Straightforward answers to unnecessarily complicated questions, number whatever the hell it is now

““The world is run by dinosaur-like reptiles.” What the hell kind of conspiracy theory is that?”

It’s a bit of a long story of how I came to know this (it involves a guy we used to refer to as “Crazy Reginald”) but this one’s a standard among serious alien enthusiasts. So standard in fact that some even consider this a distraction from the REAL conspiracy.

According to wikipedias article on David Icke, he believes that Kris Kristoferson is a member of the “Illuminati”, the reptilian humanoids known as the Babylonian Brotherhood. Isnt that a bit extreme, even for conspiracy theories ? I mean, Kris Kristoferson as a member of the “illuminati”?

Kristoferson is listed because it’s generally assumed among this particular strand of conspiracy theorist that all Rhodes Scholars (he was at Merton College Oxford IIRC) are part of the elite conspiracy. This strand (the anti-British element of the global elite conspiracy theory, viz Lyndon LaRouche’s belief that the Queen controls the international drug trade) has a certain amount of basis in fact, as it dates back to the 1940s when the British government did, in fact, employ a lot of agents of influence in the USA attempting to persuade you lot to join our war.

The real question, of course, is whether or not coalition forces found the Baghdad Stargate.

Isnt that a bit extreme, even for conspiracy theories ? I mean, Kris Kristoferson as a member of the “illuminati”?

“Busted flat in Baton Rouge
Munchin’ on some brains
I’se feellin’ ’bout as faded as my scales
Bobby thumb a spaceship down
Just before it rained
We rode it all the way to New South Wales.

“I pulled my raygun
Out of my dirty red bandanna
I’se playin’s soft while Bobby sang the blues
Dilithium crystals slappin’ time
I’se holdin’ Bobby’s claws in mine
We sang every song that pilot knew . . .

My guess is that there’s a hell of a lot of disinformation in the troofer community

Why?

shape shifter conspiracy theories are the best ones, I think.

Jesus was a dinosaur, he ate Gentiles for food
He spat out all their clothing but swallowed all their shoes.

Parrots as telepathic, given their millions of years of evolution isn’t that much of a stretch, once you get past the necessity for there to be some way to get outside the limitations of speed-of-light and time.

Indeed. I believe the mechanism for this is super-ultra-boner rays.

Randi’s got a million bucks waiting for the first impartial laboratory demonstration of psi abilities. It’s got a fairly simple and scientifically appropriate requirement, that the abilities be demonstrated in a controlled environment.

In actual fact, as Sheldrake documents ad nauseam on his website, Randi starts becoming a bit shifty whenever it looks like he’s going to have his bluff called and starts adding all sorts of irrelevant stipulations. My personal opinion is that Sheldrake has found out something interesting about the negative binomial test – specifically that it doesn’t work very well as a significance test in some kinds of experiment – and mistaken it for something incredibly interesting about psi, but I don’t really trust Randi either.

Bubba:
The confines of speed-of light and time are 20th c. sci-fi limitations. We can’t get past them with our mechanical technologies, but theoretical physics has confirmed something something something to the effect that what we’re seeing and using as real is a pretty local thing. Basically a functional illusion.
Mistaking illusion for reality is a big no-no.

Birds have been here for a long time. Orders of magnitude longer than we have.

Asserting that something like telepathy in birds as implausible is one thing, insisting it’s impossible, given the total disarray of the old paradigm, is another, less excusable thing.

11: I think that there’s a lot of disinformation in the truther literature because it would be completely unusual for there not to be – it would be the only major consipracy literature that didn’t have a sizeable lump of disinformation provided to it by the authorities. It’s an utterly standard tactic when organising a coverup, and we know that there was at least one coverup because we know that there was a concerted effort to trick up a connection with Iraq.

(note that, as Ramsay says in his book, evidence of the coverup cannot be extrapolated to evidence of complicity in the original crime – for example, whatever Lee Harvey Oswald’s status, the CIA and FBI had a massive incentive to cover up their connections to him, because they were just so bloody embarrassing).

Roy: I completely agree that Sheldrake’s been pretty shamefully treated and think he’s a very interesting case for the sociology of science, but as I say, I think the problem is that the negative binomial test he uses isn’t really powerful enough to support the use he makes of it.

I think that there’s a lot of disinformation in the truther literature because it would be completely unusual for there not to be – it would be the only major consipracy literature that didn’t have a sizeable lump of disinformation provided to it by the authorities.

Having not read the Ramsay book I don’t have your picture of the amount of disinformation involved in conspiracy theories, but it’s interesting. In the case of 9/11 my general thought is that no disinformation from government sources was necessary: it was a large and harrowing event for a lot of folks, the internet exists, the government of the time was evil and stupid and actually conspiratorial, and the Bushes already figured prominently in Icke’s world. As government-supported kook theory I can’t figure out what it might be in aid of except that the executive branch is fulla Bad Dudes.

The UFO panic was started in the 1950s because the US Air Force didn’t want too many people knowing about U2 spy planes, and has been kept going ever since because when you’ve got a disinformation program as fantastic as the UFO cult, you don’t let it die for lack of interest, because it might come in useful at some future date.

1942-5: UFO sightings become commonplace over the US and in air combat over Europe (“foo fighters”); US pursuit launched against them in the “Battle of Los Angeles”.
1945-6: Meteors over Scandinavia repeatedly misidentified as Soviet cruise missile tests (RV Jones, “Most Secret War”).
First highly publicised “flying saucer” sighting: June 1947.
July 1947: At the peak of the “flying saucer” panic, the Roswell “flying saucer” incident. “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch In Roswell Region”.
1948: the wave of UFO reports of 1947 dwindles away.

1955: first flight of the Lockheed U-2.
1960: existence and abilities of the U-2 become public with the shootdown of Gary Powers.

The dates don’t really seem to match up, do they. I suspect, dsquared, that you’re talking bllcks again.

One thing that interests me is that of the top 10 conspiracy theories in the UK, at least half of them are entirely US in scope, and only one is about the UK specifically. Does this mean people don’t believe the UK government are behind any big conspiracies, or is it just a reflection of how heavily influenced by US culture/news we now are?

This isn’t a topic I follow too often, but when did Icke come out as an anti-semite? I thought he was being chased by an anti-anti semitism group in Canada until they realised he was just plain insane.

1955: first flight of the Lockheed U-2.

which, in ajayland, was presumably magicked into existence a week earlier, rather than being the culmination of a research and development program?

God am I really going to have to look up this citation? (that one refers to the U2 specifically, but there were plenty of experimental flights in the 1940s too – note that it’s pretty clear from the article that the Air Force inherited the CIA’s disinformation project at about the same time as taking over control of the actual planes)

If all we’re talking about here is the distinction between experimental planes in general and the specific U2 program, and we’re agreed that the USAF (and therefore almost certainly the CIA before it) used disinformation in the UFO community to cover up U2s, then I am content to admit the mistake and apologise, although I think the charge “talking bollocks again” is pretty hard to sustain in context.

I think the interesting thing about the UFO phenomenon is that it moves quite swiftly from being about ‘lights in the sky’ towards the tropes established definitively by the Betty and Barney Hill ‘abduction’ of 1961 – i.e. ‘lost time’, strange skin markings, later recovered memories of ‘examinations’ [anal probe, anyone?], big-eyed, hairless aliens, etc etc etc…

As this website notes:
http://popculture.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_first_alien_abduction
this is a ‘twist’ on a 1950s ‘contact’ narrative of aliens offering a friendly warning about the dangers of nuclear war, etc.

UFOs, as a ‘mythos’, rapidly moved far beyond anything that could be accounted for by government disinformation [or, rather, beyond anything that resembles the attempt to put together a plausible explanation for something else [except maybe previous sexual abuse??]…]

So, what is it? Are ‘abductees’ nuts? Or do They Walk Among Us?? Personally, I think the same mechanisms of suggestibility and projection are at work here that cause people to see the Virgin Mary in the sky… Our grip on reality is pretty tenuous, but that doesn’t mean that The Man has a better one.

@30 I think the lack of homegrown conspiracies in Britain is due to the very low opinion people have of the capabilities of government agencies. To believe that something like the destruction of the twin towers was planned and executed by your government you have to believe those guys are really, really good – as well as being really, really bad, obviously. Even in the intelligence sector it seems that British agents are too busy leaving laptops on trains to be screwing lap-dancers in exotic resorts and saving the world.

The second factor is the press. Although journalists are much reviled, the British have a lot of trust in their invesigatory diligence. Look at the BBC’s row with Labour over the ‘Dodgy Dossier’ – even the most ‘establishment’ of media institutions simply don’t believe what the government tells them.

However, the impression we have a ‘friendlier’ press in the US leads us to believe, perhaps falsely, that they are easily conned. We also believe in American conspiracies because ‘anything’s possible’ in the States and, deep down, ‘those Yanks are crazy, so who knows?’

There are quite a few domestic conspiracy theories (in the pejorative sense – quite apart from well-sourced theories about conspiracies like the Wilson Plot, collusion between the security forces and Loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, the Zinoviev Letter, etc) in the UK, viz:

– we have plenty of 7/7 truthers with theories about inside jobs etc
– various theories about the death of Dr David Kelly (which I would say are on the cusp between the pejorative and non-pejorative senses)
– most famously, Diana murder conspiracists#

they’re just not as famous and popular as American conspiracy theories, for roughly the same reason that Dizzee Rascal isn’t as famous and popular as Jay-Z

we’re agreed that the USAF (and therefore almost certainly the CIA before it) used disinformation in the UFO community to cover up U2s,

We have done nothing of the sort. You’ve misread your own link. The article says that USAF had (internally) identified the causes of 96% of UFO sightings. Over half of them were U-2 or other reconnaissance flights. But USAF, wanting to keep the U-2 secret, instead explained them away as natural phenomena such as “temperature inversions” or “ice crystals”.

The article doesn’t support your two main claims: 1) that USAF or CIA started the UFO craze in the first place, which, as I pointed out, peaked long before the U-2 project was even thought of, and in fact before the USAF or the CIA even existed, or 2) that USAF or CIA spread any sort of “disinformation” in the UFO community in order to “keep the UFO cult going”. Nobody used UFOs as “cover” for U-2 or any other flights – U-2s were UFOs, at least to the public, and USAF provided false but entirely natural explanations when they were reported. USAF didn’t concoct any false and unexplained UFO reports of its own – which would be the obvious form of disinformation needed to feed the UFO cult – nor did it refuse to explain UFO reports provided by others.

USAF’s behaviour is entirely congruent with wanting a) to conceal the existence of projects like U-2 and b) not wanting to encourage flying saucer cults. It’s not congruent at all with wanting to sustain the existence of flying saucer cults in order to conceal aircraft flight tests. Had it wanted to do so, it would have said something like “that mysterious high-altitude aircraft you say you saw? Yes, we saw it too, it was far too fast for any earthly machine and it was giving out a weird green light” rather than “Oh, that was just a funny looking cloud”.

One needs also to recall the significant link between believing oneself a victim/target of conspiracy and believing oneself *really really important*. On an individual basis this of course manifests itself with the likes of “Son of God” Icke and poor old David Shaylor, so recently announced to actually be Christ. On a collective basis, one could comment on the self-image of Americans in general, as the perpetrators of so much conspiracy-theorising, but I do so hate to be rude.

Of course, an interesting counterpoint to all this can be gained from reading diplomatic history, especially pre-1815. Here you find people who *know* that they are really really important, and generally behave as if any twist or turn of policy they care to undertake is thereby justified. The opposite of a conspiracy, really – open, perpetual, self-interested, blatant back-stabbing manipulation.

Theosophy has just come galloping into mind for some reason.

As arguably, were the Bolsheviks pre-1917 and the Nazi party in, say, 1928…

there are no “accidental” violations!

it would be the only major consipracy literature that didn’t have a sizeable lump of disinformation provided to it by the authorities

No creation without creator: the ultimate conspiracy!

Cargo cults: conspiracy as religion. The thing that made me wonder about the disinformation angle is that, again, the human animal is awfully creative in its approach to the inexplicable (inexplicabilitinessissitude being a matter of perspective of course). Are we assuming that without disinformation the conspiracy cults would be different or would die out?

Anyone familiar with Sheldrake know if he’s ever commented on the way sports records are always being broken? Bannister breaks the 4 minute mile and then everyone can (well, not me– these days I’d be happy with 7), and so forth. I suppose the conventional explanation for this is a combination of better training and psychological barriers to achievement that get broken, but I was reading the NYT article on Phelps and someone in the article said that he saw no limit to human achievements in swimming. I started visualizing future Olympians outswimming dolphins and ultimately even emitting Cherenkov radiation, perhaps then reaching tranwarp velocities, and in the midst of all this I thought “Sheldrake.”

But he probably thought of this before.

Joking aside, I have a book of his lying around somewhere. I ought to read it.

53: I seem to remember him at the very least surmising that the act of climbing Mount Everest in 1953 made it easier for subsequent expeditions to climb it, but I might be misremembering.

my experience of working as a stringer and a staffer for magazines down the years is that nearly everyone assumes there is a conniving exclusionary cabal of folks that they are not part of who are in a kind of inner-circle in respect of the culture of the magazine, in on who gets what assignments and what gets onto the cover; in on upcoming decisions and directions

now obviously there ARE outer and inner circles of decision-making on most publications: what’s strange is that people who are clearly innermost as one can get still sometimes labour powerfully under this paranoia — a lot of people seem to be quite bad at getting their heads round the politics of distributed agency; conspiracy theory has always seemed to me a natural response to a world where a lot of events are the consequence of the sum of lots and lots of decisions that aren’t in any strict sense co-ordinated, and yet seem to combine into tellingly directed trends

in agatha christie’s very early novel “the secret adversary”, the villain is revealed to be, in addition to everything else, THE MAN BEHIND THE BOLSHEVIKS — naturally he is a brilliant english barrister

I suspect that alot of the small time conspiracy theorists at the magazines are correct. Many conspiracy theories are just theories that the people making the key decisions are either not the people who are supposed to be making the key decisions, the latter are fooled or intimidated into ratifying the decisions of another group that legally don’t have the authority, or are the result of decisions that are not for the good of the institution.

A “conspiracy” that the senior editors were meeting in private to decide on next week’s cover, in an effort to boost magazine sales, and no one knows what has discussed, isn’t much of a conspiracy. A decision by the senior editor to put the publisher’s mistress on the cover is more of what you would expect of a conspiracy, especially if a meeting of senior editors had settled on another cover, but there was a list minute substition plausibly based on a “miscommunication”.

In other words, to be a conspiracy, an organization must be directed either by people other than the people who are legally supposed to be in charge of the organization, or it must be directed to make decisions obviously contrary to the organization’s own interests. In the 9-11 conspiracy theories, US officials are directing a military operation, but it is against US soldiers and civilians. Keep in mind that the “official” explanation is that it was caused by a secret cabal, the difference with the dissident version is that the dissidents postulate that the cabal includes some people on the US government payroll.

As it happens, all organizations have informal chains of command and they all have agency problems. So you can’t accurately describe how an organization normally behaves without resorting to conspiracy theories. In the interesting theories postulate that the agency problems have gotten really out of hand. One notable historical example is that of “le secret du Roi”, the intrigues conducted by Louis XV to thwart the policies of the then French foreign minister.

#58

I’m not seriously defending Sheldrake, but I wonder which factor is the most important one in explaining why records are steadily broken. I have no basis for this, but I’d guess the psychological factor along with better training methods would be the top two reasons. I’m not sure how much of an effect the increasing population is going to have. It would be expected to have some effect, of course, but would you expect a big difference between someone who is the fastest out of 3 billion vs. someone who is the fastest out of 6 billion? (Not that those numbers are quite right–maybe a larger fraction of the larger world population is able to compete now, but if you stick to first world countries, you still see improvement and I doubt the fraction of competing athletes is that much greater now than in, say, 1970. For men, that is.)

Also, getting back to the “no limit” claim, I would think there would eventually be an asymptotic approach to whatever the theoretical maximum performance would be for humans in any given quantifiable event. I think people have claimed to see that in the data for some sports, but I don’t recall where I read this.

I’m not seriously defending Sheldrake, but I wonder which factor is the most important one in explaining why records are steadily broken.

Drugs.

Parrots as telepathic, given their millions of years of evolution isn’t that much of a stretch, once you get past the necessity for there to be some way to get outside the limitations of speed-of-light and time. Quantum physics seems to provide that.

Seems to, but doesn’t. Quantum theory as currently understood cannot be used to send faster-than-light or backward-in-time messages. Quantum theory as currently understood could be wrong, but then you don’t get to claim it’s explained by quantum theory.

I don’t know how central disinformation was to the UFO phenomenon, but I’m pretty sure some of the flying-saucer rumors were at least tolerated with a wink early on. The Roswell incident had to do with a secret military project involving balloons called Mogul; the staff at the Army air base issued a press release at the time that actually played up the “flying disc” angle, maybe as an attempt at a cover, though I get the impression they decided not to run with it later.

(Keeping in mind, too, that Roswell became much more famous during the 1990s UFO craze than it had been originally–the Kenneth Arnold sighting was a much bigger contributor to the Fifties UFO phenomenon.)

I have also heard it claimed that some large fraction of 1960s Soviet UFO sightings were really of treaty-violating ICBM tests, and rumors of aliens once again provided a natural cover.

When did Icke “come out” as an anti-Semite? Seems like one of those theories that gets “truer” for being repeated so irresponsibly and often. The guy’s a nutter and he’s quoted from the Protocols, but he thinks lizards wrote them, not Jews.

I’m still hung up on the very concept of psychic parrots. In the wild these creatures fly around the rainforest canopy and eat fruit. Where’s the evolutionary pressure to develop ESP? Now, psychic *wolves*, beaming messages about the availability of fresh caribou for miles across the tundra, coordinating their attacks, homing in on isolated travellers with uncanny precision, that I could get into…

BTW, if telepathy is real, *wanting* it not to be doesn’t come into it, any more than wanting drug-resistant TB [for example] not to exist will make a difference. Suggesting that it might is just magical thinking – of the same kind that wants ESP to be real, yet can’t find reliable evidence that it is…

I started visualizing future Olympians outswimming dolphins and ultimately even emitting Cherenkov radiation, perhaps then reaching tranwarp velocities, and in the midst of all this I thought “Sheldrake.”

But he probably thought of this before.

Thus making it easier for you to think of it too!

52: I’m sorry, but “This is obviously true because I saw a documentary about it by Nick Cook, and a strange man stood up in a hotel in Las Vegas and said it was true” doesn’t pass my giggle test.

When did Icke “come out” as an anti-Semite?

See my review of “Tales From the Time Loop”, linked above. Icke’s position at the time when I stopped reading him was that there was a global Jewish banker conspiracy and that there was no Jewish race, only a global conspiracy to defraud Gentiles. He made a few remarks about “ordinary” Jewish people not necessarily being in on this conspiracy, but his view in that book was necessarily that any politically prominent Jewish person was a global conspirator. That’s “coming out as an anti-Semite” if the term is to have any meaning. He might have changed his views since I stopped reading them, but I don’t know because I stopped reading them.

Parrots as telepathic, given their millions of years of evolution isn’t that much of a stretch

Except for the minor fact that every organism on Earth is exactly as evolved as every other organism. We all have just over four billion years of evolution behind us, so pointing out that species X has been evolving for Y years actually makes no sense.

As for the original point about Britons believing that the world is run by dinosaur-like reptiles, I blame that on the Doctor’s run-in with the Silurians back in 1970.

Dave 69:
if telepathy is real, wanting it not to be doesn’t come into it
Until it’s time to demonstrate it in the lab, then bias will come into it, strongly. Sheldrake’s early work was marred some by that.

J. Pez 75:
Parrots have 3-digit millions of years of evolution as parrots. They’re substantially more noetic than most other birds.

Canids, horses, birds, all have anecdotal scientifically unverifiable reported telepathic connects with humans. Which proves nothing. But those are animal populations which would benefit greatly from linked mind. So if it is a real aspect, that’s where you’d expect it.

Some of the problems with incidents of human-animal teleptathy are human unawareness on one side and human pro-bias on the other. If you aren’t aware something exists, or if you’re trained to believe it doesn’t, you’re a lot less likely to recognize it.
People learn to ignore weak signals with no cultural corroboration.
On the pro side, eople want their pets to be linked to them mentally.

Making absurd extrapolations about it is just disdain, which originates in bias.
Some of that bias understandably comes from the attributes of many of the in-favor crowd, new-age shallowness, lightweight eccentricity etc.
A fundamental prejudice is the tacit assumption, like I said above, that any telepathic human examples will have arisen spontaneously as contemporary mutation. As opposed to pre-existing threads in the cultural genome.
Not only is there rationalist prejudice against anything outside the rational frame, there is a culturally-driven prejudice whose roots are a little murkier.

Bubba your bias has caused you to make a fatuous comment, though surely it’s the first only…
Not Sheldrake’s early reception, his work. Marred. By bias.
You’re presenting an example of the point you’re attempting to score on.

Yes, I see that now. While not in any sense apologizing to your unpleasntly snarky self, I have to admit the error.

My Dad worked for Kristofferson’s dad with Pan Am in Brownsville, Tx in the early ’40s. The elder K eventually got to be company president. So my Dad actually got to see a shape shifting reptile member of the illuminati as an infant. Cool. But Dad says the really cool part of the job was flying to Medellin every week. He says it was paradise in 1941.

So, when do I get my telepathic wolf? Can I have one with laser guns fitted, or is that only sharks?

Hey, Roy, just in case you’re not clear here, this is overt mockery, OK?

Fractious Bubba:
You could read that too, sort of as if you were Dave.

I felt it when you wrote that, but had to confirm it by actual reading, I’ve been so thoroughly brainwashed by the cynically pragmatic dominant paradigm mindset.
Plus coffee, which I had two cups of, of instant, on four+ hours sleep, seems to negatively impact the functionality of the internal antennae.
While green tea, which I intend to return to the regular use of, seems to augment it.

One of these days I plan to write a book about morphic dissonance, which is the opposite phenomenon, making it harder to perform certain activities once someone else has performed them first.

My book about morphic assonance is ging ti kick iss in yir bik.

My book about morphic assonance is ging ti kick iss in yir bik.
Righteous Buddha has too many morphic consonants.

morphic dissonance […] making it harder to perform certain activities once someone else has performed them first
It occurs to me now that according to this same effect, by covering similar ground, publications like the Annals of Improbable Results* have made it more difficult for me to write the promised book about the effect. My inability to get around to writing a coherent paragraph in fact demonstrates the reality of morphic dissonance. It has nothing to do with my normal state of indolence.

* Or for older readers, the Journal of Irreproducible Results.

Highly respected contemporary experts sneered at both of them in their respective days emphatically, confidently, often.

Holy crap I’m JUST LIKE THOSE SNEERERS! I need a cracker to properly absorb the meaning of th– CURSE YOU POLLY!

Velikovsky I’m not sure what happened to, maybe because he was Canadian.
I have a great deal of difficulty keeping my Inner Pedant in check when I read statements like that.

Morphic humorousness has led to non-jokes becoming jokes.

Well yeah that’s just it, there’s laughter born of humor, then there’s sneering and its accompanying derisive laughter.
Humor tends to advance the species by lightening the load, scorn by leaving the scorned behind.
Semmelweiss was basically undone by scorn.