Dirt Ordinary: Shining a Light, #1

Dirt Ordinary

Shining a Light on Conspiracies

Rod Martin, Jr.

How they affect civilization, endanger lives, and what we can do about them

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."—Lord Acton (Letter to Mandell Creighton, April 5, 1887)

Smashwords Edition

December 2018

Published by Tharsis Highlands Publishing

Copyright 2015, 2018 Rod Martin, Jr.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof in any form.

Acknowledgements

Cover photo: H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, of Watergate infamy, discuss policy on board Air Force One, 1973 (PD) via Wikimedia.org. Three days later, they are asked to resign by President Nixon. Cover design: Rod Martin, Jr.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Shining a Light Series

Dirt Ordinary: Shining a Light on Conspiracies, by Rod Martin, Jr.

Favorable Incompetence: Shining a Light on 9/11, by Rod Martin, Jr.

Thermophobia: Shining a Light on Global Warming, by Rod Martin, Jr.

Climate Basics series

Climate Basics: Nothing to Fear, by Rod Martin, Jr.—an Amazon #1 Bestseller

Deserts & Droughts: How Does Land Ever Get Water? by Rod Martin, Jr.

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Contents

Introduction: Conspiracies are Dirt Ordinary

Chapter 1: Kids Will Be Kids

Chapter 2: Epidemic of Cheating

Chapter 3: Federal Bureau of Incompetence or Involvement?

Chapter 4: Crimes, Crimes and More Crimes

Chapter 5: Corporate World

Chapter 6: Maintaining Disease

Chapter 7: Skeptical Until it Pays

Chapter 8: Of the People, By the People, and For the People No More

Chapter 9: By the Numbers

Chapter 10: Accident or Cause-and-Effect?

Chapter 11: What the Future Holds

Appendix

Notes

References

About Rod Martin, Jr.

Other Books by Rod Martin, Jr.

Connect with Rod Martin, Jr.

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Introduction: Conspiracies are Dirt Ordinary

Bright green flooded the space between buildings, and the December sun poured down upon metropolitan Cebu. Inside the solitary structure of a modern, four-year college, classes of students ignored the heat beyond their air-conditioned rooms.

One of those students asked a provocative question of his American professor—your author—about politics in the United States. I admitted that there had been some evidence of corruption in America. I gave Watergate as an example.

Was that a conspiracy? asked the student.

For a moment, something shifted in my mind. I felt a knot in my stomach, a subtle tightness across my body, combined with a brief urge to flee. I felt the awkwardness of exposure, without knowing its source.

The next moment, I became critically aware of those feelings. A sense of anxiety faded as I looked inward at my own thoughts.

I had become aware of an automatic response to the word conspiracy—a knee-jerk reaction that took me entirely by surprise.

Yes, I replied. That incident was a perfect example of a conspiracy and the crime which followed.

Over the next few months, I had the good fortune to explore this topic even further. In my professional ethics class for college seniors, I observed that none of my students had my reaction to the word or topic. Was this merely a personal weakness on my part—a flaw in my own character?

Was my reaction an anomaly? Or was it purely an American phenomenon?

In my class preparation, I came across the videos of a researcher who had experienced something similar. He had found that the citizens of Europe and some Third World countries were equally relaxed with the conspiracy concept, while Americans suffered an automatic block on the subject.

Many Americans claimed to be skeptics, while ridiculing anyone who talked of such things, but those supposed skeptics showed none of the restraint and humility of a true scientist. In America, ridicule of conspiracy talk had become habitual (Storm Clouds Gathering).

I poured over dozens of hours of YouTube videos. More than once, I saw newscasters and show hosts roll their eyes at the mention of some controversial topic.

One acerbic host wouldn’t wait for his guest to finish speaking. He would lambaste his guest with something like, You nut! You’re a loony toon—tin-foil conspiracy crackpot.

Throughout the worst of them, what distressed me most was the non-sequitur nature of the hosts’ responses. A guest might mention a controversial fact or raise a provocative question, but all too frequently, these were referred to as conspiracy theories.

Were the hosts so unintelligent that they didn’t know the difference between theory and fact, or conspiracy and question? Had show hosts become so blind and belligerent that they could not ask for clarification? Was this some group delusion that had come to grip the American news media? Or was there some natural or artificial force molding their attitudes and speech?

It might prove helpful to find answers to these questions, but we won’t be answering them in this book. We will, however, look at the common nature of conspiracies. We will show that ridicule is not warranted, at least most of the time. Some conspiracy theories are based on facts, instead of imagination or delusion. These days, however, the corporate media has made it fashionable to ridicule facts, questions and even the search for truth.

It should be noted that a suspicious nature is only paranoia if it is unreasonable—based upon delusion or imagination. If suspicions are based upon facts, that is an entirely different animal. More and more, all suspicions are called paranoia in error. Both movies and corporate media are feeding this inaccurate view of things. And the public who view these movies and media repeat that behavior so that it becomes a self-reinforcing phenomenon. Another important question not to be covered in this book involves the reason why movies so consistently refer to all suspicion as paranoia. Is it by accident? A new social norm for the definition? Where did that norm crop up? Who originated it and why? Suspicion = paranoia = insanity. This false chain of equalities is inadvertently creating a kind of blindness.

The Cost of Conspiracies

In the twentieth century, documented conspiracies resulted in the deaths of 142.2 million people. This includes every major, and many minor wars throughout that hundred year period. But that’s only for wars. Millions of other deaths have resulted from corporate conspiracies, gang and organized crime conspiracies and many other types of conspiracies.

But what really are conspiracies? Quite simply, they are conversations. A conspiracy happens when two or more people talk about doing something unethical or illegal. Like all evil, the perpetrators want their plans to remain shrouded in darkness, until at least the plan is so well along that nothing can stop it. Even then, the perpetrators frequently want to protect their own carcasses from prosecution.

For instance, Hitler might not have been successful in taking over the German government so thoroughly, if everyone suddenly knew that the Reichstag fire had been created by his own thugs, instead of a lone Communist patsy.

John F. Kennedy might have finished out his presidency and lived to a ripe old age, if E. Howard Hunt had gotten cold feet before the Big Event in Dallas, instead of waiting until his death bed to confess his small part in that crime. Perhaps the meme of lone gunman would never have gained traction in the minds of Americans.

If Woodward and Bernstein, of the Washington Post, had not become increasingly suspicious of the Watergate conspiracy, President Nixon might have finished out his second term, and Carter may not have become the next