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Palate Cleanser
26 Plays5 years ago
In this episode Josh and M engage in a palate cleanse after last week's rather serious discussion about the conspiracy theories the March 15th Terror Attack in Ōtautahi/Christchurch. They look at the Concave Earth Theory, discuss a new comic book based on QAnon, and introduce the English-speaking world to Romania's own David Icke, Lorin Fortuna.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
Watch M’s series “Conspiracism” here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJEp7xTcFU3hc2W0kfdSvAQ
and learn more about their academic work at:
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
Seasonal Changes in Auckland
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. It's an autumnal evening almost in Auckland, New Zealand. Has the season officially changed yet? Technically it's autumn, I mean it's March. That means it's the start of autumn.
00:00:34
Speaker
It's to the extent that I'm wearing a jacket and now have an actual lapel on which to stick a lapel mic. I, of course, being Josh Addison and, of course, as per usual, am sitting directly next to Dr.
Humor and Memory Erasure
00:00:47
Speaker
M. R. X. Dentith, sucking the last drops of whisky out of his skull.
00:00:54
Speaker
Oh, dear. Now, after last week's rather tragic episode, I performed a slight modification to my brain to raise my memories of basically everything that's gone forward. So, Josh, tell the audience and myself, what is this podcast about? Why am I sitting here having set up lights? What are we going to talk about?
Understanding Conspiracy Theories
00:01:13
Speaker
Right. Well, you may not be aware of this, but you are possibly New Zealand's foremost expert on the philosophy of conspiracy theories. That's surprising, because the last thing I remember is being really into Dr Ho.
00:01:24
Speaker
Yeah, no, you still are. You still are in fairness. But also you have an academic career that's largely founded on the philosophical analysis of conspiracy theories. That's marvelous. Tell me more. Yeah. Well, so we talk about it in this podcast every week.
00:01:40
Speaker
We record it and do that sort of stuff. That explains the cameras. That's what the camera is for and the lapel mics, yes. And so generally you tend to take a sort of particularist approach to conspiracy theories where you think that
00:01:55
Speaker
conspiracy theory as a pejorative is something we should avoid, and conspiracy theories themselves are not inherently irrational, which is not to say that certain in particular conspiracy theories are not inherently irrational, but the point is to evaluate each one on its merits.
Frivolous Conspiracies and News
00:02:12
Speaker
That sounds very sensible. Are you sure that's my idea? I'm pretty sure it's not mine. I didn't come up with it. It must be mine then. Yep, and that's basically what we do.
00:02:22
Speaker
And we're going to do it now, I believe is the plan. And in light of the traumatic events of the last week or so, causing you to do the memory wiping thing. It's called tripanning. You put a needle into the brain. You basically excite some of the brain material. Memories sometimes just disappear. Yeah. Or you orgasm. Well,
00:02:45
Speaker
could be both. It may well have been. Cart horse, horse cart, you never know. Horse carts. But the point is we thought this week we'd want to get away from the dreariness and doom and gloom and just focus perhaps on the more frivolous possibly sillier examples of conspiracy theories we can come up with.
00:03:07
Speaker
and indeed catch up on a couple of weeks worth of news, because of course last week was entirely eclipsed by the most major news event to happen in New Zealand in quite a long time, which means you kind of have two weeks worth of conspiratorial happenings to catch up on. So we're just sort of going to romp through all of that. We're going to have a freewheeling, fast and fancy-free- Unscripted. Unscripted, yeah, now the hell with scripts this week. We're just going to have a bit of fun, hopefully.
00:03:36
Speaker
And maybe you'll learn a thing or two, but probably not. Yeah, probably not. Shall we get to it? I think so. Let's handle some news.
Francesco Kelly's Murder Conspiracies
00:03:48
Speaker
Yes, I think I mentioned this at the end of last week's episode. One thing that I did want to talk about. Getting away from the doom and gloom and horrible things with a mob killing. Which somehow involves childish Gambino? Well, it's...
00:04:05
Speaker
So, a couple of weeks ago, Francesco Kelly, otherwise known as Frankie Boy, because of course he is, who was the head of the... Not Frankie Boyle. Not Frankie Boyle, no. Frankie Boy was the head of the Gambino crime family. When I read this, it was about Childish Gambino and Frankie Boyle, and I thought the story was going to go in a very different direction from the ones going in now. There is a team up I'd like to see, though.
00:04:27
Speaker
But no, so he was murdered outside his home in Staten Island on or about March the 13th, I think it was. And so obviously criminal conspiracies started shooting up all over the place. The police thought, well, what's going on here? This guy's here to the family. He shot outside his home. Must be some other family, sort of some kind of power play. People are trying to muscle in on his territory. I assume that's a thing people say.
00:04:49
Speaker
But then, once it came out, the actual murder was caught on surveillance cameras. And the killer turned out to be... some guy. Just some guy? Some guy called... So you're saying big events, small cause. That sounds suspicious. Well, yes. So it turned out that, no, it wasn't a member of a rival criminal family. It wasn't anything to do with Mr Kelly's mafia dealings in any way. It was a man called Anthony Camallo.
00:05:16
Speaker
who was known to Mr Kelly, but not actually part of his organisation as far as I'm aware. And according to the news that's come out, his motivation for killing the head of one of the bigger mob families in America was because he was a bit annoyed with the guy because Anthony Camello wanted to date his niece.
00:05:37
Speaker
and Frankie Boy disapproved. And so, yes, Mr Camello reacted to that by staging a shooting. That sounds like a perfectly sensible American thing to do. Well, yes, from what I could gather, he sort of, he, quote unquote, accidentally
00:05:59
Speaker
crashed his pickup truck or something into Kelly's car parked outside his house when Kelly came out he sort of was like oh hey Mr Kelly I'm so sorry look at this and then when he went to bend over to like pick up his number plate I think they said that would fall off his car he pulled out a gun and shot him a whole bunch of times
00:06:14
Speaker
Yes, so probably not the smartest thing you could do, really. So there's a lot of talk of how the hell are we going to, how is this guy going to survive to see his trial?
QAnon in Court
00:06:23
Speaker
How are we possibly going to keep him safe in prison? But so that was, so that got rid of the sort of criminal conspiracy theories that were perhaps going around. But fortunately for us, he kept the conspiracy theme going because when he showed up in court for his first
00:06:38
Speaker
First appearance in the courtroom. He was holding up his hands towards the reporters on which he'd with a ballpoint been he'd doodled a bunch of stuff including phrases like magga forever united we stand magga and Patriots in charge and had a great big letter Q drawn right in the middle of his palm now See I think you get you to draw in a letter Q on your palm for that visual joke for the people watching the video
00:07:00
Speaker
I see your point, but on the other hand, I would then have had to walk around with a giant cue on the palm of my hand, even for a short amount of time. And frankly, that just sounds tiresome. It's because you don't have a maca hat. Well, you know, I do need one of those as well, perhaps. Yes. So this guy appears to be a genuine sort of hard line, Trumpy, cue and on type follower. And this seems to be the direction his defense is going in, because his lawyer
00:07:27
Speaker
has been talking up the fact that he's been influenced by this far-right hate speech and conspiracy theories. There's been talk of a drastic change in his personality over the last couple of months leading up to the shooting and so on. So I don't know if that's genuine or if they're playing it up to sort of as some sort of defense tactic or both. I don't know.
00:07:49
Speaker
But yeah, so that's been an interesting case of a man who was so infantile, so immature that his only approach to conflict resolution was bloody violence and murder. So it's just a shame, really, that his immaturity has meant he'll now have nothing to do with that crime family. And he will indeed never be a childish Gambino. I like the way you brought that home.
Christchurch Attack and Legal Issues
00:08:15
Speaker
Things which I don't like to bring home are notes about the March 15th attack down in Christchurch and one such note was found outside of a mosque in San Diego which had just been burnt down which is leading people to believe that the note and the arson are in fact connected and the burning of the mosque was a hate crime associated with the manifesto of the terrorists who of course
00:08:44
Speaker
engaged in the shooting of 50 people down in Otatahi just a few weeks ago. Yes, as I believe we mentioned last week, the Killer's Manifesto is now classed as objectionable material in New Zealand, which means you're not allowed to possess copies of it. Or distribute it. Or distribute it unless you have some sort of dispensation. Now you sort a dispensation. I have engaged in the process of applying for an exemption for having a copy of the Great Replacement Manifesto.
00:09:12
Speaker
But actually a lot of organisations are doing this, so apparently almost every media outlet in the country is applying for an exemption for the outlet to have a copy on file so that journalists can access it. Apparently there's also talk that universities are going to do the same thing. There's a very open question as to whether it's ever going to be stored in the National Library. And because it's a publication from this country, technically it probably will be.
00:09:42
Speaker
how they control access to that particular document. But that's a matter that will be coming up. So were you successful in your application? I haven't actually submitted the email at this point. Apparently once the email is in, it takes about a day or so for it to be processed. But there is a cost attached? There is an administrative fee, but it's not particularly high. Okay. Well, you could, you could dip into the old patron funds. Surely that's the sort of thing there for.
00:10:07
Speaker
It's true. Mind you, it's stuff we could never ever broadcast on this podcast. And indeed, it's something I have absolutely no interest in. But it would be useful for your academic person. So we've got a copy of the Great Replacement Manifesto on this USB. So Josh, you want to look at it? No. Well, what should I do with it? Just put it back in its box. Fine, I'll put it back in its box. Put you back in your box.
00:10:30
Speaker
But yes, actually, maybe we will use some of the funds to buy an exemption for a terrorism manifesto. That's what your Patreon money patrons are going to go towards. I'm sure that's what they'd want.
00:10:44
Speaker
Actually, they probably would.
Mueller Report Analysis
00:10:48
Speaker
So moving on, okay, so we've been trying to steer clear of anything Trump-related this year, because quite frankly, we're sick of talking about the guy, and I'm sure you're sick of hearing about the guy, but we can't go past the fact that Robert Mueller has actually released his report
00:11:03
Speaker
Well, I mean, the report has been released, but the only people who seem to have read it are William Barr, the Attorney General of the United States of America, and Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General of the United States of America.
00:11:19
Speaker
And Barr has released a four-page memo, which basically summarizes his takeaways from the Mueller Report, which is broken down in kind of two sections, one section on collusion, one section on obstruction of justice complaints about the President of the United States, one Donald J. Trump, and basically says, look, there's no evidence of
00:11:47
Speaker
collusion by members of the government with Russia, and there's not enough to charge the president with obstruction of justice. Now, of course, people have pointed out there are two issues here, with respect to the fact that we haven't seen the report, or we've got, actually there are three issues, where all we've got is Barr's representation.
00:12:09
Speaker
The first issue is the definition of collusion is rather narrow. So it talks about members of the government working with members of a foreign government. And as many analysts have pointed out, the whole way that Russia works these days is they farm their political activism off to private companies.
00:12:30
Speaker
So you might have evidence of a private company in Russia which is attached to the government but only ostensibly working with people in the US and that wouldn't count as collusion under Mueller's definition. The other thing of course is that
00:12:45
Speaker
Barr was appointed by Donald Trump, and Barr is the person who said, look, there's not enough evidence to show that the President has committed an obstruction of justice offence, which is problematic
00:13:01
Speaker
Because Barr once again was appointed by the President. And that's the third point. The appointment of Barr is an issue here. Before he was appointed Attorney General, didn't he basically completely unprompted send off a letter saying how the Mueller investigation was a lot of bollocks and essentially saying, if I were Attorney General, I'd make sure that you never saw any charges from it.
00:13:22
Speaker
Yes, and that was kind of seen as an audition for becoming Attorney General. Yeah. So once we see the report and there are open questions as to whether we will ever see the full report. So the Attorney General has said there are elements of the report that will need to be kept secret from people outside of Congress because of ongoing investigations, names and the like. So there's going to be some censorship of the report if Barr has his way.
00:13:50
Speaker
Congress of course would like the full report released, even the Senate would like the full report released. There's no open questions when it will be released to the public or to Congress itself. Until such time we actually see the report, it's actually hard to know what to make of it. As one person on Twitter pointed out, I didn't actually note who they were at the time,
00:14:11
Speaker
Imagine if Bill Clinton's Attorney General, upon receiving the Star Report, went, well I read the report, and there's no evidence whatsoever that the President has engaged in any untoward behaviour whatsoever.
00:14:27
Speaker
Did you see Monica Lewinsky's reply to that tweet? No. I just, yeah, I only saw that one because I saw someone saying, yeah, imagine if Bill Hinton's Attorney General had read the Star Report and then just issued a little summary of it that said nothing had gone wrong. And Monica Lewinsky just replied, if fucking only. But she's a funny lady, Monica Lewinsky.
00:14:47
Speaker
Yeah. But yeah, no, it has been a slightly weird look. So Barr comes out and says, yep, the Mueller report completely exonerates Donald Trump. No, no, no, no, no. He did say it. Barr says...
00:14:59
Speaker
It neither exonerates nor... It doesn't have the threshold for criminal activity, but it doesn't exonerate the president. It was Sarah Sanders. Is it Sarah Sanders who's the current White House press secretary? She's the... Yes, that's right. There was another person at some earlier point.
00:15:19
Speaker
And she so she completely exonerates the president as Trump has said but as Barr points out actually no there's enough there to at least show moral failure if not actual criminal activity. But at any rate we have some people saying this this report is
00:15:36
Speaker
Exonerates are completely exonerating. It's super exonerate. If anything, it's a little bit too exonerating. To the point where they're now saying we need to have a witch hunt to investigate the investigators for sedition and treason. And yet the super exonerating report that completely exonerates Trump from everything when you say, so can we see this report that completely proves Yuru? And they're like, no, no, you don't need to see it. Just trust me.
00:16:00
Speaker
Totally exonerating. It's exonerating. It's really, really exonerating. My girlfriend who lives in Canada just told me so. So yeah, again, don't want to spend much time on this because we're sick of the whole thing. But yeah, who knows what will happen in the future? Just in general, but also in this case. In this case, this particular story.
Jussie Smollett Case and NZ Politics
00:16:22
Speaker
So that was all the new stuff we had to talk about, but we have a couple of updates to ongoing stories, which we traditionally handle in an update section. Let's play that sting. Updates and retractions.
00:16:42
Speaker
Do I suppose the big news, or at least one of the bits of big news, is the whole Jussie Smollett case? Yeah, so Jussie Smollett's case, and this I just read about today, I assume it's a pretty recent development, Jussie Smollett's case has been dismissed, which is not the same as saying he was found not guilty.
00:17:00
Speaker
No, so those of you who don't recall the Jesse Smollett case, Jesse Smollett is an African-American gay actor who came to fame on the show Empire. I think you'll find he came to fame in the classic Emilio Esteve series, The Mighty Ducks.
00:17:15
Speaker
Really? I wasn't aware of that. But anyway, sorry. About a month ago now claimed to have been the victim of a hate crime in Chicago where he was attacked by two mugger thugs.
00:17:32
Speaker
It quickly became clear that the police in Chicago thought this was a hoax and they then started pressing charges against Smollett for faking the attack and now...
00:17:47
Speaker
The prosecutor in Chicago has gone where withdrawing charges kind of for a procedural motion. So there's this thing called an alternative to prosecution. And that's what they've done here. So his case has been dismissed in exchange for his completion of several conditions. And I believe the exact details of these conditions haven't been released yet.
00:18:11
Speaker
But we do know that there is basically volunteer service he has done and will do and also donating part of his bond to the city. So it sort of seems one of these kind of compromise situations where he isn't required to plead guilty
00:18:31
Speaker
So it's not officially found that he's guilty, but on the other hand, they do still sort of get something out of him. Although apparently, I just read this afternoon that supposedly the FBI is now looking into this because they think something is maybe a little bit fishy with the whole affair. And maybe he's being let off lightly on account of being, I don't know, a celebrity or rich or I don't know. Although it wasn't a theory that he had done the hoax attack because he wanted to get paid more.
00:18:58
Speaker
That was a motivation that was put forward in the first week or so, but I have a feeling that no one's actually entirely sure, if it was a hoax, what the motivation behind the hoax actually was. And now the other thing, so this got lost fairly quickly, quite understandably, but we should probably have another look at it because a couple of days before the Christchurch shootings in Wellington, James... Which we mentioned on the podcast. We did mention, yep.
UN Migration Pact Controversy
00:19:27
Speaker
James Shaw, co-leader of the Green Party here, was assaulted on his way into Parliament. And supposedly the guy who did it jumped out of a van, recognised him and had started saying something about the UN before running up the spectrum in the first.
00:19:43
Speaker
So yes, prior to the Christchurch shootings, that had been one of the bigger sort of right wing talking points, the UN migration pact, which is kind of like the agenda 21 stuff we've talked about before. It's one of these things that's a non-binding resolution that basically gives you some guidelines in the UN saying, hey guys, it'd be super peachy keen if you treated migration like this and does not force anyone to do anything. But it's been jumped upon by sort of the far right crowd as saying,
00:20:12
Speaker
and look, this is the UN, they're gonna take over our migration. They're gonna tell us how to do it. And we've seen this far right, but also the center right of those countries. So this was one of the things which kind of came out after the March 15th attack. So the National Party, our center right opposition party at this particular point in time, had a petition page up on their website asking for people to sign a petition to make sure the current Labour Green New Zealand First Coalition government wouldn't sign up to the UN.
00:20:42
Speaker
compact on migration. And that page disappeared. It disappeared mighty quick. And National's claim was, oh, no, no, no. That petition ended several weeks ago, and we routinely take pages down. That page was taken down weeks before March the 15th.
00:21:02
Speaker
And then people showed how it was still in Google cache and also people had screenshots from the day because after the event, people were pointing out that national was still pushing conspiracy theories about the compact on migration, which led to national having to do a mere Culper and then claiming the only reason why the page went down was due to an emotional junior staffer. Emotional junior staffer.
00:21:29
Speaker
Which isn't really the best way to explain this because A, you're going the sensible minds, we didn't take it down, it was an emotional junior staffer and also it kind of indicates that they were being emotional and they weren't acting rationally and maybe they should have taken that page down. Yes, I don't know. So yeah, I mean at the time
Assault on James Shaw
00:21:49
Speaker
When we first mentioned it, we thought, well, let's see how this develops, because everything was all a little bit unknown. But it kind of, the whole affair has just kind of disappeared, really, because a day or two later, we suddenly got something a lot more prominent to think about. And I mean, there were big discussions at the time of the attack as to whether this would kind of end
00:22:11
Speaker
the way in which our MPs interact with the public. Because as a nation state, we have MPs who are very approachable. You can talk to them in bars, in pubs, in the supermarket. They walk along streets without any security whatsoever. And there was a fear that if we get one attack on an MP
00:22:32
Speaker
maybe we might get copycat attacks and maybe our MPs will become a more rarefied, hard to get to class. But it does actually seem that after March 15th, MPs are increasingly active in their constituencies. And we've kind of forgotten that very recently, one of the MPs, a co-leader for a party in government, was attacked on the street in the nation's capital.
00:22:59
Speaker
Now, of course, the UN migration pact, compact pact on migrate, whatever it is, the thing. Compact migration, it's just very small migration by the UN. Has been a talking point among sort of alt-right circles. And very anyone who's, anyone who's notably anti-migrant was very much opposed to that. Did it show up in the manifesto at all, specifically?
00:23:23
Speaker
No, the manifesto talks about migration. It doesn't actually make any particular game. But many of the people talking about the Great Replacement Thesis have gone, well, you know, the UN, tap, tap, off the nose, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more. So, yeah, so we have a man assaulted on the street by someone talking about the UN migration pact. There's
00:23:47
Speaker
And then a couple of days later, someone, we have the Christchurch shootings performed by someone with a manifesto with a decidedly anti-immigration bent. Now, as far as I'm aware, there's no suggestion that the two events are directly related, and yet they seem to be sort of, you know, symptomatic of the same swelling in white supremacist anti-immigration stuff.
00:24:11
Speaker
Yeah. As we say, this entire event was kind of swamped by what happened basically the next day. So whether we'll actually come back to revisit it, or whether it's just kind of forgotten about, I don't know. It kind of feels like it has been, yeah. So we'll have to see. But for now, it's just kind of filed under huh. Yeah, very much huh. And speaking of huh,
Concave Earth Theory
00:24:39
Speaker
That's it for the news updates, but let's go into the main part of the episode, which I think will contain its fair share of, huh, as well. Three. That was more of a goofy being a cowboy or something. Anyway, that's it for the noises. On with the episode.
00:25:05
Speaker
So Josh, you've wanted to talk about this for a while. The concave Earth thesis. Yeah, why did it... I've forgotten why it came up. It was a couple of episodes ago. Something about Chud's interior of the Earth. It was something that we mentioned in passing a couple of episodes ago. I haven't even gone back to look at why we started talking about it. Somebody mentioned the theory.
00:25:27
Speaker
of the the concave earth theory now we've talked about hollow earth theories before where we live on the outside of the earth and things live on the inside but josh tell us about the concave earth yeah so the concave earth theory which was new to me at the time oh no it was um it was the episode about uh all the questions what's the craziest conspiracy theory you've come across in your scientific area yep
00:25:53
Speaker
And that was one of them. So the concave theory says that the Earth is hollow and we live on the inside. Yep. You may think you don't understand how horizons work now, but believe me, horizons going to work very differently in your understanding just a few minutes time. So when we look up into the night sky, the stars and the planets and what have you, what we're actually looking at is the center of our planet. And
00:26:20
Speaker
In order to account for this, people have to get fairly creative with the laws of physics. There's a lot of talk of how light moves in a circle, so it appears to us that the ground is stretching away from us horizontally, but that's just because the curvature of the light curves around the curved surface of the earth as it comes back to us. So it all just appears to be laid out in a straight line and they have to talk about how
00:26:46
Speaker
the closer you get to the center of the earth, I forget exactly how it was like, like time slows down or space becomes compressed or something. So the closer to the center, the slower everything becomes so that it's impossible to ever reach the center of the earth because everything becomes so compressed down and time gets some stuff, timey-wimey.
00:27:13
Speaker
I don't even know, but that's how there can appear to be whole galaxies and universes up there. But in fact, it's because all of it is just compressed down into this as it reaches the point at the center of the Earth, which basically means that Saturn is closer to us than Spain.
00:27:30
Speaker
Which is nice. Well that sorts out my summer holiday this year. But the best thing I found about it, first stopping at Wikipedia of course, because it's 2019 and that's what the internet is these days, told me about this fellow called Cyrus Teed, who is a fan of the Hollow Earth Theory and apparently the Konkay Earth Theory as well.
00:27:55
Speaker
So he founded a group, he had a scheme called cellular cosmogony, which I assume... Great band name. Yeah, which I think was sort of a fractally kind of pattern thing, so the whole universe is like a cell, there's a cell about with it like a nucleus and blah blah. He founded a group called the Coretion Unity,
00:28:18
Speaker
Based on this notion, which he called Correshanity, of course. He had a colony in Florida. His followers claimed to have experimentally verified the concavity of the Earth's curvature through surveys of the Florida coastline making use of rectiliniator equipment. I bet they use rectiliniator equipment.
00:28:43
Speaker
And, but then even better, a variety of 20th century German writers published works advocating the Hollow Earth hypothesis, or Holvert Lährer, but it has now, this is a great, a great quote here from Wikipedia. It has even been reported, although apparently without historical documentation, that Adolf Hitler was influenced by concave Hollow Earth ideas and sent an expedition in an unsuccessful attempt to spy on the British fleet by pointing infrared cameras up at the sky.
00:29:12
Speaker
I particularly like that, apparently without historical documentation. So basically, I had a dream. Yes, I made this thing up, but it sounds interesting. Although, were you at the next when we watched that Hollow Earth Nazi film with one of the buces? I saw half of it or something. Either I had to go or I showed up late and only saw the end, but I do know the one you're talking about.
00:29:38
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it's one of the asylum mockbusters and it's on the notion that the Nazis built a base in the Hollow Earth and of course it houses Robo Hitler because everything houses Robo Hitler in that style of film. So yeah, I was quite surprised to see it had such a pedigree quite frankly. I even read an interesting article that sort of
Scientific Falsification and Flat Earth
00:30:07
Speaker
took that and kind of made a rumination on sort of falsification in science and popper and all that business by talking about how, you know, these theories for the concave, how physics works in the concave earth environment are basically internally consistent and completely account for all the same observations that
00:30:30
Speaker
contemporary physics does with incredibly different assumptions. And so yes, certainly if you were to choose between modern physics and concave earth physics, Occam's razor would suggest that modern physics is the way to go. But as we wonder, Occam's razor isn't a hard and fast rule, it's just kind of a guideline.
00:30:51
Speaker
But yes, it was interesting. It just sort of shows you that you can actually come up with all sorts of wild and wacky theories that account for the same data, which I assume means therefore that science is bullshit and we should just believe whatever we want.
00:31:05
Speaker
No, and the reason why, have you watched the Netflix documentary Behind the Curve, the Flat Earth documentary? I haven't, I thought it might be a little depressing. It's hilarious. But what's interesting about it is it shows that the flat earthers are very good at science. So they devise three experiments over the course of the documentary to prove the earth is flat. So one experiment basically is measuring for
00:31:32
Speaker
curvature using satellites one experiment is designed to show that there's no curvature by shining lasers things like that and the thing is they develop very good experiments that would show that the earth is flat or the earth is curved the problem is they keep on getting the wrong results they get results that show curvature and so they then develop a new experiment
00:32:01
Speaker
to replace the old one in the hope the new experiment will show flatness. Well, that doesn't sound like a good application of the scientific method. Well, no. So it's a good application. They're very good at developing experiments. They're just very bad at accepting the results of those experiments. I would recommend watching the documentary. It's remarkably even-handed in its portrayal.
00:32:29
Speaker
But the stuff about the experiments they do is really quite fascinating. And there is talk of an expedition to Antarctica by a bunch of flat earthers at the moment, presumably looking for the edge or those Pac-Man portals where we wrap our hands to the other side. Why would one of the members of U2 be?
00:32:49
Speaker
in Antarctica with Flat Earth is so desperate to find him. Do they think that that bit from the U2 music video, Elevation, which belongs to the Tomb Raider film, which is the best U2 video of all time, do they think that he's taken that Egyptian solar disk to Antarctica and they need it to prove flatness? Is that what they're doing? Is that it?
00:33:14
Speaker
I've completely lost you now, haven't I? No, I'm actually somewhat dumbstruck at the way you managed to take that train of thought and just go with it and go with it and go with it. It was quite impressive. I do love that music video. It's an awful film. Don't actually know the music video, I'm afraid. I know the song. I don't know the music video. No, it's great. The edge is basically CGI'd into scenes with Lara Croft. Oh, lovely.
00:33:40
Speaker
Now, one last thing before we leave the hollow earths and concave earths and flat earths. I came across an interesting theory also while looking into this, which is the formerly flat earth theory, which is the theory that earth was flat in the time of the dinosaurs, but then the meteor impact or something like that that killed the dinosaurs
00:34:01
Speaker
smashed the flat earth and caused it to sort of buckle and fold in on itself causing the flat earth to become a spherical earth which is of course hollow and now all the dinosaurs live on the inside because the earth folded up around them and then we managed to get out and live on the outside of it now and unfortunately having read that theory I then couldn't find any evidence that it was anything other than a bit of a joke and a funny thing somebody thought of one time
00:34:29
Speaker
And as lots of people pointed out, isn't that the plot of the Super Mario Brothers movie? And that's a different dimension. It is, yes. And then other people had to correct them. Well, obviously, as everyone who's seen the Super Mario Brothers movie starring Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper knows, and I'm assuming that's all of you and everyone in this room.
00:34:48
Speaker
Yes, yes, in fact the meteor caused the Earth to split into two parallel dimensions and the dinosaurs went off into another dimension and the humans stayed here. And then there was Dennis Hopper with a bad haircut who was somehow King Cooper.
00:35:03
Speaker
still, I think, one of the most bizarre video game to movie adaptations of all time. It was high concept. I'll give it that. Somebody thought, how do we take a game where a couple of Italian plumbers jump on the backs of turtles and lizards and make a movie out of that? And somebody was like, okay.
00:35:27
Speaker
And we're going to take seriously the fact that they're plumbers. We're going to make that a very important plot point. They're actual plumbers and they are against evil. Because you are aware that Mario is no longer a plumber. Isn't he? No. No, so in the press materials for Super Mario Odyssey, the most recent canonical Super Mario game, they talk about how it's one of his former occupations. Oh, I see. Now he's a hat enthusiast. Basically, yes. A sentient hat enthusiast. Yeah, that's... I don't know.
00:35:56
Speaker
I'm not a Nintendo person, so I have very little exposure to the Super Mario Bros. game series, unfortunately. Well, yes, obviously, everybody, you can't not know that. Okay, so that's enough. That's enough cellular cosmogenies for one time. I think what have you got to chuck in the pile?
QAnon Comic Book
00:36:14
Speaker
QAnon the comic book. Yes, there is a QAnon comic book May not be suitable for an audio podcast Just talk about briefly so this was linked on Twitter. It's a imager account It's called QAnon
00:36:36
Speaker
It's by Megaman Comics. It has 30 big pages, although it actually doesn't. Maybe it will. Maybe it will. And basically the premise of the first issue is that
00:36:51
Speaker
Hillary Clinton's really really pissed off she didn't win the election which was and that she's been consulted so Barack Obama is consoling her meanwhile Trump is actually getting on with job and basically it's a photo montage
00:37:10
Speaker
album so people are just sort of a black and white filled photoshop filter a very cheap filter over the top then yes it's about eight pages of exactly what you would think a QAnon comic book would be about where the bad people Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and Trump's just a really really nice guy
00:37:36
Speaker
Yes, whereas Hillary Clinton is a foul-mouthed lunatic who's screaming at Obama saying, you said the swing states were rigged, but he has everything now. I hope, you know, if I go down, we all go down. And then Obama says no one is going down, quote unquote, and doesn't appear to be a sexual euphemism. And then you get mobs of rabid leftists spill into the streets of DC and drove fear and political outrage from losing the election is set in. The polls mislead the brainwashed mashers into a frenzy.
00:38:06
Speaker
then we have a full page spread of uh that says his name was Seth Rich and Seth Rich has an additional eye in the middle of his forehead yes he has a third eye and bullet holes and yep and so and also stigmata
00:38:24
Speaker
is that it does look like stigmata uh could just be shadows on his hands but you leave it yeah he's no no that's definitely a nail going in in into that hand yeah it could be yeah so there's something something so seth rich appears to be some sort of christ like martyr who died for our sins
00:38:41
Speaker
Then we have a summary of it and claims he was in retaliation. The DNC leadership ordered a hit on Seth Rich at the hands of MS-13 thugs. Those good old MS-13 thugs, not just happy. What are they in real life? They're Mexican drug cartel. Are they? Yeah, and I believe not as major a gang as Trump has made them out to be. No.
00:39:07
Speaker
But yes, so it's a comic book. It's on imager.com. It's called QAnon the comic book. And kind of thing that we really couldn't devote an entire episode to. No, no. But it is kind of interesting. It's a thing. It sure is a thing. It is a thing which exists in the world.
00:39:30
Speaker
I don't know, there's anything to recommend it from a political or even artistic standpoint. But it does exist. It does exist. I cannot take that away from you. It does exist. But perhaps instead to redeem yourself, you could tell me about the Romanian David Icke. I could. Lauren Fortuna.
Lauren Fortuna's Civilizations Theory
00:39:51
Speaker
Now,
00:39:51
Speaker
For Romanian listeners out there, this also might be a surprise, because it turns out that Lauren Fortuna, who died... Oh, now I've actually forgotten... You've got it down here, 2016. Yeah, 20... Sorry, it was that reason. Kind of has become a forgotten figure in Romanian politics.
00:40:10
Speaker
So Lauren Fortuna was one of the heroes of the December 1989 revolution that ousted control of the country away from the communists. And he was a member of the party at the time. After the revolution, he obtained a PhD from the Faculty of Electronics and Telecommunications at the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest.
00:40:37
Speaker
and actually ends up holding several patents and was the author of several technical papers concerning telecommunications in Romania. So had the smarts. But at some point in the early 2000s, he started to claim that he was receiving telepathic communications from members of the high echelons of the galactic government.
00:41:05
Speaker
And because of these communications, Fortuna was able to reveal that there are several civilizations and civilizational species living on the planet Earth properly known as Gaia. Tell me more. Tell me more. So there's a car.
00:41:23
Speaker
I suspect he probably did. Romanians do like their cars. That's good then. Yeah. So there's the native gorilla civilization. That's a civilization that is native to this planet. Then there's the invading snake civilization where we've got elements there of David Icke and his alien shapeshifting reptiles.
00:41:47
Speaker
The spider civilization, although sometimes the spider civilization is also the scorpion civilization, is basically the civilization of any small creature which has a creepy, crawly civilization, I believe is the scientific term. The dolphin civilization.
00:42:02
Speaker
Which is shades of Douglas Adams and then a lot of other minor species. Well, that just sounds racist. Yeah Probably gets worse. So the grillers are the native civilization and they are kindly and peaceful people and they are the ones who are in theory meant to be in control of the world and Luckily are in control of the Romanian government
00:42:30
Speaker
Well that's good, as long as the Romanian government is controlled by guerrillas. And you can tell that they're actually guerrillas, because guerrillas like throwing things. And it turns out people throw balls of paper on the like in the government chamber all the time. And literally nowhere else in the world. I assume that's where he's getting at.
00:42:50
Speaker
No, I don't think he's going quite that far. He's just showing the fact that Romanian politicians like to throw things. Shows their gorillas. Yeah. I get you. And Fortuna would go on TV to appear on chat shows and the like, and he would specify which MPs are gorillas and which MPs are from the rival snake civilization or our secret spiders.
00:43:12
Speaker
So basically, if a politician got on the wrong side of Fortuna, he would go, actually I was wrong about them being cruel, that actually they're really a snake or a spider or something of that particular kind. And if they were...
00:43:28
Speaker
a snake or a spider, they were working for some foreign power against the goodness of the guerrillas in Parliament. Now you might be thinking this sounds an awful lot like David Eichten's alien shapeshifting reptile hypothesis. It's also like the stop the planet of the apes I want to get off musical from The Simpsons.
00:43:48
Speaker
Oh no, because frankly the entire time you're talking about that all I could imagine was some one of these politicians grabbing him and saying get your paws off me you dirty ape. He can talk, he can talk, he can talk. I can sing. Help, help, help, help me doctor's act. Doctor's act, doctor's act, doctor's act, doctor's act, doctor's act, doctor's act, doctor's act, doctor's act. Is that the best musical parody ever made? Yes, it actually is.
00:44:17
Speaker
What's the line about the piano? A line that precedes it is, can I play the piano anymore? Well of course you can! Well I couldn't before!
00:44:31
Speaker
I hate every ape I see From chimpanzee to chimpanzee No, you'll never make a monkey out of me Oh my god, I was wrong It was us all along You finally made a monkey Yes, we finally made a monkey Yes, you finally made a monkey out of me
00:44:57
Speaker
I love you, Dr. Zayas. Although, of course, actually nothing beats the, so if you heard of the Planet of the Apes, the planet, or the musical.
00:45:09
Speaker
But anyway, so it turns out that Fortuna and Ike didn't get along particularly well. But they were along with each other. Yes, so when Ike came to Romania, Fortuna said, oh, he's just ripping me off. And I hope it's not the kind of person who likes people to cast aspersions on those theories. I don't know, you're ripping me off. And basically, they didn't get on particularly well whatsoever. Oh, that's a shame.
00:45:37
Speaker
As I say he he died in 2016 and basically is now largely forgotten about because even before he died he'd stopped being kind of mainstay on Romanian late night TV for a period of time in the kind of late 2000s early 2010s
00:45:57
Speaker
He was invited onto TV a lot because people liked laughing at him. And eventually he worked out that. He just got a bit sad. He eventually worked out they weren't inviting him because of his insightful political commentary. They are inviting him because people like to laugh along at home. That's a bit of a shame.
00:46:15
Speaker
yeah i see here you say that some of these presidents were snakes who worked for the queen of england so he did get the good old reptilian royals oh yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean there's an awful lot which is a which is like like he did leave writings behind but they're all in romania and there's no translations to english whatsoever if i ever had the funding
00:46:39
Speaker
I'd be quite tempted to get someone to translate Fortuna into English so the world could be aware of Lauren Fortuna. I don't know why the world needs to be more aware of alien shapeshifting reptile conspiracy theories, but I feel that Romania has something to add to that discussion.
00:46:56
Speaker
Was Ceausescu the Communist? Was he the one that got picked up? He was, yes. He was the leader of the Romanian Communist Party, and he was the one who was killed during the December Revolution. Right, because basically my only knowledge of Romanian history is Tim Curry's speech from the movie Congo.
00:47:16
Speaker
Great speech. Bad Romanian accent. Great accent. Ah, the best accent ever. It was Herkimer homelker or something, free from the chains of chest school. And so on and so forth. Another excellent film which I assume everybody in the world has seen. Ernie Hudson. Brilliant.
00:47:32
Speaker
Haven't seen it for a long time, though. No, that's because it's awful. But brilliant. It's one of those films, it really should not be revisited. I think it lives the best life in our memories, I think. I think we'd only sully our experiences by actually subjecting ourselves to it again.
00:47:49
Speaker
Yeah. Also, I have a feeling it's actually based on a really, really racist myth of the white guerrilla kingdom in Africa, which actually has a fairly horrible racist background.
Technology & Danger in Crichton's Works
00:48:03
Speaker
Does it? Yeah. Because it's the idea that the intelligent apes are white. Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. I don't know. Michael Crichton book. In fact, it's one of the few Michael Crichton books that isn't about how technology will kill us all. Actually, strange.
00:48:19
Speaker
The other one was that time travel one they made a film with Billy Connolly in. Yeah, never saw that one. I read the book, it was awful. But I should kind of think that Michael Crichton was not a particularly good writer of prose. Yeah, I don't know. He was just very good at picking up the significant emerging technologies and then showing how one day they'll kill us all. Like time travel. Well, apart from that, but he sort of gets, you know, cloning and genetic technologies will result in dinosaurs eating us.
00:48:45
Speaker
The terminal man about electrodes in your brain, treatment technologies will cause a person to go crazy and kill us. And then there was that other one about nanites, which will kill us all. Cherry fellow, Michael Crichton, I'm glad he's dead. That's not true, I'm not glad he's dead. He seemed a lovely fellow. He's an E.I., you know. Yeah, but also climate change sceptic. Well, that was just the nanites, I guess.
00:49:09
Speaker
and also the dinosaurs. Anyway, so that was all we had for a pellet cleanser of more frivolous, sillier...
Episode Wrap-up and Bonus Content
00:49:22
Speaker
Yeah, something we needed to do to be able to go back to discussing things slightly more.
00:49:27
Speaker
I say not serious, but in a more reverential, respectful, respectful way. We needed to be able to do something to kind of wipe the taste of last week out of our mouths. But for those patrons, we've got more content coming up after the break. We'll be talking about uterus donations.
00:49:48
Speaker
We'll also be talking about a person from Christchurch who claims to have actually orchestrated the March 15th attacks and how Uri Geller is going to stop Brexit with his mind. I seem to tell he does everything though with his mind. Turns on the television with his mind. Puts the kettle on with his mind. Eat breakfast with his mind.
00:50:13
Speaker
Now we're also going to be releasing last week's bonus content for everyone. That was the plan. Yeah. So where we sort of went into a bit more detail about the specific false flags and the specific false flag stuff around the Christchurch shootings last week, which was an interesting discussion. It was. It's a wider audience. We'll have one.
00:50:32
Speaker
But that's us for now, I think. So unless you're a bonus patron and therefore one of the best and brightest people in the world, we will say goodbye. And to the rest of you, we will say see you in a minute. Indeed.
00:50:56
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extenta, 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.
00:51:57
Speaker
And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara. What looks explosive about me is my flatulence. And you were recording when I said that, weren't you? I was! Funny a joke would have been diarrhea, though, I have to say. That's true. You did actually let the side down there, and...