Category: Conspiracy Corner

At 7:45am every Thursday morning, Matthew phones in his thoughts on the conspiracy theory of the week to Zac and the audience of bFM’s Breakfast Show.

Since recording the segment below, more news—which just helps to obfuscate things further—has emerged about the possible fate of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. It’s quite possible I’ll be revisiting the story this week (although if my laryngitis hasn’t passed, I might just be hissing into the microphone more unintelligibly than usual).

Still, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 wasn’t the sole topic of discussion last week; I spent some time talking about the dodgy dealings of Aotearoa’s politicians and went on a nice, long rant about how if they want is to trust them, then they probably should start acting in a trustworthy manner. Worth a lesson if you want to hear me being sincere mere moments before coming down with tonsillitis. Connected? Probably not!

Notes/script

The mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370; is it a conspiracy? Well, if it turns out to be terrorism, yes; terrorist activity is typically undertaken in secret towards some end. However, it’s just not clear that thee plane the flight went down or disappeared because of terrorists being onboard is in the pool of credible explanations; everything about the disappearance of flight MH370 is weird. It just disappeared off the radar and whilst the two passengers traveling on stolen passports is suspicious, if it was an act of terror, no one has stepped forward to take responsibility. Whilst it’s tempting to think that the flight disappeared because someone or some organisation wanted it to, we just don’t have enough evidence, and it might be years before we do; the blackbox belonging to the Air France flight which disappeared over the Atlantic was recovered some two years after the event.

Given this is a pre-record I’m imagining whatever I’ve just said will be completely out of date by the time of broadcast. I was going to make a passing reference to “Lost” at this point, but neither it nor the show ended up being particularly funny, so this meta-reference is all you get. I’m going to insert a few seconds of silence here for all our sakes, even though dead air is the anathema of good radio.

Meanwhile, dodgy dealings here in Aotearoa seem to indicate mysterious goings on in our halls of power. David Cunliffe’s latest gaff, hiding the identity of the donors to his leadership election via a trust, somewhat goes to show that we’re heading for a third term National government, since Labour seems utterly inept no matter who is theoretically running the party. Meanwhile, questions are being asked about John Key’s dinners with Antoine.

Tony Astle, the apparently celebrity chef who runs Antoines run two fundraising dinners for the National Party which brought in a whopping $160,000 dollars, and as the payments were lump sums, the identities of the donors is not evident. The Prime Minister thinks there;s nothing wrong with this arrangement; the notably right-wing, libertarian Mr. Astle did it out of love and the only reason why it all looks suspicious is that he took the monies of the dinners first and then donated the proceeds to the National Party. However, as some commentators have point out, it’s a bit of a pickle for the Prime Minister to lambast Cunliffe for his anonymous donations whilst being au faix about monies given to the National Party in a somewhat similar circumstance.

Add to this the Oraivda scandal Judith Collins, the current Minister of Justice, is currently in. She claims she popped into his husband’s milk company in China for a quick glass of lactose and it wasn’t her fault the company made it out to be an endorsement, whilst the opposition is pointing out that her so-called quick trip was scheduled, well advertised and she didn’t inform the proper authorities on her return about it, which looks suspiciously like the Minister trying to have things both ways. Frankly, with Cunliffe’s tricky dealings, the Prime Minister’s weird attitude to the Antoine’s donation, you can see why people are suspicious generally of the people who rule in our name. This kind of shady dealing, even if simply the result of incompetence, just makes it seem all the more likely that more terrible things are going on behind the scenes. Our political masters do not do themselves credit and seem to, some days, actively go out of their way to make it seem likely they are involved in conspiracies, whether big or small.

At 7:45am every Thursday morning, Matthew phones in his thoughts on the conspiracy theory of the week to Zac and the audience of bFM’s Breakfast Show

Sometimes scandals backfire, as the Taxpayers’ Union found out last week. What should have been an exposé of wasteful expenditure by Jordan Williams and the Taxpayers’ Union turned into an exposé of the partisan nature of a right-wing lobby group. So, was there a conspiracy? Who really benefited from the news coverage? Was the Pork Board involved?

Notes/transcript

So, Mojo Mather’s, Aotearoa’s first deaf MP, flew to Masterton, the glitzy tourist capital of Wellington, to do a live interview in studio. It cost the princely sum of $550 and it seems this extravagant trip has people up in arms.

Well, it has one, maybe two people up in arms and a whole lot of people saying “What the flibbertigibbet?” Yes, Conspiracy Corner is kid-friendly with respect to language, if not with respect to politics.

Most of us (he said wildly overestimating the number of listeners who read the papers) woke up on Sunday to find that the Herald was reporting that the Taxpayer Union was incredulous that Ms. Mathers would dare spend taxpayer dollars on a community radio interview. Leader of the board and chief spokesperson Jordan Williams had this to say:

“It’s amazing that she has so little to do with her time to actually travel to a community radio that probably has as many listeners as you can count on your hand”

“The only silver lining is that the time spent travelling to go on the station in the middle of nowhere is less time spent dreaming up new ways to spend tax payers money.”

What was Ms. Mather’s crime? Being a deaf MP, she did her interview in studio because video-conferencing a one hour interview on being a deaf MP is one of the many problems Ms. Mather’s faces as one of our elected representatives. The fact that the TU was holding an MP’s work in an area she represents was one thing; the fact they were suggesting a trip to Masterton of all places was some kind of glitzy junket was another. I’ve not been to Masterton for a good reason. … The other reason is that it’s not really the kind of place you go “Oh, I can’t wait to find an excuse to go there!”

Reaction was swift, at least on Twitter (and if you’re interested in conspiracy theories, Twitter is where you have to spend a lot of your time), with voices across the New Zealand Political Spectrum uniting to cast aspersions upon the Taxpayers Union. Matthew Hooton, for example, tweeted:

This is just partisan bullying by @jordNZ and $ are irrelevant. Worry about WFF, superannuation, gold card etc http://t.co/ZQ4JIR9RHQ #nzpol

— Matthew Hooton (@MatthewHootonNZ) March 1, 2014

and Tau Henare:

@mojomathers Dear Mojo, tell these self serving pricks to go find something else to do. You are doing your job. #Endofstory

— West Side Tory (@tauhenare) March 2, 2014

When you have a right-wing strategist and one of National’s feistiest MPs thinking you’e done wrong, you not only have the wrong end of the stick but you probably mistaken a trail of fetid dingos kidneys for something stick-ish.

So, why is this a conspiracy theory? Well, two reasons.

1. The Taxpayers Union claims to represent New Zealand taxpayers but as unions go it is new, the current board is appointed and we don’t know the membership number. As a body which claims to represent the ordinary taxpayer in Aotearoa, it sure looks like an astroturf group; a group designed to look like a grassroots activist organisation but one which is really built for a specific purpose; criticizing the spending priorities of parties outside the government.

Astroturf groups (and I’m not necessarily saying the Taxpayers Union is one) operate in secret to hide their real intentions, and, as such, look to be comprised of conspirators (given that we don’t necessarily know who is behind them). If the TU isn’t a cartel of neo-liberal conspirators who want to criticise parties of the Left, well, they have an image problem. If they are… Well, you do the math (as long as said math was taught to you not at the taxpayers’ expense).

2. If the TU isn’t a bunch of hard right economic conspirators, then maybe they were set up? In what can only be called a stunning claim of idiot-level conspiracy theorising, some people on the Right, like the blogger Pete George, have suggested that perhaps someone with an axe to grind against the TU leaked the story of Mather’s radio interview to the Herald knowing they would contact Jordan Williams, who would then proceed to make a fool of himself in the mainstream media. Now, this plan requires the conspirators (let’s say the Greens Comms person) knowing the Herald would contact the TU and knowing that Jordan Williams would say something foolish. This means that the Herald might very well be in on the scheme, which is odd, given the Herald’s usually pro-National (and ACT) writing style and it implicitly admits that Jordan Williams is the kind of person to speak before he thinks, which is a bit damming, really, isn’t it?

There is a more prosaic story which could be told here. Let’s imagine that the TU isn’t a real union by union standards but, rather, a collection of far right activists who want to poke fun at unionism by turning the phrase “union” against the Left, and they enjoy taunting Left wing parties moreso than they do criticizing a government sympathetic to the TU. If they are conspirators, then they are what we might call “useful idiots”, in that they have a secret plan but it’s pretty much an open secret. Their actions are useful to the status quo but no one in the status quo has implicitly or explicitly endorsed them.

Add to this a director who likes to answer questions about use of taxpayer monies without asking “How much?” By Sunday afternoon Jordan Williams had written a post on his personal Facebook page basically claiming he had been trapped into saying the trip to Masterton was wasteful because no one at the Herald had told him it was a mere $550. Of course, he could have asked or, he could have said “No comment”, both of which would have been responsible answers to a question about taxpayer spending. However, Williams decided that saying something and then working out the details later was a good idea, which kind of indicates that they are attack dogs for the Right rather than the dispassionate body they make themselves out to be.

Sometimes there is a temptation to provide comment without full information, which is dangerous. If Jordan Williams and the TU really want to the voice of the ordinary taxpayer, they need to appraise taxpayer spending in context. Mojo Mathers was doing her job, reaching out to a certain part of the constituency in the only viable way. Not only that, but a whole host of taxpayers are just like Ms. Mathers, and the TU should be representing them.

Except for the representatives of the Pork Board. They can represent themselves.

Every Thursday, about 8:15am, Matthew “phones” in his thoughts about some contemporary conspiracy theory to Zac on 95bFM’s “Breakfast Show”.

Readers of the the long-winded posts upon this blog will be aware that on the weekend of the 22nd of February, 2014, I observed (but did not attend) the “Len Brown Stand Down” march, which you can read about here. Given the protest speakers included Vinny “Mr. News” Eastwood, Will “Chemtrail Enthusiast and 9/11 Truther” Ryan and Penny Bright ((I tried to think of a nickname but Bright has added her voice to so many disparate causes it would have been a disservice to everyone to name just a few.)), I thought it might be good to collate my thoughts on the radio.

Which I did.

In other news, I have a course on Conspiracy Theories starting up at the beginning of April. If you are in Auckland and want to hear my dulcet tones for two hours a week, why not think of enrolling?

Every Thursday, about 8:15am, Matthew “phones” in his thoughts about some contemporary conspiracy theory to Zac on 95bFM’s “Breakfast Show”.

Last week I talked about Shane Warbrooke’s OIA request asking the government for evidence John Key is not a representative of an alien shape-shifting species hellbent on enslaving humanity.

Now, due to time constraints the version of the segment that was broadcast was about a minute shorter than the version I recorded; nothing was cut due to content. No, I just went on a little longer than the timeslot allowed. So, for those of you who like unadulterated me, you can listen to the longer version of the segment below.

The Original John Key, Reptile Superstar

For the record, John Key can be a reptile without literally being a reptile. That is all.

Talking with a friend the other day about my next book project, I started listing off a number of, if not unique to Aotearoa, local conspiracy theories and I managed to not talk about the whole raft of 1080 conspiracy theories, despite having talked about them on the radio recently. I can only assume that the fluoride in the water supply and the chemtrails being constantly sprayed overhead are having an effect. Whatever the case, last week’s Conspiracy Corner with yours truly (Thursday, 8:15am, 95bFM) was on the topic of poisonous blue pellets in the bush, and you can listen to it below.

Now, if you will excuse me, I need to go panic a little about finishing my book.

Notes/Script

It’s back in the news, a chemical said to be deadly to human beings, in common use through Aotearoa, and the government and its associated agencies are threatening to introduce even more of it into the environment. No, it’s not Fluoride, it’s the deadly poison 1080.

1080, sodium fluoroacetate, is a toxin which does occur naturally in plants as part of their defence strategy to deter herbivorous animals from eating them that gets synthesised for wide scale use as a pesticide to kill some of the mammals that predate on our local wildlife. It gets dropped as pellets in the bush and has been a proven and effective way to control possum populations.

1080 has a number of features going for it: it’s water-soluble, so it doesn’t built up in the environment, there’s no record of it leading to human deaths in Aotearoa and our local birdlife isn’t particularly attracted to the poison (which means that for a poison we drop aerially, it really only affects the mammals we are trying to eradicate).

So, what’s the conspiracy theory here? Well, firstly, people will point the claim that New Zealand uses 80% of the word’s 1080 and that the American government won’t use it because they classify it as a danger to human beings.

With regards to 1080 use; yes, here in Aotearoa we use the majority of the sodium monofluoroacetate produced in the US and you might think that this means we have a cottage industry here that needs to be maintained. As such, you might think the conspiracy to use 1080 as an aerial pest control is in order to control our little corner of the market. However, given that we have to import the precursor ingredients from the US to manufacture 1080 and then we don’t export that 1080 but rather use it here, that seems like an odd act of conspiracy.

Conspiracy theorists about 1080 use also claim that DoC needs to continue 1080 drops in order for the Department to stay afloat. Now, it might well be true that part of DoC’s primary work is pest eradication, but they are also involved in conspiring to hide New Zealand’s Celtic past and the ammunition dump under North Head; I’m fairly sure the government would continue to fund them on the basis of these conspiracies without needing to maintain yet another cover story for their existence.

Seriously, though, whilst pest eradication is part-and-parcel of DoC’s remit, they do have other jobs; if they suddenly had to stop aerial drops of 1080 that wouldn’t mean the end of the Department of Conservation, although it might mean the end of our local birdlife.

Let me put it another way; if Federated Farmers and Forest and Bird agree, then either that’s evidence of a particularly gruesome conspiracy or the use of 1080 really is supported by the evidence.

It’s true that it’s a horrible poison; death by 1080 is a slow and painful affair, and despite its effectiveness in controlling pests, a fair few groups oppose its use in general and are outraged that the Department of Conservation is considering a massive increase in 1080 use due to record Beech Mast seed drop. Basically, there’s a whole lot more seeds than usual deep in the bush, which is an easy food supply for rats and possums, whose numbers are multiplying because of the easy feed ; when those seeds germinate and that food supply disappears, those introduced pests will turn to the next easiest food supply, our local birdlife. Thus, commendably for this government (given that they have reduced funding to MAF’s border security protocols), DoC has been given an injection of funding to do a massive aerial drop of 1080 in order to ensure those pest numbers are kept down.

Why do we use 1080? Well, despite the downsides, it’s an effective “bang-for-bucks” or “Kill ration per dollar spent” decision; we are obliged to look after our native species (either for biodiversity reasons or, if you don’t care about wildlife, as part of our obligations under the Treaty of Waitangi) and given the Department of Conservation’s meagre budget, this is the most cost effective way to do it.

Some people don’t like it because it kills dogs much more effectively than it kills, say, possums, and whilst this is certainly true, most of the time dogs who are affected by 1080 drops are either in areas of the bush they are not meant to be in (since dogs are also a threat to our local wildlife) or their owners have failed to take suitable precautions about a publicly notified 1080 drop. So, whilst it’s sad dogs are affected by 1080, by-and-large those deaths are preventable in the same way that we can’t easily prevent the destruction of our local birdlife without the use of a poison similar to 1080. Yes, there are cases where local birds eat the poison and die and, yes, some of our domesticated mammals end up dead as well, but aerial dropping of 1080 works. Indeed, the independent Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment and the Environment Protection Authority have declared that that 1080 is safe and the only practical tool that will work, given the circumstances.

Looking after the environment is one of those things we humans like to do, as long as it doesn’t cost us anything. The problem with 1080 is that it has costs, some of which are emotive. People don’t like to see domesticated dogs dying painful deaths. Some people don’t like to think of any animals dying painful deaths, or indeed like to think that it’s somehow right to selectively kill one species to save another. As such, there are reasons to be worried about 1080, but the use of 1080 isn’t built on a web of lies or conspiracy; it’s a horrible poison that just happens to be the most effective tool we have in our financially-constrained pest eradication toolbelt.

Oh, I’ve just been passed a note to say that the Pork Board approves this message.

Do you know that I didn’t at any point mention on the radio last year that I was (and still am come 2014) writing a book on conspiracy theories and philosophy? It seems weird in retrospect; we meant to announce it and then either I’d forget or Ethan and Zac would forget and then it just got awkward. So, anyway, I’m writing a book and I recommend you don’t buy it.

Recommending you don’t buy it isn’t me trying to stop the world from reading my wise words or appreciating the strength of my cutting arguments; all I’m saying is that it’s a trade academic publication and thus it’s going to be expensive. Jovan Byford’s “Conspiracy Theories: An Introduction”, published by the same people who will be putting out “The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories”, is usually US$90 a copy; I suspect my book will be in the same price range and thus not the kind of thing you might buy as a stocking stuffer. ((If the book ever becomes a paperback, that might change, but that would require people buying sufficient copies to justify a second print run; you can see the problem.))

So, please do buy my book if you can (I say, realising that my publisher might find these words).

Now that I’m pre-recording the segments (due to a change in my lifestyle choices) I plan to talk more about the structure of the book and what’s in it over the next few months. So, some weeks it’ll be the new format Conspiracy Corner as normal but, from time to time, it’ll be “Chapter 1 – The Summary!” and so on.

However, for the time being, how about some light jazz?