winter wrote: 
Your team is more than just people, it is a productive abstraction that you are paid to create as you manage them. If it wasn't you would be gone.

There is a CIA, a fully constituted intelligence force that has a mission and objectives. The people working for the CIA are paid to follow the mission and achieve the objectives. The people working for the CIA are caught up in the culture of the CIA, how else would the CIA function if they weren't.

There also is a military and the same claims can be made about that organization. Armies exist because the military exists. Yeah, they're all just "people", but they are people with a mission and objectives and the means to reach those objectives. None of that is an abstraction. Cruise missiles and B1 bombers are not abstractions.

People on a mission who have taken loyalty oaths and fervently believe in what they are doing will keep secrets for the time they honour those oaths and beliefs. There are whole buildings full of those people and they are doing their work right now. Do you know all of what they are doing?

Lazy is right in one respect, everything comes out in the end. Individuals can break their oaths of secrecy and reveal what they know. Limitations on the release of classified information run out or are changed by governments that wish to have things revealed earlier.

But that doesn't mean that there aren't plans and schemes being drawn up right now that might just scare the crap out of all of us if we knew about them.

You can dismiss individual conspiracy theories but I don't think you can dismiss the possibility of conspiracies. Salvador Allende could tell us a few things about that, if he were still alive.

 Lazy8 wrote: 
Impossible - Elvis went home, remember?

 MusicIsMotion wrote:Then there's a silent black helicopter hovering over your house right now.

It was sent by the Trilateral Commission on behalf of the Elders of Zion. Elvis is piloting it. It has an invisibility device invented at a government lab by scientists who were all buried in unmarked graves when they wanted more money to keep quiet. Itt has a device on board that allows it to see thru roofs. It is watching your every move.

No? Prove there isn't.

If you want to make extraordinary claims you need extraordinary proof. Otherwise we will spend all our time shooting into the air on the off chance that there really is an invisible black helicopter up there.

 winter wrote: 
Heh.  You can keep a lid on anything if you've got two things:

Power and Money.

Just remember something.  The sheer fact that intellectual minds dismiss it and call it "crazy", makes it plausible and makes it possible that it would work.  

The Peanut Butter Conspiracy is spreading ...

 owld_skipper wrote: 
There is no CIA. There is no military. There is no government.

These are all abstractions with no reality beyond that of the people working for them.

It's not like there's some weird octopus-like monstrosity in a cave under the White House that calls itself "The Government" and does a bunch of stuff independently of people.

Every government action, every military plan, every CIA scheme is concocted exclusively and entirely by people.

It's all just people. And people don't, as Lazy8 pointed out, tend to keep big secrets that well for that long. There's just too much profit in blabbermouthery. 

 owld_skipper wrote: 
'Compared to him, James Bond was a fink!'
 ~ Pat Nixon ~

 oldslabsides wrote: 
Words that strike fear into my artichoke hearts....

 owld_skipper wrote:
How did we find out about Northwoods? Regime change and the passage of time removed the players who would have been embarrassed by the revelation. And if you go read the plan (links are on the wiki page to the original document) it would have taken hundreds of people and left quite a trail. Even something as simple as re-numbering a plane leaves all kinds of traces—serialized parts are listed in all kinds of databases, kept in all kinds of places by all kinds of people, as belonging to a specific airplane. An airplane that was supposed to have been shot down over the ocean. Yet here it is.

Etc.

No plan that involves that many people can remain secret forever. Somebody gets drunk and brags, somebody confesses on their deathbed, somebody gets divorced and the ex finds the documents. The information is just too useful to too many people.

 winter wrote: 
If it were just "people" it would be so much easier to just dismiss. But when it is CIA and military personnel and it gets written up as a formal plan it becomes easier to understand why people get riled up and why the chatter just doesn't go away.

 phineas wrote: 
...and you're involved.

 winter wrote: 
That was more of a sari-sarong number...

 oldslabsides wrote: 
Says the guy who actually wore white linen pants.

I don't know if it qualifies as a conspiracy theory, but I'm pretty darned sure that Schlabby is up to something....

 winter wrote: 
Linen bunchin' up on ya again?

 oldslabsides wrote: 
Exactly my point.

Nothing personal, Dave, but this conspiracy theory stuff always irritates me. And I'm irritable enough today as it is. 

 

 winter wrote: 
Well, there's certainly evidence and junk that somebody thought that one up.  Implemented?  Not so much.

 oldslabsides wrote: 
People think up all kinds of crazy stuff. It's logical to think it might be carried out when there's, you know, evidence and junk. Otherwise it's just that whole self-confirming faith thing again.

 winter wrote: 
I'm sayin' that such things are fomented.  That being the case, it stands to reason at some point some might actually be carried out.  I know, I know - I can't prove a negative.  Not tryin' to prove anything - I'm jus' sayin'.