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Conspiranews January 2020 Edition
23 Plays4 years ago
It's the end of January, so it's time for a news update: Josh and M talk the Impeachment Saga; Aotearoa's own Watergate Affair; suspicious AIs; Space Force; Jeff Bezo's nudes; the Coronavirus; Jeffrey Epstein; and a QAnon kidnapping gone wrong.
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Endorsing Andy Basciago for President
00:00:00
Speaker
People have asked us recently, given that Joe Rogan just endorsed Bernie Sanders, who we will be endorsing in the 2020 presidential election. The answer is easy. We will once again be endorsing the one, the only, Andy Basciago.
00:00:15
Speaker
Now we don't know whether Andy Bishago is running for president in 2020, but that won't stop us from endorsing him as our preferred presidential candidate. After all, Andy Bishago is the only presidential candidate who has been to Mars. Andy Bishago is the only presidential candidate who has traveled in time. And Andy Bishago is the only presidential candidate who has a concrete policy platform as to how to deal with the upcoming revelation about the existence of alien lifeforms.
00:00:40
Speaker
So when you come to cast your vote in any election that might occur this year, we say you should cast a right-and-vote for Andy Bashiago. Maybe you're voting for who's going to govern Aotearoa New Zealand. Maybe you're going to be voting in local elections to decide, say, who's going to be in charge of the plumbing. Maybe you'll just be voting in a member in your local body corporate. But whatever the case, vote Andy Bashiago.
Introduction to Conspiracy News
00:01:14
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:01:24
Speaker
Hello, you're listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Edison, getting good and tanked as usual as Dr. M.R.X.Dentist. It's the end of January, which means it is time for our first conspiracy news roundup of the year. And what a large amount of news we have for you as well. But first, a comment on our perfectly normal episode last week. It was a perfectly normal episode of the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, wasn't it, Josh?
00:01:53
Speaker
It certainly was. Often for significant anniversaries you've done something a little bit more conceptual. But not last week. Last week was perfectly normal. We just talk about a perfectly real thing that exists and is legitimate. Yes, a perfectly normal true crime podcast broadcast by the BBC which was perfectly normal and not the perfect kind of fodder for us to cover in this factuality based podcast. Precisely.
00:02:18
Speaker
I hope you've all gone and listened to The Whisperer in Darkness, actually. Yes. Good, good, good, good listen. And if you want to hear more of our thoughts on it, you should subscribe to our Patreon or Podbean Patreon system to get the background on that perfectly normal episode from last week. Perfectly normal. Perfectly normal. As normal as the news episode that we're about to do right now.
00:02:40
Speaker
Even more normal. More normal than the news episode. This news episode is unusual. Last week was perfectly normal. Perfectly normal. Perfectly normal. Shall we move on to the news? I think we're better. And I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news.
00:02:57
Speaker
So, the news.
Trump Impeachment and Bolton Revelations
00:02:59
Speaker
The news. Well, obviously, the Trump impeachment is going on, as we speak, probably. Dunno, there's a hell of a lot to say about now. There's been a few conspiratorial developments, I suppose. Now, I want to jump back in time, just over a week, because you actually put the notes up for this before we recorded last week's perfectly normal episode. And it started off with Trump impeachment. It's happening, but there doesn't seem to be anything worth saying.
00:03:25
Speaker
This week has been interesting for what has gone in and out of that little note segment in the Notes for the Podcast is going to conspiracy because there are things worth saying. It's just it's not entirely clear the things which are worth paying attention to given the Republican majority in the Senate.
00:03:47
Speaker
But there are things which are worth noting. The first of which is the John Bolton Bombshell, which continues to reverberate as bombs do in Washington. Yes, I've heard people say, should have just given him his war, he wanted a war in Iraq, you should have given it to him, instead you kicked him out, and now he's, if only that,
00:04:09
Speaker
They then angered Iran after they got rid of Bolton. Bolton would have taken a war in Iran in lieu of a war in Iraq. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if he thinks you're the same country. Just one of them is misspelled by foreign policy analysts.
00:04:26
Speaker
Yeah, so his book hasn't been released, has it? It's just been like transcripts. So excerpts have been released all the full text. It's not entirely clear to the New York Times. And the excerpts very strongly suggest, by directly stating, that President Trump knew about the withholding of aid to the Ukraine, and it was a policy decision designed to get dirt on a political candidate.
00:04:53
Speaker
The reason why the book is not released is that Bolton and his lawyers, even though they don't feel that anything in the book should be classified as top secret, still gave it to White House counsel and whatever the committee is that does the
00:05:10
Speaker
checking to make sure that tech's released by former diplomats etc etc above board and don't contain government secrets gave it to that particular committee and the white house is going no there is top secret stuff you can't release this now which does look like trying to bolt the door
Discussing Trump's Remarks on Yovanovitch
00:05:30
Speaker
after the hen to escape the hen house. That is how that metaphor goes, yes. There's a fox involved as well. Probably, he was watching. Yeah, so there's sort of the Bolton, and then of course, so do we need to call John Bolton as a witness? And there's the whole, do we call witnesses or not? And do the Republicans have enough votes to stop them from calling witnesses? Which is all an open question at time of recording.
00:05:55
Speaker
Even though, given that the next day of the impeachment is about to start in the US at the time we are recording now, it is possible it's going to turn out that by the time this comes out, everything we're saying will be moot. Well, exactly. So we should probably, we could mention that there's been the recording of Donald Trump saying they need to take her out. What's the note? That was Marie Yovanovitch. Yes, the ambassador to Ukraine.
00:06:21
Speaker
take her out, which appeared to mean get her fired from her position, not actually have her murdered hit name styles. Except that, as people have pointed out, he wasn't talking to, say, Department of Justice officials. He was talking to Rudy's mates like Lev Parnas. And so there's a question of, if you say take her out to a government official, then sure, the implication is get rid of her, demote her, repost her somewhere else.
00:06:49
Speaker
When you're at a dinner with people who have no political power, but have connections back in the Ukraine, business-wise and maybe mafia-fosa-wise,
00:07:00
Speaker
Saying take her out does take on a slightly different tinge. Tinge? Tanked. Both. Both. And so yes, there is an open question. Was Trump actually ordering an assassination? Now, probably not. But at the same time, the context is important. Wasn't actually talking with government officials when he made this claim. Yep.
00:07:23
Speaker
And, yeah, I mean, and the impeachment process is calling up the whole Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Boussina scandal. Yes, you'd almost think they're actually doing an impeachment trial of the former vice president.
00:07:38
Speaker
But at any rate, it's ongoing, rapidly changing, so that's probably all we should say about it now, and maybe there'll be more in the weeks to come. Now, moving to local news, something which started seeming like a big deal here, but then also appears to have fizzled out, kind of, was the break-in of the National Party headquarters a couple of weeks ago
New Zealand National Party HQ Break-in
00:08:03
Speaker
now, wasn't it?
00:08:03
Speaker
Well, a week and a half or something. Yeah, I mean, it actually feels like it was a long time ago, but so much news has occurred in the interim that it's a made time stretch out. So yes, the National Party headquarters in Greenland, which I went past on a bus. I drive past most days. Just the other day, which we'll come back to due to certain people claiming that no one knows where this location is, was broken into about a week and a half ago.
00:08:30
Speaker
And the only thing stolen were three laptops that belonged to staffers. I don't think any MPs lost their laptops. They were staffer laptops. And the leader of the National Party in Aotearoa, New Zealand, Simon Bridges, when now we're not saying it's clearly a politically motivated burglary, but we do find it suspicious given we're in an election year.
00:08:57
Speaker
Yes, we are. Indeed, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern just announced yesterday, I think it was, the date of the election, which will be September the 19th. Which I believe is suffragette day in this country. And also International Talk Like a Pirate Day. So we'll see which one... Dar, I can't wait to come to that election. It'll be fantastic. Josh, have you seen me misin-marced?
00:09:17
Speaker
No, I have not. Good. Good. Is that because it's mizzen? Is it? What have you done with me and mizzen mast? The mizzen mast? I told you not to, I told you not to touch it. The mizzen mast is the aftmost boat, a mast, a boat with more than three masts. The aftmost boat? Aftmost mast. Oh, you're so nautical. I'm literally a boat.
00:09:40
Speaker
So, yes, at any rate, there were a lot of dark suggestions. I find it suspicious that this happened in an election year, but the more has come out about it, the less it sounds like a politically motivated job and more it sounds like a common burglary. Yes, because the business beside the National Party headquarters
00:10:02
Speaker
was robbed in exactly the same way several weeks ago, and what did they take? The laptops. Now people, it's one of the things Ed said was, you know, it's particularly suspicious that they only took the laptops, not other valuable things that happen to be in the office. There are apparently some very valuable bottles of wine, for instance.
00:10:21
Speaker
weren't taken. But I think from what I've heard of, the details of burgers and laptops are pretty much one of the number one things. They're portable, they're good value for money, basically. They're expensive and yet small enough to carry away, unlike a bottle of wine, which is probably harder to get rid of and a bit more
00:10:39
Speaker
Yeah, there's virtually no resale value for wine on the black market. And that assumes you actually have no expensive bottle of wine. So a cheap bottle of wine is worth the same as an expensive bottle of wine if you're simply flogging off stuff you've taken from an office or a house. Well, laptops are actually valuable. So it's quite common for people to leave the wine behind. And as you point out, unless you've got one of those apps that goes, oh, oh, that's a really you'll go, yeah, that's just wine. It's just wine.
00:11:09
Speaker
Now it's possible these particular laptops I think were fairly heavily encrypted since they did have... Well they were meant to have been locked away and they hadn't been, so one might suspect that maybe the passwords might be a little easy to guess. But yes, another claim was that it seemed a little bit suspicious.
00:11:26
Speaker
They made it sound like they'd sort of gone out of their way to target the National Party headquarters, specifically suggesting that, you know, unless you knew to go looking for it, you wouldn't know it was there. But yeah, I've seen the hoardings. It's on a major bus route. And it does have big... Well, actually, to be honest, I didn't know it was the National Party headquarters because it's also the office of one of their MPs. I'd seen the MP signs. You can't miss those at all. No. So there'd certainly be... There's no way of not knowing that it's a...
00:11:55
Speaker
a national party office. But what's particularly interesting, if you're concerned this is a politically motivated event, was that about three weeks ago, one of the white nationalist groups in this country plastered the billboards outside that particular office.
00:12:16
Speaker
with claims that the National Party is also a leftist plot to take over the country. So you might go, if it's politically motivated, you've already got a group which has targeted the office once before, which are to the right and not to the left,
00:12:32
Speaker
So surely you'd be wanting to poke your finger or point your finger, wave your finger however much you care, at the party which has already done deliberate attacks on that building, rather than intimate, as Simon Bridges and other political commentators on the right have in this country, that it's a leftist plot being orchestrated by Jacinda Ardern.
00:12:53
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, it doesn't seem particularly solid, I think, those particular claims of conspiracy. Actually, one thing, I don't think we even put it down the notes, did we? But the serious fraud office sticking to the news is just details are scant at the moment. But certain national party members, I kind of remember exactly how they've been identified.
00:13:19
Speaker
No, because the party is not being sued, nor are senior MPs. But it turns out that at least some people associated with the national party are going to be prosecuted for fraud, particularly what appears to be money laundering to the party.
00:13:38
Speaker
Yes, so again, yet another thing that has come up and is quite low on details at the moment. Which is probably why we don't have an option because it'll be bigger news next week once they sort out the name suppression. Yes, so once again, watch the space. Where should we go next?
Space Force Logo vs Starfleet: Coincidence?
00:13:58
Speaker
Should we go to Saudi Arabia? Should we go to space? Should we go somewhere else entirely? Let's do something a little bit, let's say, frisky.
00:14:06
Speaker
But we do know when the cameras are off. Let's do something a little bit frivolous and talk about Star Trek. Josh, have you watched the first episode of Star Trek Picard? I have. I quite liked it, actually. I did too, actually. Not a massive Star Trek fan, but I did like that one. But I kind of felt it was doing something interesting with the franchise. Yeah. And I'm looking forward to where it's going. Did you notice the Starfleet logo in the background of some of those shots? No, but I do know what it looks like, more or less.
00:14:33
Speaker
Because if you've seen the Starfleet logo, you've seen the new Space Force logo. Yes, people have been having a lot of fun putting with side by side comparisons of the logo for Donald Trump's new Space Force and the logo for the Federation of Planets in Star Trek. They do look very similar. You've sort of got an arrowhead type shape in the middle with a circle around it and sort of a sort of an arbitrary kind of ring around the arrowhead thing. They are very similar. As people have pointed out, it may be
00:15:03
Speaker
less, the route from one to the other might be more circuitous than possibly it appears. But what's important, and we've mentioned this on the podcast before, there is a group of people, mostly actually associated with our preferred presidential candidate, Andy Basciago, who believe that Gene Roddenberry based Star Trek and Starfleet
00:15:28
Speaker
on a secretive military space program that he was privy to. Which means that maybe it's not that the Space Force logo cribs the design elements of the Starfleet logo. It might be the Starfleet logo cribs design elements of the original Space Force logo that the new Space Force logo is based upon.
00:15:53
Speaker
And the thing is, it turns out there was actually an old Space Force logo. Donald Trump didn't invent the idea of a Space Force from whole cloth. It has been sort of looked at as part of the Air Force or something in the past. And there was a Space Force logo, which did have the same sort of writing in a ring and something in the middle. And the new one looks kind of like the old Space Force logo plus the NASA logo kind of jammed together, which ends up looking like the Federation of Planets logo.
00:16:23
Speaker
It's entirely possible that it wasn't arrived at by someone simply putting a piece of tracing paper over the Star Trek one and coming up with the new Space Force One. Although given the way the Trump presidency works, that's also... Couldn't rule it out.
Clearview AI and Privacy Concerns
00:16:38
Speaker
Precisely. Let's talk about AIs. AI, now.
00:16:42
Speaker
Because we'll be talking more about AI in the patron bonus. Our patrons will hear a bit more about artificial intelligence, but what we have for all of you, Clearview AI is a company that's been in the news a little bit. I'm not quite sure exactly what's caused it to come up at the moment, because it has been around for a while, but it seems like people have just suddenly started paying attention to it.
00:17:05
Speaker
a facial recognition service that has a very, very large database of faces to draw from and their promotional materials. They sort of have a little bar graph with, you know, the FBI database has however many sort of tens of thousands or something of faces and some other law enforcement agency has more and they have like three billion or something photographs that they can draw from.
00:17:28
Speaker
It's a service that has been in use for a while. Various law enforcement agencies in the States have been using it and say it is, you know, it's a useful tool. They've got security footage of a person in the act of committing a crime, but they don't know who they are. Put it through and there it goes. But part of the question has been where exactly they've got all this facial data from. And it certainly seems like they've mostly got it from scraping social media websites, your Facebooks and your Instagrams and your Twitters and so on.
00:17:58
Speaker
Which would be against a number of policies of those social media organisations, which means that if this is the case, and Clearview are denying it, that sounds a little bit like a word beginning with C. You can't say that on a podcast!
00:18:19
Speaker
No, you're right, I can't. I was thinking fraud, but that doesn't start with a C, so I don't... Crawled? Crawled? Crawled. Yes, no, I mean, so the social, various social medias out there, they... I think cover-up is probably a better word. That'll do, yes.
00:18:40
Speaker
They have all your data. They do kind of closely guard that data, which they have, and they have their policies that say, no, you're not allowed to set bots scraping on images. Twitter specifically... Although often Facebook allows it. Well, yes. Twitter apparently explicitly says images are hosted on Twitter. You're not allowed to use them for facial recognition. They go so far as to specifically spell that out.
00:19:04
Speaker
And yet, apparently, everyone's photos are on there. There's a story in the New York Times, which seemed to be the main one going on about it, and the reporter in that even tested things like she would sort of covered half of her face and submitted a photo of that and was able to recognize her from ones like that. Interestingly enough, here's something I didn't know, a bit more.
00:19:28
Speaker
artificial intelligence not quite but there is a website I'm pretty sure it's this person does not exist dot com oh and if you go I think that's the link if you go to this person does not exist dot com you'll be greeted with a full page photograph of a person's face but as the URL suggests that person does not exist it is a composite image made by a
00:19:50
Speaker
Made by a predictive artificial intelligence, one of those things. And so apparently she did actually try some people who don't exist and that didn't come back with any search results, which is probably a point towards the algorithm behind the website so much as Clearview AI. But another thing from this particular article was, though, that basically it was through sort of slightly subtle means, she basically became aware that the company
00:20:19
Speaker
appeared to be monitoring whether or not law enforcement agencies were searching specifically for that reporter's picture, indicating they knew she was investigating them and they wanted to know if she had been going to the authorities and saying, hey, can you use that software that you have, for instance, using me as a test? So again, something they sort of denied.
00:20:45
Speaker
Yeah, it's looking shaky. There appears to be some dodginess going on in the background. Now, I was thinking one way to really screw with the system would be to then go to, this face does not exist, and then start giving those people names, putting them into your Facebook profiles and Twitter account, had lunch with my friend the other day, and that's actually swamp the AI with people who don't exist.
00:21:12
Speaker
Maybe that's a attack vector. Yeah, I'm sure you could automate it. It must have some sort of an API. But then that would involve, if they are scraping from social networks, then you'd have to flood all the social networks with fake pictures. It requires a communist revolution, Josh. A communist revolution to take power back from the corporate AIs and give them to our AI Stalin. Well, there we go. Now you're making sense. Now, speaking of Stalin,
00:21:40
Speaker
A person who's nothing like Stalin whatsoever, Prince Mohammed bin Salman from Saudi Arabia. Salman? Stalin? You make the connection. The two have nothing to do with each other.
Did MBS Hack Bezos' Phone?
00:21:53
Speaker
P.S. My bones would be very hard to hack through with a bone sore. Just putting that out there. Just if anyone ever... This is true, I've tried. Yep. No, so, Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, as he likes to be called, appears to have done the dirty on his mate Jeff Bezos.
00:22:11
Speaker
Yes, so it turns out that around about May 1st, 2018, MBS sent a video to Jeff Bezos' WhatsApp app on his phone. Like a good buddy might do. And then around about the same time, Jeff Bezos' phone started leaking a very large amount of data to a third party.
00:22:37
Speaker
which meant that about three weeks later the National Enquirer got in contact with him saying, so we've got the nodes you've been sending to the person you're having an affair with and we're going to release them to the public unless you acquiesce to our demand.
00:22:54
Speaker
Which we talked about at the time. Now, Bezos was of course ever so slightly concerned about where the photos came from. Actually, rather than allowing the blackmail to proceed, he simply released the information himself. But decided he needed to know where it came from, so he got a forensic analyst to look at his devices.
00:23:14
Speaker
And they discovered that around about the point in time that MBS sent a video to Bezos, there was a vulnerability in WhatsApp related to attachments. And that's the point in time where the data started leaking from his phone. And apparently it happened for months upon months upon months of what looks like targeted surveillance or infiltration of a device.
00:23:42
Speaker
And so the Guardian, and I also think the Financial Times and the UK who reported upon this, are claiming that the forensic analyst is pretty confident it was an infiltration led by this video sent by MBS. It was a Saudi Arabian hack upon Jeff Bezos
00:24:03
Speaker
to enact some kind of revenge about Bezos'. I keep saying his last name in different ways every single time. I'm trying to win a prize.
00:24:14
Speaker
his newspaper, the Washington Post, which was employing Jamal Khashoggi as a kind of retribution to that. Saudi Arabia has, of course, denied any of this. Indeed, and yes, the National Enquirer has said that they got Jeff Bezos' embarrassing photos via the brother of the woman he was having an affair with, suggesting he's got hold of his sister's phone or something.
00:24:41
Speaker
Which is a plausible way, yeah. Which is entirely possible, yeah. So it could be coincidence. It could be that, you know, Saudi Arabia, what probably you would imagine would be more likely to just keep secretly tapping his phone for as long as they could rather than immediately start sort of putting out embarrassing blackmail fodder or anything like that. So I could believe that it's coincidence that the two aren't related. And yet it is quite suspicious timing. It is very suspicious timing as well.
Coronavirus Outbreak: Fear and Conspiracy Theories
00:25:13
Speaker
Now, that old coronavirus, it's been going round a bit. Yes, another breaking story which continues to get bigger or smaller depending on who you're talking to.
00:25:23
Speaker
Now, the coronavirus, unfortunately named because in New Zealand at least, I don't know how international it is, Corona is a brand of beer. So they have already been slightly distasteful ads and so on. Yes, yes, they really have. Involving a play on that. But the virus originating in China at the moment got a lot of people worried.
00:25:44
Speaker
I mean, I don't want to say groundlessly. It has infected a bunch of people. People have died. But it's kind of been like SARS and the bird flew before it, which none of which turned out to be a global pandemic. But it's one of those things where.
00:26:00
Speaker
Yes, it seems like it's a big issue because the numbers look big, but then you compare it to the Chinese population. Or indeed the number of people who die every year from the plain old influenza. Yes, I mean, as people are pointing out, Americans who are getting freaked out about the coronavirus live in a country where people routinely die from diseases that can be easily vaccinated against. The West has a rather interesting view upon Asia, particularly China,
00:26:30
Speaker
Well, sometimes not actually looking at what goes on in the backyard. Yes, to the extent that I read today a news article about someone supposedly in Sydney where there has been no coronavirus outbreak, collapsing from a heart attack and not being given assistance because people were worried they might have been affected by the coronavirus.
00:26:48
Speaker
And the reason why was the heart attack occurred just outside of Sydney's Chinatown. Anyway, that's just depressing, but it's not overtly conspiratorial. There's been the usual stuff you get any time a sexy new disease starts making the rounds. Sexy new disease? It's a weird way to describe the coronavirus. Popular.
00:27:11
Speaker
in terms of news coverage. As opposed to one a popularity contest. So there's all the usual stuff that claims that it's actually a biological attack either by China or on China, the various sort of fake cures going around, including haven't people been saying that you should drink good, QAnon people been saying you should drink bleach?
00:27:36
Speaker
Members of QAnon have said that drinking bleach is the way to cure yourself of the coronavirus. It's also a way to cure yourself of life itself. So I guess it probably does work. Actually, another Q-related conspiracy theory. The Chinese have engineered the coronavirus fiasco, so it's not real, to distract from the fact that Trump's tariffs against China are finally working.
00:28:02
Speaker
I do not believe that to be the case. Slightly more credible, I guess. There have been claims that China, rather as the opposite, has been downplaying the effects of it, that they've been underreporting the deaths and have been secretly cremating bodies. So that now, unfortunately, this is predicated on the fact that China's response to SARS, which was the big issue several years ago,
00:28:32
Speaker
was underreported at the time as the Chinese government and media tried to downplay the seriousness of the first round of infections. So people are going, well, they've done it in the past. Why think the leopard has changed his time?
00:28:50
Speaker
Yes, no, so I don't think there have been any sort of official accusations, but certain organisations have been saying it. There's also been a screenshot going around, moving to more frivolous grounds again. Which, in the video version, will probably insert somewhere around about here. Here? Yeah, that'll do. Of side-by-side... Now, the claim is there's a biological... No, first... OK, first. First, before the first, first.
00:29:18
Speaker
People have been talking about there is a mysterious lab in the Wuhan province where the coronavirus has originated that possibly has something to do with biotechnologies and so on. There have been sort of claims that apparently it's been identified the outbreak came from a food market of people eating infected animal meat.
00:29:44
Speaker
But there is this biotech research place nearby, and people have been going, oh, that's a little suspicious. On top of that, people have been showing photographs of the logo of a biological research lab, which looks almost exactly like the umbrella logo for Umbrella Corp from the Resident Evil computer games, and also mentioning that Corona is an anagram for Raccoon, and the Resident Evil games take place in Raccoon City, joined the Dots people.
00:30:13
Speaker
Now, if you don't know what a resident evil game is, it's a series of games that start off as being about zombies and have morphed into other creatures of the night or nasties. And the Umbrella Corporation is a biotechnology, bioweapons company, which created this thing called the T virus and then the G virus, which mutates people into zombies.
00:30:43
Speaker
Now it's worth pointing out though that I can't help but notice that on the picture of the BioLabs logo, it does say Shanghai in English. It says Shanghai, which is in quite a different part of
00:31:04
Speaker
China is very, very huge. I had reason to look at a map of China just the other day to see where Beijing was compared to Wuhan. And it's a long way away. Yes, I believe Shanghai is fairly distant as well. So I have a suspicion
00:31:24
Speaker
that this photograph that has been used for an Internet Mimi joke might not actually be showing what the joke is. I am shocked. I am disturbed. I am disturbingly shocked.
00:31:36
Speaker
Thanks for a nice joke, though. Now, that brings to the end the new news, but there's one bit of news at the bottom. Which is the new news? The public news. Oh, right. The Sandy Hook update.
Alex Jones' Legal Troubles and Sandy Hook Harassment
00:31:49
Speaker
So we've been talking about Alex Jones's legal travails with Lenny Posner, who's basically suing him for harassment and defamation. This is Posner suing Jones.
00:32:01
Speaker
One of the people that Alex Jones got his initial round of information on, about the claim that Sandy Hook was a false flag and no one died at Sandy Hook, is a former school lieutenant, one of those people who goes around inspecting things, Wolf Harbig, who's recently been arrested
00:32:24
Speaker
for harassing Lenny Posner along with doxxing Posner's whereabouts. Posner is in hiding because of the harassment he's got from people who think that Sandy Hook never occurred and a whole bunch of other stuff of that particular ilk.
00:32:40
Speaker
Now, what's particularly interesting is that Jones has been asked numerous times in the trial about what he thinks about Halberg. And so, according to the New York Times report, Mr Jones acknowledged in his deposition that Mr Halberg had been a significant source of information for him about Sandy Hook.
00:33:02
Speaker
Asked by a lawyer for the families, if you would agree Mr Halberg was a raving lunatic, Mr Jones responded. He seemed very credible and put together earlier on, but I can't remember the exact number. He seemed to get agitated about four years, three years ago. So in other words, yes, he is a raving lunatic. Yes, yes.
00:33:23
Speaker
So yes, that's an update on the ongoing updates about the Sandy Hook trial. Wolf Halberg, one of the people that Jones is relying upon for evidence that Sandy Hook did not occur, has just been arrested for being a harassing bastard.
00:33:40
Speaker
Now that's the end of the new use. We have a couple of stories we thought we might as well bring up, but we have talked about already in the Patreon updates. We have indeed. But there was the Epstein update where it turned out that not only was there no security footage of the day when he died, let's not speculate how,
00:34:05
Speaker
There's also no security camera footage of the day that he first apparently allegedly attempted suicide, which is why he was on suicide watch in the first place. There was always the implication that he'd been attacked. Now, his cellmate at the time, who obviously would have been the prime suspect had he actually been attacked and not attempted suicide,
00:34:28
Speaker
has been attempting to defend himself and his lawyer was given assurance that the security camera footage would be kept because I assume like most places they don't actually keep security camera footage indefinitely, it'll get recycled at a regular interval.
00:34:43
Speaker
But then it turned out that, oops, we actually, we saved the wrong bit of security camera footage. We saved the floor one level up, and it's in the same location, it's just a level up from the level you were on. And we saved that bit because we thought that was the right camera, and we're really sorry, but the rest of the footage is gone.
00:35:06
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, so that's the official line is, yeah, it's just a cock up. There's nothing sinister. We just screwed up. Yep, our bad. Sorry. But it's on top of everything else that's happened. It has raised eyebrows. It has. It just makes things look very suspicious. Whether you think there was a conspiracy to kill Epstein or not,
00:35:30
Speaker
Things are not being run properly at this particular correctional institution. And finally, a bit of QAnon to send us out on. Yeah, so we mentioned this in one of the Patreon updates a few weeks ago, but it's worth repeating here. The Cynthia Abbugh story. No, Abcug story. We got that name wrong last time as well. A QAnon adept who has been arrested for a conspiracy to kidnap who we think is one of her own children.
00:36:00
Speaker
Yes, the specific identity of the person she was trying to kidnap has been suppressed, but she has been in a custody battle with the States to get custody of one of her children back. It turns out that Cynthia is a bit of a QAnon fan.
00:36:17
Speaker
and had been going on about how the state is basically run by elite pedophiles who are engaging in sexual abuse of minors and thus has had support by her local QAnon community who are not very happy at the fact that she's been arrested for a conspiracy to kidnap, daubed in by her very own
00:36:39
Speaker
daughter who wasn't in custody of the state because the daughter was concerned that her mother's plan would lead to the injury of others. Yes, so you have a woman who appears to have drafted a bunch of fellow QAnon people to carry out this kidnapping under the guise of them fighting against the various evil pedophile deep state people that the QAnon people are opposed to.
00:37:03
Speaker
gets arrested, one of the reactions I saw was implying that this woman was herself a plant who'd been put into the QAnon movement to do something dodgy like this and make them look bad. I assume she still has her supporters who think she's all been horribly set up. Oh yes, there's an entire community on Reddit which is basically convinced that
00:37:29
Speaker
they've done the dirty on her, it's the elite pedophiles who the ones who should be in prison. Which is true, elite pedophiles should, they should. I've got no qualms about that. But the exact identity of these elite pedophiles is probably something that we and the QAnoners would disagree on. I mean, there might be some of that. Could be crossover, yeah, I'm sure, but anyway. And that's all we have for you in the way of news, I believe.
00:37:56
Speaker
Now, if you're a patron or want to become one to hear the following episode, you'll be about to hear a very interesting story about New Zealand's breakthrough medical AI, Zach. It's a story with twists. It's a story with turns. It's a story which features David Faria. It is. It's a story I'm pretty sure we have mentioned in the past, but it appears to have come to something involving a conclusion, which is novel for these sorts of news things, which always tend to end up losing.
00:38:26
Speaker
So yes, if you'd like to hear about Zach, the medical AI, you could go and read all the articles on the spinoff, I suppose. But if you want to hear us talk about Zach, the medical AI. It's a dollar a month at least. You can become one of our patrons.
00:38:42
Speaker
And not only will you get to hear about extra topics that the regular audience don't, you'll be certified as being essentially better than everyone else. And you get to hear the background to our perfectly normal episode last week. Perfectly normal. Perfectly normal.
00:38:57
Speaker
So it's the end of the episode. It's a stinkingly hot, muggy evening here in Auckland. Ian very cleverly turned up the air conditioning before we started recording. But then we had to turn it off so there wasn't noise in the background. So over the last, what, 40 minutes or so, we've just been slightly sweating. My glasses are starting to fog up. I'm becoming very, very moist. So I think we better stop recording, turn on the air con,
00:39:25
Speaker
then turn off the aircon, record the bonus episode. I think that's what we'll do. It's what mother would want. So until next week, goodbye. Toodalippa.
00:39:43
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:40:44
Speaker
and remember it's just a step to the left. There's been quite a lot of talk about the Joe Rogan endorsement of Bernie Sanders given that Joe Rogan
00:40:58
Speaker
has some pretty weird and also toxic political beliefs. He does. He's a bit of a turf. Which is a shame because he was on news radio and I refuse to admit that anyone on news radio did anything bad. But if I refuse to admit that Joe Rogan did something bad, then I'd have to imagine that the
00:41:18
Speaker
original janitorial electrician character from the pilot, Ray Romano, was actually in that role. And I just can't stand Ray Romano. I do not understand why people think he's funny. No. Because he's not. If you have to title your show, Everybody Loves Raymond, you're trying too hard.