Conspiracy Theorists

A programme on the "Fernseher" recently had me alternating between extreme impatience and outright amazement. It covered a number of "conspiracy theories" currently in vogue on the internet and elsewhere. The majority seem to be fueled by people in the US, though support comes from all over the world. One of the biggest is the whole "Bush bombed the Twin Towers to start a war" theory, which is, as one would expect, extremely popular with the Iranian regime who never lose an opportunity to remind people that the images of the airliners - from umpteen different cameras and people, are all "CIA fakes."

According to the guy they featured the other night, the Pentagon was hit, not by an airliner, but by a missile fired from one of the US Navy's own nuclear submarines. In his view, there was no part of any airliner visible in any photograph and all the pieces recovered, were from a missile. How he worked that one out when the film shown on our TV clearly had large sections of aircraft marked up in the livery of the airline in it, defeats me. But he claimed in an interview that all these pieces were "fakes, planted by the military" to "stir up the people and provoke a war." Yes, I'm sure it was - how else do you stir up a war? And the Pope is the leader of the Protestant Churches ...

I find the mindset that dreams up these theories, then fosters and nurtures them, developing all kinds of "evidence" to support their claim, difficult to grasp. Some of these folk seem to make a complete industry out of "proving" their theory and "confronting the XXXX with the evidence."

Another popular one is the whole "The Moon Landings were faked by Hollywood" theory. It ranges from supposedly professional photographers who claim "there are no shadows on the Moon" to so-called "engineers" who claim it is impossible for the Lunar Lander to have actually safely made the descent and taken off again. Then you have the movie makers who claim to be able to "prove" the films and photos taken on the Moon's surface were "faked" in a laboratory. I did enjoy the clip shown with one of this last class confronting Neil Armstrong on the steps of the Capitol. He had his full camera crew and sound recorders, lighting team and all the hangers-on with him as he charged up the steps shouting "Senator Armstrong! You claim to have walked on the Moon. I say you're a liar, a thief and a fraud. What do you say to that?"

Neil Armstrong turned, shook off the restraining hand of his companion, and slugged the guy, knocking him off his feet. Perfect timing. If only someone would do it to the likes of Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 911) and all the others of that ilk.

The damage these clowns do to the standing of their own nation is incredible, yet, the strange thing is, they claim to be "serving the interests of the people" by "exposing the lies and deceits of ...." Funny thing, I don't recall ever voting for any of them, so how are they serving? Ah, of course, that simple expedient of self delusion and media exposure. Dream up a story wild enough and preferably with a government whose popularity is shaky as its focus, and some folk will believe anything. Never mind the evidence, do I want to believe President G W Bush is an enemy of the world, the people, the country? If yes - then no matter how wild or stupid, the conspiracy theorists must be right.

Another subject touched on was the idea that the Titanic didn't in fact sink. That her owners actually sent the Olympic out with a name change so they could claim the insurance. This ignores the fact that the Olympic was, in fact, slightly smaller and had a number of fairly obvious differences in her appearance. Titanic's other sister, Britannic (Originally Gigantic), would have been a better candidate for the switch since she would have been identical in appearance, but she was still on the slipway when the Titanic sank. Britannic wasn't, in fact, completed until 1915, largely because, after the Titanic sank, she was heavily modified to take into account lessons learned in the sinking. That doesn't stop the conspiracy theorists running the theory though.

This strangely twisted way of thinking seems to permeate a whole range of subjects, from the Moon Landings, through 911 and on out into the world of Climate Change. On the flimsiest of evidence people's integrity, motives and even intelligence are called into question. One of the things I find most depressing is that it is usually the supposedly intelligent younger generation, many at university, who ardently believe all this garbage. It must be some sort of reaction to the discipline of study - or perhaps it stems from the fact their lecturers may be ardent believers themselves in a "greater government conspiracy."

Returning to the Twin Towers, one "investigator" claimed to have found "explosive residues" in the debris - proof in his mind that G W B had had the Towers destroyed by demolition charges. There are any number of perfectly reasonable explanations for his "tests" having given a "positive" result, not least among them being what is called "expectation bias." Others claim the films and photos of airliners striking the Towers are photoshopped and the actual strikes were anything from missiles to F-16s of the USAF "ordered" to attack the Towers by the President himself.

I'm sure every USAF pilot would obey THAT order... Yet, thanks to Michael Moore and his cohorts, this is exactly what Iranians do believe.

Having debunked all the theories included in the TV programme did ask the same question I am pondering. What is it that makes otherwise intelligent people adopt these strange theories? Why are they driven to be so vehemently convinced that they, and they alone, are right?

I think there might be a few doctoral thesis to be had in finding an answer ...

Bureaucrats; you gotta love them ...

Mausi and the I are slowly getting all the papers required by the German authorities sorted out. The hold up is, as ever, Pretoria, but, after almost two years of waiting, even the Standesamt is prepared to make allowances. Finally, yesterday, he acknowledged that we'd run out of option for getting a response from Pretoria acknowledging my divorce in 1995 has been duly noted and recorded. The official has finally accepted the copy of the Marriage Certificate from my old ID Book as a valid document and the print-off from the SA Dept of Internal Affairs Population Register that shows me as "Divorced."

We were told it's irregular, but all our other papers are valid, so they will have to accept what we are able to supply from the South African end as it's obvious we aren't going to get a response.

All I can say is, it's taken 9 months to get this agreement. Nine months of phoning Embassies, Pretoria, more Embassies and Consulates and more calls to Pretoria. Thankfully, having shown all the forms, all the letters and emails, our Standesamt has agreed its a hopeless pursuit. Finally the Magistrate will look at issuing an approval for our marriage.

All I can say, after this experience of the system in South Africa, is I really cannot understand how anyone actually gets anything done there. It must be murder to get anything at all out of any government department and, as for dealing with two ... No, forget it.

Hiding the Past ...

Sometimes one can only wonder at the mentality of politicians, or perhaps their ability to refuse to acknowledge the often disastrous past. Watching the former German "Socialist" (Read as Communist) Party attempt to destroy the other parties candidate for the Presidency here is certainly an interesting exercise. Joachim Gauck, a former Lutheran Priest and scourge of the former rulers of East Germany, is the candidate of choice of all Parties except "Die Linke," the new name for the former communists.

Watching them witter on about how Gauck is a "turncoat" who "benefitted from the system and now undermines all the good ..." or cry about the fact that he revealed all the Stasi files and their abuses of human rights could be amusing. You certainly couldn't make up some of the stuff they accuse him of. I rather liked his reply, which ran along the lines of "if the former DDR was such a wonderfully democratic state, and everyone was so equal and so happy there; why did they need the Stasi? Why did they need to kill everyone who wanted to try a different regime? Why did they lock people up for even talking about wanting a different regime? If everyone was so equal; why did the Party have secret resorts and luxury travel arrangements no one else had access to?"

If you think he got any answers to that, think again. One of the saddest things I've seen on this was a young woman earnestly trying to convince the interviewer that "In a proper Communist State, there is no inequality, no hardship and no one goes without work." When challenged about the DDR situation, her response was to dismiss it as "teething troubles while they struggled against the Capitalist onslaught" and her response to the Stasi - "A necessary safeguard for the greater good ..." She then went on to say that the collapse of Capitalism was "inevitable" and that the only alternative was full Communism... The interviewer gave up after trying to get her to take several reality checks!

As we used to say in South Africa: Ja. Well, no. Fine, fine..." I don't think there's any cure for this sort of mental disease. It isn't stupidity, it isn't that they are unable to get the facts, they are just completely and utterly unable to face reality and to recognise their system is utterly and totally unworkable without its being imposed and enforced in breach of everything they claim to be trying to protect..

An appropriate response?

I find it difficult enough to believe that someone in the US Forces would have failed to consider the implications of burning a bunch of books in Arabic which might include copies of the Quran. Surely the long engagement in Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi and the skirmishing with Iran has taught someone something about the sensitivity of this? Apparently not, because they went and burned copies of the Quran, and then left the remains to be found ...


OK, the response across the Islamic world has, in most civilised people's eyes been totally inappropriate. Personally I find the offence committed by Islamists in attacking war graves in Libya, and, for all I know, eleswhere, is provocative in the extreme. As I'm sure it is for most Westerners.


The problem lies in the failure in the West at least, by those who push the secularist, populist agenda, to understand the culture of Islam (They don't actually understand Christianity either!) and so they interfere in matters - probably with what they consider the best of intentions - only to create situations ripe for the sort of violent response we now see. 


The reaction is way over the top in our view, but this is where the fundamental difference lies between Islam and Christianity. Burning a Bible is to offensive to a Christian, but the "Word" resides in Jesus Christ, the "Living Word." To a Muslim, the Quran is the "Word" and is to be treated as such. A true Muslim will wash his hands before picking up a copy and certainly won't place it on the ground or anywhere it could be "defiled." This is why they want it placed on the top shelf in libraries in the UK and elsewhere now so it can never be beneath any other book. It is also why they regard the only "true" text as the Arabic one. To burn a Quran is, to them, to attack God himself. It is in the failure to understand this difference that the "liberal" secularists driving most of these supposedly "democratising" conflicts have opened the door to this sort of response.

Give a dog a bad name ...

In the last two days Australia has seen the reopening of the inquest into the death and disappearance, 30 years ago, of a baby girl from her parents tent as they camped near Ayres Rock (or Uluru as it is now called). At the time it was a media sensation, the mother was accused of killing her baby, her own and other statements that a Dingo had been heard and seen in the campsite just before the baby screamed and then disappeared were ignored by the police and the prosecution. The first inquest recorded the death as "Dingo attack" but the media, police and presumably the prosecutors went on a spree spreading rumours and 'leaking' information in a campaign to bring murder charges against the mother.

She was duly tried and "evidence" was produced to "prove" she was a cold blooded killer. The "evidence" included "blood on the dashboard" of the family car, a "bloody hand print" on the baby's recovered and partly shredded jumper suit and a statement from an "expert" that the rips and tears were not Dingo teeth, but a "pair of scissors" most likely used to kill the infant. Mrs Chamberlain was convicted by the jury, convinced by media reports that "she showed no emotion" and that she was "cool and calculating." Some of the rumours were really wild, including one that accused her of "witchcraft" (I mean, really? In this day and age?) and that her daughter's name meant "sacrifice in the wilderness." In fact, in Hebrew (her father was a 7th Day Adventist Minister) it actually means "Blessed of God."

A few years later the case had to be reopened because a jacket Mrs Chamberlain had said the child was wearing at the time, was recovered - from a Dingo's den! The "blood on the dashboard" it was then revealed had been spilled milkshake and the "bloody handprint" on the recovered jump suit, nothing but red dust! So how did the Jury arrive at a guilty verdict? How on earth did the police and prosecution get away with presenting "evidence" that was, quite frankly, a load of complete and utter garbage. It should have been thrown out of court immediately and the investigators and experts prosecuted for wasting the courts time. But it wasn't.

Why not?

Enter the media. Having whipped up a storm and ably perpetrated the rumours and leaks, giving them increasing credence, they probably influenced the police and the jury. It's called "expectation bias." What it means is that once you allow a biased view to enter your thinking, you will hear and see only the things and evidence that supports your expectations ...

Mrs Chamberlain's "crime" as far as the media was concerned, lay in her inability to show her emotions in public. Nor is this the first time we've seen the media pack leap to conclusions about someone's feelings because they don't shed bucket loads of tears, beat their breasts and snivel to the cameras. Think of the accusations hurled at the Royals for failing to show their "grief" while the Diana Fan Club wailed and metaphorically "rent their robes" all over the streets and the media. Think of the accusations levelled at Mrs McCann by the incompetents in the Portuguese Police - and how the UK Media fanned those flames with sensational reporting.

The same thing happened when a young British couple were kidnapped in the Outback and the young man was murdered. The Australian Press immediately accused her of being the killer. Why? Because she wasn't "grief stricken." As it turned out, a proper investigation did, eventually, lead to the arrest and conviction of a serial killer in South Australia, but you certainly didn't see any retraction in the press of their original slanders.

This is a problem many of us face. We are schooled not to wear our hearts on our sleeves, especially in public. But now, it seems, you can be found guilty by the Media, because you didn't wish to make a spectacle of yourself and kept your grief private. As the person who sent me the article which sparked this line of thought wrote on a forum -

It's always been a fear for me that I hate displaying my emotions in public and if something happened where the world's media were all focussed on me, judging whether I was showing enough emotion, I would be branded guilty of pretty much anything. People whose mothers have postnatal depression tend to be better than average at reading other peoples' faces and controlling the expressions they show to the outside world, because their survival depends on mirroring their mother's moods.

She makes a very good point. She then went on -

It's still considered normal to cry - the McCann family have been subjected to lots of snide comments purely because Mrs McCann committed the crime of not crying with a camera in her face... And even worse - she dared to put on make up and earrings every morning. I seriously saw an article written by a woman (who hadn't had a child go missing or been subjected to press hounding), saying that Mrs McCann must be guilty, because a distraught mother wouldn't care about her appearance. A commenter pointed out that people can go through a morning routine - and even find it reassuring to do so - when they're in shock or under stress, but they got shouted down. The media is a beast that needs to be fed distraught mothers' emotions in order to be appeased - "show us yer tears luv: and if you won't give us that best selling image, we'll sell more papers by saying yer guilty..."

Unfortunately, all too often in this day and age, Juries are already biased by the media coverage long before the accused is brought to trial. Ask Mrs McCann, I'm pretty sure she would tell you exactly what it's like to lose a child and then be hounded by the media pack and accused of murder - because you didn't "show enough emotion" for some yob standing on your doorstep and hurling impertinent and insensitive questions.

There is a serious danger here that the eagerness of the Media to "inform the public" can and does compromise Justice. Likewise, the legitimate desire of the Police to catch the person responsible can sometimes be itself compromised by "expectation bias." We all remember the scenes of wailing and lamenting masses at the funeral of Kim Il Jong recently. Is this a sign of a healthy society? Is this what we expect of anyone bereaved in distressing and extremely traumatic circumstances?

I would suggest that it is stupid, unreasonable and downright intrusive to think that way. I was brought up to not show my grief in public, "we don't display our grief" was the watchword, "we keep it for when we can be private." It is a policy I have every intention of maintaining - and the Media be damned!

Give a dog a bad name - then hang him, is the idiomatic expression. It is a warning; it should not be the watchword of a free and fair society.

Pondering ....

Book trailers, actually.

I've been discussing this with a young lady who makes films. She had a hand in one for Random House and one of their 'Best Seller' authors. The numbers she gave me weren't as big as I would have expected, but now I have to think this through carefully. Which book to do this for? What aspects of the story do I want the trailer to reflect? How will I pay for it?

It needs a lot of very careful consideration I think.

Ash Wednesday

Today being Ash Wednesday we will be off to church tonight to receive the imposition of the ashes. It is always a moving service, a time for reflection and preparation.

It struck me that the words used in the "imposition" have a far wider significance than the obvious if you consider them carefully:

"Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. 
Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ."

Those who have read this blog when I have posted on matters religious will know that I believe forensic examination of the evidence we have from the New Testament makes me believe that Jesus was a real person (Josephus has commented that he is mentioned in his "Histories") and that the empty tomb was not the work of tomb robbers or any other form of sleight of hand. Therefore I have no problem with that latter instruction. However, many people do seem to have a problem with the first part of that statement.

We are indeed dust. The individual atoms that make up the molecules that make up the cells and everything else in our bodies was born in the detonation of a star possibly billions of years ago. At some point the atoms that make up the corporeal 'me' that currently wanders this earth will be returned to the dust that litters the universe. While I hope it won't occur too soon, I do have the hope that this life is but a preparation for something greater.

So tonight I will go and submit to being anointed with ashes and hear again the words "Dust you are, and to dust you will return."