Over the top conspiracy nuts negate real conspiracies!

Its’a Conspiracy! Pass it On! Wear Shades & Beware the Purple People Anteater
What is it, do you suppose, that makes perfectly sane men and women take leave of their senses and not only believe but relay any cock & bull story they receive over the net? Do they really believe half this stuff? Do they think that clogging the ether with such rubbish is going to make one whit’s worth of difference to the world?

For some of course it’s the drama. To be associated with great events, however vicariously, seems to excite them a lot. I well remember being woken by one of our more dramatic friends calling from Sydney at 2.00 am on what was for us already the morning of Sept 12 to break the news of the destruction of New York’s World Trade Centre. “Our world will never be the same”, she intoned solemnly, excitement dripping from every syllable. She wanted us to be the first to know and was going to ring and wake all our mutual friends in Bali to tell them too. She suggested we do the same so we could all have a dawn gabfest about how awful it was, while we watched it replay again and again on CNN. She was most put out when my best beloved interrupted my sleepy murblings, snatched the ‘phone from my hands and told her the world could wait until a decent hour in the morning. She hasn’t spoken to us since.

At dinner on another occasion a woman, who’s entire life it seems is played out as some frenzied Lilliputian drama, in stagey conspiratorial tones with eyes big as saucers, repeats the blood libel that it was the Mossad and the CIA which had destroyed the twin towers. She got quite shirty when I said I’d never heard so much drivel in a long time. That wasn’t playing the game, yer see? It’s a bit like those awful people who are forever telling jokes. However absurd the story, you’re supposed to hold your peace, nod and mumble placatory noises while avoiding their intense stare until you can decently change the subject or escape. Being a mild sort, that’s what I normally do, but this wasn’t some befuddled youth from a fundamentalist maddrassah in Afghanistan or Pakistan speaking. No, it was a fellow countrywoman who, even if she believed what she was saying, should know better than hijack the dinner conversation with such twaddle.

A World Takeover?
Of course some Conspiracy nuts are really just that, nuts. My friend Lance, who calls himself Babaji and would have you do too, is a lovely man, but quite off the planet. He believes the CIA has been collaborating with the aliens here on earth for many years now in all sorts of sinister ways. Why, they’ve even grafted dog’s heads onto men’s bodies, and vice versa. Though why they’d want to do that is not explained. He says the “Eight Families” already run the world, but plan to take over completely in a few years time by engineering a solar flare that will blind everyone except those who know exactly when it’s going to happen and who are wearing special dark glasses. He warns that when the US government passes laws to take guns away from private citizens, Watch Out! That will be the sign that the Eight Families have made their big move. As a man of some charm and private means, he and a number of like-minded souls are taking steps to create a separate lifestyle that will protect themselves against all this man-made mayhem, plus the rising of the seas, earthquakes and whatever else an enraged Gaia has in store for the rest of us. We’re not talking Jonestown here, Heaven’s Gate, the Solar Temple or other weird cults prone to mass suicide. It’s all harmless, even beneficial. So when the wilder shores of New Age loony tunes meets the NRA, that’s when you know you have a true original on your hands and it’s best to sit back and enjoy.

Not that all this UFO/ET stuff is that uncommon. Many magazines and countless websites are devoted to the subject. At the proliferation of New Age conferences and exhibitions held in various major cities around the world, there is usually a UFO add-on segment addressed by some individual billed as an ex-CIA high-up who’s going to spill the beans. There are just so many of them, all willing to part with their hard earned money. Are these people all nuts? I don’t think so. More a suspension of judgement, wishful/catastrophe thinking, and an escape into a fabulous world, I’d say. So why don’t they just buy a ticket for “The Lord of the Rings”? Good question, but somehow it doesn’t do it for them.

Am I saying that most if not all Conspiracy theories doing the rounds are a load of rubbish, then? Not a bit of it! History shows us all too clearly that all kinds of skullduggery goes on out there. The trick is to separate the pernicious, the paranoid and the self-serving from the loony and the woo-woo. There is quite enough naughtiness going on in the real world without having to import it from outer space. Dubya’s eyes are already far too close together and his manner and cronies so unappealing, their policies so awful that people do not have to invent and purvey silly stories to make the point. Conspiracy nuts do the world a great disservice by such unfettered credulity and general fatheadedness. There’s nothing the bad guys love better than all this stuff. It keeps people’s eyes off what’s really going on underneath our noses. Meantime they wheel their wheelbarrows of folding green all the way to the bank.

Blood Libels
“ The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, put out by the Czarist secret police in the latter part of the 19th C. claimed there was a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. In medieval days stories, which survived into modern times, were put about that Jews sacrificed Christian babies in their rituals. Nowadays stories that the Israelis were responsible for the destruction of the Twin Towers routinely do the rounds. These are all false and have been shown to be so. Anyone who is remotely willing to know the truth can establish that. And yet, every one of these stories is still being seriously advanced by someone somewhere in the world today. We’re not just talking neo-Nazis here, or even the deeply stupid, I mean governments or people of influence who cynically seek to stir hatred for their own purposes. Do some Israelis seek to prevent any vestige of a Palestinian state? You betcha, just as some Arabs plot to push the Jews into the sea. But it isn’t most people, on either side, who feel this way and the majority would much prefer to get on with their lives in peace given half a chance.

Governments can and do get up to all kinds of things they don’t want to admit to. The British government faked the Zimmerman telegram, which among other things showed that the Germans had plans to invade Mexico and helped bring America into World War 1. I don’t suppose the US government believed it for a moment, but it sure played well in the gutter press after the Lusitania and other U-boat sinkings. Passing over any beastly plots by the likes of Hitler and Stalin, more recently the Brits and the French colluded with Israel to invade Egypt and to seize control of the Suez Canal. The US has encouraged any number of coups from restoring the Shah in Iran in the 1950’s through to the present, in Vietnam, Central & South America and the botched the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. The CIA got up to all sorts of weird stunts all over the place, including an exploding cigar to whack Castro (I arsk you!), even trying to outsource the job to the Mafia. To some extent we expect our governments to do things like this, which is OK if they keep quiet about it, if it is for a cause we approve of and if it works. Most of us know Saddam Hussein is a monster and we’d much rather someone assassinated him than we had to have a war about it. What on earth ‘s wrong with the CIA? Can’t they even hack that? If the Mossad’s so dam’ good why don’t they do it? Apparently organising these things isn’t as easy as all that. Aaaah! say the conspiracy freaks, but they don’t want to.........

The assassination of Jack Kennedy, closely followed by the assassination of his assassin Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack “I did it for Jackie” Ruby just has to be a conspiracy. We may not ever know what really happened but you’d have to be born yesterday to actually believe the load of old codswallop they came up with. Same goes for the assassination of Martin Luther King. I sure have my doubts about Bobby Kennedy’s killing too, but the story is at least plausible.

Stranger then Fiction?
The world and its ways are quite weird and wonderful enough already without going to such extraordinary lengths to invent fond fancies from the galaxy. If conspiracies are your bag a good place to start is with money. Just start looking into what people will do to get it and to keep it. In the developing world they run kleptocracies as long as they can manage it, only softening into oligopolies when they have to. In the West and the rest of the developed world we are democracies, as if that made everything hunky dory! How much do you think it costs to get elected President of those there United States? And who do you suppose stumps up the boodle for it and why on earth do you think they’d do a thing like that?

In a highly populated country as small as Great Britain some 6,000 people (0.01% of the population, mainly aristocrats and the Crown) still own 80% of the land. Not only that, they don’t pay rates and their ownership is subsidised by everyone else by way of taxes. Meantime the remaining 59 million people or 99.99% of the population huddle on the 20% of land that is left. In France there has been land reform and things are more meritocratic in some ways but the country is still run “their way” by a self-serving and elite mandarinate of enarques . Do not look to the media to comment on such things in any depth because the media owners themselves are invariably part of the privileged power structure and their scribes mere hirelings.

Take a look at Big Business. You can forget Ken Lay of Enron, Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom and the like. These are just the minnows, parvenus that can be thrown to the wolves now they’ve been caught with their hands in the till. Don’t expect too much in the way of jail time though, sets a bad precedent. And don’t hold your breath waiting for any meaningful reform to prevent it happening again. That’s bad for business.

Biggest Fine in History
If you think Big Tobacco was bad, cast an eye on the ways of Big Pharma. This is the most lucrative industry in the world today. Worth more than the entire banking and beverage (that’s booze and colas) industries put together. Did you know that most of the major players were found guilty of operating a criminal cartel fixing prices of vitamins for over a decade by both the US government and the EU? They were fined something like US$1.5 billion, the largest corporate fine imposed in history. Still, that’s peanuts to the $100 billion in criminal profits they made over the period. And do you think any of these guys are doing time? Nah! Not one of them even lost their job.
You’d think this would be the stuff of headlines wouldn’t you? Not a bit of it, decently tucked away as a business story, if covered at all. You might even think that the shareholders would wonder about the gaping $750 million hole in their company’s bottom line when it came to that year’s annual results. You might think that, until you remembered how much money you’d received as your share of the huge profits made over past decade and the value of your stock. Here’s the list of the guilty; Hoffman La Roche, the prime instigator, Aventis, BASF, Rhone-Poulenc, Merck, Solvay, Takeda, Dai-ichi and Eisai.

These guys are not interested in your health, they are interested in your money, pure and simple. Do not deceive yourself thinking otherwise. If you need any convincing, just consider this. The generic cost for the ingredients of 100 tabs of Prozac is $0.11 and it is sold for $247.47 a hundred, that is a 224,973% mark-up. Not bad! But if you think that’s rich, look at this, the generic cost of 100 tabs of Xanax is $0.024 and it costs you $136.79. That’s a cool 569,958% mark-up. Nice one, lads!

Ah.... but, says Big Pharma, we have to spend years of reseach to discover this drug, not to mention all the others that didn’t work out, then we have to formulate it, test it to see if it’s safe and market it. If we don’t make a decent profit who will come up with the drugs which save so many lives? (Good question. It would be hard not to come up with a better system than this). What’s not stated is the fact that by far the greatest cost in medical research is already borne by the public anyway in taxes and by way of government grants, so we are paying through the nose twice over.

What’s wrong with a modest mark-up of say just 1,500%? What would that do to drug prices? Let’s take the stomach-acid suppressing drug Prilosec. Consumers pay $360.00 for 100 caps which costs $0.52 for the ingredients, a modest 69,417% mark-up. Then there’s the generic for Prilosec, which might be sold at around $80.00 about a 16,000% mark-up, but still being sold at an atrociously high price. Prilosec at a 1,500% mark-up, which would be the envy of many an industry, would then cost around $8.50 for 100 caps. Drugs at those kind of prices could make a real difference to world health.

If Indian pharmaceutical companies can sell anti-AIDS retro-viral drugs in South Africa at $200 per individual per annum and still make a handsome profit, while Big Pharma charges $15,000 dollars a year and sues the South African government for buying the Indian generics, you get an idea of how this nasty game is being played.

We’re only doing it for you......Honest!
Big Pharma’s protestations that they are only doing all this for our own good and without them we’d be much worse off, ring distinctly hollow when you know that, in addition to the obscene profits, each year they bring fewer and fewer lifesaving drugs to market because “lifestyle” and/or “re-formulated” drugs are more profitable; that they proceed with drugs knowing them to be dangerous and even fatal; that they have routinely “fixed” research to get favourable results and that they engage in endless litigation to prolong patents and stop at nothing to maintain artificially high prices. They largely control the market for nutritional supplements so it cannot compete with their drugs, if not by operating a criminal cartel, then by buying up nutritional companies and successfully lobbying governments to regulate the industry so as to prevent natural non-drug products from competing. They’ve been pretty successful at doing this almost everywhere except in the US.

These are not very nice people and in terms of lives lost, they leave Big Tobacco for dead. So with industries like this around (and who’s to say they are worse than a good few others?) what do you think that says about the politicians, the doctors, the lawyers the accountants, the universities, the media all of whom are routinely co-opted on the pay-roll in one form or another? This is perhaps where it starts to get a little closer to home for us ordinary folks and we might do well to think of our part in all this.

Ralph Nader, Where are you now?
It may be the best of all possible worlds, but it’s still a naughty one. Too many of the Great and the Good are nothing of the sort. People of power and position are only worthy of respect if they retain some moral stature beyond self-importance and enriching themselves and their families at the expense of everyone else.

He might make a lousy President of the USA (then again, maybe not?) but what the world needs now is a thousand Ralph Naders in public life. And if the rest of us could forebear looking for Purple People Anteaters under the bed or otherwise being interfered with by aliens we might spare a thought to what’s really going on in the world around us and doing something about it. That might make the world a better place, mightn’t it? But based on the principle that “we get the governments we deserve”, how do you reckon we’re doing......?

Insert Quote :

Big Pharma sued the South African government for buying an Indian generic anti-AIDs drug at $200 per patient per year and not from them for $15,000. The mark-up on the antidepressant drug Prozac is 224,973%. Both the US and the EU governments fined Big Pharma a combined $1.5 billion for 10 years of criminal price fixing

ParacelsusAsia
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