musictomyears said:
Isn't it just amusing when some people proclaim "There are no conspiracies!" What a hoot.
In defense of Paul K and Nick Pope; I think they are trying to see the world within certain moderate parameters. As we would all like to. Unfortunately, my 'moderation' gland malfunctioned many years ago, perhaps when my mother passed on Irish genetics to me. Perhaps it was that nasty stint with a Bipolar girlfriend. I don't know, but I do know that things don't change very much without "The Lunatic Fringe" (book title alert) to push things outside the envelope. Some of us tend to look for conspiracies to explain things, even though we know that the required conspiracy would be huge, expensive, difficult to prove, and easily denied by all involved. Others, like Paul and Nick, prefer to work like professional test pilots, starting within the parameters of known knowns, and gradually adding data on the edges of the known science.
I tend toward bigger changes to things or toward oversimplifying if possible. Generally, if someone says, "You're oversimplifying things." it is when they don't want to give up the weak advantage they thought they held through some specialized education or experience, and when someone says, "That's too complicated to work." it's because they know it would take a lot of work to learn enough of the details to grasp full understanding of that complexity.
With conspiracies, there are all kinds: but which kinds are we dealing with in the UFO fields? Are there some conspiracies that are like GM and the trolley systems, where "normal business practices" were used to eliminate competition and shift cities over to automobile transportation? Probably, right out in the open, where energy technology has been pushed to the looney bin by peer review processes and the occasional investment group, along with strategic appointments by well-oiled politicians.
There are others which are probably not as innocuous, but still not deep black. Just a simple campaign contribution here and there, complex risk actuarial formulas, and fear of (OH MY GAWD) communism eliminates the chance that our government will realize the waste involved in our insurance systems.
When it comes to government contracts and secret weapons, there is a continuous flow of crooked deals, insider trading, back-scratching, and just simple incumbent advantage which is occasionally brought out, hung on the clothesline, and whacked a couple of times to see what dust comes out, then put back down on the dirty floor of the pentagon meeting rooms. Journalists are happy that they saw something dirty, contractors have a little of their guilt assuaged, and the military gets to transfer out another general or admiral and promote someone who has been loyal into the hole.
In the meantime, there are places that NEVER see the light of day, and never will. There are programs paid completely out of money that is "taxed" from other programs without questions. There are connections to agencies (like the Secret Service, NSA, Mossad) which few people can imagine, and most shouldn't know about because they are integral to our current political security. There are entire aircraft and weapons lying around the world that have been lost at sea, buried in mountains for emergency use, hidden in cavities welded shut onboard ships, etc., that go beyond reasonable thinking. War isn't a reasonable business. Extreme threats and big Systems require extraordinary defenses and redundant replacements.
People that want to think in terms of what is 'normal' or 'reasonable' have little business in making war. That's what the UFO story is, whether aliens are really a threat to us or not, any government must treat them as such, develop measures AS THOUGH we would have to go to war with them or about them (the first country to develop antigravity would have free electricity, unbeatable weapons, unlimited resources (asteroids), and total responsibility for a world full of half-ignorant savage humans.) In some ways, we are better off limited by petroleum supplies and geographic barriers of roads, oceans and mountains.
Would a conspiracy that keeps the status quo be all that bad? Maybe not.
Being threatened by someone blowing up our oil wells is better than being threatened by someone who could lift a chunk of the planet into orbit or drop an asteroid on us.
Any interstellar civilization would have to have figured this stuff out by now, also. Why would you need to build a "Death Star" laser if you can simply push a planet out of its orbit or push a moon into a closer orbit?
What's a harder conspiracy to believe; that our government has hidden contact or technology and kept it hidden, or that the myriad of alien civilizations cooperates to avoid destroying us for some unknown moral code? Or is there something in human DNA that makes us see spaceships floating in the air that don't exist?
I don't think it's a matter of conspiracy/no conspiracy. There are conspiracies all around us. The matter of interest is which pieces of conspiracies (and military practices) fit into other conspiracies and business practices.
Is the civilized universe setting us up for some kind of pyramid scheme, where we end up paying in but never getting our money back? They are probably laughing at us and our competitive behavior all the way to the Pleiedes DNA bank.
