Getting a jump on the September open thread, what with the holiday coming up and all. This question came to me while chatting with Andrew Gold a few weeks ago. What’s your conspiracy theory?
In other words, what do you believe to be true that many people would think is crazy? For example, I think the world is round, we landed on the moon, and chem trails are nonsense, but I also think we abuse children unthinkingly (letting them “cry it out” in a dark room, all alone), our food system is designed to maximize profit over health (human or animal or planetary), the American military-industrial complex perpetuates war for profit and cash flow, and I’m not sure about fluoride in water, but given my dental history, I’m skeptical. 9/11 never smelled right to me, and Trump’s ear healed way too quickly. What standard narrative do you think is BS?
Let’s be especially non-judgmental with this one. Anyone who responds to this honestly is risking blowback, so please keep your comments civil.
Ever since I read 1984 at school many long years ago, I’ve been forever sceptical of the entire thing. That was the book that changed everything for me. The whole world of information, facts, history and of course, truth, all malleable and interchangeable with simple control. Everything we are told has at least some agenda, is heavily biased and these days it is almost impossible to decipher fact from fiction.
Personally I think the whole term “conspiracy theory” is as has been used to clown those who use it. The ability for the power hungry to act in near-plain sight is armoured by this phrase. It’s instantly applicable to those who see behind the curtain, and when thrown into the mix it’s indefensible and strangely perfect.
The original meaning is to “breathe together” where human beings mirror and reflect one another’s breathing rate and eye dilation etc. Then re-coined by the CIA to create the narrative of tin-foil hat wearing buffoons who couldn’t possibly be correct. The crazier the true activity, the less likely anyone sensible would believe it right? No one wants to be tarred with the “village Idiot” brush.
I’ve been through all the great conspiracies as far as I know. Spent years thinking about them and wandering down all manor of rabbit holes. It’s a fascinating world we live in, but that kind of thinking can creep into all areas of your life and take its toll. Critical thinking and self discovery are vital education, and lord knows just how many lies we have all been fed for the benefit of a system adapted to keep us in the dark.
My overall account is that no capitalist system can want a nation of free thinking, autonomous citizens and asking the big questions. They want you just smart enough to work the machines they own. They want replaceable tax payers to fund the military operations and keep that essential growth money flowing only upward.
The idea that you can work, be happy and “free” in this modern world is the ultimate lie, and one we all play into day after endless day.
I want to hear about this Czech dude! 😂 https://www.youtube.com/@spitmki/featured He drives all over continents with yellow old beat up cars. I don't even know if he speaks English, though I believe he must after all that extensive travel. That child-like energy just glows out of him. Apparently he designed a floating vehicle and travels with that now. Check him out! (can I ask him to be on the podcast?)
I’ll steal one of my all-time favorite comments on this subject. When asked what their favorite conspiracy theory was, someone wrote: “JFK wasn’t assassinated. His head just did that.” 😂😂
Germ theory. It’s not that simple, and getting people to be afraid of invisible enemies is always going to be the best form of mind control. Plus all the industries that rely on this! I’m not 100% germ or terrain, I prefer a mishmash of many things from spiritual sources and terrain theory to German new medicine, but nearly every fear-based thing around germs has some logical fallacy in it when you start to investigate. When you’re less afraid of germs than the average bear it’s crushingly obvious how much it controls people’s lives.
My favorite conspiracy theory is pronatalism, the idea that society needs high birth rates or else we will reach a point when there are not enough working young people to pay taxes to provide pensions for the old.
The short answer, of course, is that this is nonsense. If people don’t have kids, they can easily save enough money not to need pensions.
But what about lifestyles? Can people be happy without the nuclear family? Here’s my own modest proposal, based on my own lifestyle. Please be warned that some people may find this proposal a bit shocking. I kind of find it shocking myself.
Saturday Girls.
As a young man I loved spending Saturdays with girls. We would do something interesting in the afternoon, have dinner, maybe take in a show or just go to bed, and have fun together all night. Sometimes she would stay over Sunday too.
On Monday I would be ready for work. I had a job I enjoyed which I thought was worthwhile and worth devoting my time to. I had little need for the girl until the next Saturday. I went off to my main pursuits. The girls and I had a lot of fun on the weekends, and the weekends went by.
This generally worked well for a few months, but then problems would arise. Words would start like “commitment” and “a meaningful relationship.” Words whose hidden meaning is babies.
Girls seem to want relationships. Maybe it’s because they are so interested in babies, as much or even more than they are interested in men. A man is needed to start the baby business, and is useful to provide the support the baby requires, but that’s all. The baby if what’s really important, and the man is second.
The Saturday girl would begin to look like she wanted to be a weeklong fixture. But I didn’t need that. I was focused on my work, my career. I think a lot of men are like that. I just wanted the girl on the weekend. I also wanted to travel, to learn, to be free.
Of course, some girls do not want babies in the near future, or at all, but their morals are often constructed as if they did. They want a long-term relationship. Exclusive too. If you start to think about the joys of other Saturday girls, there is friction.
So the connection with the Saturday girl would fizzle out, or blow up. Either way, I would lose my Saturday girl, and have to find another. Sometimes this was painful, but like most men, I was happy with a new girl, or a series of new girls. It worked pretty well. The emotional crises could be depressing, but I survived.
It was also a lot cheaper than having a woman with kids. Salaries today are really quite lucrative, if you don’t burden yourself with what I call MOM. Marriage, Offspring, and Mortgage. I was able to save money and grow quite comfortable, if not rich.
If you avoid bad ideas, and unnecessary burdens, like marriage and kids, it is fairly easy to be quite well off in our rich modern world.
That’s the way it’s supposed to be. People should always grow financially, to provide for their old age. This business of living paycheck to paycheck is strictly for MOM. Or spendthrifts, I suppose.
Before old age, however, there was a hiccup. All men come to that fateful day, around 40 or 45 or so, when suddenly you enter a room and see an attractive girl, and she is Too Young For You.
It can be a shock. A man is used to being able to enter a room and chat up any attractive girl he finds. He is used to women being out of reach because they are old, but that never bothered him. Suddenly a girl is unattainable because she is Too Young For You.
There are things men can do. We can buy a snazzy car with a chick magnet, or do exercise, or change clothes and hair style, but these efforts only postpone the fateful day.
What to do? For many men, girls are only attractive when they are young. Women can be attractive too, but there is no zing. If you don’t think so, read women’s magazines, and ponder on what sort of looks they think appeal to men.
Now that a man has reached the fateful age, how can he find a Saturday girl? Many men are defeated by the problem, and many are quite frustrated.
But for me it didn’t really turn out to be a problem. I kind of sidestepped it. I gradually changed my paradigm. I decided still to spend time with beautiful girls, but not with passion, romance, and sex. I decided just to have fun.
There’s a dark energy about sex, I sometimes think, and it brews anger, arguments, and strife. You could say I kind of lost interest.
I started to look for girls who enjoyed going hiking with me, or having dinners at nice restaurants, or going on trips with me. We would enjoy each other’s company, and sometimes a girl would even stay in my guest room for awhile.
The real breakthrough came when I started to invite girls to go on overseas trips with me. Roshelle was the first, and we spent four delightful weeks in France together. Michelle and I went to the Greek Islands for four weeks. Henriette toured Florida with me, and the American West the next year, and even came to live with me in Australia for a few months.
The best was Shannon, who went to Ibiza, Mexico, Ibiza again, the Greek Islands, and Barcelona, in a series of years. There have been many others, right down to Dominika on Naxos for three weeks last summer.
The girls loved these trips. I don’t think there is any harm in these trips. I think it is good for an old man to spend time with beautiful girls once in awhile.
Of course some people may object that there is no sex, or intimacy, or a deep relationship, or any of the other much touted facets of the modern dream of romance. Well, you’re right. It is also no fights, or demands, or financial burdens like divorce and kids.
The girls and I get along great. We go wherever they want, and see whatever they want, and I pay for everything, so our travels always go smoothly. It’s not hard for me to pay because I have never murdered my savings with MOM.
The girls look beautiful, which they do very well, and I get to look at them, and chat, and talk, and tell stories and make jokes, and they even listen to my stories and laugh at my jokes.
Of course, there are always many girls who will not have anything to do with trips of this nature. I can respect that. People want different things. But there are always smart girls who are glad to take advantage of wonderful opportunities.
So, in most senses, I still have my Saturday girls. Some will say I’ve missed out, with no family cares or concerns. Some will bewail my lack of a great gleaming relationship. But when I see parents and kids and couples from the outside, I often think I am better off.
Some men will look at me and think I am leading an ideal life, just the sort of life they would love to lead. Others will shake their heads and think of the joys I have missed.
Many women will object to this lifestyle, and to the thought of my enjoying time with girl after girl. But I think my lifestyle fits the genetic behaviour patterns of the long, long tribal days much better than MOM.
Many women may say that I am shallow, and miss out on the beauties of a deep and meaningful relationship, and live an empty life. Yet there is sometimes the compensation of getting on a jet to a wonderful new place with a beautiful Saturday girl.
How interesting. I am a 45 year old woman, have no kids (never wanted to) and have never been in a committed relationship… I’ve had and have plenty of lovers (I don’t know if I am their Saturday girl or they are my Saturday boys) and have a rich tribe of friends, most of whom are also childless and singlish, so we have plenty of time for one another. Recently, though, I started worrying about what I will do when my parents -who are a pain in the ass but very close to me- pass away. I am an only child so I will not have a nuclear family anymore. Will the absence of intimacy make me cold? Will I become “spoiled” doing just want I want all the time? Am I cold already? Is my heart “closed” to deeper love? It’s a big worry of mine recently, even if I love my hedonistic life. Do you have such doubts?
These are interesting issues, and thanks for bringing them up. I’m 80 now, so both my parents are gone, and also my two sisters, so I have no nuclear family at all. I was raised in the US but moved to Australia at age 30, so I effectively have no relatives at all – only some cousins in the US, very nice people, but it is unlikely I will ever see them again. I haven’t found this a problem at all. When you make close friends, you are effectively choosing good relatives, I think. Also I don’t feel selfish because I can help the young women I travel with, or who stay in my guest room. One was a Ukrainian refugee, for example. Before her was a Brazilian girl who lost her job due to Covid (and broke her foot surfing too) and needed a place to stay. Another pleasant thing is I’m able to introduce the girls to Byron Bay, which is a wonderful place. A French girl came to visit for a week last year and wound up staying the whole year; she soon had a group of French friends and we had parties and a big Christmas dinner and all sorts of fun. The most recent girl was also French but not happy with her home country, so she will. I think, come back to stay in Australia soon. It’s very heart warming to be able to help girls – not offspring I have foisted on a overpopulated world, but young women in need through no fault of their own. Also I think it’s healthy for a man my age to have young women around sometimes. So there’s plenty of warmth in my life, even if no family connections.
Do what makes you happy, you're not harming anyone & enjoying life, who cares what other people think.
Plus, relationships are such a massive gamble these days. My neighbour just told me a story about the elderly guy I purchased my house from that she kept in touch with. He met & married a women before selling the house he obviously spend considerable time renovating for the sale & he's now living in poverty as she immediately left him & took off with ALL the money.
"Better to have loved & lost than not to have loved at all"?
Thanks for taking the time to share this. I can think of far worse ways to spend your time and money. Have you read John Perry Barlow's essay, "A Ladies' Man and Shameless"? Kindred spirits.
Glad you liked the essay. It was actually inspired by Sex At Dawn. Here’s the connection. I hope I have interpreted your book correctly.
If I understand Sex At Dawn correctly, the tribal way of sex (which is embedded in our genes) is for girls to mate freely with several men of the tribe, embracing what the book calls partitive paternity. Nubile girls perform sexily to attract attractive men, the men with the best genes. The girls (unlike modern girls) have no need to select a particular husband, because the whole tribe will care for the expecting mother and the child.
Once the girl has a baby or two, she focuses on her offspring, which is what you would expect from natural selection. She stops trying to attract guys, and focuses on the babies. For the benefit of the babies, natural selection also causes her to lose her figure and her sexy good looks, so guys stop chasing her, which otherwise might distract her from giving the babies the care they need. The guys turn naturally to the younger girls. Most of the time, the guys focus on their main duty, which is to protect the tribe, plus hunting occasionally.
Modern marriage doesn’t really fit these tribal patterns. A man and a woman are told they must focus on each other for life. They are both expected to give up any natural inclinations to mate with others.
I don’t think Sex At Dawn proposes an alternative which will fit our biological heritage better than marriage, but here’s a possibility.
Following my tribal or genetic heritage, I think my lifestyle fits in with the natural patterns of tribal life. I wrote the essay Saturday Girls so that others can judge for themselves.
9/11, done by neo cons, Mossad, and Saudis. No plane hit Building 7 at World Trade Center and it magically collapsed at free fall speed into its footprint. Realizing Building 7 was a controlled demolition, I was able to see that the towers too were blown up. The planes were remotely controlled and the hijackers really believed they were in control. The corporate owned media was used to push the narrative. The shock and subsequent bloodlust of the American public allowed them to be led where the narrative took them. This allowed the military industrial complex to funnel trillions of printed fiat money into their coffers while waging wars for resources all over the global to combat "the terrorists". Building 7 was the key for me.
Humans live in the midst of a vast anti-conspiracy. Our society and politics are filled with countless individuals and groups working desperate, endless nights, conspiring in an attempt to control this thing. But it all only amounts to bulwarks and dykes, which from the moment of their creation were destined to be eventually over-run by the incessant tide of human history.
We live in little protected pockets and can only collectively hold our breaths hoping the wall doesn’t fail until after we’re already dead and gone. We cling to conspiracy theories because we feel secure in knowing somebody, anybody, is in control. Even if they are “evil” or have bad intentions, if someone is calling the shots that means there is hope that one day, if we just vote in the right person or advocate for the right policy, maybe one day someone “good” can run the show. The truth is, no one truly has their finger on the pulse. Most people only realize this when they finally have that heart attack that’s been building up for 40 years and they understand in a moment of terrible realization that all the cleverness of human society, which they’ve trusted implicitly, was never going to save them.
Do you mean to imply that there are no conspiracies and never have been any? It doesn't take an entire governmental apparatus or thousands of people to commit all conspiracies. Some conspiracies only need a small group of people to be pulled off.
The fact is, groups of people coordinate. Some of that coordination is nefarious. Conspiracies happen and have happened. They are not just bulwarks and dykes. They are river rerouters. And we're flowing in channels that are often shaped small groups of powerful people. The masses ebb and flow with it's own influences but small, coordinated groups have had massive influences on the channels we all flow in.
Good question. I do not mean there are no conspiracies and never have been. Of course a great many “massive influences” have been pulled off in coordinated efforts, both hidden and in plain sight. My contention is those influences, even those that reroute our entire society, are in the larger context not so much purposeful as they are accidental. While even the most successful of conspirators (think Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Jesus, Muhammad) clearly altered the course of human history in very significant ways, they could hardly have anticipated either the qualitative or quantitative degrees by which history was changed through them. In this light, the rerouting of the river of history by the hand of men might as well have been the re-routing of the Columbia river by way of seismic activity.
An additional consideration is the motivation of such “influencers”. The kind of obsessive compulsion to accumulate power (or in the case of Jesus and Muhammad, truth, which is after-all just another kind of power) necessary to reroute rivers, is clearly an attempt to stave off the inevitability of mortality. In this way, even the most influential of conspiracies amount to little more than bulwarks or dykes.
I'm convinced mainstream media outlets from both sides of the political spectrum are largely suppressive, pro-censorship, and have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo (e.g. perpetuation of war, hoarding of wealth, treating the majority of citizens like peons that need to be influenced/controlled through propaganda "for their own good").
Mainstream media outlets masquerade as proponents of free speech, but are owned by a very select (and gradually decreasing) few who prioritize their own wealth and the maintenance of wealth for their wealthy constituents (whom their relationships with are intentionally obfuscated). Same goes for high-level politicians on either side of the political spectrum.
These issues I point to are not black-and-white, but are far worse than most people are aware of. There are genuine, well-intentioned folks who work in mainstream media outlets and political organizations, and there is some excellent content/policies put out into the world. However, the powerful ones at the top run the overall narrative.
For anyone interested in these topics I recommended reading the following texts by Chomsky.
I totally agree with that, in fact I believe there is a trajectory by some to keep the SAD diet alive and well making us all sick and in hospital. Thus making bigger profits for all involved. We will never have any kind of a social healthcare system.
Along with our food system being designed to maximize profit over health. I think our healthcare system in the US is designed to maximize profit over health. This may be the least controversial take on this thread lol.
The nail in this coffin was the Flexner Report, ever read about it? I totally believe/abhorrently admire the massive all-encompassing entity that is western healthcare, and avoid it entirely.
I came over this quote in the book "The Psychology of Money":
> Most people, when confronted with something they don't understand, do not realize they don't understand it because they're able to come up with an explanation that makes sense based on their own unique perspective and experiences in the world, however limited those experiences are. We all want the complicated world we live in to make sense. So we tell ourselves stories to fill in the gaps of what are effectively blind spots.
The quote is about about why people make bad financial decisions, but it seems to apply just as well (maybe even better) to why they come up with conspiracy theories. The world is complex, and most big events do not have a single easily understandable cause. Our innate instinct is to come up with an explanation that puts the blame on some identifiable culprit, be it the rich, the poor, the immigrants, the military-industrial complex, or some guys in a smoke-filled room. it is hard to accept that most things are much more chaotic than that 🤷♀️.
That since the founding of this nation our leaders have always been colluding, in some fashion, with organized crime. There are shows like Boardwalk Empire and Ozark that are pretty insightful.
What about Jeffrey Epstein!!! I think we all agree he didn’t kill himself. How quickly did that all blow over? I give credence to him being an Israeli Intelligence asset that used his sex trafficking operation to gain black mail material to be used to control people.
I've been interested in weird shit all my life. I see people use the term 'UAP' and to me they are like toddlers just getting their first pair of floaties while my weird friends and I hang up in the deeper part of the pool. Most people aren't ready for the kind of discussions we like to have —UFOs have more to do with Death than space scientists from other planet, Bigfoot is the poltergeist of the Pacific Northwest, ghosts are probably caused by Time distortions, and Magic is real but it's being kept secret underneath thousands of years of deceiving superstition. How's that for starters, kids?
Pickled aliens kept hidden in some US hangar? Yawn... I'm more excited about the connections between so-called 'alien implants' and Christian stigmata, and between UFO physical remains and 'apports' —small doodads that materialize out of nowhere during spiritualist seances.
At this point in my life, if it's not weird enough, I don't trust it —Bob Lazar and Area 51? Too 'normal' sounding to be true. Besides, Bob has always been too much of a pussy to debate a real scientist...
But if you force me to talk about a bonafide 'conspiracy theory', try this one for size: There seems to be many power players in Silicon Valley obsessed with the development of Artificial Intelligence, because they follow the tenets of an technochratic philosophy called TESCREALism (look it up) which they treat as a roadmap to usher in the Singularity and 'upgrade' Homo Sapiens so our cyborg descendants can conquer the Universe.
...Which is all fine and good if you're one of the people at the top of the capitalist pyramid, but it won't do any good to all the miserable grubs like me trying to make a living in a time when people think some magical algorithm on their computer can replace human creativity. TESCREALism dictates that the suffering of billions of humans today is nevertheless justified, if it ensures the life and potential happiness of trillions of posthumans once genAI is finally developed (or rather, 'manifested').
The only upside to this doomsday scenario is that 'AI' as it currently exists is nothing but a fancy digital 8-ball programed to spew out results based on approximation. It doesn't 'think' but it's powerful enough to convince many people it does. Meanwhile the people peddling the tech are trying to keep the charade going by luring more an more investors, but sooner or later (hopefully sooner) the house of cards will fall and everyone will finally realize the digital emperors have no clothes and very tiny dicks.
9/11 remains the motherlode of all conspiracies in the 21st century, because it led to everything else that is sordid and criminal which came after it and it was never adequately - and never will be adequately - explained. A perusal of David Ray Griffin’s books on the subject makes this fact pretty clear, unless one is a conspiracy theorist who believes Osama Bin Laden did it with 19 Saudi hijackers under military, CIA, and FBI surveillance.
When I learned about Building 7, it woke me up. That was the thing that allowed me to see that the twin towers were demolished and to the realization that two airliners never could have taken both down.
Once you see this, the sordid military offensive the neocons have taken us on in that last 23 years starts to make more sense. 9/11 was their engineered trigger.
It’s enraging the conspirators have successfully kept the truth of that event secret, but it is still a fact that a would-be democracy will have to address.
I believe in UFO's, or UAP's, because I saw two when I was a kid. Here is my story: I believe this happened in October, 1966, though it might have been late Sept. or early Nov. I was 7 at the time and living with my parents in Keene, NH. It was a Friday night and I had just gone to bed, maybe it was 10 p.m. or a bit later, when my mother came into my room, and told me to come into the back yard. It was a clear, cool evening, with no clouds in the sky. I don't recall seeing a moon, but I don't know what phase it was in.
My dad had been in the backyard, probably having a smoke, when he saw something high in the sky and called my mom out. What they saw was strange enough to wake me and have me watch with them. Our house was in a neighborhood at the far edge of the city, and behind it was a forest. The object was high up, above the trees, maybe at a 60- 70 degree angle. It looked like a very bright star, the brightest in the sky, and it changed colors, from red, to blue, to orange, to green as it slowly moved around in a small area. It was not a blinking light, just a solid light that would change colors. It would move slowly one way, and then go back the other way, and then up and then down, and then zig zag, tracing various shapes. There was no predictable movement, just random. We watched, enraptured, for several minutes. There was no sound at all.
After a few minutes, another object just like the first appeared, out of nowhere, close to the first object, and we watched as both objects moved around each other in their random patterns as they changed color. Then an arc of light moved from one object to the other while they were pretty close together, and one of the objects disappeared. The remaining object continued to move slowly in its random patterns, changing color, until it moved below the tree line and we could no longer see it.
My dad called the police to report what we had seen, and they told him they had other UFO reports that night. Nothing else came of the incident. I've tried to find references online to UFO sightings in Keene, NH around that time, but have found nothing. It's worth noting that NH was the location of two of the most famous UFO reports in American history, the so-called Exeter Incident in 1965, and the alleged abduction of a couple, Barney and Betty Hill, by UFO denizens, in NH's White Mountains in 1961.
I remember this whole thing very clearly, and the details I relay are exactly the same as I've relayed to friends over the years, nothing has changed in my story. I did become a real UFO nerd after that, and read every book at my library about the topic. To this day, I have no idea what we saw, but I've ruled out many of the possibilities, like balloons, aircraft, shooting stars, planets, swamp gas…
There was a show called “ in search of “ hosted by Leonard Nimoy. Had all the original conspiracy theories … big foot , Loch Ness , aliens , it had it all !! Was maybe the most spooky show ever because back then you could not fact check any of it.
I always suspected Neruda was assassinated. That turned out to be true... I don't know. Maybe a "conspiracy theory" is what you have when you are at certain distance from events that you are not suppose to know, or are unable to know. In this sense is not a counter narrative, but a story you tell yourself to hide the fact that the agents of the events are unwilling to partake with their knowledge. So the conspiracy theorist is not really "countering" anything, but riffing about his lack of understanding.
“if you want to know the democrat position today, look to the republican position 4 years ago” - hasanabi
Kamala is now advocating for a border wall which the the dems were strongly against when trump was advocating for it. They are slowly but surely shifting the overton window righwards, while the average Dem is completely oblivious that this is whats happening right now.
^race riots in the UK. Fascism is starting to grow in europe. You also got the hindutava in India. In every almost every single capitalist economy we are seeing fascism grow today.
My favorite conspiracy theory is that the meaning of the phrase conspiracy theory was forever altered by the CIA after the 1967 CIA document “Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report” to encourage everyone to ridicule those that didn't believe the official magic bullet / lone shooter theory after the JFK assasination. Although it's evolved to the point where people today often use it to simply dismiss any opinion that differs from theirs lol. So 'conspiracy theory' has just about lost all meaning imo, kinda like UFO did so they came up with UAP. In the same way I feel we need to replace 'conspiracy theory' with something new now.
That conventional, party politics matter. Even those that seem to promote the idea that they don't still talk about their details a lot (see Russell Brand, Jimmy Dore, etc.)
To me, the biggest "conspiracy theory" is the power of such a theory to begin with. Don't get me wrong, I think power seeks to stay in power and will assume what ever guise it must to stay there. But the idea that some shadowy actors have assumed control over the chaos we call life is nonsense. We give these "shadow forces" way more credit than they deserve and that is how they like it.
T he most efficient way to build "The Matrix" is to convince enough people that it has already been built. That way, people will act as if they are 8n it without you ever having to build it.
I fully believe that the Governor of Florida, Ron Desantis. Is working to systematically destroy the state to the greatest degree possible while he is in office. Though I have no theory on why he is hellbent on the decimation of my home state, I look at his attacks on our educational system, environmental policies, social equality, the state park system and even Disney (the single largest employer and tax fund earner in the state) as irrefutable evidence that he is working toward a legacy that we may never recover from. As a Native Floridian, this man is more of a threat to my quality of life than any other single entity that I currently know of,
I'd be curious to hear a little more about the baby sleep/cry-it-out. I've heard you mention this sentiment before, and it's becoming a more relevant piece than before... haha. I assume you discussed in the Darcia Narvaez episode, though that was so long ago. I recently read this article about the debate which had some interesting points on both sides: https://pudding.cool/2024/07/sleep-training/
It's interesting to me because there seem to be two different "tangential" threads here, one being the one you expressed above, but also I could see the act of rushing in to console a baby every time she cries might be over-parenting. Pamela Druckerman who wrote a pop-parenting book comparing US and French styles, and it seemed like cry-it-out was the french method (not sure if extendable to the rest of europe).
Eight years ago At my friend’s house in the first days after she had her first baby, I started looking up what indigenous cultures did when babies cried, and quickly found that the way westerners parent would be considered child abuse. Babies are attended to within seconds when they cry, and passed around between a dozen or more adults throughout the day - which speaks to why it’s so goddam hard to solo or even double-parent by comparison.
Think of it this way, at least pertaining to cry it out in the context of sleep training - why would a baby EVER be alone, in the dark, in the wild?
Women are really ignoring some deep instincts (or aren’t in touch with them) when they believe they should let their babies cry it out.
Gabor Mate talks a lot about this, also attachment theory could be of interest.
I wasn't really able to navigate the article but I feel this is an area of civilization that we get backwards. We neglect babies and toddlers and then over-protect and coddle kids into childhood. I also feel like the need for research on cry it out feels silly, like shouldn't it be instinctual to want to be near our babies at night? Only because people are so instict-injured themselves they are able to override this
I agree with all of yours, and I'll proffer mine. Humanity fell under the sway of some, for lack of a better term, "evil" forces at the dawn of civilization. We've been under a spell that's lasted for 10,000 or so years, and it's beginning to fray at the edges.
Agreed. He completely changed after all that money and its doesn't seem natural. Have you seen his last special? 15 min in it just becomes pandering to the dumbest conservatives and I used to be a huge joe rogan fan. Thats how I found Chris.
I guess he can't be truly authentic when he knows that millions of ears are listening and could potentially lose his hundred million dollar contract if he says the 'wrong' thing. He's just apart of the system now.
I loved that show! I think of it often.
Ever since I read 1984 at school many long years ago, I’ve been forever sceptical of the entire thing. That was the book that changed everything for me. The whole world of information, facts, history and of course, truth, all malleable and interchangeable with simple control. Everything we are told has at least some agenda, is heavily biased and these days it is almost impossible to decipher fact from fiction.
Personally I think the whole term “conspiracy theory” is as has been used to clown those who use it. The ability for the power hungry to act in near-plain sight is armoured by this phrase. It’s instantly applicable to those who see behind the curtain, and when thrown into the mix it’s indefensible and strangely perfect.
The original meaning is to “breathe together” where human beings mirror and reflect one another’s breathing rate and eye dilation etc. Then re-coined by the CIA to create the narrative of tin-foil hat wearing buffoons who couldn’t possibly be correct. The crazier the true activity, the less likely anyone sensible would believe it right? No one wants to be tarred with the “village Idiot” brush.
I’ve been through all the great conspiracies as far as I know. Spent years thinking about them and wandering down all manor of rabbit holes. It’s a fascinating world we live in, but that kind of thinking can creep into all areas of your life and take its toll. Critical thinking and self discovery are vital education, and lord knows just how many lies we have all been fed for the benefit of a system adapted to keep us in the dark.
My overall account is that no capitalist system can want a nation of free thinking, autonomous citizens and asking the big questions. They want you just smart enough to work the machines they own. They want replaceable tax payers to fund the military operations and keep that essential growth money flowing only upward.
The idea that you can work, be happy and “free” in this modern world is the ultimate lie, and one we all play into day after endless day.
I want to hear about this Czech dude! 😂 https://www.youtube.com/@spitmki/featured He drives all over continents with yellow old beat up cars. I don't even know if he speaks English, though I believe he must after all that extensive travel. That child-like energy just glows out of him. Apparently he designed a floating vehicle and travels with that now. Check him out! (can I ask him to be on the podcast?)
That would be a difficult interview if he doesn't speak English! If he comes through Crestone, I'd love to have him on.
He does. I am just chatting with him in Facebook.
I’ll steal one of my all-time favorite comments on this subject. When asked what their favorite conspiracy theory was, someone wrote: “JFK wasn’t assassinated. His head just did that.” 😂😂
I don’t go too deep but I definitely rolled my eyes and spelled bullshit around that attempted Trump assassination.
https://admem.net/en/img/4123618650
Germ theory. It’s not that simple, and getting people to be afraid of invisible enemies is always going to be the best form of mind control. Plus all the industries that rely on this! I’m not 100% germ or terrain, I prefer a mishmash of many things from spiritual sources and terrain theory to German new medicine, but nearly every fear-based thing around germs has some logical fallacy in it when you start to investigate. When you’re less afraid of germs than the average bear it’s crushingly obvious how much it controls people’s lives.
A farmer I met on a worktrade said, “City people worry about germs, country people worry about chemicals.”
My favorite conspiracy theory is pronatalism, the idea that society needs high birth rates or else we will reach a point when there are not enough working young people to pay taxes to provide pensions for the old.
The short answer, of course, is that this is nonsense. If people don’t have kids, they can easily save enough money not to need pensions.
But what about lifestyles? Can people be happy without the nuclear family? Here’s my own modest proposal, based on my own lifestyle. Please be warned that some people may find this proposal a bit shocking. I kind of find it shocking myself.
Saturday Girls.
As a young man I loved spending Saturdays with girls. We would do something interesting in the afternoon, have dinner, maybe take in a show or just go to bed, and have fun together all night. Sometimes she would stay over Sunday too.
On Monday I would be ready for work. I had a job I enjoyed which I thought was worthwhile and worth devoting my time to. I had little need for the girl until the next Saturday. I went off to my main pursuits. The girls and I had a lot of fun on the weekends, and the weekends went by.
This generally worked well for a few months, but then problems would arise. Words would start like “commitment” and “a meaningful relationship.” Words whose hidden meaning is babies.
Girls seem to want relationships. Maybe it’s because they are so interested in babies, as much or even more than they are interested in men. A man is needed to start the baby business, and is useful to provide the support the baby requires, but that’s all. The baby if what’s really important, and the man is second.
The Saturday girl would begin to look like she wanted to be a weeklong fixture. But I didn’t need that. I was focused on my work, my career. I think a lot of men are like that. I just wanted the girl on the weekend. I also wanted to travel, to learn, to be free.
Of course, some girls do not want babies in the near future, or at all, but their morals are often constructed as if they did. They want a long-term relationship. Exclusive too. If you start to think about the joys of other Saturday girls, there is friction.
So the connection with the Saturday girl would fizzle out, or blow up. Either way, I would lose my Saturday girl, and have to find another. Sometimes this was painful, but like most men, I was happy with a new girl, or a series of new girls. It worked pretty well. The emotional crises could be depressing, but I survived.
It was also a lot cheaper than having a woman with kids. Salaries today are really quite lucrative, if you don’t burden yourself with what I call MOM. Marriage, Offspring, and Mortgage. I was able to save money and grow quite comfortable, if not rich.
If you avoid bad ideas, and unnecessary burdens, like marriage and kids, it is fairly easy to be quite well off in our rich modern world.
That’s the way it’s supposed to be. People should always grow financially, to provide for their old age. This business of living paycheck to paycheck is strictly for MOM. Or spendthrifts, I suppose.
Before old age, however, there was a hiccup. All men come to that fateful day, around 40 or 45 or so, when suddenly you enter a room and see an attractive girl, and she is Too Young For You.
It can be a shock. A man is used to being able to enter a room and chat up any attractive girl he finds. He is used to women being out of reach because they are old, but that never bothered him. Suddenly a girl is unattainable because she is Too Young For You.
There are things men can do. We can buy a snazzy car with a chick magnet, or do exercise, or change clothes and hair style, but these efforts only postpone the fateful day.
What to do? For many men, girls are only attractive when they are young. Women can be attractive too, but there is no zing. If you don’t think so, read women’s magazines, and ponder on what sort of looks they think appeal to men.
Now that a man has reached the fateful age, how can he find a Saturday girl? Many men are defeated by the problem, and many are quite frustrated.
But for me it didn’t really turn out to be a problem. I kind of sidestepped it. I gradually changed my paradigm. I decided still to spend time with beautiful girls, but not with passion, romance, and sex. I decided just to have fun.
There’s a dark energy about sex, I sometimes think, and it brews anger, arguments, and strife. You could say I kind of lost interest.
I started to look for girls who enjoyed going hiking with me, or having dinners at nice restaurants, or going on trips with me. We would enjoy each other’s company, and sometimes a girl would even stay in my guest room for awhile.
The real breakthrough came when I started to invite girls to go on overseas trips with me. Roshelle was the first, and we spent four delightful weeks in France together. Michelle and I went to the Greek Islands for four weeks. Henriette toured Florida with me, and the American West the next year, and even came to live with me in Australia for a few months.
The best was Shannon, who went to Ibiza, Mexico, Ibiza again, the Greek Islands, and Barcelona, in a series of years. There have been many others, right down to Dominika on Naxos for three weeks last summer.
The girls loved these trips. I don’t think there is any harm in these trips. I think it is good for an old man to spend time with beautiful girls once in awhile.
Of course some people may object that there is no sex, or intimacy, or a deep relationship, or any of the other much touted facets of the modern dream of romance. Well, you’re right. It is also no fights, or demands, or financial burdens like divorce and kids.
The girls and I get along great. We go wherever they want, and see whatever they want, and I pay for everything, so our travels always go smoothly. It’s not hard for me to pay because I have never murdered my savings with MOM.
The girls look beautiful, which they do very well, and I get to look at them, and chat, and talk, and tell stories and make jokes, and they even listen to my stories and laugh at my jokes.
Of course, there are always many girls who will not have anything to do with trips of this nature. I can respect that. People want different things. But there are always smart girls who are glad to take advantage of wonderful opportunities.
So, in most senses, I still have my Saturday girls. Some will say I’ve missed out, with no family cares or concerns. Some will bewail my lack of a great gleaming relationship. But when I see parents and kids and couples from the outside, I often think I am better off.
Some men will look at me and think I am leading an ideal life, just the sort of life they would love to lead. Others will shake their heads and think of the joys I have missed.
Many women will object to this lifestyle, and to the thought of my enjoying time with girl after girl. But I think my lifestyle fits the genetic behaviour patterns of the long, long tribal days much better than MOM.
Many women may say that I am shallow, and miss out on the beauties of a deep and meaningful relationship, and live an empty life. Yet there is sometimes the compensation of getting on a jet to a wonderful new place with a beautiful Saturday girl.
How interesting. I am a 45 year old woman, have no kids (never wanted to) and have never been in a committed relationship… I’ve had and have plenty of lovers (I don’t know if I am their Saturday girl or they are my Saturday boys) and have a rich tribe of friends, most of whom are also childless and singlish, so we have plenty of time for one another. Recently, though, I started worrying about what I will do when my parents -who are a pain in the ass but very close to me- pass away. I am an only child so I will not have a nuclear family anymore. Will the absence of intimacy make me cold? Will I become “spoiled” doing just want I want all the time? Am I cold already? Is my heart “closed” to deeper love? It’s a big worry of mine recently, even if I love my hedonistic life. Do you have such doubts?
Hi Isotta,
These are interesting issues, and thanks for bringing them up. I’m 80 now, so both my parents are gone, and also my two sisters, so I have no nuclear family at all. I was raised in the US but moved to Australia at age 30, so I effectively have no relatives at all – only some cousins in the US, very nice people, but it is unlikely I will ever see them again. I haven’t found this a problem at all. When you make close friends, you are effectively choosing good relatives, I think. Also I don’t feel selfish because I can help the young women I travel with, or who stay in my guest room. One was a Ukrainian refugee, for example. Before her was a Brazilian girl who lost her job due to Covid (and broke her foot surfing too) and needed a place to stay. Another pleasant thing is I’m able to introduce the girls to Byron Bay, which is a wonderful place. A French girl came to visit for a week last year and wound up staying the whole year; she soon had a group of French friends and we had parties and a big Christmas dinner and all sorts of fun. The most recent girl was also French but not happy with her home country, so she will. I think, come back to stay in Australia soon. It’s very heart warming to be able to help girls – not offspring I have foisted on a overpopulated world, but young women in need through no fault of their own. Also I think it’s healthy for a man my age to have young women around sometimes. So there’s plenty of warmth in my life, even if no family connections.
I love this, good for you man.
Do what makes you happy, you're not harming anyone & enjoying life, who cares what other people think.
Plus, relationships are such a massive gamble these days. My neighbour just told me a story about the elderly guy I purchased my house from that she kept in touch with. He met & married a women before selling the house he obviously spend considerable time renovating for the sale & he's now living in poverty as she immediately left him & took off with ALL the money.
"Better to have loved & lost than not to have loved at all"?
Well, not always
Thanks for taking the time to share this. I can think of far worse ways to spend your time and money. Have you read John Perry Barlow's essay, "A Ladies' Man and Shameless"? Kindred spirits.
Hi Chris,
Glad you liked the essay. It was actually inspired by Sex At Dawn. Here’s the connection. I hope I have interpreted your book correctly.
If I understand Sex At Dawn correctly, the tribal way of sex (which is embedded in our genes) is for girls to mate freely with several men of the tribe, embracing what the book calls partitive paternity. Nubile girls perform sexily to attract attractive men, the men with the best genes. The girls (unlike modern girls) have no need to select a particular husband, because the whole tribe will care for the expecting mother and the child.
Once the girl has a baby or two, she focuses on her offspring, which is what you would expect from natural selection. She stops trying to attract guys, and focuses on the babies. For the benefit of the babies, natural selection also causes her to lose her figure and her sexy good looks, so guys stop chasing her, which otherwise might distract her from giving the babies the care they need. The guys turn naturally to the younger girls. Most of the time, the guys focus on their main duty, which is to protect the tribe, plus hunting occasionally.
Modern marriage doesn’t really fit these tribal patterns. A man and a woman are told they must focus on each other for life. They are both expected to give up any natural inclinations to mate with others.
I don’t think Sex At Dawn proposes an alternative which will fit our biological heritage better than marriage, but here’s a possibility.
Following my tribal or genetic heritage, I think my lifestyle fits in with the natural patterns of tribal life. I wrote the essay Saturday Girls so that others can judge for themselves.
https://relix.com/news/detail/r-i-p-journalist-editor-and-counterculture-enthusiast-steve-silberman/
RIP Steve Silberman
Fuck. Wasn't expecting that.
9/11, done by neo cons, Mossad, and Saudis. No plane hit Building 7 at World Trade Center and it magically collapsed at free fall speed into its footprint. Realizing Building 7 was a controlled demolition, I was able to see that the towers too were blown up. The planes were remotely controlled and the hijackers really believed they were in control. The corporate owned media was used to push the narrative. The shock and subsequent bloodlust of the American public allowed them to be led where the narrative took them. This allowed the military industrial complex to funnel trillions of printed fiat money into their coffers while waging wars for resources all over the global to combat "the terrorists". Building 7 was the key for me.
Humans live in the midst of a vast anti-conspiracy. Our society and politics are filled with countless individuals and groups working desperate, endless nights, conspiring in an attempt to control this thing. But it all only amounts to bulwarks and dykes, which from the moment of their creation were destined to be eventually over-run by the incessant tide of human history.
We live in little protected pockets and can only collectively hold our breaths hoping the wall doesn’t fail until after we’re already dead and gone. We cling to conspiracy theories because we feel secure in knowing somebody, anybody, is in control. Even if they are “evil” or have bad intentions, if someone is calling the shots that means there is hope that one day, if we just vote in the right person or advocate for the right policy, maybe one day someone “good” can run the show. The truth is, no one truly has their finger on the pulse. Most people only realize this when they finally have that heart attack that’s been building up for 40 years and they understand in a moment of terrible realization that all the cleverness of human society, which they’ve trusted implicitly, was never going to save them.
Do you mean to imply that there are no conspiracies and never have been any? It doesn't take an entire governmental apparatus or thousands of people to commit all conspiracies. Some conspiracies only need a small group of people to be pulled off.
The fact is, groups of people coordinate. Some of that coordination is nefarious. Conspiracies happen and have happened. They are not just bulwarks and dykes. They are river rerouters. And we're flowing in channels that are often shaped small groups of powerful people. The masses ebb and flow with it's own influences but small, coordinated groups have had massive influences on the channels we all flow in.
Good question. I do not mean there are no conspiracies and never have been. Of course a great many “massive influences” have been pulled off in coordinated efforts, both hidden and in plain sight. My contention is those influences, even those that reroute our entire society, are in the larger context not so much purposeful as they are accidental. While even the most successful of conspirators (think Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Jesus, Muhammad) clearly altered the course of human history in very significant ways, they could hardly have anticipated either the qualitative or quantitative degrees by which history was changed through them. In this light, the rerouting of the river of history by the hand of men might as well have been the re-routing of the Columbia river by way of seismic activity.
An additional consideration is the motivation of such “influencers”. The kind of obsessive compulsion to accumulate power (or in the case of Jesus and Muhammad, truth, which is after-all just another kind of power) necessary to reroute rivers, is clearly an attempt to stave off the inevitability of mortality. In this way, even the most influential of conspiracies amount to little more than bulwarks or dykes.
I'm convinced mainstream media outlets from both sides of the political spectrum are largely suppressive, pro-censorship, and have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo (e.g. perpetuation of war, hoarding of wealth, treating the majority of citizens like peons that need to be influenced/controlled through propaganda "for their own good").
Mainstream media outlets masquerade as proponents of free speech, but are owned by a very select (and gradually decreasing) few who prioritize their own wealth and the maintenance of wealth for their wealthy constituents (whom their relationships with are intentionally obfuscated). Same goes for high-level politicians on either side of the political spectrum.
These issues I point to are not black-and-white, but are far worse than most people are aware of. There are genuine, well-intentioned folks who work in mainstream media outlets and political organizations, and there is some excellent content/policies put out into the world. However, the powerful ones at the top run the overall narrative.
For anyone interested in these topics I recommended reading the following texts by Chomsky.
1. Manufactured Consent
2. Who Rules the World?
3. Precipice
I totally agree with that, in fact I believe there is a trajectory by some to keep the SAD diet alive and well making us all sick and in hospital. Thus making bigger profits for all involved. We will never have any kind of a social healthcare system.
Along with our food system being designed to maximize profit over health. I think our healthcare system in the US is designed to maximize profit over health. This may be the least controversial take on this thread lol.
The nail in this coffin was the Flexner Report, ever read about it? I totally believe/abhorrently admire the massive all-encompassing entity that is western healthcare, and avoid it entirely.
I came over this quote in the book "The Psychology of Money":
> Most people, when confronted with something they don't understand, do not realize they don't understand it because they're able to come up with an explanation that makes sense based on their own unique perspective and experiences in the world, however limited those experiences are. We all want the complicated world we live in to make sense. So we tell ourselves stories to fill in the gaps of what are effectively blind spots.
The quote is about about why people make bad financial decisions, but it seems to apply just as well (maybe even better) to why they come up with conspiracy theories. The world is complex, and most big events do not have a single easily understandable cause. Our innate instinct is to come up with an explanation that puts the blame on some identifiable culprit, be it the rich, the poor, the immigrants, the military-industrial complex, or some guys in a smoke-filled room. it is hard to accept that most things are much more chaotic than that 🤷♀️.
That since the founding of this nation our leaders have always been colluding, in some fashion, with organized crime. There are shows like Boardwalk Empire and Ozark that are pretty insightful.
What about Jeffrey Epstein!!! I think we all agree he didn’t kill himself. How quickly did that all blow over? I give credence to him being an Israeli Intelligence asset that used his sex trafficking operation to gain black mail material to be used to control people.
I've been interested in weird shit all my life. I see people use the term 'UAP' and to me they are like toddlers just getting their first pair of floaties while my weird friends and I hang up in the deeper part of the pool. Most people aren't ready for the kind of discussions we like to have —UFOs have more to do with Death than space scientists from other planet, Bigfoot is the poltergeist of the Pacific Northwest, ghosts are probably caused by Time distortions, and Magic is real but it's being kept secret underneath thousands of years of deceiving superstition. How's that for starters, kids?
Pickled aliens kept hidden in some US hangar? Yawn... I'm more excited about the connections between so-called 'alien implants' and Christian stigmata, and between UFO physical remains and 'apports' —small doodads that materialize out of nowhere during spiritualist seances.
At this point in my life, if it's not weird enough, I don't trust it —Bob Lazar and Area 51? Too 'normal' sounding to be true. Besides, Bob has always been too much of a pussy to debate a real scientist...
But if you force me to talk about a bonafide 'conspiracy theory', try this one for size: There seems to be many power players in Silicon Valley obsessed with the development of Artificial Intelligence, because they follow the tenets of an technochratic philosophy called TESCREALism (look it up) which they treat as a roadmap to usher in the Singularity and 'upgrade' Homo Sapiens so our cyborg descendants can conquer the Universe.
...Which is all fine and good if you're one of the people at the top of the capitalist pyramid, but it won't do any good to all the miserable grubs like me trying to make a living in a time when people think some magical algorithm on their computer can replace human creativity. TESCREALism dictates that the suffering of billions of humans today is nevertheless justified, if it ensures the life and potential happiness of trillions of posthumans once genAI is finally developed (or rather, 'manifested').
The only upside to this doomsday scenario is that 'AI' as it currently exists is nothing but a fancy digital 8-ball programed to spew out results based on approximation. It doesn't 'think' but it's powerful enough to convince many people it does. Meanwhile the people peddling the tech are trying to keep the charade going by luring more an more investors, but sooner or later (hopefully sooner) the house of cards will fall and everyone will finally realize the digital emperors have no clothes and very tiny dicks.
Later! ;)
I like you. Life deserves the kind of excitement you’re talking about. Screw half-assing a conspiracy we go whole ass
First post and I am already down the rabbit hole haha
9/11 remains the motherlode of all conspiracies in the 21st century, because it led to everything else that is sordid and criminal which came after it and it was never adequately - and never will be adequately - explained. A perusal of David Ray Griffin’s books on the subject makes this fact pretty clear, unless one is a conspiracy theorist who believes Osama Bin Laden did it with 19 Saudi hijackers under military, CIA, and FBI surveillance.
When I learned about Building 7, it woke me up. That was the thing that allowed me to see that the twin towers were demolished and to the realization that two airliners never could have taken both down.
Once you see this, the sordid military offensive the neocons have taken us on in that last 23 years starts to make more sense. 9/11 was their engineered trigger.
It’s enraging the conspirators have successfully kept the truth of that event secret, but it is still a fact that a would-be democracy will have to address.
I believe in UFO's, or UAP's, because I saw two when I was a kid. Here is my story: I believe this happened in October, 1966, though it might have been late Sept. or early Nov. I was 7 at the time and living with my parents in Keene, NH. It was a Friday night and I had just gone to bed, maybe it was 10 p.m. or a bit later, when my mother came into my room, and told me to come into the back yard. It was a clear, cool evening, with no clouds in the sky. I don't recall seeing a moon, but I don't know what phase it was in.
My dad had been in the backyard, probably having a smoke, when he saw something high in the sky and called my mom out. What they saw was strange enough to wake me and have me watch with them. Our house was in a neighborhood at the far edge of the city, and behind it was a forest. The object was high up, above the trees, maybe at a 60- 70 degree angle. It looked like a very bright star, the brightest in the sky, and it changed colors, from red, to blue, to orange, to green as it slowly moved around in a small area. It was not a blinking light, just a solid light that would change colors. It would move slowly one way, and then go back the other way, and then up and then down, and then zig zag, tracing various shapes. There was no predictable movement, just random. We watched, enraptured, for several minutes. There was no sound at all.
After a few minutes, another object just like the first appeared, out of nowhere, close to the first object, and we watched as both objects moved around each other in their random patterns as they changed color. Then an arc of light moved from one object to the other while they were pretty close together, and one of the objects disappeared. The remaining object continued to move slowly in its random patterns, changing color, until it moved below the tree line and we could no longer see it.
My dad called the police to report what we had seen, and they told him they had other UFO reports that night. Nothing else came of the incident. I've tried to find references online to UFO sightings in Keene, NH around that time, but have found nothing. It's worth noting that NH was the location of two of the most famous UFO reports in American history, the so-called Exeter Incident in 1965, and the alleged abduction of a couple, Barney and Betty Hill, by UFO denizens, in NH's White Mountains in 1961.
I remember this whole thing very clearly, and the details I relay are exactly the same as I've relayed to friends over the years, nothing has changed in my story. I did become a real UFO nerd after that, and read every book at my library about the topic. To this day, I have no idea what we saw, but I've ruled out many of the possibilities, like balloons, aircraft, shooting stars, planets, swamp gas…
There was a show called “ in search of “ hosted by Leonard Nimoy. Had all the original conspiracy theories … big foot , Loch Ness , aliens , it had it all !! Was maybe the most spooky show ever because back then you could not fact check any of it.
I always suspected Neruda was assassinated. That turned out to be true... I don't know. Maybe a "conspiracy theory" is what you have when you are at certain distance from events that you are not suppose to know, or are unable to know. In this sense is not a counter narrative, but a story you tell yourself to hide the fact that the agents of the events are unwilling to partake with their knowledge. So the conspiracy theorist is not really "countering" anything, but riffing about his lack of understanding.
Democrats = Rainbow fascism, Fascism with good PR
Republicans = Mask off Fascism
The culture war beef is fake. Its Sensationlism to keep us distracted. They are all on the same side. The side of the capitalists who run our society.
Check this out if you're skeptical. Look at the history of western media and how it operates. Its long but worth it.
https://youtu.be/-iwOTyv1gyY?feature=shared
“if you want to know the democrat position today, look to the republican position 4 years ago” - hasanabi
Kamala is now advocating for a border wall which the the dems were strongly against when trump was advocating for it. They are slowly but surely shifting the overton window righwards, while the average Dem is completely oblivious that this is whats happening right now.
https://youtu.be/6LPuKVG1teQ?feature=shared
^ the ratchet effect. This is how they shift public opinion.
https://youtu.be/T_TheRdobu8?feature=shared
^race riots in the UK. Fascism is starting to grow in europe. You also got the hindutava in India. In every almost every single capitalist economy we are seeing fascism grow today.
Fascism is capitalism in decay - Lenin
My favorite conspiracy theory is that the meaning of the phrase conspiracy theory was forever altered by the CIA after the 1967 CIA document “Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report” to encourage everyone to ridicule those that didn't believe the official magic bullet / lone shooter theory after the JFK assasination. Although it's evolved to the point where people today often use it to simply dismiss any opinion that differs from theirs lol. So 'conspiracy theory' has just about lost all meaning imo, kinda like UFO did so they came up with UAP. In the same way I feel we need to replace 'conspiracy theory' with something new now.
That conventional, party politics matter. Even those that seem to promote the idea that they don't still talk about their details a lot (see Russell Brand, Jimmy Dore, etc.)
To me, the biggest "conspiracy theory" is the power of such a theory to begin with. Don't get me wrong, I think power seeks to stay in power and will assume what ever guise it must to stay there. But the idea that some shadowy actors have assumed control over the chaos we call life is nonsense. We give these "shadow forces" way more credit than they deserve and that is how they like it.
T he most efficient way to build "The Matrix" is to convince enough people that it has already been built. That way, people will act as if they are 8n it without you ever having to build it.
I think we are "evolving", but on the wrong branch of the tree.
I fully believe that the Governor of Florida, Ron Desantis. Is working to systematically destroy the state to the greatest degree possible while he is in office. Though I have no theory on why he is hellbent on the decimation of my home state, I look at his attacks on our educational system, environmental policies, social equality, the state park system and even Disney (the single largest employer and tax fund earner in the state) as irrefutable evidence that he is working toward a legacy that we may never recover from. As a Native Floridian, this man is more of a threat to my quality of life than any other single entity that I currently know of,
Florida is testing ground for american fascism.
I'd be curious to hear a little more about the baby sleep/cry-it-out. I've heard you mention this sentiment before, and it's becoming a more relevant piece than before... haha. I assume you discussed in the Darcia Narvaez episode, though that was so long ago. I recently read this article about the debate which had some interesting points on both sides: https://pudding.cool/2024/07/sleep-training/
It's interesting to me because there seem to be two different "tangential" threads here, one being the one you expressed above, but also I could see the act of rushing in to console a baby every time she cries might be over-parenting. Pamela Druckerman who wrote a pop-parenting book comparing US and French styles, and it seemed like cry-it-out was the french method (not sure if extendable to the rest of europe).
Eight years ago At my friend’s house in the first days after she had her first baby, I started looking up what indigenous cultures did when babies cried, and quickly found that the way westerners parent would be considered child abuse. Babies are attended to within seconds when they cry, and passed around between a dozen or more adults throughout the day - which speaks to why it’s so goddam hard to solo or even double-parent by comparison.
Think of it this way, at least pertaining to cry it out in the context of sleep training - why would a baby EVER be alone, in the dark, in the wild?
Women are really ignoring some deep instincts (or aren’t in touch with them) when they believe they should let their babies cry it out.
Gabor Mate talks a lot about this, also attachment theory could be of interest.
I wasn't really able to navigate the article but I feel this is an area of civilization that we get backwards. We neglect babies and toddlers and then over-protect and coddle kids into childhood. I also feel like the need for research on cry it out feels silly, like shouldn't it be instinctual to want to be near our babies at night? Only because people are so instict-injured themselves they are able to override this
I agree with all of yours, and I'll proffer mine. Humanity fell under the sway of some, for lack of a better term, "evil" forces at the dawn of civilization. We've been under a spell that's lasted for 10,000 or so years, and it's beginning to fray at the edges.
Joe Rogan is the asset of some deep state intelligence service.
I'm always curious what Chris really thinks about Joes trajectory. Are they still friends? Why doesn't Chris still do his podcast?
Ha ha! That’s a good one. I’ve heard that Chris Ryan is actually a deep state operative with a mission to control our minds for $50 a year ;)
This is becoming increasingly more possible to believe.
Agreed. He completely changed after all that money and its doesn't seem natural. Have you seen his last special? 15 min in it just becomes pandering to the dumbest conservatives and I used to be a huge joe rogan fan. Thats how I found Chris.
Was directed to this and found it well done.
I guess he can't be truly authentic when he knows that millions of ears are listening and could potentially lose his hundred million dollar contract if he says the 'wrong' thing. He's just apart of the system now.