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It’s 8pm, June 20th, and this is the ‘Conspiracy News!’
24 Plays5 years ago
The monthly news episode: Josh and M discuss Keanu Reeves' view on Shakespeare; they touch on the Gulf of Oman crisis; get concerned that maybe someone has planted child pornography on Alex Jones; discuss the fatal nature of reporting on the environment; ask whether MI5 can be trusted; worry about emboldening local Nazis; present findings on forced organ harvesting in China; ask why Seth Rich is in the news again; and, finally, go back the ur-text of the podcast, the disappearance of MH370.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
Watch M’s series “Conspiracism” here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJEp7xTcFU3hc2W0kfdSvAQ
and learn more about their academic work at:
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Transcript
Recap and New Format Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
previously on the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy.
00:00:08
Speaker
Traveling back in time to June 2014, we harped on about harp. Where has harp gone? Talked Ben Gausey, something that doesn't seem to be mentioned too much these days, and ruminated over the death of the Archduke Ferdinand. This time in 2015, we talked about gender identity and agenda 21, all the genders. We should maybe go back to gender identity, because that particular conspiracy theory's kind of gone mainstream.
00:00:35
Speaker
It really has, but talking about mainstream 2016, June, we celebrated our 100th episode and talked about the Bilderberg Group. Now, having been to the hotel to Bilderberg, that now means I'm a member of that group and thus even more suspicious than usual.
00:00:54
Speaker
The highlights of June 17 were the birches. Good old birches. Trees, I assume. We talked about trees. And Russian death lists. It's always a barrel of laughs. Which I presume I'm on, and possibly you are as well. And then last year in June we talked about phelon gong and organ harvesting and that
00:01:14
Speaker
Not actually funny, but it's funny because we have an update on that in this very episode. But it's not June any of those other years. It's June 2019. It's 8 p.m. And this is The Conspiracy News. The podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:01:46
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy news edition. It's our first attempt at this weird new format we're doing. So we've done three weeks of normal topics with no news. It's the fourth week. It's time for news. All news all the time. Well they do make it sound as if we've never done a new centric episode unscripted before, which of course we can. We have actually done episodes pretty much identical to
00:02:06
Speaker
But never as part of an overall scheme. It is part of the plot. A conspiracy, you might say. Except it's not very secret. And I'm actually not quite sure what the intention is. No. So it's kind of just an activity done by two people. And that kind of makes it a thing. Yeah. Yeah. This is a thing we're doing on the podcast is going to the conspiracy. So no topic, just news. So I guess we should get into the news.
Keanu Reeves and Shakespeare Authorship
00:02:32
Speaker
Yes, we should.
00:02:34
Speaker
Breaking, breaking, conspiracy theories in the news.
00:02:41
Speaker
Right, so a bumper harvest of news culled from the events of the last month or so. But the most important story concerns Keanu Reeves. Darling of the Internet. And also an Oxfordian. That's a Shakespeare thing? Yes, he believes that the Earl of Oxford is the real person who wrote the Shakespearean canon. You might love Keanu Reeves and claim he has no suspicious beliefs and no bad characteristics.
00:03:07
Speaker
I put it to you. Someone who thinks Edward Devere wrote the Shakespearean canon. So he actually said that, did he interview or something? Yeah. Whilst being surrounded by puppies answering questions from the internet. The utter swine. Sounds like something he'd do. But we're not here to talk about Keanu Reeves and his dreamy eyes and long, luxurious hair.
Gulf of Oman Tensions
00:03:30
Speaker
Instead we're going to talk about the Gulf of Oman, because I think that's probably been the biggest thing over the last month. Strangely enough, it's kind of going away? Yeah, so in the bonus content last week, we talked about the Gulf of Oman and the claim that the US is saying they have evidence that two of the oil tankers that were attacked or damaged in the Gulf of Oman
00:03:53
Speaker
Iran was due to Iranian forces. Iran says no. The Japanese who own the tankers say actually the story doesn't quite fit. America produced a photo which they took to be evidence of a limpet mine being detached by the Iranians after the attack.
00:04:12
Speaker
the EU or EU member states, so NATO in particular, are going, we need slightly more evidence than that. And then a few days ago, Donald Trump has been telling people to tone down the rhetoric about the Gulf of Oman. So what looked like
00:04:32
Speaker
a Golf of Tonkin Escafir seems to be dissipating quickly, although as soon as we say this, there's going to be something happening that we're not aware of, and by the time we actually go out,
00:04:50
Speaker
the story would have changed entirely. But yes, no, that does seem to be the thing. Like they were trying it on. People have said this is just like the bloody Gulf of Tonkin thing, isn't it? Now they're just sort of trying to sweep it under the carpet a little.
Alex Jones' Legal Trouble
00:05:03
Speaker
But as you say, yes, by the time this goes out tomorrow morning, possibly we'll all be at nuclear war. Here's hoping.
00:05:09
Speaker
So instead, let's talk about child pornography. Yes. Have you been sending people child pornography recently, Josh? Not that I know, but my computer could have been hacked. I could be broadcasting child pornography as far as the eye can see. So you're saying you could be the new Alex Jones. I literally am the new Alex Jones. You need to be more aggressive in your answers. I am the new Alex Jones. No, the new Alex Jones is more chill. Not so aggressive that we peak like I just did there.
00:05:35
Speaker
No, so Alex, so obviously you all know Alex Jones is being sued for being a dick about Sandy Hook and all that business. You've just said he's been sued for being a dick. Well, there have been a few things, but specifically the families of the victims of Sandy Hook.
00:05:51
Speaker
And it turns out, Alex Jones, well, not probably not Alex Jones personally, Alex Jones's lawyers sent the families of the Sandy Hook victims, lawyers, a whole bunch of electronic files, and when these lawyers looked through them, they found child pornography among them. Now that seems like an odd thing to do, send child pornography to the opposing council. Especially when they're suing you. It doesn't really look very good in court.
00:06:17
Speaker
Because we have a new complaint. What is that? Alex Jones sent us pictures of children naked. So Alex Jones claims he's being framed, claims that someone has had somewhere along the line has hacked someone's computer and managed to not hack the computer. So the documents they sent to the to the lawyers of the families representing the Sandy Hook victims.
00:06:39
Speaker
Those documents included a tranche of emails sent to Infowars. And the implication here is the child pornography was sent by email to Infowars. And the lawyers simply packaged up all of the emails they had
00:06:57
Speaker
under discovery to send to the lawyers for the Sandy Hook families, and that's how the child pornography has swapped hands. Well, yes, that appears to be the actual facts of the matter. I think Alex Jones has been going on about hooking them all in and so on. So he's claiming he's been hacked because, of course, Alex Jones has said the real victim here is Alex Jones. It's the lawyers for the Sandy Hook families
00:07:22
Speaker
who have somehow introduced child pornography into his computers. Now, I mean, this is actually a case where I kind of feel like being charitable to Alex Jones here, because it does kind of look, you know, why the hell would anyone do that? It does seem more plausible that someone was trying to make him look bad by somehow slipping child pornography into...
00:07:44
Speaker
they have successfully made his lawyers look bad because if the lawyers had actually bothered to check the documents they were sending through they would have discovered there was child pornography in amongst those documents and as it's a federal crime to share child pornography in any sense
00:08:08
Speaker
then they would have realised they were about to commit a crime. So his lawyers looked very bad because they didn't actually do the work to check the documents they were sending to the families of the Sandy Hook massacre. Yeah, so the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre. The Sandy Hook massacre does not have a family. No, no.
00:08:30
Speaker
Yes, so even if it is a frame up, and it seems entirely plausible that it could be, they've still committed a crime. Ignorance is no defence. They have passed this stuff on. Of course, it might not be a frame up. It might just be that, because Alex Jones is a big name, and his emails are all over the place, he's been put into a list, and that list has been used for trolling purposes, and people are just randomly sending out inappropriate images. So there is a possibility there's no conspiracy here at all.
00:08:59
Speaker
But it does seem that we can kind of go, actually, maybe Alex Jones is not technically in the wrong here, even though his lawyers are. But he does appear to be technically in the wrong in other in other fronts. He apparently is personally targeted. One of the attorneys in one of his shows has been sanctioned for doing so. And because of that sanction, he's lost a special motion to dismiss the case.
00:09:27
Speaker
And so he has kind of shot himself in the foot there by being his usual Alex Jonesy self. Which includes he will have to pay the attorney fees for the investigation as to where the child pornography came from. So he's going to pay for that child porn no matter who got it.
00:09:43
Speaker
Now, in the bonus content for this episode, we're going to be talking about LX Jones a little bit more. Not news. We thought the bonus content tends to get a bit newsy, so we thought in a news episode, the bonus content should maybe be a bit different. It should be more content-y. Now, I had to make sure I said that properly, because otherwise, you might say content-y in a way which sounds, with our shortened vowel sounds. It does. A little vulgar, and we would never be vulgar. We have never been vulgar on this podcast at all.
00:10:10
Speaker
So anyway, tune in for an interesting story about the life and times of an Alex Jones. We're moving on. Yes, basically Alex Jones' origin story. Is it exactly what he said it is, or is it a little bit of a lie? But yes, moving on.
Environmental Reporting Dangers
00:10:27
Speaker
Environmental reporting. Apparently it's a dangerous thing.
00:10:30
Speaker
Yeah, so this is more an example of a story which is actually just worth looking into because of the way that people talk about environmental issues. It turns out that being a war correspondent is pretty bad. People die as a war correspondent quite naturally for being in a war zone. The second most deadly profession in the reporting world is being an environmental reporter.
00:10:54
Speaker
because you get swept away by icebergs or killed by polar bears? No, you get killed by the people who run mines in third world countries because you've embarrassed them. And so they either have you killed or they send you death threats or they send your family death threats. So apparently 29 journalists have died in the last decade due to big fossil fuel extractors and the like.
00:11:24
Speaker
threatening or just having journalists killed. Well, that's lovely. So, I mean, yeah, it is. There's this conspiratorial in nature, certainly, when people are organizing to do these things, but as a general point, yeah, it's a bit of a worry. It is a wee bit.
00:11:41
Speaker
A little bit like MI5.
MI5 Data Scandal
00:11:44
Speaker
Yeah, no, MI5, those rep-skelions, those wacky jeconapes. Those spies. Spies, yep. They've been caught, basically, doing dodgy stuff in shades, or actually not shades of, probably more pronounced stuff than some of the things we've seen here in New Zealand.
00:12:04
Speaker
But basically they've been surveilling people and gathering data without actually ticking things off and doing it properly and getting all the proper missions. They've just been going out and scooping up whatever data they feel like.
00:12:19
Speaker
putting it in, and I use the technical term here, an ungoverned space, which is basically a space which has a storage facility, unit, program, or database, which has virtually no checks and balances with respect to who can access it or what the data can be used for. Then this data and ungoverned space is then used to get surveillance warrants to gather more data
00:12:45
Speaker
even though the surveillance warrants are illegal because the data they were using wasn't actually appropriate for the task. So they've been doing this knowingly for several years now. Yes, so their failure to comply with all the rules and regulations was severe enough that the Investigatory Powers Commissioner's Office, the IPCO, has sent a team of inspectors around there for a week.
00:13:11
Speaker
to investigate, Green Party peer Jenny Jones, which is a name that sounds familiar, but possibly just because it sounds like it comes from a comic book. Or Dr. Her. Do we know Jenny Jones? No, not offhand. Possibly making stuff up when I think she's someone who's come up before them. But she said, this report has confirmed what we've known for some time that the security services as well as the police are operating their surveillance systems without accepting that they have to operate lawfully and in a properly targeted manner.
00:13:40
Speaker
And as you said, we had a similar issue with our secret service here just a few years ago, where they thought they were pretty legal with the evidence or requirements for wiretaps. And then the court went, no, no, you're not.
00:13:58
Speaker
And again, I mean, this can go all the way back to sort of your Edward Snowden and that sort of stuff. This is the sort of thing which five or so years ago, if you'd see an MI5 was up to, people would say, oh, you put your tinfoil hat back on, you big conspiracy theorist. And yet more and more, it's coming out that no, actually, sometimes these security agencies do do stuff that they're not supposed to do. And the question now is, is it sometimes or is it a lot of the time?
00:14:28
Speaker
Yes, yes. And many people suspect it's actually, it's been a lot of the time for a long time now. So on that cherry note, we can wrap up the news section of this newsletter. So we have a bunch more news, it's just not so much news as more of that sort of, sort of olds. There have been in the past month a bunch of news stories which actually relate back to things we've talked about in the past.
00:14:52
Speaker
Which means we can use the update and retractions sting. That sting again. Update and retractions. That's a quality sting. I'm just thinking about sting now.
00:15:10
Speaker
The musician or the wrestler? Or the sword from Lord of the Rings? Well, actually, the musician is apparently going to have tantric sex up to nine hours. Well, that's what he says. And many people go, you don't really want to have one single act of coitus for nine hours in time. Sting does.
00:15:29
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think that makes him the best lover in the world. I know he probably thinks he's the best lover in the world in the same way that Moby thought he was the best lover in the world for going out with people 20 years younger than him. Turns out that a lot of men have
00:15:44
Speaker
very strange views on things, including white men in the South Island of this country. I found a way to take us from Sting, to Neville, Philip Arps. Philip Neville Arps. Let's get the name of this white supremacist dickhead, right? So this is the fellow, we mentioned this previously, he was a guy who was arrested for distributing the video of the Otitahi mosque shooting
00:16:13
Speaker
And not just distributing the video, asking a friend to put a kill counter on the video and superimpose crosshairs in the centre of the screen to make it look more... fun. Yes, this man, I think we can all agree, is one classy individual. Yes, let's not invite him round for dinner. No. Well, we can't because he's been in jail for 21 months.
00:16:35
Speaker
Indeed. And this is causing a bit of a stir, mostly amongst white supremacists, who are claiming that he's been put in jail not because of his crime, but because of his political beliefs. Those political beliefs, as Arps has said, being that of a Nazi.
00:16:55
Speaker
Well, I mean, that's just not true because he distributed material that it was an offence to distribute. Yes, but he's saying that the severity of the sentence is predicated on his politics, not his action. Now, this is slightly muddied because the sentencing judge has said that there is information about his conduct, which has not been made public, because if it was made public, it might embolden other Nazis.
00:17:24
Speaker
Now, this isn't technically secret evidence, all of the evidence about what Arpstead was presented to the jury in a public trial. It's just more that the judge has said there's a factor about the sentencing. I don't want to discuss publicly because Nazis might be emboldened if I do. Right. So would that be details of the stuff that he got away with or that might also be passed criminal activity?
00:17:52
Speaker
Upsters have a bit of a history of being a Nazi, not just recently, but in a long-term fashion. Yes, yes. Yeah, so I mean, you hear secret evidence or information being suppressed around a trial, and that does raise the heckles of some, but I don't think there's any real cause to suggest that maybe this poor fellow's been hard done by it.
00:18:19
Speaker
No. No. No. Yeah, I'm quite happy with the answer of no. Now, moving on to something we just talked about in the intro. You recall about, when was it? A year ago, this time in 2018, we talked about organ harvesting in China.
China Tribunal on Forced Organ Harvesting
00:18:36
Speaker
Does China routinely harvest the organs of political prisoners, in particular practitioners of Falun Gong? And at the time, the conclusion we came to was probably, but no one can prove it.
00:18:48
Speaker
That's kind of still the case, but... But there's new evidence... Well, there's a new finding by a tribunal called the China Tribunal, which was operating out of the UK, led by a QC, whose name was Sir Jeffrey Nice. Sir Jeffrey Nice. A nice QC, literally.
00:19:09
Speaker
Well, he was a prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal. Yeah, but he was a nice prosecutor. He probably was a nice prosecutor in Nice. In Nice in France. It's funny if you just say nice. No, obviously. No, so, cheered by this guy QC from a former International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia,
00:19:31
Speaker
And they said that the unanimous determination of this tribunal is that they were rather certain that Falun Gong is being used as a source, quote, probably the principal source of organs for forced organ harvesting. So again, there was no smoking gun as it were. I don't think they were able to say, here is something that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is exactly what's happening. But having examined a whole lot of evidence, they seemed quite confident that it's pretty much got to be happened.
00:20:00
Speaker
which is basically based around the discrepancy of organ donations in the world in total, and the fact that there are an awful lot of organ donations in China alone, which doesn't quite match patterns found elsewhere, but do match interesting things about their prison mustard. And there was also a sort of witness testimony from
00:20:24
Speaker
a doctor who claimed to have harvested organs from people, some of whom were not quite dead yet, a woman who was imprisoned for being a Falun Gong practitioner, who was sort of asked about medical history and so on, and was eventually released because she pretended that she'd renounced Falun Gong, but reckoned if she hadn't convinced them that she had hepatitis or something like that, she could have been in trouble as well. So there was
00:20:53
Speaker
Again, it's not 100% proof if you want to say, well, maybe they could be lying or making stuff up or disinformation or blah, blah, blah, blah. But there seem to be some fairly strong evidence, certainly enough to convince an international tribunal. Of course, China's stance is still officially, no, no, no, this doesn't happen. In fact, I think they even claimed that they've been ramping down the number of organs that they take from executed prisoners as well, like actual prisoners in the actual legal system.
00:21:21
Speaker
So, yeah, I mean, this tribunal has said what people have been saying for a long time and it hasn't actually made much of a difference. So who knows if this will make much of a difference, but it is interesting to see an international tribunal come out and actually say it explicitly. I mean, I think what's interesting about this story is the theory that China might be engaging in forced organ harvesting
00:21:45
Speaker
has gone from being a fringe belief to something which is almost the accepted wisdom now. And certainly believable at least. It's gone from being, oh don't be silly. I mean people make up stories about China all the time but that's implausible too. It is slightly plausible isn't it? And now it is quite plausible isn't it? Less plausible are the stories around Seth Rich. Who we've talked about on this podcast again.
00:22:14
Speaker
And again. Quite a few times. And again. And we thought it was kind of done with. I mean, even old Sean Hannity had been browbeaten into... Did he actually retract anything or did he just stop talking about it? He basically just stopped talking about it. But you'll recall Seth Rich was a man who worked for the DNC, the election campaign or whatever. What is it? Democratic National Committee? Correct. For the presidential campaign.
00:22:41
Speaker
A few years ago, he was killed in what the police and basically anyone directly connected the case say was a mugging gone wrong. But in a sort of Clinton death-listy kind of way, people started spreading the idea that maybe he had been murdered by the democratic campaign. And then they started linking that to the hack, the DNC email hack, where if you recall, John Podesta's Gmail account, wasn't it, got hacked and various details got out there. And so then led to Pizzagate.
00:23:10
Speaker
And so some people had tried to sort of put two and two together and claimed that Seth Rich had been the one who somehow hacked the emails and was killed in retaliation or something or something. Basically, it was a stupid bloody thing to say. And to the extent that people have largely stopped saying it because like the family sued in the end, didn't they? They did, yes. So it had kind of been shut down. So we thought.
00:23:35
Speaker
So, last week, a alt-right, conservative online magazine called Red State, hosted a post by one Elizabeth Vaughan, who's a former financial consultant at Merrill Lynch, where our former Prime Minister, John Key, wants work. That's completely unrelated to this, but any local list will go, oh,
00:23:56
Speaker
Merrill Lynch, that's John Key's lot, yes it is. And in this story, posted at Red State, Elizabeth Vaughan promoted the conspiracy theory that Robert Mueller, you know, of the Mueller Report had gone out of his way to tweak the report to cover up the fact that the DNC murdered Seth Rich and that Seth Rich was involved in the DNC email hack and not the Russians.
00:24:23
Speaker
Yes. Now, this thing, it was printed with quite a disclaimer. It was. So the editor of RedState said at the top, I don't do this as a rule, but in this case, I want to emphasize that from the perspective of the leadership team at RedState, Seth Rich's death is settled and it is not a mystery. Each contributor at RedState has the right to express their own opinions. This is one of those cases where we think the opinion is an error.
00:24:52
Speaker
Now that's an odd thing too. If you're going to put that at the top of the article, why publish the article in the first place? Here's an article that I personally believe is a lie, but who am I to say what? The editor of a magazine?
00:25:07
Speaker
has final control as to what appears in my magazine. Who am I to exercise control of any particular kind? See, this just seems like a convenient cover for, oh, this will get some people inside and will make them very happy. And those of us who are slightly more sensible, we can just distance ourselves. We still publish it just to make sure those people are with us. And it seems like a very calculated ploy. Well, it seems like a case of trying to have your cake and eat it, really. A calculated ploy.
00:25:37
Speaker
Tave your cake, and eat it. Yes. With a calculator. I haven't had a calculator in quite some time. No. Well, nobody does any more, if it's all on your phone.
00:25:46
Speaker
But no, apparently my cake is on my phone. Yes. I assume you have a cake app along with your calculator app. No, I should download one fourth worth. See what you do. Now, we sort of, we say all of this has happened in the time in between the story first coming up and us actually recording this episode, the article has been taken down. But of course, now people are talking about censorship and
00:26:09
Speaker
the right to an opinion. Indeed, what this has caused is a creative censorship amongst the right who are angry at the editor of Red State for censoring a post by someone else that she was already critical of in the first place because free speech. Yeah, it's a funny one. The old, actually one thing we haven't talked about is the free speech bizzou going on in New Zealand at the moment, a little bit with the folks from the Act Party.
00:26:35
Speaker
Yes, we do need to at some point talk about David Seymour and his very interesting approach towards liberalization of speech which seems to only be based upon allowing people to use racist epithets in public. That's the only thing he seems to be arguing for. Yeah.
00:26:55
Speaker
He doesn't need to be arguing against getting rid of things like defamation torts and the like. No, just, how do you censor me for my, for spreading my, uh, extreme old values? In fact, he admitted he thinks he should be allowed to say the N-word.
00:27:10
Speaker
without censorship. Well, he is. He can't say it without getting punched in the face in certain quarters. I think he thinks that even that kind of opprobrium
MH370 Pilot Theory
00:27:20
Speaker
is inappropriate. Does it count as censorship? I mean, they let him say it. They just punch him in the face afterwards in this imaginary hypothetical.
00:27:28
Speaker
Yes. We're not advocating that people should punch David Seymour. He is an elected representative. We weren't too fond of older James Shaw being punched in the face. We're not too fond of James Shaw. We love James Shaw. We didn't like him being punched in the face. No. So in the interest of consistency, we should probably say we are against David Seymour getting punched in the face.
00:27:49
Speaker
But we are also guessing using the n-word. Yep, I think we dug ourselves into and out of that hole quite nicely. So let's hurry on to the final update for today's News Only episode, which goes all the way back to our favourite topic, Flight MH370.
00:28:04
Speaker
the story that will never end. So if you like this podcast, you need to make sure no one ever uncovers the truth of what happened to MH317.
00:28:20
Speaker
And if you do want this podcast to come to an end, you need to put all of your money into uncovering the truth of what happened to MH370. But there's been a fairly sizable piece recently giving, well, when I say another theory, it's a theory that's been going around. It has been one of the main ones all along, but sort of a bunch of a stronger case for it.
00:28:41
Speaker
Well, I would say it's not so much a stronger case. It's a very convincing psychological portrait. I don't think it says anything new. It just really, really digs deep into the notion that it was Zahari Ahmad Shah, the pilot in charge of MH370, who basically led the plane astray that made the death of 128 people sound rather fun.
00:29:09
Speaker
it is the the murder-suicide theory rather than the terrorism theory or whatever else you more or accident you know catastrophic failure on the plane theory so this piece I wouldn't know I hadn't didn't read the whole thing it was it was very long I just sort of looked at a bunch of pictures mostly to be honest so it's in the ad lab
00:29:33
Speaker
Although it showed up or excerpts of it were in the New Zealand. Yeah, I mean, very, very short, very short excerpts in our local papers. So the Atlantic has the full story. It is quite long. It's largely a recounting of the events. A
00:29:48
Speaker
accounting of the available evidence and the author points out there's actually a lot more evidence than people think as to what happened on the day and the hours after the flight went missing including information which only came out a year or so ago about what the Malaysian military knew at the time
00:30:08
Speaker
And then it goes through and says, look, the only person that psychologically makes sense to be the person for taking the plane off course is Zaha'i. But then the evidence gets a little bit weird. So...
00:30:25
Speaker
Part of the evidence was he was depressed and that's a known fact about him. His relationship had broken down. He was spending most of his time at home pacing around the place waiting for flights or running simulations of flights on his simulator at home.
00:30:43
Speaker
And then the author goes, well look, Malaysia said he was a person in good standing. Now we know that's suspicious because Malaysia, you know, they lie all the time. So if they say someone's in good standing, he probably wasn't. And that's one of those bits of evidence of I'm not entirely sure how we meant to interpret that. Not what you call eartight.
00:31:04
Speaker
No, no. And then they go for the more plausible rationale, which was he had actually run a simulation of a flight that's very similar to what we think actually happened to image 370.
00:31:19
Speaker
So the official investigation goes, well, he ran a lot of simulations of different flights. This is one which vaguely resembles what happened to MH370, but there are all these other simulations he also ran, so it's probably just a coincidence. The Atlantic piece goes, no, this is the smoking gun. He basically simulated the flight that was eventually taken by MH370.
00:31:45
Speaker
Now, what is the official theory as it currently stands? Is there one? There kind of isn't. It's a we don't know what happened theory. So I mean, yeah, from what I understand this theory, it's not implausible.
00:32:01
Speaker
But it's not a slam dunk in any sense. No, and actually what's interesting at the very end, they go, well, we will probably never know because even if we find the plane and we find the two black boxes that were on board the plane,
00:32:16
Speaker
All we're going to get is about two hours worth of recordings, audio-wise, because they kind of wipe themselves every two hours or so. So unless one of the pilots, if they happen to be awake while the plane is going down, admits to what they've done, even finding the plane will probably never confirm any particular hypothesis other than something went wrong with the engines, etc.
00:32:49
Speaker
which is good for us, I guess, in terms of not having to cancel the podcast, but pretty bad for everyone else, basically. That's fabulous, yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, there has been...
00:33:04
Speaker
Among the family's sort of, you know, agitation, the complaints when they've stopped searches and so on, and people say, you know, we need to know. And certainly from a personal level, you know, you could completely understand why someone would want that. But unfortunately, life is unfair.
00:33:20
Speaker
And that was kind of a depressing note to end the episode on, really, because we have come to the end of all of our news things. That didn't take too long. That was good. No. And what's interesting for patrons is that we basically, apart from a brief mention of the Gulf of Oman at the beginning, haven't repeated a single thing from our patron updates for the last three weeks. But those patrons now get a special treat, something we're not likely to repeat again.
00:33:46
Speaker
a discussion about a piece from This American Life where John Ronson talks about the origin stories of Alex Jones and then confronts Alex Jones with a claim that maybe he's been telling fibs about his becoming a conspiracy theorist story. Alex Jones telling fibs? Never, never could I believe such a thing.
00:34:10
Speaker
Well, Josh, believe it or not, you'll find out if you're a patron and fling us a few dollars a month to get access to our bonus episodes and other bits and pieces we sometimes come up with. And access to the warm feeling inside that you get from supporting us in our podcasting endeavors. The warm feeling I get inside is due to blood going through my heart. Ah, and the alcohol I assume.
00:34:33
Speaker
Alcohol is blood. Well, there we go. So, back to regular topics next week and the week after that and the week after that. And then the news. And then the news one. In a month's time. Yep, and on and on and on forever.
00:34:47
Speaker
until the sun burns out and even then we'll be living on the moon in the cold, having adapted to a harsh environment and we'll still be broadcasting until MH370 is found. We will broadcast until the end of time and beyond. And that's a promise. Goodbye.
00:35:17
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.
00:36:18
Speaker
And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara.