Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Not the Conspiracy!
22 Plays2 years ago
M and Josh bid farewell to the "What the Conspiracy!" segment and say "hello again!" to The Podcaster’s Guide to the Conspiracy Grab Bag Cavalcade of Conspiracy Nuggets! That's three exclamation marks in one sentence, so you know this episode will be a riot! By which we mean it will involve numerous deaths and some amount of property destruction.
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
Why not support The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy by donating to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/podcastersguidetotheconspiracy
or Podbean crowdfunding? http://www.podbean.com/patron/crowdfund/profile/id/muv5b-79
Recommended
Transcript
Unbelievable Stories and Characters
00:00:00
Speaker
I've told you things you wouldn't believe. Stories of novels by Todd Noy and Rich Shapiro. We've laughed about Rin, Tung and Dawna, and the mystery of the elusive Papaya. I regaled you with false invasions of Norway. All those episodes of what the conspiracy will be lost in time, like tears and rain. Time to retire the segment. Yeah, hang on, haven't you done a Blade Runner reference before? Like, just a few episodes ago?
00:00:28
Speaker
Maybe you'll end up like me, a hobo with a podcast. Yeah, that's better.
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:51
Speaker
Hello, you're listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison here in Auckland, New Zealand and in Zhuhai, China. We have associate professor of philosophy who's over sent tofu by weight. Dr. N.R. extends it. Now I know that's a lie. In China, I'm 60% dofu. Ah, where do you go? I don't know. That's the difference. No, well, it's just it's just that's the that is the Mandarin word for tofu is tofu.
00:01:20
Speaker
We'll make more sense then.
Ending and Revisiting 'What the Conspiracy'
00:01:23
Speaker
So this episode, this is both an ending and a beginning. The Alpha and the Omega of the podcasters guide to the conspiracy.
00:01:33
Speaker
I mean, kind of. I mean, you're talking about this as being the end of What the Conspiracy. It's not really ending per se. What we've hit here is the limit of you having topics for What the Conspiracy. I may surprise you with a What the Conspiracy from time to time, but as a regular segment, it's coming to an end because of your inability to surprise me with novel conspiratorial content. Although today,
00:02:01
Speaker
Today might be the test. Today you may have found three examples that I go, yes, you could have done an entire episode on that. You fool! You fool! You gave up too soon! Or something of that particular kind. Who knows?
00:02:12
Speaker
Yes, so as a little send-off to the segment, as a regular, we're going to go through, I'm pretty sure we've mentioned this, in previous episodes I certainly have a list, and I assume Em does too, of little ideas that I've come across and then looked at and thought, eh, there's probably not a whole episode in there, so never actually got around to using them. Well, now's the time we'll be going to use them.
00:02:38
Speaker
And in a way, this is sort of both looking back and looking forward a little bit, because as we've suggested, we're going to start revisiting old topics, given that we've been going for almost eight years now.
00:02:54
Speaker
No, over eight years now. And there are a whole lot of things that there have been updates on. There are a whole lot of things that you, the listeners, if you haven't, unless you've been with us since the very beginning, have not heard us talk about. So it probably wouldn't hurt to go back to them. And the thing is, we've kind of done an episode like this before as well. So in a way,
00:03:13
Speaker
It's also the start of our regular segment of revisiting old topics because back in episode 113, September of 2016, we first took a dive into the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy grab bag cavalcade of conspiracy nuggets.
00:03:32
Speaker
That was the episode when UM were about to go off to Romania and we weren't quite sure if the podcast was going to continue. So we did a little bit of, hey, here's a whole bunch of little things we've thought about mentioning, but never actually did, and got them all out of our system. We're kind of going to do that again.
00:03:50
Speaker
The other thing to note, and this came up in a Patreon bonus episode, when we were going through a list of things we've covered in the past, there were a fair few number of things that we had looked at in the past that we have no memory of, what's a wall, Bo Bergdahl being a great example. So some of this actually might be going back and going,
00:04:17
Speaker
What was that again? And did this become a major story or did it just disappear? In fact, this was part of the topic of conversation I had with Joe Ucinski, I think, outside of the interview last week, which was around the notion that so many conspiracy theories die. There are so many topics that we've looked at which have had no shelf life whatsoever. None at all.
00:04:44
Speaker
Yes, I mean we did puzzle our way, we did manage to remember who Birkdale was in the end, but yeah, not a lot came of that. Or certainly I think that was one that possibly got dumped when more juicy conspiracy theories came on, because it was one of those ones that sort of appealed to a certain end of the political spectrum, I think. But anyway, that's not what we're here to talk about today.
00:05:05
Speaker
Who knows? I don't know what you're here to talk about today. You don't know what I'm here to talk about today. Should we play one last what the conspiracies sting and get
Unexplored Conspiracy Topics
00:05:16
Speaker
into it? Indeed we shall. It's time to play What the Conspiracy.
00:05:33
Speaker
Right, so, who wants to go first? Do you want to go first? Actually, it's alright. We should get some ground rules down here, because I've got three moderate...
00:05:44
Speaker
what the conspiracy topics and that there's more than just say a headline, but there wasn't enough for an episode. But I've got one or two topics which really would never have fitted the segment at all. So do you have, do you have kind of moderately sized topics we can talk about in bite sized chunks? Because if you don't have any kind of, I couldn't do this one because it was too small. And I couldn't do this one because it was too big. We could also do those as well before we get into the meat of the topic.
00:06:14
Speaker
No, I've got a few that aren't much more than a couple of sentences, really. And I've got a couple that are not big enough to have filled up an entire episode, I think, but still have a bit of substance and will be interesting to talk about. That's what I think.
00:06:35
Speaker
Well, let's start with the one which I wanted to do an episode on and then really couldn't find enough to justify it.
Lyndon LaRouche and the Grateful Dead
00:06:45
Speaker
And this can be summed up with the sentence, Jerry Garcia and the Great Full Dead on Her Majesty's Secret Service.
00:06:52
Speaker
I like it. Can you expand on that, or are you just going to leave it as it is? Which would be OK? Well, no, see, Lyndon LaRouche, the now dead, but for a long time quite prominent, confusing conspiracy theorist in American politics, confusing because Lyndon LaRouche was described as being either hard left or hard right, depending on who you were talking to, was adamant that the Grateful Dead were indeed part of the British invasion.
00:07:20
Speaker
of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, which is usually taken to be the Brits taking over music in America. But in LaRouche's worldview, it was part of a plot by the English crown to make American teenagers degenerate. So he was adamant that Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead were working for MI5, MI6, MI7, MI9, MI8. Who knows which MI they were working for?
00:07:47
Speaker
They were working for one of them to make American youth degenerate. And that's basically it. Lyndon LaRouche claimed this. He claimed this a lot. There really is no evidential basis to it, other than the fact it was something that Lyndon LaRouche talked about a lot.
00:08:06
Speaker
So I went, I mean, it's a great idea for a topic, but basically I've just told you everything, otherwise it would have been a discussion about how neither of us know anything about The Grateful Dead. That is a true fact, yes. Yeah, I think that one probably just gets filed under Lyndon LaRouche said a lot of stuff.
00:08:26
Speaker
Which would be a topic in its own right, and maybe one day we should look... And that's something that we might want to revisit as part of our remake series, because I imagine there's a lot more to say about LaRouche.
00:08:44
Speaker
Well, meanwhile, so one idea I had was doing a What the Conspiracy episode about monopolies? Because I thought they were interesting. So not the variation of board games. There are a lot of monopoly board games. There are so many. I mean, there are too many because A, it's monopoly, it should be one. And two, monopoly is a very bad game. So you shouldn't be making endless variations of it anyway.
00:09:09
Speaker
I mean, the whole point of it was sort of a satire of capitalism, wasn't it? You're supposed to play it and go, well, this is a bit rubbish. It always ends up with one person who's ring up all the money and destroying everyone else.
00:09:22
Speaker
And everybody plays it without actually reading the rules. Because it turns out if you read the rules, that free parking rule that everybody plays with does not exist. Not an official rule, no. No. And indeed, it kind of skews the game. The whole point is you're meant to be... The tactic for winning Monopoly is to only build houses and never build hotels. You're meant to be a slumlord. You're meant to be a slum... Because you make a lot more money that way.
00:09:54
Speaker
Anyway, now I wanted to talk about corporate monopolies. I thought it could be an interesting topic to discuss just because they're sort of conspiratorial and sort of aren't, because monopolies
00:10:09
Speaker
There's sort of a thing that not a lot of people know about in some cases, but they're not technically secret. Like, who owns what company is generally a matter of public record, so anyone can find out, but not a lot of people do. So, I mean, there are examples. This was triggered, I was watching an episode of, what's his name? Adam Ruins Everything.
00:10:33
Speaker
where he was talking about sunglasses and how Luxotica, which is a brand of sunglasses you may have seen, actually owns all of the other brands. So when you're buying sunglasses in the middle of the brand, you're essentially buying Luxotica sunglasses, which goes some way, or if I think just any glasses, which goes some way towards explaining why they're so damn expensive.
00:10:55
Speaker
And then you could talk about that. You could talk about De Beers for a bit, obviously, with their hold on the diamond industry. I'm not sure. You could say a lot about De Beers and the wackiness they've got up to and their massive stores of diamonds and how
00:11:12
Speaker
diamonds used to be the the preserve of royalty until people started basically picking them up off the ground in Africa and suddenly there were heaps of them but to be as managed to maintain a stranglehold on the market and then all the wackiness they got up to when people started producing synthetic diamonds and so on. But again a lot of it's hard to justify as conspiratorial except in a funny is it or isn't it discussion around whether being
00:11:41
Speaker
obscure but not technically secret accounts.
Corporate Monopolies: Luxotica
00:11:45
Speaker
And then there was one that I'm pretty sure I've talked about in this podcast before, the porn monopoly. How there is a company whose name I haven't looked up because I never actually got into researching this topic and I didn't want what is the company that makes all the porn in my search history. But there is a company
00:12:09
Speaker
I can't remember the name, but it's the most generic, meaningless sort of international holdings, or just something that means absolutely nothing, that owns the major porn production companies, in America at least, and the major porn websites out of America, which means even when people pirate the videos they make and put them up on other sites, they're making advertising money off of it anyway.
00:12:36
Speaker
Which was an interesting discussion, if only for the fact that this monopoly means that the people who work in that industry, not just the actors, but anyone involved in the industry, have fairly poor working conditions because it's a monopoly. And yet nothing's going to be done about that because in order for it to happen, politicians would have to get involved, which means a politician would have to stand up in the Senate or Congress or wherever politicians stand up in the States.
00:13:02
Speaker
and say, we need to do something about the porn industry, and that politician would be known as the porn politician from now until the end of days. So that will never happen. I thought there could have been some interesting discussions around it, but I thought it would have been going a little bit too far off topic to really justify an episode. I'm just thinking now about the porn czar. They become the porn czar. America needs a porn czar, yes.
00:13:32
Speaker
Yes, so that's my first abortive topic, what else you got? Josh, can I interest you in some primates? You always. Always. So, have you heard of monkey gate? I have not heard of monkey gate, no. Is it just a gate, unlike the monkey enclosure at a zoo?
00:13:51
Speaker
No, no, see the thing about Monkey Gate. So you remember that Volkswagen's emission scandal that we've talked about a lot on this podcast? We have. Is this about monkey emissions? Now I'm interested. Well, no, it's more about about an experiment that Volkswagen
00:14:08
Speaker
committed back in either May of 2015 or 2014. I've actually found two different dates here and I think one may refer to when the experiment started and the other might be referring to by the time the experiments were finished. So it turns out back in 2018 it was revealed that Volkswagen had experimented with gassing monkeys with the exhaust fumes of diesel cars.
00:14:36
Speaker
Well, that's a lot less amusing than I was hoping. Actually, that does sound familiar to me. I'm sure I remember seeing pictures of monkeys essentially in gas mask arrangements, weren't they? With fumes being piped directly into their faces. Yes, that's correct. So, Volkswagen wanted to show that diesel fumes are not carcinogenic. So they decided the best way to show that would be to gas a whole bunch of monkeys.
00:15:06
Speaker
Now, what makes this particular experiment horrific actually isn't the ethics of the experiment of taking primates and getting gas masks. No, the thing which makes this experiment particularly horrific was that the Volkswagen Beetle they were using, to guess these monkeys, had a cheat device installed in it. So it was producing fewer emissions.
00:15:32
Speaker
and thus of course wasn't going to be as carcinogenic as an actual car was going to be because the cheap devices that Volkswagen were using in the emission scandal were also the cheap devices they were using to show that diesel fumes are not carcinogenic. Right, they're not good for you though are they?
00:15:51
Speaker
So this is a classic case of a conspiracy folding into another conspiracy here. So Volkswagen were using their cheap devices in the US and the EU in order to try to show that their cars don't produce as many emissions as they did. And then they're using the same kind of cheap device to show that the emissions they do produce are not as carcinogenic as they are.
00:16:19
Speaker
Now, this was one of those things where it turns out it didn't just affect VW, it also affected Daimler and BMW because the experiment itself was being carried out by the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute. And it turns out that members of Daimler and BMW were involved in those experiments. So employees got fired across three different companies.
00:16:45
Speaker
And the chief lobbyist and head of external relations and sustainability, Thomas Stig, was also suspended from his job over this. Although I'll ask you, Josh, how long do you think this suspension stuck for? Oh, I'm going to say about three days.
00:17:03
Speaker
No, I actually, see, I was hoping you'd say something bigger than that. He was suspended for five months. Five months for guessing some monkeys using a cheat device in a Volkswagen Beetle. Five months. Frankly, I'm surprised anybody suffered any consequences whatsoever.
00:17:23
Speaker
Oh, and the other thing is this experiment was never made public. So it was it was found out about I think at some point people went we can't get away with this. We really can't get away with this. So the experiment was never published. It was found out about ISIS by presumably whilst they were doing the investigation of the emissions scandal and when what there are primates involved. Most most unsettling.
00:17:51
Speaker
Yeah, so that's Monkey Gate. I have a disturbing experiment to talk about as well, but that was one of the bigger topics, so I might just... I'll come back to that.
Theories and Mockumentaries
00:18:02
Speaker
The next little thing I had to talk about was apparently there is a conspiracy theory around the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, if you recall, the one that did massive damage in Indonesia.
00:18:14
Speaker
and I think sort of the eastern coast of India and around there. So apparently there is, according to a website I read, a popular theory in the Muslim world is that the tsunami could have been caused by an Indian nuclear experiment in which Israeli and American nuclear experts participated.
00:18:35
Speaker
So apparently, several newspapers in Egypt and the Middle East alleged that India has acquired sophisticated nuclear technology from the US and Israel as a part of their nuclear race with Pakistan. And this was some sort of thing that was targeted to cause casualties in
00:19:00
Speaker
areas with large Muslim populations, obviously Indonesia, most populous Muslim country in the world, and really that's all I've got. There is a conspiracy theory that the tsunami was caused by some sort of nuclear experiment, but I have not been able to have not really seen anything more about it than that. So an interesting factoid, but not much more to it.
00:19:24
Speaker
Interesting, I've got a fakery conspiracy theory as well. So this is about a 2002 Swedish documentary film called Conspiracy 58 that claims that the 1958 FIFA World Cup in Sweden did not take place, and was actually faked by the CIA and FIFA as part of the Cold War. Why, I guess? The obvious question?
00:19:54
Speaker
Actually, that's a good question. I didn't actually look into who was playing who in this. I'm assuming it must have been a Swedish team against, say, a communist bloc team, because otherwise it would make no sense for there to be a conspiracy there.
00:20:07
Speaker
But of course, because we're both so heavily into sports, I just didn't need to do that research. You just know what that was. So the evidence presented in the documentary is that recordings of the matches, they're talking about recordings available now, show houses in the background that could not have existed in 1958.
00:20:32
Speaker
It also claims that the shadows of the players on the field are angled in an impossible way, given the position of the son over Sweden. And the chairperson of KSP 58, the committee looking into the conspiracy, stated he spent 20 years looking for physical evidence that the match took place and couldn't find anything.
00:21:01
Speaker
What would count as physical evidence that a football match could place decades ago? Well, I mean, I suppose you'd say, you know, there'd be, you know, ticket stubs, you know, those all flags people wave at matches, you know, a beer stein of some particular kind. Presumably, you assume there'd be like massive amounts of eyewitness testimony though. Surely lots of people would have attended and be able to say that they did.
00:21:30
Speaker
or newspaper reporting at the time. Now, if I had done this as an episode, this would be a classic sting in its tail story. It turns out the Conspiracy 58 is a Swedish mockumentary from 2002. It was produced for Swedish TV, and it's a fictional account of a conspiracy theory concerning the purported match in 1958.
00:21:57
Speaker
And it was a little bit like forgotten silver, the infamous mockumentary that Peter Jackson made about the untold story of what turned out to be a fictitious silent filmmaker back home in Aotearoa, New Zealand.
00:22:14
Speaker
Viewers were not aware it was a mockumentary until the very end of the film. That actually, Forgotten Silver, they revealed it was a mockumentary the next day, which is the reason why it pissed off so many people back home, because they were taken in by it. In this case, they do reveal it to mockumentary, I believe, in the very last scene.
00:22:35
Speaker
But it wasn't advertised as a mockumentary. It was played in a documentary slot. People went into it thinking it was going to be a documentary. People, of course, who turned off whilst watching the mockumentary may have been convinced by it. Some people may have been, some people weren't.
00:22:56
Speaker
but it was meant to provoke discussions about source criticism, about how easy it would be to put forward the claim that a major event that had occurred hadn't occurred by simply saying, but there's no evidence here. And that's basically it. I mean, it's
00:23:16
Speaker
It's a documentary, it's a conspiracy theory that virtually no one believes. I mean, I'm assuming some people must believe it to have made it ever so slightly plausible to put Ford in the first place, and also would have required me to watch a Swedish language mockumentary. So it ended up being, I don't think it's big enough for what the conspiracy, but it is big enough for a mention in a mini, possibly what could have been the conspiracy.
00:23:44
Speaker
Well, sticking on the fakery theme then, I have this one. I can't remember where I got it from. It might have been one sent to me by a friend of the podcast Hayden, who's supplied a few topics in the past, or it might have been someone on Twitter sent me the link. So if it wasn't Hayden, I apologize to the person who it actually was. But I was sent an interesting story about a contributor to Chinese Wikipedia.
Fake History and Its Impact
00:24:14
Speaker
who spent 10 years using four different accounts making dozens of articles describing fake Russian history. So on Chinese Wikipedia, you could find these articles about places and events and battles and aristocrats and other people.
00:24:41
Speaker
in various areas of Russia and people start to notice it was a little bit strange that the Chinese language articles about these areas seem to have a lot more in them than say the Russian language articles about Russian topics.
00:24:59
Speaker
in some areas, or the English language ones. And so it was a guy, they identify as Yifan, who was a novelist looking for, browsing through Chinese Wikipedia, looking for historical events to inspire.
00:25:18
Speaker
the next novel and they sort of discovered that upon sort of finding what looked like an interesting topic but then going deeper and deeper into the detail and realizing that this particular was a mine, a silver mine that there was apparently a significant theme that battles were fought over and so on, never existed.
00:25:41
Speaker
and this article was basically fiction. Wikipedia conducted an investigation, found that yes, there were four puppet accounts that were used to make a false history of the Qing Dynasty in China and the history of Russia.
00:26:01
Speaker
And so this has been going on since 2010. This article was from earlier this year. And yes, so you sort of had four accounts which would sort of reference one another or sort of back each other up.
00:26:16
Speaker
and it turned out it was basically a single contributor who's known as, referred to as Ximao, which was one of her aliases apparently. She claimed in her profile to be the daughter of a diplomat stationed in Russia and had a degree in Russian history
00:26:37
Speaker
and was now a Russian citizen having married a Russian. And yeah, she just started writing articles on Wikipedia and got away with them. She's not the first person I think we've heard of that's done stuff like that. Sort of started making edits and realised that you can, you know, they check stuff, but they don't check that much and you can probably just get away with stuff and then sort of
00:27:05
Speaker
As she put it, as the saying goes, in order to tell a lie, you must tell more lies. I was reluctant to delete the hundreds of thousands of words I wrote, but as a result, I wound up losing millions of words and a circle of academic friends collapsed. The trouble I've caused is hard to make up for, so maybe a permanent ban is the only option. My current knowledge is not enough to make a living, so in the future I will learn a craft, quick honestly, and not do nebulous things like this anymore. So it's an interesting story. Not really conspiratorial, I guess, just because it was only one person doing it.
00:27:34
Speaker
There's a nice tie-in to the themes of fakery and stuff in the art world and so on that we've looked at in the past. Indeed, as many listeners will be aware, we could almost be the podcaster's guide to fakery in the art world because it is a topic we do like to get into whenever possible. They always meant to be interesting, those arty ones.
00:27:56
Speaker
Yeah, a single case probably not enough to justify an entire episode, and also not technically a conspiracy in the first place. Okay, would you like to go to Romania? I'd love to go to Romania. I know you would. I've been to Romania more than once. So this is Decree 770, and this is the inspiration for the Handmaid's Tale. Oh, okay.
00:28:24
Speaker
So decree 770 was a decree by Nikola Ceausescu's communist government signed in 1967 that restricted and restricted very heavily abortion and contraception in Romania. It was designed or at least intended to create a large and new Romanian population
00:28:47
Speaker
And also, by the way, explains why there were so many orphanages in Romania in the 70s and 80s, the general view of Romanians towards abortion today. How is it conspiratorial then?
00:29:03
Speaker
Well, that's I mean, it's not necessarily conspiratorial, which is part of the issue of this not being a particularly good what the conspiracy because it was all very much done in the open. And if I had done this as a full episode, I probably would have done a lot more about the can you guess which country
00:29:20
Speaker
enacted a kind of handmaid's tale that Margaret Atwood based the story upon. So it'd do something along the lines of, they think it's fictional, but actually it turned out to be real. So abortion was legal in very common pre-1967 back in Romania, and that was largely due to the fact that contraception was very hard to come by.
00:29:43
Speaker
So the standard way of population control enacted by family units in Romania was to simply get an abortion for any unwanted pregnancy. And Romania post the 1950s had a very low birth rate. Now the communists
00:30:02
Speaker
blame this on their liberal abortion laws, but most historians, economists and sociologists claim the real reason for the low birthrate in Romania from the 1950s onwards was due to a very low standard of living and thus the necessity for women to be in the workforce.
00:30:21
Speaker
So essentially, women weren't going to work, and thus they weren't staying at home having babies or raising them. And that does sound ever so slightly sexist when I put it forward, like that is if that's what women should do, but indeed in the 1950s, even if you wanted children.
00:30:38
Speaker
and he wanted lots of chihudrim, both parents had to work if they were to sustain themselves. Now the communists didn't like this, they wanted Romania's population to go from 20 million to 30 million inhabitants, so they enacted decree 770, and indeed in the first few years the estimated number of children per
00:31:05
Speaker
women increased from 1.9 to 3.7 and this was done by the fact that all women had to report to a gynecologist every month
00:31:20
Speaker
and if a gynecologist detected a pregnancy, there was follow-up procedures happening on an almost weekly basis until such time that the child was born. This was done by both requiring women to report to their gynecologist on a month-by-month basis, and also the fact that the secret police were then notified
00:31:43
Speaker
about any pregnancy and would basically surveil pregnant women to make sure that they weren't doing anything to endanger the life of the unborn child. Sex education in Romania became all about the virtues of motherhood and basically wasn't anything to do with safe sex practices and the like. And so as I say in the first few years there was a almost a doubling of the birth rate in Romania
00:32:12
Speaker
And then a few years after that, there was a very heavy decline, both in the birth rate and also mother and child mortality rates. So how long did this last for?
00:32:26
Speaker
Well, Decree 770 was abolished on the 26th of December 1989, so a few days after the December Revolution that saw the deposing and then execution of Nikolai and Elena, Ceausescu, and basically the end of a formal communist government in Romania.
00:32:53
Speaker
The decree itself stopped working well because wealthier families worked out that they could obtain contraceptives illegally, largely from abroad, or they'd simply bribe doctors to give diagnoses that made abortion possible. So abortion wasn't made entirely illegal, it was just made very, very difficult to obtain. So you simply pay your doctor to ensure that
00:33:21
Speaker
you were allowed to have the abortion that you required. Unfortunately, poor women could only utilize primitive methods of abortion, which often led to infection, sterility, or even their own death, which meant that the mortality rate amongst pregnant women in Romania became the highest in Europe during the reign of Ceausescu. I believe it was 10 times higher than their near neighbours in Eastern European cut.
00:33:51
Speaker
countries, so it was a horrifically high mortality rate.
Romania's Decree 770 and Fictional Influence
00:33:57
Speaker
And many of the children who were born were given up to adoption, which meant they went into orphanages where they became severely malnourished and thus often actually physically disabled due to that malnourishment and ended up in
00:34:16
Speaker
not particularly syllabious conditions of care in Romania, which led to a rise in child mortality as well post-birth. So, yeah, did anybody acknowledge that this rule wasn't really producing the results they wanted, or was it just about numbers? The fact that more children were being born, the fact that they... Well, more children were initially being born.
00:34:43
Speaker
There was a steep decline in the survivability of those children by the mid-1970s. But no, the Communists technically kept it up. As I say, the decree was only abolished in 1989. But this largely explains
00:34:59
Speaker
why Romania has such a liberal abortion policy now, despite the fact that the Romanian Orthodox Church is very dead set against it, and Romanian Orthodoxy is kind of the official state religion of Romania, which is that Romanians remember decree 770, and don't want to go back to those days, and the Romanian Orthodox Church has gone
00:35:26
Speaker
We can't really be associated with that communist decree because we're also formally against communism, but we're also against abortion, and I think we have to be consistent with our anti-communist attitudes and just say nothing about abortion even though we'd like to. Must unsettling. Yes, and very unsavory.
00:35:51
Speaker
Yes. Well, I'll continue that theme then. So those last ones with the smaller topics here are the ones that are a little bit larger, but still not enough to make an episode out of, I think. So this is the dodgy experience I mentioned before. Have you heard of Project Sunshine? I've seen Sunshine the film, the Danny Boyle film. Different, different, different sunshine.
00:36:13
Speaker
Are you sure? Is this about reigniting the sun? Sending rockets to reignite the sun? No. Oh, is this the project where they give Mario a water-paced jetpack and they make Super Mario Sunshine? This is a conspiracy theory about the making of that game.
00:36:34
Speaker
No, it's less about Nintendo platform-based entertainment, more about experimenting on dead tissue.
00:36:45
Speaker
Well, now you've got me interested. You know me and my necromancy.
Project Sunshine and Ethical Concerns
00:36:51
Speaker
Project Sunshine was a series of research studies in the 1950s commissioned by the United States Atomic Energy Commission and Rand Corporation. I don't think we've talked about before, but they did. They were technically a sort of a non-profity think tank, but they did research and analysis for the US armed forces.
00:37:16
Speaker
So it was all about, they wanted to find out, because this is starting in the early 50s, so not long after World War II, nuclear weapons have been developed, they've been used, but we still don't know a hell of a lot about the long term, apart from the initial devastation, about the long term effects of
00:37:36
Speaker
using nuclear weapons. So there had previously been a project called Project Gabriel that was to do with investigating sort of the, was looking at a nuclear fallout and what the dangerous bits of nuclear fallout was going to be, what substances and what have you were the things to worry about the most in terms of
00:38:03
Speaker
the dangers of nuclear fallout. That had concluded that the radioactive isotope Strontium-90 was the biggest danger, the biggest threat to human health from nuclear fallout. Project Sunshine was a follow-up to that. From what I can gather, they wanted to get a baseline of how much Strontium-90
00:38:30
Speaker
is out there, the equivalent of a background radiation or something. They wanted to know, they wanted to find out the concentration of strontium-90 in people's bodies right now so that I assumed to give them a better idea of how
00:38:48
Speaker
how much is too much, essentially. And for reasons I don't quite understand, having not gone into research this into great detail, the best way to find this out was by examining dead tissue. I guess if you want to find out how much strontium-90 is in bodily tissue, you need to sort of chop it up into a bunch of experiments on it, so better to experiment on the recently dead rather than chop its off living people to
00:39:18
Speaker
to examine them. I guess you need more than just a blood sample or something. So basically they needed cadavers. They needed to experiment on cadavers to find out the levels of strontium 90 usually found in body tissues and bones. And they were particularly interested in the bodily tissues of children, of the very young, because they're developing bones would have
00:39:46
Speaker
the highest propensity to accumulate strontium-90, which would make them the most susceptible to radiation damage. So basically, in order to do this study, the commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission, Dr. William Libby,
00:40:02
Speaker
Apparently said, I don't know how to get them, but I do say that it's a matter of prime importance to get them, referring to its samples from dead people, and particularly in the young age group. So human samples are often of prime importance, and if anybody knows how to do a good job of body-snatching, they will really be serving their country. So I assume that was slightly a light-hearted way of putting it, but nevertheless, apparently over 1,500 samples of dead tissue
00:40:31
Speaker
were acquired, although they only ended up analyzing about 500 of them. And the thing was, apparently a lot of these samples from, I believe they didn't get 1500 whole cadavers, they got samples from 1500 cadavers. Many of them, babies and children who had tragically died young, a lot of them were taken without the consent of, say, the relatives of those people.
00:41:01
Speaker
Yeah, so they came from all over the world, from Australia, from Europe. So there's an article, I can't see a date on it, I think it was 2011, from ABC, the ABC network in Australia, about how people were finding out that samples from dead Australian babies had been sent off to America for this. So there was a
00:41:29
Speaker
there was an investigation into all of this. And as you can imagine, people were a little bit disturbed by the whole thing. So for instance, so one particular story is that this article, I think it says this from 2011, but this started to be found out about in the 90s. There was a documentary in 1995
00:41:57
Speaker
A British documentary called Deadly Experiments, I assume Project Sunshine was one of the experiments featured, who spoke to a woman called Jean Pritchard, whose baby was stillborn in 1957. She claimed that the baby's legs were removed to be sent away for testing in Project Sunshine.
00:42:17
Speaker
and she was not allowed to dress the baby for her funeral because so she wouldn't find out that that chopped bits off of it. So yeah, so it turned out there's a bunch of
00:42:34
Speaker
severely dodgy dealings in acquiring the samples that they needed to conduct their studies and that's kind of where it leaves it. The results from it were used in other studies which found out interesting stuff about how much strontium-90 exists naturally and how much of it's bad for you and whether or not if you get strontium-90 in the soil will that go into the grass which will go into the
00:43:03
Speaker
cows, which will go into milk, which will go into people, and sort of tracing that sort of stuff. So useful results came from it, but the way, ultimately, the way in which those results were obtained turned out to be deeply, deeply dodgy. And it's not surprising that they didn't publicise them at the time.
00:43:26
Speaker
Hmm. Indeed. I say. Hmm. So there we go. I've got dead babies. Can you raise the tone a little bit or are we going to stick at that level of depressingness? Well, the only other one which I was musing about was talking about what the Jesuits were doing in China and during the Crusades, which seems ever so slightly conspiratorial, but also too big.
00:43:54
Speaker
So if you know anything about the history of the Jesuit Order, one of the more interesting Roman Catholic Orders, or as I've discovered from many of my European friends, one of the interesting Roman Catholic
00:44:09
Speaker
orders because we say catholic most europeans go catholic instead so it's quite interesting to go hmm if italians call it the roman catholic church i have a feeling that's probably what it's called i have a feeling that maybe in the english speaking world we don't know how to say catholic or catholic so during the crusades the gesso is often sent into
00:44:33
Speaker
areas bordering Muslim territories and would encourage feudal lords in those areas to get into ajibaji with their Muslim neighbours. So they were basically sent there to cause trouble, to then justify Europeans going to the so-called Holy Lands to wage a holy war because the Muslims were predating upon good Christians.
00:44:59
Speaker
when it was in fact the good Christians who were kind of causing the issues in the first place to justify a holy war. So there's that angle of what were the Jesuits up to and exactly what was the plan. Was it a Jesuit plan? Was it a plan that was actually being put forward by the Holy See in Rome?
00:45:18
Speaker
Was it a case of the Holy See and European principalities acting in consort? There's quite a lot of literature on this and at that point the story gets too big because it would require reading an awful lot to get even the basic grasp on what's going on here. And the other thing which is interesting is that the Jesuits are involved in a whole bunch of issues going on both in
00:45:48
Speaker
The part of Europe that wasn't Catholic, so the Orthodox part of Europe, so looking particularly at Orthodoxy around Constantinople, formerly Istanbul, long time gone, Istanbul.
00:46:04
Speaker
And also, the Jesuits went into China and got involved in politics there, and they were involved in politics in China at the point that the Chinese expelled all the Christians from China, and yet continued to be at the royal court for years after that.
00:46:30
Speaker
And there's a lot of literature on the what political game were the Jesuits playing in China, where they seem to have been at least partially responsible for the Chinese attitude of being intolerant towards Christians at that time, yet still actively being Christians in the royal court.
00:46:53
Speaker
And it was one of those things where I went, it's just too big. I'm not quite sure how to approach it, or how to talk about it, because it'd probably be one of those hour and a half long podcasts. You know, you think we've dealt with the Jesuits with the Middle East, but now we need to think about what were they doing in China? And go, in China? And go, yes.
00:47:14
Speaker
part two of what the conspiracy, the Jesuits and China. So that went onto the list of, can I find a way to approach it? And the answer was always, no, I can't. No, I can't. It's too big. Does that tie into when we talked about the Taiping Rebellion? Because I remember the the fellow who kicked that off had some weird synthesis of Christianity and other
00:47:38
Speaker
I think by the time the Taiping Rebellion is going on, the Jesuits have left China. So they do overstay their welcome, but they are there at the point where the Christians are initially turfed out. And so the forms of Christianity we see in China host the exodus of Western Christians.
00:48:01
Speaker
Basically, the remnants of Christian belief systems kind of becoming nativised into Chinese belief systems, which leads to things like the really interesting form of Christianity that we talked about around the Taiping Rebellion, which has elements of traditional Chinese beliefs with avant-garde Christian beliefs, and well, we did an entire episode on that. It was very exciting. Yes. Okay, was that your last one?
00:48:31
Speaker
It was indeed. Because the thing is, I have kept a few in lieu for when I might want to surprise you in future. So there are other ones, which I almost put into this list and we're... No, it shall save that. I've also put a few others into the future topics list. So there are some which I think might be interesting for us to both dive into and talk about.
00:48:55
Speaker
Right. Well, I have one more then. Maybe I could have stretched this into a full episode. I don't know. Maybe if I talked about a bit more of the history around it or something. But an interesting topic is the death of William II.
Conspiracy of William II's Death
00:49:10
Speaker
Do you know anything about William II, King of England?
00:49:14
Speaker
I know there was a William II, but that's about it. Well, William II was the son of William I, otherwise known as William the Conqueror, so that's the Norman who invaded England in 1066 and basically conquered England.
00:49:32
Speaker
So William II, otherwise known as William Rufus, which is based in Latin for William the Red, possibly he had red here, or we're not quite sure. So William II was the third son of William the Conqueror. The second son died, and when William the Conqueror died, his oldest son, Robert,
00:49:56
Speaker
was given, because obviously William was still the king of Normandy or Duke or whatever, I don't even know how these things worked, but so rule of Normandy was given to his eldest son and then William being the next in line was given England basically. So he was the king and then there was a bit of there was a bit of aji-baji between the two of them, between Robert and William where
00:50:23
Speaker
various people thought, you know, it would actually be nice if we had one person in charge of both Normandy and England, like with William I, but that all eventually came to nothing. I think William II, being in England, was able to sort of shore up his own support and became very definitely the king of England. Interesting side note from a philosophical perspective, William II is the person who nominated Anselm as Archbishop of Canterbury.
00:50:53
Speaker
famous medieval philosopher, or later, Saint Anselm. If you've done a stage one metaphysics paper, you've probably heard of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. Those seem to be the big three that came to medieval philosophy. And so, I mean, I could talk a bit about the trouble he got in and the disagreements between him and the church and stuff like that, but the interesting thing is his death. The death of William II.
00:51:19
Speaker
happened apparently on the 2nd of August 1100 AD. He was shot during a hunting trip, apparently killed by an arrow through the lung. He was out hunting with a bunch of other nobles.
00:51:38
Speaker
And his death appeared to be the result of a hunting accident, the sort of thing that happens to this day. Of course they were using bows and arrows rather than firearms, but initially he was there with a bunch of nobles.
00:51:53
Speaker
he gets shot and killed, the immediate reaction is, oh shit, let's get out of here. So the entire party just bolts. They leave the king's body lying in the middle of a forest where it would eventually be found by a local arrow maker. And I assume nobody wanted to get in trouble. Now, the thing that's made some people suspicious is that one of the members of William II's hunting party was his younger brother, Henry.
00:52:22
Speaker
Now, as soon as William was dead, Henry immediately ran off to Winchester to secure the Royal Treasury, and then to London, and he was crowned King of England within days of William's death, apparently before either Archbishop could arrive to, I assume, confirm it or whatever. And the King's body was, you know, found by a commoner
00:52:47
Speaker
taken off to Winchester Cathedral and so on. So at the time it was just written off as a hunting accident. A particular nobleman by the name of Walter Tyrell was named as the man who had accidentally shot the king. You know, the typical hunting accident scenario, you think you're creeping through the underbrush, think you see an animal loose and arrow, and it turns out that no, you've accidentally killed the king of England. Could happen to anyone.
00:53:13
Speaker
At the time, because, as I said, he was kind of on the outs with the church a little bit, and so people sort of thought, oh, well, this was just, this was an act of God, this was sort of retribution for his unchurchly ways, and so people were quite happy to leave it at that. But since then, people have said, you know, was it an accident? Are we sure it was really an accident?
00:53:41
Speaker
Apparently Walter Tyrell was known to be a very good bowman and supposedly not the sort of person who would loose an arrow without properly identifying his target. And basically the fact that Henry was so quick to run off and declare himself king straight away has made historians in the past suspicious that maybe this could have actually been an assassination.
00:54:10
Speaker
So there is no evidence either way. We will never know for sure, but modern historians are more accepting of the view that maybe it was an assassination than people thought about it at the time.
00:54:28
Speaker
So yeah, I mean an interesting story, interesting conspiracy theory involved, but probably not enough to occupy a full episode, which is why I'm talking about it now. And a wonderful story it is too. Accidents, not accidents. I mean history, history will tell us, and the problem is it won't.
00:54:50
Speaker
No, no it won't. That's entirely correct. Now that I think of it, maybe it would have actually be made a good little bit for a patron bonus episode. It's true. Now we do do patron bonus episodes. For people who listen to us, you may well be aware that over on the internet we have patron bonus episodes. You can go to patreon.com, look up the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, and you can become a patron
00:55:18
Speaker
where you get extra content. Sometimes we talk about the latest in conspiracy theory news. Sometimes we talk about mysterious happenstances in far flung countries such as Spain or Portugal or Dunedin. I mean, the world is our oyster. So if you want to hear more of the kind of prevarification that we engage in, why not become a patron and go to Patreon and become a patron on Patreon?
00:55:47
Speaker
As little as a dollar a month will get you bonus content up the wazoo. Ooh, the actual wazoo, that's a miracle term.
00:55:59
Speaker
Nevertheless, your respective wazoos can take a break now because I think we're done with the main part of this episode, as M intimates, we are about to go off and record a bonus episode for our patrons where we will let them in on more dark and interesting developments in the ongoing operation of this podcast. And yeah, talk about Portugal a bit, maybe. Who knows?
00:56:25
Speaker
Who knows? But until then, I think it's time to just draw this main episode, and with it, the what the conspiracy feature is. Unless you decide to spring one on you. Unless I decide to spring one on you, you never know. I might stumble across something and think, oh, that would have made a good what the conspiracy, wait a minute. But until then, I think the only thing to responsibly do is say goodbye. Beautiful days, my friends.
00:56:54
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy is Josh Addison and me, Dr. M.R.X.Dentist. You can contact us at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com, and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon. And remember, remember, oh December, what a night.