Or so the joke definition goes.
Pleiades sent in this interesting ittle link to some guy defending the cause of conspiracy theorists. It's a good little read.
Today, in the communication age, people have much greater access to information, particularly via the Internet, the world´s greatest public access channel. Therefore it is much easier to discover, share and promote conspiracy theories and expand them to include more current events. Like everything else in our society, conspiracy theories have become hyper-accelerated--every time a major figure dies, or a major event happens, conspiracy theorists are there to point out the connections and explain what happened in sinister terms. Although the Internet is free speech at its best, what we have gained in quantity, perhaps we have lost in quality--anybody with anything to say can build a web site and say it, and it carries some credibility precisely because it is published.
The result is noise. One could argue that with so much noise, with so many theories, conspiracy theory itself loses more credibility even while real conspiracies may actually be happening. Conspiracy theories have become so accelerated that the theorists are the boy who cried wolf. Investigative journalists, once considered something of conspiracy theorists themselves, are continuously taking themselves more seriously and conspiracy theories less seriously, and now deride them in print. Stories about alleged connections between the CIA and the crack epidemic are met with open hostility and ridicule by the media (although the Director of the CIA took them seriously enough to hold a televised town meeting with LA residents). Plots to take over the government are met with laughter.
To be fair, it IS amusing. The world IS going to hell in a basket; it doesn't seem pertinent which conspiracy is driving it that way. And there's also Occam's razor: maaybe there's a simpler explanation to all this crap?
Anyway, I like conspiracy theorists, probably more than their theories; while not necessarily bellieving everything I read what they write. :)
Nazis Exploded A-Bomb?
This was in the SMH.
Here's a classic: The Nazis may have done their own nuclear tests successfully. So Albert Einstein was right when he went and taalkeed to FDR and told them what could be on the cards. It's not all 'Oppenheimer's deadly toy' as Sting sang in the 1980s, after all.
On October 12, 1944, Romersa, then a 27-year-old war correspondent, was taken to the island of Rugen, where he watched the detonation of what his hosts called a "disintegration bomb".Well, this kind of adds credence to the notion that there is evidence of suppressed information a-plenty when this sort of information surfaces 60 years later. After all it would explain the speed with which the Russians acquired a plutonium bomb, having captured the better German scientists.
"They took me to a concrete bunker with an aperture of exceptionally thick glass. There was a slight tremor in the bunker; a sudden, blinding flash, and then a thick cloud of smoke. It took the shape of a column and then that of a big flower.
"The officials there told me we had to remain in the bunker for several hours because of the effects of the bomb. When we eventually left, they made us put on a sort of coat and trousers which seemed to me to be made of asbestos and we went to the scene of the explosion.
"The effects were tragic. The trees around had been turned to carbon. No leaves. Nothing alive. There were some animals - sheep - in the area and they too had been burnt to cinders."
When he wrote of his experiences after the war, "everyone said I was mad". By then, it was universally accepted that Hitler's scientists had been years away from testing a nuclear device.
However, documents published recently by Mr Karlsch and a US scholar, Mark Walker, have punctured this consensus. Russian archives have shown one of the German scientists lodged a patent claim for a plutonium bomb as early as 1941 and, in June, the two historians published an article in Physics World that included what they said was the first diagram of one of the bombs Hitler's scientists were trying to build, a device that exploited both fission and fusion.
Here's a question. There was a tech exchange between the Germans and Japanese where the Japanese acquired plans for the Me262 Edelweiss, Me163 Komet and other interesting things. Did the Japanese get the plans this A-Bomb? We'll never know, but I've never seen any evidence thay did, I've seen War Ministerial discussions about the bomb after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but not prior to it.
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