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The Sinking of the USS Maine
30 Plays3 years ago
Josh and M look at the least false flaggy alleged false flag, the sinking of the USS Maine!
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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
Comedy Concepts on USS Maine Sinking
00:00:00
Speaker
Okay, we need a sketch about the sinking of Maine, something with a tagline like, Maine, more like, blown up by Spain, alright? Some kind of William Randolph Hearst thing, I like it. Yeah, let's really twist the knife into the Hearst Empire, what's he up to these days anyway? Still dead I believe, just like the 260 odd people killed in the sinking of the USS Maine.
00:00:23
Speaker
What rhymes with Hearst? Burst? Flurst? Smurst? Oh, it's Smurst, right? Sounds like Smursh, and that's Vinless organization in the James Bond films. Maybe we can link the sinking of Maine to that. You only sink twice? On Her Majesty's sinking ships? To the bottom of the ocean with love? The Spanish with the golden gun? Sink another day? Oh, it's sink. And, of course, Octopussy.
00:00:51
Speaker
You'll want me to sing a theme tune next. You're right. I do want you to sing a theme tune. Now that Paul McCartney nonsense, no. Let's go with the bombast of Tom Jones. Do you think he'd make Thunderball rhyme with Maine? Thunder Maine? They call him the winner who takes pains and he strikes, da-da-dun, like
00:01:13
Speaker
The Thund main. That doesn't work. Are you sure? Yes. It does? Brilliant. Right. Now, this film treatment, we're going to need to explain why James Bond was in Havana in the first place. He is a naval commander, but I don't think he was enlisted at the time of the sinking.
00:01:31
Speaker
Well, if he was, he'd be about 130 now. But maybe the film can be about Bond re-investigating the sinking now and discovering that Smursh was behind it after all. Who do we know is a good actor and can plausibly play someone in their hundreds? Wait! I've got it. It's a time travel movie. James Bond catches a lift on the USS Philadelphia and travels back in time to Havana, where he stops the sinking of the main.
00:01:57
Speaker
Okay. Which means we don't have to record this episode because Maine never sank. I... I... well... Josh, did you just not do the research for this episode? What? No, of course I did. Sinking of the state of Maine and Havana, the first American state to be blown up in war. Didn't realise Maine was so close to Florida though.
00:02:21
Speaker
I... I... I... Nope. Actually, I've got nothing. I really think you've excelled yourself here. My, thank you. So, shall we look at another topic? When I was trying to work out why we're talking about Maine, actually, I found some false flag theories about a boat with the same name.
Introduction of Podcast Hosts
00:02:44
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Dentith. Hello and welcome to The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. Sitting side by side in Auckland, New Zealand, it is I, Josh Addison, and they, Dr. M. Dentith. We actually managed to co-locate once again. I don't know that we have a lot to talk about before we get into things, but I understand you've been off gallivanting around on other podcasts again.
00:03:14
Speaker
See, I was really thinking, you say, I don't have a lot to say, but you do, given I did record a almost three hour interview with Julian Charles of The Main Review last night. Right. And what is this podcast?
00:03:28
Speaker
It's a podcast which is about conspiracy theories, both the analysis of the academic discussion of also the occasional film review Julian found that over the last year in lockdown in the UK, the occasional film review was what was needed to keep a podcast going and the diastrates the UK has been in. And Julian wanted to talk to me about my 2018 book, Taking Conspiracy Theories Seriously,
00:03:55
Speaker
And so we did for almost three hours. Goodness, and the whole thing's up there? Well, it hasn't been posted yet. I mean, it takes a long time to edit a three-hour interview. Yes, it probably would. So then, podcast again? The Mind Renewed. The Mind Renewed. Look for it in all good podcast stores.
00:04:13
Speaker
Yes, like the Google store and the Apple store and the Spotify store and the Podbean store and I don't know what I'm saying so just move on. I think so, yeah.
00:04:29
Speaker
I don't know if we said this last week, but all of your all of the videos from your 45th Midwest colloquium of philosophy are now available on YouTube. We couldn't say it last week because they only became available today. Well, there we go. So that's why it was. So those are all there. A good a good nine hours, I think of talky talky and then talky talky about the talky talky.
00:04:54
Speaker
Well, see, I'd say there's probably a good four hours of talky-talky, and then there's four hours of wibbly-wobbly. The wibbly-wobbly being the Q&A that occurs after the talky-talky. It's quite academic, really, when we talk about these things. Yes, it generally tends to be now. We have a regular topic for you this week. No conspiracy theory masterpiece theatres, no know-what-the-conspiracies, just a good old-fashioned episode about a thing that happened.
False Flag Events: USS Maine Focus
00:05:24
Speaker
Now, this kind of goes back to the series we did on false flags, which was three years ago now, in which we looked at actual cases of false flags. In part because we were sick and tired of people saying false flags don't occur when dismissing conspiracy theories about false flags now. So we thought it'd be quite good to look at actual historical cases of false flags. And if you go on the internet, there's a whole variety of different lists of false flags, some of which include things which aren't false flags.
00:05:54
Speaker
Some of which include things that never even happened as false flags. And one of the things we didn't look at in that series is a commonly labeled false flag event, the syncing of the USS Maine, which we're going to look at today. And I have to say, and this is a bit of a spoiler, is he less false flaggy than I thought he was going to be? No, no, but we'll get into that. In fact, shall we get into that right now?
00:06:28
Speaker
Okay. Right. Hit me with the facts then. What do we actually know for certain about the USS Maine? And then we'll get into what people say about it. So the USS... Ah, I can't even say USS without working out where to stop saying my esses.
00:06:46
Speaker
So there's going to be a lot of... The USSSSSSS main was sunk in Havana, Cuba, and so the harbour of Havana. Not the actual city of Havana. That would be a bit strange. That would actually make for an amazingly different story, where the USSS main was sunk in the middle of the city of Havana. It was in the harbour of Havana City in Cuba. Where boats belong.
00:07:09
Speaker
It was February the 15th. It was 21, 40 hours and an explosion occurred leading to the killing of around about 260 crew. So some accounts state it's 260 in which 252 died in the actual explosion and eight died due to injuries a few days later. Some other account actually say it's about 261. I swear I read 266 somewhere but then I've also read 250
00:07:39
Speaker
So, a lot of people anyway, that was at least in the region of I think three quarters of the crew who were on board the ship at the time. But not the officers? Not the officers, no, fortunately. Which is actually not due to a mystery at all, they'll be explaining just a second. So, the explosion ripped apart the first third of the ship.
00:08:00
Speaker
And it turns out the officers and their quarters, because it was nighttime, were located in the back third of the ship. So they were just more likely to survive the explosion anyway. Most of the contemporary accounts, so the accounts which appear on the day, refers to the explosion as, I should say contemporaneous accounts, refer to the explosion as mysterious. And most of the contemporary accounts, the accounts today,
00:08:27
Speaker
also refer to the event being mysterious.
00:08:32
Speaker
Now, whatever calls the initial explosion on the USS Maine leads to five long tons, which is apparently 5.1 tons. And I'm assuming this is one of those cases where American tonnage and European tonnage turns out to be different in the same way that American inches are somehow different from European inches. Maybe it's a nautical thing where you have knots and miles.
00:09:00
Speaker
Or maybe things just weigh differently at sea. Or maybe it's a military thing. So whatever it is, there's a long tongue. A long tongue? A long tongue. So I mean there are also some long tongues there, but they're actually not uncomfortable. So whatever caused the explosion caused five long tons of powder charges for the ship's guns to explode. So you have an initial event, which is the mysterious explosion,
00:09:24
Speaker
which then led to a secondary explosion of basically all the ammunition in the front of the ship, leading to the first third of the USS Maine to explode and then for the main to sink into Havana Harbour.
00:09:39
Speaker
And this event was very significant because it not directly led to the Spanish-American War, but it was very much sort of a contributing factor. It's not as though America declared war on the Spanish as soon as the main was sunk. I believe the war was actually declared by Spain.
00:10:00
Speaker
But I think it put people in a warlike frame of mind. And I think once the war did start, there was a lot of, let's get those damn Spaniards back for what they did to the main. Apparently, at the time, the initial report said the explosion was an accident, but Assistant Navy Secretary won Theodore Teddy Roosevelt.
00:10:21
Speaker
Yes, he's going to become important for some reason in the future, but at the time, I might say he's just an assistant naval secretary, but I assume actually that's a fairly powerful position nonetheless. That's a position in the Cabinet. So he thought this was a premature assessment to say it was an accident, and he agreed with others who had been saying that the ship had possibly struck a mine.
00:10:43
Speaker
which makes it look much more, much more sinister. So the reason the main was actually in Havana at the time was the US was monitoring the Spanish regimes put down of an armed uprising by nationalist guerrillas. So at that time Cuba was a Spanish colony.
00:11:04
Speaker
And America was in favour of Cuban independence from Spanish. Although they were there under the invitation of the Spanish basically to monitor and act as a placating force, which did mean that the Cubans at the time were looking at the USS Maine with some degree of suspicion because even if American sympathies lay with Cuban independence,
00:11:31
Speaker
The American military was there at the behest of the Spanish authorities. It was sent there by then President William McKinley, who I believe it does have the distinction of being one of the few presidents who was actually assassinated. I think that's that's how Teddy Roosevelt became president, I think. So you're saying that Teddy Roosevelt assassinated William McKinley.
00:11:53
Speaker
Well, I think that's the logical conclusion. But he was vice president at the time, I think, and became president after McKinley was killed. The only way to succeed a president as vice president is through dead man's boots. So I do really think you are saying that Teddy Roosevelt killed William McKinley. Well, history will be my judge.
00:12:13
Speaker
But, yeah, so the war eventually happened because the US sort of relations went downhill. The US blockaded the port in the Port of Havana in April, and that caused Spain to declare war on America. The Spanish-American War, despite being the Spanish-American War, was fought neither in Spain nor in America. It was in Spanish-controlled colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific.
00:12:42
Speaker
that technically that is the Americas, given, you know, the two continents, Mesoamerica. So it wasn't in the state of America in the same respect the USS Maine was not blown up in the middle of Havana City. Yeah, it wasn't. But yeah, and so, I mean, this was the Philippines, basically. This is why so many people in the Philippines have Spanish-sounding last names and kind of American-sounding accents.
00:13:10
Speaker
And why people in the Philippines are not particularly fans of America. There's that image of a mass grave or something that, from 100 years ago, that the likes of Duterte still like to trot out to say what evil bastards the Americans are.
00:13:29
Speaker
And basically, America pretty much just stomped on Spain from what I gather and took control of the likes of Cuba and the Philippines and Guam, I think, and possibly others. But that's what happened afterwards. What we're interested right now is the sinking of the main itself.
00:13:51
Speaker
Now, as you say, there were two explosions, the second one was the big one, we know what that was, but we want, but we, the opinions are divided, shall we say, as to the cause of that first explosion, so what do people suggest?
Media Influence on USS Maine Narrative
00:14:06
Speaker
Well, let's just talk about the media, because let's talk about what the media suggested occurred, because
00:14:13
Speaker
When you're a young William Randolph Hearst, or a young Joseph Pulitzer, and you've got a newspaper, so Hearst has a New York Journal, and Hearst has the... I have not written this down. Pulitzer has the New York World.
00:14:32
Speaker
New York, oh yes of course actually no, sorry, I'm reading the wrong line. That's a classic blunder. So Hurst has the New York Journal, Pulitzer has the New York world. Now I actually know about the sinking of the USS Mame entirely due to the film Citizen Kane.
00:14:51
Speaker
So there's a bit in, there's kind of a montage in the first third to half of Citizen Kane where a young William Foster Kane is setting up his newspaper empire and because Kane is basically a stand-in for Hearst there's a joke where
00:15:10
Speaker
Kane sends someone to a place where there's meant to be a conflict going on. The guy turns up and he rings back and says, look, there's no conflict going on here. And Kane jokes, you supply the pictures, I'll supply the war, which is a reference entirely to what was going on with New York Journal around the sinking of the USS Maine, because
00:15:32
Speaker
the New York Journal kind of made famous the phrase, remember the Maine to hell with Spain. So Hearst was really pushing quite hard the idea that the USS Maine struck a mine and it was a deliberate act by the Spanish to antagonize the Americans.
00:15:52
Speaker
supported by a whole lot of claims from anonymous sources. Some admiral told him this, but it was never established. Very anonymous sources, to the point where you can probably surmise these sources did not exist. But actually what's important to note,
00:16:08
Speaker
is that the New York Journal and the New York world were filled with what we would call today fake news. So they routinely ran stories which were false but promoted the ideological interests of the founders of those journals.
00:16:25
Speaker
That was the, what did they call it? Yellow press? Yeah. Yellow in, I believe, in terms of cowardly, not in terms of Chinese, so it was merely insulting instead of racist, although it was 1898, so it was probably a bit racist as well. Yeah, precisely. Because I suspect the yellow peril thing also comes from the idea that they're too cowardly to declare their real intentions.
00:16:46
Speaker
So, apparently, Pulitzer himself had privately said that, quote, nobody outside a lunatic asylum actually believed that Spain was involved in Maine's destruction. But in public, in his newspapers, he very much pressed the It Hit a Mine story as well.
00:17:08
Speaker
is in Hearst, for example, offered a reward of US$50,000, which back in those days I think is the equivalent of about a million dollars now, for the conviction of the criminals who sent 258, a different number again, 258 American sailors to their deaths.
00:17:28
Speaker
Okay, so that's one view. One view is that the USS Maine hit a mine. What's the other? So, as we kind of intimated at the top of the show, the US view was kind of vacillating between it was an accident, which was the initial report, until Teddy Roosevelt went, no, you're being a bit too fast there. I think there might be something going on that isn't just explosions on ships, and the idea that the USS Maine hit a mine.
Investigations Into the Sinking
00:17:57
Speaker
So you've got mysterious explosion which at the time was taken to be a problem in the coal bunker of the ship or you've got the idea that the main struck a mine at which point you've got two hypotheses there which was there's a mine in the harbour and the main either moves into it or the mine is moved by natural forces into the side of the ship or
00:18:21
Speaker
It's a deliberate act, so the mine is basically magnetised to then head towards the ship and cause the explosion.
00:18:29
Speaker
Or yes, there was just simply some sort of a coal dust explosion that happened on the ship itself. And so it was completely accidental. So the mine theory was what seemed to come up to begin with. But later reports started to lean towards the idea that maybe it was just a coal dust explosion and therefore nothing to do with the Spanish at all. So there were a few reports conducted over time.
00:18:54
Speaker
So in 1898 there were two investigations. There was a Spanish investigation which the American government didn't admit to for quite some time. The Spanish review concluded that no mine struck the main because the weather conditions were such that the mine would have had to have been electrified, so they would have actually had to have been powered.
00:19:17
Speaker
For it to actually strike the ship and the weather was too calm for the mine to be moving in waters that particular day Plus there were no dead fish in the water which you'd expect the mine had gone off would of course local fish to die and Also, the Spanish concluded that by and large Munition stalls don't tend to go up if it's in an external explosion So the fact it was an internal explosion indicates that something was happening within the ship not without the ship
00:19:47
Speaker
There was that explosion in somewhere up in Canada, I think during World War I, which is the largest non-nuclear man-made explosion in the world where a ship's ammunition detonated in the harbour. I think I vaguely know about this. That was due to a fire on the ship. That was nothing to do with this episode, but it's quite a read reading about that thing. It's supposedly
00:20:11
Speaker
The explosion was so big that the bottom of the harbour was briefly visible until the water rushed back in. It was so big that to this day you're not allowed to do any logging around the area because the trees have too much shrapnel in them. It is an interesting story, but not the story we're talking about today.
00:20:33
Speaker
So as I intimated, there was a Spanish review that year. There was also an American review that year. And that review, unlike the Spanish review, concludes that the most likely culprit for an explosion on the ship was a mine. However, that review was done at haste in what was increasingly hostile waters. And many people felt that the review was done in such a way that it
00:21:01
Speaker
probably wasn't the best investigation so in 1911 after Cuba has become independent from Spain the people in Havana are kind of a bit bored of there being a wreck of an American ship in the middle of their harbour and so they kind of intimate to America would quite like it if you remove the ship so the Americans build what's called a cofferdam
00:21:27
Speaker
around the ship, so they basically wall the ship off from the water, drain the water from within those walls, which allows them to then get to the ship, repair the ship such that they can then reflow it, and then they can sail the ship away and sink it in waters which aren't going to cause issues for shipping. And this investigation
00:21:48
Speaker
allowed them to actually look at the hull of the ship and work out exactly what went on and once again they went well actually everything's bent in such a way that we think given the access we have to the ship itself it's probably once again an external explosion it was a mine.
00:22:09
Speaker
Although some people said the opposite, said that the way in which the plates on the ship had bent and the explosion supported the idea that it was actually an explosion from within the ship, but nevertheless, I think back then the mine hypothesis wanted to be. In 1911 the mine was all the dominant story. Then you have an investigation in 1974, and this is actually a
00:22:33
Speaker
private investigation led by one of the admirals of the Navy. This is the investigation which starts to use more sophisticated modelling and this is the investigation that goes actually, given everything we know about the way explosions work and the story that was told on the day of this particular explosion, it does seem like it's going to be a cold dust issue leading to the detonation of the ammunition
00:23:03
Speaker
rather than there being an external source.
00:23:07
Speaker
Apparently, it went into some depth about the various sort of chemical agents that were stored on board the main at the time and how a change in coal-based fuel that happened at the time might have led to the explosion. And it also, like those dissenting experts in the 1911 investigation, suggested that the structural damage to the main suggested that the explosions happened inside the ship, within the ship, not external to it.
00:23:37
Speaker
Now there's also a 1998 investigation by National Geographic and this one actually uses computer modelling and the computer model once again goes back to the mine hypothesis and this actually caused issue with the investigators in 1974 because they really really didn't like the National Geographic investigation at all.
00:24:00
Speaker
Well, they wanted their report to be the final word, didn't they? They thought... And good old Nat Geo, which is, of course, now owned by Fox, had to want it in and really... I'm about to say, screw the pooch, but I have no idea why pooches are being screwed in this particular story. No, no.
00:24:16
Speaker
No, as far as known, no animals apart from human beings were harmed in the detonation of the USS Mayan. Actually, I suspect that's probably not true. They probably kept dogs on that ship. Well, you'd think so. Yeah. It seems to be the sort of thing that happens. Anyway, so yeah, so we have these two theories.
Conspiracy Theories and Historical Impact
00:24:32
Speaker
It was a
00:24:34
Speaker
a mine and therefore a deliberate act by Spain, or it was a coal dust explosion and therefore a tragic accident. And we have a series of reports that basically can't make up their minds between them. But there is a third theory.
00:24:50
Speaker
There is a third theory and that's where things actually start to get false flaggy. Well, yes, because you've got the official theory or official story in Cuba itself. And the Cuban story is that the USS Maine was sunk by
00:25:10
Speaker
U.S. agents. Yeah, so an actual false flag that the ship itself, I don't know if they say how whether the U.S. agents deliberately mined their own ship or deliberately set off a coal dust explosion of some sort from within their ship, but nevertheless the theory there is that the U.S. sunk their own ship
00:25:36
Speaker
basically because they wanted to go to war with Spain and as we said while the sinking of the main didn't directly immediately lead to the Spanish-American war it did kind of well it led to heightened
00:25:54
Speaker
Yeah, and I think sort of public sentiment at the time shifted towards those lousy Spanish people... Yeah, which then led to American blockading... pizza? American blockading the harbour of Havana, which then led to Spain going, enough is enough, we're going to declare war on you, and then discovering that America has a much more sophisticated navy than Spain did it.
00:26:21
Speaker
Yes, so actually only marginally because America a few years before that had a navy which was very, very bad indeed. Yes, so February 1898 is the explosion, April 1898 is the declaration of war. So it was only a couple of months in between, but it wasn't the event that started the war, it just played a great role in it.
00:26:44
Speaker
So, yeah, I mean, interesting for the things we've been talking about in the more recent conspiracy theory masterpiece theatres is around sort of the tension between conspiracy theory versus the official story. I think here's a good case where the official story in most places is one thing and something which would normally be labelled as a conspiracy theory in Cuba is the official story.
00:27:11
Speaker
Now of course there are other conspiracy theories, so some people actually take the notion of blowing up a ship in Guantanamo Bay, which was part of the Operation Northwoods plan, to be a kind of tacit admission by the Americans that they were the ones who sank the USS Maine. So the idea is, oh, they're
00:27:34
Speaker
They're just going back to their old playbook here. They blew up a ship in the harbour of Havana. Now they're suggesting they should blow up a ship in Guantanamo Bay. Interesting how history wants to repeat itself. Wasn't there an Operation Northwoods an actual quote along the lines of, you know, we need to remember the main type of the ending? Yeah.
00:27:54
Speaker
So, I mean, there is kind of a rationale to go, well, they're kind of doing exactly the same thing, but then you can also go, well, no, because the people who are involved in Operation Northwoods might be terrible people, but they are aware of American history and they're going, well, you know, a lot of public sympathy for America after the Maine was blown up, no matter who did it, we can probably garner the same thing again if we engineer an event of a similar kind.
00:28:22
Speaker
And then there is the theory, I believe, that Teddy Roosevelt himself was the person behind it all, that he wanted a war and that while he may not have been behind the sinking himself, he very much forced the investigators to conclude that Maine had been sunk in a deliberate act by Spain. And again,
00:28:48
Speaker
But because the sinking of the main wasn't actually the immediate cause of the war, that looks slightly less certain. But if he did want a war, he certainly got it, that's for sure.
USS Maine's Role in U.S. Unity Post-Civil War
00:29:00
Speaker
Yes, and what is interesting is that because we're dealing with a period in American history, which is the reunification between North and the South, one thing which an attack upon an American boat
00:29:15
Speaker
would have done if the attack had occurred so one thing the sinking of the main did actually achieve was suddenly making people in both the north and the south feel like they were one people together being angry at an external force so the remember the main cry was something which was said both in the north of america and also the south of america unifying people after
00:29:39
Speaker
What had been a pretty wrong doing, you know, that whole Civil War thing? You know, the slavery. Yeah, I actually I hadn't heard of the American Civil American Spanish War until a year or two ago when I happened to listen to a podcast about it. And the theme of the podcast essentially was not many people have heard about the Spanish-American War, because it kind of very much takes a backseat to the world wars that happened in the decades that followed.
00:30:08
Speaker
And it was also...
00:30:10
Speaker
Only seven American personnel died during the Spanish-American War, whilst most of the Spanish fleet in the Americas was completely annihilated. Yeah, it was over in, what was it, 10 weeks or something? Yeah. It wasn't massively long-lasting. But the argument in this particular podcast that I listened to was that it is possibly the most significant war in American history because it was the war which essentially gave rise to the idea of America as the world's policeman.
00:30:39
Speaker
It was supposedly, according to this one view of history, the war which gave America the idea that, oh, we can actually go into other countries run by other people and
00:30:55
Speaker
attack them essentially because we don't think we don't like the way in which they're being run. And supposedly they think a lot of the sort of American interventionism that we've seen over the last century can be traced back to the Spanish-American War. Interesting indeed. So should we talk about the rationale as to why we might prefer one story over the other?
Debate on Explosion Causes
00:31:20
Speaker
Do you mean in terms of evidence or in terms of politics? Let's talk about the evidence. Well, I mean, like we say, the evidence has been interpreted by people. The same evidence has been reported in different ways. So one reason why people have supported the coal dust hypothesis
00:31:43
Speaker
is that the Spanish are very very quick to offer aid to the American sailors as the main is sinking which made people at the time go well they're probably not responsible at least it's not a deliberate attack given how much care and duty they feel towards injured personnel in the harbour of Havana at the time and the other thing which
00:32:07
Speaker
kind of explains why you might want to say it to mine when it turns out to be coal dust. And this isn't in the notes here. So you aren't aware of what I'm about to say. So prepare to have your socks blown. Although he actually did get mentioned ever so briefly with respect to the change in fuel thing. So the main is basically the first of its kind. So America's Navy was in a pretty dilapidated state 10 years prior.
00:32:34
Speaker
And the Americans had realised that actually things could go really badly if they had a naval conflict because they're using very out-of-date ships compared to the ones that are being produced by the UK and we're now being sold to places in Europe like Spain, which has holdings very nearby.
00:32:53
Speaker
So America starts to build new and improved warships, to which the main is the first of its kind. The main takes around about 10 years to be built, at which point the technology and the type of ships being used in conflict changes dramatically in that time. So by the time the main rolls out of dry dock, it's already an out of date ship.
00:33:16
Speaker
And due to the fact that it's out of date, the kind of propulsion mains or engine types that the main was meant to use aren't actually the kind of engines that ships use by the time the main comes into service, which requires that the main needs to use different types of fuel.
00:33:35
Speaker
and it's very likely if you take the coal dust hypothesis to be the correct one that the reason why the coal bunker went up was that there was the wrong mix of chemicals in a room in a damp environment which then led to an exothermic reaction causing an explosion causing the first third of the ship to detonate when the ammunition went up and maybe you don't want to admit that
00:34:01
Speaker
the reason why your ship blew up in the middle of someone else's harbor is that you're not running it properly. So it might be more convenient to blame the explosion on an external force than admit that, actually, we have no idea what we're doing with these things, because we literally don't know how to run this ship. It's actually not the kind of ship we want, and the propulsion's all wrong, and we're still trying to work out the fueling system, and, oh, God, it's so complex.
00:34:30
Speaker
In the reading about the history of the investigations into this, the numerous investigations that have been done and the differing conclusions they came to, I didn't actually read if the U.S. government has an official position on it.
00:34:47
Speaker
Do we know? As far as people are concerned, if you check the historical record, it's a mysterious explosion. OK, so there isn't an official consensus? Not that I saw. It's just put down as a mysterious explosion.
00:35:04
Speaker
Well, there you go. Does bring to mind the story of a ship that exploded in a harbour a lot closer to home for us? The old Rainbow Warrior. The old Rainbow Warrior. Which we did actually talk about. It's in 2015, which was the 30th anniversary of the bowling of the Rainbow Warrior. It was the last
00:35:33
Speaker
the last terrorist attack by a foreign power in this country. So we've had a terrorist event in the last few years. The shootings down in Christchurch very much are a terrorist event. That was basically committed by a local bombing event. This was a state-sponsored act of terrorism by the French government in the Waitemata. Yes.
00:35:59
Speaker
If you're interested to learn about the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, go and hunt down Episode 57, July 2015. How in-depth should we go into that? Because I actually don't remember that episode at all. I think we went over it fairly in-depth. We talked about the fact that
00:36:18
Speaker
The bombings were intended to not cause casualties. There were two bombs. There was one that sort of started the boat sinking and then another one 10 minutes later that made a much bigger hole and actually sunk it properly. And the idea was that the first blast would get everyone to clear off the ship and then the second one would sink it. But unfortunately, a Greenpeace photographer went back onto the ship specifically to take photographs of the damage that had been done before the ship sunk.
00:36:47
Speaker
and was killed. We talked about what happened afterwards where the two French agents were caught and then France kind of insisted that we give them back and then they punished them with a slap on the wrist in a few years on an island paradise. Yes, they claim they were in prison. They appeared to be living in a resort. One of those prison resorts that you hear about.
00:37:11
Speaker
Well, I mean, I believe they have something similar in the US for the high profile prisoners, but that's another matter entirely. Or is it? Because we can segue into the bonus episode right now on that very line, unless there's anything else you'd like to talk about the thinking of the USS Maine before we do.
00:37:29
Speaker
No, because I want to know how the segue works. Well, that's basically it for this episode, but we, of course, have a bonus episode for our patrons coming up. And one of the things that we can't go without mentioning is the death of one Bernie Madoff, who presumably was in one of those rich person prisons. Oh, I see what you've done there. Very clever, my man. Very clever. Fancy prisons.
00:37:55
Speaker
You know, we're going to go back and do a sort of a newsy patron episode, I think, this week. So we can talk about Bernie Madoff. We can talk about a bunch of local politics. We can talk about the cool new thing that all the cool QAnon kids are up to. Which is Sadmik. I think it's Sadmik. Sadmik. Sadmik. There's also the Atlantean sword of Shaw Unawars. Shawanawars?
00:38:25
Speaker
Possibly. There's Princess Emili Archimedes. Most of these names are probably actually made up, so we can actually get away with not pronouncing them properly. And then we're going to talk about how Roblox players are attending White House briefings. Yes, my kids have started playing Roblox. I don't see the appeal, I have to say.
00:38:49
Speaker
I actually don't see the appeal of Minecraft either actually. Minecraft can be fun and it's a good creative outlet. So what is the actual difference between Roblox and Minecraft when it comes to the kind of building stuff? Welcome to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy where we're talking about what Josh's kids are playing. Our children's game, your children's game, I deny the parenthood of these children. Fair enough. Roblox
00:39:12
Speaker
It's not like Minecraft where you actually have an environment where you build stuff. There's like a programming platform. You need to actually code. You need sort of actual coding skill, but it's sort of a common platform so people can author their own games on it, basically. And then there's just this big library of thousands of games that people have made and other people play around on it.
00:39:37
Speaker
But you like programming. Surely you'd prefer Roblox to Minecraft. I'm personally not a big fan of Minecraft either. No, basically. Short answer.
00:39:51
Speaker
And that was Games, Josh's Children Play. I need to work on the title for this segment, which is not coming back. So, frankly, that's all the work I need to do. And this has come to a running thing. And I think that's all the work we need to do on this episode itself, because we've come to the end.
00:40:09
Speaker
So we have in the something so as I said at the top of the show, it's actually not quite as false flag as I thought it would be. So the USS Maine appears in a lot of list of false flag events. And so we did the research to find out exactly what the story is. And it turns out that yes, there's an official theory in Cuba of it being a false flag event, but actually this
00:40:32
Speaker
standard american stories actually external explosion which may or may not have been deliberate by the spanish but actually probably just an accident versus maybe covering up a story about an internal explosion to get away from some kind of problem about admitting defaults within your your ship design
00:40:52
Speaker
And so I went back, I went back to those lists of false flags that mention the USS Maine. And I tried to find, do they give a nice story as to why they think this is a major false flag event that needs to be reported upon when you talk about false flags? And by and large, they're all just summaries of the event and then end with, oh, by the way, in Cuba, people think it's a false flag. You end up going,
00:41:20
Speaker
I need slightly more than that for it to be a false flag. I need some kind of grandiose story. And the best story I can think of is either Teddy Roosevelt decided that he wanted a war with Spain, so he forced people to agree with him, although then he managed to force people to agree with him well after he was dead.
00:41:41
Speaker
or you've got a cover up at the time about bad ship design, which has kind of basically fallen to the wayside as people go, well, it's just a mysterious explosion. We don't know what really happened. And it turns out it's not really the cause of the Spanish-American War. It's simply heightened tensions at the time. But the actual cause of the war was Spain.
00:42:05
Speaker
Yes, unfortunately, I was almost thinking we need to get a new sting, a new false flag sting so we can stamp that out any time a false flag shows up, but we wouldn't have been able to use it this episode anyway. It would have been false flag, which doesn't really have the same kick.
00:42:21
Speaker
No, although I think the idea of having a false flag stay. I mean, back from that episode, we do a false flag, false flag, false flag. All the false flags. It's true, we could even pitch shift them. You know what I'm gonna do now, don't you? I know exactly what you're gonna do. Oh, you're gonna pitch shift our voices right now. Well, I think we should probably bring this episode to a close and make people feel as though they're sliding off.
00:42:48
Speaker
into the night ready to have a relaxing time maybe you're going to go to bed maybe maybe maybe you're going to brew yourself a cup of hot joe eat a donut and get yourself ready for an exciting afternoon on the town or something goodbye everybody
00:43:17
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy is Josh Addison and me, Dr. M.R.X.Denteth. You can contact us at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com, and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon. And remember, it's just a step to the left.