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Conspiranews for September 2019
23 Plays5 years ago
It's the September news episode, and what a bonanza Josh and M have for the loyal listeners: there's talk about whether Boris Johnson lied to the Queen, Pewdiepie, that attack on the Saudi Arabian oil fields, supposedly fiendish plotting by a finalist in the New Zealander of the Year competition, a missing underwater observatory, the whole Donald J. Trump impeachment thing, a judgement about Leave.EU, the fate of the Area 51 festivities, and more.
—
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
September 2014 Recap
00:00:00
Speaker
Previously on the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy Time travel listeners of the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, who are five years out of sync, will now be listening to things that happened back in September 2014, where our major topics were 1080. That's the poison, not the screen size slash resolution.
00:00:23
Speaker
and the general election in Aotearoa, New Zealand.
Kui Bono and WTC7
00:00:27
Speaker
Not the best election, really. Might in a bit of the old dirty politics. Fortunately, yes. Now, if our putative time travellers were a mere four years out of step, then in September 2015, they would have been able to hear a discussion of Kui Bono, who I believe at the time we pointed out is a singer from Ireland with a penchant for sunglasses. Yes, yes, very droll. And they would have heard us talk about WTC Building 7, a topic we returned to last week in our patron bonus episode.
00:00:53
Speaker
As well as an interview with Brian L. Keeley. Oh, and we talked about a...
00:00:58
Speaker
Watergate? Whatever that is. Never heard of it. Meanwhile, people stuck a mere three years in the past will have experienced September 2016's topical choices.
Conspiracy Theories Overview
00:01:09
Speaker
A filler episode. Well, more a grab bag of conspiracy nuggets. A preciate of my talk at Deakin University in Melbourne. And a summation of a topic Brian Keeley and I worked on in our joint book chapter on conspiracy theories, the notion of improvised knowledge and expertise.
00:01:27
Speaker
And, because it was a September episode, we had to cover the whole controlled demolition set of 9-11 conspiracy theories. Now, as we get closer to the present day, time travellers are mere two years out of step, while doubtless recall the episodes of September 2017.
Celebrity Theorists and QAnon
00:01:43
Speaker
Celebrity conspiracy theorists, and the beginning of our false flag series, which featured the shelling of Manila. Not literally. Of course, we didn't actually commit any war crimes ourselves.
00:01:54
Speaker
It'll lead to that later. The Glow Witch incident, and those instant ball pogroms. Yes, and finally, last year's visitors will have heard our September 2018 sweep consisting of not one, but two Michael Collinses. Our first discussion of that whole QAnon thing, and then some junk science like the Flat Earth thesis and the Dolls Plan. But now is not the past. Now is the future.
Humorous Whiskey Introduction
00:02:16
Speaker
Well, almost. Because it's September 26th, 2019, and this is The Conspira. News?
00:02:33
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:02:42
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison sitting next to me getting sourced as usual as Dr. M.R. Extenteth. This is cask strength. Is it? What? Cask strength. Whiskey, which is cask strength, is the alcoholic percentage as it comes out of the cask as opposed to the watered down stuff you tend to buy in your humble green grocers. Right, cask. It sounded slightly like you were saying cask strength and I thought does that mean it has the same octane as
00:03:11
Speaker
car petrol or something. 58% alcohol. Probably did the job. It requires a little bit of water from the monk. For our podcast listeners, Emma's referring to a little jug in the shape of a monk.
00:03:25
Speaker
But it's actually a tiny, tiny little monk that you've hollowed out and filled with water. Yes. Nevertheless, I think getting something from the monk should be our euphemism of choice
9/11 Anniversary Reflection
00:03:36
Speaker
and future. Our new catchphrase and now from the monk. Now it's the end of September. It's also September.
00:03:41
Speaker
Did we talk about September? I think we talked about the fact we haven't talked about September 11 last week, didn't we? But that may have been the patron bonus episode. It may have been the patron episode. We should acknowledge the fact that September and September 11, the granddaddy of all conspiracy theories, happened in September, strangely, hence the name. But we don't really have anything new to say about it this year, so we kind of haven't.
00:03:59
Speaker
Well, we kind of did put that whole WTC7 thing in the patron bonus episode. But it was, yeah. I mean, it's not new or novel. It's not breaking news.
WTC7 Engineering Report Discussion
00:04:10
Speaker
It's just people who think that WTC7 wasn't destroyed by debris from the twin towers and do think it was destroyed by a controlled demolition have commissioned an engineering report that says exactly that. There you go.
00:04:25
Speaker
But yeah, speaking of the month, it's time for a nice news roundup episode. So we actually have a hell of a lot, I think, looking at our notes. So we might have to skip briskly through some of it, but that's okay. I prefer to gamble. We can gamble like little baby lambs, if that's what you prefer. I think more gamble than gamble. If you're gambling like a baby lamb, A, you want to know what kind of casino you're going to, and B, stop it. Stop it now. Fair enough.
00:04:50
Speaker
So yes, I think we have a lot of we have a lot of some updating stuff, most of which we've mentioned in the bonus episodes. We'll skip past that quickly. But before we get to that, we have some actual new news.
Boris Johnson and Brexit Controversy
00:05:00
Speaker
And that requires a sting and a fortress around my heart. Breaking breaking conspiracy theories in the news.
00:05:13
Speaker
So I guess we have to start with the big news and the other big news is actually in the update section because it is kind of an update to the story we've already told. Did Boris Johnson lie to the British public, the British Parliament and the Queen?
00:05:29
Speaker
The Queen, ladies and gentlemen. I know, I know. The British are really concerned, but he may have lied to Parliament, but he lied to the Queen. How dare he. And this does suggest a conspiracy, because it's quite obvious that Johnson has
00:05:45
Speaker
Advisor Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove, I think is the Attorney General in the UK, all kind of got together to tell the story about they were going to pro-rog Parliament to put it into recess to give a Queen's speech. And it now seems quite clear the Supreme Court in the UK has gone. They actually just wanted to shut down Parliament to stifle any debate about Brexit, which does look as if that goes against the stated rationale by the Prime Minister, his Attorney General and the Advisor.
00:06:14
Speaker
which does suggest the existence of a conspiracy. And it's all rather exciting. It's all kind of breaking news right now. So, yeah, there was a what happened this morning, a Supreme Court ruling or some sort of court yesterday morning. So there's been that. And then, yeah, Boris Johnson seems to be doing the whole dead cat thing by saying incredibly offensive stuff about the death of MP Joe Cox. And daring Labour to vote for an election.
00:06:44
Speaker
So, yes, that's probably to be expected, but nothing of substance has happened this very second, so I guess we'll have to come back to it later. And I'm sure it'll be an update next month. Quite possibly.
PewDiePie's Donation Controversy
00:06:56
Speaker
Now, PewDiePie! You're down with the kids. I have kids, yes.
00:07:02
Speaker
You're not down with them? Not particularly down with them, no. They do their own thing, you know, generation gap and all that. Have you sent them down the coal mines yet? Not yet, but it's only a matter of time. They do, though, sort of returning to topic. They do enjoy watching YouTubers YouTubing
00:07:22
Speaker
which I cannot see the appeal of. I think they prefer the term influencers these days. Well, some of them are, some of them are. But PewDiePie, I don't actually know if he still is. For a while, he was the biggest of them all. He had more subscribers than any other channel on YouTube. 100 million subscribers or something like that? I think it was even more. He beat Rihanna. She was number one and he knocked her off the top. I don't know if that's still true, though, but he's definitely still very big. He does keep doing
00:07:53
Speaker
Stupid stuff. Stupid stuff. He's had the occasional racial slur pop out during heated moments on some of his streams. He's done hilarious japes like he found some people who would, in Africa or somewhere, who you could pay to just hold up a sign on the camera saying whatever you want. And so he thought the hilarious thing would be to get them to say, what was it? Death to the Jews or something? Something on that type, yeah. Something, something.
00:08:20
Speaker
ever so slightly Nazi adjacent. And yeah, so this sort of stuff has happened enough for it to become a bit of a theme in itself. Which then meant that a few weeks ago, PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kielberg,
00:08:41
Speaker
decided he was going to donate, and this is in British pounds, £40,500 sterling to the Anti-Defamation League to show that he's not an alt-right figure and not a racist. How did the world react to PewDiePie going, I'm going to give money to the Anti-Defamation League to show that I'm not a racist?
00:09:01
Speaker
Well, some people sort of said it's a nice gesture, but doesn't actually make you not a racist. And some people said, what? You're giving money to the Anti-Defamation League, thereby distancing yourself from alt-right peoples. But I'm an alt-right peoples. And I like you. And if you're giving money to the Anti-Defamation League, that means you don't like me. And this caused PewDiePie to decide to not give money to the Anti-Defamation League. So yeah, his line was kind of
00:09:31
Speaker
Yeah, I had been advised to give money to the anti-defamation because they're the most prominent sort of, what would you call them, advocates for Jewish causes and what have you. And that would be the sort of the most visible way of sort of sending a message, sending an anti-semitism message. And then said, but now he sort of agreed to do that, not really knowing anything about them. And then claims having looked into them, he now doesn't so much like the cut of their jib. So he plans to give a donation to someone else.
00:10:00
Speaker
but not the Anti-Defamation League. Yes, and basically he's reacting to people who are making the claim that the ADL goes around calling people anti-Semitic for no other reason than they dislike particular people, and apparently they've been using the Christchurch shooting to manipulate people emotionally. Hmm, have they?
00:10:19
Speaker
they've talked about the Christ you're shooting and people have got quite emotional when they think about the loss of life and the rhetoric which led to that loss of life. Yes, so as it stands, he said he's kind of apologized, I guess, apologized
00:10:38
Speaker
For wanting to donate money to the ATL, yeah. And has said basically that he doesn't agree with them wholeheartedly and should have actually researched the charity that he was going to plan to give money to before he gave money to them.
00:10:54
Speaker
And so now it's not going to do that. But yeah, in terms of in terms of the optics, I suppose you could say the situation saying I'm going to do this this thing sort of to symbolically show that I'm not one of these antisemitic alt-right twats and then going back on it kind of sends the message that maybe you are. Yeah. Yeah. So basically didn't give money because of a conspiracy.
00:11:20
Speaker
And the suspicion is that he's part of the very conspiracy itself. Let's move on. Let's move on, yes. Let's move on to a much more jolly topic.
Saudi Arabia-Iran Tensions
00:11:29
Speaker
Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia. Gotta love them. Except for when they murdered foreign journalists and hacked them up with a wooden sword. Oh, we've forgotten about that. That's ancient news. No, no. Now we're concerned that the Iranians are attacking the Saudis.
00:11:42
Speaker
Yeah, and I haven't, I confess I haven't been paying possibly as much attention as I should have been to this topic, given that it seems to be how the Trump administration is trying to kick off a war in Iran. But what is it? Saudi Arabia oil installations were bombed. They say Iran did it.
00:12:04
Speaker
The Iranians say they didn't. So the Houthi, who are in the Yemen area, which is kind of the south of Iran, and is in the southern region, they have claimed responsibility. Saudi Arabia and the US have said, no, that's nonsense.
00:12:23
Speaker
The Iranians are simply using the Houthi to basically wage a proxy war against Iran. So you can't trust the people saying they're responsible for the event because they're being used by the Iranians to cover the fact the Iranians were in fact responsible.
00:12:40
Speaker
The Saudi Arabian said we've got evidence that it's Iranian manufactured weaponry, which caused the attack. The Houthi have gone, actually, these are the devices we use to attack you. Here are the launch points. This is how we coordinated the attacks and all occur at the same time. And the entire world is going, we don't know who to believe, because it is true that Iran has waged proxy wars using proxies in the past.
00:13:09
Speaker
At the same time, we have an organization which is saying, we actually did it, and the US and Saudi Arabia is going, no, just ignore them, just ignore them. The real people we want to blame at this particular point in time, who Donald Trump has been kind of a bender on, is Iraq. Yes, and it is kind of... It's convenient. Shades of the Iraq War too, really, the whole al-Qaeda
00:13:33
Speaker
a bunch of largely Saudi Arabian terrorists carried out this attack appear to be hiding in Pakistan now. So let's go invade Iraq and Saddam Hussein. There seems to be a little bit of the idea that it's what they want to do anyway, and they're just coming up with an excuse. And also Americans won't be able to spot the difference on a map anyway. Well, yes, although to be brutally honest, I'm not sure I could.
00:14:00
Speaker
I know the region, but if you gave me a map of the Middle East with no names, I would struggle to tell you which was Iraq and which was Iran. Scandalous. Sorry, that's my geographical ignorance for you. Again, kind of a developing thing. There is no war in Iran as we are recording this podcast. Or at least as of 15 minutes ago. Yeah.
00:14:25
Speaker
But who the heck knows? And certainly I can think of one or two beleaguered American presidents who might fancy a distraction at the moment, but we'll get to that shortly. Yeah, we will. But some local news now.
Marawa Glover's Funding Debate
00:14:41
Speaker
Yes, so this is the story of Marawa Glover.
00:14:45
Speaker
Now, she's a finalist for New Zealander of the Year due to her work around smoking cessation in Maori, particularly pregnant Maori woman. But it turns out she takes money from Philip Morris, and this is causing many health researchers, not just here, but abroad, to look askance at her work and her advocacy.
00:15:12
Speaker
Yeah, so it's kind of a murky one, really. It really is very murky. She has done some genuinely good work here around smoking, but the foundation that she set out of has received one and a half million New Zealand dollars from the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World, which is a U.S.-based foundation whose sole source of funding is Philip Morris.
00:15:37
Speaker
Now, she claimed at the time when she was being interviewed about this case of you can't say it's all just from Philip Morris. I mean, I get my money from this foundation and it gets its sources from all sorts of places. Philip Morris is probably just one of the donators.
00:15:53
Speaker
And then they went, no, actually, Philip Morris is the sole funder. It's their foundation. The money has come indirectly from Philip Morris. And we do think it's a little bit unusual that for someone who does research into smoking, you're not aware of how this works. Now, I suppose the question to ask, though, is
00:16:18
Speaker
Like, it would be fairly blatant if someone who's doing work on smoking were to receive a bunch of money from a foundation funded by Philip Morrison and then come out with the result. Actually, it turns out smoking's not that bad. Smoking's kind of cool, actually. You should all do it because it makes you interesting and fashionable.
00:16:36
Speaker
But, so what has she actually been saying? Now, so you're vamping here because your tablets just crashed once again, you've got no access to the notes. Well, I do, because I'm much more reliable, much more reliable Apple ecosystem. I knew what Philo said and was leading you towards the next point. That I knew was there. I decide to sometimes part the curse on this podcast. My tablet has a weird bug that sometimes it resets itself for no reason whatsoever.
00:17:01
Speaker
usually in the midst of a podcast. So yes, there are questions here. Is her research driven by the funders, Philip Morris, or is her research actually driven by her research? And this is a murky situation because
00:17:17
Speaker
She is skeptical of passive smoking, and that's something that Big Tobacco has been skeptical of for quite some time. She thinks that we shouldn't focus on stopping young people from taking up smoking. We should be focusing on heavy smokers, which is something that the Big Tobacco companies have also talked about, because the Big Tobacco companies are afraid that if we focus our attention on people entering the smoking marketplace,
00:17:45
Speaker
there won't be a smoking marketplace in a generation's time. So they'd much rather we focus on the heavy problematic smokers, rather than casual smokers and the like. And you also oppose the recent ban that was brought in by the New Zealand government in smoking in cars. So you can no longer smoke in a car if you've got other, is it other passengers or just children? I think it's just children.
00:18:12
Speaker
So she does have a variety of positions, which do seem to at least resemble positions put forward by big tobacco companies. But the problem is, researchers who have worked with her are saying, no, actually, she holds these strident views, but they are usually evidence based.
00:18:33
Speaker
usually based upon research or at least saying given competing priorities and funding decisions we've got to make this is what we should do for the most outcome. Yeah so it's an interesting situation you sort of have
00:18:50
Speaker
this sort of situation that outwardly kind of seems to be on the level but then when you dig a little bit looks to be conspiratorial activity in terms of at least sort of people trying to peddle influence while hiding the fact that they're doing so by laundering their money through a foundation.
00:19:08
Speaker
The encounters to that saying, well, yeah, maybe that is true, but it still doesn't actually mean that the research coming out of it is invalid. Did we say at the start she is up for New Zealander of the Year? Yeah, that's the thing.
00:19:25
Speaker
Seems to be doing important work, but it's all just a little bit hard to know what to make of it. And at the same time, she's been blacklisted by the World Health Organization because of the association with Philip Morris. So it is a very, very murky situation. Is that something they did specifically to her, or is it simply they blacklist anyone who's associated with this foundation? Basically, yes. Yeah. So, yeah, it's a funny one. And an interesting, just from a sort of...
00:19:53
Speaker
academic might not be the right word, but an academic sort of viewpoint of looking at how conspiracies work and stuff. It's kind of interesting to sort of see the claim and counterclaim and whether or not the claims actually impact reality in any case at all. Yeah, so the short story here is just don't take money from big tobacco. Well, yes, it'll probably make life easier in the long run. It really would.
00:20:18
Speaker
So, now we have one last new news that is something, not an update to a story we've had before.
Missing Underwater Observatory Mystery
00:20:26
Speaker
Our bonus patron content listener sort of heard a little bit about this, but we'll cover it again, because it's too good a story not to play correctly. Precisely, because it's all about sea monsters, isn't it George? Sea monsters. So, an underwater observatory in the Baltic Sea... The Baltic-ness-ic observatory. It's gone.
00:20:42
Speaker
It's not there no more. Not a manned observatory, we should say. It was transmitting data one day. It stopped transmitting data the next day. This... I haven't written down. It's worth about 400,000 US dollars or so. So they sent divers down to work out what's gone wrong without rather expensive observatory.
00:21:05
Speaker
And it's gone. All that's left is a ripped cable and it's been removed. And according to the weather scientists who investigate these things, there was no storm at the time. There's no deep sea current that would have dragged it away.
00:21:20
Speaker
It's been taken, and I say it's been taken by sea monsters, for no evidence whatsoever. Well, quite possibly. So apparently the area is restricted for fishing, so it could have been dredged up in a net. People have said that supposedly sharks sometimes go for cables and could possibly have bitten through it and then it could have gone away or something, but then other people have said, no, that isn't actually possible.
00:21:42
Speaker
So yes, I think the leading contention among most people is that it was taken away by human looters wanting to get their hands on several hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment, but I think the sea monster's hypothesis should not be ignored. See, the fact that they're denying it's a sea monster makes me think that's the real conspiracy. That's exactly what a sea monster would say.
00:22:00
Speaker
And the people who work for sea monsters. Who are themselves sea monsters. This is the claim I'm making. Sea monsters all the way down, isn't it? All the way down to the bottom of the ocean, yes. Does the ocean even have a bottom? I mean, that might be part of the conspiracy. Well, I don't know. Now we're really through the looking glass. We've really blossomed out on that one. Oh, dear God. Now we're into bed punty. Time to... I'm waiting to get to where we can power bottom our way through it. Oh, dear.
00:22:26
Speaker
So that was all we had for new news. But there's quite a lot of updates. There's quite a lot of updates. There's quite a lot of updates. And even a retraction. So we can play the updates and retraction sting and it'll actually apply. It will. Let's play that now. Update. And retractions. Now, now an update to an ongoing
Trump's Ukraine Call and Impeachment Inquiry
00:22:48
Speaker
story. I think there's um...
00:22:50
Speaker
Something about someone getting impeached for something? It doesn't sound like a big deal, is it even worth mentioning? Given it does seem to just conspiracy, we're kind of obliged to bring us up.
00:23:08
Speaker
Yeah, so just today and did it start coming out yesterday? I knew it was only reading about it today. So I mean, so the long story is, I've had the long story, the short story even, the short story is Donald Trump is likely to be impeached. He's so they're launching a formal impeachment inquiry.
00:23:32
Speaker
may end up being impeached on the basis of demanding the Ukraine basically investigate Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden around a corruption story that we covered back in episode 219.
00:23:49
Speaker
Yes, we did talk about it a while ago. This is why this is an update and not news. The conspiracy theory is that Biden used his influence to basically make an investigation into a business that his son was involved with go away.
00:24:06
Speaker
Which is a story that Donald Trump seems to be spinning when saying that people need to investigate Biden and justifying the phone call to the Ukrainian president, who we'll get onto in just a second. But it's a little bit of a background on the whole Biden-Biden situation. Yes. So.
00:24:25
Speaker
It's been, I mean, it has been investigated. That's the thing. That's what we talked about before. So this was back when Joe Biden was vice president. There was a situation in the Ukraine where it turned out the country's chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokam,
00:24:43
Speaker
was corrupt. And Viktor Shokin was the person who was responsible for investigating corruption in the Ukraine. And Biden as vice president basically urged the president of the Ukraine at the time to investigate the corrupt prosecutor so that there wouldn't be any further corruption in the Ukraine.
00:25:07
Speaker
And at the time, Republicans tried to paint this as being a case of Biden's real motivation, being covering up the corrupt practices of his son, Hunter Biden, who was working for a Ukrainian guest company at the time.
00:25:25
Speaker
Now, Ukrainian anti-corruption activists, who you'd think would have an interest in finding out whether or not corruption is occurring in Ukraine, have basically said that this side of things, the Biden using his influence angle of it, did not happen.
00:25:44
Speaker
Yeah. So the investigations there certainly pour cold water on these things. But should the claim be true, of course, it would be very harmful to Joe Biden, who at the moment is looking like possibly one of the leading contenders for being Trump's opponent. Unfortunately, it's a good president, but it does seem to be quite popular.
00:26:05
Speaker
And so, you know, it started off there was a few days ago, there was the whole whistleblower thing. There was some whistleblower had said initially it was
00:26:18
Speaker
It was quite vague. It was sort of Trump had said stuff he shouldn't have while talking to another country's leader. And people were sort of saying, OK, so who's he actually spoken to in the time period in question and so on and so forth. But since it seems now seems to have come out that it was his conversation with the Ukrainian president was the was the one in question.
00:26:42
Speaker
And it seems to have been this thing basically here where Trump, the insinuation was that Trump was threatening to withhold military aid or something like that unless they did his bidding and investigated Joe Biden. And indeed what came out today was it turns out, at least the accusation, is that the condition for Trump talking with the Ukrainian president was this topic had to come up.
00:27:10
Speaker
No, I had not even got to that. That was breaking news this afternoon. So yes, the claim is that Donald Trump is pressuring the Ukrainians to do an investigation into the firing of the chief prosecutor in the Ukraine and the lack of investigation into Hunter Biden's activities there.
00:27:29
Speaker
on the notion that the US is going to restrict around about $400 million worth of aid to the Ukraine, unless the Ukraine actually does the investigation on Trump's behalf, which does look like asking a foreign government to give you aid in preparation for an election, which looks like the kind of thing which is impeachable, which then led to Nancy Pelosi actually announcing impeachment proceedings going ahead.
00:27:58
Speaker
in the U.S. So the White House has released a transcript of the call that isn't, it's all to do with apparently there's like there's voice, yeah, there's like voice recognition software that sort of records or scans all calls from the White House. And so it's sort of a transcript via voice recognition software of this call. And there's possibly been some editing and so on. And people have sort of set
00:28:27
Speaker
OK, this is the administration that tried to fake a hurricane report by drawing an extra line on it with a Sharpie. Can we trust that this thing, this transcript, their supply is anything? What it has contained
00:28:41
Speaker
It is enough open for interpretation that Trump supporters say, look, see, it proves nothing bad went on. And Trump detractors say it proves something bad did go on. And in terms of it, it sort of sounds a little bit like a mafia shakedown. So obviously, there is no point at which Trump says
00:29:01
Speaker
investigate Joe Biden, or I will withhold US military aid for you. But it's just sort of, you know, mentions Joe Biden happens to mention aid at the military aid at the same time. It's, you know, and people sort of, some people have come out and said, Yeah, this sounds exactly like a
00:29:21
Speaker
What's the word? Protection rackets? And because once again, it's a reconstruction of a conversation. People are going, if this is the best they can do to shunt attention away from the issue by not releasing the full transcript, this is pretty damning in its own way because, you know,
00:29:41
Speaker
The transfer goes a bit like this. I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good, and he was shut down, and that really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that. The way they shut down, you're very good prosecutor down, and you had some bad people involved. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I'd like you to call him.
00:30:02
Speaker
I'll ask him to call you along with Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what's happening, and he's a really capable guy. If you could speak to him, that would be great. A former ambassador from the United States to the woman was bad news, and the people she was dealing with in Ukraine were bad news. So I just want to let you know that. The other thing, there's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution, and a lot of people want to find out about that.
00:30:27
Speaker
So whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around breakingly stopped the prosecution. So if you look to that, it sounds horrible to me. Bold choice to do that in the voice of Ernie from Sesame Street. I would have gone with the Trump impression, but good for you for breaking the mold.
00:30:46
Speaker
Yeah, so as well as there's this transcript but the actual report from the whistleblower themselves has been made available to Congress but hasn't been released yet and so that's the one that people really want to get released because that will be the actual claim against Trump rather than this evidence which appears to be somewhat unreliable.
00:31:08
Speaker
So yes, there could be a large-scale conspiracy being run by the American president to get foreign powers to influence the American election, which is a shocking thing to claim, and I'm surprised we've never covered a table like that on this podcast before. Amazing. Who could have thought such a thing?
00:31:25
Speaker
And that's probably enough to say about it now because we are still sick to our back teeth of talking about Donald Trump and anything to do with him. Even though we haven't actually talked about him for what feels like over a year now. And not long enough, quite frankly. But no, you can't really ignore that. But let's move on now. So I think
00:31:44
Speaker
I think most of what we have left is, well it's all updates to stuff we've talked before, a lot of it's stuff we've already talked about more recently on some of our patron bonus content. So let's rattle through it fairly quickly. David Koch died, aged 79, cancer. Yep. Which he had for a while. And they say you should never say anything bad about the dead, so we're not going to say anything at all.
00:32:10
Speaker
Suhan Suhan, the man who shot RFK, has been stabbed but not killed in prison.
00:32:18
Speaker
Which doesn't appear to be anything to do with conspiracy, it's just there's a bit of news about Sir Han. Now this one I don't think had come up, this piece of news hadn't come up before the case had. Peter Ellis has died in New Zealand. Peter Ellis, you may recall, he's come up before. He's our one real instance of the satanic panic back in the 1980s.
00:32:40
Speaker
work at a creation Christchurch and then stories started coming out of child abuse, ritualized child abuse, satanic who knows what. He was found guilty on what appears to be very dodgy evidence, testimony of children that appears to be very coached. There are all sorts of regularities with the investigation, not the least of which was the lead detective having affairs with various more than one of the mothers of the children in question. Yes, there were elements of soap opera to the investigation.
00:33:09
Speaker
And ever since then, I mean, he's out of jail now, or he's dead now. He was released from jail, but has never been cleared. And there have been numerous attempts, numerous requests to have another inquest that might clear his name. And the frustrating thing has always been that whoever, whichever political party is in opposition at the time says, yes, we should have a look at this because they know that's what the people want to hear.
00:33:32
Speaker
And as soon as they get into power, they go, oh, actually, we trust the police and the prosecution services here, so we're not going to do anything. And it largely seems to be about preserving the reputation of New Zealand's justice system, ahead of preserving the reputation of what appears to be an innocent man. And unfortunately, he's died without having the chance to get his name cleared, which is just a bit of a shame. And he was actually literally weeks away from another appeal.
00:33:57
Speaker
So that's just a bit sad really. Also sad is the fact that according to the UK's National Crime Agency, Aaron Banks and Leave.eu did not break campaign finance laws or the laws in general in their Brexit campaigning.
Arron Banks Investigation Outcome
00:34:14
Speaker
So, they had appeared to break campaign finance laws by brokering a loan via Aaron Banks, who was running Leave.eu, rather than getting the loan directly as an entity. However, it was turned out that this was, whilst immoral, perfectly legal as options are, although it is interesting that the UK National Crime Agency then also went on to say,
00:34:40
Speaker
There have been also media reports alleging Mr Banks has been involved in other criminality related to business dealings overseas. The NTA neither confirms nor denies that he is investigating these reports.
00:34:57
Speaker
shades of James Comey popping up on TV to say, hey, just want to remind you all that we're investigating Hillary Clinton. Yeah. No, no, no big deal. Yes, I mean, Brexit is the one thing I'm possibly less interested in talking about than the Trump administration, to be honest. It's just endless. It's like the car pile up in Blues Brothers, where they just keep coming and coming and coming. And a bit like that, but it just doesn't stop. It's the entire movie.
00:35:26
Speaker
Brexit does feel like Blues Brothers 2000. Oh god, yes, even worse. Okay, let's lighten the tone a bit. The Area 51 Festival. So I went ahead, bit of a, you know, I wouldn't say non-event might be a bit strong. Josh, two million people said on Facebook they were attending. How many people turned up? Not two million.
00:35:47
Speaker
About 3,000. A few thousand. Which is not enough. Actually if you've ever run a Facebook event, actually it's past the course. It's not bad. So I mean some people showed up, they wore silly outfits, they sold silly merch, a few people did Naruto running around the place.
00:36:04
Speaker
It's solidified itself in the pantheon of means due to the fact that there's apparently a porn parody of it now. Adult website Pornhub has apparently commissioned a porn parody in which a couple of busty urban explorers break into an Area 1 type lad and encounter an alien and his penis.
00:36:26
Speaker
Pornhub, yep, such a problematic entity, mostly because they take porn you're meant to pay for, put it for free online, and thus artists lose their revenue streams, but then they get the good graces of doing these little parodies.
00:36:41
Speaker
It's an interesting topic and kind of conspiratorial as well because apparently there's like one company. I can't remember. It has like the most benign name you could think of. It's just sort of international holdings or something ridiculously generic. But there's this one company that controls all the major porn producers in the States and all the major websites. So the company don't lose out when they're
00:37:06
Speaker
movies get pirated on a site like Pornhub because they own Pornhub. But yeah, it is the artists that suffer and apparently the whole monopoly condition means that, yeah, conditions for everyone in the industry, not just actors, but it's not good for any of them. And nothing's going to be done about it because for something to be done about it, a politician is going to have to stand up in the Congress or Senator River and say, hey, we need to do something about regulating the porn industry. And from then until the end of time will be known as the porn politician. And no politician wants to do that to their career. So it's
00:37:35
Speaker
We should rename this podcast The Porncaster's Guide to a conspiracy. We should. We can get pirated on Pornhub. They could make a porn parody of us. Oh, I want to see that. I don't, but yeah. So, yes, Area 51, bit of a fizzle, Pornhub are actually a global monopoly that will probably crush us all beneath its iron and slightly- Amazon's going to do that first.
00:38:00
Speaker
And you know Amazon's going to get into porn eventually? Well... Alexa... Alexa... Yes... Not sure where you're going...
00:38:11
Speaker
Not sure I wanna know. Precisely. Okay, back to reality then. I suppose the Area 51 kind of counts as reality, but back to more earthy topics.
Jeffrey Epstein Death Speculation
00:38:25
Speaker
Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein. Still dead? Still dead, yep. So there's been lots of stuff coming out about his suicide, or was it? One of the things, of course, is the fact that supposedly the security cameras outside his cell were not functioning.
00:38:41
Speaker
So these cameras have been actually been sent to the FBI to see whether or not they just plain, you know, it was the result of, as we talked about in the past, poor funding of the whole thing and they just had malfunctioned due to lack of maintenance or whether they had been actually sabotaged in some way.
00:39:03
Speaker
And so that's with the feds. Now, the whole Jeffrey Epstein thing is going to be fascinating for people like me in March of next year, and there's going to be a major conference on conspiracy theories at the University of Miami being held, or is it run by Joe Yosinski? And as far as I can tell, amongst conspiracy theory theorists,
00:39:24
Speaker
There are those who are going, there's nothing to it. Does it call it a conspiracy, and a faked death, or a bad conspiracy theorising? The official theory is obviously true. And then others who are going, yeah, but you know, and you know, that.
00:39:44
Speaker
And I think it's going to be a quite contentious issue in the field of conspiracy theory theories between people are going, actually, there seems to be enough grounds to at least go, we should consider the possibility, versus the theorists are going, no, it's just stupid, vapid conspiracy theorizing, shut up about it.
00:40:02
Speaker
Certainly, as we talked about when we talked about Jeffrey Epstein, the first time, the layperson angle in that this one event has been the one more than anything recently, where I've seen lots of people saying, I don't normally go in for conspiracy theories, but this one, it seemed to be...
00:40:21
Speaker
I don't know if it's just sort of a more recent distrust of the rich and powerful, but then there's always been a bit of that anyway. So, sort of person who supposedly could threaten the interests of the powerful elite conveniently is no longer a problem for them. It's, yeah, it certainly seems, I can see there's an element of plausibility to there. Oh, yeah. I'd say it's going to be a very interesting issue in March of next year.
00:40:46
Speaker
And finally an update on Malaysian Airlines MH17, which is the other one. MH370 is the one that disappeared. MH17 is the one that got shot down. It's kind of a straight to DVD sequel to MH370. The one we actually know most of what happened to it, but not a few crucial details. So it's shot down over Ukraine. Was it shot down by Ukrainian forces? Was it shot down by Russian forces? Was it shot down by Ukrainian
00:41:17
Speaker
loyalists, not separatists, the opposite of what separatists are. Was it shot down with sort of Ukrainian elements who were armed by the Russians in sympathetic to them? Was it Russians in Ukraine? Was it Ukrainians in Russia? Who the hell knows? So we have some
00:41:33
Speaker
Yeah, so what we do know is that there's been a prisoner swap between Russia and Ukraine recently. And one of the people who claimed responsibility for the downing of MH17, Vladimir Smok,
00:41:47
Speaker
has been given over to Russia which has led to people in the EU in particular going that was the worst decision Ukraine ever made because at least when he was in your custody you had the ability to pressure him to explain what was going on but now he's ensconced in Russia we'll probably never hear from him ever again.
00:42:11
Speaker
Yes, so a bit of a blow to the case because I mean that the The well the results of the Dutch investigation wasn't it was that it was Russian forces within Ukraine either people loyal to Russia or actual Russian military forces operating with Ukraine's borders were the one to see the the book missile to down MH 17 to then blame the Ukraine for what went on. Yeah, or
00:42:38
Speaker
inadvertently downed a passenger jet, thinking it was a Ukrainian jet. So yeah, I mean, that's been the results of this, what was it, Dutch investigation, but nothing conclusive has happened, and now this seems to be somewhat of a blow towards something conclusive actually happening. Because Russia, by and large, neither extradites its citizens or its holdings for investigations overseas. So basically Vladimir
00:43:07
Speaker
is probably palling it up with the other Vlad. And we'll never hear from him again. That's a shame. And I think that brings us to the end of our news updates. But we do have time for retraction. We have a retraction. Josh, retract. What I should like to retract is a couple of episodes ago when we were talking about Tesla, we had fun talking about the whole Edison electrocuted and elephant thing. I found out more recently that that's kind of actually not true.
00:43:36
Speaker
There is a famous movie, Electrocuting an Elephant, where Topsy the Elephant was scheduled to be put down, basically, and they decided to make a public spectacle out of it for some fairly ghoulish reason. The whole thing was just kind of messed up. I don't know if the SPCA existed back then, but some animal welfare groups sort of said, dude, you can't just electrocute an elephant. And they're like, okay, well, they had a bunch of other contingencies in place to make sure they did kill the elephant quickly without its suffering. So it was like,
00:44:05
Speaker
fed poison and then electrocuted which which appeared which sort of dropped it instantly and appeared to if not kill it then knock it out and then strangled it to death.
00:44:16
Speaker
How would you strangle an elephant today? They had big motors, a pad had like a quarter round its neck and great big steam engines or something, pulling on it to make sure. So it gets more horrific than what you describe it. But the point is, this was filmed, it was filmed by the Edison Film Company, and as a film made by the Edison Film Company, when you get to the end of it, in the credits it says, by Thomas A. Edison,
00:44:38
Speaker
So that's sort of where people mistakenly thought that this film was made specifically on the orders of Thomas Edison, specifically to prove the dangers of AC electricity, but that's not the case. The whole sort of war of the currents thing had been settled a good 10 years before this film was actually made. That said...
00:44:56
Speaker
Edison was known to have supported a man called Harold Brown, who very definitely did electrocute a bunch of dogs as part of a campaign to prove that AC electricity was dangerous, so you can't say it's not the sort of thing he would have done if you thought of it at the time.
00:45:12
Speaker
It's true, Edison was a very, very terrible human being. And this Harold Brown guy, he electrocuted a bunch of dogs, and then electrocuted a bunch more dogs when people claimed that possibly his electrocutions hadn't been, like that said, because you electrocuted one with DC, and then AC, and the AC killed it. Well, maybe that was because the DC weakened it first. And so he said, oh, fine, I'll electrocute a few more dogs. Just don't stop me now. Yeah.
00:45:41
Speaker
So yes, not particularly so. So just let it be known, Thomas Edison did not order the electrocution of an elephant as a blow in the war over whether AC or DC was good, but he's still a dick, so that's okay. Precisely. Now you know who aren't dicks? You and me.
00:46:02
Speaker
no we can we can be fairly dickish our patrons our patrons yes now as it's a news episode we like to reward our patrons with content because normally when we give content we reward our patrons with news and our content this week is a doozy
00:46:17
Speaker
we are going to talk about the plot to assassinate George Washington. So if you want to find out more about the plot to assassinate George Washington, why not become one of our patrons for just a dollar a month and you can get fun and exciting episodes such as a plot to assassinate, who? George Washington? Yes. Right. Well, good then.
00:46:41
Speaker
If you want to do that, go to PatrayOn and look for us, or go to conspiracism.publyne.com and sign up to the inative patronage system. But for now, I think it's the end of this episode on this slightly chilly Auckland evening, really. It's kind of cold in here. There's been a polar blast from the south, heating's not a good reason.
00:47:02
Speaker
No, and it's kind of dropped the temperature about four degrees in the last week. Which I don't know if my microphone has possibly been picking up a creaking noise the entire episode, which is because I'm actually wearing a jacket.
00:47:15
Speaker
Josh is actually made of leather. I am actually made of leather. Yeah, it's from my all my years of being an outdoorsman. You know, all that outdoorsing I like to do. It's true. You're just like Dexter at the end of Dexter. I'm literally Davy Crockett. So that is the end of this episode, I believe. So we will speak to you next week unless you're a patron, in which case we'll speak to you fairly soon, unless you listen to the episode later and then we'll I don't know.
00:47:43
Speaker
At which point it's all gone to theory, timey, whimey and frankly we don't have time for that. We do not have timey whimey for that. So goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.
00:48:04
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster'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.
00:49:05
Speaker
And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara. Look at here, your leather jacket creaking. Yep. Jonathan creaking.
00:49:18
Speaker
TV show that probably went on ever so slightly too long. Ah, I didn't watch much of it after this second season, I think. Yeah. Some of the films were okay. The ones with Rick Mayall were great. No, did he come back? Yeah. Ah, excellent. Yes, I only saw him in that first Christmas special orchard. Yeah, no, he came back at least once, if not twice. And he was as Rick Mayall as you expect Rick Mayall to be. Never the greatest dramatic actor. No.
00:49:45
Speaker
but the greatest Rick male. Yes. I don't think there has been a better Rick male. I can't think of one. There might have been one in 1366, which was better. But that because it was not who it was. It was a mantelpiece, but it was a really fine Rick male mantelpiece.