To me, it’s the initial report from the air base. They put out a report saying they found something, then later retracted it.
Whatever it was, it was something unusual, and balloons aren’t all that unusual.
About 9/11 let me amend:
Yes it was a conspiracy, by the terrorists and their backers - who had a conspiracy going to commit an act of terrorism. It was not an act of conspiracy by anybody connected to the US as a means of starting a war.
Just like I will fully admit [and have done so previously a couple times on the dope] to having seen a UFO. Of course it was a meteorite, but since I never bothered to see if one dropped in western NY at the time I saw the odd and very striking and bright green ball streaking across the sky, it remains an unidentified [because I didn’t ask anybody] flying [through the sky, duh] object [and since someone else saw it, I didn’t hallucinate it, it was flinging itself through the sky above western NY] 
Context, people! 
Yep.
They were unusual to the crew of Roswell. The giant balloon trains used for Project Mogul were top-secret and Roswell had never seen one.
Mogul balloon train is launched.
Mogul balloon train is lost within 10 miles of Roswell.
Rancher finds weird junk.
Air base gets all excited.
Air base commander is told to STFU about a classified project.
Air base says, “Uh, it was a weather balloon.”
End of story.
We don’t vote on the facts. The facts are incredibly voluminous and form a coherent, self-supporting case with very few gaps - far fewer than would be needed to send someone straight to death row.
There are a thousand “plausible” anecdotal versions that work fine until you do the math and realize that somewhere between 50 and 5,000 people would HAVE to be knowledgably involved to make the theory work. Keep in mind that perhaps the greatest conspiracy of the 20th century was at one time known to four or five men, all of whom had the strongest possible reasons to keep it concealed, and it leaked in a matter of days. So if the JFK assassination was a conspiracy involving more than perhaps three people - total, absolute, even on the fringes - it has set a galactic record for omertá.
[edit window weirdness again… sigh]
Make that “…far fewer than would be needed for someone to escape being sent to death row.”
While several of the claims had issues that deserve discussion, none as literally stated rated as what I consider a real possibility as a conspiracy.
The strongest contender was the drug companies. I have no doubt that they pursue the bottom line, and probably have treatments that aren’t cost-effective (profitable), so they sit on the shelf unless something changes. Does that mean they’d suppress a cheaper and more effective treatment because they’re making money with a more expensive, less-effective one? I doubt that would really serve the bottom line (you have to keep the pipeline full, since it takes so long to get approval and then your patent lasts only 10 years.) But no doubt there are cases where we’d all question the ethics. I think it falls short of “conspiracy”, though.
Lee Harvey Oswald? I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he was put up to it, but that doesn’t mean there was another gunman.
The paparazzi created the conditions that caused Diana’s death, but I doubt any of them intended that outcome. Again, falls far short of conspiracy.
Who was Shakespeare, if he wasn’t the guy who wrote all that stuff? In any case, even if he was an ordinary guy acting as a front for a writer, is it a conspiracy? Perhaps I should have selected this one.
Secret society … I don’t really suspect a big conspiracy, though I’m sure there are secret societies trying to influence goverments daily, and have for as long as there have been governments. No doubt at certain times, some of them have had some effectiveness. But all this is far too vague to support a conspiracy theory.
Flouride: I read this as “other than” rather than “beyond”, meaning that I’m confident that dental health is the main reason. However, I’m sure that chemical companies do their best via lobbies to keep the quantity of flouride used as high as possible. Conspiracy? No, just normal self-interest lobbying.
Maybe I set the bar too high for “might be something in” – but I didn’t want to support any of them with a vote.
What you describe is pretty much the way the military always works. If they are forced to explain a secret project, they either they stonewall or make up shit. Compare the Glomar Explorer raising of the Russian sub with the cover story of mining for manganese nodules.
And this was a very unusual balloon. It was designed to secretly detect a secret nuclear test in Russia. Do you think the US military wanted to let Russia know all that? Shit, they didn’t even know if would work yet.
If there’s any conspiracy here, it’s the military conspiring to keep secrets for longer than necessary, driven by the brass’ paranoia and their desire to not have egg on their faces if it didn’t work. Stupid, in retrospect, to be sure, as I guess no one thought the balloon would ever crash land. :rolleyes:
There is a strong case against Oxford authorship – I wonder if the hypothesis is untenable without assuming a major collaborator. But there is also a strong case against Stratford authorship. Even if the “Not without mustard” man wrote the works which bear his name, one is left with interesting mysteries for which conventional solutions are unconvincing.
You must be quite an expert on the subject to speak with such confidence against four Justices! Can I trouble you to enumerate the 4 or 5 Oxfordian or anti-Stratfordian points you would find it hardest to answer? (If you answer “there are none,” you won’t be taken seriously.) I’m not asking you to trot out another anti-Oxfordian argument – they exist, just as strong anti-Stratfordian arguments do as well – but to demonstrate your familiarity with anti-Stratfordian evidence.
You might have a point, except I’m not aware that ANY Supreme court Justices are experts in this subject, just interested parties, as we all are.
Being an expert in one field does not automatically make you an expert in unrelated ones, although it often engenders unwarranted confidence. This fallacy is called the argument from authority. Linus Pauling is a prime example of a Nobel Prize winner who parlayed his expertise into a field where he only came off as a Prize Boob.
As James Randi often says, once you earn that PhD., you become incapable of saying, “I don’t know.”
I was not suggesting those Justices have any special authority on the matter. But it did seem more demonstrative to cite four of only nine specific respected intellectuals, rather than four arbitrary respected intellectuals. One might guess (:dubious:) that a S.C. Justice would be at least a bit reluctant to be labeled a crackpot.
I strongly doubt you can find another “conspiracy” on OP’s list with four (or even a single?) S.C. Justices in support.
Maybe you should begin looking. Who knows what evil lurks in the mind of our esteemed justices?
Let’s put it another way. If you had cancer, and 4 out of 5 Supreme Court Justices said this red pill will cure it, would you swallow one without further ado?
I think all the ones listed are horse shit, including the Shakespearean Authorship “conspiracy.”
However, I clicked the “I give credence to another conspiracy theory” choice because I think Sirhan Sirhan may not have been acting alone in killing RFK.
OK, thanks, sounds interesting!
I have always been sceptical about the authorship of some of Shakespeare’s plays and therefore I clicked on that selection. However, I don’t think it was what we can effectively call a conspiracy. Publishing standards of the time were considerably more flexible than those we are more familiar with. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bacon wrote some of the plays attributed to Shakespeare.
The rest of that extensive list (thank you Mr. Kobayashi) was interesting to read and laugh at.
RRSN?
Can’t mean Real Real Soon Now… that isn’t conspiratorial at all.
Hmmm.
What kind of conspiracy would involve Regional Radio Sports Network?
Or Rational Recovery Support Network?
Hmmmm… this looks suspicious: Russian Regional Studies Network.
The first thing that came to my mind was Rational, Robust, and Secure Negotiations in Multi-Agent Systems, but that just doesn’t make sense.
I certainly hope you survive this week. I am dying to know the truth. It IS out there. I believe.
Also, it doesn’t necessarily involve any conspiracy at all. The proper attribution of works of art has a long history of errors. Leopold Mozart’s “Toy Symphony” was, for years, attributed to Schubert. Jeremiah Clarke’s “Trumpet Voluntary” was thought to have been written by Henry Purcell.
Shakespeare’s plays might have fallen into the same trap, not by any deliberate act of malice or deceit, but simply by someone’s blunder when writing a catalogue.
I read Joe Sobran’s “Alias Shakespeare” and found it worth thinking about. He makes some good points. Also some weak ones. I’ve read some of the rebuttals of that book, and found them sorely lacking. They usually resort to arrant ridicule, as if the proposition isn’t worthy of rebutting seriously. This is an error, as it fails to address the actual points in a substantive way. Laughter is not a meaningful rebuttal.
Fine. If anyone wants a Shakespeare Authorship debate in a different thread, I volunteer to be pro-Shakespeare, and to not laugh or make fun of anti-Stratfordians.
I almost did that too for that reason and would’ve likely checked an “RFK conspiracy” box if it had been included. I think it’s more than likely Sirhan Sirhan acted alone but I’m not 100% sure. Sometimes when looking at the facts, I can’t rule out the possibility there was at least one other person involved (or at least knew about it beforehand). I feel the same way about the murder of MLK.
I think it’s possible that car companies (or oil companies) have sabotaged the electric car. If the pharmaceutical one had been worded differently, I probably would’ve ticked that too - I really doubt they’re squashing the cure for cancer, but I think there could be a possibility that they’re squashing other treatments, or at least holding them over till the current ones go out of patent and aren’t profitable any more.
What does ‘blue blood is black blood’ mean?