Conspiracy Related Quotes

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For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying—and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering—slowly or quickly—as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we “enjoy” as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature. And being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.
Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race)
England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
George Orwell (Why I Write)
There is no problem more difficult to solve than that created by ourselves.
Felix Alba-Juez (Galloping with Sound - The Grand Cosmic Conspiracy (Relativity free of Folklore #5))
When we say two bodies 'touch', what we mean (without knowing it) is that both electromagnetic fields are interacting to avoid physical interpenetration and ... that happens well before subatomic particles touch!
Felix Alba-Juez (Galloping with Sound - The Grand Cosmic Conspiracy (Relativity free of Folklore #5))
It is curious that the human mind could blindly accept an infinite speed but had reservations to accept a finite one, simply because it was too large!
Felix Alba-Juez (Galloping with Sound - The Grand Cosmic Conspiracy (Relativity free of Folklore #5))
If elitist groups like Bohemian Club, the CFR and the Bilderberg Group select and groom candidates to become Presidents of the US then isn’t it safe to assume they also dictate certain policies once their alumni are in the White House?
Lance Morcan (The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy)
When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together. —ISAAC ASIMOV, THE RELATIVITY OF WRONG, 1989
Michael Shermer (The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths)
The press in America has become the public relations arm of the Democrat Party, which is so blinded by rage for its loss of the White House and Congress that it will stop at nothing to cook up a negative story about Donald Trump, with no regard for truth.
Jeanine Pirro (Liars, Leakers, and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy)
For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else.
Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror)
So strong was the preconception of absolute space and time in the scientific mentality of those days, that Lorentz did not realize the grand transcendence of what he had discovered, and contented himself with remodeling the edifice of Physics -- instead of rebuilding it with a new foundation.
Felix Alba-Juez (Galloping with Sound - The Grand Cosmic Conspiracy (Relativity free of Folklore #5))
What meaning our lives seem to have is the work of a relatively well-constituted emotional system. As consciousness gives us the sense of being persons, our psychophysiology is responsible for making us into personalities who believe the existential game to be worth playing. We may have memories that are unlike those of anyone else, but without the proper emotions to liven those memories they might as well reside in a computer file as disconnected bits of data that never unite into a tailor-made individual for whom things seem to mean something. You can conceptualize that your life has meaning, but if you do not feel that meaning then your conceptualization is meaningless and you are nobody.
Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race)
What meaning our lives may seem to have is the work of a relatively well-constituted emotional system. As consciousness gives us the sense of being persons, our psychophysiology is responsible for making us into personalities who believe the existential game to be worth playing. We may have memories that are unlike those of anyone else, but without the proper emotions to liven those memories they might as well reside in a computer file as disconnected bits of data that never unite into a tailor-made individual for whom things seem to mean something. You can conceptualize that your life has meaning, but if you do not feel that meaning then your conceptualization is meaningless and you are nobody. The only matters of weight in our lives are colored by rainbows or auroras of regulated emotion which give one a sense of that “old self.” But a major depression causes your emotions to evaporate, reducing you to a shell of a person standing alone in a drab landscape. Emotions are the substrate for the illusion of being a somebody among somebodies as well as for the substance we see, or think we see, in the world. Not knowing this ground-level truth of human existence is the equivalent of knowing nothing at all.
Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror)
There is no question that, if John F. Kennedy Jr. had lived, he would have been a formidable political candidate. But his premature death prevented us from ever knowing if he indeed would have publicly confronted the deaths of his father and uncle, and other related issues.
Donald Jeffries (Hidden History: An Exposé of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics)
Regardless of all the hysterical Fake News trying to rev up American voters, the investigators, by their own admission, have found no evidence of collusion or any related crime committed by anyone associated with the Trump campaign or administration. There’s just nothing there.
Jeanine Pirro (Liars, Leakers, and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy)
He was perfectly astonished with the historical account gave him of our affairs during the last century; protesting “it was only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition, could produce.” His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to recapitulate the sum of all I had spoken; compared the questions he made with the answers I had given; then taking me into his hands, and stroking me gently, delivered himself in these words, which I shall never forget, nor the manner he spoke them in: “My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required toward the procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are ennobled on account of their virtue; that priests are advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers, for their conduct or valour; judges, for their integrity; senators, for the love of their country; or counsellors for their wisdom. As for yourself,” continued the king, “who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.
Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels)
I believe that the Big-Bang Theory and the Evolution Theory, as well as Einstein’s Special Relativity Theory which does not allow for the existence of faster-than-light (superluminal) phenomena, all have flaws in them and must be replaced by new theories that can give Mankind a more concise view of our Universe. But the fact is exceptional discoveries and theories that challenge official science have been ignored by the Establishment for decades.
Takaaki Musha (The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy)
One of the various theories proposed to explain the negative result of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment with light waves (conceived to measure the absolute space), was based on the ballistic hypothesis, i.e. on postulating that the speed of light predicted by Maxwell's equations was not given as relative to the medium but as relative to the transmitter (firearm). Had that been the case, the experiment negative results would have not caused such perplexity and frustration (as we shall see in forthcoming sections).
Felix Alba-Juez (Galloping with Sound - The Grand Cosmic Conspiracy (Relativity free of Folklore #5))
Of all the chemical transmitter substances sloshing around in your brain, it appears that dopamine may be the most directly related to the neural correlates of belief. Dopamine, in fact, is critical in association learning and the reward system of the brain that Skinner discovered through his process of operant conditioning, whereby any behavior that is reinforced tends to be repeated. A reinforcement is, by definition, something that is rewarding to the organism; that is to say, it makes the brain direct the body to repeat the behavior in order to get another positive reward.
Michael Shermer (The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths)
Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented,” Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said in 2011. “Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, and the communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence.”37 Assange’s
Sarah Kendzior (They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent)
You asked me what linguistics I find most pernicious. I started with "is". The "either/or" habit is very pernicious. It seems very pernicious to me, I mean. Two-valued situations are relatively rare, actually.
Robert Anton Wilson (Robert Anton Wilson: Beyond Conspiracy Theory (RE/Search #18))
The powerful wrote the rules, that was all. It had always been thus and always would be. If everybody could be open and clear about that, it would considerably simplify international relations in general and his job in particular.
Timothy Balding (The Zucchini Conspiracy: A Novel of Alternative Facts)
The line came from a legend about a hunter who was relating an experience he had on safari. “This huge lion was racing toward me, and all my gun bearers had fled. I had no gun, and there was nowhere to hide. Not a bush or a tree in sight. And the beast was charging straight at me, coming closer and closer.” “How did you escape?” a listener asked. “I ran over to the nearest tree and climbed it.” “But you said there were no trees.” “You don’t understand. There has to be a tree!” And I have to find it, Robert thought. He
Sidney Sheldon (The Doomsday Conspiracy)
The last weeks of the school year spun out before James like a blur, remarkably free of deathly peril and adventure, but packed nonetheless with the lesser stresses of schoolwork and final essays and wand practicals, all of which were relatively welcome in the wake of the Hall of Elders’ Crossing. To no one’s great surprise, Hufflepuff was awarded the House Cup, being the only house to avoid major point deductions for involvement in the various Merlin conspiracy skullduggeries. The broomstick caper alone had cost Ravenclaw and Gryffindor fifty points each.
G. Norman Lippert (James Potter and the Hall of Elders' Crossing (James Potter, #1))
A statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts. In evaluating whether evidence about collective action of multiple individuals constituted a crime, we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of “collusion.
The Washington Post (The Mueller Report: Presented with Related Materials by The Washington Post)
Relatively few people in town were paying close attention to the issue; a much bigger controversy in the local papers during that long, hot summer was whether flying the United Nations flag at town hall was a gesture of international cooperation or “evidence of communist conspiracy,” as one newspaper article put it.16
Dan Fagin (Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation)
There is the convenient temptation to attribute the current turmoil and bitterness throughout the world to the presence of a Communist conspiracy to undermine Europe and America, but the potential explosiveness of our world situation is much more attributable to disillusionment with the promises of Christianity and technology.
Martin Luther King Jr. (Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?)
The Rothschilds are people we certainly would not attempt to defend given the rumors swirling around them of financial corruption and market manipulation in this era and in earlier eras. However, the way they are held up, by conspiracy extremists and other paranoid thinkers, to represent the Jewish community is an absolute joke. There are good and bad people in all races. The fact that there are many Jews in the banking sector is being used by neo-Nazis and anti-Semites to try to sway the uneducated to believe the Jews are the problem instead of banking shysters and banksters in general. Another important point relating to the current Jewish prominence in the banking world is there is a very obvious historical reason for it...Historically Jews did not have much freedom of choice when it came to their occupations. In fact, they were once forbidden by Christian authorities, and by some Muslim authorities, to pursue most regular occupations. They were, however, permitted and even encouraged to enter the banking industry because, in the medieval era at least, Christians/Muslims were not allowed to charge fellow-Christians/Muslims interest, but someone had to make loans – so the Jews were charged with the task. Jews were also permitted to slaughter animals – another equally unsavory job – and they were then despised and mocked by entire communities for being animal slaughterers and bankers.
James Morcan (Debunking Holocaust Denial Theories)
Computer scientists calculate that there have been thirty-two doublings since World War II, and that as early as 2030 we may encounter the singularity—the point at which total computational power will rise to levels that are so far beyond anything we can imagine that they will appear nearly infinite and thus, relatively speaking, be indistinguishable from omniscience.
Michael Shermer (The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths)
We make up hidden stories that tell us who is against us and who is with us. Whom we can trust and who is not to be trusted. Conspiracy thinking is all about fear-based self-protection and our intolerance for uncertainty. When we depend on self-protecting narratives often enough, they become our default stories. And we must not forget that storytelling is a powerful integration tool. We start weaving these hidden, false stories into our lives and they eventually distort who we are and how we relate to others. When unconscious storytelling becomes our default, we often keep tripping over the same issue, staying down when we fall, and having different versions of the same problem in our relationships—we’ve got the story on repeat. Burton explains that our brains like predictable storytelling. He writes, “In effect, well-oiled patterns of observation encourage our brains to compose a story that we expect to hear.” The men and women who have cultivated rising strong practices in their lives became aware of the traps in these first stories, whereas the participants who continued to struggle the most appeared to have gotten stuck in those stories. The good news is that people aren’t born with an exceptional understanding of the stories they make up, nor does it just dawn on them one day. They practiced. Sometimes for years. They set out with the intention to become aware and they tried until it worked. They captured their conspiracies and confabulations. Capturing
Brené Brown (Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.)
Kaminski plunged ahead. "I am not going to sign off on anything related to the Raptors," he said. "And I don't care if I'm fired for it." Buy raised a hand. "Whoa, wait a minute, I don't think you'll be fired," he replied quickly. "Now that Skilling's gone, we have a different mantra in Enron." He looked Kaminski in the eye. "We're expected to be honest", he said. p.525
Kurt Eichenwald (Conspiracy of Fools)
He was perfectly astonished with the historical Account I gave him of our Affairs during the last Century, protesting it was only a Heap of Conspiracies, Rebellions, Murders, Massacres, revolutions, Banishments, the very worst effects that Avarice, Faction, Hypocrisy, Perfidiousness, Cruelty, Rage, Madness, Hatred, Envy, Lust, Malice, or Ambition could produce... 'As for yourself,' continued the King, 'who have spent the greatest Part of your Life in Travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many Vices of your Country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the Answers I have with much Pain wringed and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives to be the most pernicious race of odious little Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the Earth
Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels)
Something not going well, Mr. Boxley?" The novelist looked back at him in thunderous silence. "I read your letter," said Stahr. The tone of the pleasant young headmaster was gone. He spoke as to an equal, but with a faint two-edged deference. "I can't get what I write on paper," broke out Boxley. "You've all been very decent, but it's a sort of conspiracy. Those two hacks you've teamed me with listen to what I say, but they spoil it--they seem to have a vocabulary of about a hundred words." "Why don't you write it yourself?" asked Stahr. "I have. I sent you some." "But it was just talk, back and forth," said Stahr mildly. "Interesting talk but nothing more." Now it was all the two ghostly attendants could do to hold Boxley in the deep chair. He struggled to get up; he uttered a single quiet bark which had some relation to laughter but non to amusement, and said: "I don't think you people read things. The men are duelling when the conversation takes place. At the end one of them falls into a well and has to be hauled up in a bucket." He barked again and subsided. Would you write that in a book of your own, Mr. Boxley?" "What? Naturally not." "You'd consider it too cheap." "Movie standards are different," said Boxley, hedging. "Do you ever go to them?" "No--almost never." "Isn't it because people are always duelling and falling down wells?" Yes--and wearing strained facial expressions and talking incredible and unnatural dialogue." "Skip the dialogue for a minute," said Stahr. "Granted your dialogue is more graceful than what these hacks can write--that's why we brought you out here. But let's imagine something that isn't either bad dialogue or jumping down a well.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon)
Today, acknowledgement of the prevalence and harms of child sexual abuse is counterbalanced with cautionary tales about children and women who, under pressure from social workers and therapists, produce false allegations of ‘paedophile rings’, ‘cult abuse’ and ‘ritual abuse’. Child protection investigations or legal cases involving allegations of organised child sexual abuse are regularly invoked to illustrate the dangers of ‘false memories’, ‘moral panic’ and ‘community hysteria’. These cautionary tales effectively delimit the bounds of acceptable knowledge in relation to sexual abuse. They are circulated by those who locate themselves firmly within those bounds, characterising those beyond as ideologues and conspiracy theorists. However firmly these boundaries have been drawn, they have been persistently transgressed by substantiated disclosures of organised abuse that have led to child protection interventions and prosecutions. Throughout the 1990s, in a sustained effort to redraw these boundaries, investigations and prosecutions for organised abuse were widely labelled ‘miscarriages of justice’ and workers and therapists confronted with incidents of organised abuse were accused of fabricating or exaggerating the available evidence. These accusations have faded over time as evidence of organised abuse has accumulated, while investigatory procedures have become more standardised and less vulnerable to discrediting attacks. However, as the opening quotes to this introduction illustrate, the contemporary situation in relation to organised abuse is one of considerable ambiguity in which journalists and academics claim that organised abuse is a discredited ‘moral panic’ even as cases are being investigated and prosecuted.
Michael Salter (Organised Sexual Abuse)
Last night, I spoke at one of the Circle Meetings of the Baptist Church. Afterward, a Kenyan friend, Wangari Waigwa-Stone, and I spoke about darkness and stars. “I was raised under an African sky,” she said. “Darkness was never something I was afraid of. The clarity, definition, and profusion of stars became maps as to how one navigates at night. I always knew where I was simply by looking up.” She paused. “My sons do not have these guides. They have no relationship to darkness, nothing in their imagination tells them there are pathways in the night they can move through.” “I have a Norwegian friend who says, ‘City lights are a conspiracy against higher thought,’ ” I added. “Indeed,” Wangari said, smiling, her rich, deep voice resonating. “I am Kikuyu. My people believe if you are close to the Earth, you are close to people.” “How so?” I asked. “What an African woman nurtures in the soil will eventually feed her family. Likewise, what she nurtures in her relations will ultimately nurture her community. It is a matter of living the circle. “Because we have forgotten our kinship with the land,” she continued, “our kinship with each other has become pale. We shy away from accountability and involvement. We choose to be occupied, which is quite different from being engaged. In America, time is money. In Kenya, time is relationship. We look at investments differently.
Terry Tempest Williams (Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place)
There was also a carton of paperbacks entitled America the TruthWay: The Communist-Jewish Conspiracy Against Our United States. Greg did better with this paperback, printed on cheap pulp stock, than with all the Bibles put together. It told all about how the Rothschilds and the Roosevelts and the Greenblatts were taking over the U.S. economy and the U.S. government. There were graphs showing how the Jews related directly to the Communist-Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyite axis, and from there to the Antichrist Itself.
Stephen King (The Dead Zone)
Mrs. Watson was feeling a little sorry for herself. Widowed, in the autumn of her life, her only relation away much of the year. But oh, such warmth radiated through her at Miss Holmes’s words, as if she’d swallowed a drop of sunfire and now glowed from within. True, certain beloved phases of her life had come to an end, but with Miss Holmes’s arrival, a whole new vista had opened up. And for one who had tended her years with care, autumn need not be a season of scarcity or regret—but one of harvest and celebration.
Sherry Thomas (A Conspiracy in Belgravia (Lady Sherlock, #2))
Lord Alfred Milner, wealthy Englishman and front man for the Rothschilds, served as paymaster for the international bankers in Petrograd during the Bolshevik Revolution. Milner later headed secret society known as The Round Table which was dedicated to establishing a world government whereby a clique Of super-rich financiers would control the world under the guise of Socialism. The American subsidiary of this conspiracy is called the Council on Foreign Relations and was started by. and is still controlled by Leftist international bankers.
Gary Allen (None Dare Call It Conspiracy)
It was about how humans compulsively categorize information because we need the illusion of control. Sorting scary, unfathomable variables like infant mortality rates by relating them to economics makes us feel safer. That if we can predict it or draw a little line, we’ll be protected from, at the very least, feeling stupid. It’s why randomness is unacceptable. Why organized religion is a salve. It’s far more palatable to think of a divine order. Why conspiracies are easier to stomach over psychopaths making a rash decision that alters the course of history.
Mary H.K. Choi (Yolk)
Meanwhile, people are busy using fractals to explain any system that has defied other, more reductionist approaches. Since they were successfully applied by IBM's Benoit Mandlebrot to the problem of seemingly random, intermittent interference on the phone lines, fractals have been used to identify underlying patterns in weather systems, computer files, and bacteria cultures. Sometimes fractal enthusiasts go a bit too far, however, using these nonlinear equations to mine for patterns in systems where none exist. Applied to the stock market to consumer behavior, fractals may tell less about those systems than about the people searching for patterns within them. There is a dual nature to fractals: They orient us while at the same time challenging our sense of scale and appropriateness. They offer us access to the underlying patterns of complex systems while at the same time tempting us to look for patterns where none exist. This makes them a terrific icon for the sort of pattern recognition associated with present shock—a syndrome we'll call factalnoia. Like the robots on Mystery Science Theater 3000, we engage by relating one thing to another, even when the relationship is forced or imagined. The tsunami makes sense once it is connected to chemtrails, which make sense when they are connected to HAARP. It's not just conspiracy theorists drawing fractalnoid connections between things. In a world without time, any and all sense making must occur on the fly. Simultaneity often seems like all we have. That's why anyone contending with present shock will have a propensity to make connections between things happening in the same moment—as if there had to be an underlying logic.
Douglas Rushkoff (Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now)
Hundreds of political assassinations related to minority races, labor leaders and spokesmen against fascism have taken place in the U.S. since World War II. In 1963, the assassination of President John Kennedy in Dallas allowed our own hidden, clandestine government to maintain control. The candidate for President in 1968, Robert Kennedy, was murdered by the same people on the night of his victory in the primaries. The judiciary, including the Supreme Court, have supported secret government by lending its authority to the concealment of conspiracies to murder our leaders. They refuse to examine documents that exist, allow truth to remain locked in the National Archives to perpetuate the “national security” lie.
Mae Brussell (The Essential Mae Brussell: Investigations of Fascism in America)
So, basically, to put off the old person and put on the new we only follow Jesus into the activities that he engaged in to nurture his own life in relation to the Father. Of course, his calling and mission was out of all proportion to ours, and he never had our weaknesses, which result from our long training in sin. But his use of solitude, silence, study of scripture, prayer, and service to others all had a disciplinary aspect in his life. And we can be very sure that what he found useful for conduct of his life in the Father will also be useful for us. It was an important day in my life when at last I understood that if he needed forty days in the wilderness at one point, I very likely could use three or four.
Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God)
18. A third powerful factor in the diffusion of communism is the conspiracy of silence on the part of a large section of the non-Catholic press of the world. We say conspiracy, because it is impossible otherwise to explain how a press usually so eager to exploit even the little daily incidents of life has been able to remain silent for so long about the horrors perpetrated in Russia, in Mexico and even in a great part of Spain; and that it should have relatively so little to say concerning a world organization as vast as Russian communism. This silence is due in part to short-sighted political policy, and is favored by various occult forces which for a long time have been working for the overthrow of the Christian Social Order.
Pope Pius XI (Divini Redemptoris: On Atheistic Communism)
The sensed irrelevance of what God is doing to what makes up our lives is the foundational flaw in the existence of multitudes of professing Christians today. They have been led to believe that God, for some unfathomable reason, just thinks it appropriate to transfer credit from Christ’s merit account to ours, and to wipe out our sin debt, upon inspecting our mind and finding that we believe a particular theory of the atonement to be true—even if we trust everything but God in all other matters that concern us. It is left unexplained how it is possible that one can rely on Christ for the next life without doing so for this one, trust him for one’s eternal destiny without trusting him for “the things that relate to Christian life.” Is this really possible? Surely it is not! Not within one life.
Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God)
Oona's mother was active online, and listened to the radio, and watched the news, and she had come to believe she was on the inside, among the elect, those who understood the plot, the plot her daughter said was ridiculous, a plot that had been building for years, for decades, maybe for centuries, the plot against their kind, yes their kind, no matter what her daughter said, for they had a kind, the only people who could not call themselves a people in this country, and there were not so many of them left, and now it had arrived, and was upon them, and she was afraid, for what could she do, but there were those among them who would stand up, stand up and protect her, and she had to believe in them, and be ready, be ready as best she could, to preserve herself, and especially her daughter, her daughter who was the future....
Mohsin Hamid (The Last White Man)
PART III THE TRIUMPH OF ODYSSEUS CHAPTER XXIX. Athena Advises Telemachos XXX. Telemachos Astonishes the Wooers XXXI. Penelope's Web XXXII. The Journey of Telemachos XXXIII. Telemachos in Pylos XXXIV. Telemachos in Sparta XXXV. Menelaos Relates His Adventures XXXVI. The Conspiracy of the Suitors XXXVII. Telemachos Returns to Ithaca XXXVIII. Telemachos and the Swineherd XXXIX. Telemachos Recognizes Odysseus XL. Telemachos Returns to the Palace XLI. Odysseus is Recognized by His Dog XLII. Odysseus Comes, a Beggar, to His Own House XLIII. Conversation of Odysseus and Penelope XLIV. Eurycleia Recognizes Odysseus XLV. Penelope's Dream XLVI. Athena Encourages Odysseus XLVII. The Last Banquet of the Suitors XLVIII. Odysseus Bends the Bow XLIX. Death of the Suitors L. Eurycleia Announces the Return of Odysseus to Penelope LI. Odysseus Visits His Father Vocabulary and Notes
Homer (Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece)
And still I had not admitted to myself that I should have stopped seeing Albertine long before, for she had entered, in relation to me, that wretched period when a being, dispersed in space and time, is no longer a woman in our eyes, but a series of events on which we cannot shed light, a series of insoluble problems, a sea which, like Xerxes, we absurdly try to beat, to punish it for all that it has swallowed up. Once this period has begun, one is inevitably defeated. Happy are those who see it in time not to be drawn into a useless, exhausting battle, surrounded on all sides by the limits of our imagination, where jealousy struggles so humiliatingly that the same man who once, if the eyes of his constant companion fell for a moment on another man, imagined a conspiracy, suffered who knows what torments, may later allow her to go out alone, sometimes with the man he knows is her lover, choosing this torture which is at least familiar in preference to the terrible unknown. It is a question of finding a rhythm which one afterward follows from habit.
Marcel Proust (The Prisoner: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition))
He perceived too in these still hours how little he had understood her hitherto. He had been blinded, — obsessed. He had been seeing her and himself and the whole world far too much as a display of the eternal dualism of sex, the incessant pursuit. Now with his sexual imaginings newly humbled and hopeless, with a realization of her own tremendous minimization of that fundamental of romance, he began to see all that there was in her personality and their possible relations outside that. He saw how gravely and deeply serious was her fine philanthropy, how honest and simple and impersonal her desire for knowledge and understandings. There is the brain of her at least, he thought, far out of Sir Isaac's reach. She wasn't abased by her surrenders, their simplicity exalted her, showed her innocent and himself a flushed and congested soul. He perceived now with the astonishment of a man newly awakened just how the great obsession of sex had dominated him — for how many years? Since his early undergraduate days. Had he anything to put beside her own fine detachment? Had he ever since his manhood touched philosophy, touched a social question, thought of anything human, thought of art, or literature or belief, without a glancing reference of the whole question to the uses of this eternal hunt? During that time had he ever talked to a girl or woman with an unembarrassed sincerity? He stripped his pretences bare; the answer was no. His very refinements had been no more than indicative fig-leaves. His conservatism and morality had been a mere dalliance with interests that too brutal a simplicity might have exhausted prematurely. And indeed hadn't the whole period of literature that had produced him been, in its straining purity and refinement, as it were one glowing, one illuminated fig-leaf, a vast conspiracy to keep certain matters always in mind by conspicuously covering them away? But this wonderful woman — it seemed — she hadn't them in mind! She shamed him if only by her trustful unsuspiciousness of the ancient selfish game of Him and Her that he had been so ardently playing.... He idealized and worshipped this clean blindness. He abased himself before it.
H.G. Wells (The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman)
Berkman and Goldman had met three years earlier, in the dim, smoke-filled dining room of Sachs’ Café on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Sachs’ was the regular hangout of Yiddish-speaking radicals, poets, and free spirits. Goldman had found her way there after escaping a loveless marriage and oppressive relatives. She had felt that no one in her family understood her, and she couldn’t fathom why they weren’t as angry as she was about the injustices of American society. She seethed with anger over the highly publicized hanging of four anarchists. They had been wrongly convicted of conspiracy following the detonation of a bomb thrown by an unseen assailant at an 1886 labor rally for the eight-hour day on Chicago’s Haymarket Square. The executed men had been made into scapegoats. They were rounded up because of their views and given a sham trial to placate a disquieted public agitated by a yellow press who saw bearded, fiery-eyed foreign revolutionaries behind every strike and workers rally. The Goldmans had fled oppression in their native Russia only to find that capitalists were no better than czars.
James McGrath Morris (Revolution By Murder: Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and the Plot to Kill Henry Clay Frick (Kindle Single))
Dopamine enhances the ability of neurons to transmit signals between one another. How? By acting as an agonist (as opposed to antagonist), or a substance that enhances neural activity. Dopamine binds to specific receptor molecule sites on the synaptic clefts of the neurons, as if it were the CTS that normally bind there.12 It increases the rate of neural firing in association with pattern recognition, which means that synaptic connections between neurons are likely to increase in response to a perceived pattern, thereby cementing those perceived patterns into long-term memory through the actual physical growth of new neural connections and the reinforcement of old synaptic links. Increasing dopamine increases pattern detection; scientists have found that dopamine agonists not only enhance learning but in higher doses can also trigger symptoms of psychosis, such as hallucinations, which may be related to that fine line between creativity (discriminate patternicity) and madness (indiscriminate patternicity). The dose is the key. Too much of it and you are likely to be making lots of Type I errors—false positives—in which you find connections that are not really there. Too little and you make Type II errors—false negatives—in which you miss connections that are real.
Michael Shermer (The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths)
Before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the very word conspiracy was seldom used by most Americans. The JFK assassination was the seminal national event in the lives of the Baby Boomer generation. We’ve heard all the clichés about the loss of our innocence, and the beginning of public distrust in our government’s leaders, being born with the events of November 22, 1963, but there’s a good deal of truth in that. President Kennedy tapped into our innate idealism and inspired a great many people, especially the young, like no president ever had before. John F. Kennedy was vastly different from most of our elected presidents. He was the first president to refuse a salary. He never attended a Bilderberg meeting. He was the first Catholic to sit in the Oval Office, and he almost certainly wasn’t related to numerous other presidents and/or the royal family of England, as is often the case. He was a genuine war hero, having tugged an injured man more than three miles using only a life preserver’s strap between his teeth, after the Japanese had destroyed the boat he commanded, PT-109. This selfless act seems even more courageous when one takes into account Kennedy’s recurring health problems and chronic bad back. He was an intellectual and an accomplished author who wrote many of his memorable speeches. He would never have been invited to dance naked with other powerful men and worship a giant owl, as so many of our leaders do every summer at Bohemian Grove in California.
Donald Jeffries (Hidden History: An Exposé of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics)
There was enough intimidation, witness tampering and foul play to go around. Many books have been published about this subject, witnesses have died, some violently, under very suspicious conditions. Over the years, evidence has been tampered with, and fearing for their lives, most other people have decided to clam up and withdraw into the shadows. Personally I still retain a list of convenient deaths after the Kennedy Assassination that happened rounding the Dealey Plaza in Dallas on November 22, 1963! In February 1996, Robert Kennedy, Jr. and his brother, Michael, flew to Havana for a meeting with Fidel Castro. As a gesture of goodwill, they brought with them a file of formerly top-secret U.S. documents. These documents were specifically about the Kennedy administration’s attempt to find a peaceful settlement with Cuba. Castro thanked them for the file and shared the impression that it was President Kennedy’s desire to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba. “It’s unfortunate,” Castro said, “that things happened as they did.” Castro also indicated that normalization might have been possible, had it not been for President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Although numerous attempts at normalization between the two countries have been attempted since this meeting, powerful anti-Castro factions continued to thwart all of these efforts. Perhaps we are now witnessing the time when ways will be found to improve the relations between the United States and Cuba and then again perhaps not!
Hank Bracker
The German Volk will believe me when I say that I would have chosen peace over war. Because for me, peace meant a multitude of delightful assignments. What I was able to do for the German Volk in the few years from 1933 to 1939, thanks to Providence and the support of numerous excellent assistants, in terms of culture, education, as well as economic recovery, and, above all, in the social organization of our lives, this can surely one day be compared with what my enemies have done and achieved in the same period. In the long years of struggle for power, I often regretted that the realization of my plans was spoiled by incidents that were not only relatively unimportant, but also, above all, completely insignificant. I regret this war not only because of the sacrifices that it demands of my German Volk and of other people, but also because of the time it takes away from those who intend to carry out a great social and civilizing work and who want to complete it. After all, what Mr. Roosevelt is capable of achieving, he has proved. What Mr. Churchill has achieved, nobody knows. I can only feel profound regret at what this war will prevent me and the entire National Socialist movement from doing for many years. It is a shame that a person cannot do anything about true bunglers and lazy fellows stealing the valuable time that he wanted to dedicate to cultural, social, and economic projects for his Volk. The same applies to Fascist Italy. There, too, one man has perpetuated his name for all time through a civilizing and national revolution of worldwide dimensions. In the same way it cannot be compared to the democratic-political bungling of the idlers and dividend profiteers, who, in the Anglo-American countries, for instance, spend the wealth accumulated by their fathers or acquire new wealth through shady deals. It is precisely because this young Europe is involved in the resolution of truly great questions that it will not allow the representatives of a group of powers who tactfully call themselves the “have” states to rob them of everything that makes life worth living, namely, the value of one’s own people, their freedom, and their social and general human existence. Therefore, we understand that Japan, weary of the everlasting blackmail and impudent threats, has chosen to defend itself against the most infamous warmongers of all time. Now a mighty front of nation-states, reaching from the Channel to East Asia, has taken up the struggle against the international Jewish-capitalist and Bolshevik conspiracy. New Year’s Proclamation to the National Socialists and Party Comrades January 1, 1942
Adolf Hitler (Collection of Speeches: 1922-1945)
As it turned out, Mary Jo White and other attorneys for the Sacklers and Purdue had been quietly negotiating with the Trump administration for months. Inside the DOJ, the line prosecutors who had assembled both the civil and the criminal cases started to experience tremendous pressure from the political leadership to wrap up their investigations of Purdue and the Sacklers prior to the 2020 presidential election in November. A decision had been made at high levels of the Trump administration that this matter would be resolved quickly and with a soft touch. Some of the career attorneys at Justice were deeply unhappy with this move, so much so that they wrote confidential memos registering their objections, to preserve a record of what they believed to be a miscarriage of justice. One morning two weeks before the election, Jeffrey Rosen, the deputy attorney general for the Trump administration, convened a press conference in which he announced a “global resolution” of the federal investigations into Purdue and the Sacklers. The company was pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States and to violate the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, as well as to two counts of conspiracy to violate the federal Anti-kickback Statute, Rosen announced. No executives would face individual charges. In fact, no individual executives were mentioned at all: it was as if the corporation had acted autonomously, like a driverless car. (In depositions related to Purdue’s bankruptcy which were held after the DOJ settlement, two former CEOs, John Stewart and Mark Timney, both declined to answer questions, invoking their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves.) Rosen touted the total value of the federal penalties against Purdue as “more than $8 billion.” And, in keeping with what had by now become a standard pattern, the press obligingly repeated that number in the headlines. Of course, anyone who was paying attention knew that the total value of Purdue’s cash and assets was only around $1 billion, and nobody was suggesting that the Sacklers would be on the hook to pay Purdue’s fines. So the $8 billion figure was misleading, much as the $10–$12 billion estimate of the value of the Sacklers’ settlement proposal had been misleading—an artificial number without any real practical meaning, designed chiefly to be reproduced in headlines. As for the Sacklers, Rosen announced that they had agreed to pay $225 million to resolve a separate civil charge that they had violated the False Claims Act. According to the investigation, Richard, David, Jonathan, Kathe, and Mortimer had “knowingly caused the submission of false and fraudulent claims to federal health care benefit programs” for opioids that “were prescribed for uses that were unsafe, ineffective, and medically unnecessary.” But there would be no criminal charges. In fact, according to a deposition of David Sackler, the Department of Justice concluded its investigation without so much as interviewing any member of the family. The authorities were so deferential toward the Sacklers that nobody had even bothered to question them.
Patrick Radden Keefe (Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty)
as Einstein’s Special Relativity Theory which does not allow for the existence of faster-than-light (superluminal) phenomena, all have flaws in them and must be replaced by new theories that can give Mankind a more concise view of our Universe.
James Morcan (The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy)
Miami police were reportedly hesitant to pursue these crimes for fear that they would be accused of racial and religious persecution.313 And, in fact, that is precisely the argument that defense attorney and former judge Alcee Hastings tried to make. He claimed that the prosecutions were racially motivated. In May 1992, a jury found Mr. Mitchell guilty of conspiracy to commit murder.314 Needless to say, there would be a coast-to-coast media din of unprecedented proportions if a white group were discovered to have engaged in ritual murder and mutilation of blacks. In fact, the Yahweh trial ran concurrently with the trial of the Los Angeles policemen who were videotaped beating Rodney King. Mr. King’s name was constantly in the news and practically a household name; few outside of Miami had heard of the Yahweh cult.
Jared Taylor (Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America)
...If you're not with family on major holidays, people worry, calling to see if you're being sufficiently festive, yelling at you if you eat Chee-tos for phans by circumstance, geography, or choice, but a cultural conspiracy was afoot to make us feel otherwise. Work, I decided, was the antidote.
Harley Jane Kozak (Dating is Murder (Wollie Shelley Mystery #2))
Is that part of what we are seeing? Are increasingly violent conspiracy theorists in the Mirror World afraid of being rounded up, treated as second-class, occupied, and culled because on some level they know that these are the genocidal behaviors that created and sustain their relative but increasingly precarious privileges? Are they terrified that if the truths of the Shadow Lands—past, present, and future—are ever fully revealed and reckoned with, then it can only result in a dramatic role reversal, with the victims becoming the victimizers?
Naomi Klein (Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World)
The Abwehr also achieved a great success against the Dutch resistance beginning in March 1942. It called this counter-intelligence coup Operation North Pole, or the Englandspiel. This disaster was almost entirely due to appallingly lax practices in N Section at SOE’s London headquarters. An SOE radio operator was picked up in a sweep in The Hague. The Abwehr forced him to transmit to London. He did so, assuming that, because he had left off the security check at the end of his message, London would know that he had been captured. But to his horror London assumed that he had simply forgotten it, and replied telling him to arrange a drop zone for another agent to be parachuted in. A German reception committee was waiting for the new agent, and he was in turn forced to signal back as instructed. The chain continued, with one agent after another seized on arrival. Each was deeply shocked to find that the Germans knew everything about them, even the colour of the walls in their briefing room back in England. The Abwehr and SD, for once working harmoniously together, thus managed to capture around fifty Dutch officers and agents. Anglo-Dutch relations were severely damaged by this disaster; in fact many people in the Netherlands suspected treachery at the London end. There was no conspiracy, just a terrible combination of incompetence, complacency and ignorance of conditions in occupied Holland.
Antony Beevor (The Second World War)
Chinese authorities started systematically removing any mention of the virus online. This began on December 31, when technology services in China censored key words linked to the pandemic. The live-streaming platform YY censored words including “unknown Wuhan pneumonia” and “Wuhan Seafood Market”. WeChat censored phrases related to the pandemic, banned both speculative and factual information related to the outbreak, and removed even “neutral references to Chinese government efforts to handle the outbreak that had been reported on state media”, according to the Citizen Lab’s March 2020 report. The CCP censorship alarmed doctors and Chinese health authorities, who knew the precise opposite approach should be taken in order to save lives. This crucial point clearly shows China’s deliberate, intentional and clear-eyed decision to cover up the virus; to stop their own people and those internationally from finding out about it.
Sharri Markson (What Really Happened in Wuhan: The Cover-Ups, the Conspiracies and the Classified Research)
Animal awareness is the perfect carrier of propaganda - it is the ideal facilitator of animal conditioning, while human awareness is the only civilized answer. Let me show you how animal conditioning through propaganda works. I'll mention a word, and you'll tell me what's the first thing that comes to your mind. And the word is - "terrorism". Here, the first thing a white american nationalist will think of, is "arabs". Ask an indian hindu nationalist the same question, and their first thought would be "pakistan". In the same way, israeli zionists would automatically associate the word terrorism with palestine. Like it or not, that's animal nature. Every moment you are bombarded with materials that have no relation to truth and humanity, as far as the civilized mind could see. Through cinema, through video games, through news - propaganda is everywhere. And no, I am not talking about some grand conspiracy. Apes, who still cannot look past the color of skin and language of tongue, do not have the brains to orchestrate some grand scheme of manipulation - all they can do is, simply peddle the same old rotten narrative of hate and fanaticism repeatedly, and the rest is taken care of by the primitive survival instinct of the ape brain. So, what's the way out? Simple - start using that grand instrument you carry on your shoulders, which you call a brain - driven by an actual civilized craving for uplift and illumination.
Abhijit Naskar (Iman Insaniyat, Mazhab Muhabbat: Pani, Agua, Water, It's All One (Caretaker Diaries))
Leor Zmigrod, Peter Jason Rentfrow, and Trevor W. Robbins, “The Partisan Mind: Is Extreme Political Partisanship Related to Cognitive Inflexibility?” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 149, no. 3.
Scott A. Shay (Conspiracy U: A Case Study)
The Atonement as the Whole Story If you ask anyone from that 74 percent of Americans who say they have made a commitment to Jesus Christ what the Christian gospel is, you will probably be told that Jesus died to pay for our sins, and that if we will only believe he did this, we will go to heaven when we die. In this way what is only one theory of the “atonement” is made out to be the whole of the essential message of Jesus. To continue with theological language for the moment, justification has taken the place of regeneration, or new life.8 Being let off the divine hook replaces possession of a divine life “from above.” For all of the talk about the “new birth” among conservative Christians, there is an almost total lack of understanding of what that new birth is in practical terms and of how it relates to forgiveness and imputed or transmitted righteousness.
Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God)
three years, John F. Kennedy enjoyed a relatively quiet presidency, with no major roadblocks. With Lyndon Baines. Johnson (LBJ) as a supposedly loyal Vice-President, JFK grew complacent.
Frank White (The Illuminati's Greatest Hits: Deception, Conspiracies, Murders And Assassinations By The World's Most Powerful Secret Society)
Gerald Ford, 33rd degree Freemason, member of the Illuminati created Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg Group; Nixon’s Vice-President; 38th President of the United States (1974-1977);
Frank White (The Illuminati's Greatest Hits: Deception, Conspiracies, Murders And Assassinations By The World's Most Powerful Secret Society)
Now, we live under the tyranny of a New World Order—a world that has been reordered by a small group of wealthy financiers and industrialists centered within secret societies such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg group. Also,
Jim Marrs (The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy)
Now, we live under the tyranny of a New World Order—a world that has been reordered by a small group of wealthy financiers and industrialists centered within secret societies such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg group.
Jim Marrs (The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy)
Nick Rockefeller, a participant in the World Economic Forum and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, may have revealed the agenda of the New World Order in a casual comment. According to the late Hollywood producer Aaron Russo, Rockefeller told him, “The end goal is to get everybody chipped, to control the whole society, to have the bankers and the elite people control the world.
Jim Marrs (The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy)
If the anti-vaxxers are conspiracy nuts, which they sure are, so are the politicians, who keep dumping billions and billions of dollars in defense contracts out of sheer primitive insecurity instead of working to organize peace.
Abhijit Naskar (Şehit Sevda Society: Even in Death I Shall Live)
conflicting demands for and requirements of evidence and burdens of proof measure against assumptions about normative and reasonable behaviors and expectations in the construction of historical truths. THE CONFERENCE The Royal Society meeting participants fell into three main groups: (1) four of the scientists involved in the Congo Trials (Paul Osterreith, Jan Desmyter, Hilary Koprowski, and Stanley Plotkin) and allies, including a group of phylogeneticists; (2) Hooper and allies; and (3) a varied group of speakers addressing zoonosis generally and epidemics broadly related to HIV.
Joseph Masco (Conspiracy/Theory)
This was my time at the MUN; not just a symbol of international cooperation, but a dark and mysterious nexus of conspiracy and intrigue. Indeed, a place where the forces of chaos and order collide in an endless struggle for dominance. But let's not kid ourselves, behind the facade of diplomatic protocols and bureaucratic banalities lurks a dark underbelly. A shadow world of secret meetings and covert operations, where the true rulers of the world pull the strings of fate like puppeteers in a grand cosmic theater. Here, in the labyrinthine corridors and dimly lit backrooms, the fate of nations is not decided by the will of the people, but by the whims of those who dwell in the shadows.
Ryan Gelpke
He says the virus was highly adapted for infection of humans from the start, unlike earlier natural zoonoses, and that its infectious trigger – the furin cleavage site – isn’t found anywhere in related betacoronaviruses in its class, and thus he argues couldn’t have come from a natural recombination, but has been repeatedly included in viruses by laboratory scientists including at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. “Since 1992, laboratories have been putting furin cleavage sites into viruses that didn’t have them – 11 different laboratories, 11 different experiments, including previous Wuhan Institute of Virology experiments, and every single time it makes it more virulent, more transmissible and more lethal,” he says. The end result, Dr Quay says, has always been supercharged viruses.
Sharri Markson (What Really Happened in Wuhan: The Cover-Ups, the Conspiracies and the Classified Research)
A year on, in 2021, 43 international scientists would sign four letters calling for an investigation into a possible laboratory leak. The first group of 25 scientists went public with their letter on March 4, 2021 in response to the WHO’s flawed inquiry, which failed to investigate the Wuhan laboratories. The scientists published a series of letters outlining the steps the WHO needed to take for a rigorous scientific inquiry into the origins of the virus. One of the essential questions they identified that needs examining is this: “Did the WIV or any other laboratory ever attempt to recreate RaTG13 or any other coronaviruses by assembling them from synthetic gene sequences?” They want to obtain the records of laboratories involved in coronavirus research in Wuhan, such as laboratory notebooks, electronic records and details of gain-of-function research, including related sequences and isolates.
Sharri Markson (What Really Happened in Wuhan: The Cover-Ups, the Conspiracies and the Classified Research)
We were watching videos at night on her Samsung tablet or my company iPad. She showed me the Silvano Agosti 1983 Italian interview with a little Italian boy called “D'Amore si vive, We Live of Love.” The boy was so cute, and his thoughts seemed similar to mine and Martina's. I was so deeply in love with her. The boy on the interview was just like what our own child would be, and we agreed and laughed. “We Live of Love.” What a coincidence! Living. By: Love. I knew the interview from before and she was surprised at how I knew about it. I showed her on my Instagram a picture of the boy I had recently taken a screenshot of and posted. With the subtitle at the right moment under his face: “Descubrir a la vida.” To discover life. Together. With his one and only girlfriend, as the boy explains. I told her multiple times that I was still unsure if she was real, or if it was all a dream; if I had only dreamed of her one night in the dark; if Pinto and I had invented her in my mind. She was a big fan of space, but I thought she liked the mystery behind the endless space with all its questions and secrets for us humans. I thought she liked the sky and space because she recently flew from Argentina to land in my arms. Martina and I were obsessed with Chris Rock and Eddie Murphy; we both knew all their stand-up comedies by heart. We kept replaying the best moments or faces that Chris or Eddie made. We had so much fun watching the same videos over and over that I couldn't believe it. Nobody else ever found the same moments or the same stand-ups as funny as Martina and I did. Nobody before or after found it so amusing. If I showed it to someone, they didn't understand why I was so excited about it or why racist jokes were so funny for an hour from one black comedian to the next. We were obsessed the way Eddie spoke about the „Zebra-Bitch of her dreams, her dream-wife who doesn’t know the concept of money”, saying “she should have an afro, like Angela Davis goes 'God damn it.'“ We were laughing so much. Sometimes I tickled her flat belly or her ribs and she was laughing so sweetly and so much that she couldn't stop. She was begging me to stop tickling her when I barely touched her. She said “No, no, no, no” so many times so quickly and cutely that I had to stop and kiss her; I couldn't resist her lips or her person, I had to kiss and hug her. We laughed so much at particular parts of Chris Rock's stand-up comedies that we could barely stop, almost as if we were tickling each other. We were laughing when Chris Rock was mocking Bone-Thugs-n-Harmony for singing ‘Welfare chariots’ such as „The First of the Month” or when he explained that the government hates rappers, but „only the good rappers get gunned down. They could find Saddam Hussein in a cave in Iraq but couldn't arrest anyone related to Tupac Shakur’s assassination, which didn't happen in a cave in Iraq but in Las Vegas, on the Strip, not one of those side streets, but in front of Circus Circus, after a Mike Tyson fight. Now how many witnesses do you need, to arrest somebody?” We were fascinated with Eddie Murphy, Charlie Murphy, and Chris Rock, but when I showed her Richard Prior, Doug Stanhope, Aries Spears, or George Carlin, she was no longer so impressed for some reason. Her favorite part perhaps was when Chris Rock talked about love and relationships. He said that „you never really been in love unless you have contemplated murder; unless you have practiced your alibi in front of the mirror, staring at a can of rat poison for 45 minutes straight, you haven't been in love. And the only thing preventing you from killing your significant other was an episode of CSI.” He said that relationships are hard and that in order for them to work, both people need to have the same focus, which is all about: her.
Tomas Adam Nyapi
We were watching videos at night on her Samsung tablet or my company iPad. She showed me the Silvano Agosti 1983 Italian interview with a little Italian boy called “D'Amore si vive, We Live of Love.” The boy was so cute, and his thoughts seemed similar to mine and Martina's. I was so deeply in love with her. The boy on the interview was just like what our own child would be, and we agreed and laughed. “We Live of Love.” What a coincidence! Living. By: Love. I knew the interview from before and she was surprised at how I knew about it. I showed her on my Instagram a picture of the boy I had recently taken a screenshot of and posted. With the subtitle at the right moment under his face: “Descubrir a la vida.” To discover life. Together. With his one and only girlfriend, as the boy explains. I told her multiple times that I was still unsure if she was real, or if it was all a dream; if I had only dreamed of her one night in the dark; if Pinto and I had invented her in my mind. She was a big fan of space, but I thought she liked the mystery behind the endless space with all its questions and secrets for us humans. I thought she liked the sky and space because she recently flew from Argentina to land in my arms. Martina and I were obsessed with Chris Rock and Eddie Murphy; we both knew all their stand-up comedies by heart. We kept replaying the best moments or faces that Chris or Eddie made. We had so much fun watching the same videos over and over that I couldn't believe it. Nobody else ever found the same moments or the same stand-ups as funny as Martina and I did. Nobody before or after found it so amusing. If I showed it to someone, they didn't understand why I was so excited about it or why racist jokes were so funny for an hour from one black comedian to the next. We were obsessed the way Eddie spoke about the „Zebra-Bitch of his dreams, his dream-wife who doesn’t know the concept of money”, saying “she should have an afro, like Angela Davis goes 'God damn it.'“ We were laughing so much. Sometimes I tickled her flat belly or her ribs and she was laughing so sweetly and so much that she couldn't stop. She was begging me to stop tickling her when I barely touched her. She said “No, no, no, no” so many times so quickly and cutely that I had to stop and kiss her; I couldn't resist her lips or her person, I had to kiss and hug her. We laughed so much at particular parts of Chris Rock's stand-up comedies that we could barely stop, almost as if we were tickling each other. We were laughing when Chris Rock was mocking Bone-Thugs-n-Harmony for singing ‘Welfare chariots’ such as „The First of the Month” or when he explained that the government hates rappers, but „only the good rappers get gunned down. They could find Saddam Hussein in a cave in Iraq but couldn't arrest anyone related to Tupac Shakur’s assassination, which didn't happen in a cave in Iraq but in Las Vegas, on the Strip, not one of those side streets, but in front of Circus Circus, after a Mike Tyson fight. Now how many witnesses do you need, to arrest somebody?” We were fascinated with Eddie Murphy, Charlie Murphy, and Chris Rock, but when I showed her Richard Prior, Doug Stanhope, Aries Spears, or George Carlin, she was no longer so impressed for some reason. Her favorite part perhaps was when Chris Rock talked about love and relationships. He said that „you never really been in love unless you have contemplated murder; unless you have practiced your alibi in front of the mirror, staring at a can of rat poison for 45 minutes straight, you haven't been in love. And the only thing preventing you from killing your significant other was an episode of CSI.” He said that relationships are hard and that in order for them to work, both people need to have the same focus, which is all about: her.
Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
They were speechless. Now one of them had to go up and talk to Sabrina and I had to stay downstairs with the other officer, just like earlier in the same day at Ruan's place. After a few minutes, the officer came down shaking his head, meaning there was no reason for Sabrina to call the police, as they were confused as to why she had called them in the first place when I had obviously done nothing wrong. She had let me inside the building when I buzzed. It was odd for me as well as for the officers. Perhaps she thought I wouldn't leave by her door once she slammed it, and she called the police because someone was inside I should not have seen, or she was expecting someone to arrive I should not have met. They had let me go, but they asked me to promise that I wouldn't go there anymore. Bet. They told me they believed me that I hadn't meant any harm, but I had to understand that Sabrina had meant harm, and she was not whom I had thought she was. This suggests that either the Police officer who went upstairs had prior knowledge or they both were aware of something about her and them that I wasn't. It's possible that there were previous incidents or situations at that address throughout the year when I wasn't there anymore, primarily involving drug-related activities, parties, and occupations such as growing weed and using/cocking/selling drugs like mushrooms, weed and crack cocaine. If these activities were limited to their self-destruction, it wouldn't be a concern in itself. But.
Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
trumpeting the quarter’s performance. After that came the question period. It started predictably enough, with requests for information about run-of-the-mill operating matters. Then the operator called on the next questioner. “Richard Grubman, of Highfield Capital.” As Skilling stared at the speakerphone, Mark Koenig, the investor-relations chief, began scrawling a note. Grubman asked what the balances of assets and liabilities were in the trading business
Kurt Eichenwald (Conspiracy of Fools)
What e-mail was Ryan Siurek talking about? Siurek, an architect on the Raptors, had been speaking with Andersen accountants about some technical detail involving $1.2 billion booked as “notes receivable” from the Raptors, or commitments to pay Enron, which related to the company’s agreement to contribute stock to the entities. That had resulted in Enron’s increasing its reported equity by the same amount. Siurek said he had raised the issue during the March restructuring in an e-mail to Patricia Grutzmacher, a member of the Andersen team.
Kurt Eichenwald (Conspiracy of Fools)
Postmodernism provides another popular alibi for bowing to the idol of freedom. God is dead, and truth is dead, it claims, so the ultimate determinant in society is power. But if all relations are negotiated solely by power, the best protection against the unwanted power of others is to approach everyone with suspicion (the infamous “hermeneutics of suspicion”). The outcome is an aging society fueled by pervasive suspicion, mistrust, rumor, conspiracy theories, and cynicism.
Os Guinness (The Magna Carta of Humanity: Sinai's Revolutionary Faith and the Future of Freedom)
Henry revealed the strategies Entz Media used to break marriages apart. Entz programming pushed the idea of marriage being stale and uneventful and then glamorized a freer and more exciting life outside of marriage. Institutions that upheld chastity before marriage and fidelity within marriage were ridiculed. Storylines relating to religion centered on religious conspiracies and how people gained enlightenment apart from God, not from Him. The idea of commitment -- to a wife, a child, a religion -- was ridiculed. Selfishness was championed.
Patrick Ord (The Curtain)
And yet the idea that a person’s character and social station could be read in his or her face had greater currency than ever. There were social and political reasons for this. Since the 1789 revolution, social hierarchies in France had undergone seventy years of unstinting, often violent upheaval. With the deck of class violently shuffled by a series of political disruptions, and industry rapidly changing the face of the city, fears of conspiracy and criminality were rife among the bourgeoisie and the upper classes. Not even fashion and dress brought clarity to the situation, since people could no longer be depended upon to dress in ways that reflected their social standing. Instead—and increasingly—people’s clothes expressed their social aspirations. Those whose status had once been relatively settled wanted reassurance. They needed to feel the city was legible, knowable, and at least potentially under control. (It’s not by accident that the genre of the detective novel, in which a hero endowed with preternatural abilities at reading clues solves puzzling crimes, emerged at the same time.) In these new, unstable social circumstances (which are a large part of what we mean by modernity), the pseudoscience of physiognomy was immensely appealing.
Sebastian Smee (The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art)
A youth of such promise, especially if his body be on a par with his mind, will be at once foremost among all his fellows. His relatives and fellow-citizens, eager to make use of him for their own purposes, and anxious to appropriate to themselves his growing force, will besiege him betimes with solicitations and flatteries. Under these influences, if we assume him to be rich, well born, and in a powerful city, he will naturally become intoxicated with unlimited hopes and ambition; fancying himself competent to manage the affairs of all governments, and giving himself the empty airs of a lofty potentate. If there be any one to give him a quiet hint that he has not yet acquired intelligence, nor can acquire it without labour — he will turn a deaf ear. But suppose that such advice should by chance prevail, in one out of many cases, so that the youth alters his tendencies and devotes himself to philosophy — what will be the conduct of those who see, that they will thereby be deprived of his usefulness and party-service, towards their own views? They will leave no means untried to prevent him from following the advice, and even to ruin the adviser, by private conspiracy and judicial prosecution.
Benjamin Cocker (Stoic Six Pack 9: The PreSocratics – Anaximander, The School of Miletus, Zeno, Parmenides, Pre-Socratic Philosophy and The Eleatics (Illustrated))
The FBI has stated that the investigation relating to Kennedy’s assassination is officially closed. The government’s position still stands behind the Warren Commission’s finding, maintaining that Oswald acted alone. The book “Reclaiming History” was published in 2007 by Vincent Bugliosi, an American attorney and New York Times bestselling author. He wrote 1,632 pages that categorically attempt to debunk the conspiracy theories, however human nature will most likely prevail and these theories will probably continue. In addition, there are still findings of relevance that are surfacing. Although there is a smoking gun suggesting a cover-up, no details have appeared with enough definitive evidence to prove that a conspiracy took place. Was the Castro régime involved or was it the anti-Castro faction in South Florida? These questions are still open but may be answered when President Trump releases the final files presently held by the government. Fifty years after the assassination the World may finally learn the truth… or not!
Hank Bracker
If all narratives are relative, then we are lost. Widespread anti-Semitic fantasies may have reflected the plight of Germans, may even have been their “soul’s version of the truth” in the post-1918 period, but they were still fantasies, and the failure to counter them, or to see the fantasies as themselves creating terrible political realities, proved totally catastrophic. Relativism doesn’t care to distinguish between the scholarly and the slap-dash, the committed researcher and the careless loudmouth, the scrupulous and the demagogic. For that reason, it is hard to see how an insistence on “proper events” can ever be said to be dogmatic, or a refusal to insist can be anything other than treacherous. Spike
David Aaronovitch (Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History)
In the context of our particular family or group or congregation, to present the kingdom of the heavens will mean that we must teach about the nature of belief (which is the same as faith) and how it relates to the rest of our personality. And then we must study our friends and associates to see what they really do believe and help them to be honest about it. We understand that our beliefs are the rails upon which our life runs, and so we have to address their actual beliefs and their doubts, not spend our time discussing many fine things that have little or no relevance to their genuine state of mind.12 Then we must be very fair and thorough in examining those beliefs and considering to what extent they are or are not justified. There must not be the least effort to be unfair in this examination or to pooh-pooh genuine problems, for that will weaken and infect everything we try to develop thereafter. One cannot build discipleship to Jesus by dodging serious issues or not doing justice to honest doubts about him and his teachings.
Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God)
God relates to space as we do to our body. He occupies and overflows it but cannot be localized in it. Every point in it is accessible to his consciousness and will, and his manifest presence can be focused in any location as he sees fit. In the incarnation he focused his reality in a special way in the body of Jesus. This
Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God)
important that we be very clear in our own minds what condemnation is and how it relates to the more basic sense of judgment that only involves “separating” one thing from another to the best of our ability. We simply cannot forsake discernment, and Jesus himself devotes the last half of Matthew 7 to urging us precisely to discern and, in that sense, to “judge.” But we must forsake the practice of condemning people, and that will not be difficult at all once we see clearly what it is to condemn and have previously rid ourselves of anger and contempt.
Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God)
So prayer is a total activity, incorporating many elements essential to a personal relationship between two persons—persons different from and related to one another as the Father is to his children on earth. But still the heart of prayer is the request.
Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God)
For this purpose we will benefit most from the great passages of scripture that clearly show us our Father in relation to his creation and his earthly family. These are passages such as Genesis 1 or 15; Exodus 19; 1 Kings 8; 2 Chronicles 16 and 19; Nehemiah 9; many of the psalms (34, 37, 91, and 103, for example); Isaiah 30, 44, and 56–66; Luke 11; Romans 8; Philippians 4.
Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God)
There is a long-standing trend of documented trend of UFO appearances and these appearances have led to a fascinating worldwide yet still unsolved enigma. ‘’Disclosure: The Future is Now’’ takes a close non-fictional look at the history of UFO sightings and related areas such as alien abductions.and alleged government conspiracies. Disclosure is also a science fiction story of how events in the future may return to affect the Earth at the present time. ‘’Release From Stasis’’ is a fictional sequel to the first book’s story.
Graham Clingbine (Disclosure: The Future Is Now)
As we try to learn from the past, we form patterns of thinking based on our experiences, not realizing that the things that happened have an unfair advantage over the things that didn’t. In other words, we can’t see the alternatives that might well have happened if not for some small chance event. When a bad thing happens, people will draw conclusions that might include conspiracy or forces acting against them or, conversely, if a good thing happens, that they are brilliant and deserving. But these kinds of misperceptions ultimately deceive us. And this has consequences in business—and for the way we manage. When companies are successful, it is natural to assume that this is a result of leaders making shrewd decisions. Those leaders go forward believing that they have figured out the key to building a thriving company. In fact, randomness and luck played a key role in that success. If you run a business that is covered with any frequency by the media, you may face another challenge. Journalists tend to look for patterns that can be explained in a relatively small number of words. If you haven’t done the work of teasing apart what is random and what you have intentionally set in motion, you will be overly influenced by the analysis of outside observers, which is often oversimplified. When managing a company that is often in the news, as Pixar is, we must be careful not to believe our own hype. I say this knowing that it is difficult to resist, especially when we are flying high and tempted to think we have done everything right. But the truth is, I have no way of accounting for all of the factors involved in any given success, and whenever I learn more, I have to revise what I think. That’s not a weakness or a flaw. That’s reality.
Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: an inspiring look at how creativity can - and should - be harnessed for business success by the founder of Pixar)
The Council on Foreign Relations is like an establishment country club—a veritable Who’s Who of American policy-making. The mainstream press has historically given scant coverage to exactly what it is that the CFR does. The “Foreign Relations” part of the name would seem to indicate a group devoted to the study of foreign policy objectives. Indeed, on the rare occasions that the CFR is mentioned in the mainstream media, it is inevitably referred to as “an influential foreign policy think tank”—makes it even more curious that so many celebrated figures decidedly lacking in “foreign policy” experience are or have been members.
Donald Jeffries (Hidden History: An Exposé of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics)
He recalled first Timothy five, verse 8.: “If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
Mark Goodwin (Conspiracy (The Days of Noah, #1))
So industry executives made a fateful decision, one that would later become the basis on which a federal judge would find the industry guilty of conspiracy to commit fraud—a massive and ongoing fraud to deceive the American public about the health effects of smoking.24 The decision was to hire a public relations firm to challenge the scientific evidence that smoking could kill you.
Naomi Oreskes (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming)
The white enemies of the white supremacy movement are almost always associated with the conspiracy theory called the New World Order (NWO). This is just another name for the deep state, or as anti-Semites call it, the Zionist occupation government (ZOG). The origin of the NWO is relatively recent.
Malcolm W. Nance (They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency)
As a full-time prognosticator of doom—that is, a twenty-first-century realist—I was relatively prepared for the pandemic when it hit hard in March 2020.
Sarah Kendzior (They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent)
Welch became more confident that the press was reporting his words more accurately, but that worked against him because his discourses on the rise of the Illuminati or the Insiders made him sound strange to some, or worse. In September 1973, he sat for the Boston Globe and just purged. He told the reporter that it all began in Bavaria on May 1, 1776, when Baron Adam Weishaupt founded the Order of the Illuminati. It's all in a book by John Robinson, Welch explained. But the Illuminati were forced underground when Bavarian authorities raided their headquarters. The reporter's eyes probably widened. But by 1840, the Illuminati was strong and produced the Great Revolution of 1848 and the League of the Just Men, which hired Karl Marx to draft Das Kapital. The conspiracy was on the doorsteps of Russia by 1905, Welch continued, and in 1917, the agents of the Illuminati, Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, threw over the czars, with funding from the Rotschilds. Welch was on fire now. The Insiders, he continued, went to Yale and Harvard, grew up with all the advantages, controlled American politics and international banking, and wanted to enslave everyone else. In 1912, the Insiders brought in Woodrow Wilson to drag the country into World War I. They convinced America to fight World War II with assistance from Insiders like President Roosevelt and George Marshall. They master-planned the civil rights revolution, and they work through the UN, the Council on Foreign Relations, and tax-free foundations. Perhaps the reporter nodded now and then, encouraging him on.
Edward H. Miller (A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism)
In 2011, Epps was listed as the Arizona chapter president of the Oath Keepers. In the decade leading up to January 6th, he gave interviews, conducted vigilante investigations, and appeared at events with the militia group’s founder, Stewart Rhodes, who would go on to be charged with seditious conspiracy related to the Capitol attack.
Denver Riggleman (The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation into January 6th)
Machiavelli said that a proper conspiracy moves through three distinct phases: the planning, the doing, and the aftermath. Each of these phases requires different skills—from organization to strategic thinking to recruiting, funding, aiming, secrecy, managing public relations, leadership, foresight, and ultimately, knowing when to stop. Most important, a conspiracy requires patience and fortitude, so much patience, as much as it relies on boldness or courage.
Ryan Holiday (Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue)
For our own government and other governments around the world the abduction phenomenon presents a special problem. It is, after all, the business of government to protect its people, and for officials to acknowledge that, for strange beings from radar-defying craft to, in seeming defiance of the laws of gravity and space/time itself, invade our homes and abduct our people would create particular problems. This may explain why government policy in relation to UFOs has been, from the beginning, so confusing, a kind of garbled mixture of denial and cover-up that only fuels conspiracy theories.
John E. Mack (Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens)
disease, scarcity, and weather-related disasters.
Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God)