Category: Conspiracy Corner

Every Thursday, about 8:15am, Matthew talks with Ethan and Zac on 95bFM’s “Breakfast Show” about conspiracy theories.

Unbeknownst to you all (well, except those of you who also follow me on Twitter (http://twitter.com/HORansome”>@HORansome), I’ve been engaged in a war of words with a “prominent” proponent of conspiracy theories, Ben Vigden ((I say “war of words” but, really, I’ve been trying to say “Let’s have a conversation” whilst he’s been mostly trying to pick a fight)). As such, today’s segment and the following discussion document might be seen as yet another salve by “bigoted” and “ignorant” me, because it’s the fluoride debate, and the presence of fluoride in water is, apparently, a big deal.

We last talked about fluoride back in March of 2012, which seems like a long time ago. I don’t quite recall the context; I think it was a suggested topic and I went with it. However, now fluoride is in the papers because the good people in Hamilton didn’t vote to get rid of it, but the council decided getting rid of it was a good idea. ((We’ll see just how good an idea that was come the local body elections.)) Why did the Hamilton City Council overwhelmingly decide to stop fortifying the local water supply with fluoride?

Special interest groups. Specifically the Fluoride Free Hamilton group (part of the Fluoride Action Network NZ), who are so emboldened by their success that they think this will turn the tide on fluoridation in Aotearoa me Te Wai Pounamu. They are worried about the amount of fluoride in our water supply and the medical effect it might have on children and the elderly.

So, either fluoride is introduced into water supplies to help prevent preventable dental decay or it has been put into our water supply for some other reason. Those “other reasons” range all the way from a simple capitalist plot to make money from waste (“It’s an industrial waste/by-product that needs to be disposed of!” to claims that it’s part of the New World Order plot to devastate humanity! (“It’s a mind control agent which calcifies the pineal gland! and makes us docile.”).

It’s not clear that FFH or FANNZ believe in a large scale, “make the population docile” conspiracy theory, although it is clear that they think there is some degree of collusion or cover-up by those who argue for fluoride fortification of our municipal water supplies.

So, does fortifying our water supplies with fluoride cause a reduction in dental decay across a population?

Well, yes, it does, but it’s a contributory cause rather than the cause of such a reduction.

Opponents of fluoridation (which aren’t necessarily people who think there is a conspiracy behind fluoride in water; they might just think it’s just not ethical to forcefully dose a population with fluoride) will point to countries which don’t fluoridate their water supply and yet still have the same rate of dental decay (or, to put it another way, the same lack of widespread dental decay) as countries which do. They will go “Aha! Fluoride isn’t the salve you claim it is!”

Most of the countries people will point at when it comes to healthy-smiles-without-addiitonal-fluoride are developed Western nations like, say, those we find in Europe (which, by-and-large, does not fluoridate, in part because a fair amount of their water is naturally fluoridated; we learnt about the benefits of fluoride precisely because there was a difference in smiles, say, between the UK and France). These developed Western nations also tend to have quite developed dental hygiene programmes (and may, or may not, encourage the use of fluoridated toothpaste).

Of course, even if what I have said is true, it might still be the case that fluoride is good for teeth but bad for the rest of the body. It might even be the case that it is an evil mind-control drug. What better vehicle for population control than a drug which also gives you a winning smile?

Both of these theories have been asserted by some opponents of fluoridation. FFH and FANNZ focus on the weaker (but more plausible) claim that fluoride toxicity is a very real factor in human ill health in Aotearoa me Te Wai Pounamu.

So, is fluoride poisonous? Yes, in large enough quantities, it is toxic. This is why we regulate the amount of fluoride in our water supplies–you would have to drink more than a lethal (read: salt-stripping) dose of water in a day to suffer the ill-effects of fluoride. In some areas of Europe the naturally occurring fluoride in spring water is watered down because it occurs in amounts which are considered harmful, but here we fortify the water to an amount which should harden teeth but shouldn’t harm humans.

It is also true that fluoride is what we call a “waste product”; most of the additional fluoride we have in water (most water contains a naturally-occurring amount of fluoride anyway, which is why we fortify, rather than introduce, our water with it) comes from the fertiliser industry, where it’s a by-product of the production of phosphate. Note that: “by-product.” We get fluoride and phosphate from the same process. As someone once pointed out, molasses is technically a waste-product in the production of sugar, but we call that a “by-product” rather than a “waste product”.

The question is, is fluoride dangerous at the levels we fortify water at? The answer to that seems to be no. “Seems”, because we’re relying here on population studies and appeals to experts (and FFH and FFANZ have their own experts who disagree, and who point towards studies which go against the consensus on water fluoridation).

The appeals to expertise here are tricky; science works via a consensus (where consensus means “Most of the qualified experts”) and the consensus (or scientific orthodoxy, if you will) has it that fluoride in water is not harmful at the levels we fortify at and said fluoride levels harden teeth and prevent dental decay. Yes, there are experts who disagree with water fluoridation. Some agree that fluoride helps prevent dental decay but disagree with what they consider to be “forced doping”. Others disagree that fluoride has any particular benefit. Some even consider fluoride to be dangerous. However, these experts are in the minority, and whilst certain proponents of alternative medicine will play the “Even Galileo was thought to be wrong!” card to justify placing their trust in the non-orthodix experts, this isn’t a good reason for the rest of us to ignore the consensus. It’s perfectly rational to prefer the testimony of the majority of experts, even if it eventually turns out that most of those experts are wrong.

Things are not so tricky when FFANZ and FFH point towards the actions of local body politicians and an increasing trend worldwide to stop fluoridating water. Politicians, as well we know, are not necessarily beholden to experts (indeed, often they ignore them for fun and profit). The fact that water fluoridation in the West is declining speaks to both social pressures by groups like FFH and FFANZ, an increasingly popular position that people should take responsibility for their own health care (thus why we don’t have mandatory folate in bread), increasing scepticism of mainstream health practices (thus lowered vaccination rates in the West) and increasing dental hygiene (thus less need to fortify municipal water supplies with fluoride). Just because water fluoridation is on the decline, that doesn’t mean it’s a dangerous practice that needs to be stomped out.

So, is fluoride a mind-control agent? (a claim, I would caution readers to remember, is not central to the FFH and FANNZ groups)

People like David Icke claim it is, and books have been written on fluoride as a cause of docility in, say, the American population, but there’s no actual good evidence for the claim that fluoride affects humans psychologically. That being said, the proponents of views like this will claim that this is precisely what the Establishment, and their pet scientists, want us to think; it is, after all, a grand conspiracy. People like me either are under the control of fluoride (given that I don’t try to avoid it) or know what fluoride does but are engaged in a disinformation campaign to stop people like you finding out its real purpose.

Now, it is true that there is plenty of quality scientific debate as to whether rich Western nations like our own need to put fluoride in the water and whether it’s ethical sound to do so even if it is beneficial. There are also debates, once again good debates, as to what the right concentration of fluoride is safest for human consumption, and I can see how the existence of these debates might make average epistemic agents like ourselves worried that maybe they should be concerned about fluoride. However, the fact that there is a debate doesn’t mean we should be concerned that there is a conspiracy, or that fluoride is a grave threat; for such a controversial claim to hold we need good evidence, which, as far as I can see, there really isn’t any.

Lest I be seen as totally partisan in this debate, here’s an interesting point and counterpoint: the Prime Minister’s Scientific Advisor on the benefits of fluoridation and a response by the Anti-Fluoridation Association of Mildura.

Every Thursday, about 8:15am, Matthew talks with Ethan and Zac on 95bFM’s “Breakfast Show” about conspiracy theories.

Imagine being an angry white man who was being persecuted by a government that largely does the work of angry white men? Imagine thinking that said government was really under the control of a Kenyan-born, Muslim Socialist who was out to get you.

Imagine it.

Now, I’m being a bit unkind in starting things in this way; the unfolding Inland Revenue Service (IRS) scandal in the US, where it turned out that the IRS was quietly denying certain nonprofit groups on the right tax exempt status, is a scandal no matter the fact it mostly affected the Tea Party (it also affected some liberal groups as well, but the scandal is with respect to the scale in which nonprofit, Tea Party-aligned groups were denied tax exempt status). Basically, the IRS targeted certain conservative groups (and all Tea Party ones) based upon their names or politics, dating back as far as 2010 and certainly through the presidential campaign of 2012. Groups like “Truth the Vote” found themselves denied tax exempt status because they were engaged in political lobbying, which previously had been an allowed activity with respect to seeking tax exempt status.

It’s not hard to imagine the outrage; here was a Democrat administration making it hard for opponents of said administration to lobby against it. Certainly, if you wanted to talk about some government-lead conspiracy to stifle the opposition, this would be a good place to start vis-a-vis hard evidence.

Not only that, but when one of the central tenets of your protest against the government is based upon questioning the legitimacy of taxation itself, it really does look like the government of the day is out to get you via the institution that rankles.

So, what happened? Was it a conspiracy?

Officially, no. Although this activity by the IRS was known of as far back as 2010, people accepted the assurance of officers high up in the IRS that nothing untoward was going on. Indeed, as some members of the US establishment have pointed out, when the matter was investigated the kind of cases that were used as examples of what the IRS were up to were organisations whose lobbying did not fit the criteria of being charitable because they were expressly political organisations seeking to elect particular candidates rather than advancing some cause for the betterment of society. However, when the scandal broke this year, both the Republicans and the White House were suitably outraged. It looked as if this was just some zealous IRS personnel in Cincinnati who had made some basic mistakes.

Now, this is the perfect response by the conspirators: it was an institutional problem rather than conspiracy. Sure, some liberal groups had been targeted, but the vast majority of the groups were Tea Party-aligned, and that’s suspicious.That being said, the Commissioner of the IRS that was in charge of the IRS at the time was a George W. Bush appointment; awkward.

Tea Party members, like Glenn Beck, have argued that this overzealous approach to the tax exempt status of Tea Party-aligned groups stifled the ability of the Tea Party to agitate their membership and get them out to vote. No matter the conspiracy or lack of conspiracy, the scandal is going to be another avenue of attack for certain members of the libertarian right in America to attack Barack Obama. The Birther Movement has largely fizzled because of a lack of evidence, but the IRS scandal is real and no matter the protestations of the White House that they did not order any of it, it happened under a Democratic administration. The Right will use this to question the legitimacy of the election and to question the role of the IRS in its other oversight tasks. Like their role in collecting monies for Obamacare…

So, with all that said/written down in actual fact, why not listen in/again to this very special episode of “Conspiracy Corner with a Truman Capote impersonator” on the unfolding IRS scandal?

This week: Benghazi, Jon Karl and how I’m not coming down off of drugs.

Notes

One of the more interesting tales of conspiracy and intrigue are the allegations as to what President Obama and White House did and didn’t say about the Benghazi attacks and what they may or may not have told various government departments and agencies to deliver as “talking points” to the Media.

On September 11th, 2012, prior to the POTUS election, there was an attack on American diplomatic mission at Benghazi, in Libya. The ambassador was killed, as were three other people in the compound. Initially it was suspected that the attacks were a reaction/uprising to the trailer of the “film” “Innocence of the Muslims” but it is now known to have been a pre-mediated attack by militants.

Benghazi has been a bit of a sideshow: Republicans have chided Obama for not labelling the attacks as terrorist attacks (he did call the attacks “acts of terror”, but apparently an “act of terror” is not the same as a “terrorist attack”). The Obama administration was also taken to task for singling out “Innocence of the Muslims” as a factor in the attacks, both of the Left (who said this played into a naive notion of “Muslim rage against the decadent West”) and the Right (who said Al Qaeda was obviously behind the attacks). ((According to the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/22/benghazi-consul-attack-us-identifies-suspects):

“Officials in the US say they have identified five men who might be responsible for the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 and there is enough evidence to justify seizing them by military force as suspected terrorists or killing them with a drone strike. However, there is not enough proof to try them in a US civilian court as the Obama administration prefers.”

So, there’s not enough evidence to try them but there is sufficient evidence to kill them…))

What has happened now is this: some members of the Republican Party have tried to create “talking points” which suggest political inference by the White House and the State Department in whitewashing the “talking points” various political agencies were working with just after the attack on the embassy in Benghazi in order to help Obama’s re-election chances. Certain politicos want to create the impression the White House was telling agencies exactly what to say and making sure they were watering down key talking points (like the role of Al Qaeda in the attacks). For example, a leaked quote from Ben Rhodes (White House) about the attacks, supplied to Jon Karl, a reporter for ABC went:

“We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation.”

This indicated that the White House was being disingenous/lying in their press conferences in the immediate aftermath of the attack, particularly with respect to deleting talking points (say, the role of Al Qaeda) or scrubbing information to make things look better than they were.

This seemed newsworthy, since there have been quite a number of investigations into what happened in Benghazi and how much people new beforehand and how much information was suppressed afterwards. ((According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Benghazi_attack#U.S._government_response):

“Several official investigations have been completed, are ongoing, or are under consideration:
Federal Bureau of Investigation (opened September 2012 – ongoing)
Five House Committees (Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, Judiciary, and Oversight and Government Reform) initiated their own inquiries (opened October 2012 – ongoing)
Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (October 2012 – report delivered December 31, 2012)
State Department Accountability Review Board (opened October 4, 2012 – report delivered December 20, 2012)
House Select Committee on the Terrorist Attack in Benghazi (proposed, in HR 36)”

))

Now, it does seem there are legitimate concerns. The embassy in Benghazi was understaffed and the protection details inadequate. However, what the opponents of the Obama Administration want to push is a conspiracy theory that shows the administration manipulated the public and told lies about who was responsible for the attacks in order to secure Obama’s re-election. To large extent, this is a version of the October Surprise Theory (Iran, the hostages and Reagan), although many are also comparing it to Watergate (by claiming that Obama has actually lied).

So, what happened. Well, according to Mother Jones (http://m.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/05/its-official-bogus-email-leaks-came-republicans):

“Republicans in Congress saw copies of these emails two months ago and did nothing with them. It was obvious that they showed little more than routine interagency haggling. Then, riding high after last week’s Benghazi hearings, someone got the bright idea of leaking two isolated tidbits and mischaracterizing them in an effort to make the State Department look bad. Apparently they figured it was a twofer: they could stick a shiv into the belly of the White House and they could then badger them to release the entire email chain, knowing they never would.”

However, the White House did the unthinkable: they released the entire e-mail exchange, which showed that the selective leaks supplied to journalists by members of the Republican Party contained fabrications.

Jon Karl, ABC’s White House correspondent, still stands by the story, even though the leaked e-mail turns out to be part-fabrication (which makes for a strange “standing by a story”). However, it seems the truth of the story is not based upon the facts but rather the suspicion that maybe there is a smoking gun somewhere.

It seems the truth of the story is not based upon the facts but rather the suspicion that maybe there is a smoking gun somewhere.

What has happened here is that a purported conspiracy by the White House has failed to be supported by hard evidence, whilst a suspected conspiracy by the Republicans to use Benghazi against the Obama Administration seems to have been proven.

Now, let’s be clear, Obama has done plenty of things to justify suspicion of his presidency. From “The Atlantic”: (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/05/the-biggest-obama-scandals-are-proven-and-ignored/275960/)

He’s ordered the assassination of American citizens in secret without respect to due process.

Refused to reveal the legal reasoning he used to conclude his targeted killing program as being legal/lawful.

Hated on whistleblowers.

Spied on a multitude of (presumably) innocent Americans without a warrant or probable cause.

Counts dead military-aged males killed by U.S. drones as “militants”.

Signed a bill that enshrines in law the previously merely-alleged executive power of indefinite detention without trial of terror suspects?

Every Thursday, about 8:15am, Matthew talks with Ethan and Zac on 95bFM’s “Breakfast Show” about conspiracy theories.

(Sorry for mislabelling the Marriage Amendment Bill as the “Gay Marriage Bill”. Framing is important and I failed in my duties.)

This week: weather manipulation (somewhat inspired by my having to leave the house in the middle of a storm).

Notes

Like any Aucklander, I like to complain about the weather. But I’m not a typical Aucklander ((Although I don’t know why I’m making this all about Auckland, since complaining about the weather is a generic human condition.)), am I? I’m a conspiracy theory theorist and, as such, I’ve got to ask:

“Is this succession of heavy showers really the result of a natural phenomenon or is it the work of evil scientists working for evil governments bent on doing evil?”

The phenomena in question is what appears to be an increase in severe weather conditions; droughts (like the one that just ended), storms (like those that did immense damage to Haiti), cold snaps (like in the UK last year). So, what could be causing it if it’s not just a natural cycle? Well…

1. It could be climate change: maybe the climate is changing and, as such, we’re seeing extreme or freak weather condiitons as the Earth’s environment tries to find a new equilibrium? Of course, sinister forces might be doing their utmost to hide the fact the climate is changing, which means we’re treating the new paradigm of weather as being freakish because we don’t think it’s the new normal.
2. Of course, you might be a climate change denier, which makes freak weather conditions slightly harder (but not impossible) to explain. You might just buy into some claim that what appears to be freak weather conditions aren’t (or, at the very least, are not symptomatic of some longer term condition) or you might claim that whilst anthropogenic climate change is not occuring, evil scientists are changing the environment for some malign purpose. ((This kind of view is weird and slightly contradictory: humans can’t change the environment, except when they can.))
3. Or you may be agnostic about anthropogenic climate change but believe that some weather manipulation is going on.

Evidence for the intent to change the weather is fairly rife in the political literature on the ‘net. Many countries have engaged in cloud seeding (trying to force it to rain in otherwise non-rainy conditions) and several climate scientists have talked about how it would be good to modify the environment to stop anthropogenic climate change, increase crop yields and the like. But, the question is this: just because people desire some end, this doesn’t mean they have necessarily taken any steps to achieve, nor does it mean there is even a conspiracy to try to achieve it.

The distinction is crucial. On one level, the definition of a conspiracy is the existence of some group, acting in secret, who desire an end. Conspiracy theorists of a particular “weather manipulation” strip will point towards articles, statements and the like to show that some people have mused about weather manipulation, which is to say we can show intent (a phrase I now associate with the show “Spartacus”) but that doesn’t mean that these people are working in secret to try to achieve it. I intend to wipe out all humanity; I’ve not yet done much more than decide not to breed. ((A decision I may, or may not have made with several people, so, actually, maybe I am involved in a conspiracy to help bring about the end of humanity. It’s not a very effective plan at this stage, I have to say. Want to join me cartel of non-breeders?))

Note: most of the whistleblowers about weather manipulation don’t claim to have proof positive such manipulation is going on. Rather, they tend to argue that the people in power have the want and the ability to control or manipulate the weather.

People also like to point to agreements between nations to share weather manipulation technology, the fact the UN has regulations about the use of “weather warfare” and the like, arguing that such political talk would only be going on if it were already possible to manipulate the weather. However, this ignores two important factors.

1. Sometimes we leglislate for things that might happen so that if (not necessarily “when”) they happen, there are rules and regulations already in place.
2. Sometimes politicans regulate and legislate based upon perceived threats which are not real (witness Maurice Williamson’s 3D-printed Ectasy worries).