Hook for Conspriacy Conjecture, Sandy

Life has a way of sending you down unexpected back alleys. One minute, you are firing along on the main street, 4 lanes each way, the whole world makes sense. Traffic cops are just traffic copes and the people on the sidewalk are just shopping. Those 3 gray cars behind you just an accident of lots of folks liking gray and the light being dim enough you can’t tell that one of them is really ‘seafoam’ and not gray…

Then some how you end up diverted into a side street, that has a traffic jam, so you turn onto a sort of an alley and then you find yourself in a strange part of town on not-quite a street. Surrounded by people eying your looks and your ride with a “Like what brought your sorry ass down here?” and you are wondering that too. You start to think you really just want the next freeway onramp, to anywhere, but don’t know where it is.

Sometime you even stop to get directions and pick up a soda or coffee. Occasionally you try the local “dive” for lunch and find the people not really all that bizarre after all. Soon you are wondering if maybe you ought to stay a while and see what these folks do every day? Then you notice the two big guys on the other side if the street as one points at your car… Time to go…

I’ve had many adventures like that on a couple of continents.
Mostly good, some a bit less so.

Now they mostly happen in a metaphorical way.

Tonight was one of them.

The Friend Of Conspiracy

So the spouse hands me a scrap of paper and says “One of the people I know asked me to ask you to watch this and tell her what you think of it.” Which really means tell the spouse who will tell something slightly different to the “friend of a friend”.

The scrap says: “Youtube Sandy Hook Shooting Exposed” and is supposed to be “about a half hour” per verbal guidance. So I go off to pick some random youtube that looks close and hope it’s the one they mean… About now I’m also wondering why I’ve turned down this small winding dark street just because the spouse said someone not in the car once turned down a street near here and wanted my opinion of small dark winding streets… Didn’t I have somewhere I was supposed to be going? How many levels removed ought one just “blow off”? Like an Erdős Number, or perhaps more accurately like an Erdős-Bacon number, ought one have a point where they say “Your Chiefio-number is too large, to far removed; your request is outside acceptance bands”. Does having a “Spousal Number” automatically over ride that? Even if the Spousal-Number is 2 or 3? Can a friend of a friend of the spouse get priority and send you down that winding dark road? How about a friend of a friend of a friend of the spouse?

Such are the things I think as I notice people putting odds bits of trash in old metal cans and setting them afire next to the road… as they look at the car and the contents passing by and I wonder if they wonder if my clothes fit and how long a good tire can keep the cold away when fed to a burn barrel… Once: I ‘took the wrong exit’ from the freeway in New York and ended up driving through part of Jamaica New York at just past dusk. Then, the place looked semi-bombed out. Some buildings a rubble pile. Folks starting fires in the occasional ‘oil drum’ like metal drum. The essentially all black population looking at this glow-in-the-dark white face driving by. A bit further down, 2 blocks? 4?, some folks were playing with an old tired kick-ball outside some run down housing. I committed the insane act (or so I was told by richer white folks later) of stopping, rolling down the window (as they moved out of the playground / street ) and saying “Hey, I took the wrong exit off the freeway. Trying to get to {wherever it was}. Can you tell me where the on ramp is?” Delivered with my usual smile and my general attitude of “I think you are an OK person.” Many semi-concerned faces got nice smiles. Someone or other said “No problem. Two blocks up an’ one over, make it a left up the ramp.” I said something like “Great! Thanks! Enjoy your game.” and headed off.

I’m wondering where the onramp is from where I ended up tonight.

The Videos

I have no idea the veracity of these things.

There are all kinds of conspiracy theories on the web. ANYTHING can be done with video and photoshop to make any visual you want. Just a question of time and talent. Folks get paid for videos that go viral. The result is a lot of crap. Alien spacecraft shown flying over The City and who knows what all else. Some quite good. (Though fake). But I’m committed to watching due to the power of the Chiefio-spouse number.

So I’m noticing that the one that I think is the one in question has some things that actually are a bit problematic. Was the part where the ‘little girl’ shot at Sandy Hook who is then shown in a photo op with the President really an accidental exposure of the conspiracy / fraud? Or just some other blond kid and a photoshopped dress? No way to know without a full on forensic analysis and access to the original materials. Was the part where the Dad comes in laughing then ‘enters character’ of sadness and concern prior to “his shot” evidence of an actor entering character; or just a person having a momentary happy emotion at being in the presence of important people and being picked to be ‘on the news’, reentering reality and letting his loss overtake him again?

For each “Conspiracy Theory” point, there is a “Rational Alternative”. Take the coroner who is, er, “quirky”. Evidence of bad acting? Or just that folks who spend their lives getting a medical degree so they can then cut up dead bodies all day are, well, a little Quirky (or even more than a little…) Were the web pages with creation dates “same day” due to friends “doing what they knew how to do” as soon as they heard (rather than shadowy actions of non-grieving non-parents), and were web pages set up the day before, perhaps just a mis-set clock on the server, or even just an artifact of another time zone? (Unlikely since they are so close to GMT, so much of the world is running later, not earlier).

Yet there are two points that are quite clear.

1) There are some rather strange “loose ends” here. Things that don’t “fit”. ‘Why’ is another matter, and might be innocent. (Or might be manufactured; so that whole fact checking / vetting thing would need to be done.)

2) A lot of folks are so completely alienated by the present government that they are quite willing to entertain the notion of an entirely staged mass-murder “for effect”.

Heck I even find myself thinking “I have no reason to think our government would not do this as a manufactured crisis ‘for effect’.” That was not true 5, 10, or 15 years back. I’d have just flushed the whole idea on the face of it. Now? Now there is no reason to assume there is no conspiracy. Agenda 21 proves that there is a conspiracy (though they don’t call it that. It is called “coordination” instead… Another of those irregular English verbs:

I coordinate, you collaborate, they conspire ;-)
Or in the case of Government Agencies ‘He Chairs the committee’…

Similarly the Climategate emails, the FOIA-2011 releases, the EPA-Gate fake email accounts. Folks are conspiring all over the place these days, openly at times. Sure, it is called collaboration, coordination, or just ‘working together’ or ‘getting grants’ / ‘giving grants’. It’s all just legal forms of conspiracy. That is why police like “conspiracy to do FOO” laws so much. More conspiracy is done, and prosecuted, than most anything else. It isn’t a theory if they are doing it; and we know a lot of it gets done.

So given “never let a crisis to to waste” it is a very short stroll over to “manufacture a crisis as needed”. The thing that surprised me was how many folks some of these videos had that watched them, and how many videos there were. Large chunks of the world culture are clearly quite willing to embrace the Conspiracy Conjecture. (‘Conjecture’ as it isn’t even a hypothesis, never mind a thesis or theory. “Hypo” meaning ‘below’ or ‘less than’ a thesis. Theory being generally accepted as true.)

So I’m feeling like I can embrace the Conspiracy Conjecture enough to investigate, but I can’t swallow the Conspiracy Theory angle.

Yet the videos have things in them I can’t explain. Too many folks ‘wiping a tear’ from dry eyes. Laughing until ‘on camera’ to a camera that was already on. A photo that sure looks like ‘the wrong dead girl’ quite alive on Obama’s knee…

Something is wrong. I just don’t know if it is the state of our government, or the conspiracy conjecture videos being faked. In any case, there are interesting puzzlements.

This one is about 1/2 hour and I think it was the one I was supposed to look at:

They make a lot of hay out of ‘discrepancies’ that could just be folks making errors. Like saying someone was in the front of a police car that might have been the back, or the usual confusion at the start of an event where the facts are never correct (in my personal experience with the news).

It is also surprising how much time some folks put into this stuff. One guy wandered through a particular set of photo albums online and did face matches. How many families did they have to go through to find that one?

They make a big deal out of the rifle being left in the car and the coroner (prior to doing any autopsies) saying the shooting was done with a rifle. Maybe it’s just hard to tell in the field and the guy guessed wrong when on camera.

Some bits much harder to dismiss. The shooter’s mom being both a teacher at the school and not a teacher. The out of place girl on the Presidential lap. The “odd” way the crime scene is managed. One I noticed is a surprising lack of colored cars in the lot. A heck of a lot of white, gray, dark. Not so much yellow, red (other than fire / ambulance), green, purple, etc. Now maybe a lot of them are the undercover cops and such who rushed to the scene, but there still ought to be more color. Unless the people there are very different from Californians. We have far fewer “standard sedans” in dull “municipal” colors.

At the very end, about 27 minutes, they find web sites with creation dates prior to the event as “memorials”…

Typically at events like this some police are assigned to keep access open, especially for the medical folks. This scene does have a much more staged look, or out of control look. Lousy police control? Staged? Police just a bit shocked, too, so: late in the process not caring much?

So there are a lot of ‘non-fit’ things here. But people are lousy at giving a good eye witness account. Leaping from inconsistent stories and confusion to a grand conspiracy is a bit more than I can do. Yet the guy at 14 minutes really has trouble keeping a strait story and a believable one? At 15-16 minutes there is a good case that the parents of the newly dead child are looking way too cheery. Yet in another clip I found what they were saying. It was ‘remembering things she liked’. Are these maybe just folks who’ve accepted death long ago, so having it be personalized isn’t that much of a leap? I’ve been accused of “not enough” or inappropriate emotional display. Some of us are that way. I can put on a very strong suppression of strong negative events and “be normal” for periods, leaving the crying for “me time”. Not everyone is slave to their emotional state.

Yet the number of folks acting that way just seems wrong. There is an overall ‘artificial’ feeling to the whole thing. Curious. Then again, with about 1/3 the population on drugs of one kind or another, who knows how drugged up these folks were on anti-depressant feel good pills.

In this one, at about 2 minutes, even with the resolution turned up high, we have a dramatic tear wiped from what looks like a dry eye.

This one is about 13 minutes of off the deep end conspiracy theory talk, but the video of the cars and lots (repeated) is rather good. Much easier to see the ‘non-random’ nature of the distribution of car types.

This one, the guy is all about folks looking way too happy and fake about the whole thing. Does seem odd that so many folks were filmed and they didn’t have folks losing it. Starting about 2:30 in to it we have the “Two Smiling Parents” talking about their dead daughter, but you can get the words. Some folks DO have a ‘wake’ attitude, celebrate the life, not mourn the death. But I don’t think I could be that collected that quick (and I’m pretty darned collected…) At 10:30 for a bit we have the ‘cry faced’ person doing ‘sniffs’, but sniffs are from tears being dumped into the nose. (There is a little duct in the lower eyelid to drain tears to the nose.) Yet there are no tears… perhaps higher resolution might show them? Yet not even a glitter of reflected light.

Then he goes off a conspiracy deep end about an owl…

This guy thinks the “owl” in the dollar bill is just the background pattern overlay artifact.
I agree:

http://edj.net/think/dollarowl.html

I also find the narrator saying “Fake actors were used” annoying. IFF it was a put up job, then they were “REAL Actors”, not fake actors… Real actors making a fake persona. Then toward the end he goes into a Manchurian Candidate hypnosis and shooters bit.

Then there is this guy. Really has a Kaczinski In The Cabin look ;-) but also make an interesting point of it all; at about 2 minutes.

Then there is this guy spending 15 minutes showing a bunch of folks in some family look a whole lot like folks from the event. Then again, folks of similar minority genetics often look similar. That he’s picked out the Jews to pick on doesn’t sit well with me either. OTOH, it’s a more genetically closed community in some ways so more likely to have folks with a similar ‘look’. (While various sub populations are quite different, inside individual groups, they often lived in the same areas for a long time in the past.)

Fun to see the family album, anyway.

This one does 2 minutes on a single person. High res and slow advance; there are a lot of detail matches, even things like neck and eye wrinkles and tooth shape / positions (made harder by different exposure of tooth length with different smile depths).

Spooky close if they are not the same. Yet I’ve had my mother tell me that my cousin looked just like me, so ‘it happens’.

Then this one has the “cop in charge” having participated in a crisis training drill, so clearly he could have staged one. OK, and I guess anyone who trains for nuclear preparation could start a nuclear war too?…

But their point that ‘the infrastructure for making a fake does exist’ is pretty clear. Just the deeper meaning is a bit sparse ;-)

In many ways, this guy is my favorite. No video embeds, no technical details. Just he looks at it and rants that the folks are just looking way too plastic. Wonder how many ‘pasty white folks of means’ neighborhoods he’s been in? ;-)

It’s also nice to see that “Conspiracy Theorist” can apply to a ‘person of color’ too. ;-)

I was beginning to think it was another “white man’s disease”…

Then this guy goes all geek-wonky and finds a page on Google put up 3 days prior to the event. A United Way page. One wonders if United Way creates a blank page from time to time and then ‘filled them in’ if an event happens? An interesting date dis-connect, but the frame can be built prior to populating it. Then goes on into the ‘wrong kid on the lap’ image.

In Conclusion

All in all, while some of the folks in the links are a bit strange, it’s an interesting winding back road to visit. Still, I find myself wondering how I got here, and why, and just where is that on ramp to the freeway back to mainstream civilization…

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