Tag: conspiracy

A tale of two statements

American Heritage Girls and an Order of the Arrow Chief respond to the recent action by the Boy Scouts of America to relax its membership standards:

“It was with great disappointment that American Heritage Girls, Inc. Board of Trustees received the news of the change to the Boy Scouts of America’s membership standards. It was our sincerest hope the voice of the majority of those associated with the BSA would be heard and that the BSA would continue the amazing 103-year legacy of its founder to prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices. Unfortunately, the organization chose to step away from that commitment.
 
As a result of leaving its time-honored traditions, the BSA has left American Heritage Girls with no choice but to dissolve our Memorandum of Mutual Support. We do so with a heavy heart. We have enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship with BSA through the years. However, the American Heritage Girls Board of Trustees has decided that we cannot in good conscience continue in a formal relationship with the BSA.
 
As an independent, faith-based leadership and character development organization, we want everyone associated with the American Heritage Girls to know that our board members unanimously affirm the AHG Statement of Faith and its Scriptural foundation, and we are committed to continue providing a safe environment for every girl involved.”

The American Heritage Girls have sent a clear message that they will not pretend that the decision of the Boy Scouts of America to remove the requirement to be “morally straight” from its members is not a serious one.  Whereas, on the other hand, this member of The Order of the Arrow, is scurrilously attempting to encourage scouts who took that oath to ignore it.

Dear Arrowmen of Coosa Lodge,

I know many of you are concerned about what has just happened with the change to the Boys Scouts of America’s membership policy. On May 23, 2013, the National Committee held a vote on whether or not homosexual youth scouts would be allowed into the Boy Scout program. Out of the 1,400 delegates over sixty percent voted to approve the new resolution which states,

“Youth membership in the Boy Scouts of America is open to all youth who meet the specific membership requirements to join the Cub Scout, Boy Scout, Varsity Scout, Sea Scout, and Venturing programs. Membership in any program of the Boy Scouts of America requires the youth member to (a) subscribe to and abide by the values expressed in the Scout Oath and Scout Law, (b) subscribe to and abide by the precepts of the Declaration of Religious Principle (duty to God), and (c) demonstrate behavior that exemplifies the highest level of good conduct and respect for others and is consistent at all times with the values expressed in the Scout Oath and Scout Law. No youth may be denied membership in the Boy Scouts of America on the basis of sexual orientation or preference alone.”

Although the resolution has passed, it shall not take effect until January 1, 2014. The reason for this is to give us and our leadership time to adjust and prepare for the upcoming change. Many of you have expressed your opinions and thoughts on this matter, and whether this is right or wrong, do not let this affect the true core values on which the upon which Scouting was founded: to get our youth active in the outdoors, to instill proper skills for the future, and to gain the ideals of leadership and service in today’s youth which will help build a better future for our country and world.

The road ahead will be a long and hard one for our organization. Many scouts have already expressed their desire to leave the program, but I would like to issue a challenge to you all in the hopes that the Boy Scouts of America will come out stronger than it ever has before. In the upcoming months, speak to your fellow brothers about how you can help build our organization. Please do not focus on someones sexual orientation, but on what you yourself can do for Scouting. It is up to us as the leaders of tomorrow; to be the best we can for the packs, troops, crews, and other groups within Scouting. Scouts will be looking for someone to show them what to do. Let us lead the way by showing them Scouting is no different than it was before. Our focus is still to build leadership and skills for our youth and to give service to our local troops, councils, and camps and we intend to keep it that way. I am proud to call myself an Eagle Scout and Vigil Honor recipient, and I am ecstatic to have the opportunity to be a part of this great organization.

As a former Star Scout and member of the Order of the Arrow, my response to the Chief of the Coosa Lodge is that his feeble attempt to minimize the significance of the degradation of standards represented by the board’s action is not worthy of an Arrowman or a Scout, and that I am requesting the removal of my name from the Lodge to which I belonged because I no longer wish to be associated with the Boy Scouts of America or the Order of the Arrow.

The seeds of destruction have already been successfully sown by the homosexual activists.  Both the Boy Scouts and the Order will be rapidly following the way of the Girl Scouts, whose membership fell by 250,000, (about one-tenth), between 2003 and 2008.  The BSA membership is already only half of what it was in 1972; the mass withdrawal of scouts, troops, and councils should see it fall by another half in much less time.

Tolerance is not a virtue.  It is, as I have written in the past, “the sin of Jeroboam“.  One would think that seeing one organization after another, one institution after another, decline rapidly after lowering its standards in the name of modernizing them would give the various leaderships pause, (for evil’s activists are never successful without the useful fools convinced by their false promises and tortuous arguments). And yet, as the BSA action shows, the same short-sighted attempt to appease the internal destroyers is repeated again and again and again.

So let the Boy Scouts dwindle.  They have made their bed, let them lie in it. Let their decline into irrelevance be a lesson to you.  Vigilance and internal discipline is necessary for every organization that wishes to preserve itself against the wolves in sheep’s clothing. Relaxing your standards and abandoning your traditions is always the first step along the easy way that leads to destruction.

Mailvox: Vox’s First Law redux

Rufusdog is the latest to discover that I really and truly don’t give a damn what he happens to think:

Vox could be a strong voice for gun rights, but when he says things this
stupid he just comes off like a crazy person and loses credibility. He
dishonors those children and their families and damages his own
reputation in one crack pot post.

Vox is what he is.  Take him seriously or dismiss him as a crazy person, it makes no difference to him.  Nor does he care in the slightest for honoring “those children and their families”.

As for my reputation, well, one of the dangers of dismissing someone as a crackpot means that the individual so dismissed no longer has any fear of it.  If you happen to believe in the economic recovery of 2009, global warming, and the heroic teachers of Sandy Hook elementary school, that’s fine with me.  It doesn’t bother me any more than your belief in unicorns, evolution by natural selection, or human equality.

Vox’s First Law: Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.

Covering up the false flag

State officials are secretly attempting to bury the public records related to the Sandy Hook “shootings”:

The staffs of the state’s top prosecutor and the governor’s office have been working in secret with General Assembly leaders on legislation to withhold records related to the police investigation into the Dec. 14 Newtown elementary school massacre — including victims’ photos, tapes of 911 calls, and possibly more.

The behind-the-scenes legislative effort came to light Tuesday when The Courant obtained a copy of an email by a top assistant to Chief State’s Attorney Kevin Kane, Timothy J. Sugrue. Sugrue, an assistant state’s attorney, discussed options considered so far, including blocking release of statements “made by a minor.”

“There is complete agreement regarding photos etc., and audio tapes, although the act may allow the disclosure of audio transcripts,” Sugrue wrote to Kane, two other Kane subordinates and to Danbury State’s Attorney Stephen Sedensky, who is directing the investigation of the killings….

As envisioned by Kane, the bill wouldn’t be limited to the Newtown file.
“We are seeking legislation to protect crime scene photographs
protecting victims and certain 911 tapes,” Kane told The Courant
Tuesday. “It is something that I have been concerned about for years and
years and the situation in Newtown brings it to a head. I don’t want
family members seeing pictures of their loved ones publicized in a
manner in which these are subject to be published.”

He said as he sees the legislation, it would apply to “basically
crime scene photographs depicting injuries to victims and recordings,
911 recordings displaying the mental anguish of victims. Things like
that, of that category. And it seems to me that the intrusion of the
privacy of the individuals outweighs any public interest in seeing
these.”

No doubt anyone who is familiar with the government’s interest in “the privacy of individuals” will find this justification as ludicrous as I do.  One wonders what sparked the sudden need for this secretive legislative effort; did someone notice the forgotten Heinz bottle lying next to the “corpses” or was it the datestamp on the pictures taken three weeks before the scheduled event?

My favorite conspiracy ever

I can’t even begin to describe how much I love this conspiracy theory:

You know what they say about the early Middle Ages, don’t you? If you can remember them, you weren’t really there. However, if you could recall those times, was this simply because you had been making up the entire era as a state-enrolled forger? If so, this would be explicable by the Phantom Time Hypothesis (PTH), a chronological theory almost unheard of in its radicalism, and which has been propagating steadily through German academic circles since 1998.

Picture a mediæval-style ‘Man­hattan Project’ with scriptoria instead of hangars, and Gothic minuscule instead of maths. Holy Roman Emperor Otto III (980–1002) has engaged his theo­logians under the leadership of Gerbert d’Aurillac (later Pope Sylvester II) in a project that is among the most zealous and secretive of its kind since the facsimile houses of Alexandria were at their busiest. The gilding of narratives has many precedents in the writing of hist­ories, especially self-aggrandising ones. But the one described by the PTH takes this art of embellishment up a few more notches: more than two centuries worked up from scratch, then infiltrated into as many chronologies as possible. Only a Middle Gothic or a Byzantine fanatic could have taken it to such lengths. But it worked. And as the traces were destroyed, the histories reconfigured and rebound, no one was any the wiser. At least until Heribert Illig and his adherents apparently figured it out.

Illig’s theory is rooted in the introduct­ion of the Gregorian calendar in 1582. It had long been known that the old Julian calendar had a defect – the Julian year being roughly 11 minutes too long – and the new calendar was designed to correct this discrepancy, to the tune of making up for 10 days that gradually slipped during the years between AD 1 and AD 1582. But Illig alleged that the Julian calendar should have produced a discrepancy of not 10 but 13 days over the period in question, and concluded that roughly three centuries had been added to the calendar that had never existed. His response was to run with the notion of calendar “slack” and look for corroborat­ive evidence.

It’s even got a cool name: Phantom Time.

Rubio fails to follow the logic train

The Republican Senator doesn’t think through the logical implications of the accusations he is directing against the Obama administration:

“So in the span of four days, [there were] three major revelations about the use of government power to intimidate those who are doing things that the government doesn’t like. These are the tactics of the third world. These are the tactics of places that don’t have the freedoms and the independence that we have here in this country.”

They are the tactics of the third world.  They are, unsurprisingly enough, the tactics of a president who is himself an immigrant and a third worlder.  They are the tactics of a place that no longer has the freedom and independence and population that it once had. And yet, even as he laments this, Rubio is actively campaigning to legalize millions of third worlders who illegally settled in the country and add tens of millions more to their ranks.

Welcome to Third World America.  This is merely the smallest taste of what it is going to look like.

Are they afraid of ghosts?

Isn’t it interesting how buildings that are involved in events of questionable veracity so often need to be torn down afterwards?

The day after a task force unanimously recommended razing and rebuilding Sandy Hook Elementary School, residents expressed relief tinged with sadness on Saturday in the small New England town that became a focal point of the national debate on gun control…. A 28-member task force of elected town officials decided late Friday night to demolish the 56-year-old school and build a new one on the same site.

This seems more than a little strange.  I went to a school that was built in 1913 and is still being actively utilized.  And how difficult would it be to clean up a few classrooms?  But if a school shooting can be reasonably expected to produce $57 million in construction business, conspiracy theorists may have to seriously rethink who has an incentive to be hiring patsies.

The working model

Dan Drezner points it out for anyone who has somehow failed to notice:

So, in all, this has been a pretty crappy week for people who dislike conspiracy theories.

I would go so far as to say that unless you accept the basic concept of conspiracy theory and actively look for conspiracies behind most significant current events, you cannot possibly understand history or reasonably hope to anticipate the future in any meaningful way.

It is better to pick up a few false signals than recognize nothing that takes place around you.

The secret of the Moon water

It came from Earth:

The latest results come from studies on the most extraordinary samples hauled back from the moon, including green-tinged stone collected by Apollo 15 in 1971, and orange material gathered by Apollo 17 in 1972.

The surprise discovery of the green rock, by Commander Dave Scott and lunar module pilot Jim Irwin, sparked a lengthy debate among the astronauts about the boulder’s true colour while Nasa controllers listened in.

Scientists focused on tiny droplets of volcanic glass that were trapped in crystals inside the rocks. The crystals protected the droplets from the violence of eruption, and so preserved in them a snapshot of the moon’s ancient interior.

Researchers found evidence for water inside the glass droplets in earlier work but the latest study goes further, showing that the lunar water is chemically identical to that on ancient Earth.

So, now we know that the water in the Moon rocks came from Earth.  And we already knew that the Moon rocks came from Earth.  At what point is it going to become sufficiently obvious that the “Moon landings” were filmed on Earth?

What more is required, signed confessions from Stanley Kubrick and Neil Armstrong?

There is no scientific evidence that Man landed on the Moon, after all.  Since the scientific evidence points quite clearly to the various “lunar” objects having a terrestrial origin, then must we not, as good rational scientific materialists, conclude that Man never landed on the Moon?

The conspiracy theorists were right

As I have repeatedly written, the Conspiracy Theory of History is the only one that stands up to critical analysis.  Not only that, but the closer you look, the more readily apparent the various conspiracies become.  Matt Taibbi, who has been doggedly investigating the world of high finance since the 2008 crisis began, finally throws up his hands and admits what was always readily apparent to the sufficiently logical:

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of
the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you
an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but
your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this
out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories
spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest
banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three –
and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have
been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around
with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”)
worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into
public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in
history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it “dwarfs by orders of
magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has
leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker
of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities
for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess.
Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at
ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to
manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to
calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations
and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their
use is almost unimaginably massive. It’s about a $379 trillion market,
meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100
times the size of the United States federal budget.

It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this
scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks –
including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal
Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global
interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have
already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive
manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were
caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year,
to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial
acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there
may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix
suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and
price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall
Street culture.

Nor should it come as any surprise that the chief role of government in all of this has been to enable and defend the conspirators.

“But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of
March – though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been
so shocking at all – when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against
the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants’
incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money
because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever
thinking the banks were competing in the first place.”

The reason all of this information is finally coming out is because the system is breaking down.  The scale of the efforts required to attempt salvaging the players precludes any ability to keep everything behind the veil of genteel respectability while the straightforward demands for access to taxpayer funds and bank deposits prevents any attempt to confuse matters by appealing to their complexity. 

Ron Paul did not go far enough

Ron Paul is absolutely right to criticize the horrific abuse of American civil liberties in the pursuit of men who killed fewer people than died sitting on toilets the day of the Boston Marathon:

Forced lockdown of a city. Militarized police riding tanks in the streets. Door-to-door armed searches without warrant. Families thrown out of their homes at gunpoint to be searched without probable cause. Businesses forced to close. Transport shut down.

These were not the scenes from a military coup in a far off banana republic, but rather the scenes just over a week ago in Boston as the United States got a taste of martial law. The ostensible reason for the military-style takeover of parts of Boston was that the accused perpetrator of a horrific crime was on the loose. The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city. This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.

What has been sadly forgotten in all the celebration of the capture of one suspect and the killing of his older brother is that the police state tactics in Boston did absolutely nothing to catch them. While the media crowed that the apprehension of the suspects was a triumph of the new surveillance state – and, predictably, many talking heads and Members of Congress called for even more government cameras pointed at the rest of us – the fact is none of this caught the suspect. Actually, it very nearly gave the suspect a chance to make a getaway.

Paul’s criticism is strong, but it could be stronger. The fact is that President Obama should be ordering a federal investigation of the violations of the Constitution by the city and state police, as well as any federal agencies involved. It is depressing to think that we might have had a President Paul responding to this unprecedented attack on the American people by the police forces of the State if only the Republican Party had not insisted that Mitt Romney was “electable”.

Moreover, as Karl Denninger points out, not only were the Boston police not heroic, they were both incompetent and dishonest about their incompetency:

The cops unconstitutionally locked down a 20-block area.  This was not a case of “hot pursuit” where a valid exception exists to the 4th Amendment — they had no idea where the bad guy was, other than the general area where they saw him last.  That does not give license for what was done in Watertown.

But then to add to that they were both incompetent in that they didn’t search a street inside the perimeter, they lied about the fact that the boat was inside the perimeter and in addition the cops fired without having acquired a target and without having taken fire themselves when they shot up the boat.

The defendant had no weapon; he clearly did not shoot at the cops first.

In addition remember that the cops claimed the boat was outside of the perimeter.  That, it turns out, was a lie. 

The fact that the police are always full of praise for themselves after an incident such as the Boston Marathon doesn’t mean that they actually merit the praise. In most cases, a closer look will reveal that they are attempting to rewrite history and conceal their customary bumbling.