The extent of mafia money and influence within the corridors of American power in the middle of the past century is a familiar story, told in fictional form in iconic movies like The Godfather. Given the extent of these connections, it wouldn’t be surprising if the shadowy realms of the government now known to have been involved in illegal covert activities—such as COINTELPRO and the CIA’s Operation CHAOS—turned to the mafia to handle certain jobs; for one thing, they could offer the services of experienced hit men sworn to omertà. For his part, Hoover famously denied for decades that the mafia existed, whether because he owed any mob bosses favors—or simply because he preferred to stay focused on political subversives like King.
Seneca Scott, Did the FBI Kill MLK? | Compact Mag
Tag Archives: conspiracies
Do Your Light Bulbs Last as Long They Should?
I haven’t written down any dates, but for the last ten years or so with all the push to stop using incandescent bulbs, I’ve purchased several CFLs that did not last as long as I thought they should. Has that been your experience as well?
I remember touring an energy-saving model home at a museum in Georgia and the guide saying CFLs were super longlasting. The Internet is saying they could last five to ten times longer than incandescent blubs. My wife almost derailed the guide by asking if their long life relied on leaving them on most of the time. Our CFLs have burned out just as quickly, if not more quickly, than regular bulbs, and maybe that’s because we turn off the lights when we leave the room, like our fathers taught us to do. (We’re not lighting the whole neighborhood, are we?)
As I type, it occurs to me the lights in this room have been in place for a very long time, at least long enough for me to forget when I put them in. They’re probably LEDs.
We wrote last year about the number of filaments Edison actually tested, because folklore has run away with that number. Today, I offer you a video that shows a light bulb that has been burning since 1901 and the story of a group of businessmen who conspired to keep light bulbs from becoming nigh-perfect.
Consensus of Depravity, Eager to Neglect
I believed, therefore I spoke,
“I am greatly afflicted.”
I said in my haste,
“All men are liars.” (Psalm 116:10-11)
I felt a bit triggered today when I saw someone casually mention the 9/11 attacks were an inside job. Were Bin Laden and his disciples bought and paid for by U.S. government officials? How does that explain anything better than the attack being their best effort to harm the country they hate? It doesn’t, but it is more tantalizing, more sensational, more of the prideful vein of being able to see through the lies powerful men sell us.
Earlier this week we said conspiracy theories were attempts at better explanations and they seem to ignore human neglect that causes all kinds of trouble. They also seem to ignore the common pride and self-interest that easily allow or actively pursue exploitation and hatred. We don’t need evil puppet masters pulling our strings to put our comfort or success over everyone around us.
Many people say prejudice isn’t natural, that people have to be taught who to dislike. I think prejudice is the most natural thing we do. It’s the easiest thing in the world to notice a difference in someone else and believe that difference makes you better than them. And it only takes the right flow of circumstances, rumors, and actual injuries to turn prejudice into hate.
I’ve read this is how the civil war in Rwanda was seeded. Belgian colonialists sowed racism among Rwandans a century ago, dividing them into ethnic groups in order to keep them under control. The people accepted this division and after a few decades began to hate each other. You could call that a conspiracy, but the colonial powers only wanted control; after they left, the hatred they sowed bore fruit in genocide.
Our own civil war was arguably worse, because we mostly wanted to exploit the labor of enslaved foreigners. Along comes General Lee to say, “What we wanted was the right to govern our lands by our own judgement.” But our judgement was an economy of exploitive labor, which many people both North and South supported. As long as we weren’t doing the hard work, we supported it. And along comes the Marxists to say, “All labor is criminally exploitive! We will lead a revolution to overthrow the current exploitation so that we can exploit the workers the right way–to our benefit!”
The Lord tells us to love him with all of our heart, soul, and mind, and to love our neighbor as ourselves, and if ever a commandment demonstrated our depravity, it’s this one. Who among us doesn’t want our neighbor to simply keep to himself? How many of us are willing to allow risks for people who are removed from us and not for those close to us?
This week, a friend on Twitter described his neighborhood as being on the wrong side of the tracks. When the city scheduled a day for big item pickup in the nice parts of town, it sent several trucks, and teams of people volunteered to help. For his neighborhood, it sent one truck at a time with one driver to clear off the things his neighbors set out on the sidewalk. Some of those things couldn’t be picked up for various reasons; the city felt no compulsion to get them completely cleared away. And so the poor are further impoverished by the carelessness of the privileged.
I’ve heard that pharmaceutical companies run drug trials in African nations, where people have less ability to push back when things go wrong. People are complaining that their neighbors are being experimented on. This, dear believer of conspiracies, is the way of the world. No evil society with mythical power to command presidents and CEOs. Just regular people seeking their own interest and likely not thinking too long about the best interests of their neighbors.
Searching for a Better Conspiracy
I’ve heard a little about QAnon in the wild, primarily that one of my congressional candidates has favorable views on it. World’s current cover story reports the rising concerns among Christians over friends and family members who profess to believe in the QAnon conspiracy. As I understand it, they believe an secret society of Satanists is running the world or pushing toward an evil one world government and Donald Trump is the chosen one to defeat them. I’ve read that he has already defeated many of them in secret ways the public may never know.
“In the pandemic lockdown, QAnon accounts exploded in popularity as people spent more time online,” Emly Belz writes. “Many Christians have sunk so deeply into Q that it fills a lot of their conversations and most of their time online.”
The theories spun are the sticky, tangled kind. I don’t want to try to refute specific claims here, but I do want to talk about conspiracy theories in general, their uselessness, and how they run contrary to what we know of human nature. First, let’s look at what conspiracies actually are.
You could easily come to think a conspiracy theory is just wild hare, an elaborate explanation for a particular disaster with an unsatisfactory explanation or a series of unthinkable events. The Kennedy assassination, the Zodiac killer, and why Firefly was cancelled are prime subjects for theories like this. The official explanations are either incomplete or unsatisfactory, so some people construct better theories.
Conspiracy theories argue that the powerful have fed us these incomplete explanations because the lie is better than the truth at maintaining the status quo. They remain theories because investigators cannot unearth enough facts to prove them; if the claims were to be revealed as true, we would call start called the theories “history.”
The world’s most famous actual conspiracy led to the death of Christ. Temple leaders, including the high priest, wanted Jesus of Nazareth dead for political, and ultimately spiritual, reasons. They were powerful men, but they didn’t have that kind of power. If Herod or Pilate or Caesar Tiberius had wanted him dead, they could have given the order, but the high priest didn’t have the power to execute people. Plus he didn’t have the backing of all of the temple leaders. Plus the optics weren’t right; too many people loved this wandering rabbi. So a few of them conspired behind the backs of other temple leaders to conduct a mock trial, get him before Pilate, lobby for his execution, and have him dead before Monday. That’s a conspiracy.
The Gunpowder Plot that launched the face of a thousand Guy Fawkes was an attempt to blow up the House of Lords with the king and many supporters with it. They had to plot in secret because they didn’t have any real power to direct or overthrow their own government. They had to try unexpected brute force. What they should have tried was some explosive ideas, but with all of this gunpower lying around, why let it go waste?
This is how conspiracies actually work (or don’t). These secret cabals didn’t have the power to accomplish their goals outright, so they did what they could in the shadows. Compare that to modern day China murdering and abusing the Uighurs for the last few years. They aren’t conspiring against them; they are directly abusing them and lying to the world about it. The only secret is what the outside world knows about it. This is not like the QAnon claims of the powerful directing our society through shadow strings, celebrity endorsements, and trafficking networks. We’ll get to a better explanation in another post.
As Abe Lincoln’s first VP, Hannibal Hamlin, famously said, “Once the twenty-four news gets ahold of this, there’ll be a conspirator in every pew. Verily.”
Photo by Mohammad Hoseini Rad on Unsplash
Stranger thoughts
I’m taking a vacation week this week. It wasn’t supposed to be a stay-cation, but it turned out that way. I had planned (along with the other Vikings) on being at the Tall Ships Festival in Duluth, as part of the penumbra surrounding the visit of the Draken Harald Fairhair replica Viking ship. But the Norns had other plans. So I’m hanging around the house, catching up with maintenance stuff, working (in a preliminary way) on my next novel, reading, and watching Stranger Things on Netflix.
I was reluctant to try Stranger Things. It’s basically horror, a genre that does not entertain me (I was a traumatized child. There’s no thrill for me in fear). But descriptions made it sound interesting. I gave it a shot. So far, so good. There are plot weaknesses, but the characters are good and the writers keep it interesting.
It got me thinking about the whole phenomenon of the Evil Government Conspiracy in fiction and entertainment. It seems to me strange that so many Hollywood productions, created by confirmed liberals who theoretically love government, are based on the idea that the government is secretly running massive projects aimed at enslaving us all and destroying the very fabric of the universe, unleashing unspeakable horrors. Offhand, you’d think that people who believe government can never be too big or too powerful would be incapable of imagining such a thing.
Part of it might be an impoverishment of the imagination. The liberal writer looks for some great force that might be capable of doing really cosmic evil. And the only great force he/she can imagine is the government, because he/she believes in nothing higher.
But perhaps it’s also a question of comfort. The liberal writer imagines a huge government conspiracy because he/she considers the very idea fantasy. Everyone knows the government is good, so an evil government is pure fantasy. Willing suspension of disbelief. There’s no existential dread for them in the mix.
I, on the other hand, consider big government a very real threat in the world. For that reason such a conspiracy is threatening to me. I prefer not to think about it. And so I avoid such stories most of the time.
These are preliminary thoughts. And probably wrong in large part.