Yeah, it had to happen: N1H1 Flu Must be a Conspiracy…
May 17th, 2009
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There’s a new strain of the flu virus making the rounds. Yep, that’s right. There’s a new strain of the flu virus always making the rounds, because organisms have a tendency to evolve and mutate and viruses are especially good at doing this. Influenza is constantly producing new strains. Most of them are pretty similar to the ones we’ve already seen. On occasion an unusual one crops up. It happens.
And yet, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that there are already plenty of conspiracy theorists claiming that this is a big project by the US government, the Chinese, the British, the Bush family, the Obama’s, the NWO or the League of Women Voters or whomever they happen to think are working hard to do evil.
Apparently this is a biological weapon. It’s a crappy one, though. It seems all the conspiracy-produced biological weapons are really crappy when you get down to it. This one, for example, doesn’t kill many people and the last one they allegedly created (AIDS) takes years to kill and can only be spread by direct body fluid contact.
But enough with the sarcasm.. my only explanation for this is that some people are so out in left field that every single news story they see immediately gets them thinking of how they can connect it to a conspiracy or reason it into a wacky theory of world domination and genocide. Amazingly, despite claims that they’re going to start the killing any day now, the population of the world has still not taken any significant hits from any of the alleged activities.
This entry was posted on Sunday, May 17th, 2009 at 3:37 am and is filed under Bad Science, Conspiracy Theories, Culture, Just LAME, Quackery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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May 17th, 2009 at 3:51 am
I can only quote Charles P. Pierce:
“America is a bad place for crazy notions. Its indolent tolerance of them causes the classic American crank to drift slowly and dangerously into the mainstream, wherein the crank loses all of his charm and the country loses another piece of its mind. The best thing about American crackpots used to be that they would stand proudly aloof from a country that, by their peculiar lights, had gone mad. Not today. Today, they all have book deals, TV shows, and cases pending in federal court.
But this is not just America, the Internet has given every paranoid on Earth that wants it a bully-pulpit of staggering scope to vomit his/her delusions right into the brains of the weak minded fueling worry and fear that would be of no real concern except for the fact that these victims can vote.
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May 17th, 2009 at 4:21 am
DV82XL said:
Oh it’s not just America, it’s not just the internet and it’s not new. The Internet sure makes it easier to get it out there. I remember it must have been 1980 I was given a flier in Ottawa about how the Canadian government had been infiltrated by the Soviet Union and how all the candidates of all the parties were really Soviet assets.
I guess the Soviets are out of the picture now though. I’ve heard conspiracy theories over fluoridation of water my whole life. I remember people supposedly drilling wells to escape from the horrible fluoride of municipal water in the 1970’s. It was a resurgence of the counter-culture and ‘nature is good’ hippies who thought the chemicals in the water were killing their vital life force or whatever the hell it was.
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May 17th, 2009 at 6:48 am
Flu virus? Conspiracy? Wow, reminds me of…. Deus Ex!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJegc9eEG8M
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May 17th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
I still don’t quite get what exactly the goal of this conspiracy is: is it to make money by increasing vaccine sales or to control the population by justifying martial law or is it general purpose population reduction? Or is it all of these?
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May 18th, 2009 at 3:14 am
Why are they always so long-winded? I don’t have the patience to listen to a nutcase for 10 minutes.
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May 18th, 2009 at 3:49 am
I once had a problem with the flu. So I had to call a chimney sweep and have it cleaned out.
Thank you thank you. I’m here all week!
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May 18th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
It’s the JOOOOZ, I tell you!!! Or maybe the Masons…
Not that you’d know it, because they’re spreading it by chemtrails from unmarked black planes, just to be inconspicuous.
My tinfoil hat keeps slipping off, too; my mother tells me that it’s because I never come out of the basement to wash my hair, but I’m SURE that it’s because of some new CIA anti-tinfoil ray.
If they’re technologically advanced enough to knock off my hat at a distance, then who can doubt that they’re capable of spreading flu?!?
WAKE UP, PEOPLE!!!!
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May 19th, 2009 at 10:02 am
Its a conspiracy by Kleenex to sell more tissues!
See people have been trying to live healthy lately, and not getting the flu as much, needed a new strain!
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May 21st, 2009 at 3:48 am
Rob Farrington said:
The Jews are behind the *swine* flu? Oy Vey! That’s not kosher!
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May 27th, 2009 at 3:49 am
Perhaps these “intelligent design” idiots are behind this. They can’t fathom that evolution might be real so they have to explain the fact that the flu strain changes by saying some designer has been tinkering with it.
I’m not sure how they explain all the different strains of the past before humans had genetic engineering. I guess god did it then.
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June 25th, 2009 at 10:20 am
Did they create the 1918 flu too?
Poor paranoid idiots. They see something happen and assume it must be a conspiracy and then work their way backwards to try to figure out what the motive is. It is a warped kind of reverse-logic that is used in support of the notion that somehow the world has been fooled by the ultra powerful and evil conspirators and yet they are so smart that they are the only one able to see through it.
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October 5th, 2009 at 9:43 pm
what if this is was merely a plan to be profitable project? having to increase the medical staff around the world to sell employment and cheap drugs!! god forbid, if it can control the population.. sick thoughts but some great people in the world have killed lots of people for a “cause”…
so, is this the definition of conspiracy?
thank god that I am not a politician nor a replication, they are two different species too aren’t they? .. hmm I wonder what we can get out of mixing these two parasites.. sorry, parties.. ehemm
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October 6th, 2009 at 4:27 am
JohnE said:
“To sell employment”? You mean the unemployed nurses and med techs around the world are behind this?
Anyways, your contention is that a huge conspiracy by the big pharmaceutical companies, governments and rich people of the world, as well as out of employment med staff has lead to a multi-billion dollar project to genetically engineer a flu strain that looks natural but is transmitted a bit more easily than normal and occasionally seems to cause an immune response that can be harmful even to those who would seem healthy?
My god, what a dastardly scheme. How did we miss these hundreds of billions being spent on this global project?
These companies stand to make…. millions… off of this.
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November 28th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
Actually AIDS is not spread by blood, sure that’s what everyone has heard all these years. HIV has nothing to do with AIDS, do your research. The original claims about HIV by Gallo were actually pulled from the Science magazine because it was never reviewed by the scientific community. Gov needed answers fast, and people didnt want to listen that immuno deficiency problem comes from life style, so they presented people with pills (such as AZT). Well AZT is a poisonous chemical that was supposed to be used to cute cancer before AIDS came about, but FDA stated that it was too poisonous for human consumption. When AIDS hit, they started using it. Now simply because someone tests positive with HIV they get put on AZT, which in turn kills them. Get off the AZT meds and you will live, there are many cases around the world. HIV is a simple virus that is actually passed on from mother to a baby, nothing more. AIDS is caused by many reasons, they are totally different in America than in Africa. Provide people with healthy food, water, shelter and most of the AIDS problems will go away, just like cancer problems, diabetes problems, heart condition problems. Our environment is making us what we are, commercialism is promoting the worst food.. alive food, alive people; dead food, dead people. And yes someone is making a lot of money on selling us crappy food as well all of the pharmaceuticals. I suggest everyone does their own research, opens up their eyes. I happen to do a lot of research for my Public Health Master program, and it’s unbelievable what one can find out simply by reading, instead of staring at the television screen.
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November 28th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
Sky said:
Well, primarily by blood, as that is where the white cells generally are, but it can be spread by other bodily fluids, as there is viral material in the lymphatic system, and of course sexual contact is well known to spread it.
Sky said:
Oh one of those. Jeez. The only thing more annoying than one of those wacky HIV-deniers is one who comes in all high and mighty with the “do your research” bull****.
Oh, I’ve done my research. I’ve been interested and involved in empirical skepticism and bad science action for many years and you can’t be involved in that subject area without crossing paths with HIV denialism from time to time.
Sky said:
Okay, you have a number of facts wrong there. First of all, despite your claims of needing answers “fast” AZT did not become a widespread treatment for AIDS until the mid 1990’s, which is not exactly “fast” considering the disease first showed up in the early 1980’s. From reconition as a condition in 1981, it was almost two decades before treatment with anti-viral drug combination became the standard.
Although AZT entered experimental trails in the mid 1980’s, it was not approved for HIV use until 1991. The full antiviral “****tail” evolved through the 1990’s due to intensive research.
AZT has its side effects and in large enough doses, it is toxic, but that’s true of any drug. The fact of the matter is that antiviral therapy has turned AIDS from a death sentence in the 1980’s to a chronic condition that can be reasonably suppressed and treated, sometimes for decades.
Sky said:
What slanderous idiotic bull****! Before AZT or any other drugs were used to treat AIDS, people died from it all the time. Just look at celebrities alone: Rock Hudson, Liberace, Freddy Mercury, Ricky Wilson and of course, tens of thousands of non-famous people.
When was the last time you heard of anyone well known dying of AIDS? No, it doesn’t happen too much anymore. Now that the virus is recognized and precautions are taken and now that people of means can get treatment, it is no longer causing them to drop like flies.
Of course, in Africa, where few get modern therapies, it continues to kill on an epic scale.
Sky said:
No, that’s just plain false. Not all children born to HIV positive mothers have the virus and with proper precautionary measures, the vast majority do not.
Sky said:
Nope. Believe it or not, Africans, Americans, Australians, Japanese, British, it doesn’t matter. All our bodies work basically the same. Okay, some ethnic groups do have certain predispositions and a few may even have resistances to certain things, but in general, what makes a Mexican guy sick will make a French guy sick and will make a Chinese guy sick. We’re all biologically almost the same.
Sky said:
Oh for pitty’s sake! This ignorance is just plain insulting. Health in the industrial world is better than it ever has been in history, and this is despite the “curse of plenty” that many are experiencing. The increases in heart disease and diabetes are a direct result of the fact that we now have huge amounts of high calorie, high quality, high density food and it’s cheap. We also don’t have to do huge amounts of manual labor.
But this is far superior to the alternative of lacking food. In any case, there’s no “dead food, dead people.” That is pure bull****. All food is dead, unless you’re Ozzy and like to bite the heads off of things, in which case it may actually still be somewhat alive by the time it hits your stomach.
But that doesn’t change the fact that even if everyone did eat an optimal diet, it would not eliminate cancer, heart disease, diabetes or the other conditions. Reduce them? yes. However, some people are predisposed to diabetes and will have it no matter how they eat, and no matter how healthy your lifestyle, eventually something will kill you. If you can avoid heart disease, then it could be cancer. Even if you have a perfectly healthy lifestyle, the human body doesn’t last forever and something will break and kill you. Sorry to inform you of this.
Sky said:
Oh for the love of science.
Yeah, crappy food. You remember how this summer a handful of people got sick from peanut products? You remember how it was a really big deal? You know why? Because it doesn’t happen often. Now, it was not always that way. At one time, food borne illness was so common most people got minor food poisoning a few times a year and it was a fairly common cause of death.
Sky said:
There is nothing inherently good or intellect building about reading. Oh sure, it can expand your brain, but that’s got more to do with the content than the act. If you read trash like Kevin Trudeau books and conspiracy theory banter, it’ll rot your brain as bad as the worst reality tv.
Please, go read a real book, with real facts, not whatever trash this **** comes out of.
Also, consider something other than “public health” as a career. Really, that’s a place where you’ll cause too much damage.
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November 28th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
Boy this place is becoming a virtual honeypot for the crazies…
Hey, nitwit – why do you think that you are going to be taken seriously on a website devoted to demonstration that opinions like your are a crock? You people have a persecution complex that needs feeding or what?
Do you honesty think that a place that has a group of well-educated regulars is going to give off-the-wall ideas like yours the time of day? Did it ever occur to you that spouting this sort of rubbish in our faces will only gain our contempt? And finally do you think you will be allowed to spout such rubbish here without being chalanged and beaten down?
I would really like to know.
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November 28th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
DV82XL said:
Meh, doesn’t bother me too much. I mean for one thing, there’s the whole issue of “preaching to the choir” and I would not mind getting a broader cross section, including those who may not agree all the time. Of course, ones like “Sky” are probably beyond hope, but I have gotten a few people who said this page changed their mind on something and that makes it all worth while.
Actually, having a crazy stop by from time to time is just fine with me. It generally shows how crazy they are. Considering that 90% of commenter on here are intelligent and not crazy, they usually get dispensed pretty well and end up coming off a lot worse for having come in her and bothered with their idiotic points.
Actually, it would be nice if they could at least make some slightly intelligent points. It would make it more sporting and challenging.
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November 28th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
drbuzz0 said:
I wasn’t complaining, you are certainly right – there is no point to running a mutual admiration society, which is the other trap that sites like this can fall into. No, I would honestly like to know what motivates these types to jump into the bear-pit, and jump in head first.
They can’t possibly think that they are going to make any headway with the ‘I know more than you’ approach, can they? I would really like to engage one of these people on what motivates them, beyond their particular paranoid delusion, because I have actively scanned several nutbar sites and I don’t find rationalists going out of their way to call BS on them. In fact it is rather rare to find someone like us trying to do there what they do here.
Think about it, Depleted Cranium is a rather unique site where you have gone out of your way to address these matters in general. Yes there are places with an ax to grind on one topic or another, but not this sort of idiocy as a class. To me this begs the question of why those of us that know better are not more proactive fighting lunacy the way the nitwits that come here are intent on promoting it. You are doing your bit here, but should the rest of us make it a point to fan out across the web lighting matches in these other places?
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