Mike Tribe

The bit about distilled water reminds me of the mad airforce general in Dr Strangelove who only drank rainwater because there was a commie plot to corrupt American vital bodily fluids. Could Mr Gaal be related?

Considering the source, that comes as no surprise! No doubt Prof Fetzler MEANT to write something like: "I sincerely apologize to members of the forum for cluttering it up with silly, unsubstantiated rumors put out by bizarre conspiracy theorists with weak track records for reliability. I will, of course, be much more careful before I spread this sort of thing again." ...or perhaps not...

The match is actually over. Germany beat Canada. I await an apology from Prof Fetzler of perpetrating a silly hoax on the members of the forum. Your wait will be a very long one, it should come just about the time Lucifer has to go shopping for thermal underwear. As Peter McKenna pointed out up thread, "This is, I think, what they call "a self reinforcing delusion". If it doesn't happen Fetzer saved the day." Note that Fetzer was unfazed by his previous failed prediction of a June x6, 20xx attack on an international football (soccer) game in Europe. Well, here we are on June 27th and there appears not to have been any sort of attack on the Women's World Cup in Germany. What went wrong, Prof Fetzler? Or was this just another silly conspiracy story designed to deceive the gullible?

The match is actually over. Germany beat Canada. I await an apology from Prof Fetzler of perpetrating a silly hoax on the members of the forum.

Does this mean that when nothing happens on June 26, Prof Fetzler will stop posting his paranoid distortions or is that too much to hope for?

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/video/module.html?mod=0&pkg=6102010&seg=1

Whether or not he laundered money, and given the fact that his control of the print media in several countries is very negative, I still fail to understand why his religious affiliations should be in any way relevant. Why mention it?

Evan sees a conspiracy, oh my. Not so much a conspiracy as a rather transparent attempt to contravene the forum rules...

In his defence, it was a speech and the quoted examples could be found in lots of different articles. But he really should be a bit "Caesar's wife" in this respect, shouldn't he?

http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6058168

No one mentioned your name, but if the cap fits...

Wonderful. Typical.

I see no point whatsoever in continuing this. It started as a thread discussing a report which you have no intention of reading. You have taken the opportunity to display your usual lack of civility. I have better things to do.

And Ms Mauro thereby makes my point... And how is that? That you know nothing of history? Tell us about the "Jew" and "British Royal family" conspiracy "The so-called Zionist families are not a power on their own. They are deployed by the Monarchies of Europe, like the British monarchy. They were called "hofjuden" (court Jews). But they're cut outs or front men for these European oligarchical families who hate the United States and have always hated the United States." Terry Mauro, The Education Forum, 22nd July, 2010

And Ms Mauro thereby makes my point...

"And this current assault on "Conspiracy Theories" and those who propagate them by a flurry of books and web sites (Leventhal/McAdams/Demos, et al) now consider such conspiracy theories a threat to national security, and you consider them a threat to the educaiton of our children?" Please re-read what I wrote. Your statement here bears no relation to it. I simply said that the point the Demos report made about the need to educate our children about how to evaluate what they read on the internet. A couple of years ago, I was supervisor for a student's IB Extended Essay. He intended to study law at university and wanted to write his extended essay on something "legal". He chose to do it on the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials. When he turned in his rough draft, I was a little uncomfortable with some of his quotations from one of his three major sources. I checked his source and found that some of the citations the author used didn't actually say what he claimed they said. Further investigation showed that the author also regularly contributed to the web pages of the American Nazi Party and Aryan Nation. So, the student had accepted uncritically information on an apparently "normal" web site which was, in fact, totally unreliable. This was not an unintelligent student. He was a straight-A student. He had just never been taught how to check the validity of what he was reading on the internet. You might say that "someone" should have taken care of this during his school career, but the fact of the matter is that information technology has moved much more quickly than has educational practice. When information was passed on largely through the print media, it was far easier to check up on the reliability of one's sources. Anything published by a reputable publishing house could generally be trusted, as could articles in peer-reviewed journals. That's all changed and Demos was suggesting that education needs to change to take account of this. You choose to focus your attention on what you believe to have been a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy. You are fortunate enough to live in a free society and are therefore at liberty to believe whatever you wish. Mr White and Dr Fetzler are similarly free to believe that man never went to the moon and that no planes ever flew into the World Trade Center. Similarly, Ms Mauro is at liberty to believe that there is an international conspiracy of Jews and the British Royal Family to take over the world. Ain't free speech wonderful? However, the discourtesy with which all three of these forum members (along with several others who have left for pastures new) have treated anyone bold enough to disagree with them is so obvious that one would have to be blind not to be able to see it. By the way, have you actually read the Demos report?

I don't suppose you bothered to read the Demos report, and there is no link in your post to the report: http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/thepowerofunreason. I have selected three parts from the 55-page report which I think are worthy of further thought: "One of the greatest threats to the cohesion of extremist groups is criticism from former members and friends and family of current members. From the perspective of the group – especially the leaders – it is vital to discredit such voices quickly and comprehensively. In the groups we examined a common ploy was for group leaders to accuse critics of being patsies, even disinformation agents working on behalf of the conspirators." Sound familiar? "The last decade has seen an explosion in the circulation of false information, or ‘counter-knowledge’: misinformation packaged to look like fact. Every day, from hundreds of sources, people are assailed by thousands of pieces of counter-knowledge. Yet, as Michael Shermer writes, ‘as a culture, we seem to have trouble distinguishing science from pseudoscience, history from pseudohistory, common sense from nonsense.’ In an age of social media, peer-to-peer communications, and user-generated content, many of the established gatekeepers of knowledge – the peer reviewed journal, the traditional newspaper, the scrutinised book – have been undermined and not replaced. The limited research there is suggests that young people in particular are not being equipped with the personal critical abilities to discriminate between truth and its many imposters. New research is finding that the way we are consuming knowledge online is affecting our capacity for ‘deep processing’ skills: inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection. Indeed, scholars at University College London found that students' research habits tended towards skimming and scanning rather than in-depth reading, with little time spent evaluating information for relevance, accuracy or authority. According to OFCOM’s 2010 survey of internet and web-based content, around a fifth of internet users in the UK do not think about accuracy or bias of information they consume on the internet, they simply use sites they like the look of. Moreover, Ethan Zuckerman argues that one danger of on-line networking is that it can lead to people simply interacting with people who already share your opinion, creating ‘filter bubbles’: conversations of similar people running in parallel, but rarely conflicting with other conversations of different people." This would also seem to me to be a completely responsible point about which we should all be thinking, especially those of us who are involved in education. The "information explosion" has given us access to a huge range of sources but we are not providing our children with the abilities necessary to evaluate them... "Civil Society must play a more proactive role in confronting the lies and myths of conspiracy theories when they find them. There are a number of independent civil society groups that currently work to fight various forms of extremist and terrorist ideology. It is important that they also confront conspiracy theories that are part of the ideology. Such groups have more credibility than the government to factually rebut them. This applies not just to active civil society groups, but society as a whole: community leaders and individuals for example should be ready and willing to rebut conspiracy theories head-on where they find them." On this forum, of course, any attempt to "rebut conspiracy theories head-on" would lead to the sort of insults, stalking and harrassment that Evan and Len have had to put up with... Demos is a very well-respected UK "think-tank" and this report raises a number of very interesting points. There is indeed quite a lot of new ideas to think about here and several suggestions which the thoughtful reader may find worthy of support.

I agree that Spain was the most skillful team there and that, on the night, they fully deserved to win. The Dutch, who invented total football, tried to substitute total mayhem in order to stop the Spanish. Webb should have been far firmer and brought out red cards much earlier. Holland could easily have been down to 9 men inside the first 45 minutes. The British game is much more physical than it is in Spain, but the referee let so much go unpunished that it just encouraged more of the same. I must admit, though, that I'm not a fan of the Spanish style of play. It's very skillful. The passing is beautiful. But, when all's said and done, the point of the game is to put the ball in the back of the net, and that's something Spain didn't do very much in South Africa... A little curiosity pointed out by one of my ex-students: Which was the only team to leave SA with an unbeaten record in this World Cup?

http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/2009/08/21/813820/william-calley-apologizes-for.html A slightly longer report of Calley's remarks in Columbus.

At the risk of incurring yet more snide remarks from the usual sources, I suggest that both these conspiracy theories were aired here on this forum. I haven't even scraped the bottom of the barrel, either. Try reading some of Ms Maura's posts...

Gosh, I've been insulted again, this time by a moderator! I'm either a "cognitive infiltrator" (whatever that is) or I'm too "naive" to "catch on" that he's right... Isn't it against the rules to cast aspersions of this sort? Have you read the book, Peter? Nathaniel, the book is not primarily about whether or not there was a conspiracy to assassinate Pres. Kennedy. As you said, there is only a short chapter on that. There are other issues which interest historians. And there are other conspiracy theories...

Whilst I'm sure this is true, I doubt that it would be a consideration in the case of such a prominent and widely respected historian as Margaret Macmillan. I strongly recommend the book to anyone interested in the importance of history and historians.

Have you read Macmillan's book, John? What did you think?

I doubt whether many inhabitants of this section of the forum have read Voodoo Histories. I found it generally very well written, well researched and thought-provoking. I would also recommend Margaret Macmillan's The Uses and Abuses of History. http://www.amazon.com/Dangerous-Games-Hist...4818&sr=8-1

KFC? Teaching too stressful?