of us?Millions of people live in New York.
You really are such a dishonest shit eater, dude. The question is not how many people live in New York. Sure, there are millions of people in New York, but just for starters, how many of those people at a given point in time have a clear line of sight to be looking at the right point on the building? Like, some people are sitting in a car and only have a view of the car in front of them basically. Or they are in an office with no window or a window that just has a view of the next building....
Of those who could be looking at the building, how many of them actually were looking in that direction? I mean, people are busy, they have things to do. They have their work and so on. They're not all just staring at a building thinking a plane is going to crash into it, you know. The people living it in real time don't know a plane is going to crash into a building, so they wouldn't be looking in that direction. Especially the first building that was allegedly hit, if you just happened to be looking that direction and see it, it would be a huge happenstance sort of thing, no? But even the second one.... who is going to be staring at the other building, thinking that ANOTHER plane is going to hit that one?
I simply posed a legitimate question, which is how many people claim they saw a plane hit a building -- and, of course, I mean, NOT on TV! I don't know the answer to the question, honestly. I think it's quite a low number, frankly. I've heard it said that it's easy to find somebody who knows somebody who saw a plane hit a building, but it's pretty much impossible to find a person who themselves saw it happen. Probably some people say they saw it direct but then if you press them, they admit that they saw it on the TV like everybody else.
Anyway, you said "hundreds of people saw this". Where did you get that figure, I wonder...
Oh shit.... I see.... You pulled it out of your ass. You just made it up!
Gee, that's pretty deplorable really, you know. Just to be making up facts in what is supposed to be a serious conversation.
DAMN! YOU JUST MADE THAT UP!!! THAT IS REALLY COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE!!!
YOU REALLY ARE A LITTLE LYING SHIT EATING BASTARD!!!
Now, I do have to say that I think I have expressed myself on this before.... I don't like liars. It's really not just some pretense. I really really do not like liars LIKE YOU. I really really don't! And I particularly don't like it when a pathological liar who just makes up shit repeatedly calls ME a LIAR!
That is really pretty scummy and is completely unacceptable.
Look, you know what's easier than faking 40-odd videos with CGI and paying/planting lots of witnesses and praying that no one squeals and hoping no one finds your planes and hoping that no one videotaped the non-plane crash, and dropping a bunch of airplane debris from somewhere? It's just crashing a plane into a building.OH, GOOD GRIEF..... WTF is your problem? Did your momma repeatedly drop you when you were little? I mean, on the head?Uhh, yeah, right. Crashing a plane into a building is so damned easy. Or getting somebody to fly a plane into a building is easy.... Sheesh....
You know, really, I honestly don't think so.... I do not think the Israeli civil service pay scale is quite good enough to get anybody to fly a plane into a building....
But hold on, that's it! I think you've got this week's shit eater of the week award wrapped up!
"Why make a fake video? It's just so easy to get people to fly planes into a building for real! No problem!!!!"
Shit, I think you surpassed yourself. That is really champion shit eater bullshit! SUPERSTAR YOU ARE!!!
I knew you had talent, but my god, this is epoch making. I can't believe I am really conversing with such a fucking idiot. I mean, you really must be one in a million! YES, it's just so easy to fly a plane into a building, or convince somebody to fly a plane into a building!!!
I guess that's why there are no stuntmen working in Hollywood. If you need a scene where somebody falls off a tall building to their death, why pay stuntmen or special effects people to fake the scene??? NO!!!! You just pay somebody to jump off the building to their death for real, because THAT'S EASIER!!!
MY GOD! YOU JUST MADE MY DAY! YOU ARE A FUCKING IDIOT!!!!! BAW HA HAAAAAH!!!!!
Anyway, I hereby retract all the nasty things I've said to you and wish you the best.Okay, dude, you have made me laugh and I should thank you for that. BUT.... if the above is supposed to be some sort of apology for calling me a liar repeatedly and stuff like this, I can't really accept it. It's not good enough.This business where you say there are "hundreds" of people who saw the plane hit the building (with their naked eyes, NOT on TV), you just made that up and that is completely unacceptable.
You need to explicitly apologize for that for me to even think about a reset of our relationship.
In general, you would also have to just stop being such a complete shit eater. It might be hard, I know. I myself didn't stop being a shit eater from one day to the next.
But at this point, there ought to be a recognition of the problem and then a sense that you're making an effort.
This latest champion shit eater stuff that there is no need to fake a video because it's easy to get somebody to fly a plane into a building... you must have, in AA terms "hit bottom" now. That's just such ridiculous SHIT that I don't think it can be surpassed. I mean, actually, I thought the nonsense that Atta had a ticket, therefore the official story is truth, that this was insurpassable, and I was wrong. You surpassed that. This latest thing is far more dazzling, breathtaking in its idiocy.
So if you've hit bottom now as a shit eater, you can only go up from here. But.... dude... you've got a long ways to go... Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- KA says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 13, 2016 at 12:28 am GMT • 200 Words @Boris
Hundreds of people? Really? You mean, hundreds of people saw one or more planes fly into a building with their own two eyes, i.e. NOT on the TV like the rest of us?Millions of people live in New York.Look, you know what's easier than faking 40-odd videos with CGI and paying/planting lots of witnesses and praying that no one squeals and hoping no one finds your planes and hoping that no one videotaped the non-plane crash, and dropping a bunch of airplane debris from...somewhere? It's just crashing a plane into a building. That is so easy compared to your ludicrous scenario. The reason that you find whatever 9/11 CGI video you've seen convincing is because you just don't understand much about the evidence you're watching. And you show this behavior with the other evidence too, focusing in on car rentals. I don't know why that's in his Wiki page, but no one says it's important or vital.
I mean, I fully intended to just keep mocking you because your persona is so grating, but...I'm just out of juice here. I mean, honestly, you're probably a nice guy. I don't know. I think you're confused on some things, but we're all confused about some things, and I understand you don't trust the government. I don't either--it just seems like there's this disconnect, that you let your distrust carry you away. I don't know, it just feels sad piling onto you at this point. And not in a sense that you're pathetic, but just in the sense that there's no common language here at all. We see logic and evidence in very different ways, at least when it comes to these topics.
And you are not alone, lots of people believe these things. From my point of view, that's terrifying not because of 9/11 but because if people give in to their own biases when evaluating the world, then that has massive implications. That's one of the reasons I seek out places like Unz: to always challenge my own thinking. That's why I'm sitting here, slowing down and thinking about things you've written.
If you said Bush and Cheney knew exactly what the hijackers were going to do, I might, at times, share that suspicion. But that's an unproveable conjecture with only a bit of evidence hinting at the possibility. I'm okay with never knowing. It sucks, but here we are.
Anyway, I hereby retract all the nasty things I've said to you and wish you the best. Sure I could be lying, but I hope you'll consider that it's sincere. Unless you ARE an actual Nazi, in which case I meant every word. :)
Israeli did warn about potential attack by terrorist on US soil. But Israel packaged the entire information mixing with Saddam Hussen and likely terrorism from Iraqi administration. against US .That made sure that the entire information would be treated as disinformation ,because no one in intelligence ever believed
that Saddam would attack US on its soil or anywhere .
"The Telegraph has learnt that two senior experts with Mossad, the Israeli military intelligence service, were sent to Washington in August to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation.
"ISRAELI intelligence officials say that they warned their counterparts in the United States last month that large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible targets on the American mainland were imminent.
""They had no specific information about what was being planned but linked the plot to Osama bin Laden and told the Americans that there were strong grounds for suspecting Iraqi involvement," said a senior Israeli security official."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1340698/Israeli-security-issued-urgent-warning-to-CIA-of-large-scale-terror-attacks.htmlStill it should not have been ignored . Why was it ignored?
• Replies: @utu "Still it should not have been ignored . Why was it ignored?" - Because it did not happen or their mission was disinfo cover up. , @Wizard of Oz Thanks for that link to the Telegraph story. It incidentally offers an explanation for Cheney's urging the CIA to come up with an Iraq connection as shown in the PBS doco "The Secret History of ISIS". After all if Mossad had been ahead of the CIA on the main plot they might well be right about Iraq. It will be a long time before we will know whether Mossad believed there was an Iraqi connection. , @Jonathan RevuskyStill it should not have been ignored . Why was it ignored?With all due respect, I think you have some conceptual gaps in your understanding of these sorts of psy ops.A big component of a synthetic narrative is what you could call preparing the terrain or foreshadowing. I tend to use the word "prefiguration".
I don't say this to offend you, but I just don't think you have too much concept of prefiguration . You see it in other psy ops, like with Charlie Hebdo, the event was prefigured with these other things where Muslims were supposed to be so outraged about some cartoons.
All this stuff that the various government agencies were receiving warnings "Osama Bin Laden about to attack America" -- this is all synthetic prefiguration . Can't you see that? Just think about it.
What you then get are these narratives about how the various agencies were "incompetent" because they ignored all these "warnings" and blah blah.
Actually, the key thing to get out of this is the Mossad did, I guess, play a role in prefiguring the attacks by putting out these "friendly warnings" (LOL) that OBL is gonna come get you and ya dee da..... I mean, once you understand what basically happened, you can see this stuff for what it is.
That is all a red herring and then they create these cookie crumb trails that lead nowhere, or lead to Saudi Arabia or whatever.... which is basically nowhere, in terms of figuring out who really did 9/11.
Well, in short, this whole branch of the conversation of "why they ignored the warnings" is amounts to falling for a constructed distraction. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Sam Shama says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 13, 2016 at 1:28 am GMT • 600 Words @Rurik Hey L.K.,
holocau$t is a monstrous Hoax?I think you're right about some of the trolls here, or so it seems to mebut this is the thing vis-a-vis the Holocau$t. I don't like calling the whole thing a hoax, because then it sort of looks like you're suggesting that NONE of any of that stuff happened, when I believe that it's clear that Jews (and many others) were systematically persecuted by the Nazis for being Jews, and not necessarily for any crimes they committed. Just like the Japanese in the US during the war. If they Japanese claimed there were gas chambers at the camps where they were held, then I think it would be fair and prudent to examine those claims for veracity, just as in the case of the Holocaust- where I don't think they had homicidal gas chambers for human extermination purposes. But that doesn't change the fact that many people perished in those camps, and many of them were innocent Jews, and if the Jews want to call that particular suffering a name to commemorate it, just like what the Japanese went through, then I don't see what's wrong with that per se.
That it has become this momentous blood libel against the German people in particular and all Gentiles in general is just another testament to the power of the lobby.
Controlling the world's banks and money supply and therefor all the media of consequence and all the major politicians (and publishing houses and courts and universities, etc..) has had an effect on things. The Eternal WarsⓊ being perhaps the most troublesome for the moment.
I believe that it's clear that Jews (and many others) were systematically persecuted by the Nazis for being Jews, and not necessarily for any crimes they committed.
[...]
But that doesn't change the fact that many people perished in those camps, and many of them were innocent Jews, and if the Jews want to call that particular suffering a name to commemorate it, just like what the Japanese went through, then I don't see what's wrong with that per se.Rurik,
As I've said in some previous posts, you have an admirable capacity for gleaning the essence of some important subjects. The aforementioned, more or less my own feelings about the Holocaust, was an event which occurred in the midst of a period that saw tens of millions slaughtered. They were certainly not just Jews. To be frank I never dwelt on the subject too much in my adult life, [even though the real experience of what happened to my kin is very close to me - my granny, whom I spare the ordeal these days of retelling her life events; and she holds no grudge, none at all] i.e., until I stumbled upon the Unz Review last year. This publication seems to be rife with discussions, of which, the ultimate goals are clear; and I needn't explicate the obvious. So again, I am completely unfamiliar with this charge of people exploiting the Holocaust for personal gains. I really don't know any.Furthermore there is no blood libel on Germans. Nazis, on the other hand were 'no boy scouts' indeed! We all relate to personal experiences. So in my case, my work brings me in contact with a large number of Europeans and Germans. I can tell you nothing but positive things about my contacts [on a lighter note I've dated German girls and they are a fun loving lot].
There is perhaps a grain of truth in what you say regarding what has become verboten in polite society, and by extension in the media. I hardly think any decent, educated person would use the 'n' word e.g. Its an assault on basic humanity. So is calling an Asian, A Jew, an Arab, A muslim, A White man or a woman by derogatory terms. Its simply not done in this day an age [more generally I am revolted by some of the verbal obscenity that goes on here, led by Revusky, a man I lament to admit a co-religionist] . More specifically, I am against any laws that stifle free speech and expression. So if certain laws are oppressive, the majoritarian system that created those in the first place, ought to be utilised to render them null and void post partum. [In the case of Ursula H., there is more to her story than meets the eye. She had been held in contempt of court on a few occasions, having used her age and the fragility associated with it, to provoke the legal/judicial system, when the judges finally threw the book at her. They will brook defiance of the law up to a certain extent and no more. Still, I understand it is galling to witness a granny thrown in gaol for nothing more than revisionist activism. Who made those laws?]
Jews don't control the world's money supply. A person like you ought to rid yourself of this risible notion. [Its a discussion we've had often and let's avoid it this time shall we? btw I commented on Mike Whitney's piece apropos, and we might continue on this subject there if you so wish]
cheers.
• Replies: @Rurik Hey Sam,As I've said in some previous posts, you have an admirable capacity for gleaning the essence of some important subjects. ... ...This publication seems to be rife with discussions, of which, the ultimate goals are clear; and I needn't explicate the obvious.I will take the first part as a complement and offer my gratitude at your graciousness in offering it. Since we don't always see eye to eye, so to speak. As for the second part, I'm not sure what the obvious is. If it's to demean or downplay the suffering of your loved one, then I don't think that's what anyone is trying to do. But I do think I get your gist.So again, I am completely unfamiliar with this charge of people exploiting the Holocaust for personal gains. I really don't know any.not for personal gain per se. Although I'm sure there are some who're guilty of that. Rather it's to benefit a amorphous idea that is most succinctly described as "What's good for the Jews". And as we all know, there have been myriad benefits to be gleaned (both by Israel in particular and Jews in general) from the guilt and sympathy people have felt for 'the Jews' vis-a-vis the Holocaust.Furthermore there is no blood libel on Germans. Nazis, on the other hand were 'no boy scouts' indeed!a little while back I was watching a show with my previous girlfriend, CSI or some such. And the story line was beginning to look as if it was the Wolfowitz's who were guilty of an unspeakably heinous crime. They also had an adopted child who was of German ancestry. I didn't have to watch the show to remark to my gal that it would end up that the Wolfowitz's were innocent, but even I was surprised that -as it turned out- that it was (shock, shock) the adopted but now grown boy who was guilty, - that as the investigators were discussing the solution to the crime, the one mentioned to the other, well I guess what happened is 'the nature won out over the nurture'. IOW all Germans are congenitally evil, even when they're raised in an eternally forgiving Jewish household. That for me was Hollywood in a nutshell.We all relate to personal experiences. So in my case, my work brings me in contact with a large number of Europeans and Germans. I can tell you nothing but positive things about my contacts [on a lighter note I've dated German girls and they are a fun loving lot].I like em too. Brash and brassy and tough. And you're right, we all see things though the prism of our own life experiences and perspectives. I'm sure that had I grown up hearing about how Germans murdered and tried to genocide my people, that such a thing would necessarily have an effect on me. Just as if I were a black man and heard nothing else but what the white man had done to my ancestors, or more to the point, how he was relentlessly holding me down, or all the other narratives and paradigms that we all marinate in, all have an effect on our psyches and view points. This is true.There is perhaps a grain of truth in what you say regarding what has become verboten in polite society, and by extension in the media. I hardly think any decent, educated person would use the 'n' word e.g. Its an assault on basic humanity.well I've used it, but then I never pretended to be a member of polite society. Hardly. There are some people whom I would refer to as niggers. Not Obama, certainly not. He's not a nigger in my book. An empty suit and a war criminal, sure. A racist and a Marxist, yea, but not a nigger. For me a nigger is a low-life POS, black or white. And who revels in being a low-life POS. The animals who perpetrated the crimes notoriously reviled as the 'Wichita Massacre' are straight up niggers, in my book. Same with the sub-human animals who murdered Channon Christian. Niggers to a T. I don't shrink from using words that describe something in such a succinct, if jarring way. And I also am not trying to write for the NYT. I'm here writing simply for the purpose of conveying what I consider to be an honest and ingenuous search for the truth.Its an assault on basic humanity. So is calling an Asian, A Jew, an Arab, A muslim, A White man or a woman by derogatory terms.oh Lord Sam, that's soo politically correct. Have some fun for God's sake. Trust me, African Americans can take being called the 'n' word. I've never known a people to use a word with such alacrity as a Negro uses the word 'nigger'. It's like the Irish with the word 'fuck'. Take those words away from them and they'd be mute. I've been called a 'redneck, hillbilly, cracker', even a CIS, and it's like water off a ducks back. I didn't even get 'triggered'. We need to grow a little thicker bark I think today. Everyone's so sensitive.led by RevuskyJR is passionate. When he goes on about lurid description of anatomy, I'm not put off at all. (even if I confess I am occasionally put off by relentless flame wars) I remember how the Priss talked about how Ann Coulter had 'the Jews' dick in her mouth and she was using too much teeth at times, and I had to laugh. Come on Sam, get out of your Etonian linguistic straight jacket. Break the bonds of puritan parameters on your discourse. You'll breath and write freer, and how could that ever be a bad thing? [see Hunter S., Thomson]In the case of Ursula H., there is more to her story than meets the eye. She had been held in contempt of court on a few occasions,oh my gosh! say it isn't so!!!to provoke the legal/judicial systemgasp!They will brook defiance of the law up to a certain extent and no morehttps://i.ytimg.com/vi/6K6ukRrKjKY/hqdefault.jpgsorry, but that is the image that came to my mind
or this one
http://www.zerofiltered.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Nurse-Ratched-Unsung-Films-2.jpg
it troubles me Sam, that you would write such a thing and not see the glaring tyrannical undertones of such a statement.
Who made those laws?]umm.. Western governments under Zionist occupation?Jews don't control the world's money supply. A person like you ought to rid yourself of this risible notion.not Jews per se Sam. Not my colleagues at work or my dentist or neighbors or relatives or friends. No, they sure don't. But there are a few Jews who wield inordinate power over the financial markets of the Western world, Sam. Like the Rothscild agents, known as the "Russian" oligarchs who looted the wealth and reasources of Russia proper. Those Jews Sam, do control money supplies and markets and banks and control Wall Street and the Fed and the Treasury and other influential institutions of the world's money supply. And I suspect that you're more or less aware of all of that Sam. But for this kind of thing to be common knowledge, would not necessarily be "good for the Jews", now would it Sam? Perhaps people might start to wonder why we need to have a Goldman Sachs boy holding the keys to the US Treasury. Or running the unaccountable Federal Reserve Bank. Eh Sam?and we might continue on this subject there if you so wish]my pleasure, but not at the momentCheers to you as well Sam :) , @Jonathan Revusky
Still, I understand it is galling to witness a granny thrown in gaol for nothing more than revisionist activism. Who made those laws?You cannot possibly be that stupid.Maybe you're trying to win the shit eater of the week prize. I mentioned that 2017 Golda Meir nude pictorial calendar and that must have really incentivized you... Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- utu says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 13, 2016 at 2:59 am GMT @KA Israeli did warn about potential attack by terrorist on US soil. But Israel packaged the entire information mixing with Saddam Hussen and likely terrorism from Iraqi administration. against US .That made sure that the entire information would be treated as disinformation ,because no one in intelligence ever believed
that Saddam would attack US on its soil or anywhere .
"The Telegraph has learnt that two senior experts with Mossad, the Israeli military intelligence service, were sent to Washington in August to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation.
"ISRAELI intelligence officials say that they warned their counterparts in the United States last month that large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible targets on the American mainland were imminent.
""They had no specific information about what was being planned but linked the plot to Osama bin Laden and told the Americans that there were strong grounds for suspecting Iraqi involvement," said a senior Israeli security official."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1340698/Israeli-security-issued-urgent-warning-to-CIA-of-large-scale-terror-attacks.htmlStill it should not have been ignored . Why was it ignored?
"Still it should not have been ignored . Why was it ignored?" – Because it did not happen or their mission was disinfo cover up.
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- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 13, 2016 at 4:58 am GMT @Rurik
After all I am 99 per cent sure that you have absolutely no qualifications either in knowledge or reasoning power to give any authority ...you don't need a degree in engineering to see that building seven was brought down by controlled demolition. Duhand I have no such degree, but I am a successful businessman who builds things out of metal (and concrete among other materials), and I understand their properties intimately. - If I didn't, then the things I built wouldn't last and function properly and I wouldn't have managed to be successful enough that I would waste time bantering around inanities with someone like you on the Internet. ;)
I almost pay you a compliment at #201 on The Saker's 9/11 thread
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- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 13, 2016 at 5:22 am GMT • 100 Words @KA Israeli did warn about potential attack by terrorist on US soil. But Israel packaged the entire information mixing with Saddam Hussen and likely terrorism from Iraqi administration. against US .That made sure that the entire information would be treated as disinformation ,because no one in intelligence ever believed
that Saddam would attack US on its soil or anywhere .
"The Telegraph has learnt that two senior experts with Mossad, the Israeli military intelligence service, were sent to Washington in August to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation.
"ISRAELI intelligence officials say that they warned their counterparts in the United States last month that large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible targets on the American mainland were imminent.
""They had no specific information about what was being planned but linked the plot to Osama bin Laden and told the Americans that there were strong grounds for suspecting Iraqi involvement," said a senior Israeli security official."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1340698/Israeli-security-issued-urgent-warning-to-CIA-of-large-scale-terror-attacks.htmlStill it should not have been ignored . Why was it ignored?
Thanks for that link to the Telegraph story. It incidentally offers an explanation for Cheney's urging the CIA to come up with an Iraq connection as shown in the PBS doco "The Secret History of ISIS". After all if Mossad had been ahead of the CIA on the main plot they might well be right about Iraq. It will be a long time before we will know whether Mossad believed there was an Iraqi connection.
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyIt will be a long time before we will know whether Mossad believed there was an Iraqi connection.Oh, well, this is all just total bullshit. But hey, what can one expect from some pathetic old Aussie shit eater who thinks that the proof of the official story is that it's the official story?The Iraqi regime was completely transparent to U.S. intelligence. They had an asset right at the top of the government, at the cabinet level, for example, somebody who would have known whether Iraq had WMD or not. And they surely had informers throughout the Iraqi government, it was totally infiltrated. If U.S. Intelligence knew what was going on in Iraq, you can be pretty damned sure that Mossad knew whatever they did.
The whole idea that Mossad or CIA sincerely believed that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11, this is complete nonsense, of course. Everybody who knows anything knows that at this point. Of course, you don't know anything, which is why you don't know that.
This is another characteristic of a shit eater. They just manage, year after year, to remain ignorant of the most basic facts that are available. , @KA Saddam was just a 'neighborhood bully,' Netanyahu says– 13 years after saying Saddam threatened 'security of our entire world' -
to AEI's Pletka"Mind you, Saddam was horrible, horrible. Brutal killer. So was Qaddafi. There's no question about that. I had my own dealings with each of them. But I do want to say that they were in many ways, neighborhood bullies. That is, they tormented their immediate environment. But they were not wedded to a larger goal. The militant Islamists–either Iran leading the militant Shi'ites with their proxies Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad and Hamas Or the militant Sunnis led by ISIS they have a larger goal in mind Their goal is not the conquest of the Middle East. It's the conquest of the world. It's unbelievable, people don't believe "
Hold on a second. Thirteen years ago in testimony to Congress, Netanyahu said that Saddam did represent a threat to the entire world. Excerpts (thanks to Jim Lobe at lobelog):
http://mondoweiss.net/2015/11/neighborhood-netanyahu-threatened/#sthash.VP3FYo80.dpuf
Mossad is ventriloquizing through the malleable vocal cord of these psychopath
That Mossad gave the 9pre 911 information to US . Telegraph as stenographer reported it
They are still doing and Telegraph is still reporting , @KA "Netanyahu was alarmed by the signals from both Tehran and Washington in the summer of 1997 indicating interest in reducing tensions between the two countries. That would have represented a real threat to Israel's political and strategic interests, and he was determined to cut it short. Netanyahu's response was to start to begin sending messages to Iran through other governments that Israel would carry out pre-emptive strikes against Iranian missile development sites unless it stopped its ballistic missile programme."Gareth Porter. --http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/06/israels-long-history-of-gaming-the-iranian-threat/
Another wide open evident building and spreading of conspiracy involving intelligence,media foreign entities .
Just as Soviet disappearance gave rise to fervent creation of " Green Peril' from Malayasia to Sudan, the disappearance of tension between Iran and US in 1997 made the Netanyhu ( the whole Israeli regime) go off the deep end . They started conjuring of Shi crescent , worldwide Iranian sleeper cells , Yellow Robbon, " Wiping off the map" , killing American soldiers, sending terrorist to Western Hemisphere and latest addition to that Money - driven garbled claims is the ransom.Israel needs an enemy and wants America to fight . American politicians ,some stupid Evangelics, and CNN. FOC drink that Kool Aid first thing in morning . Conspiracy goes unchecked. Unscrutinized ,unquestioned .
Actually conspiracy factory is so active,it churns out periodically predictably and consisyently one letter head organization after another like Israeli Project,David Project,ECI FDD Campus Watch who have usually one particular lie to promote at a given time before conjuring up another lie Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 13, 2016 at 2:15 pm GMT • 300 Words @KA Israeli did warn about potential attack by terrorist on US soil. But Israel packaged the entire information mixing with Saddam Hussen and likely terrorism from Iraqi administration. against US .That made sure that the entire information would be treated as disinformation ,because no one in intelligence ever believed
that Saddam would attack US on its soil or anywhere .
"The Telegraph has learnt that two senior experts with Mossad, the Israeli military intelligence service, were sent to Washington in August to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation.
"ISRAELI intelligence officials say that they warned their counterparts in the United States last month that large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible targets on the American mainland were imminent.
""They had no specific information about what was being planned but linked the plot to Osama bin Laden and told the Americans that there were strong grounds for suspecting Iraqi involvement," said a senior Israeli security official."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1340698/Israeli-security-issued-urgent-warning-to-CIA-of-large-scale-terror-attacks.htmlStill it should not have been ignored . Why was it ignored?
Still it should not have been ignored . Why was it ignored?
With all due respect, I think you have some conceptual gaps in your understanding of these sorts of psy ops.
A big component of a synthetic narrative is what you could call preparing the terrain or foreshadowing. I tend to use the word "prefiguration".
I don't say this to offend you, but I just don't think you have too much concept of prefiguration . You see it in other psy ops, like with Charlie Hebdo, the event was prefigured with these other things where Muslims were supposed to be so outraged about some cartoons.
All this stuff that the various government agencies were receiving warnings "Osama Bin Laden about to attack America" - this is all synthetic prefiguration . Can't you see that? Just think about it.
What you then get are these narratives about how the various agencies were "incompetent" because they ignored all these "warnings" and blah blah.
Actually, the key thing to get out of this is the Mossad did, I guess, play a role in prefiguring the attacks by putting out these "friendly warnings" (LOL) that OBL is gonna come get you and ya dee da .. I mean, once you understand what basically happened, you can see this stuff for what it is.
That is all a red herring and then they create these cookie crumb trails that lead nowhere, or lead to Saudi Arabia or whatever . which is basically nowhere, in terms of figuring out who really did 9/11.
Well, in short, this whole branch of the conversation of "why they ignored the warnings" is amounts to falling for a constructed distraction.
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- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 13, 2016 at 2:23 pm GMT • 200 Words @Wizard of Oz Thanks for that link to the Telegraph story. It incidentally offers an explanation for Cheney's urging the CIA to come up with an Iraq connection as shown in the PBS doco "The Secret History of ISIS". After all if Mossad had been ahead of the CIA on the main plot they might well be right about Iraq. It will be a long time before we will know whether Mossad believed there was an Iraqi connection.
It will be a long time before we will know whether Mossad believed there was an Iraqi connection.
Oh, well, this is all just total bullshit. But hey, what can one expect from some pathetic old Aussie shit eater who thinks that the proof of the official story is that it's the official story?
The Iraqi regime was completely transparent to U.S. intelligence. They had an asset right at the top of the government, at the cabinet level, for example, somebody who would have known whether Iraq had WMD or not. And they surely had informers throughout the Iraqi government, it was totally infiltrated. If U.S. Intelligence knew what was going on in Iraq, you can be pretty damned sure that Mossad knew whatever they did.
The whole idea that Mossad or CIA sincerely believed that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11, this is complete nonsense, of course. Everybody who knows anything knows that at this point. Of course, you don't know anything, which is why you don't know that.
This is another characteristic of a shit eater. They just manage, year after year, to remain ignorant of the most basic facts that are available.
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz I said "know " not "believe"..... Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 13, 2016 at 3:12 pm GMT • 1,100 Words @Boris
Hundreds of people? Really? You mean, hundreds of people saw one or more planes fly into a building with their own two eyes, i.e. NOT on the TV like the rest of us?Millions of people live in New York.Look, you know what's easier than faking 40-odd videos with CGI and paying/planting lots of witnesses and praying that no one squeals and hoping no one finds your planes and hoping that no one videotaped the non-plane crash, and dropping a bunch of airplane debris from...somewhere? It's just crashing a plane into a building. That is so easy compared to your ludicrous scenario. The reason that you find whatever 9/11 CGI video you've seen convincing is because you just don't understand much about the evidence you're watching. And you show this behavior with the other evidence too, focusing in on car rentals. I don't know why that's in his Wiki page, but no one says it's important or vital.
I mean, I fully intended to just keep mocking you because your persona is so grating, but...I'm just out of juice here. I mean, honestly, you're probably a nice guy. I don't know. I think you're confused on some things, but we're all confused about some things, and I understand you don't trust the government. I don't either--it just seems like there's this disconnect, that you let your distrust carry you away. I don't know, it just feels sad piling onto you at this point. And not in a sense that you're pathetic, but just in the sense that there's no common language here at all. We see logic and evidence in very different ways, at least when it comes to these topics.
And you are not alone, lots of people believe these things. From my point of view, that's terrifying not because of 9/11 but because if people give in to their own biases when evaluating the world, then that has massive implications. That's one of the reasons I seek out places like Unz: to always challenge my own thinking. That's why I'm sitting here, slowing down and thinking about things you've written.
If you said Bush and Cheney knew exactly what the hijackers were going to do, I might, at times, share that suspicion. But that's an unproveable conjecture with only a bit of evidence hinting at the possibility. I'm okay with never knowing. It sucks, but here we are.
Anyway, I hereby retract all the nasty things I've said to you and wish you the best. Sure I could be lying, but I hope you'll consider that it's sincere. Unless you ARE an actual Nazi, in which case I meant every word. :)
Hundreds of people? Really? You mean, hundreds of people saw one or more planes fly into a building with their own two eyes, i.e. NOT on the TV like the rest of us?
Millions of people live in New York.
(Sigh .)
You really are such a dishonest shit eater, dude. The question is not how many people live in New York. Sure, there are millions of people in New York, but just for starters, how many of those people at a given point in time have a clear line of sight to be looking at the right point on the building? Like, some people are sitting in a car and only have a view of the car in front of them basically. Or they are in an office with no window or a window that just has a view of the next building .
Of those who could be looking at the building, how many of them actually were looking in that direction? I mean, people are busy, they have things to do. They have their work and so on. They're not all just staring at a building thinking a plane is going to crash into it, you know. The people living it in real time don't know a plane is going to crash into a building, so they wouldn't be looking in that direction. Especially the first building that was allegedly hit, if you just happened to be looking that direction and see it, it would be a huge happenstance sort of thing, no? But even the second one . who is going to be staring at the other building, thinking that ANOTHER plane is going to hit that one?
I simply posed a legitimate question, which is how many people claim they saw a plane hit a building - and, of course, I mean, NOT on TV! I don't know the answer to the question, honestly. I think it's quite a low number, frankly. I've heard it said that it's easy to find somebody who knows somebody who saw a plane hit a building, but it's pretty much impossible to find a person who themselves saw it happen. Probably some people say they saw it direct but then if you press them, they admit that they saw it on the TV like everybody else.
Anyway, you said "hundreds of people saw this". Where did you get that figure, I wonder
Oh shit . I see . You pulled it out of your ass. You just made it up!
Gee, that's pretty deplorable really, you know. Just to be making up facts in what is supposed to be a serious conversation.
DAMN! YOU JUST MADE THAT UP!!! THAT IS REALLY COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE!!!
YOU REALLY ARE A LITTLE LYING SHIT EATING BASTARD!!!
Now, I do have to say that I think I have expressed myself on this before . I don't like liars. It's really not just some pretense. I really really do not like liars LIKE YOU. I really really don't! And I particularly don't like it when a pathological liar who just makes up shit repeatedly calls ME a LIAR!
That is really pretty scummy and is completely unacceptable.
Look, you know what's easier than faking 40-odd videos with CGI and paying/planting lots of witnesses and praying that no one squeals and hoping no one finds your planes and hoping that no one videotaped the non-plane crash, and dropping a bunch of airplane debris from somewhere? It's just crashing a plane into a building.
OH, GOOD GRIEF .. WTF is your problem? Did your momma repeatedly drop you when you were little? I mean, on the head?
Uhh, yeah, right. Crashing a plane into a building is so damned easy. Or getting somebody to fly a plane into a building is easy . Sheesh .
You know, really, I honestly don't think so . I do not think the Israeli civil service pay scale is quite good enough to get anybody to fly a plane into a building .
But hold on, that's it! I think you've got this week's shit eater of the week award wrapped up!
"Why make a fake video? It's just so easy to get people to fly planes into a building for real! No problem!!!!"
Shit, I think you surpassed yourself. That is really champion shit eater bullshit! SUPERSTAR YOU ARE!!!
I knew you had talent, but my god, this is epoch making. I can't believe I am really conversing with such a fucking idiot. I mean, you really must be one in a million! YES, it's just so easy to fly a plane into a building, or convince somebody to fly a plane into a building!!!
I guess that's why there are no stuntmen working in Hollywood. If you need a scene where somebody falls off a tall building to their death, why pay stuntmen or special effects people to fake the scene??? NO!!!! You just pay somebody to jump off the building to their death for real, because THAT'S EASIER!!!
MY GOD! YOU JUST MADE MY DAY! YOU ARE A FUCKING IDIOT!!!!! BAW HA HAAAAAH!!!!!
Anyway, I hereby retract all the nasty things I've said to you and wish you the best.
Okay, dude, you have made me laugh and I should thank you for that. BUT . if the above is supposed to be some sort of apology for calling me a liar repeatedly and stuff like this, I can't really accept it. It's not good enough.
This business where you say there are "hundreds" of people who saw the plane hit the building (with their naked eyes, NOT on TV), you just made that up and that is completely unacceptable.
You need to explicitly apologize for that for me to even think about a reset of our relationship.
In general, you would also have to just stop being such a complete shit eater. It might be hard, I know. I myself didn't stop being a shit eater from one day to the next.
But at this point, there ought to be a recognition of the problem and then a sense that you're making an effort.
This latest champion shit eater stuff that there is no need to fake a video because it's easy to get somebody to fly a plane into a building you must have, in AA terms "hit bottom" now. That's just such ridiculous SHIT that I don't think it can be surpassed. I mean, actually, I thought the nonsense that Atta had a ticket, therefore the official story is truth, that this was insurpassable, and I was wrong. You surpassed that. This latest thing is far more dazzling, breathtaking in its idiocy.
So if you've hit bottom now as a shit eater, you can only go up from here. But . dude you've got a long ways to go
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- Anonymous says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 13, 2016 at 4:28 pm GMT • 100 Words
I don't want to be part of this crazy shouting match, but I saw the second plane hit. We were all watching the towers after the 1st impact, hell there must have been about 100 spectators gathered around the street level around 500 yards or a bit less away from the Tower ground esplanade, paused. The second impact came in less than I'd say 20 mins! We stuck around for another 10 mins until fire dept. came in numbers and cops together started driving people away.What are you talking about TV man?!!
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyI saw the second plane hitThat's interesting. Could you provide your name and some contact details so that we could talk to you and assess how credible this is? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 13, 2016 at 7:01 pm GMT @Anonymous I don't want to be part of this crazy shouting match, but I saw the second plane hit. We were all watching the towers after the 1st impact, hell there must have been about 100 spectators gathered around the street level around 500 yards or a bit less away from the Tower ground esplanade, paused. The second impact came in less than I'd say 20 mins! We stuck around for another 10 mins until fire dept. came in numbers and cops together started driving people away.What are you talking about TV man?!!
I saw the second plane hit
That's interesting. Could you provide your name and some contact details so that we could talk to you and assess how credible this is?
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- Anonymous says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 13, 2016 at 8:39 pm GMT
Yes sure, that's all I need a bunch of crazies calling me up about 9/11 "truth". Take my post for what it is worth to you, I don't care about your "how credible this is" test either. And yeah, there WERE hundreds of people watching it!
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyAnd yeah, there WERE hundreds of people watching it!Oh really? Did any of those people have a name? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
- Rurik says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 13, 2016 at 9:42 pm GMT • 1,300 Words @Sam Shama
I believe that it's clear that Jews (and many others) were systematically persecuted by the Nazis for being Jews, and not necessarily for any crimes they committed.Rurik,
[...]
But that doesn't change the fact that many people perished in those camps, and many of them were innocent Jews, and if the Jews want to call that particular suffering a name to commemorate it, just like what the Japanese went through, then I don't see what's wrong with that per se.
As I've said in some previous posts, you have an admirable capacity for gleaning the essence of some important subjects. The aforementioned, more or less my own feelings about the Holocaust, was an event which occurred in the midst of a period that saw tens of millions slaughtered. They were certainly not just Jews. To be frank I never dwelt on the subject too much in my adult life, [even though the real experience of what happened to my kin is very close to me - my granny, whom I spare the ordeal these days of retelling her life events; and she holds no grudge, none at all] i.e., until I stumbled upon the Unz Review last year. This publication seems to be rife with discussions, of which, the ultimate goals are clear; and I needn't explicate the obvious. So again, I am completely unfamiliar with this charge of people exploiting the Holocaust for personal gains. I really don't know any.Furthermore there is no blood libel on Germans. Nazis, on the other hand were 'no boy scouts' indeed! We all relate to personal experiences. So in my case, my work brings me in contact with a large number of Europeans and Germans. I can tell you nothing but positive things about my contacts [on a lighter note I've dated German girls and they are a fun loving lot].
There is perhaps a grain of truth in what you say regarding what has become verboten in polite society, and by extension in the media. I hardly think any decent, educated person would use the 'n' word e.g. Its an assault on basic humanity. So is calling an Asian, A Jew, an Arab, A muslim, A White man or a woman by derogatory terms. Its simply not done in this day an age [more generally I am revolted by some of the verbal obscenity that goes on here, led by Revusky, a man I lament to admit a co-religionist] . More specifically, I am against any laws that stifle free speech and expression. So if certain laws are oppressive, the majoritarian system that created those in the first place, ought to be utilised to render them null and void post partum. [In the case of Ursula H., there is more to her story than meets the eye. She had been held in contempt of court on a few occasions, having used her age and the fragility associated with it, to provoke the legal/judicial system, when the judges finally threw the book at her. They will brook defiance of the law up to a certain extent and no more. Still, I understand it is galling to witness a granny thrown in gaol for nothing more than revisionist activism. Who made those laws?]
Jews don't control the world's money supply. A person like you ought to rid yourself of this risible notion. [Its a discussion we've had often and let's avoid it this time shall we? btw I commented on Mike Whitney's piece apropos, and we might continue on this subject there if you so wish]
cheers.
Hey Sam,
As I've said in some previous posts, you have an admirable capacity for gleaning the essence of some important subjects. This publication seems to be rife with discussions, of which, the ultimate goals are clear; and I needn't explicate the obvious.
I will take the first part as a complement and offer my gratitude at your graciousness in offering it. Since we don't always see eye to eye, so to speak. As for the second part, I'm not sure what the obvious is. If it's to demean or downplay the suffering of your loved one, then I don't think that's what anyone is trying to do. But I do think I get your gist.
So again, I am completely unfamiliar with this charge of people exploiting the Holocaust for personal gains. I really don't know any.
not for personal gain per se. Although I'm sure there are some who're guilty of that. Rather it's to benefit a amorphous idea that is most succinctly described as "What's good for the Jews". And as we all know, there have been myriad benefits to be gleaned (both by Israel in particular and Jews in general) from the guilt and sympathy people have felt for 'the Jews' vis-a-vis the Holocaust.
Furthermore there is no blood libel on Germans. Nazis, on the other hand were 'no boy scouts' indeed!
a little while back I was watching a show with my previous girlfriend, CSI or some such. And the story line was beginning to look as if it was the Wolfowitz's who were guilty of an unspeakably heinous crime. They also had an adopted child who was of German ancestry. I didn't have to watch the show to remark to my gal that it would end up that the Wolfowitz's were innocent, but even I was surprised that -as it turned out- that it was (shock, shock) the adopted but now grown boy who was guilty, – that as the investigators were discussing the solution to the crime, the one mentioned to the other, well I guess what happened is 'the nature won out over the nurture'. IOW all Germans are congenitally evil, even when they're raised in an eternally forgiving Jewish household. That for me was Hollywood in a nutshell.
We all relate to personal experiences. So in my case, my work brings me in contact with a large number of Europeans and Germans. I can tell you nothing but positive things about my contacts [on a lighter note I've dated German girls and they are a fun loving lot].
I like em too. Brash and brassy and tough. And you're right, we all see things though the prism of our own life experiences and perspectives. I'm sure that had I grown up hearing about how Germans murdered and tried to genocide my people, that such a thing would necessarily have an effect on me. Just as if I were a black man and heard nothing else but what the white man had done to my ancestors, or more to the point, how he was relentlessly holding me down, or all the other narratives and paradigms that we all marinate in, all have an effect on our psyches and view points. This is true.
There is perhaps a grain of truth in what you say regarding what has become verboten in polite society, and by extension in the media. I hardly think any decent, educated person would use the 'n' word e.g. Its an assault on basic humanity.
well I've used it, but then I never pretended to be a member of polite society. Hardly. There are some people whom I would refer to as niggers. Not Obama, certainly not. He's not a nigger in my book. An empty suit and a war criminal, sure. A racist and a Marxist, yea, but not a nigger. For me a nigger is a low-life POS, black or white. And who revels in being a low-life POS. The animals who perpetrated the crimes notoriously reviled as the 'Wichita Massacre' are straight up niggers, in my book. Same with the sub-human animals who murdered Channon Christian. Niggers to a T. I don't shrink from using words that describe something in such a succinct, if jarring way. And I also am not trying to write for the NYT. I'm here writing simply for the purpose of conveying what I consider to be an honest and ingenuous search for the truth.
Its an assault on basic humanity. So is calling an Asian, A Jew, an Arab, A muslim, A White man or a woman by derogatory terms.
oh Lord Sam, that's soo politically correct. Have some fun for God's sake. Trust me, African Americans can take being called the 'n' word. I've never known a people to use a word with such alacrity as a Negro uses the word 'nigger'. It's like the Irish with the word 'fuck'. Take those words away from them and they'd be mute. I've been called a 'redneck, hillbilly, cracker', even a CIS, and it's like water off a ducks back. I didn't even get 'triggered'. We need to grow a little thicker bark I think today. Everyone's so sensitive.
led by Revusky
JR is passionate. When he goes on about lurid description of anatomy, I'm not put off at all. (even if I confess I am occasionally put off by relentless flame wars) I remember how the Priss talked about how Ann Coulter had 'the Jews' dick in her mouth and she was using too much teeth at times, and I had to laugh. Come on Sam, get out of your Etonian linguistic straight jacket. Break the bonds of puritan parameters on your discourse. You'll breath and write freer, and how could that ever be a bad thing? [see Hunter S., Thomson]
In the case of Ursula H., there is more to her story than meets the eye. She had been held in contempt of court on a few occasions,
oh my gosh! say it isn't so!!!
to provoke the legal/judicial system
gasp!
They will brook defiance of the law up to a certain extent and no more
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6K6ukRrKjKY/hqdefault.jpg
sorry, but that is the image that came to my mind
or this one
http://www.zerofiltered.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Nurse-Ratched-Unsung-Films-2.jpg
it troubles me Sam, that you would write such a thing and not see the glaring tyrannical undertones of such a statement.
Who made those laws?]
umm.. Western governments under Zionist occupation?
Jews don't control the world's money supply. A person like you ought to rid yourself of this risible notion.
not Jews per se Sam. Not my colleagues at work or my dentist or neighbors or relatives or friends. No, they sure don't. But there are a few Jews who wield inordinate power over the financial markets of the Western world, Sam. Like the Rothscild agents, known as the "Russian" oligarchs who looted the wealth and reasources of Russia proper. Those Jews Sam, do control money supplies and markets and banks and control Wall Street and the Fed and the Treasury and other influential institutions of the world's money supply. And I suspect that you're more or less aware of all of that Sam. But for this kind of thing to be common knowledge, would not necessarily be "good for the Jews", now would it Sam? Perhaps people might start to wonder why we need to have a Goldman Sachs boy holding the keys to the US Treasury. Or running the unaccountable Federal Reserve Bank. Eh Sam?
and we might continue on this subject there if you so wish]
my pleasure, but not at the moment
Cheers to you as well Sam
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- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 13, 2016 at 9:55 pm GMT @Jonathan Revusky
It will be a long time before we will know whether Mossad believed there was an Iraqi connection.Oh, well, this is all just total bullshit. But hey, what can one expect from some pathetic old Aussie shit eater who thinks that the proof of the official story is that it's the official story?The Iraqi regime was completely transparent to U.S. intelligence. They had an asset right at the top of the government, at the cabinet level, for example, somebody who would have known whether Iraq had WMD or not. And they surely had informers throughout the Iraqi government, it was totally infiltrated. If U.S. Intelligence knew what was going on in Iraq, you can be pretty damned sure that Mossad knew whatever they did.
The whole idea that Mossad or CIA sincerely believed that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11, this is complete nonsense, of course. Everybody who knows anything knows that at this point. Of course, you don't know anything, which is why you don't know that.
This is another characteristic of a shit eater. They just manage, year after year, to remain ignorant of the most basic facts that are available.
I said "know " not "believe" ..
• Replies: @Jonathan RevuskyI said "know " not "believe" ..I don't understand your point. I doubt you have one, but if you do, you'll have to flesh it out more. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 13, 2016 at 10:39 pm GMT @Wizard of Oz I said "know " not "believe".....
I said "know " not "believe" ..
I don't understand your point. I doubt you have one, but if you do, you'll have to flesh it out more.
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz We may believe that we have worked out what Mossad knew and be able to give the reasons for our inferences but to get to the point of "knowing" something requires more than one's personal certainties or confdence in thd high probabilities. It requires for example that archives have been opened and the most respected scholars say that it is remarkable but they don't seem to have been doctored and this, that and the other now becomes clear in a way it wasn't before. Of course new mysteries or uncertainties can open up. E.g. one can imagine that, if Churchill's 1930s debts were not hitherto known about and it was just disclosed by letters that would make people say they didn't just believe but "knew" he had been insolvent *and* that the South African Jewish mining magnate had fixed up his debts, then some might start speculating about hitherto unsuspected Jewish influence on his attitude to Hitler.Still there are serious differences between believing and knowing even if the lines are fuzzy because no empirical fact is 100 per cent certain. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 13, 2016 at 11:44 pm GMT • 100 Words @Sam Shama
I believe that it's clear that Jews (and many others) were systematically persecuted by the Nazis for being Jews, and not necessarily for any crimes they committed.Rurik,
[...]
But that doesn't change the fact that many people perished in those camps, and many of them were innocent Jews, and if the Jews want to call that particular suffering a name to commemorate it, just like what the Japanese went through, then I don't see what's wrong with that per se.
As I've said in some previous posts, you have an admirable capacity for gleaning the essence of some important subjects. The aforementioned, more or less my own feelings about the Holocaust, was an event which occurred in the midst of a period that saw tens of millions slaughtered. They were certainly not just Jews. To be frank I never dwelt on the subject too much in my adult life, [even though the real experience of what happened to my kin is very close to me - my granny, whom I spare the ordeal these days of retelling her life events; and she holds no grudge, none at all] i.e., until I stumbled upon the Unz Review last year. This publication seems to be rife with discussions, of which, the ultimate goals are clear; and I needn't explicate the obvious. So again, I am completely unfamiliar with this charge of people exploiting the Holocaust for personal gains. I really don't know any.Furthermore there is no blood libel on Germans. Nazis, on the other hand were 'no boy scouts' indeed! We all relate to personal experiences. So in my case, my work brings me in contact with a large number of Europeans and Germans. I can tell you nothing but positive things about my contacts [on a lighter note I've dated German girls and they are a fun loving lot].
There is perhaps a grain of truth in what you say regarding what has become verboten in polite society, and by extension in the media. I hardly think any decent, educated person would use the 'n' word e.g. Its an assault on basic humanity. So is calling an Asian, A Jew, an Arab, A muslim, A White man or a woman by derogatory terms. Its simply not done in this day an age [more generally I am revolted by some of the verbal obscenity that goes on here, led by Revusky, a man I lament to admit a co-religionist] . More specifically, I am against any laws that stifle free speech and expression. So if certain laws are oppressive, the majoritarian system that created those in the first place, ought to be utilised to render them null and void post partum. [In the case of Ursula H., there is more to her story than meets the eye. She had been held in contempt of court on a few occasions, having used her age and the fragility associated with it, to provoke the legal/judicial system, when the judges finally threw the book at her. They will brook defiance of the law up to a certain extent and no more. Still, I understand it is galling to witness a granny thrown in gaol for nothing more than revisionist activism. Who made those laws?]
Jews don't control the world's money supply. A person like you ought to rid yourself of this risible notion. [Its a discussion we've had often and let's avoid it this time shall we? btw I commented on Mike Whitney's piece apropos, and we might continue on this subject there if you so wish]
cheers.
Still, I understand it is galling to witness a granny thrown in gaol for nothing more than revisionist activism. Who made those laws?
You cannot possibly be that stupid.
Maybe you're trying to win the shit eater of the week prize. I mentioned that 2017 Golda Meir nude pictorial calendar and that must have really incentivized you
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- Jonathan Revusky says: • Website Show Comment Next New Comment September 13, 2016 at 11:47 pm GMT @Anonymous Yes sure, that's all I need a bunch of crazies calling me up about 9/11 "truth". Take my post for what it is worth to you, I don't care about your "how credible this is" test either. And yeah, there WERE hundreds of people watching it!
And yeah, there WERE hundreds of people watching it!
Oh really? Did any of those people have a name?
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- KA says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 14, 2016 at 3:10 am GMT • 200 Words @Wizard of Oz Thanks for that link to the Telegraph story. It incidentally offers an explanation for Cheney's urging the CIA to come up with an Iraq connection as shown in the PBS doco "The Secret History of ISIS". After all if Mossad had been ahead of the CIA on the main plot they might well be right about Iraq. It will be a long time before we will know whether Mossad believed there was an Iraqi connection.
Saddam was just a 'neighborhood bully,' Netanyahu says– 13 years after saying Saddam threatened 'security of our entire world' –
to AEI's Pletka"Mind you, Saddam was horrible, horrible. Brutal killer. So was Qaddafi. There's no question about that. I had my own dealings with each of them. But I do want to say that they were in many ways, neighborhood bullies. That is, they tormented their immediate environment. But they were not wedded to a larger goal. The militant Islamists–either Iran leading the militant Shi'ites with their proxies Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad and Hamas Or the militant Sunnis led by ISIS they have a larger goal in mind Their goal is not the conquest of the Middle East. It's the conquest of the world. It's unbelievable, people don't believe "
Hold on a second. Thirteen years ago in testimony to Congress, Netanyahu said that Saddam did represent a threat to the entire world. Excerpts (thanks to Jim Lobe at lobelog):
http://mondoweiss.net/2015/11/neighborhood-netanyahu-threatened/#sthash.VP3FYo80.dpuf
Mossad is ventriloquizing through the malleable vocal cord of these psychopath
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That Mossad gave the 9pre 911 information to US . Telegraph as stenographer reported it
They are still doing and Telegraph is still reporting
- KA says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 14, 2016 at 3:37 am GMT • 300 Words @Wizard of Oz Thanks for that link to the Telegraph story. It incidentally offers an explanation for Cheney's urging the CIA to come up with an Iraq connection as shown in the PBS doco "The Secret History of ISIS". After all if Mossad had been ahead of the CIA on the main plot they might well be right about Iraq. It will be a long time before we will know whether Mossad believed there was an Iraqi connection.
"Netanyahu was alarmed by the signals from both Tehran and Washington in the summer of 1997 indicating interest in reducing tensions between the two countries. That would have represented a real threat to Israel's political and strategic interests, and he was determined to cut it short. Netanyahu's response was to start to begin sending messages to Iran through other governments that Israel would carry out pre-emptive strikes against Iranian missile development sites unless it stopped its ballistic missile programme."
Gareth Porter. –http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/06/israels-long-history-of-gaming-the-iranian-threat/
Another wide open evident building and spreading of conspiracy involving intelligence,media foreign entities .
Just as Soviet disappearance gave rise to fervent creation of " Green Peril' from Malayasia to Sudan, the disappearance of tension between Iran and US in 1997 made the Netanyhu ( the whole Israeli regime) go off the deep end . They started conjuring of Shi crescent , worldwide Iranian sleeper cells , Yellow Robbon, " Wiping off the map" , killing American soldiers, sending terrorist to Western Hemisphere and latest addition to that Money – driven garbled claims is the ransom.Israel needs an enemy and wants America to fight . American politicians ,some stupid Evangelics, and CNN. FOC drink that Kool Aid first thing in morning . Conspiracy goes unchecked. Unscrutinized ,unquestioned .
• Replies: @Wizard of Oz Truths which are less than whole truths are usually much more effective than lies and I would expect Mossad manipulators to be aware of that. But it is btw. My purpose in replying is merely to make my view clear that the story of forewarning in The Telegraph story may well have been one that was related to Cheney after 9/11 and which made him inclined to believe what was also said about Iraq. It doesn't mean that he wasn't already predisposed to depose Saddam Hussein but it alters the context somewhat. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
Actually conspiracy factory is so active,it churns out periodically predictably and consisyently one letter head organization after another like Israeli Project,David Project,ECI FDD Campus Watch who have usually one particular lie to promote at a given time before conjuring up another lie
- Smiddy says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 14, 2016 at 3:45 am GMT • 100 Words
"How could it possibly go through the steel? I happen to think that they had not only a plane but they had bombs that exploded almost simultaneously."
- Donald Trump (on the day of 911)
https://www.facebook.com/stfnews/videos/1145505108859931/?pnref=story
Why can't I find a second reference to this audio interview literally anywhere (otherwise I would've used a different source)? Shouldn't this be the audio clip that sinks Trump's Presidential hopes? This should be the biggest news story of the year, but systematic silence is all as usual
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- AnonCrimethink2016 says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 14, 2016 at 4:10 am GMT • 200 Words @biz
you are too quick to conflate 9/11 and the moon landingsActually, it was Unz himself who stated a while back that if we admit that one of them is possible, then all are possible, or something more or less to that effect.In an case, the 9/11 controlled demolition / missile / flight 93 is in a hangar in Cleveland stuff is just as implausible as faking the moon landings. Too many people and organizations and countries needing to be in on it, etc.
Conflating the two is indeed absurd. Regarding 9/11, the government's own conspiracy theory, that the twin towers were demolished by office fires started by the two planes (not to mention Building 7, which fell without being struck by a plane later that day) does not hold up under any real scrutiny; any child with a decent high school education in chemistry and physics can see that those buildings did not and could not have collapsed due to the official explanation, but rather, they fell due to a prepared demolition. While it is not, and may never be clear exactly who was behind the event, the fact that key aspects of the government's narrative are demonstrably false, and many others unsupported by independent evidence, should give any thinking person considerable pause for thought about the events of that day, and all that has inexorably followed in U.S. foreign policy to this very day. It is a technique of distraction frequently used by supporters of the official conspiracy theory to raise all kinds of broad questions about "How could such a vast conspiracy ever be kept?" etc. (Well, look at the Manhattan Project for starters ) rather than engaging in the particulars of physical evidence and reliable eye witness accounts that attest to the utter nonsense of the lie we've been sold lo these many years.
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- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 14, 2016 at 12:53 pm GMT • 100 Words @KA "Netanyahu was alarmed by the signals from both Tehran and Washington in the summer of 1997 indicating interest in reducing tensions between the two countries. That would have represented a real threat to Israel's political and strategic interests, and he was determined to cut it short. Netanyahu's response was to start to begin sending messages to Iran through other governments that Israel would carry out pre-emptive strikes against Iranian missile development sites unless it stopped its ballistic missile programme."
Gareth Porter. --http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/06/israels-long-history-of-gaming-the-iranian-threat/
Another wide open evident building and spreading of conspiracy involving intelligence,media foreign entities .
Just as Soviet disappearance gave rise to fervent creation of " Green Peril' from Malayasia to Sudan, the disappearance of tension between Iran and US in 1997 made the Netanyhu ( the whole Israeli regime) go off the deep end . They started conjuring of Shi crescent , worldwide Iranian sleeper cells , Yellow Robbon, " Wiping off the map" , killing American soldiers, sending terrorist to Western Hemisphere and latest addition to that Money - driven garbled claims is the ransom.Israel needs an enemy and wants America to fight . American politicians ,some stupid Evangelics, and CNN. FOC drink that Kool Aid first thing in morning . Conspiracy goes unchecked. Unscrutinized ,unquestioned .
Actually conspiracy factory is so active,it churns out periodically predictably and consisyently one letter head organization after another like Israeli Project,David Project,ECI FDD Campus Watch who have usually one particular lie to promote at a given time before conjuring up another lieTruths which are less than whole truths are usually much more effective than lies and I would expect Mossad manipulators to be aware of that. But it is btw. My purpose in replying is merely to make my view clear that the story of forewarning in The Telegraph story may well have been one that was related to Cheney after 9/11 and which made him inclined to believe what was also said about Iraq. It doesn't mean that he wasn't already predisposed to depose Saddam Hussein but it alters the context somewhat.
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- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 16, 2016 at 12:13 am GMT • 100 Words @Ron Unz For those without convenient access to a copy of the deHaven-Smith book, I've discovered there are some lengthy extracts available on the web:
https://off-guardian.org/2016/09/04/are-you-a-mind-controlled-cia-stooge/
International Pravda. My phone has just received from The Economist an article or editorial variously headed "Pepe and the Stormtroopers" and "The Normalisation of the Alt-Right". What is remarkable is the near unanimity of the hundreds of Comments in condemning TE for its condescending anti-Trump rant, even by those who won't vote for him.
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- Anonymous says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 20, 2016 at 3:13 am GMT
"American media is extraordinarily hostile to Russia, certainly much more so than it ever was toward the Communist Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s. " LOL were you even alive then!
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- Wizard of Oz says: Show Comment Next New Comment September 20, 2016 at 10:23 am GMT • 200 Words @Jonathan Revusky
I said "know " not "believe" ..I don't understand your point. I doubt you have one, but if you do, you'll have to flesh it out more.We may believe that we have worked out what Mossad knew and be able to give the reasons for our inferences but to get to the point of "knowing" something requires more than one's personal certainties or confdence in thd high probabilities. It requires for example that archives have been opened and the most respected scholars say that it is remarkable but they don't seem to have been doctored and this, that and the other now becomes clear in a way it wasn't before. Of course new mysteries or uncertainties can open up. E.g. one can imagine that, if Churchill's 1930s debts were not hitherto known about and it was just disclosed by letters that would make people say they didn't just believe but "knew" he had been insolvent *and* that the South African Jewish mining magnate had fixed up his debts, then some might start speculating about hitherto unsuspected Jewish influence on his attitude to Hitler.
Still there are serious differences between believing and knowing even if the lines are fuzzy because no empirical fact is 100 per cent certain.
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- Peripatetic commenter says: Show Comment Next New Comment November 15, 2016 at 10:54 pm GMT @Yngvar
So as a means of damage control, the CIA distributed a secret memo to all its field offices requesting that they enlist their media assets in efforts to ridicule and attack such critics as irrational supporters of "conspiracy theories."And what do you know, the term "conspiracy theories" was non-existent in books before JFK's assassination but took off right after, according to Google's Ngram Viewer: https://is.gd/GYioQZI see that someone has updated a document about that:
https://infogalactic.com/info/Conspiracy_theory#Pejorative_meaning
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Alternet
What would you do if you wanted to topple Saddam Hussein, but your intelligence agencies couldn't find the evidence to justify a war?
A follower of Leo Strauss may just hire the "right" kind of men to get the job done – people with the intellect, acuity, and, if necessary, the political commitment, polemical skills, and, above all, the imagination to find the evidence that career intelligence officers could not detect.
The "right" man for Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, suggests Seymour Hersh in his recent New Yorker article entitled 'Selective Intelligence,' was Abram Shulsky, director of the Office of Special Plans (OSP) – an agency created specifically to find the evidence of WMDs and/or links with Al Qaeda, piece it together, and clinch the case for the invasion of Iraq.
Like Wolfowitz, Shulsky is a student of an obscure German Jewish political philosopher named Leo Strauss who arrived in the United States in 1938. Strauss taught at several major universities, including Wolfowitz and Shulsky's alma mater, the University of Chicago, before his death in 1973.
Strauss is a popular figure among the neoconservatives. Adherents of his ideas include prominent figures both within and outside the administration. They include 'Weekly Standard' editor William Kristol; his father and indeed the godfather of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol; the new Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone, a number of senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) (home to former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and Lynne Cheney), and Gary Schmitt, the director of the influential Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which is chaired by Kristol the Younger.
Strauss' philosophy is hardly incidental to the strategy and mindset adopted by these men – as is obvious in Shulsky's 1999 essay titled "Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)" (in Greek philosophy the term nous denotes the highest form of rationality). As Hersh notes in his article, Shulsky and his co-author Schmitt "criticize America's intelligence community for its failure to appreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with, its susceptibility to social-science notions of proof, and its inability to cope with deliberate concealment." They argued that Strauss's idea of hidden meaning, "alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception."
Rule One: DeceptionIt's hardly surprising then why Strauss is so popular in an administration obsessed with secrecy, especially when it comes to matters of foreign policy. Not only did Strauss have few qualms about using deception in politics, he saw it as a necessity. While professing deep respect for American democracy, Strauss believed that societies should be hierarchical – divided between an elite who should lead, and the masses who should follow. But unlike fellow elitists like Plato, he was less concerned with the moral character of these leaders. According to Shadia Drury, who teaches politics at the University of Calgary, Strauss believed that "those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior."
This dichotomy requires "perpetual deception" between the rulers and the ruled, according to Drury. Robert Locke, another Strauss analyst says,"The people are told what they need to know and no more." While the elite few are capable of absorbing the absence of any moral truth, Strauss thought, the masses could not cope. If exposed to the absence of absolute truth, they would quickly fall into nihilism or anarchy, according to Drury, author of 'Leo Strauss and the American Right' (St. Martin's 1999).
Second Principle: Power of Religion
According to Drury, Strauss had a "huge contempt" for secular democracy. Nazism, he believed, was a nihilistic reaction to the irreligious and liberal nature of the Weimar Republic. Among other neoconservatives, Irving Kristol has long argued for a much greater role for religion in the public sphere, even suggesting that the Founding Fathers of the American Republic made a major mistake by insisting on the separation of church and state. And why? Because Strauss viewed religion as absolutely essential in order to impose moral law on the masses who otherwise would be out of control.
At the same time, he stressed that religion was for the masses alone; the rulers need not be bound by it. Indeed, it would be absurd if they were, since the truths proclaimed by religion were "a pious fraud." As Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason magazine points out, "Neoconservatives are pro-religion even though they themselves may not be believers."
"Secular society in their view is the worst possible thing,'' Drury says, because it leads to individualism, liberalism, and relativism, precisely those traits that may promote dissent that in turn could dangerously weaken society's ability to cope with external threats. Bailey argues that it is this firm belief in the political utility of religion as an "opiate of the masses" that helps explain why secular Jews like Kristol in 'Commentary' magazine and other neoconservative journals have allied themselves with the Christian Right and even taken on Darwin's theory of evolution.
Third Principle: Aggressive Nationalism
Like Thomas Hobbes, Strauss believed that the inherently aggressive nature of human beings could only be restrained by a powerful nationalistic state. "Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed," he once wrote. "Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united – and they can only be united against other people."
Not surprisingly, Strauss' attitude toward foreign policy was distinctly Machiavellian. "Strauss thinks that a political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat," Drury wrote in her book. "Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external threat exists then one has to be manufactured (emphases added)."
"Perpetual war, not perpetual peace, is what Straussians believe in," says Drury. The idea easily translates into, in her words, an "aggressive, belligerent foreign policy," of the kind that has been advocated by neocon groups like PNAC and AEI scholars – not to mention Wolfowitz and other administration hawks who have called for a world order dominated by U.S. military power. Strauss' neoconservative students see foreign policy as a means to fulfill a "national destiny" – as Irving Kristol defined it already in 1983 – that goes far beyond the narrow confines of a " myopic national security."
As to what a Straussian world order might look like, the analogy was best captured by the philosopher himself in one of his – and student Allen Bloom's – many allusions to Gulliver's Travels. In Drury's words, "When Lilliput was on fire, Gulliver urinated over the city, including the palace. In so doing, he saved all of Lilliput from catastrophe, but the Lilliputians were outraged and appalled by such a show of disrespect."The image encapsulates the neoconservative vision of the United States' relationship with the rest of the world – as well as the relationship between their relationship as a ruling elite with the masses. "They really have no use for liberalism and democracy, but they're conquering the world in the name of liberalism and democracy," Drury says.
An excerpt from The Truth about Leo Strauss Political Philosophy and American Democracy by Catherine and Michael ZuckertMr. Strauss Goes to Washington?
A specter is haunting America, and that specter is, strange to say, Leo Strauss. Dead more than thirty years by now, Strauss was a self-described scholar of the history of political philosophy. He produced fifteen books and many essays on his subject. Although well known and very controversial within his discipline, he never achieved public fame. For example, during his lifetime he was not reviewed in places like the New York Times Book Review or the New York Review of Books. He was not accorded the kind of public notice that other philosophic figures of our age, such as Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, or Richard Rorty, acquired. Although Strauss's books covered a broad range of topics in the history of philosophy-ancients like Plato and Xenophon; medievals like the Arab philosopher al Farabi, the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, and the Christian philosopher Marsilius of Padua; and moderns like Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Heidegger-he gained little acclaim because nearly his entire corpus consisted of studies of figures from the history of philosophy and because he himself therefore rarely spoke out in his own name on issues of political life. Moreover, the character of his studies had limited appeal; they were distant from the concrete issues of politics. He wrote detailed, almost Talmudic interpretative studies, dedicating more space to questions like how often Machiavelli cited the Roman historian Livy than to the substantive discussion of Machiavelli's principles of realpolitik. Such interpretative practices not only excluded Strauss from that broader public recognition attained by an Arendt-whose shared interest in the history of philosophy did not prevent her from pronouncing on issues like the Vietnam War-but it also cut into the acceptance of his work within the more specialized scholarly community to which it appeared to be primarily addressed. Many scholars found his books nearly unreadable, and many others considered them so drastically misguided in their substantive readings of the history of philosophy that he was often dismissed by fellow scholars as an eccentric or, worse, as a willful and distortive interpreter of the philosophic tradition.
Thus, James Atlas observes that "Strauss's work seems remote from the heat of contemporary politics. He was more at home in the world of Plato and Aristotle than in debates about the origins of totalitarianism." Alain Frachon and Daniel Vernet point out that "Strauss never wrote about current politics or international relations. He was read and recognized for his immense erudition about Greek classical texts, and Christian, Jewish, and Muslim sacred writings. He was honored for the power of his interpretive methods." "Strauss," two other commentators conclude, "did not write books in such a way as to be immediately relevant to the policy debates of his day or ours. Rather the reverse." Nearly a decade ago, Richard Bernstein wrote a piece about Strauss titled "A Very Unlikely Villain (or Hero)."
Despite these testimonials to Strauss's remoteness from practical politics, we see claims of the following sort: Time magazine in 1996 called Strauss "one of the most influential men in American politics." Before that, Strauss was identified as particularly influential on the Reagan and first Bush administrations. He is held to have really come into his own in the second Bush administration, however, and particularly in that administration's foreign policy, most especially in the Iraq War. In the discussion of the war, it has been nearly impossible to miss "Strauss-in-the-news." The New York Times, the New Yorker, the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic Monthly, to mention only a few of the most mainstream media outlets, have all carried stories about Strauss and his purported influence on the George W. Bush administration. The coverage of Strauss is not limited to American media, either: the Economist, Le Monde, and Asia Times, to say nothing of newspapers and journals in Germany, China, Japan, and the Netherlands, have joined in with articles on the scholarly Strauss.
The claims put forward in this recent literature are quite remarkable. The Economist identifies Strauss as the latest in a long list of alleged "puppeteers" pulling the strings of President Bush. Jeet Heer in the Boston Globe informs us: "We live in a world increasingly shaped by Leo Strauss, who is 'the thinker of the moment' in Washington." In an article entitled "The Long Reach of Leo Strauss," William Pfaff assures us that "Strauss's followers are in charge of U.S. foreign policy." Even though he is among those who explicitly note Strauss's apparent remoteness from politics, James Atlas takes seriously the claim that the Iraq War "turns out to have been nothing less than a defense of Western Civilization-as interpreted by the late classicist and philosopher Leo Strauss." He cites certain "conspiracy theorists" who believe that "the Bush administration's foreign policy is entirely a Straussian creation." Although Atlas seems reluctant to endorse the view of these conspiracy theorists-which he nonetheless repeats without dissent-he does, in his own name, answer the question "who runs things?" as follows: "It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to answer: the intellectual heirs of Leo Strauss." As evidence in support of that answer, he points to the fact (or alleged fact) that "the Bush administration is rife with Straussians." The Le Monde writers identify Strauss as one of two "master thinkers," the "theoretical substratum" beneath the neoconservatives, who, they say, "have marginalized center or democratic center left intellectuals to occupy a predominant position where the ideas are forged that dominate the political landscape."
If one strays from mainline media and consults the Internet, the home of modern electronic democracy, one finds even more extreme claims. Not only does Strauss control the Bush administration, or the neoconservatives, or the Republicans, but he is the éminence grise behind the Democrats as well, or at least that wing of the party associated with Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
Strauss-in-the-NewsRestricting ourselves for the moment, however, to the mainstream media, it is difficult to draw a consistent picture of what Strauss is said to stand for and thus of what his allegedly immense influence is wielded in support of. Two features of the popular media presentations stand out. The authors are concerned above all to grasp those aspects of Strauss's thought that seem to have some direct connection to the policy positions the authors are attempting to explain. But there is little evidence that the reporters and columnists have "done their homework," that is, that they have read much of Strauss at all, to say nothing of reading him with the kind of care that their own description of his work suggests is necessary for understanding his elusive and politically remote thinking. The consequences are predictable: there is a fair amount of disagreement among the different writers, and the agreement there is appears almost to be deduced from the writers' conceptions of what Strauss must have said in order to produce the policy results they are trying to explain. It is hard to avoid the thought that there is something circular about the literature: the exposition of Strauss's thought is motivated by the desire to find in it the themes that resonate with Bush foreign policy, and the writers' conceptions of the themes that drive that foreign policy are then attributed to Strauss with little independent effort to find them in his texts.
Two broad substantive themes do stand out, however. For convenience' sake, let us call these Straussian Wilsonianism (or Straussian idealism), and Straussian Machiavellianism (or Straussian realism). One, for the most part, is meant to explain the genesis and purposes of Bush foreign policy insofar as Strauss's thought has anything to do with it; the other, the justification for the means by which that policy has allegedly been pursued.
A composite picture of Strauss's Wilsonian idealism would run something like this: Strauss's chief motivation as a thinker derived from his desire to oppose the twin forces of positivism and historicism, which separately and in combination produce relativism in political thinking. Positivism is the theory that says only scientifically (empirically) supportable claims merit the label of truth; all claims of the sort we have come to call values (for example, judgments of what is morally and politically good, right, and just) are pronounced merely subjective preferences, which can never be rationally validated. Only facts and broader theoretical conceptions built upon facts can be rationally established and defended. Values are thus "subjective" and "relative" to their holders.
Historicism goes even further than positivism in a relativistic direction: even truths of the sort positivists are willing to accept as rationally defensible are rejected as being subjective, as being dependent on or expressive of values-indeed, identified as value judgments themselves. In contrast to positivism, historicism, and relativism, it is said, Strauss taught "the immutability of moral and social values." This commitment to what is often technically (though never in the popular media) called "value cognitivism" ran contrary to the "moral relativism" dominant in the 1960s and1970s.
Moral relativism was not, in the eyes of Strauss and his followers, a merely academic foible; it underlay, among other things, the dominant foreign policy approaches of the era. It accounts for the sense of "malaise" so evident, for example, in the Carter years and the policy of détente pursued in the Nixon (Kissinger) years, a policy based on a notion of convergence of, or even moral equivalence between, western liberal polities and their communist adversaries in the cold war. In place of value relativism and the drifting foreign policy established under it, Strauss and the Straussians affirmed the necessity for "moral clarity," a term one hears fairly frequently from the lips of President Bush and Strauss-influenced political thinkers like William Kristol. Moral clarity, based on value cognitivism, is thought to supply clearer guidance on foreign policy than do the tenets of relativism.
But the bare commitments to value cognitivism and moral clarity in policy say nothing in themselves of what exactly one is committed to. The media writers (mostly) find Strauss committed to liberal democracy. Perhaps the most unequivocal statement of that position came from Strauss's daughter in an op-ed piece in the Times. Strauss "believed in and defended liberal democracy; although he was not blind to its flaws, he felt it was the best form of government that could be realized." Frachon and Vernet emphasize Strauss's sober and restrained, yet solid, commitment to liberal democracy; like Winston Churchill, Strauss "thought that American democracy was the least bad political system. No better system has been found for the flourishing of the human being." According to Atlas, Strauss finds "the free society . . . the best man has devised." Writers who are sympathetic to Strauss are the most insistent in emphasizing his stance in favor of liberal democracy. Writing some years before the hubbub about Iraq, Dinesh D'Souza pointed to Strauss's and his students' employment of "the philosophy of natural right to defend liberal democracy and moral values against their adversaries."
Thinkers more hostile to Strauss make the same point. Charles Larmore says that "Strauss repeatedly declared his allegiance to modern liberal democracy. Some of the bitterest opposition to Strauss supposes that he rejected such values . . . but this is a misconception. . . . As a political form, liberal democracy seemed to him a good approximation to the ideal." Paul Gottfried, a self-described "paleo-conservative," finds the Straussian position to be a "defense [of] global democracy or a . . . standing up for 'values,'" a position of which he does not approve, for he thinks it amounts to "managerial tyranny" in practice.
Strauss, according to the consensus of mainstream writers, may have endorsed liberal democracy as best, or at least as good enough, but he also, the Economist says, "emphasized . . . the fragility of democracy." "Strauss's influence on foreign-policy decision-making . . . is usually discussed in terms of his tendency to view the world as a place where isolated liberal democracies live in constant danger from hostile elements abroad, and face threats that must be confronted vigorously and with strong leadership," says Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. Strauss's sense of the fragility and vulnerability of liberal democracy is often traced to his personal experience in the 1930s. "As a young man, he lived the dissolution of the Weimar Republic under the converging attacks of the communists and the Nazis. He concluded that democracy had no ability to impose itself if it stayed weak and refused to stand up to tyranny."
Moral clarity-the refusal of relativism-thus means defense of liberal democracy in the face of its vulnerability. The particular version of "defense" is related to one of Strauss's most characteristic themes: "the central notion of the regime." According to William Kristol, one of the most frequently identified neoconservative Straussians in Washington, Strauss has "restored" a political science "that places the regime in the forefront of analysis." The regime, the nature of the internal ordering of a political community, "is much more important that all the international institutional arrangements for the maintenance of peace in the world." The greatest threat comes from states that do not share American democratic values. Changing these regimes and causing the progress of democratic values constitutes "the best method of reinforcing security (of the United States) and peace." Thus, it is alleged, Straussians endorse a Wilsonian agenda of an active, even militant foreign policy aimed at "regime change" and, in principle, universal implantation of liberal democracies throughout the world. "Moral clarity" is taken to mean an unabashed recognition of the difference between liberal democracy and the various less free alternatives it faces and has faced in the world (e.g., Communist dictatorships or radical Islamic theocracies), together with a commitment to act to bring into being a world where the better regimes (those that are liberal democracies) predominate. That action is premised on both self-interest (American security is best achieved in a world of likeminded regimes) and benevolence (peoples everywhere are better off and actually prefer, if they are free to express their preferences, a free and democratic polity).
This Wilsonianism, or militant commitment to the worldwide spread of liberal democracy, is but one-half of the dominant view of the Straussian orientation, as portrayed in mainstream media sources. It is, strange to say, combined with a very hard-edged realism, which tends to be a feature distinguishing it from human rights idealism. Strauss, it is said, may be committed to liberal democracy and its spread, but his is a peculiar version of liberal democracy. William Pfaff, for example, identifies the Straussian theory as "a bleak and anti-utopian philosophy that goes against practically everything Americans want to believe. It contradicts the conventional wisdom of modern democratic society." In the first place, Straussian theory is unabashedly elitist: "There is a natural hierarchy of humans, and rulers must . . . exploit the mediocrity and vice of ordinary people so as to keep society in order." According to Jeet Heer, "Strauss believed that classical thinkers had grasped a still-vital truth: inequality is an ineradicable aspect of the human condition." Peter Berkowitz identifies the elitism charge as one of the three chief elements in the current set of allegations about Strauss. Strauss "emphasized . . . the importance of intellectual elites," according to the Economist; a recent study of American conservatives found that "it is hard to be more elitist than the Straussians."
The novelty or uniqueness of the alleged elitism can, of course, be much overstated, for one strain of American political science, going all the way back to the Federalists, has always emphasized the significant role of elites within democratic politics, as have more current writers like Joseph Schumpeter and Robert Dahl. But in the media presentations, Strauss's elitism is different and appears more sinister than other versions of democratic elitism. His elitism is presented as more intellectual: the relevant division between the elite few and the many is the line between philosophers and nonphilosophers. What distinguishes Strauss's elite is not wealth, status, power, or military or economic power, but recognition of "the truth." This truth is hard to face: there is no God, and there is no divine or natural support for justice. "Virtue . . . is unattainable" by most people. "The . . . hidden truth is that expediency works." Or, alternatively: "Strauss asserted 'the natural right of the stronger' to prevail."
The truths discovered by the philosophic elite "are not fit for public consumption." Philosophy is dangerous and must conceal its chief findings. Philosophers must cultivate a mode of esoteric communication, that is, a mode of concealing the hard truth from the masses. "Only philosophers can handle the truth." The elite must, in a word, lie to the masses; the elite must manipulate them-arguably for their own good. The elite employ "noble lies," lies purporting to affirm God, justice, the good. "The Philosophers need to tell noble lies not only to the people at large, but also to powerful politicians." These lies are necessary "in order to keep the ignorant masses in line." Thus Strauss counseled a manipulative approach to political leadership. In sum, the media writers conclude, Strauss held that "Machiavelli was right." When read with "a skeptical mind, the way he himself read the great philosophers . . . Strauss . . . emerges a disguised Machiavelli, a cynical teacher who encouraged his followers to believe that their intellectual superiority entitles them to rule over the bulk of humanity by means of duplicity."
The Machiavellian side of the Strauss served up in the mainstream media is also readily connected to the Iraq War and Bush foreign policy more generally. Just as the Wilsonian side is used to explain the ends of neoconservative policy, so the Machiavellian side is used to explain the means deployed in procuring consent to the war. The various claims raised by the administration to justify the war-the apparently nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the apparently nonexistent links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda-are connected to the Straussian themes of elite manipulation and noble (or not-so-noble) lying.
One of the very difficult questions thrown up by the composite view of Strauss we have just summarized concerns the relation between the Wilsonian idealist side and the Machiavellian realist side. There is, to say the least, a tension between the two. Some attempt to resolve the tension by emphasizing one side at the expense of the other. Thus, there are writers who suspect that the Wilsonianism is mere "exoteric," or public doctrine, and that the hard truth that "expediency is all," or that "natural right is the right of the stronger," dominates and sets the ends as well as the means of political action. But the alternate view holds as well. That is to say, the attribution of either of the two main theses to Strauss is in fact controversial, and the discussion in the media is of little help in understanding what Strauss actually stands for.
Peeling the Onion: Tracing an Urban LegendStrauss's rise to prominence in the media is as part of a story of connected persons and events: (1) Strauss supposedly influenced a large body of students, who (2) either became or influenced the group called neoconservatives. These neoconservatives (3) entered government and influential media in large numbers and (4) either made policy themselves, or influenced those in the Bush administration who did. Among the policies they devised or promoted are (5) the Iraq War and the broader new strategic doctrine announced in the document "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America," issued in September 2002 over the signature of President Bush. Thus, by a chain of transitivity we arrive at the conclusion: Leo Strauss caused the Iraq War.
Strauss's prominence in the story of the Iraq War, or in the story of the neoconservative ascent to power, remains a puzzle, however. He did not, it will be recalled, write much about practical politics, and certainly not about international relations. Moreover, even if every link in the aforementioned chain were real-which we will argue is not the case-Strauss's rise to notoriety in the media would remain puzzling because, so far as we have seen, those who have been allegedly influenced by him have not paraded his name and doctrines and have not defended or explained their policy preferences by reference to Strauss or his views. Whence, then, comes the connection to Strauss?
The first to suggest a link between Strauss and makers of public policy was, so far as we can tell, the English professor of ancient philosophy Miles Burnyeat, in a well-known piece in the New York Review of Books from 1985 titled "The Sphinx Without a Secret." Although the article was directed more toward Strauss's scholarship and his academic following, Burnyeat did identify at least one policymaker in the then current Reagan administration as a Straussian. Burnyeat did not have a long list, as the more recent writers do, and he did not place the political influence of Strauss-influenced individuals at the center. His claims were thus far less cosmic than those made by later versions of the "Strauss is running the government" literature. Yet one senses that the political implications Burnyeat perceives in Strauss's work are quite central to what motivates him to his scholarly critique of Strauss. As one reviewer of the Burnyeat diatribe put it, "the dispute between Strauss and Burnyeat is, in the end, not a scholarly dispute. It is political." Burnyeat particularly objects to the way, as he sees it, "Strauss's 'ruthless anti-idealism' [leads] to a dangerously aggressive foreign policy." Political concerns drive Burnyeat's critique-he is especially eager to challenge Strauss's interpretation of Plato's Republic as the philosophic source of that "ruthless anti-idealism"-but he is operating more in the mode of warning or forewarning. The one Straussian in government whom he identifies is also a classical scholar, with whose work Burnyeat was most likely familiar before he made the Strauss connection to the Reagan administration. He did not begin from the political side and move back to Strauss in search of intellectual forebears of a dominant political clique. Thus, this first explicit linking of Strauss and Washington is limited in its claims and intelligible in its origins: Burnyeat, a scholar, knew the work of Strauss, another scholar, and perceived a political tendency in it, which he saw realized to some degree in the person of another scholar who was a member of the Reagan foreign policy team. Accordingly, although the Burnyeat critique made something of an impression in academic circles, it had no power to draw Strauss into the daily press.
Another commentary linking Strauss to practical politics was an essay by Gordon Wood in the New York Review of Books. Wood was reviewing a number of books related to the bicentennial of the Constitution in 1987–88. He identified a cluster of scholars influenced by Strauss and devoted to scholarship on the founding period. Unlike Burnyeat, who treated Strauss scholarship dismissively, Wood spoke with respect, if not agreement, with the Straussian scholarship. He did note-and dissented from-a tendency he saw in that scholarship to support the doctrine of "originalism" in constitutional interpretation. He did not voice any worry, however, about Straussians running the government. Burnyeat and Wood represent what we might call the prehistory of the "Strauss and Straussians in politics" motif. They made limited claims, and the claims they made are not in any way puzzling, even if one may be inclined to dissent from some of them, as we are.
The number of public allegations of links between Strauss and Washington made a quantum leap with the publication of a 1994 op-ed piece in the New York Times by Brent Staples. Although he wrote it during the Democratic Clinton administration, Staples was concerned about conservative ideas that had become or were "poised to become . . . central . . . [to] this country's social policy." He was remarkably ill-informed about Strauss's views, but he asserted quite assuredly that Strauss's "ideas have crept into vogue in American politics." "Strauss," he intoned, "appealed to the conservative elite because he viewed the status quo as an expression of divine will." Staples named two individuals in or near practical politics who bear the mark of Leo. Strangely, the two he named, Thomas Sowell and Robert Bork, had nothing whatever to do with Strauss. He also named two writers of books more distant from politics, Allan Bloom and William Henry, author of In Defense of Elitism. Like Bork and Sowell, Henry had nothing to do with Strauss; his book never mentions Strauss or draws on Straussian ideas. Bloom was indeed a student of Strauss's, and his best-selling Closing of the American Mind did make use of Straussian thought. This appears to have been a lucky hit for Staples, however, for what he said about Bloom's book does not make one confident that he had read either it or any of Strauss's writings.
Staples's attempts to link Strauss to the politics of the day were also less puzzling than the current wave of such efforts. Staples, like Burnyeat, had a special reason to hit upon Strauss. As he recounts in his article, he arrived at the University of Chicago for graduate studies in 1973, the year of Strauss's death. He was thus aware of Strauss as a Chicago figure and connected him with Bloom, who was returning to Chicago in the years Staples spent there and whose Closing of the American Mind became a major item in the culture in the years between Staples's attendance at the University of Chicago and his writing of his op-ed piece.
Staples's screed revealed something of the power of the New York Times editorial page, for his assertions were bandied about in both liberal and conservative media outlets, producing the first wave of interest in Strauss in such places. This flurry of interest did not last long, nor was it so widespread as the recent wave of Strauss-in-the-news. Perhaps the coup de gr?ce was administered to this mid-nineties round of interest in Strauss by a thoughtful, if sometimes inaccurate, article in the New York Times by Richard Bernstein. Unlike many of the writers in the wake of the Iraq War debate, Bernstein did read at least one essay by Strauss, and his reading led him to conclude that Strauss's ideas were "not . . . especially conservative," nor was his elitism, such as it was, incompatible with democracy.
The character, intensity, and quantity of interest in 2000 and after are thus very different from the earlier interest shown in Strauss's alleged influence on politics in America, as well as being much more puzzling. A clue to the puzzle appears in several of the recent mainstream media essays. In June 2003, after the Strauss craze had erupted in the mainstream media, Robert Bartley published a piece in the Wall Street Journal recounting the boast made by a member of the Lyndon LaRouche organization that the media were following LaRouche into what Bartley called the "the fever swamps" of anti-Strauss fulmination. Bartley himself was somewhat uncertain whether to credit the LaRouchite claim to have pioneered the Strauss "exposé," but there is evidence to support their claim. In the first place, LaRouche and his people were on the Strauss story well before the regular media got to it. The first irruption of Strauss into the reputable media in the United States (in this round of interest) was the James Atlas "Leo-Cons" article of May 4, 2003. However, Atlas was preceded by the April 19 article in Le Monde by Frachon and Vernet. They, in turn, were preempted by a salvo of publications, press releases, and other communications about Strauss, the neocons, and Bush foreign policy emanating from the LaRouche organization. LaRouche wrote an essay dated March 5, 2003, titled "The Essential Fraud of Leo Strauss," which was followed up by a number of essays and press releases by LaRouche himself or members of his group all through March and early April.
The LaRouche materials clearly did not go unnoticed, for Atlas in the "Leo-Cons" piece makes reference to "intellectual conspiracy theorists" who claim that "the Bush administration's foreign policy is entirely a Straussian creation." This is certainly a reference to the LaRouchites, for they are the only "conspiracy theorists" at that time positing a connection between Strauss and Bush foreign policy. The Economist in June, shortly after Bartley's Wall Street Journal editorial, also identified the LaRouche literature as the origin of the buzz about Strauss and Bush foreign policy.
It is likely, moreover, that the relatively early essay by Frachon and Vernet was influenced by the LaRouche literature, also. One aspect of the chain of writings particularly suggests a link between the LaRouche materials and the Frachon-Vernet essay: the latter identifies the two "master thinkers" of the neoconservatives as Strauss and Albert Wohlstetter. In one of the LaRouche essays predating Frachon and Vernet, the parallelism between Strauss and Wohlstetter is drawn via their twin presence in the background of Paul Wolfowitz. (Interestingly enough, both Jeffrey Steinberg, the LaRouchite, and Frachon and Vernet are more careful in their presentation of the Strauss-Wohlstetter connection to Bush foreign policy than Atlas is in the Times; for Atlas identifies Wohlstetter as a Straussian, which he most definitely was not, whereas the others keep him separate from Strauss, except in the influence both had on certain statesmen of the day, particularly Wolfowitz.) Beyond the Strauss-Wohlstetter point, another sign of a LaRouche influence on Frachon and Vernet is that all the people identified by the latter as Straussians were so identified in the LaRouche writings, with the exception of a few individuals in the media, who were not discussed by the LaRouchites. Finally, another very clear connection between the LaRouche materials and the mainstream media is the clear dependence on the LaRouchites of Seymour Hersh's essay in the New Yorker about the Pentagon intelligence operations allegedly run by a Straussian, Abram Shulsky. Jeffrey Steinberg, in the same essay that highlights Strauss-Wohlstetter as mentors of neoconservative leaders, also discloses the Shulsky intelligence operation, well before Hersh's article.
The conclusion to which the evidence is leading, we think, is that the "story" about Strauss began in the LaRouche camp and jumped from there to mainstream media-for the most part without attribution. This is not to say that the mainstream journalists took over the LaRouche line hook, sinker, and all, for the story changed a fair amount as it moved from the pamphlets and Internet postings of this fringe, if not quite lunatic, political group into the most august venues of international journalism. Nonetheless, it is a fact worth noting that that is the jump that occurred.
To trace the explosion of interest in Strauss back to the LaRouchites helps settle some of the puzzle surrounding this literature: the mainstream writers came upon the notion of Straussians under nearly every bed in Washington in the LaRouche literature. But that is merely to push the puzzle back one step: how did the LaRouchites come to formulate the theory of the Great Straussian Conspiracy? The simplest answer is that LaRouche and his followers are given to conspiracy theories and there need be no particular rhyme or reason to any given theory they develop.
Perusing the LaRouche literature suggests there is more to it than this, however. One of the earliest LaRouchite statements, by LaRouche himself, is less about the Straussian Washington connection than about Strauss's way of interpreting Plato. It must be nearly unique in American politics that a presidential candidate-for that is what LaRouche was (and most of the anti-Strauss material was posted on his campaign Web site www.larouchein2004.net)-makes the interpretation of Plato a major issue in his campaign. The fact is, LaRouche fancies himself a Platonist and takes great issue with Strauss's approach to Plato. Indeed, his objections to Strauss as a reader of Plato are remarkably similar to Burnyeat's, for he objects to the presentation of Plato's "anti-idealism." LaRouche is a self-proclaimed "Promethean," a believer in the (infinite?) possibilities of technological progress for the betterment of the human condition. Plato, he believes, underwrites this Promethean project; LaRouche maintains in his Web site that the Socratic dialogue "expresses a principle of knowable certainty of truthfulness, . . . a method which undergirds the progressive achievement of knowledge, true principles governing the universe, which can then be 'applied.'" The progressive adumbration of knowledge-based technology in turn allows the development of ever more egalitarian and wealthy societies. There are interests in society, however, some material, some intellectual, which put up roadblocks to this progress in knowledge and power.
Strauss's approach to Plato, denying the progressive character of Platonic thought, is one such roadblock. Strauss is thus "a depraved anti-Promethean creature." Strauss "tended to uproot and eliminate the idea of progress, on which all the true achievements of our U.S. republic had depended." Because Strauss stands against progress (and reads Plato as doing so as well), LaRouche wonders whether Strauss is "actually human," or instead a product of some kind of "reversed cultural evolution, into becoming something less than human."
Eccentric as he may be, LaRouche appears to have read some of Strauss's writings and to have had opinions about him prior to the debate over the Iraq War. He had Strauss in his sights before March of 2003 and thought about Strauss in a larger context than most of the mainstream writers did. Of course, when the mainstream media picked up the Strauss theme from LaRouche, they trimmed away most of the bizarre eccentricities and added some theories of their own. So, very little of the Prometheus–anti-Prometheus theme migrated over to the regular media. But two of the chief theses of the LaRouche literature did make the crossing: the strong claim that Strauss stands behind neoconservative thinking, especially on foreign policy and the war, and the notion that Strauss is a Machiavellian or a Nietzschean, a "child of Satan" or perhaps Satan himself, as the title of one LaRouche pamphlet suggests. It is the LaRouchites who produced the long lists of Washington Straussians that made it into places like the New York Times and the New Yorker.
Characteristically, the LaRouchite version of the carryover themes is stated in more extreme and immoderate language, but the main elements of what the mainstream press promoted as Straussian are present in nearly recognizable form in the LaRouchite statements. In contrast to LaRouche's own promodern, proprogressive, prodemocratic Prometheanism, Strauss is presented as regressive and fascist-even Nazi. According to one of the LaRouchite statements, significantly subtitled "Leo Strauss, Fascist Godfather of the Neo-Cons": "A review of Leo Strauss' career reveals why the label 'Straussian' carries some very filthy implications. Although nominally a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany . . . Strauss was an unabashed proponent of the three most notorious shapers of the Nazi philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt. . . . Strauss, in his long academic career, never abandoned his fealty to Nietzsche, Heidegger and Schmitt."
The LaRouche writings constantly affirm the Nietzsche-Heidegger-Schmitt-Nazi filiation of Strauss, and then they group him with a surprising set of thinkers (mostly fellow émigrés), who allegedly stand for the same "fascist" principles. Thus LaRouche himself associates Strauss with Karl Jaspers, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-Paul Sartre; and to this "gang" Steinberg adds Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Leo Lowenthal. The grouping of Strauss with these others-a diverse group indeed, including some of the best-known leftists of our day, such as members of the Frankfurt School and Marxist existentialists like Sartre-is itself surprising, for Strauss is usually thought of as a man of the right-of-center with little sympathy for the "bedfellows" LaRouche is identifying for him. But the grouping the LaRouchites come up with makes a certain sense from their perspective. All the thinkers they name have in the first instance been influenced by Nietzsche and especially Heidegger, and all have reservations about modernity. From LaRouche's "Promethean" perspective, the differences between these thinkers are less important than their antiprogressive orientation.
Thus Steinberg identifies "the hallmark of Strauss's approach to philosophy" as "his hatred of the modern world, his belief in a totalitarian system, run by 'philosophers,' who rejected all universal principles of natural law, but saw their mission as absolute rulers, who lied and deceived a foolish 'populist' mass, and used both religion and politics as a means of disseminating myths that kept the general population in clueless servitude." Tony Papert, another member of the LaRouche organization, expands on these themes: according to Strauss, "moral virtue had no application to the really intelligent man, the philosopher. Moral virtue only existed in popular opinion, where it served the purpose of controlling the unintelligent majority." Papert attributes to Strauss the nihilist views "that there is no god, that the universe cares nothing for men or mankind, and that all of human history is nothing more than an insignificant speck in the cosmos, which no source began, that it will vanish forever without a trace. There is no morality, no good and evil; of course any notion of an afterlife is an old wives' tale."
These "truths" are so harsh, says Papert, that "the philosopher/superman is that rare man who can face" them. In order "to shape society" in the interest of those "philosophers themselves . . . the superman/philosopher . . . provides the herd with the religious, moral, and other beliefs they require, but which the supermen themselves know to be lies . . . they do not do this out of benevolence, of course." Their public face is all "exoteric" doctrine; they attempt to rule indirectly through "gentlemen" whom they indoctrinate with their false but salutary myths. Although the character of the connection to foreign policy is somewhat vague, the LaRouchites are insistent that there are strong foreign policy implications to their Machiavellian-Nietzschean-nihilistic philosophic stance: "Their policy is to permanently transform the United States, from a constitutional republic, dedicated to the pursuit of the general welfare and a community of principle among perfectly sovereign nation states, into a brutish, post-modern imitation of the Roman Empire, engaged in modern imperial adventures abroad, and brutal police-state repression at home. . . . Raw political power was the ultimate goal."
Although the position is more immoderately and harshly put by the LaRouchites, we see in their writings the elements of the Machiavellian strain we have identified in the mainstream media literature on Strauss and Straussians. The regular media clip off the harsh edge and drop some of the more arcane references (e.g., to Heidegger and Schmitt), but they tell essentially the same story as LaRouche. However, they modify that story in one other way: there is no hint of what we have called the Wilsonian strain of Straussian or neoconservative policy as expressed in the mainstream media. The LaRouchites are more certain that anything that looks like this is pure "exoteric doctrine."
Going Yet Deeper into the Onion: Shadia DruryBeneath or within the mainstream media treatments of the Straussian invasion of Washington lies the journalistic-political propaganda of the LaRouche movement. A strange bedfellow for the New York Times and Le Monde, to be sure. But a close look at the LaRouche literature reveals that we have not yet reached the heart of things. LaRouche may have had his own personal views on Strauss as a Plato scholar and an anti-Promethean, but the LaRouchite literature persistently cites and picks up theories from another source, which it adds to LaRouche's indigenous ideas. Papert's essay "The Secret Kingdom of Leo Strauss" relies on the work of Shadia Drury for its explication of the intellectual roots of Strauss's thought. In that context, he refers to her The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss as "by far the best book on Strauss." Steinberg in his "Profile" of Leo Strauss cites Drury's other book on Strauss, Leo Strauss and the American Right, as the source for his list of Strauss-influenced politically powerful neoconservatives.
Even when the LaRouchites do not cite Drury explicitly, it is clear to those who know her work that they are drawing from it. For example, LaRouche and his faction regularly accuse Strauss of following the triumvirate of "Nazi theorists," Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schmitt. This is a position originally developed by Drury in her two books, and when she put it forward, it was quite unique to her. Another major thesis in the LaRouche literature is the claim that Strauss finds Thrasymachus to be the "hero" of Plato's Republic, and not, as millennia of readers have believed, Socrates. This too is a position Drury pioneered. In other words, the LaRouche treatment of Strauss depends heavily on Drury: behind the eccentric and frequently kooky conspiracy theorists stands Drury, a scholar. The trail thus leads from the mainstream media to LaRouche and thence to Drury.
Drury's influence on the discussion has not been entirely indirect via the LaRouchites. She has a direct presence in some of the literature, especially left-leaning journals and Web sites. In much of this material we find citations to Drury's writings, in particular her Leo Strauss and the American Right, the book that (along with Robert Devigne's Recasting Conservatism), in a nonjournalistic venue, pioneered the claim of the link between Strauss and neoconservative politics. Several such articles recount interviews with her about Strauss and his purported political influence, and in one case she posted a short essay on the topic on the Web site of an Australian foundation.
Drury stands somewhere behind the eruption of media coverage of Strauss and Straussians, but her own statements in the media are much closer to the LaRouche version than to what we find in the mainstream media. Perhaps her views are most concisely put in the conclusion to an essay she wrote in response to the Atlas and Hersh articles: "It is ironic that American neo-conservatives have decided to conquer the world in the name of liberty and democracy, when they have so little regard for either." Drury dismisses the dual emphases we have noted in the mainstream media - what we have called the Wilsonian and the Machiavellian strains of the Straussian position - by referring to the distinction between "the surface reading," appropriate for public dissemination, and "the 'nocturnal or covert teaching,'" suitable for the Straussians themselves alone, but the true core of their thought and policy prescriptions. In her rendition, the Wilsonianism is surface, the Machiavellianism the covert or true doctrine. She rejects the Wilsonianism attributed to the Straussians by Hersh and others in no uncertain terms: "Strauss was neither a liberal nor a democrat"; therefore his followers are most definitely not crusaders for the worldwide spread of liberal democracy.
Drury's account of Strauss is not necessarily more accurate than that found in the mainstream media or in the LaRouche material (we will argue that she is far from accurate), but it must be said that her account is at least informed by a serious reading of Strauss's works. She is recognized as a major scholarly voice on Strauss, having written two books on him and his followers and a third book in which he plays a prominent part. Her voice has therefore been taken to be particularly authoritative by media writers and has had an undeniable impact on public opinion.
Although her first book, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, was critical of Strauss, it was also marked by respect for the man. Strauss was, she said there, "an important philosopher worthy of study." She admits to having learned from him, despite her ultimate dissent from his views. By the time she became a participant in the current more popular discussions, her tone had substantially changed. Although she is slightly more nuanced about it, she is the source of the ideas expressed so often in the LaRouche literature and sometimes suggested in the more mainstream literature that Straussian thinking is fascist or Nazi in character. She is the source of the notion, now frequently repeated, that Strauss was a student and follower of the triumvirate of Nazi thinkers: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schmitt. Thus, in her public writings she has made such strong claims as these: "Hitler had a profound contempt for the masses-the same contempt that is readily observed in Strauss and his cohorts. But when force of circumstances made it necessary to appeal to the masses, Hitler advocated lies, myths and illusions as necessary pabulum to placate the people and make them comply with the will of the Fuhrer. Strauss' political philosophy advocates the same solutions to the problems of the recalcitrant masses."
Drury's interest in Strauss of course predated the current efforts to connect him to the Iraq War. She has been an important voice in this effort because she wrote an earlier book, well before the Bush presidency, tying Strauss to the "American right," complete with a list of important alleged Straussians-many of whom, by the way, had nothing to do with Strauss at all. Her book followed the lead of Brent Staples's earlier attempt to link Strauss and conservatives in politics, but her effort was infinitely better informed, far more concrete, and in general more powerful. Although her work was not inspired by the Iraq War, she did not hesitate to jump on the bandwagon that she had, in a certain sense, started up, or at least inspired. In her recent public statements, she has enthusiastically and in an ever-more-extremist manner connected Strauss to Bush policy. She informs us that "the Straussians are the most powerful, the most organized, and the best-funded scholars in Canada and the United States. They are the unequalled masters of right-wing think tanks, foundations, and corporate funding. And now they have the ear of the powerful in the White House." Strauss is "the inspiration behind the reigning neoconservative ideology of the Republican party." His students, "a cultish clique . . . have left the academy in quest of political power." Being "poorly trained" for the academic life, Strauss's students are "held in contempt" in the universities, even though they are "the most powerful" group of scholars in Canada or the United States. Therefore they left to seek power, or were hounded out as incompetents to run the Republican party think tanks, corporations, the government of the United States, and no doubt the United Nations. (Her charges remind one a bit of the old claims about the trilateral commission and the UN's black helicopters.) Strauss's students "aspire to action," not the scholarly life. They are moved by their own quest for power.
She has no difficulty connecting these omnipotent incompetents to Iraq. For one thing, they believe in the need for "perpetual war." "Perpetual war, not perpetual peace is what Straussians believe in." They therefore support "an oppressive, belligerent foreign policy." Strauss believes that political communities require "external threats" in order to be stable and unified. "If there is no external threat, one has to be invented." In her mind, this is what Iraq represented.
Since the war was fought for reasons of this sort, it had to be sold to the public on other terms, for no sane group of people would conduct a policy built on such views. This was not difficult for the Straussians to do, for "they are compulsive liars." They, following Strauss, are "very preoccupied with secrecy." Being "compulsive liars," they had no difficulty mounting a deceptive defense of their war. Although the Iraq War was really sought as part of their attachment to "perpetual war," "public support" for it "rested on lies about Iraq's imminent threat to the United States"-all that business about weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi links to al-Qaeda.
Although Drury's statements as part of the recent public attention to Strauss and the Straussians are on the whole more polemical and exaggerated than in her earlier books, the main line of her comments follows the argument of the books. Strauss, according to what she has said in both her scholarly and her popular statements, is no kind of Wilsonian, for he is no partisan of liberal democracy. He is in fact an enemy of liberal democracy. He and his followers seek "to turn the clock back on the liberal revolution and its achievement." He has a "hatred for liberal modernity." He had "a profound antipathy to both liberalism and democracy," but "his disciples have gone to great lengths to conceal the fact." (This, we suppose, is why they always speak as defenders and partisans of liberal democracy; only Drury can see through the pretense).
Strauss, as is well known, is a partisan of "ancients" (e.g., Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle) over "moderns" (e.g., Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau), but, according to Drury, Strauss has an idiosyncratic, not to say unique, reading of the ancients: he reads them as Machiavellians, or even Nietzscheans. Thus Drury strongly endorses (is actually the ultimate source of) the other half of the media image of Strauss, Strauss the Machiavellian. Drury's Strauss is a Machiavellian of a peculiar sort, however. Her Strauss favors the ancients, who agree with Machiavelli in all respects but one: they are atheistic and amoral, like Machiavelli and Nietzsche, but are critical of the moderns for openly admitting these things. The truth, according to Drury's Strauss, is that there is no God, no divine or natural support for justice, no human good other than pleasure. Her Strauss, in a word, is a nihilist. These truths are too hard and too harsh for the ordinary person. Only philosophers are capable of facing or living with them. Thus philosophers must conceal the truth from most human beings and communicate it secretly or esoterically to each other. In place of truth, they must tell the people lies; they must give the people sugarcoated myths that will console them and make them fit for social life. These myths include teachings about the gods, the afterlife, and natural justice or natural right. The philosophers manipulate the masses with lies and deception.
The philosophers tell themselves (or others) that this manipulation is for the good of the people, but, Drury insists, it is more than anything for the sake of the philosophers themselves. It caters to their desire for power. The Straussian philosophers see themselves as "the superior few who know the truth and are entitled to rule." They affirm no natural right but the "right of the superior," by which they mean themselves. However, she also has Strauss endorse the quite different claim raised by Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic that "justice is the right of the stronger," that is, the thesis that might makes right. The Straussian philosophers seek to rule indirectly, via their influence on the gentlemen, that is, ordinary leaders like George W. Bush or Donald Rumsfeld, who can be manipulated to manipulate the masses.
Her Strauss therefore rejects all the elements of political morality we associate with liberal democracy as defended by modern philosophers like Locke or Kant. There is no "natural right to liberty"; the doctrine of natural quality is rejected; instead Strauss labors to establish the view that "the natural human condition is not one of freedom but of subordination." His chief book "is a celebration of nature-not the natural rights of man . . . but the natural order of domination and subordination." The people are "intended for subordination," and in the final analysis the lies the Straussian elite must tell are for the sake of concealing this unpleasant fact from the people. The people need to be fed religion, and thus the Straussians have "argued that separating church and state was the biggest mistake made by the founders of the U.S. republic."
In sum, Drury is an extremely important voice in the current conversation about Strauss, Straussians, and American liberal democracy. She is the source and presents the best-informed, most articulate version of the anti-Strauss case that is now circulating in the general media. As the author of three Strauss-related books, she has been an obvious quick source for deadline-pressed journalists to consult. And the picture of Strauss they get from her is surely not a pretty one.
Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 1-20 of The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy by Catherine H. Zuckert and Michael Zuckert, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©2006 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press. (Footnotes and other references included in the book may have been removed from this online version of the text.)
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SockPuppet on April 28, 2015
An important book by an important thinker
In NRH, Strauss recovers and valorizes philosophy as a way of life. Examination of the politically urgent question of what is right by nature discloses that natural right is only possible if philosophy in the original sense, as the quest to grasp what is eternal, is possible. Philosophy in this sense had been dismissed both by early (theoretical) historicism and then later by radical (existentialist) historicism. However, Strauss argues that radical historicism cannot disprove the possibility of philosophy and actually points the way to its recovery. Existentialist, delusion-dispelling insights into the insolubility of the "fundamental riddles" prove compatible with philosophy as originally understood, and Strauss questions why the radical historicists view these insights as being dependent on historical fate. Strauss sees radical (existentialist) historicism as but an inadequate articulation of trans-historical Socratic skepticism, which seeks to understand and articulate the permanent problems and alternatives inherent in human existence. In Strauss's hands, old, seemingly familiar thinkers emerge as strange and vital.
The recovery of philosophy as originally understood is necessary but insufficient for recovering natural right. The positivistic notion that reason is incapable of solving value conflicts (reflected in the fact/value distinction) must also be overcome. Strauss thus critically assails the methodology of Max Weber.
Because Philosophy is a way of life involving the intransigent search for truth, what unites philosophers is more important than their disagreements, and separates them from other men. This is true even when the disagreements are profound. Consider for instance the "Socratic turn," a momentous change marking the birth of classical political philosophy. Prior to Socrates, philosophers (who take Nature as their standard) had deprecated politics, understanding notions of right to be merely conventional. Socrates, on the other hand, affirmed natural right. He also gave political philosophy an expanded meaning: political philosophy was no longer simply what philosophers thought about the ultimate status of politics, it now became the ascent to philosophy through the serious study of political opinions. Because this new approach to philosophy is interdependent with the perspective of the citizen, philosophy now began taking on responsibility to help guide the city. Socrates, in opposition to the pre-Socratics, taught that man was a political and social animal, and in his behavior, Socrates practiced what he preached. Yet even with this profound change in philosophical teaching and behavior, the classical political philosophers still shared with the pre-Socratics the notion that philosophical contemplation, the questing search for truth that disturbed and undermined society and for which only a tiny minority of individuals were by nature qualified, was man's highest end. Philosophy still involved an ultimate transcendence of the political realm. Classical political philosophy thus coupled responsibility with moderation: Philosophy was communicated to the few, the many were supported in their salutary beliefs, and society was intelligently guided through principled yet flexible statecraft to the extent this was possible.
Because political philosophy since Socrates has accepted the task of guiding society both for the sake of philosophy and for the general good, what emerges for Strauss is a history of political philosophy, where different teachings can be understood as responses to different historical circumstances, and as supplying adjustments to situations brought about in part by philosophical predecessors. The contrast between classical political philosophy and modern political philosophy looms large for Strauss. This theme in his work is often called "the Ancients vs. the Moderns." Strauss has a decided preference for classical political philosophy, which he seeks to recover, and in some sense he treats the rebellion against the classics as a giant decline. The moderns rebelled against the Great Tradition of classical political philosophy and the Bible. They did so with great political success, but in the process much was lost. Following Hobbes, the Moderns rejected the classical notion of man as naturally a political and social animal, positing the primacy of rights over duties. Jettisoning the classical concern with character formation and the humanizing focus on "the best regime" as transcending politics, they "realistically" decided to embrace and manipulate human passions in in order guarantee results. This approach has proved socially corrosive over time. Also, in various ways, modern political philosophy has adversely affected the practice of statesmanship.
Modern political philosophy has proceeded in 3 waves. (Strauss does not employ the 3 wave terminology in this book, but he later used this terminology and it helps explain what he is talking about in NRH.) The first wave of modernity culminated with John Locke and has had its greatest practical success in America. The second and third waves involved attempted correctives to problems inherent in modernity, but these attempts have been rooted in modern premises and have served to radicalize modernity, making it even more problematic. The second wave of modernity emerged in the work of Rousseau, involved historicism, and produced among other phenomena the Soviet Union. The third wave of modernity emerged with Nietzche, involved radical (existentialist) historicism, and produced the Third Reich. In America, Strauss considered himself to be living in a first wave Lockean regime that was susceptible to the corrosions of modernity but which was relatively healthy because the second and third waves had yet to play themselves out to the extent they had in Europe and Russia. His return to classical political philosophy can be viewed as a paradoxical attempt to discern and apply ways to fortify modern America against internal decline and external threats. (Even so, many people who have written studies on Strauss point to his ultimate pessimism regarding the eventual fate of all modern regimes.)
It should be mentioned that for Strauss, the emergence of modern political philosophy, though highly problematic, was entirely understandable. A profound change had happened with the triumph of Christianity in the Middle Ages. Philosophy was made the handmaiden of Theology. This not only stifled the true nature of philosophy, it also meant that because of the political influence of priests, classical political philosophy lost its ability to promote moderation and flexible statesmanship. Much political turbulence and religious warfare helps explain the rise of modern political philosophy. Here I'll make mention of a second major theme for Strauss, the so called "theological-political problem," which I take to mean that philosophy must find a way to accommodate itself to religious belief without being ruled by it. Modern political philosophy emerged because classical political philosophy was no longer effectively handling this problem. The moderns, in their attempt to restore philosophical guidance and moderation to society, worked to radically undermine the influence of religion. (But of course, Modern political philosophy, from the perspective of Strauss's theological political problem, leaves itself open to the charge of failing to accommodate itself to religious belief.)
This brings us to another major theme for Strauss, "Athens vs. Jerusalem." Some of Strauss's students tend to treat Athens vs. Jerusalem (reason vs. biblical faith) as simply an example of what they consider the more basic theological political problem that stretches back to the world of the classical polis. That is, they think that religion is but a salutary and ultimately necessary opium for the masses, and they think that Strauss's intellectual defense of biblical religion against modern rationalism (which in effect argues that all alleged refutations of revelation presuppose unbelief and points out how modern rationalism has actually proceeded against religion by way of mockery), is merely an attempt to prop up an ailing superstition. However, though Strauss does view religion as socially salutary and necessary, I think it does not do justice to Strauss to collapse Athens vs. Jerusalem into the theological-political problem. Looking at NRH, especially the chapter on Max Weber, I get the sense that Strauss viewed Biblical faith (the life of obedient love) as truly the great and viable alternative to Philosophy (the life of free insight.) The tension between reason and revelation is a field of rich reflection for Strauss. Though Strauss insists that Athens and Jerusalem are irreducible alternatives, I agree with interpreters of Strauss who contend that in his writings he manages to give his full allegiance to both.
I have used this review to try to articulate Strauss's perspective rather than critique it. I'm just trying to come to grips with the thought of this influential yet elusive figure. I hope this effort at comprehension proves helpful to other readers. Any comments/ critiques are welcome!
Timothy E. Kennelly on January 3, 2014
A Classical Work on the History of Political Philosophy
"Natural Right and History" is a relatively straightforward intorduction to the development of the idea of natural right in the history of political philosophy. The book does assume some knowledge of the subject and Strauss puts many things on the table; however, there is in the work a very powerful sense that natural right is an immediate human problem.
In the front of book Strauss includes two Biblical pieces which convey an immediate sense of justice or injustice: the parable of Nathan, and the story of Naboth and his vineyard. The stories convey glaring examples of abuses of power which were understood in an ancient nation which had no concept of nature. One might see in these tales nature or nature's God calling out for justice or for a right relationship between ruler and ruled. This right relationship or its possibility is the surface meaning of the text as a whole and it is the heart of the whole matter.Enjoy.
Loo Tion February 17, 2013
Disappointing
Very little about this book justifies Strauss's high reputation. He doesn't define his terms, and it's difficult to decipher his own position when he's always quoting someone else. His use of English, obviously not his native language, is poor.
The book needed a severe editor, but Strauss's reputation must have scared everyone away. It's hard to keep in mind anything of what he says.
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October 31, 2014 | counterpunch.org
The greatest crime of the twenty-first century so far was the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Broadly conceived by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney immediately after 9/11, it initially lacked a coherent justification . But as Condoleezza Rice noted at the time, the tragedy brought "opportunities." (People in fear can be persuaded to support things policy-makers long wanted, but couldn't quite sell to the public.)
First Bush and Cheney (and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Rice) made the decision to go to war. Then they sat down and carefully invented the reasons for their war.
On Sept. 11, 2001 Bush asked his counterterrorism advisor Richard A. Clarke, who had warned him in early 2001 about an "immanent al-Qaeda threat" (warnings Clarke alleges Bush "ignored") to produce a report blaming Iraq for the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
In his own account Clarke says: "I said, Mr. President. We've done this before." (Meaning, we've explored the possibility of ties between Baghdad and al-Qaeda before.) "We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There is no connection."
But Clarke's recollection of the event continues:
"He came back at me and said, 'Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report. It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. … Do it again.'"
Few policy decisions in modern history can rival the evil of that demand that the U.S. intelligence community deliberately contrive a false historical narrative, to justify a war that has destroyed a country and killed half a million people.
Meanwhile Secretary of "Defense" Donald Rumsfeld advocated - from day one - attacks on Iraq as a response to 9/11. Clarke has stated that he assumed Rumsfeld was joking when he first suggested, immediately after the event, that since Afghanistan had "no good targets" the U.S. should proceed to bomb the totally un-related country. But he soon learned that Rumsfeld and his staff headed by Paul Wolfowitz were in deadly earnest.
The Powell UN speech, demanding global support for an attack on a threatening, al-Qaeda aligned Iraq, in fact bombed. But more than that, key U.S. allies-NATO heavies France and Germany among them-refused to get on board the program. This occasioned an amazing campaign of vilification of France, best symbolized by Congress's decision to rename "French fries" "freedom fries" in the Congressional cafeteria. An asinine book trashing France as "our oldest enemy" became a best-seller.
... ... ...
Republican presidents, Democratic presidents. All on the same page when it comes to maintaining what Wolfowitz termed "full-spectrum dominance" in the post-Cold War world. Now as it all falls apart-as ISIL expands its "caliphate," as the Syrian Baathists hold out against both U.S.-backed and other Islamists, as Iran gains respect as a serious negotiator in the Geneva talks, as China rises, as Russia thwarts NATO expansion, as U.S.-Israeli ties fray, as a multi-polar world inevitably emerges- what triumphs can the neocons claim?
Once flushed with history, proclaiming the "end of history" with the triumph of capitalist imperialism over Marxist socialism and other competing ideologies, they have only a handful of successes they can claim.
- They have successfully avoided prison. They calculated that they could mislead the people and commit the gravest possible crimes with impunity, under the U.S. system. Wolfowitz was nominated by Bush to become World Bank president in 2005, and held the post two years before departing amidst a scandal. Feith sashayed out of office the same year, hired at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service (despite opposition from the more principled faculty). They serve as news consultants and live comfortable lives.
- They have left behind in positions of power and influence fellow neocons (most notably, Victoria Nuland, architect of the Ukraine disaster) and neocon allies, "liberal internationalists" like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as well as an assortment of dear friends who simply love war, such as Sen. John McCain. Some are describing Obama's renewed bombing of Iraq, and the strikes on Syrian targets, as a new "neocon moment." It must give them great pleasure.
- Perhaps most importantly: Iraq, although (or because) it has been absolutely destroyed as a modern state by U.S. fury, is no longer a threat to Israel.
Oilmen Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush (and Rice who has an oil tanker named after her) lusted after oil profits. They lusted too for an expansion of U.S. military power in the "Greater Middle East." They were less concerned with Israel. But Israel's survival as a specifically "Jewish" state, with a subject Arab population that must never become demographically threatening-and blow the whole Zionist project by forcing a one-state multi-ethnic solution-is the central neocon concern. They will not say this, of course; Leo Strauss students like Wolfowitz and Shulsky believe in the need for deception to get things done. But this was the minimal objective of the neocons' response to 9/11: to use the event to advantage Israel.
Recall how, in late 2003, as it became embarrassingly evident that Iraq had had no weapons of mass destruction, Wolfowitz in Iraq tried to change the subject entirely. Who cares about weapons of mass destruction? he told a reporter. The Iraqi people want to reconstruct their country, he declared (as though the question of the war's legitimacy was an irrelevant detail). Having acknowledged some "intelligence flaws" (attributing them to the CIA, rather than to themselves-despite what we know of the unprecedented Cheney-Libby visits to the Pentagon to browbeat the intelligence professionals to include their bullshit into official reports), Cheney and his neocon camp changed the subject.
The real issue, they now averred, was creating "democracy" in the Middle East. Condi Rice happily connived with this strategy, arguing dramatically that it was as wrong to deny people in the Middle East their freedom as it had been to deny black people in her home of Birmingham, Alabama their right to vote. Suddenly special diplomats were dispatched to Arab countries to lecture skeptical, sometimes glowering audiences on the advantages of the U.S. political system.
Under great pressure, some Arab countries somewhat expanded their parliamentary processes. The effort backfired as Islamists were elected in Egypt, Hizbollah made advances in Lebanon, and Hamas won a majority in the first free Palestinian election (in 2006). The "terrorists" were winning elections! The State Department denounced such results and has since shut up about "democracy" in the Middle East.
No, it wasn't about the announced reasons: weapons of mass destruction, or al-Qaeda ties. Nor was it about U.S. Big Oil (which hasn't profited from the Iraq War, the big contracts going to China and Russia). Nor was it about permanent military bases; the Iraqis have successfully rejected them. What does that leave us with?
A war pushed by the neocons to destroy a foe of Israel. It succeeded, surely, but only to produce a vicious Sunni successor state in Anbar Province potentially far more threatening to Israel than Saddam ever was.
But Binyamin Netanyahu doesn't see it that way. He has repeatedly dubbed Iran as a greater threat than ISIL. Having predicted since 1992 that Iran is close to developing a nuclear bomb; having repeatedly demanded (echoed by prominent U.S. neocons such as Norman Podhoretz) that the U.S. bomb Iran (to prevent a "nuclear holocaust"); having angrily dismissed U.S. intelligence assessments that Iran has no nuclear weapons program, Netanyahu wants Obama to focus on destroying the Iranian regime.
GARY LEUPP is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion.
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peakoilbarrel.com
R Walter, 02/03/2016 at 6:43 pmNeoconservatives follow the philosophy of Leo Strauss, the father of the neoconservative movement. Whether is has been bad or good, hard to know. A little bit and a good read about the neoconservatives and Leo Strauss:likbez, 02/03/2016 at 7:16 pm"Neoconservatives hold the view that 'American' is the best bet for the world – America's institutional set-up is a very useful combination of modern elements, having to do with the sovereignty of individuals together with the older idea of a substantial role for government – and that this is an idea that needs to be widely promulgated. Indeed, without its promulgation there can arise and persist major threats to the countries which do embrace this set up, such as the United States of America. In short, unless the semi-free democratic society is strong, and not only ready to defend itself but also willing to go on the offensive in support of its system abroad, it will perish. The neocon view is that either you're willing to export liberal democracy or it will be crushed by all kinds of barbaric global groups.
Now let us return to Strauss. Recall his prudential endorsement of classical liberalism as the best bet for philosophy. (Just exactly why philosophy ought to be cherished is not made clear by Strauss & Co; and their implicit or explicit nihilism calls the merit of philosophy into serious question.) Strauss's embrace of classical liberalism – or at least a watered down version of it, as per liberal democracy – did appear to influence the neocons. They too believe – some of them because they were taught it by Strauss & Co – that their most important values are best advanced and preserved in a relatively free society, provided such a society is strong and wields power wisely, both at home and abroad."
https://philosophynow.org/issues/59/Leo_Strauss_Neoconservative
For what it's worth.
"Neoconservatives follow the philosophy of Leo Strauss, the father of the neoconservative movement."No. They follow the philosophy of Leo Trotsky with "proletariat" replaced by "international elite" and global corporations.
http://softpanorama.org/Skeptics/Political_skeptic/neocons.shtmlNeoconservatives are neoliberals with a gun, changing Al Capone maxim into "You can get much farther with a neoliberal recommendations and a gun than you can with a neoliberal recommendation (as in Washington consensus) alone." Kind of attack dogs of neoliberalism.
Using deception as a smoke screen in politics was actually introduced by Machiavelli, not by Leo Strauss; that's why Bush II administration was called Mayberry Machiavelli (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayberry_Machiavelli)
What Leo Strauss introduced and what is used in neoconservative/neoliberal discourse is the concept of "noble lie" (which includes "false flag" operations; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag). Here is how Professor of History at Tufts University Gary Leupp defines their behavior:
== quote ==
Hersh notes the critical influence of the philosopher Leo Strauss (d. 1973) on Wolfowitz's thinking. His article stimulated, among other articles, a substantial piece on Strauss by Jeet Heer in the Boston Globe (May 11), and another by William Pfaff in the International Herald Tribune (May 15), the latter noting that "Strauss's thought is a matter of public interest because his followers are in charge of U.S. foreign policy." Strauss, of German Jewish origins who taught for many years at the University of Chicago, mentoring Wolfowitz among others, was a brilliant man. No question about that. But also a man profoundly hostile to the modern world and to the concept of rule by the people. He believed it was the natural right of the wise and strong to lead societies to the fulfillment of their wise aims, using subterfuge when necessary, because speaking the naked truth won't get the job done.Strauss's point of departure is Socrates, who in Plato's Republic denounces Athenian democracy (the rule of the untutored masses) and instead promotes government by "philosopher-kings." Strauss had experienced the Weimar Republic (one of the more democratic experiments in modern history) and seen Germany fall into the hands of the Nazis. He understandably opposed the latter, but he derived some lessons from their methodology.
The failure of the Weimar regime to prevent the rise of fascism, in his view, resided in its failure to put power into the hands of the strong and good, who inevitably, unable to acquire popular support through honest methods, should (like their Nazi adversaries) have cleverly used Big Lies (towards good ends) to nudge the people towards those ends. Only wise men, acting in secrecy, can do that.
As Hersh points out, the neocons (just about a dozen officials-including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton, Abrams - operating in concert with the oil-baron contingent in the administration-Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Bush-and providing them with intellectual guidance) refer to themselves (with smug amusement) as a "cabal" (a word with an interesting etymology).
They have contempt for the masses, and feel utterly justified in wisely misleading those masses into a roadmap for global peace on their terms. That meant, initially, using 9-11 to produce support for the seizure of Iraq,
That seizure is still in progress, messily, untidily, brutally and illegally, and with results no cabal, however wise, can really predict. Among the results might be a growing revulsion among the American people themselves at the neocons' misanthropic arrogance, and perhaps (much though it should be regretted and fought) anti-Semitism. The latter might be provoked by the fact that persons inclined to embrace the most extreme factions in the Israeli political apparatus are disproportionately represented in the neocons' cabal, and while the general movement of U.S. foreign policy is driven by broad geopolitical concerns, rather than the alliance with Israel, the neocons' allegiance to what they perceive to be the interests of Sharon's Israel is highly conspicuous.
== end of quote ==See also
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/31/the-gloating-of-the-neocons/
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October 31, 2014 | counterpunch.org
The greatest crime of the twenty-first century so far was the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Broadly conceived by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney immediately after 9/11, it initially lacked a coherent justification . But as Condoleezza Rice noted at the time, the tragedy brought "opportunities." (People in fear can be persuaded to support things policy-makers long wanted, but couldn't quite sell to the public.)
First Bush and Cheney (and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Rice) made the decision to go to war. Then they sat down and carefully invented the reasons for their war.
On Sept. 11, 2001 Bush asked his counterterrorism advisor Richard A. Clarke, who had warned him in early 2001 about an "immanent al-Qaeda threat" (warnings Clarke alleges Bush "ignored") to produce a report blaming Iraq for the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
In his own account Clarke says: "I said, Mr. President. We've done this before." (Meaning, we've explored the possibility of ties between Baghdad and al-Qaeda before.) "We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There is no connection."
But Clarke's recollection of the event continues:
"He came back at me and said, 'Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report. It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. … Do it again.'"
Few policy decisions in modern history can rival the evil of that demand that the U.S. intelligence community deliberately contrive a false historical narrative, to justify a war that has destroyed a country and killed half a million people.
Meanwhile Secretary of "Defense" Donald Rumsfeld advocated-from day one-attacks on Iraq as a response to 9/11. Clarke has stated that he assumed Rumsfeld was joking when he first suggested, immediately after the event, that since Afghanistan had "no good targets" the U.S. should proceed to bomb the totally un-related country. But he soon learned that Rumsfeld and his staff headed by Paul Wolfowitz were in deadly earnest.
The Powell UN speech, demanding global support for an attack on a threatening, al-Qaeda aligned Iraq, in fact bombed. But more than that, key U.S. allies-NATO heavies France and Germany among them-refused to get on board the program. This occasioned an amazing campaign of vilification of France, best symbolized by Congress's decision to rename "French fries" "freedom fries" in the Congressional cafeteria. An asinine book trashing France as "our oldest enemy" became a best-seller.
... ... ...
Republican presidents, Democratic presidents. All on the same page when it comes to maintaining what Wolfowitz termed "full-spectrum dominance" in the post-Cold War world. Now as it all falls apart-as ISIL expands its "caliphate," as the Syrian Baathists hold out against both U.S.-backed and other Islamists, as Iran gains respect as a serious negotiator in the Geneva talks, as China rises, as Russia thwarts NATO expansion, as U.S.-Israeli ties fray, as a multi-polar world inevitably emerges- what triumphs can the neocons claim?
Once flushed with history, proclaiming the "end of history" with the triumph of capitalist imperialism over Marxist socialism and other competing ideologies, they have only a handful of successes they can claim.
* They have successfully avoided prison. They calculated that they could mislead the people and commit the gravest possible crimes with impunity, under the U.S. system. Wolfowitz was nominated by Bush to become World Bank president in 2005, and held the post two years before departing amidst a scandal. Feith sashayed out of office the same year, hired at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service (despite opposition from the more principled faculty). They serve as news consultants and live comfortable lives.* They have left behind in positions of power and influence fellow neocons (most notably, Victoria Nuland, architect of the Ukraine disaster) and neocon allies, "liberal internationalists" like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as well as an assortment of dear friends who simply love war, such as Sen. John McCain. Some are describing Obama's renewed bombing of Iraq, and the strikes on Syrian targets, as a new "neocon moment." It must give them great pleasure.
* Perhaps most importantly: Iraq, although (or because) it has been absolutely destroyed as a modern state by U.S. fury, is no longer a threat to Israel.
Oilmen Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush (and Rice who has an oil tanker named after her) lusted after oil profits. They lusted too for an expansion of U.S. military power in the "Greater Middle East." They were less concerned with Israel. But Israel's survival as a specifically "Jewish" state, with a subject Arab population that must never become demographically threatening-and blow the whole Zionist project by forcing a one-state multi-ethnic solution-is the central neocon concern. They will not say this, of course; Leo Strauss students like Wolfowitz and Shulsky believe in the need for deception to get things done. But this was the minimal objective of the neocons' response to 9/11: to use the event to advantage Israel.
Recall how, in late 2003, as it became embarrassingly evident that Iraq had had no weapons of mass destruction, Wolfowitz in Iraq tried to change the subject entirely. Who cares about weapons of mass destruction? he told a reporter. The Iraqi people want to reconstruct their country, he declared (as though the question of the war's legitimacy was an irrelevant detail). Having acknowledged some "intelligence flaws" (attributing them to the CIA, rather than to themselves-despite what we know of the unprecedented Cheney-Libby visits to the Pentagon to browbeat the intelligence professionals to include their bullshit into official reports), Cheney and his neocon camp changed the subject.
The real issue, they now averred, was creating "democracy" in the Middle East. Condi Rice happily connived with this strategy, arguing dramatically that it was as wrong to deny people in the Middle East their freedom as it had been to deny black people in her home of Birmingham, Alabama their right to vote. Suddenly special diplomats were dispatched to Arab countries to lecture skeptical, sometimes glowering audiences on the advantages of the U.S. political system.
Under great pressure, some Arab countries somewhat expanded their parliamentary processes. The effort backfired as Islamists were elected in Egypt, Hizbollah made advances in Lebanon, and Hamas won a majority in the first free Palestinian election (in 2006). The "terrorists" were winning elections! The State Department denounced such results and has since shut up about "democracy" in the Middle East.
No, it wasn't about the announced reasons: weapons of mass destruction, or al-Qaeda ties. Nor was it about U.S. Big Oil (which hasn't profited from the Iraq War, the big contracts going to China and Russia). Nor was it about permanent military bases; the Iraqis have successfully rejected them. What does that leave us with?
A war pushed by the neocons to destroy a foe of Israel. It succeeded, surely, but only to produce a vicious Sunni successor state in Anbar Province potentially far more threatening to Israel than Saddam ever was.
But Binyamin Netanyahu doesn't see it that way. He has repeatedly dubbed Iran as a greater threat than ISIL. Having predicted since 1992 that Iran is close to developing a nuclear bomb; having repeatedly demanded (echoed by prominent U.S. neocons such as Norman Podhoretz) that the U.S. bomb Iran (to prevent a "nuclear holocaust"); having angrily dismissed U.S. intelligence assessments that Iran has no nuclear weapons program, Netanyahu wants Obama to focus on destroying the Iranian regime.
GARY LEUPP is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion.
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For the neocon cabal running the country, recent news hasn't been entirely good. The successful invasion of Iraq has met with unexpected opposition (from a people with a dignified capacity to resist occupation that the aggressors, in their arrogance, didn't quite anticipate). Paul Wolfowitz, deputy Secretary of "Defense," has stated frankly to Congress that the situation will get "messier as Iraqis sort out their political process" (as though the Iraqis, milling about gun-toting and order-barking foreigners, were free to have their own political process). Meanwhile the reinstitution of the Northern Alliance regime in Afghanistan also remains problematic. The reconfiguration of Southwest Asia just isn't going as smoothly as envisioned by the New American Century Project operators. Richard Perle, who once told the Italian press that the U.S. had "proof" that 9-11 mastermind Mohammed Atta met with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad (and who in making such a statement revealed himself to be a shameless liar) has been disgraced due to some financial dealings, and has been obliged to step down from his powerful (but unpaid and unsupervised) position as chair of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. This is good, although he is still on that board and remains at large and dangerous.
It's also good that Perle's fellow Likudist and career disinformationist Ari Fleischer is stepping down. And that Gen. Tommy Franks, who everybody used to think would be the MacArthur of Iraq, has decided to retire. There is disarray at the top (manifested in the changing appointments for Iraq occupation administration, in policies towards the Mujahadeen Khalq and Iran, etc.) and perhaps a spreading loss of confidence in the neocons' whole imperialist program. Most importantly, the philosopher-kings, with academician Wolfowitz at their head, are increasingly coming under scrutiny in the mainstream press. This is meet, right and salutary, because they are very bad people, with lots of blood on their hands already, and busily planning further crimes against the world, beginning with Syria and Iran. Their badness most notably was revealed in a vitally important New Yorker article (May 6) by veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. Not to sound Gandalfian, but this may be the turning of the tide
Hersh reveals the philosophical underpinnings of the neocons' project, and draws attention to their cynical, anti-democratic nature. His piece has stimulated other articles, laying bare the nature of the cabal and its ideological foundations. It will take time for the information to sink in, but if and when the masses come to see what's been going on, they will probably be very angry, as good people should be, under the circumstances. We have been lied to, relentlessly, systematically, fascistically. The Sept. 12 lie was that Sept. 11 was planned in Baghdad. Profoundly untrue and really, really stupid (to any informed person), but profoundly useful to those prepared to draw upon ignorance, fear and racism to effect their goals. This they have done, and they're just at the beginning of their project. But it's just possible that their project might get derailed, due in part to the efforts of journalists like Hersh.
Hersh notes the critical influence of the philosopher Leo Strauss (d. 1973) on Wolfowitz's thinking. His article stimulated, among other articles, a substantial piece on Strauss by Jeet Heer in the Boston Globe (May 11), and another by William Pfaff in the International Herald Tribune (May 15), the latter noting that "Strauss's thought is a matter of public interest because his followers are in charge of U.S. foreign policy." Strauss, of German Jewish origins who taught for many years at the University of Chicago, mentoring Wolfowitz among others, was a brilliant man. No question about that. But also a man profoundly hostile to the modern world and to the concept of rule by the people. He believed it was the natural right of the wise and strong to lead societies to the fulfillment of their wise aims, using subterfuge when necessary, because speaking the naked truth won't get the job done.
Strauss's point of departure is Socrates, who in Plato's Republic denounces Athenian democracy (the rule of the untutored masses) and instead promotes government by "philosopher-kings." Strauss had experienced the Weimar Republic (one of the more democratic experiments in modern history) and seen Germany fall into the hands of the Nazis. He understandably opposed the latter, but he derived some lessons from their methodology. The failure of the Weimar regime to prevent the rise of fascism, in his view, resided in its failure to put power into the hands of the strong and good, who inevitably, unable to acquire popular support through honest methods, should (like their Nazi adversaries) have cleverly used Big Lies (towards good ends) to nudge the people towards those ends. Only wise men, acting in secrecy, can do that.
As Hersh points out, the neocons (just about a dozen officials---including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton, Abrams---operating in concert with the oil-baron contingent in the administration-Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Bush---and providing them with intellectual guidance) refer to themselves (with smug amusement) as a "cabal" (a word with an interesting etymology). They have contempt for the masses, and feel utterly justified in wisely misleading those masses into a roadmap for global peace on their terms. That meant, initially, using 9-11 to produce support for the seizure of Iraq. That seizure is still in progress, messily, untidily, brutally and illegally, and with results no cabal, however wise, can really predict. Among the results might be a growing revulsion among the American people themselves at the neocons' misanthropic arrogance, and perhaps (much though it should be regretted and fought) anti-Semitism. The latter might be provoked by the fact that persons inclined to embrace the most extreme factions in the Israeli political apparatus are disproportionately represented in the neocons' cabal, and while the general movement of U.S. foreign policy is driven by broad geopolitical concerns, rather than the alliance with Israel, the neocons' allegiance to what they perceive to be the interests of Sharon's Israel is highly conspicuous.
Maybe the tide will turn. Or, maybe the cabal will triumph, and the world will for some time pay for their wisdom, throughout a whole American Century, 2001-2099, such as they envision and wish their children to celebrate in appreciative psalms and sagas.
In the Buddhist religion, there are esoteric trends. In Japanese, such esoterism is called hiden ("hidden tradition"). The idea is that wise men pass on directly to their disciples their insights that aren't appropriate to communicate to the masses, those who don't have the capacity to understand and attain enlightenment. I respect that viewpoint, best represented in the Shingon (Chen-yuan) tradition rooted in the Tantrism currently fashionable (if for all the wrong reasons) in Hollywood. There is also in Buddhism a concept (called upaya in Sanskrit and hôben in Japanese) that might be translated as "expedient means." You use truth and falsehood flexibly to produce human happiness. The Buddha, carefully considering the audience, said different things to different people, to help alleviate their suffering. Maybe Strauss was well-motivated in urging the use of cryptic language and lies. As a basically collegial, fellow academic I'll happily give him the benefit of a doubt. I understand he was a good professor. Maybe he was thinking like the Buddha.
But the cabal in Washington is thinking more like Joseph Goebbels, in its eminently wise use of lies. (The "Defense" Department is, by the way, deeply annoyed at the CIA's disinclination to produce more lies; hence Rumsfeld's new "Office of Special Plans" which can generate disinformation on demand.) It is using simplistic language of "good" and "evil," preparing the American people, whom it regards with utilitarian contempt and condescension, to support "regime change" in Syria and Iran and elsewhere.
This (in my opinion anyway) is unwise for the world, a world falling victim to the philosopher-kings, who do not know what they're doing, who are totally out of control, who are standing daily in front of the mirror like crazed simians beating their chests and feeling apishly proud and giddy, who should be brought before an objective international tribunal for judgment as soon as possible.
We need to (as any good Zen priest will put it) "See things as they REALLY are," and specifically to see what these Straussian neocons are up to, and mount a democratic and moral challenge to their Socratic contempt for ourselves. And we must question their plans for this, our planet, that they want to refashion, in their special dishonest wisdom, in their own image.
Gary Leupp is an an associate professor, Department of History, Tufts University and coordinator, Asian Studies Program.
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crookedtimber.org
from the OP:This shift from the visually immediate to the distant and the abstract-one can see it in Machiavelli's claim that in politics, no one knows who you are but how you appear; in Hobbes's notion of the Leviathan-would be a recurring theme in Wolin's analysis
Interesting. That Machiavelli line ("everyone sees how you appear, few touch what you are") could be read that way. More obviously, it's about "the discerning few" (as the editors of one edition of The Prince say in a footnote) versus the gullible many.
Anyway, v. nice post.
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May 09, 2015 | The Guardian
libbyliberal -> libbyliberal 9 May 2015 20:01
Obama/Hillary/Dem apologists, like the corporate media, can't admit that anyone exists to the real liberal left of these tools of the "empire of chaos" -- disaster capitalism is okay with them, profits uber alles.
So so much of the citizenry -- the voting majority which really is a pathetic minority -- stay penned up as the US sinks into quicksand, and the reins of the country keep getting passed back and forth between the supposed good cop and bad cop parties, and the citizenry is CON-FUSED, which according to Latin origin is "fused with". Obama is a Republican, a far right one in sensibility. Yet crazy Repubs call him liberal. How confusing is that??? How stupid to believe they are right.
Obama apologists call those more liberal than Obama (so not hard) to be non-liberal and demonize them since they are so ego-desperate to not admit just how betrayed we all have been not only since the highly lying Obama campaign days but when Clinton and his cabal of Ruben and Summers and Hillary and others destroyed consumer protections and handed over control to the corporate class.
We are hypnotized to think we have only two voting options, and the media underlines this never giving the microphone to those outside of the authoritarians of the two pens. We are hypnotized to think we have to go with the media-beloved sure-winners, when the corruption is so over the top the bewildered herd keeps contributing to the problem and never finding a solution.
So many non-hypnotized have stopped voting in disgust and despair.
Jill Stein of Green Party once said that with either Repubs or Dems we are on the Titanic. It may sink a tad faster with the Repubs in charge but it is sinking with the craven Dems as well.
Bill Ehrhorn Ozymandia 9 May 2015 20:01
It gives the chickenhawks a chance to act manly. Sitting from away from the battlefield they like to pretend that they're tough
tupacalypse7 babymamaboy 9 May 2015 20:00
Religious freedom means calling yourself Christian and practising Islam.
oh that's a good one!
sour_mash TheWholeNineYards 9 May 2015 19:55A mantle that murdered 4,486 Americans with +30,000 wounded and an untold number of Iraqis dead. $4-$6 trillion spent destabilizing Iraq which was no threat, never attacked America is the GOP calling card.
(I agree with you, just fine tuned a bit.)
sour_mash babymamaboy 9 May 2015 19:50"We will look for you, we will find you, and we will kill you."
Religious freedom means calling yourself Christian and practising hypocrisy.
Michael Q 9 May 2015 19:07The republicans are irrelevant. Americans need to stop watching Fox News and not elect these crazy lunatics who will create more wars, more inequality, more neoliberalism, more deregulation, and completely screw the working and middle classes, just like they did under Bush snr and jnr, and Reagan.
We live in a multi polar world. Latin America is more independent than it has ever been, and IMO Obama has done a good job negotiating with Iran.
Treat people the way you would like to be treated and there will be peace in the world,
t bone Michael Q 9 May 2015 19:46
There's nothing worse than a secret war - the one that your Obama is committed to. He's set the Mideast on fire because he's just as much as a war devil as anyone else.
He's messed up Egypt, Syria, Libya and Iraq, there's all kinds of heinous murdering and uprisings going on there now. Now he's trying to start a race war here in the United States!
Congratulations - because you're the only one living in your utopian dream world. Obama (and his minions) has destroyed our U.S. Constitution - irreparably! He's an sobmfr! GD him!
cromwell2015 9 May 2015 18:43
listen to the war talk once again. Their talk, their glory, your blood, your death, your dreams .when will they lead like the kings of old and put the uniform on. In your dreams, when will "normal" people wake up and send these people to where they belong. We including Iran all belong to a same race ,its called the human race.
To add insult to any one with a brain knows your not so lily white when you have gone into and interfered with so many other country's including bombing Iraq back into the stone age. I would finish with you the USA's politicians, you are the people who are the real danger to the world,
MiniApolis 9 May 2015 17:56"Conservatives howled and hooted as Walker, who was criticized by Obama for his lack of foreign policy expertise, went after the administration's nuclear deal with Iran, its handling of terrorism and its relationship with Israel."
Well.
And Obama's expertise on foreign policy when he was elected was exactly what? Having a Kenyan father?
The Republicans are a truly miserable bunch - worse this time around than even before, with the stunning exception of Sarah Palin, who can out-worse anyone.
But they are absolutely right on Iran, and Obama is absolutely wrong.
A plague on all of them.
tupacalypse7 9 May 2015 17:53ISIS will be the biggest campaigner for the rightwing in 2016. republicans will paint anyone who doesn't support full-throttled blind aggression against IS as weak and unpatriotic. there will be frothing talk of smashing IS to pieces and bringin 'MERICAN justice to Iraq once again. and once again, no one will talk about what comes after IS because that would require vision, foresight, finesse, community organizing, LISTENING to the native population, listening to women and owning up to true motivations. there is no doubt the US and its allies are fully capable of blowing that part of the earth off the map. congratulations, you are all badasses.
however, the vicious cycle of self-perpetuating war will continue until the focus is put on the humanitarian endgame of any military aggression and not solely on military aggression. the question that needs to be answered and addressed by any war committee is why did WWI set the perfect stage for WWII? and why did Iraq 2 cause the potential Iraq 3 and IS? the answer to me is a complete lack of finesse and vision centered around an all-male war party with a complete conflict of interest because a world without war is a world without weapons sales.
ExcaliburDefender ACTANE 9 May 2015 17:50Always good to bring up the Obama/Hitler, the nra have been milking that one for decades now too. Who could forget 'ninja Nazi jack booted thugs Fourth Reich' of 1994/1995. After the bombing of Oklahoma City federal building, which killed 168, Bush 41 publicly withdrew from the NRA and trashed La Pierre specifically.
All your talk is just part of fear mongering, only believed by the bunker dwellers.
No one believes this any more. ISIS is not coming to the parking lot of Walmart, you don't need an AR15 that hold 100 rounds of ammo.
The greatest threat to the Tea Party faithful is Type II Diabetes, and they really need to keep their Medicare and ACA coverage. Too many super sized happy meals.
Profhambone ACTANE 9 May 2015 17:43
How little you know.....one aspect of Chamberlain signing is that it bought time for GB to begin to re-arm and prepare the industrial base for war making. Germany had a large lead and GB was not prepared to go to war then. Today, it is used as "appeasement" which has a negative connotation.
An example of appeasement for those who slept through history is the Republican hopefuls for Emperor who pledge any and all things to Israel in order to keep Shelton Adelson happy here in Las Vegas and giving millions and tens of millions of dollars to PAC's friendly to them. "Elect me!!" is the name of the game. It is all about "me", the whole country, it seems these days....
illegitimato -> Tony Wise 9 May 2015 17:43Disingenuous dick -- this isn't about Republican versus Democrat. It's about failed leadership across the board.
Besides, count the casualties. Dubya killed more people.
How much does the GOP pay you for this drivel, 50 cents a post? Or do you carry their water for free?
illegitimato -> Boredwiththeusa 9 May 2015 17:38Great, another round of chicken-hawk "leaders" with no combat background, ready to send others' sons and daughters into the carnage. How did that work out last time with Dubya, Cheney, Rummie, et al?
The new outrage this latest clutch manifests tops even those "Iraqi Freedom" incompetents -- bowing on bended knee to the owner of a Macau casino which uses underage sex slaves, all for his cash.
Those Predator drones have the wrong targets.
Robert Greene 9 May 2015 17:23
"Blackburn instead summed up the general argument candidates have been making at conservative gatherings: if voters do not elect a Republican in 2016, America could very well cease to exist as a global superpower."
So what we do not need to be a global superpower anymore. What has is got us just MORE FUCKIN' WAR!!
Tony Dearwester -> saltyandtheman 9 May 2015 17:22Oh, like when Hillary says "We have to stop the 1% from running things" as she begs them for money, I mean... "What difference does it make"?
Steve Troxel -> seehowtheyrun 9 May 2015 17:07What will they do when Obama is out of office? Apparently the only ideas they have is the opposite of what Obama is doing. The GOP field this election is a vacuous collection clowns each trying to out noObama the next.
Steve Troxel -> Pete Street 9 May 2015 17:02
Well said... I wonder if they guys or their constituency ever read the news. All you have to do get a red meat roar from this crowd is to flap you jaws about bombing someone.
When asked for specifics they usually reply with something that is already being done... and are evidently unaware of it.
sour_mash Tony Wise 9 May 2015 16:54"your explanation is NOT the historical explanation"
Damn, I must have missed Bill Clinton calling for a Crusade against an Axis of Evil. And claiming that Saddam Hussein was going to attack the US with WMD'S.
libbyliberal 9 May 2015 16:23Obama is a disgusting warmonger, but not warmonger enuf for the crazy Republicans.
Here comes the fodder to build Dem "lesser evilism" which means both evil parties get to mass murder.
A frightened and very low-information and/or conscience-possessing American citizenry has learned from the authoritarians that the only tool in America's tool box for global co-existence is a HAMMER. As well as colossal lies about reality. We live in a spiritually profoundly dark age.
The US (and cronies) are arming ISIS, using ISIS in some of its wars like in Syria. Israel is covertly helping ISIS. The bullying nations are helping bomb the shit out of the poorest country in the ME. US is providing anti-international law cluster bombs to SA as one of their big helps. Why? Because the big sharks must devour the little fish. Proxy wars against nuclear allies or potential allies of that country, or they pretend they are, all leading to the big nuclear WWIII these insane monsters at the helms of our countries seem committed to.
The Republican hypocrit neocons who speak of God and war in the same sentences. The Dem hypocrit neolibs who pretend war is humanitarian. Disaster capitalism requires lots of bloodbaths and lemming Americans, especially bloodthirsty and stupid lemming Americans are willing to kill anyone that isn't them.
The world is a big video wargame to America, and you pick Blue Team or Red Team and then kill, kill, kill.
Tony Wise Pete Street 9 May 2015 16:06"Evidently, these faces have neglected to keep current with the ongoing, successful U.S. project using armed aerial drones and other weapons to find and snuff the Islamic terrorist leadership from the top down the ladder."
except its not been sucessful, we are still fighting the same war, and are fighting increased numbers, because we keep creating more terrorists then we kill. we are ctually bombing targets without even knowing whos inside (signature strikes) then labeling anyone in the blast radius a terrorist. pakistan, PAKISTAN for goodness sakes, is working with the UN human rights commission to STOP the bombs with new laws governing drone warfare. this war has been going on for over a decade, and is predicted to go on decades longer, with NO tangible results. how do you call it "successful" when the main target of the war on terror wasnt even eliminated with it?
Pete Street 9 May 2015 16:01Thanks for presenting the Chicken Little view of the Republican Party wannabes. Evidently, these faces have neglected to keep current with the ongoing, successful U.S. project using armed aerial drones and other weapons to find and snuff the Islamic terrorist leadership from the top down the ladder.
Even a news media worker has a better grasp of the activity of this project:
"Strikes began against Isis fighters in Iraq on 8 August and in Syria on 23 September. Such strikes have now run into the thousands; on Saturday the US military said 28 more had been carried out since Friday."
The RP faces put themselves in a vulnerable position here when an ordinary voter can easily do enough fact-checking to explode the false view of these faces.
Thereby, they make themselves easy picking by HRC who would eat their lunch anyhow.
Meanwhile, cheers and applause from a couple thousand RP right-wingers does not a viable candidacy make.
If this numbskull approach to vote-seeking continues, then little doubt exists that the RP will remain a rump party controlling state houses and gerrymandered voting districts for political power, but excluded from the White House again for lacking a sensible, moderate platform to appeal to more voters in the middle of the political spectrum.
From that position of course the RP will have a big target for its political asininity and hostility in the form of HRC as president for 8 years beginning in 2017.
Tony Wise Ozymandia 9 May 2015 16:00
obamas more of a warmonger then republicans, and the economy is only better if you are rich.
Tony Wise Milo Bendech 9 May 2015 15:54if the republicans need help,
"Tanden: '95 percent of the income gains in the last few years have gone to the top 1 percent'"
Neera Tanden, head of the Center for American Progress, a liberal-leaning group, argued that the issue not only would work well among the party faithful but beyond.
"95 percent of the income gains in the last few years have gone to the top 1 percent, That's a fact in the country," Tanden said. "I think this is going to be an issue on both the right and the left."
source: politifact
Tony Wise LostintheUS 9 May 2015 15:48"There are no worse sources for money than the Koch Bros."
sachs, jpmporgan, BP, citibank, need i go on?
Tony Wise -> Zepp 9 May 2015 15:47oh, and pakistan, because those bombings are actually illegal in spirit. they are actually working on making it illegal in the letter. the drones are new technology and pakistan is working on legislation governing their use with the UN human rights commission, because we are slaughtering too many innocents.
you wonder why I keep saying that? its not because im the one supporting the warmongering, bro. end it all, today. imo.
Tony Wise -> Zepp 9 May 2015 15:44so tell us, Tony: which of those countries do YOU think Obama should not have bombed?
- libya: because the terrorists we left in charge are worse then kadaffy
- syria, because it was a civil war we had no business getting involved in.
- iraq, because it should have been over when it was over. obamas own incompetence required us to return and go to war again. when we left, ISIS was a minor, defunct, disbarred, offshoot of al-quida, then they started getting the weapons we were sending to so called "vetted moderates" who turned out to be no such thing. with those, they were able to march back into iraq picking up allies along the way, and take an entire city, and all the war toys left behind when obama withdrew. why would you leave such weapons in the hands of an obviously incompetent, corrupt, army? why would you keep sending them MORE after the pullout?
- yemen, because we are not world police
- and afghanstan, because we got bin laden already.
I didnt know rush limbaugh was antiwar? if hes for war, then your comparison of me to him is just vastly...ridiculous and childish.
Milo Bendech 9 May 2015 15:43
Did you ever wonder why Republicans have decided NOT to challenge Obama on the state of the US economy???
Because any references to the economy under Obama will automatically conjure up comparisons between the current President and the last REPUBLICAN president.
Just 6 years ago, the US economy was in tatters.As the last Republican president prepared to leave the White House...
6 years ago....As the Last REPUBLICAN was preparing to leave office in early 2009....1. the DOW had fallen to 7,949 and
2. the NASDAQ had plunged to 1500.
3. The average American with a 401K lost about half of their retirement savings.4. Banks and financial institutions many over 100 years old that had survived the Great Depression went belly up: Bear Stearns, Countrywide, Merrill Lynch . AIG. Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, Wachovia, Indymac
5. Housing prices were falling like a rock as the bubble burst.
6.The unemployment rate was 7.8%...and heading up. In the same month that Bush left office a staggering 818,000 workers lost their
jobs. . The number of Americans filing for first-time unemployment benefits rose to a 26-year high for the week ended Dec. 20.,20087. The US auto industry was on it's knees. A month before he turned over the The White House to Obama, Bush announced a $17.4 billion taxpayer bailout for GM and Chrysler. "If we were to allow the free market to take its course now, it would almost certainly lead to disorderly bankruptcy," Bush admitted.
8. The Bush administration had to borrow 700 billion dollars from the taxpayers to bail out the banks. ""This is a big package because it was a big problem." Bush said ""People are beginning to doubt our system, people were losing confidence ."
9. In the 4th quarter of 2008...3 weeks before the flickering torch was passed from Republican to Democrat the US economy contracted a whopping 8.9%...the worst in postwar history.
10. Two months before Obama took office The Conference Board said that its Consumer Confidence Index fell to 38 in October, 2008. The decline marked the index's lowest level since its inception in 1967.
11. By the end of Republican Bush's stewardship his job approval ratings had plummeted to 25%
12. In the final month of Bush's term only 7% of Americans were happy with the direction the country was headed, the lowest reading ever measured by Gallup
How different things are today.
Elizabeth Thorne 9 May 2015 15:42
"Iran: enemy. Israel: friend."
I can't imagine why people compare him to a Neanderthal.
I have to admit though that giving the loony right a free hand in foreign policy would bring the date the world grows a pair and takes care of the US' anti-social antics much closer. They would destroy the county and most our "allies". Not ENTIRELY bad if you compare that with "liberals" having not one complaint about expanded illegal use of drones by their guy. Look at the choices. The US will continue to maim destroy and kill in the name of short-range interests and goals with disproportionate effect on developing nations until it destroys itself. Look how long it took Rome to fall and look at what happened in the meanwhile. Like a useless structure. Better an implosion than to slowly burn.
Tony Wise ExcaliburDefender 9 May 2015 15:34why are democrats such hypocrites about the kochs? democrats had no problem taking money from the kochs, when it was being offered.
they did take it, its documented history, as well as their offer to the kochs of special privileges in return for more cash. the kochs said no, and the war was on. your party still takes money from FAR worse sources, like Bp, that wrecked our shore, and banks like sachs and jpmorgan hat wrecked our economy. the kochs, even if you disagree with their political philosophies, at least create jobs here in America, manufacturing things we ALL use. how many jobs does warren buffets unregulated derivatives create?
I suppose his rail lines, transporting that dirty tar sands oil, creates jobs. this koch stuff just seems so ridiculous given your own parties donors. kochs are what, 56th in political giving? something like that?
Tony Wise sour_mash 9 May 2015 15:27we know why bush bombed iraq"
Yes, we do. He lied. Iraq and Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Al Qaeda was not in Iraq.
your explanation is NOT the historical explanation, see 1998 iraq liberation act. signed by bill clinton.
Michael Miller 9 May 2015 15:20The MIC needs to be fed.
Boredwiththeusa Tony Wise 9 May 2015 15:09Bernie Sanders has always acted in accordance with his conscience. He is no sell out. That he made one decision you dislike doesn't affect my admiration for the man in the least, but paints you as a leftist purist who is never satisfied with anything.
Tony Wise -> Milo Bendech 9 May 2015 15:08TARP Vote: Obama Wins, Senate Effectively Approves $350 Billion
Six Republicans joined with 45 Democrats and one Joe Lieberman to defeat a resolution that would have blocked the release of $350 billion in financial-industry bailout funds Thursday. The Senate action -- or lack of it -- paves the way for the dispersal of the money regardless of any action taken by the House of Representatives.
The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is structured so that the president has access to the money unless Congress actively prevents its release. Only 42 senators -- seven Democrats, 34 Republicans and one Bernie Sanders -- voted to block the money.
Taku2 9 May 2015 14:58""We need a commander in chief who will once and for all call it what it is, and that is radical Islamic terrorism," Walker said. "We need a president who will affirm that Israel is our ally and start acting like it."
These pathetic Republicans shameless has nothing to offer the American people, especially as they do not give a damn about the American poor. So, what do these bourgeois parasites focus on; 'making America Great.'
And how do these parasites try to achieve this; making war on other nations. For them, America 'being great' means military might. It means spending more on the military, which makes more money for these parasites. It does not mean spending more on maintaining and improving the nation's infrastructure, because the Republicans are only interested in enterprises which makes them lots of money.
If Walker and Santorum are intellectually deficient and talking shit, what does that make their Republican colleagues who support them?
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May 09, 2015 | NYTimes.com
American in London
I read in these comments about how this is a harbinger for the next American election - a wave of conservatives all the way to the White House. Let's remember, the British Conservative Party is left of the US Democratic Party in many instances, and could not even begin to run as a conservative party in the US.
The British Conservative Party is:
- Pro Choice
- Pro gay marriage
- A staunch defender of national health care.
Any one of these positions would immediately dismiss them for consideration in the US Republican Party.
GabbyTalks
The strongest bastion of Canadian conservative politics - the province of Alberta- where the Torys have been in power 44 years consecutively, have just thrown the bums out and voted for the socialist, left wing, tree hugging, New Democratic Party! The candidates were yoga teachers and college students, knitters guild, and so on. People voted for CHANGE more than anything.
They just got sick of the 1%ers running the joint, and their entitlement attitude, and kow-towing to the corporations and never raising business taxes, just piling it all on the backs of the great unwashed, the middle class. Apparently Britain hasn't reached the breaking point yet. But they will.\
Lynda, Gulfport, FL 22 hours ago
The BBC coverage of the election results provided a glimpse of the real contrasts between the US stuck in the two party mold and the British parliamentary system with multiple parties and very old traditions. The "always in campaign mode, overwhelmed by money, carefully handled candidates" system in the US contrasts with the limited in time and money campaigning of the British elections.
I loved the hand-counting of ballots, the "looney" parties whose candidates wore tall hats and costumes and especially the public line-up of all candidates for the announcement of results that the British system employs. No hiding in hotel rooms and behind spokespeople for British candidates. They lined up with all their opponents and heard the voting results in public. Most candidates then were vigorously questioned by journalists. Party leaders of the losing parties had to overcome their shock and speak up about what they did wrong, why the voters rejected their messages and what they would do to change. The leaders of the losing parties faced the consequences and resigned from party leadership.
The current mode of US elections is producing dysfunctional government at local, state and national levels. The detailed coverage of the British elections offers a primer on ways our elections could be improved--starting with vigorous questioning of all candidates by actual journalists, limits on campaign money and including the piercing of the PR images of the candidates.
Ashley, Wayzata, MN 21 hours ago
It's funny how a lot of US Republicans view this as an overall victory for conservative values. What these individuals fail to understand is that in the UK, the Conservative Party actually consists of sane people with ideas on how to improve their country (whether you agree with them or not is another issue entirely).
Across the pond, conservatives do not push policy based on personal religious beliefs. As Alistair Campbell, adviser to Tony Blair once stated, "Brits don't do God."
Can you imagine a conservative not mentioning religion in the US? It would ruin his/her entire campaign. The leader debate in the UK and the overall campaign structures focus on the ISSUES facing the country, rather than frivolous items like a candidate's birth certificate and college records. Each party releases manifesto's with ideas on how to improve living standards, education policy, foreign affairs, etc.
To any American conservative who thinks that this is truly a victory for US conservative values, I would encourage you to read the Tory Party manifesto; which pushes for 15 additional hours of FREE childcare, an increase in state pension funding , and an additional 8 billion pounds made available to the NHS (what Republicans would refer to as boogeyman socialized medicine).
Each of these values are inconsistent with the basic tenets of today's US conservatism; which raises the question as to how in the world did our conservatives get so crazy?
Nick Metrowsky, is a trusted commenter Longmont, Colorado Yesterday
A great day for the conservative movement, the wealthy, the well connected, business, Ayn Rand and for making war. A bad day for the middle class, the poor, the elderly, eco-friendly, labor unions, workers and those who toil to survive and not have it handed to them.
At least we know, the Unites States is not the only country which votes against their own interests. See Canada, Australia and New Zealand which all now have conservative governments. With legislatures that are akin to the current US Congress; though not the same gridlock or the extremes.
If the UK election was sending a message to this side of the pond, then it could be a clean sweep for the GOP next year; unfortunately. The Democrats, if they want to win, better quickly come up with new ideas and candidates that would put a wrench in the GOP works. Else, we will see Paul Ryan's budget plans, and Tea Party plans, be put into full implementation; which will complete this nation's advance to the Industrial Revolution years of the late 19th century. Well, on the bright side, your income taxes will be a flat 15% to pay for US empire building.
Also, the wealthy won't have an estate tax or capital gains to pay; so wealthy will flood to the masses (sarcasm). As for Medicare, Social Security, Veterans Benefits, Food Stamps, Child Care Credits, mortgage deductions, etc.; you're on your own. Just the way Ayn Rand advocated.
I hope I can retire without adverse affects, but woe to those under 55.
Walter Rhett, is a trusted commenter Charleston, SC Yesterday
Britian's unemployment numbers, its job creation, its double-dipped GNP growth (increasing only after austerity was relaxed) simply don't bear out the narrative, in which the details are overweighed in order to overwhelm the basic principle of economics that Krugman asserts: austerity, in times of depression, has no capacity to act as a stimulus.
Regarding "printing" money, it's spending money -- increasing demand -- that works to reinvigorate depressed economies, as Europe's individual and collective slow recoveries continuously affirm, as the facts are ignored.
Putting less gas/petrol in your car will not increase its gas mileage, whether paid by cash or credit.
Un, PRK Yesterday
Reading the New York Times explanation of the expected results should remind everyone why nothing you read in this paper is reliable. They got it all wrong. Their analysis was wrong. Their facts were wrong. Their polling was wrong. Their opinions were way off base. It was an example of how opinion driven reporting is not reporting at all.
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March 28, 2015 | State of the Nation
Emails disclosed by a hacker show a close family friend was funneling intelligence about the crisis in Libya directly to the Secretary of State's private account starting before the Benghazi attack.
This story was co-published with Gawker.
Update, March 27, 6:48 p.m.: This story has been updated to include responses from the FBI and the State Department.
Starting weeks before Islamic militants attacked the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, longtime Clinton family confidante Sidney Blumenthal supplied intelligence to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gathered by a secret network that included a former CIA clandestine service officer, according to hacked emails from Blumenthal's account.
The emails, which were posted on the internet in 2013, also show that Blumenthal and another close Clinton associate discussed contracting with a retired Army special operations commander to put operatives on the ground near the Libya-Tunisia border while Libya's civil war raged in 2011.
Blumenthal's emails to Clinton, which were directed to her private email account, include at least a dozen detailed reports on events on the deteriorating political and security climate in Libya as well as events in other nations. They came to light after a hacker broke into Blumenthal's account and have taken on new significance in light of the disclosure that she conducted State Department and personal business exclusively over an email server that she controlled and kept secret from State Department officials and which only recently was discovered by congressional investigators.
The contents of that account are now being sought by a congressional inquiry into the Benghazi attacks. Clinton has handed over more than 30,000 pages of her emails to the State Department, after unilaterally deciding which ones involved government business; the State Department has so far handed almost 900 pages of those over to the committee. A Clinton spokesman told Gawker and ProPublica (which are collaborating on this story) that she has turned over all the emails Blumenthal sent to Clinton.
The dispatches from Blumenthal to Clinton's private email address were posted online after Blumenthal's account was hacked in 2013 by Romanian hacker Marcel-Lehel Lazar, who went by the name Guccifer. Lazar also broke into accounts belonging to George W. Bush's sister, Colin Powell, and others. He's now serving a seven-year sentence in his home country and was charged in a U.S. indictment last year.
The contents of the memos, which have recently become the subject of speculation in the right-wing media, raise new questions about how Clinton used her private email account and whether she tapped into an undisclosed back channel for information on Libya's crisis and other foreign policy matters.
Blumenthal, a New Yorker staff writer in the 1990s, became a top aide to President Bill Clinton and worked closely with Hillary Clinton during the fallout from the Whitewater investigation into the Clinton family. She tried to hire him when she joined President Obama's cabinet in 2009, but White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel reportedly nixed the idea on the grounds Blumenthal was a divisive figure whose attacks on Obama during the Democratic primary had poisoned his relationship with the new administration.
It's unclear who tasked Blumenthal, known for his fierce loyalty to the Clintons, with preparing detailed intelligence briefs. It's also not known who was paying him, or where the operation got its money. The memos were marked "confidential" and relied in many cases on "sensitive" sources in the Libyan opposition and Western intelligence and security services. Other reports focused on Egypt, Germany, and Turkey.
Indeed, though they were sent under Blumenthal's name, the reports appear to have been gathered and prepared by Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of the CIA's clandestine service in Europe who left the agency in 2005. Since then, he has established a consulting firm called Tyler Drumheller, LLC. He has also been affiliated with a firm called DMC Worldwide, which he co-founded with Washington, D.C., attorney Danny Murray and former general counsel to the U.S. Capitol Police John Caulfield. DMC Worldwide's now-defunct website describes it at as offering "innovative security and intelligence solutions to global risks in a changing world."
In one exchange in March 2013, Blumenthal emailed Drumheller, "Thanks. Can you send Libya report." Drumheller replied, "Here it is, pls do not share it with Cody. I don't want moin speculating on sources. It is on the Maghreb and Libya." Cody is Cody Shearer, a longtime Clinton family operative-his brother was an ambassador under Bill Clinton and his now-deceased sister is married to Clinton State Department official Strobe Talbott-who was in close contact with Blumenthal. While it's not entirely clear from the documents, "Moin" may refer to the nickname of Mohamed Mansour El Kikhia, a member of the Kikhia family, a prominent Libyan clan with ties to the Libyan National Transition Council. (An email address in Blumenthal's address book, which was also leaked, was associated with his Facebook page.)
There's no indication in Blumenthal's emails whether Clinton read or replied to them before she left State on February 1, 2013, but he was clearly part of a select group with knowledge of the private clintonemail.com address, which was unknown to the public until
Gawker published it this year. They do suggest that she interacted with Blumenthal using the account after she stepped down. "H: got your message a few days ago," reads the subject line of one email from Blumenthal to Clinton on February 8, 2013; "H: fyi, will continue to send relevant intel," reads another.
The memos cover a wide array of subjects in extreme detail, from German Prime Minister Angela Merkel's conversations with her finance minister about French president Francois Hollande–marked "THIS INFORMATION COMES FROM AN EXTREMELY SENSITIVE SOURCE"-to the composition of the newly elected South Korean president's transition team. At least 10 of the memos deal in whole or in part with internal Libyan politics and the government's fight against militants, including the status of the Libyan oil industry and the prospects for Western companies to participate.
One memo was sent on August 23, 2012, less than three weeks before Islamic militants stormed the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi. It cites "an extremely sensitive source" who highlighted a string of bombings and kidnappings of foreign diplomats and aid workers in Tripoli, Benghazi and Misrata, suggesting they were the work of people loyal to late Libyan Prime Minister Muammar Gaddafi.
While the memo doesn't rise to the level of a warning about the safety of U.S. diplomats, it portrays a deteriorating security climate. Clinton noted a few days after the Benghazi attack, which left four dead and 10 people injured, that U.S. intelligence officials didn't have advance knowledge of the threat.
On September 12, 2012, the day after the Benghazi attack, Blumenthal sent a memo that cited a "sensitive source" saying that the interim Libyan president, Mohammed Yussef el Magariaf, was told by a senior security officer that the assault was inspired by an anti-Muslim video made in the U.S., as well as by allegations from Magariaf's political opponents that he had CIA ties.
Blumenthal followed up the next day with an email titled "Re: More Magariaf private reax." It said Libyan security officials believed an Islamist radical group called the Ansa al Sharia brigade had prepared the attack a month in advance and "took advantage of the cover" provided by the demonstrations against the video.
An October 25, 2012 memo says that Magariaf and the Libyan army chief of staff agree that the "situation in the country is becoming increasingly dangerous and unmanageable" and "far worse" than Western leaders realize.
Blumenthal's email warnings, of course, followed a year of Libyan hawkishness on the part of Clinton. In February of 2011, she told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva that "it is time for Gaddafi to go." The next month, after having described Russian reluctance over military intervention as "despicable," Clinton met with rebel leaders in Paris and drummed up support for a no-fly zone while in Cairo. On March 17, 2011, the UN Security Council voted to back Libyan rebels against Gaddafi.
It's this buildup, which Clinton still proudly recalled in her 2014 memoir, that Blumenthal appears to join in on 2011. In addition to the intel memos, his emails also disclose that he and his associates worked to help the Libyan opposition, and even plotted to insert operatives on the ground using a private contractor.
A May 14, 2011 email exchange between Blumenthal and Shearer shows that they were negotiating with Drumheller to contract with someone referred to as "Grange" and "the general" to place send four operatives on a week-long mission to Tunis, Tunisia, and "to the border and back." Tunisia borders Libya and Algeria.
"Sid, you are doing great work on this," Drumheller wrote to Blumenthal. "It is going to be around $60,000, coverting r/t business class airfare to Tunis, travel in country to the border and back, and other expenses for 7–10 days for 4 guys."
After Blumenthal forwarded that note to Shearer, he wrote back questioning the cost of the operation. "Sid, do you think the general has to send four guys. He told us three guys yesterday, a translator and two other guys. I understand the difficulty of the mission and realize that K will be repaid but I am going to need an itemized budget for these guys."
"The general" and "Grange" appear to refer to David L. Grange, a major general in the Army who ran a secret Pentagon special operations unit before retiring in 1999. Grange subsequently founded Osprey Global Solutions, a consulting firm and government contractor that offers logistics, intelligence, security training, armament sales, and other services. The Osprey Foundation, which is a nonprofit arm of Osprey Global Solutions, is listed as one of the State Department's "global partners" in a 2014 report from the Office of Global Partnerships.'
Among the documents in the cache released by Lazar is an August 24, 2011, memorandum of understanding between Osprey Global Solutions and the Libyan National Transition Council-the entity that took control in the wake of Qadaffi's execution-agreeing that Osprey will contract with the NTC to "assist in the resumption of access to its assets and operations in country" and train Libyan forces in intelligence, weaponry, and "rule-of-land warfare." The document refers to meetings held in Amman, Jordan between representatives of Osprey and a Mohammad Kikhia, who represented the National Transition Council.
Five months later, according to a document in the leak, Grange wrote on Osprey Global letterhead to Assistant Secretary of State Andrew Shapiro, introducing Osprey as a contractor eager to provide humanitarian and other assistance in Libya. "We are keen to support the people of Libya under the sponsorship of the Ministry of Finance and the Libyan Stock Exchange," Grange wrote. Shapiro is a longtime Clinton loyalist; he served on her Senate staff as foreign policy advisor.
Another document in the cache, titled "Letter_for_Moin," is an appeal from Drumheller to then-Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan offering the services of Tyler Drumheller LLC, "to develop a program that will provide discreet confidential information allowing the appropriate entities in Libya to address any regional and international challenges."
The "K" who was, according to Shearer's email, to be "repaid" for his role in the Tunisia operation appears to be someone named Khalifa al Sherif, who sent Blumenthal several emails containing up-to-the-minute information on the civil war in Libya, and appears to have been cited as a source in several of the reports.
Contacted by ProPublica and Gawker, Drumheller's attorney and business partner Danny Murray confirmed that Drumheller "worked" with Blumenthal and was aware of the hacked emails, but declined to comment further.
Shearer said only that "the FBI is involved and told me not to talk. There is a massive investigation of the hack and all the resulting information." The FBI declined to comment.
Blumenthal, Grange, and Kikhia all did not respond to repeated attempts to reach them. Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Clinton had no comment on Blumenthal's activities with Drumheller.
Whatever Blumenthal, Shearer, Drumheller, and Grange were up to in 2011, 2012, and 2013 on Clinton's behalf, it appears that she could have used the help: According to State Department personnel directories, in 2011 and 2012-the height of the Libya crisis-State didn't have a Libyan desk officer, and the entire Near Eastern Magreb Bureau, which which covers Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Libya, had just two staffers. Today, State has three Libyan desk officers and 11 people in the Near Eastern Magreb Bureau. A State Department official wouldn't say how many officers were on the desk in 2011, but said there was always "at least one" officer and "sometimes many more, working on Libya."
Reached for comment, a State Department public affairs official who would only speak on background declined to address questions about Blumenthal's relationship to Clinton, whether she was aware of the intelligence network, and who if anyone was paying Blumenthal. Asked about the Tunisia-Libya mission, the official replied, "There was a trip with the secretary in October of 2011, but there was also a congressional delegation in April, 2011. There were media reports about both of these at the time." Neither trip involved travelling via Tunis.
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Mar 06, 2015 | The Guardian
Hillary Clinton has been on the defensive this week over the revelation that she exclusively used a private email account while serving as secretary of state. The presumptive 2016 presidential candidate has tried to douse the flames, but key questions about the controversy remain unaddressed.
Where are the missing emails?
Two months ago, a team of Clinton people combed through a vast stack of her emails – from the period covering 2009 to 2013, when she served as America's top diplomat. Having reviewed the emails, they handed over 55,000 pages to the State Department.
... ... ..
That begs the question: how many pages did she not hand over? More importantly, what did they contain?
... ... ...
But we still don't know who those advisers were, and whether they had any training in the art of preserving official records.
So: who vetted the Clinton emails? Why should they be trusted to preserve something as precious to the nation as its historic records?
... ... ...
Why was email vetting even permitted?
The question of who vetted Clinton's emails before their transfer to the State Department raises another question: why was this allowed in the first place?
Since 2009, US government rules have been very clear on this subject. The National Archives and Records Administration stated categorically in that year – the first of Clinton's term as secretary – that "agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system."
Alas: why did senior State Department officials allow Clinton to override clear official rules? What role did Clinton herself play in circumventing the regulations?
Was the secret server secure?
We now know that Team Clinton set up its own domain name, ClintonEmail.com, shortly before Hillary Clinton took up the job as secretary of state. It was linked to a "homebrew" server at her home in Chappaqua, New York.Given that Clinton was dealing with highly sensitive diplomatic issues, and that President Obama has declared cybersecurity a top priority for the nation, one might have expected additional protection.
But simple tests conducted by experts suggest that the server's security shield was not particularly sophisticated – though neither was that of the State Department.
What was done to protect Clinton's private server from hacking attacks? Were any vulnerable loopholes cut off? Were state secrets at risk?
Republicans accuse Clinton of 'scheme to conceal' emails from public view
State Department officials do not expect 50,000 pages of email to be released for several months, as Clinton – a lone tweet aside – chooses to stay silentWhy did she do it?
Perhaps the most intriguing question that still hangs in the air – and one that the public may never have satisfactorily answered, much to the chagrin of Benghaziphiles – is the simplest: why would Hillary Clinton decide, in effect, to privatise her own official emails? Was it an innocent move made for the sake of convenience – one which Clinton supporters have emphasised was made by her predecessors and by leading Republican politicians?
Or: were the private emails a conscious manoeuvre? As watchdogs at the Sunlight Foundation put it: "There is shock at what Secretary Clinton did because the most likely explanation of her intent seems clear – she created a system designed to avoid accountability, potentially in violation of the law."
jebhanson986
TheMediaSuxHillary Clinton behaves very strangely on the background of Obama's statements about cybersecurity. We are used our authorities and special services are watching us through internet. FBI and other may read our e-mails, look through our accounts in social networks.
Actions of Hillary are too unpatriotic against the background of her applications for participation in presidential elections 2016. It is already known fact she was sponsored by foreign residents. It is crime.
Anyway she has something to conceal. I don't want Hillary to become our president. I know believe her as well as Obama. They have too many skeletons in the closet.
"Perhaps the most intriguing question that still hangs in the air" - "why would Hillary Clinton decide, in effect, to privatise her own official emails?"
That's also the easiest question to answer. And my five year old nephew figured it out: so people won't find out what was in the emails.
Theodore Svedberg -> osprey1957
It is not just the right that is alarmed over Hillary's actions but also many progressive Democrats. This is definitely not a manufactured scandal created by the Republicans but one created by Hillary herself. It reflects on her character and her belief she is above the rules that the rest of us must obey.
macktan894
These are the basic questions I have. Should all elected and appointed govt officials have the right to privatize govt business, in effect removing it from the sunlight that democracy requires? I really don't understand why she would do something like this, why she thought conducting business using secure govt servers would be such a bad idea. Nor do I get how she got away with making govt records her personal property.
Additionally, wouldn't John Kerry have needed to review the communications of his predecessor? Typically when one starts a new job,reviewing the files of one's predecessor is the way you get up to speed.
Is anyone able to ask her these questions?
GrammaW -> macktan894
How soon we forget...bush (aka Karl Rove) used a private account for gov bus, and somehow 100s were 'lost'. Have they been found and turned over yet?
AistheWay -> macktan894
I agree with you about the gov't privatizing what should be public and transparent dealings. This issue is a major concern that requires immediate legislation. For example the outsourcing of prison "care". I have spoken to ex-inmates who have served time in these private correctional facilities and to my disgust found out that they (private prison company) basically denied inmates, of most if not all, of the rights mandated by federal/state statutes regarding prisoner treatment.
Under the guise of budget savings and tax cuts our politicians are once again attacking citizen's rights.
macktan894 -> AistheWay
Don't get me started on the criminal justice system. I'll just say here that what's going on in Ferguson is happening all over the country, mainly to poor people no matter the race. And it is disgusting. I suggest emergency donations to the ACLU since the govt clearly has no inclination to correct this injustice.
SteveLight
This is not analysis -- this is muck raking.
Was the secret server secure?
I'd say it was a far sight more secure than a government server. Frankly, I would not trust a government server. The more we know about cyber intrusions, the more I would argue government emails are at risk.
Besides -- the first thing Hillary detractors would do is look for quotes they could take out of context.
Besides -- given Snowden's revelations -- if we were tapping Merkel's phone, NSA probably has all of Hillary's emails. They may not want to divulge that fact but I will bet dollars to doughnuts that her emails are under government wraps right now.
terrible analysis -- is Guardian slipping? I don't see the Guardian in the same high regard as I did, say 12 month ago. Who left?
macktan894 -> SteveLight
It's not her decision to make. She may have some political fears about her job, but if her fears were that great, then she shouldn't have taken the job. She cannot privatize sensitive govt records. They aren't her property. If she's that fearful, she should just stay retired and not work for an open govt such as ours.
MaxBoson -> SteveLight
The muckrakers-the most famous of whom was Sinclair Lewis-were early twentieth-century American journalists who exposed corrupt politicians and robber-baron industrialists.
So If you want to call Ed Pilkington a muckracker, go ahead, it's a compliment I'm sure he will appreciate, even if he hasn't raked in any mud yet- the New York Times did that when it published the e-mail revelations. What the author has done is pose some very interesting questions, which, by your choice of the word "muckraking," you seem to think pose a danger to Hillary Clinton. I think they do, too.
Corinne Marasco
Incredibly lazy reporting.
The server is not in Chappaqua. It is a service provided by Optimum, which offers both website and e-mail hosting. And, you can use any e-mail domain you like. http://www.ip-tracker.org/locator/ip-lookup.php?ip=24.187.234.187
Climb off the Edward Snowden Gravy Train, Guardian. Get back to doing real reporting.
macktan894 -> Corinne Marasco
Well, that's even worse. A Secretary of State shopping for a website and email hosting service to manage the govt.'s official records. Was this company certified by the govt as secure to handle the govt.'s sensitive official records?
chiefwiley -> macktan894
If people got personal, political, State Department, and Clinton charitable e-mails all from a single non-government account, that would deliver an interesting hidden message, too. It's all intermingled and interconnected with the Clintons.
Elton Johnson -> Corinne Marasco
"The server is not in Chappaqua."
I didn't realize they searched her home to determine this. Do you have a link to the story where they did?
JJHLH1
Now it makes sense why Hillary continued to receive all those foreign contributions during her time as Secretary of State. She could make deals via e-mail and then destroy the evidence and nobody would know.
And her homebrew e-mail server was guarded by Secret Service agents using taxpayer dollars.
This story has larger implications other than severely harming her 2016 prospects. A home server is much more vulnerable to security attacks compared to one run by professionals with experience. As Sec. of State her emails would contain sensitive information. Her behavior places the U.S. at risk. Not a bright move on her part, but then again she failed the D.C. Bar exam so I guess it's not unexpected.
Elton Johnson
Those emails are not hers. They belong to all of us. Stop apologizing for her.
MillbrookNY
You couldn't be involved in this many blunders and scandals unless you were trying.
Regardless of how smart HRC may be, she is a magnet for scandals and blunders. If you are always having to explain why what you didn't isn't technically wrong, you're doing the wrong things. Stop expecting to get a pass every time, HRC.
en again she failed the D.C. Bar exam so I guess it's not unexpected.
Elton Johnson MillbrookNY
Her "intelligence" is a myth. She wants to be President yet she can't even come out and speak to the people on this matter?
She can't even manage her own mess, how can she be entrusted to manage the country?
JJHLH1 Elton Johnson
Hillary isn't very bright. Just look at all the gaffes she makes like saying they left the White House "dead broke".
She failed the D.C. Bar exam in 1973. Over 2/3 pass it. That's why she ended up in Arkansas.
williamdonovan
I'll bet that Obama & Kerry where recipients of email from her account. Of course there is a cover story and cover up. Here it is in Black and White. (It is a felony)
Title 18 §641. Public money, property or records
Whoever embezzles, steals, purloins, or knowingly converts to his use or the use of another, or without authority, sells, conveys or disposes of any record, voucher, money, or thing of value of the United States or of any department or agency thereof, or any property made or being made under contract for the United States or any department or agency thereof; or
Whoever receives, conceals, or retains the same with intent to convert it to his use or gain, knowing it to have been embezzled, stolen, purloined or converted-
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; but if the value of such property in the aggregate, combining amounts from all the counts for which the defendant is convicted in a single case, does not exceed the sum of $1,000, he shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.
The word "value" means face, par, or market value, or cost price, either wholesale or retail, whichever is greater.
(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 725; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, §330016(1)(H), (L), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2147; Pub. L. 104–294, title VI, §606(a), Oct. 11, 1996, 110 Stat. 3511; Pub. L. 108–275, §4, July 15, 2004, 118 Stat. 833.)
Homeland security? Start by looking inside Government where a the real criminals hide.
The biggest threat to our Republic is the very people who swore to serve it.
NSubramanian 12h ago
"Why was email vetting even permitted?"
Yes. In the context of Obama's desire for Net security, this is a crucial question and it deserves an honest reply.
However, where Hillary Clinton goes, the question seems to follow: "Was the vetting permitted? "Was the vetter authorised to vet?", destined never to be answered.
During her 2008 campaign for nomination, Hillary Clinton claimed greater fitness to be Commander-in-Chief of the US Armed Forces because as the First Lady, she had fielded those dreaded 3 ' O Clock calls on the Red Phone which always meant nothing but trouble, apparently to vet them for seriousness before passing on the call to the President.Neither Hillary nor her team chose to answer the logical question which an incredulous America asked "Who had authorised the First Lady to answer calls which came on the Red Phone?"
Husband Bill chose wisely to stay out of it.
AmericanGruntShe and her minions are obviously trying to hide how easy it was for she and her sisters (Rice, Power and Albright) to lie their way to an unprovoked war against Libya simply by baiting really dumb men always eager to have their military go destroy stuff and kill people. That war was initiated with nothing but a UN resolution specifying only an intent "to protect innocent life" from something that "might" happen, but was in fact intended from the very beginning to effect violent "regime change" by US military force (along with the usual British and French co-conspirators) under a phony "NATO" cover.
These women were able to circumvent the US Constitution and the US Congress based on an "emergency human rights" excuse that was entirely bogus. They did it solely to get a free ride on the naïve "Arab Spring" bandwagon and give Ms Clinton a "foreign policy accomplishment" for her planned 2016 presidential campaign. The only way to get the resolution passed by the UN Security Council - solely to establish a "humanitarian no-fly-zone" - was for those women and their minions to boldly lie to the American people, to the UN Security Council, to the Russians and to the Chinese, and then misuse the American people's military for their own self-serving domestic political agenda.
As soon as the resolution was passed, France and the UK, along with the US, went on the direct attack against Libyan forces trying to maintain some semblance of order in their own country, and killed far more people than those Libyan forces "might" have. It was indeed "clever" to attack a country only AFTER it had given up its weapons of mass destruction and was essentially defenseless against the far superior forces of "NATO" – which sent a powerful message to both Iran and North Korea about what happens AFTER you give up your nukes, what happens AFTER you play by all the rules demanded by the Americans.
And a whole range of "macho" men, even eager to send their military forth to destroy stuff and kill any suspicious people in sight, stupidly took the bait and joined the bandwagon like the predictable fools they are. All the "Four Sisters" had to do was toss some red meat over the kennel fence. And just behold the death and destruction they wrought with their bombs and the totally lawless playground for fanatical crazies they created right at Europe's underbelly. With zero adult consideration to "what comes next", it was all entirely predictable, thoroughly shameful, and completely self-defeating emotional nonsense by people trying to operate far beyond their competence levels.
How can a guy like Vladimir Putin witness the ignominious death of Gadhafi in a sewer pipe and NOT wonder if he and his own country are next? How can he not consider that it was a "defensive" anachronism still called "NATO" that relentlessly attacked another sovereign country for eight months – the same "NATO" ever eager to push its arrogantly offensive nose right up to the Kremlin gate? Why would he sit and wait for it to come, especially after being so shamefully lied to by those American women? The main thing that a single super-power status does for the women who own it is obviate the need for them to think.
There probably won't be a lot of people interested in pouring over THOSE embarrassing e-mails. Far too much potential for EVERYONE to get egg all over their own faces, the same people who for generations have reveled in righteous indignation over the unprovoked bombing of Pearl Harbor. It all makes me ashamed to be a professional American soldier.
Theodore Svedberg AmericanGrunt
Very good set of reasons why Hillary should never be President.
harryboy
In 2007 as a Senator she thought differently - Hillary Clinton Bashes Bush Officials for Secret Email Accounts
WeThePeople harryboy
Maybe she's also been secretly trying to start another war for arms profiteering, oil grabbing and Empire like the Bush Officials did...
harryboy -> WeThePeople
Or maybe shes just a hypocrite
WeThePeople -> harryboy
Your right, she is a hypocrite… but at least she's not responsible for a few hundred thousand dead humans and 5 million refugees not to mention the countless maimed and many tortured like the Bush Officials. Yet.
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Leo Strauss' Philosophy of Deception Alternet
Leo Strauss - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Leo Strauss (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Natural Right and History (Walgreen Foundation Lectures) Leo Strauss 9780226776941 Amazon.com Books
Society
Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers : Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy
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War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes : Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce : Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes
Bulletin:
Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law
History:
Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds : Larry Wall : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS : Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development : Scripting Languages : Perl history : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history
Classic books:
The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month : How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite
Most popular humor pages:
Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor
The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D
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Last modified: August, 04, 2020
