Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Conspiracy Guy

  I'm the conspiracy guy in my little circle of friends, and there is a pretty good chance you are too.  Now I don't spend inordinate amounts of time charting out all the various threads of connection between all the different government agencies and powerful people, at least not anymore.  Also I don’t stay awake at night worrying about the NSA mapping my brain waves, even though my wife took away my tin foil hat.

 
My belief in conspiracies is really quite simple. I believe powerful people would like to stay that way, and will orchestrate events to either enhance their power or maintain it. I think, in some instances, they love this power more than they love their own life, and especially more than they love your life. If you get between one of these people and their power, they will kill you. In this sense, an American is no different from anyone else.  To assume that  bad people weaseled themselves into positions of power in times past and in other countries but that such a thing could never happen  here  and now is phenomenally stupid.
  
Governments lie on a perpetual basis.   It's in their nature.  They lie to establish themselves, they lie to maintain themselves, and they lie to weed out the competition. If the government ever told the populace the whole truth about anything, it would be the first time. Since a lie has to usually be propped up with other lies, these deceptions give birth to a whole stable full of other deceptions.  Records have to be altered, witnesses have to be silenced, and critics have to be smeared.


  In no particular order, here are some big-scale events in recent American history where, at the very least there appears to be more going  on than meets the eye.   These events also resulted in great shifts of power and influence into the hands of a handful of people.

1) Apollo Moon Landing.  Honestly, here's what I think. I think we probably did go to the moon, but I've always thought it a bit risky from a government PR perspective to   broadcast it live into people's living rooms. This was an unprecedented event, and not only was all of America watching, but the entire world was watching.  What if something had gone wrong? What if the astronauts had died or had some sort of equipment failure?  The loss of face in the international   community, especially to the Soviets, would have been unbearable. The government had spent   vast quantities of cash and couldn’t afford a failure. So what do you do? Well you simply broadcast an error-free version of the lunar landing into people's living room at some point after the real landing has happened.  If something would have gone wrong, the general public would never know about it. If you wanted to be spectacularly clever about it, you could have the fake moon landing be as close as possible in sequence and in events to the real moon landing so that later on the recollections of astronauts and other  NASA employees line up with people’s memories of what they saw on their television sets.

  My theory also eliminates the oft-cited weakness of a hoaxed landing; the necessary inclusion of hundreds of people in the conspiracy. If what people saw in their living rooms was staged, while the real Apollo crew landed on the moon, only a handful need be in on the fakery.

  So what came out of all that? NASA pretty much put a lockdown on any private space travel for 4 decades after that, citing their stellar (pun intended)  achievements.   There was a river of money that flowed into NASA for my entire life. Somehow the government, who couldn’t run the Post Office without hemorrhaging money, was put in charge of outer space. This gave the government great clout, and the necessary platforms to launch any number of spy satellites with almost no civilian knowledge. That’s quite a bang for your buck.

2) Assassination of JFK.  Out of all the ways in which a man could be killed, I’ve always thought it interesting that Kennedy’s killers chose to do so publicly.  He could have died in his sleep, he could have been poisoned, he could have ‘slipped’ in the bath tub, but for some reason, the architects of his demise thought it better to blow off the back (or the front) of his head from behind (or in front, or to the side) in broad daylight before a crowd of witnesses (many of whom died soon after).  There was a statement being made; look what we can do.
  But even assuming that a mediocre marksman like Oswald could pull off those amazing shots (I’d love to know how to shoot a man from behind while making entry wounds in the front) and then race down 4 flights of stairs (without being seen by the girl on the  4th floor stairs) in time to be seen by a cop drinking a Coke  30 seconds later, Oswald didn’t have the ability to bungle the handling of the President’s body,  or the altering of the autopsy records or to ensure the loss of the autopsy photos or the  withholding of the Zapruder film for years or the  or to set up the frames being shown out of sequence or even to prepare his own assassination ( also done very publicly).  Lone guman? Really?
Out of that came LBJ’s  Presidency, the  escalation of  foreign intervention in Vietnam , the further entrenchment of the military-industrial complex, and  LBJ’s  Great Society  income redistribution  empire.  Once again, a great investment for what it cost them.

3) September 11   I can’t even begin to dig into all the  strange things that happened that day, but it’s really simple; buildings like that don’t collapse from fire.   They never have in the  entire history of steel buildings, but yet  on Sep 11th,  3 of them did, including WTC 7 which wasn't  hit by a plane.
  I remember  being home that day  and telling my wife "That looks like a controlled demolition".  Later on it came out that  not only were explosions reported by cops, firefighters, eyewitnesses, news crews, etc, but they found unexploded thermite residue in the rubble.
  So what came out of that?  Well, to my reckoning , just about every  insane  power grab  by the government has been tied back to the  fall of the towers.  No longer were we a people  concerned with liberty, now we were a people concerned with safety.  Our  military was trotted off to half a dozen or so  foreign lands (and counting), and blood was spilled and  money spent, all with talking heads like Sean Hannity saying  empty slogans such as '9/11 changed everything'.  The President, doesn't need Congress to go to war, you silly ninny; 9/11 changed everything. Naked  body scanners at airports ( and bus stations, and  football games and proms) can't possibly be opposed because after all, 9/11 changed everything. The NSA  are the good guys when they read your mail because 9/11 changed everything. The Presidential oath to  uphold the Constitution was replaced with a mandate to 'keep the American people safe' because 9/11 changed everything. Every cop, firefighter, mailman, and dog catcher was a 'hero' because 9/11 changed everything.  Changed it to what?

4) Boston Bombing If I follow this correctly, here's roughly what happened. Two guys who may or may not have been on the FBI watch list blow up two pressure cookers full of metal shrapnel at the  close of the  Boston marathon. We know this because there is video footage of them walking around with backpacks, and the FBI found the remains of the backpacks, post-explosion.  Never mind that there were thousands of people walking around with backpacks that day, and never mind that the backpacks they were carrying don't appear to be full. Never mind that the backpacks they were wearing  don't even match the one the police found.
  So after the two brothers who may or may not have been CIA assets steal a car, or not and kill a policeman, or not, the one brother runs over the other brother and then manges to  evade the entire world looking for him within the city limits of Boston for several days.   Whole blocks of the city were  cordoned off, but apparently he wasn't there. Then the entire city was put under martial law shelter in place as  armed men in military uniforms went door to door without a warrant.  the people of Boston who couldn't leave their homes, even though Dunkin Donuts stayed open, welcomed the armed men into their homes while cheering them as heroes in a city  marked for its  refusal to bow  to the whims of the British crown.
  When the police finally lifted the martial law shelter in place ( sorry) the remaining brother who may or may not have been wounded and may or may not have been armed had a gun battle, or not, with police , but not before  scrawling out a confession  in his own blood on the inside of the boat. This  confession wasn't found till later, but hey, who's keeping score, right?
  The  bullet-perforated suspect was then taken into custody and questioned for several hours without a lawyer present and under the influence of pain medications, where he  confessed to everything short of the  torpedoing of the Lusitania.

  Do you see what I mean? Do you see how these events always lead to an increase in the power of the state to trample the Constitution? The way things are right now, any one of us could be put in a cage for the rest of our lives for anything or nothing.  But hey, I'm sure that it will all turn out OK. What do I know, I'm just your friendly neighborhood conspiracy guy.
 
 

Monday, August 26, 2013

We Need a New Pediatrician

  We need a new pediatrician.
  The reason we need a new pediatrician is rather involved.  A while back, the pediatrician that our family has frequented for years came out with what was, in my opinion, a rather draconian and insulting policy regarding immunizations. The policy was simple; you will take the shots the CDC recommends, or we will not treat you.   The written policy went on to refer to the unimmunized as ‘selfish’.  Their policy is reproduced here.  When I read the policy I was incensed, and it lead to a number of family discussions. My wife wanted to stay with the doctor, and I did not.  My compromise was that we would stay with his office until we were forced to leave by this issue.
  Fast forward a few weeks and their office calls to tell me that my oldest needs to come in for his 11 year physical. I had never heard of such a thing, and the person on the phone was just a message service with no insight into such things.  I wanted to know what was driving this physical. My kids aren’t in government schools so I couldn’t imagine any reason that   pre-6th grade physical would be required. My wife called their office a time or two on my behalf and got no answer that would satisfy me.
  On the day of the appointment my wife called from the doctor’s office and told me that   part of the 11 year checkup was a series of immunizations.  One of the  immunizations was for HPV( Human papillomavirus vaccine), It's ’recommended’ by Big Pharma for both girls and boys to prevent genital warts and certain types of cancer. We had already declined this for my daughter before the new policy came out.  One of the shots was a Tdap booster (Tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis) booster.  The last on the list was the Meningococcal vaccine which supposedly prevents meningitis. She read them off to me and I made a command decision.   She was to instruct the doctor that my son would receive a tetanus booster and that was it. I hung up the phone and waited. I felt in my gut that this was going to be a day of confrontation.
  A few minutes later the phone rang and my wife told me that the pediatrician wanted to speak to me. His first question was whether or not I had actually done any research before I decided to risk my child’s health. I told him I didn’t think the risk was that high, and that injecting foreign substances into my child’s body wasn’t my idea of health care. He warned me of all the meningitis outbreaks that still happen in America and told me that I was putting my child in grave danger. He said, and I quote, “If he catches it, I don’t want to have to stand there in ICU and watch him die because he didn’t get this shot.”  Keeping in mind that meningitis is treatable with penicillin and that death from it usually only happens in a previously compromised immune system, the message was clear; take the shot or death may happen.
  I continued to decline the shots, and he asked me if I was aware of their office policy.  I told him I was and that I found their   low regard for parental choice very troubling. By now we’re both yelling at each other, which wasn’t the best way to handle it. He asked me if I understood that he could no longer treat our family unless we got these shots.  I made some comment about how much money his office makes off of immunizations. He told me he didn’t have time to argue with me, that we were done here.  He handed the phone back to my wife. I instructed her (still in a fairly harsh tone of voice unfortunately) to pack up our son and come home.
  Once I was off the phone, he began to work on my wife.  He apologized for getting so upset on the phone with me, and he wanted to give us some time to ‘think about’ it before we severed the doctor-patient relationship. He gave my wife the party line on vaccines in general, and somehow my upcoming mission trip to Haiti came up.  The idea was floated out there that I could bring back some plague from Haiti and infect our unvaxed kids.  Before she left, my wife had to sign a ‘Refusal to Vaccinate’ form that they would keep on file.  They also informed my wife that she would not be able to get our children’s medical records. Their policy is to release those records to our next doctor, not to us.
  A week went by and I was still trying to locate a doctor that honored our choices as parents when we received a letter in the mail officially severing the doctor-patient services unless we ‘comply’. Included was a revised version of their policy in which the word ‘selfish’ is replaced with a reference to ‘herd immunity’.
  My issue is simple; it’s my child, not theirs.  Maybe vaccines are good, maybe they’re bad. Maybe Wakefield was right and they attribute to allergies and autism, maybe they don’t.  Either way, I as a parent ought to be able to pick and choose what shots are given to my child, not the CDC.  In the pediatricians defense, they are a private practice and can do as they see fit, but I think it’s poor policy and a poor business decision to sever years of customer relations over the recommendations of Big Pharma and their lackeys in the government. I think it’s poor policy as a parent to blindly sign on to whatever injections the government dictates from on high
  So we have no pediatrician at the moment, and there is a certified letter waiting ominously for us  up at the post office from the pediatrician.  My concern is not that we won’t find another doctor, and my concern isn’t that my  son will catch meningitis. My concern at this point is that a visit from Child Protective Services comes out of all this.  Out of concern for the staff at this misguided doctor’s office, I’ve not released the name of the office, but I suspect we have not heard the last from all this.