It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Acting)

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Thursday, September 11, 2014

It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Acting)

You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks they really found you

A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit
To satisfy, insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not forget
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to

Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to

-Bob Dylan, It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)



Among conspiracy theorists real and phony (you know who you are), one of the most contentious subjects in recent years goes by the label "crisis actors." The concept behind this hypothesis is that certain conspiracies utilize people engaging in phony activities, acting out a role to one degree or another, in order for the conspirators to achieve their objective. This claim has been attached to several high profile incidents in the last few years - the theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado in July 2012, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut in December 2012 and the Boston Marathon Bombing in April 2013. Could this be plausible?

First, I want to address the plausibility of the concept before exploring how it relates to the tragedies listed above. The plausibility factor must be predicated within the framework of how conspiracies work based on historical precedent. To do that, I'm turning to a quote I've used before to illustrate the point from the late, great Michael Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon:

From the Manhattan Project to the Stealth fighter, the US government has successfully kept secrets involving thousands of people. Secondly, in order to execute a conspiracy of the size and type I am suggesting, it is not necessary that thousands of people see the whole picture. The success of the US in maintaining the secrecy around the atom bomb and the Stealth fighter, or in any classified operation, lies in compartmentalization. A technician in Tennessee refining uranium ore in 1943 would have had no knowledge of its intended use, or any moral culpability in any deaths that occurred as a result of it. Another technician in Ohio, mixing a polymer resin in 1985, would have had no knowledge of what an F117A looked like or what it was intended to do.

Understanding that the secret to shielding a conspiracy lies in compartmentalization, is it plausible that conspirators would utilize "crisis actors" to engage in phony activity that helps the conspirators achieve their objective? I believe the answer is a qualified yes. That qualification, as it relates to compartmentalization, means any crisis actor activity would have to be a sideshow as opposed to the main event. A good way to explain this is to say it occurs at a "low level", as the Jim Garrison character played by Kevin Costner in the movie JFK described the level the Mafia operated at in the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy:

Jim Garrison: I don't doubt their involvement, Bill, but at a low level. Could the mob change the parade route? Or eliminate the protection for the President? Could the mob send Oswald to Russia and get him back? Could the mob get the FBI, the CIA, and the Dallas Police to make a mess of the investigation? I mean, could the mob get the Warren Commission appointed to cover it up? Could the mob wreck the autopsy? Could the mob influence the national media to go to sleep? And since when has the mob used anything but .38s for hits up close? The mob wouldn't have the guts or the power for something of this magnitude. Assassins need payrolls, schedules, times, orders. This was a military style ambush from star to finish. A coup d'etat with Lyndon Johnson waiting in the wings.

Interestingly enough, it is within the labyrinthian maze of the JFK assassination conspiracy that we can observe the possible activity of a "crisis actor" at work. Sure, it happened several decades before that term became popular within conspiracy culture, but the incident reeks of phony acting. On November 22, 1963, at about 12:10 or 12:15pm, a young man fell to the ground near the Texas School Book Depository in Dealey Plaza and was taken away in an ambulance, believed to be the victim of an epileptic seizure. Yet he never received treatment, leaving Parkland Hospital right as President Kennedy was arriving, somehow managing to walk away before the area was sealed.

Naturally, the Warren Commission defenders like David von Pein and David Reitzes have plastered the media with points to "debunk" anything suspicious about the incident. The young man did not walk away unidentified, he was Jerry Belknap, a part time mailroom worker for the Dallas Morning News who was interviewed by the FBI about the incident in 1964. It turns out he did not have epilepsy, but had been in a car accident and suffered a head injury which caused him to have fainting spells if he didn't take his medication, which is what happened on the day JFK came to town. So it would seem as if this case were closed, all suspicions addressed. Except for the fact that in the months prior to November 22, 1963, there had been a number of phony emergency calls placed for an ambulance from the corner of Elm and Houston, which implies a scheme to time how long an ambulance would take to respond. Author Larry Hancock included this research in his book Someone Would Have Talked and the subject is discussed at length in this thread.

To these strands of strange coincidences, we must apply the important question cui bono - who benefits? How could the conspirators who profited from the assassination of JFK possibly have benefited from having a man faint near the scene of the upcoming crime? The fainting episode created a delay in the forward progression of the motorcade as the ambulance blockage of the Elm and Houston intersection would have been radioed back to the lead vehicle in the parade. The possible reasons for needing a delay? One would have been to get the shooter into position on the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Bonnie Ray Williams testified to the Warren Commission he was eating his lunch there from noon until about 10 or 12 minutes later. They may also have needed more time for other shooters, spotters and law enforcement officials, phony and legitimate, to get into position. The fainting episode, along with a stalled pick-up truck beyond the triple overpass which diverted police before the motorcade arrived, would have served that purpose.

While I freely admit that the anecdote above does not constitute proof, it does contain enough evidence to showcase the plausibility of how a "crisis actor" could be employed to create a phony scene to help a conspiracy unfold in a manner beneficial to the conspirators. I can't prove whether Jerry Belknap was hired to fake his fainting, whether he was paid to deliberately not take his medication and wait at the appropriate moment at the Houston/Elm intersection, or whether it really was just one of those "coincidences" that he just happened to really need an ambulance at the same place fake calls had previously been placed, but at a time in which a real President was about to be executed. My primary point in highlighting this incident is for the purposes of illustrating the level at which a crisis actor could be employed to facilitate the unfolding of a conspiracy to the satisfaction of the conspirators.






Having illustrated how this could happen, I want to be crystal clear about how this could not happen: it is completely implausible that a crisis actor or especially a team of crisis actors could be employed to completely fake a conspiracy event to help the conspirators to achieve their objective. As this hypothesis has been proposed to the events I mentioned at the beginning of this post - Aurora, Sandy Hook, Boston - claiming that actors were hired to fake their injuries (and presumably deaths where fatalities were reported) so that the event itself was a hoax, this scenario is preposterous because it obliterates the capability to compartmentalize for the purposes of maintaining secrecy! It's one thing when, in the case of the fictional satire Wag the Dog, an actress (Kirsten Dunst) is hired to play a phony war victim running from bombs carrying a bag of Doritos that will be digitally replaced with a cat. Even in this fictional case, when she asks if she can put this on her resume, she is told someone could come to her house and kill her if she did that. What's absurd to me in that scenario is that the conspirators (Dustin Hoffman and Robert DeNiro) would hire someone that they didn't trust enough in the first place to keep their mouth shut that they would have to tell them directly without some level of buffer.

In the case of real life events where this sort of hoax is claimed, compound that absurdity by dozens to hundreds of times. Implicit in this claim is that dozens to hundreds of actors were hired (I've seen some claims there is an agency through which this is done) to engage in phony activity simulating injuries. There's a reason Larry Hancock's book is titled Someone Would Have Talked - because someone always does! They come forth on all ranges of the credibility spectrum - for every Julia Ann Mercer, there is a Charles Spiesel. Witnesses to a conspiracy come forth, are typically belittled by debunkers, and either get discredited as attention seekers or are able to withstand scrutiny so that the credibility of their story stands in inconvenient contrast to the conventional narrative. That has not been the case with crisis actor-driven hoax conspiracy hypotheses! There have been numerous videos that I refuse to link to, cleverly edited and constructed to make a real life event look as if actors were hired to sell the story - but not one actor to date has come forward to have their story of either willingly or unwillingly engaging in a hoax withstand the scrutiny of rigorous analysis.

There's another issue that doesn't seem to withstand the weight of scrutiny where crisis actor conspiracy hoaxes are concerned: motive. Why would the conspirators go to the trouble to hire paid actors who could potentially spill the beans after seeing their fakery online rather than hire paid assassins to do a real job?! This discrepancy doesn't seem to concern the proponents of such hypothetical hyperbole. Instead the plausibility for the method to achieve the conspiracy is bypassed to directly address the perceived objective: President Obama wants your guns! At this point, I have to groan and roll my eyes. I've seen this movie before and I know how it fucking ends. I fucking lived through it in the 90's - President Clinton expended a lot of energy during his first term trying to pass gun control legislation. Right-wing Americans, goaded on with extensive financing by the National Rifle Association and other vested interests, went into hysterics proclaiming 'President Clinton wants your guns!' The hysteria reached a fever pitch during his second term as we approached the dreaded Y2K apocalypse with the supposition that President Clinton would react to this crisis by suspending the Constitution, declaring himself Emperor and - youbetcha - taking away your guns. Already I'm seeing videos on youtube basically making the same predictions about President Obama in 2016. While I've failed miserably at trying to play Nostradamus in the past, I feel pretty safe in predicting that the end of Obama's second term in 2016 will go down the same way Clinton's second term went down in 2000: a Republican will either be elected or selected and will be sworn in some day in January with the lame duck president observing insouciantly.

But here's a measure of inconsistency that rubs me the wrong way: why wasn't Columbine declared a hoax? I'm not talking about now, there's plenty of bullshitters posting pictures of "crisis actors" in retrospect, I'm talking about then, in 1999. It was the year before Y2K was supposed to make civilization collapse, not to mention the internet, but I can't find one website from that time pimping a Columbine hoax. I believe the reason for this oversight is that the genesis for the whole crisis actor conspiracy hoax cottage industry occurred after Columbine. It happened after 9/11, or to be more precise, it happened in response to genuine probing inquiries into what really happened on 9/11. By 2004, the movement questioning the Official Story about what happened on 9/11 was reaching critical mass. Inspired by the tough tactics of the Jersey Girls who were able to prevent George W. Bush's choice Henry Kissinger from chairing the "independent" 9/11 commission (but not able to prevent Philip Zelikow from steering it), numerous activists such as Paul Thompson, Michael Ruppert, Daniel Hopsicker and others did extensive research on various websites refuting significant portions of what we were being told was the truth. There were some differences among these activists as to what actually happened, yet for the most part they were united in exposing the Big Lie under the banner of "9/11 Truth." But there was a strange anomaly to this in the person of Morgan Reynolds. Here was someone saying the Official Story wasn't true, but with a strange twist: there were no hijacked planes. The really strange anomaly? This "activist" was previously chief economist for the US Department of Labor in the Bush administration. Reynolds's hypothesis has a creepy similarity to the conspiracy hoax claims that have cropped up in the years since - the crashing of planes into the twin towers was fake and the cell phone calls from the victims on those flights were done by "actors."

Reynolds was joined in his hypothetical reverie by David Shayler, who believed the planes crashing into the World Trade Center were "missiles wrapped in holograms." Something else Shayler has in common with Reynolds? Both worked for their respective governments prior to becoming 9/11 Truth activists. Shayler's prior employer is even more ominous: British intelligence agency MI-5. This reeks of a classic disinformation intelligence campaign. The results of this campaign is that the 9/11 Truth movement lost direction and momentum. For the next several years, many websites investigating 9/11 were plagued with members propagating this fallacious material. Now as we reach the 13th anniversary of this horrific atrocity, the movement is essentially dead. The research continues, but at this point the best case scenario the 9/11 Truth movement can hope for is another investigation like the House Select Committee on Assassinations that concluded there was a conspiracy to assassinate JFK. That's not likely to happen, but even if it did, it brings nobody to justice who should be prosecuted.

So if this hoax cottage industry really is a disinformation campaign, what is the motive? Quite simply, it is to discredit any legitimate conspiracy inquiry by equating it with silliness and lunacy. Wall Street financial institutions with CIA connections making put option profits off 9/11 may as well be actors just playing make believe. Tamerlan Tsarnaev turns from being a possible intelligence asset to a complete phony swimming in fake blood. Worst of all, it turns honest victims into lying perpetrators. This cottage industry is really the Westboro Baptist Church of conspiracy hypotheses. Proceed with extreme caution whenever you encounter them.


An’ though the rules of the road have been lodged
It’s only people’s games that you got to dodge
And it’s alright, Ma, I can make it

[Rory]

This is a quality piece of writing, RP - exactly what this board needs more of.

Great work

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Thanks Rory, I appreciate the encouragement.

Thanks also to elfismiles for helping me correct obvious spelling mistakes. I appreciate that too!

[brainpanhandler]

Many here agree with the constructive overstatement that World War III started long ago, and it is an information war (McLuhan, originally). Some of the same people, however, aid and abet the enemy in this war, objectively serving the interests of the very same spook "elites" they purport to oppose. There are many subtle and arguable ways we might all unconsciously do so, I dare say. But there are also obvious and egregious cases. I refer specifically to the brand of "crisis actor" stories that could not be more repulsive and alienating to non-reptilian human beings endowed with minimal empathic capacity than if this was the plan. The practice involves confabulating non-evidence and wrapping it in some general irrelevant facts to create maximally misleading, confusionist narratives. For which claim can we find more evidence, actually? That there are "crisis actors" present at whatever the latest gun or bomb massacre is that murdered many Americans at random? (In the present wave these theories only seem to attach to cases of mass-murder involving Americans.) Or for the idea that such theories are known to be false and yet advanced by plan?

Let's entertain that hypothesis for a moment: that "crisis actor" posts are part of a plan to discourage discussion about actual open cases of deep state or parapolitical abuses. Let us consider the Boston bombing. One of the brothers had been adopted by academics in the neocon milieu. The others' criminal associate was shot dead in cold blood while in custody by an FBI officer during an interrogation. You can find lots of stories and posts about this on RI, although these are currently unkicked, even as a disinfo thread about "crisis actors" in Boston prospers on the front page.

We're talking about the same FBI that, since 9/11, has initiated and constructed two dozen entrapment cases recruiting naive young Muslim men in the United States as patsies, and sold this as a wave of "terrorism". In the wake of an actual bomb killing people in Boston, details like the brothers' actual associations can't be good for too many people to know. (Parallel: the actual associations of the 9/11 alleged hijackers and their "Al Qaeda" support network, which provides the original template for hoax stories starting a dozen years ago.)

So a distraction is needed. If you look at pictures of people staggering around in the smoke and blood and severed limbs after the Boston bombing, can you perhaps see someone who is acting to help people? Does he turn out to be some random antiwar veteran, also the father of an Iraq war veteran? Is he someone most people will automatically like? Does he wear a cowboy hat?! Perfect! We can suggest that this person was actually involved as an accomplice in the very same act of mass murder that unfolded around him, which could have also killed him. As a bonus, he is Latino, and we can highlight this as a means of adding some racist appeal to our toxic mix. That should serve to make for weeks worth of disgusting posts at Alex Jonestown!

And, of course, it will mobilize legions of "anti-conspiracist" skeptics in response. A symbiotic if hostile interaction follows between the sorts of people who follow Alex Jones and the sort who follow James Randi. It serves to make it radioactive for anyone rational to talk of an FBI involvement in the Boston incident (and of the outright FBI murder of the witness!). If you do, you will be associated with the likes of the Jonestowners and the sewage they smear.

Spiritual brethren of the Jonestowners in the arts of black propaganda should have thought of this back at Kent State. They should have said the dead students were actually live actors working with the National Guard. They should have "discovered" the girl crying and screaming over the corpse of her dead friend once played the lead in a second-grade school play about Jesus, and was therefore a born faker.

Back then, the haters and people poisoned by decades of Amerikanist conditioning were far more literal minded, however, and instead said the students deserved to be shot. Rumors were invented and spread that the coroners didn't want to touch the lice-ridden corpses of the dead hippies with their powerful body odor. What kind of people would approvingly adopt and spread such statements? (There's a surplus of such people still left today, of course, and they make up the bulk of the current Tea Party and patriot right, especially the couch potato brigades.) Those of you inventing evidence and inverting logic to manufacture "crisis actors" out of the victims of modern-day atrocities differ from these predecessors in that they were incomparably more honest and direct.

Is my point clear enough now? This is an information war. I am not here to propagate kumbaya and fake friendliness with apologists for crime, morons, assholes, disinfo artists, disinfo repeaters, and junior COINTELPRO agents, to be included in sick, inhuman defamations of random victims and witnesses, or to find the magic formula for a middle ground between the Left (such as it is) and the Tea Party right. If that is what you are doing, you have already chosen to be my enemy in an information war and a class war, and I will not be seeking anything other than your enlightenment. There are points of view with which we need not compromise, which allow no middle ground. Everyone dig?

There is an information war going on and small skirmishes have taken place right here at the RI message board. RP's OP and efforts like JR's above and barracuda's in the boston bombing thread are the antidote. Well done.

[Searcher08]

bph, I see very little common ground between what Robert wrote - a thought-provoking clear and very balanced piece - and Jack's barely-controlled, deeply divisive rant which I thought was filed in the category of "how much crap can you fling and not get banned".

Robert, how do you think the question of investigating something like Sandy Hook could be done in a way that would be in the spirit of R.I. Or could it not be done?

Certainly I think that issues like 'no-planers' have been used to assist the 9/11 Truth Movement in imploding, yet at the same time I am aware that both pseudoskeptics and even folks like Chomsky will use similar arguments against ANY form of real 9/11 investigation - that it is much more important to focus on the crimes of the state, right here, right now.

I have been really surprised on some fora and fB recently to see that many former 9/11 skeptics are now talking about "maybe it is worth investigating Saudi links" and saying they dont accept the government version 100%. The same people still have a link that 9/11 Truth = Controlled Demolition and seem stuck on a meme that 'hundreds of thousands of people would have been involved'.


I thought about the phrase 'rigorous intuition' and searched the definitions


adjective: rigorous

extremely thorough and careful.
"the rigorous testing of consumer products"
synonyms: meticulous, punctilious, conscientious, careful, diligent, attentive, ultra-careful, scrupulous, painstaking, exact, precise, accurate, correct, thorough, studious, exhaustive, mathematical, detailed, perfectionist, methodical, particular, religious, strict; More
fussy, fastidious, hair-splitting, finicky, finical, demanding, exacting, pedantic;
informal nitpicking, pernickety;
archaic nice, overnice, laborious
"their rigorous attention to detail paid off"
antonyms: slapdash

(of a rule, system, etc.) strictly applied or adhered to.
"rigorous controls on mergers"
synonyms: strict, severe, stern, stringent, austere, spartan, tough, hard, harsh, rigid, cruel, savage, relentless, unsparing, inflexible, authoritarian, despotic, draconian, intransigent, uncompromising, demanding, exacting
"the rigorous enforcement of minor school rules"
antonyms: lax

(of a person) adhering strictly to a belief or system.
"a rigorous teetotaller"
synonyms: strict, severe, stern, stringent, austere, spartan, tough, hard, harsh, rigid, cruel, savage, relentless, unsparing, inflexible, authoritarian, despotic, draconian, intransigent, uncompromising, demanding, exacting More
"the rigorous enforcement of minor school rules"
antonyms: lax

harsh and demanding.
"many of the expedition had passed rigorous SAS courses"
synonyms: harsh, severe, bad, bleak, extreme, inclement;
unpleasant, disagreeable, foul, nasty, filthy;
stormy, blustery, squally, wild, tempestuous, storm-tossed, violent, heavy, heaving, raging, choppy, agitated

noun
noun: intuition

the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning.
"we shall allow our intuition to guide us"
synonyms: instinct, intuitiveness; More
sixth sense, divination, clairvoyance, second sight, ESP (extrasensory perception)
"he works according to intuition"
antonyms: intellect

a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning.
plural noun: intuitions
"your insights and intuitions as a native speaker are positively sought"
synonyms: hunch, feeling, feeling in one's bones, gut feeling, funny feeling, inkling, sneaking suspicion, suspicion, impression;
premonition, presentiment, foreboding;
satori;
informal feeling in one's water
"this confirms an intuition I had"

[82_28]

Good write-up, SRP. However, it is not out of the realm of possibility that there are CAs. But the phenomena of it being a topic at all says something about the topic itself. We live in a time where this kind of shit has become commonplace and basically people shrug their shoulders into the blur of complacence. If all the people down at the local store were all shot to death, I could walk down there to buy something and find out what happened and then I too could play the role of a crisis actor.

What I'm getting at, is that with this steady clip of inexplicable horrors this shit perpetuates into all of us actually being actors in and of ourselves. I do think that "Oh, yeah" guy was definitely a CA on 9/11. How many times have you heard or even said "it was just like out of a movie" when something weird happens? Probably too many to count for any of us. Being a crisis actor has been "installed" in each and every one of us. This is why I say and have maintained that the events of 9/11 would have been impossible today with all the capabilities of digital phones and data uplinks. Also, the reason that they embedded reporters into the invasion of Iraq. The ubiquity of digital access to witness atrocities would have been too much to overcome.

Remember the "command center" that appeared? There was no way that that telegenic facility was built in a day. It was clearly a stage in a "studio". Remember this is when HD was just being adopted. 9/11 happened when 99% of all televisions were CRT. Yet the command center or central command or whatever the fuck they called it was souped up like a stage with a bunch of HD flatscreens of (at least for me) "you expect us to believe this shit?" If it was a stage, who were the actors manning the fancy media coverage of the outset of the "war"? Then you got Jessica Lynch and so on.

How about the charred soldiers somebody hung on the poles on the outskirts of Fallujah? Who was able to get out there and capture that? Somebody.

All I'm saying is that CAs are not out of the realm of possibility.

[brainpanhandler]

... Jack's barely-controlled, deeply divisive rant ...

There are points of view with which we need not compromise, which allow no middle ground.

[Rory]

Jack's piece above is brilliant - again, what this forum sorely needs more of.

[conniption]

Jack's piece above is brilliant - again, what this forum sorely needs more of.

~

Cow Crap!

[KUAN]

You are doing a False Flag.

OK
Do you..

A. Make it go off and then go home to watch the reaction on the TV ? ( oooo... I really hope they all get it... I hope someone doesn't say the wrong thing and start eveyone thinking.. nah it'll be ok.. whose TV will we watch it on )

B. You know what B. is and you know what you would (have to) do... Duh

[Nordic]

These threads never go well. I tried to start one myself and good old Jack "look at me I'm Shakespeare" blew his inflated ego jism all up one side and down the other, as he is doing here without actually being here. I believe the word "minion" was invented to describe this kind of person.

In other words, reasonable discussion of this topic is impossible here due to a couple of people's bullying and what amounts to verbal terrorism.

So good luck. I think it's an interesting topic because there most certainly ARE actors interviewed in TV "news" stories -- it's indisputable - so where do the PTB draw the line as to where they use them?

Also, my first thoughts on the immediate crisis actors hysteria on Sandy Hook was that it was organized disinfo. Which doesn't rule out the use of one or two actors, just enough to stir the pot and fire people up and muddy the waters - the usual recipe for creating another rabbit hole.

But hey, carry on ....

[Nordic]

Deleted for double post.

[Tyler Rabbit]

Really good stuff. I think your analysis about when the idea started, and why it's- for the most part- unlikely, are spot on. I really like the idea of using pre-911 Columbine sites as a control. The idea of it being disinfo to distract from something larger(?) is interesting. I'll offer the addition that it also seems to coincide with the increased mass popularization of "reality" TV coupled with an unprecedented rise in the mistrust of the powers that be, and the new(ish) ubiquity of Youtube. I think these factors play a role and lead to a general sense of wondering if what we're seeing is real or not. I also think a lot of it comes from the idea that if 911 was a big show, then what other things might be big shows? And of course big shows need actors..

[Searcher08]

These threads never go well. I tried to start one myself and good old Jack "look at me I'm Shakespeare" blew his inflated ego jism all up one side and down the other, as he is doing here without actually being here. I believe the word "minion" was invented to describe this kind of person.

In other words, reasonable discussion of this topic is impossible here due to a couple of people's bullying and what amounts to verbal terrorism.

So good luck. I think it's an interesting topic because there most certainly ARE actors interviewed in TV "news" stories -- it's indisputable - so where do the PTB draw the line as to where they use them?

Also, my first thoughts on the immediate crisis actors hysteria on Sandy Hook was that it was organized disinfo. Which doesn't rule out the use of one or two actors, just enough to stir the pot and fire people up and muddy the waters - the usual recipe for creating another rabbit hole.

But hey, carry on ....

Can we not have a rational discussion about this?
The OP by Robert was excellent and surely worth discussing in a way that focuses on it's original content rather than either a "Jack love-in" or a "Jack hate-in", both of which mean he is the unspoken subject of the thread , not Robert's post.

Personally, I think it is a *really* tricky area, to even talk about coherently.
Why? because it can occur at an intersection between our own deeply held but unconscious biases on the one hand and people who know about these biases are are in the game of knowingly manipulating them for their own covert purposes.

The NoMansLand between KnownUnknownsVille and PsyopsCity?

Maybe starting from an individual perspective:
Many of the people who I have know who are 9/11 Truth orientated, have described having an experience of intense "incongruence" - where their consistent external reality-stream of sights and sounds is made sense of one one way eg "Terrorists have attacked our country!", yet their inner sense is making meaning of it in a different way and selecting features that don't fit "Passports from the plane? WTF?? This is BS!"

I remember reading years ago (it may even have been here) a story of a person who had a family member in the CIA. One day, they asked the person if they had any advice for them about maintaining sanity in these times and their family member said -
"Only one piece of advice. Never - ever - EVER watch TV". In the context, it wasn't an Alex Jones anti-MSM rant. It was a very clear implication that there were advanced manipulation technologies and agendas going on that we had ZERO knowledge of, delivered through this medium, and to stay away.

[Searcher08]

Really good stuff. I think your analysis about when the idea started, and why it's- for the most part- unlikely, are spot on. I really like the idea of using pre-911 Columbine sites as a control. The idea of it being disinfo to distract from something larger(?) is interesting. I'll offer the addition that it also seems to coincide with the increased mass popularization of "reality" TV coupled with an unprecedented rise in the mistrust of the powers that be, and the new(ish) ubiquity of Youtube. I think these factors play a role and lead to a general sense of wondering if what we're seeing is real or not. I also think a lot of it comes from the idea that if 911 was a big show, then what other things might be big shows? And of course big shows need actors..

I think this is great
Columbine is very interesting because there seems to be a possible connection between the shooters and sexually abusive cops who picked on them after they broke into a van a year previously.

Regarding the origin of the no-planes theory, I thought it began with Australian musician Gerald Holmgren and his work was always presented by him as an attempt to ensure "critical thinking" and "logic" entered 9/11 discussions.


Curiously, Holmgren was (he died a couple of years ago) the brother of David Holmgren, the co-inventor of Permaculture.

I wasn't aware until writing this that the whole "Crisis Actor" theme had been present in 9/11 Truth land. From some of the videos I have seen on yT, I think there is psyops going on, but much more from the people introducing the themes of 'simulated victims'. There is even a term called 'vicsim' and a clear tie-in with the Sims game. The central website / source of this seems to be a group called septemberclues.info and someone called Simon Shack.

My intuition? that this is a combination of next generation memetic warfare and people who are mentally ill, like "DallasGoldBug" who seems to be where a lot of this started.

http://www.whale.to/c/ed_chiarini.html