Tag Archives: America

Conspiracy Theories, Plausible or Not

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Last year, a company called Public Policy Polling asked 1,247 registered voters in the United States their opinions regarding what the company called “conspiracy theories” (although some of the questions, such as “Do you believe aliens exist, or not?” don’t necessarily refer to conspiracies). Here are some of the more interesting questions and answers, beginning with the least popular “theories”. The poll, which is described here, had a margin of error of 2.8%.

1) Do you believe that shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate our societies, or not?

11% of the respondents said Yes or weren’t sure (happily, that means 89% said No).

2) Do you believe that the exhaust seen in the sky behind airplanes is actually chemicals sprayed by the government for sinister reasons, or not?

13% said Yes or weren’t sure (not surprisingly, 87% said No).

3) Do you believe the moon landing was faked, or not?

16% said Yes or weren’t sure.

4) Do you believe Paul McCartney actually died in a car crash in 1966 and was secretly replaced by a lookalike so the Beatles could continue, or not?

19% said Yes or weren’t sure.

5) Do you believe the United States government knowingly allowed the attacks on September 11th, 2001, to happen, or not?

22% Yes or weren’t sure.

6) Do you believe media or the government adds secret mind-controlling technology to television broadcast signals, or not?

30% Yes or weren’t sure.

7) Do you believe global warming is a hoax, or not?

49% Yes or weren’t sure.

8) Do you believe a UFO crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, and the US government covered it up, or not?

53% Yes or weren’t sure (21% said Yes).

9) Do you believe that a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government, or New World Order, or not?

53% Yes or weren’t sure (but 28% said Yes).

10)  Do you believe there is a link between childhood vaccines and autism, or not?

54% Yes or weren’t sure (20% said Yes).

11) Do you believe the Bush administration intentionally misled the public about the possibility of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to promote the Iraq War, or not?

56% Yes or weren’t sure (44% said Yes).

12) Do you believe that there was a conspiracy (whether or not it included Lee Harvey Oswald) behind the assassination of President Kennedy?

75% Yes or weren’t sure (although I rephrased the question to make it consistent with the others).

One might conclude from some of these results that an uncomfortably large percentage of the American electorate is absolutely nuts. However, we should keep in mind what David Hume said about miracles. If someone claims to have seen a miracle, it’s much more likely that he or she is lying or confused than that a miracle actually occurred. Likewise, if roughly 10% of voters are open to the possibility that shape-shifting reptiles walk among us or that those vapor trails up in the sky are a government plot, we should conclude that many who gave those answers were either confused about the question or messing with the pollsters.

On the other hand, if shape-shifting reptiles do control many of the world’s governments, that would explain a lot. And I for one say “Welcome to our reptilian overlords!”.

(Note: that’s supposed to be a giant insect in the picture behind Kent Brockman, but somebody decided to add a guy’s face.)

A couple of these poll results are more troubling. Half of us think that global warming is a hoax or are open to that possibility, and a similar percentage think that vaccines do or may cause autism. It’s understandable why some might think that the experts are mistaken about global warming, but to believe that thousands of scientists are or could be conspiring to mislead the rest of us is incredibly dumb and also likely to impede efforts to address the problem. Similarly, one might wonder if there is a possible link between vaccines and autism, but to take that idea seriously enough to ignore the medical consensus and not vaccinate one’s children is both foolish and dangerous.

There’s a natural tendency to be skeptical about whatever the official story is. None of us want to be taken in by the powers that be. Governments, corporations and supposed experts lie more than they should and conspiracies do sometimes occur. There’s also nothing wrong with keeping an open mind on controversial topics when there is evidence on both sides.

So I’m comfortable being with the skeptical majority who think people in the Bush administration lied about those weapons of mass destruction or at least decided it wasn’t worth knowing the truth. I’m also comfortable saying that Lee Harvey Oswald may have participated in a conspiracy or been used by one. I think he acted alone but wouldn’t be surprised either way (unless Vice President Johnson had something to do with it – that would be a big surprise). The good news is that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld can’t do much damage anymore and anyone who was involved in the Kennedy assassination is probably gone or will be soon.

A probably unrelated note: Having been on the Central Coast of California for the past week or so, I can report that the state has not completely dried out. In fact, casual observation revealed very little evidence of the major drought they’re having. Shops in one small town were directing everyone to some new portable toilets on the main street, and the outdoor showers at one of the beaches were turned off. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the drought is a hoax being carried out by conspiring reptilian shape-shifters, but you never know.

What People Say Happened in Ferguson

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The town of Ferguson is near St. Louis, Missouri. It has a population of 21,000, so it’s big enough to have a small police force. Everyone agrees that Darren Wilson, a Ferguson police officer, shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, around noon on August 9th. The results of the official autopsy haven’t been released yet, but it’s been reported that it will substantially agree with a second autopsy done at the family’s request: Wilson shot Brown approximately six times.

I spent some time recently trying to find out how many witnesses to the incident there were and what they had to say. It wasn’t easy, but two sites had some details. One was Wikipedia and the other was The Root. The latter is a magazine devoted to African-American news and commentary founded by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Donald Graham, Chairman and CEO of what used to be the Washington Post.

Here’s a summary based on these two sources and a statement made by the St. Louis County police chief on August 17th:

Officer Wilson ordered Michael Brown and Dorian Johnson to walk on the sidewalk, not the street. Wilson and Brown got into a physical altercation while Wilson was still in his police car. A shot was fired in the car, which may or may not have struck Brown. Wilson’s face was apparently bruised during the struggle. Brown then ran away. Wilson got out of his car, chased Brown and fired again. Apparently, none of these other shots hit Brown until Brown turned around and faced Wilson. At that point, Wilson continued to fire, killing Brown. Overall, Brown was shot four times in his right arm and twice in his head. Brown’s body ended up about 35 feet from Wilson’s car.

Whether or not Brown raised his hands to surrender after he turned around, or fell toward Wilson, or decided to move toward Wilson, is now a matter of dispute. However, the four people who claim to have seen the shooting and who have been identified so far (Dorian Johnson, Piaget Crenshaw, Tiffany Mitchell and James McKnight) all indicate that Brown wasn’t threatening Officer Wilson at that point. They suggest, in fact, that Wilson executed Brown. On the other hand, Officer Wilson, who still hasn’t been directly quoted, is said to have felt threatened. The wounds Brown suffered are consistent with Brown having surrendered and fallen toward the ground, although they don’t rule out Brown having moved toward Wilson with his head down.

If this were the only evidence presented and I was on the jury, I’d have to conclude that Officer Wilson was guilty of second-degree murder. It wouldn’t be first-degree murder, since there’s no evidence of premeditation. Firing his weapon at Brown as Brown was running away indicates Wilson’s willingness to use deadly force. The consistency of the four statements from people who apparently didn’t know each other (except for the two women, one of whom supervises the other at work) implies that Brown had stopped running and was giving up. Is there reason to doubt that this is what happened? Of course, it’s possible that Brown meant to stop Officer Wilson from firing at him by moving toward Wilson. But so far there is no good reason (which is the definition of “reasonable doubt”) to think that Wilson was in danger when he killed Brown.

At some point, it would be helpful to hear a police officer admit that the deadly force he (it always seems to be “he”) applied to some black man or some crazy person wasn’t necessary. He’d explain that he was angry and excited and fearful and his emotions took over. He’d remind us that police officers hate it when their authority is challenged. He’d also remind us that he’s only human and that having the power of life and death over one’s fellow citizens will sometimes inevitably lead to misuse of that power. He’d further admit that, when it comes right down to it, he’s like too many Americans in feeling that some people’s lives just aren’t as valuable as others, especially black people’s. 

Update:

The New York Times ran an article two days ago concerning “conflicting accounts” of what happened in Ferguson. To her credit, Margaret Sullivan, the Times‘ Public Editor (which is similar to an ombudsman), points out here that:

The story goes on to quote, by name, two eyewitnesses who say that Mr. Brown had his hands up as he was fired on. As for those who posit that Mr. Brown was advancing on the officer who was afraid the teenager was going to attack him, the primary source on this seems to be what Officer Wilson told his colleagues on the police force. The Times follows this with an unattributed statement: “Some witnesses have backed up that account.” But we never learn any more than that…[The Times story] sets up an apparently equal dichotomy between named eyewitnesses on one hand and ghosts on the other. 

General Sherman Has a Blog

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J J Brownyneal, “a resident of Indiana with an interest in history”, has a remarkable blog devoted to General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Civil War years. The entries are based on Sherman’s correspondence and other papers and are being posted in chronological order.

The first entry, for December 1, 1860, was posted on posted on December 25, 2010. It’s a letter Sherman wrote to his brother when Sherman was living and working in Louisiana. Abraham Lincoln had been elected but not yet sworn in as President:

The Convention will meet in January, and only ‘two questions will be agitated, Immediate dissolution, a declaration of State independence, and a General Convention of Southern States, with instructions to demand of the Northern States to repeal all laws hostile to slavery and pledges of future good behavior… the moment Louisiana assumes a position of hostility, then this becomes an arsenal and fort.

Let me hear the moment you think dissolution is inevitable. What Mississippi and Georgia do, this State will do likewise.

On August 2, 1864, Sherman was outside Atlanta. An entry for that date (posted today) includes his messages to other Union officers, with remarks like these:

If you have any negro regiments fit for duty I would like to have them in front of Nashville…

Losses in battle and sickness from work and weather is beginning to tell on the strength of my army.

Too many citizens manage to come to the front. Be even more stringent than heretofore. Grant no passes beyond Chattanooga, and only the smallest possible number that far.

Another entry for August 2 features a letter Sherman wrote to his wife:

I have for some days been occupying a good house on the Buckhead Road about 4 miles north of Atlanta but am going to move in the morning nearer to the Right to be nearer where I expect the next battle….

Somehow or other we cannot get Cavalry. The enemy takes all the horses of the Country and we have to buy and our People won’t sell. [Major General] Stoneman is also out with a cavalry force attempting to reach our prisoners confined at Andersonville, but since [Maj. Gen.] McCook’s misfortune I also have fears for his safety….

No Recruits are coming for the draft is not till September and then I suppose it will consist mostly of freed slaves & bought recruits that must be kept well to the Rear. I sometimes think our People do not deserve to succeed in War. They are so apathetic….

Atlanta is on high ground and the woods extend up to the forts which look strong and encircle the whole town. Most of the People are gone & it is now simply a big Fort. I have been a little sick today but feel better. Weather very hot.

By all accounts, Sherman was an excellent officer, although some of his actions in the South might qualify as war crimes today (his role in our treatment of the American Indians probably would). Of course, he also helped end a terrible war that was begun in order to protect and propagate an economic system based on the subjugation of millions. Fierce Patriot, a new biography of Sherman, has just been published and I plan to learn more about him by reading it.

One last thing: That scary burning of Atlanta depicted in Gone With the Wind wasn’t Sherman’s doing. It was Confederate General John Bell Hood who ordered the burning of both public buildings and military supplies on the night of September 1st, as his troops and some residents left the city.

Sherman’s army occupied Atlanta on September 2nd. All remaining civilians were ordered to evacuate. Later, on November 15, when Sherman moved on toward Savannah, he ordered the city’s remaining war resources, including a train depot, to be burned. According to a site called About North Georgia (probably not a regular purveyor of Yankee propaganda), Sherman’s burning of Atlanta was “significantly less than Hood’s Burning of Atlanta”.

Final Words on Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and America

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Not being a Muslim or a Jew, I don’t feel any special kinship with the Palestinians or the Israelis. And since I’m not a Christian either, I don’t have any special interest in the so-called “Holy Land”.

Yet I can’t remember being this disturbed by a national or international event since the 2000 Presidential election fiasco and our subsequent fantasy-based invasion of Iraq.

I didn’t mention 9/11. I was in Lower Manhattan that morning and soon thereafter, but that astounding, horrible event didn’t traumatize me as much as the immense fuck-up and scandalous political-judicial decisions that gave us President George W. Bush, and the evil way in which Bush and bastards like Cheney and Rumsfeld used 9/11 to justify their criminal behavior (which, of course, led to much more death and destruction in Iraq than occurred earlier in New York City).

Men (of course it’s almost always us) insist on killing innocent people. 9/11 was another example of that. There were fanatics and ideologues who claimed it was justified, but they were easy to ignore. For some reason, I’m finding it very difficult to ignore what the Israeli government is doing to the Palestinians. It’s so patently wrong, yet so many apparently reasonable people claim it’s completely justified (blind allegiance will have that effect). In addition, writing this blog and trying to be accurate has made me read more about the situation, and the more I read, the angrier I get.

So, regarding accuracy: A few days ago, I cited a United Nations report that said there was an Israeli airstrike on June 11, before the three teenagers were kidnapped, which was followed by someone in Gaza firing rockets at Israel. I’ve since seen another account here that says the rockets were fired before the airstrike. I also cited a Times of Israel article stating that Hamas launched its first barrage of rockets since 2012 on June 30, apparently in retaliation for another Israel airstrike. That implies that the rockets fired earlier in June weren’t fired by Hamas. It’s been pointed out, however, that there are non-Hamas factions in Gaza that sometimes fire rockets (and that Hamas has sometimes stopped them from doing so). The obvious moral here is that it’s often unclear who is doing what in this conflict and who did it first (“truth is the first casualty of war”).

Nevertheless, who first attacked by airstrike or rocket isn’t the main issue. The much bigger story, which many of Israel’s defenders fail to understand or accept, is that Israel provoked this latest round of fighting.

Therefore, as befits an enterprise that Alexa currently ranks as the 13,378,330th most-visited website in the world, I’ll now express my final thoughts on Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, mainly by quoting people who write better and are better informed. Let’s all hope the ceasefire announced last night becomes permanent. (After adding that last sentence just now, I checked and see that last night’s planned 72-hour ceasefire has already been broken.)

Last week, Henry Siegman, a former national director of the American Jewish Congress, published an article called, simply enough, “Israel Provoked This War”.

There seems to be near-universal agreement in the United States with President Barack Obama’s observation that Israel, like every other country, has the right and obligation to defend its citizens from threats directed at them from beyond its borders. But this anodyne statement does not begin to address the political and moral issues raised by Israel’s bombings and land invasion of Gaza: [1] who violated the cease-fire agreement that was in place since November 2012 and [2] whether Israel’s civilian population could have been protected by nonviolent means that would not have placed Gaza’s civilian population at risk.

Siegman quotes a piece by Nathan Thrall, an analyst at the non-profit International Crisis Group, who wrote that:

The current escalation in Gaza is a direct result of the choice by Israel and the West to obstruct the implementation of the April 2014 Palestinian reconciliation agreement [between Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization]….Israel immediately sought to undermine the reconciliation agreement by preventing Hamas leaders and Gaza residents from obtaining the two most essential benefits of the deal: the payment of salaries to 43,000 civil servants who worked for the Hamas government and continue to administer Gaza…, and the easing of the suffocating border closures imposed by Israel and Egypt… For many Gazans, and not just Hamas supporters, it’s worth risking more bombardment and now the ground incursion, for a chance to change that unacceptable status quo. A cease-fire that fails to resolve the salary crisis and open Gaza’s border with Egypt will not last.

Siegman also quotes Yitzhak Laor, a writer for Haaretz. Here’s how Laor begins his article:

In the midst of events, with all the TV commotion enveloping the current crisis, one tends to forget the crux of the matter, the continuous chain linking it to previous steps – the foiling of negotiations with the Palestinians, refusal to release prisoners as agreed upon, incitement against their unity government and the expansion of settlements. All of these are part of [Israel’s] right-wing government’s plan to destroy any political entity in the occupied territories, turning the Palestinian people, at best, into a fragmented, marginalized people deprived of their rights.

Siegman concludes that the U.S. needs to exert more pressure on Israel, because the present Israeli government has no interest in a real two-state solution. Halting military aid to Israel would be a great start, of course, rather than resupplying Israel’s military with ammunition, as we shamefully did this week.

More recently, Rashid Khalidi, a professor at Columbia and a former adviser to the Palestinians, writing for The New Yorker called attention to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s statement at a press conference in Tel Aviv. Netanyahu said:

“I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.”

Khalidi concludes that:

What is going on in Palestine today is not really about Hamas. It is not about rockets. It is not about “human shields” or terrorism or tunnels. It is about Israel’s permanent control over Palestinian land and Palestinian lives. That is what Netanyahu is really saying, and that is what he now admits he has “always” talked about. It is about an unswerving, decades-long Israeli policy of denying Palestine self-determination, freedom and sovereignty.

What Israel is doing in Gaza now is collective punishment. It is punishment for Gaza’s refusal to be a docile ghetto. It is punishment for the gall of Palestinians in unifying, and of Hamas and other factions in responding to Israel’s siege and its provocations with resistance, armed or otherwise, after Israel repeatedly reacted to unarmed protest with crushing force….

As Netanyahu’s own words show, … Israel will accept nothing short of the acquiescence of Palestinians to their own subordination. It will accept only a Palestinian “state” that is stripped of all the attributes of a real state: control over security, borders, airspace, maritime limits, contiguity, and, therefore, sovereignty. The twenty-three-year charade of the “peace process” has shown that this is all Israel is offering, with the full approval of Washington. Whenever the Palestinians have resisted that pathetic fate (as any nation would), Israel has punished them for their insolence.

On a more optimistic note, William Saletan sees promise in a plan to demilitarize Gaza in exchange for $50 billion in international aid. That’s 30 times Gaza’s gross domestic product. The demilitarization would be monitored by neutral observers. Whether either side would accept a plan like that is an excellent question.

My own conclusion is that Israel is reasonably satisfied with the status quo, even though it occasionally requires “mowing the grass” in Gaza, as Israeli pundits and officials often put it. The Israelis occasionally provoke a violent response from somebody in Gaza, as they did this time by conducting an extremely aggressive search for those kidnappers, and then use that violent response as justification for open warfare, all the while claiming self-defense.

Israel has occupied Gaza for close to 50 years, and so long as American politicians support the status quo, the situation in Gaza probably won’t change very much. Meanwhile, the Palestinians of the West Bank, who met Israel’s demands to renounce violence and acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, will continue to lose ground to Israeli settlers. For a startling look at how many Israeli settlements have been built in the West Bank on land that once belonged to the Palestinians, you can visit this page operated by Americans for Peace Now.

Peace out, as they say.

American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic by Joseph J. Ellis

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American Creation is an excellent summary of what Ellis calls “the Founding Era”, defined as the 28 years between the start of the War for Independence in 1775 and the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

The author’s method is to focus on six key periods or events: the 15 months between the violence at Lexington and Concord and the signing of the Declaration of Independence; the Continental Army’s winter at Valley Forge, “a pivotal moment” when George Washington realized he could not win the war by winning full-scale battles with the British; the political battle between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists to ratify the Constitution; the approval of the Treaty of New York in 1791 between the United States and the Creek Nation; the beginning of party politics with the creation of the original Republican Party by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, mainly in response to Alexander Hamilton’s proposed Bank of the United States; and finally the Louisiana Purchase, when President Jefferson doubled the size of the United States but set the stage for the Civil War by ignoring the issue of slavery’s expansion to the new territory.

Being relatively ignorant about the history of this period, it was especially surprising to read about Thomas Jefferson’s checkered career and the creation of the first Republican Party, which later became the Democratic-Republican Party and eventually split into two parties, the Democrats and the Whigs (it’s ironic that the current Republican Party is known as the Grand Old Party, even though the Democratic Party is 30 years older). Jefferson and his follower Madison engaged in all kinds of bad behavior premised on the bizarre idea that people like Washington and John Adams wanted to restore monarchy to America.

The other especially surprising story is the attempt by members of Washington’s administration to create a policy that would protect the interests of the Indians east of the Mississippi. The Creek Nation occupied much of the American South and was lead by Alexander McGillivray, an expert negotiator who was only one-quarter Indian. McGillivray eventually agreed to the Treaty of New York, which reserved a large part of the South for the Indians and included the promise that Federal troops would stop any further settlement in the area by American colonists. As with most treaties between the United States and the Indians, the agreement was immediately broken by the Federal government, mostly because there weren’t enough Federal troops to enforce it.   

One of Ellis’s principal conclusions is that the struggle over the balance of power between the central government and the states was built into the Constitution from the beginning and has defined much of American history, even to the present day. My conclusion is that we’ve been lucky to do as well as we have, given the political and economic conflicts that have existed since the Founding Era and will apparently never be resolved.