Armchair theories

Anything with aliens not of this planet - love those theories, all of them - from aliens were the first white people & the planet originally belonged to the humans from the 7 cradles of human development in Africa - to aliens are responsible for discovering DNA (sorry, Nobel scientists Crick et. al.) - to aliens have programmed terrorists to infiltrate and destroy our technologically advanced civilization.

The more wacko, the more I like reading about them.

But let's get this straight - none of them are *my* theories - just stuff I like reading...

latex cushions wrapped in Down are more durable than plain Down filled ones.

the comfy chair was a favourite tool of the spanish inquisition.

Anything involving an Elvis sighting.

Anything involving shooters other than Oswald.

oh okay. the moon landing was faked. especially that documentary with all the "evidence" and the rebuttal to the documentary that showed that the "evidence" was the documentarian not knowing basic science.

and the comfy chair/spanish inquisition was a nod to Monty Python. sorry.

It's in the weekly Midnight Star!

ive posted this one before but i can watch it over and over again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c6HsiixFS8

Please tell me that either:

1 - She's not serious, or
2 - Those sirens were the men in white coats coming for her

OFG i dont know what's worse. the theory or the explanation of why kennedy was assasinated in the notes. it boggles my mind.

Coke and Pepsi are the same exact thing. It's just a secret government test on the affects of labels on taste.

Reality, as we know it, is just a dreamlike trance of something larger than us.

tomothecat said:

I've always found armchair theories interesting. I came across this one on the good ol' internets:



What are some of your favorite armchair theories?

Click to expand...

Echelon.

There was a news story a few years ago saying the FBI was going to tap into the Internet, and/or all the ISP's and save all emails. But that was (or is) nothing compared to what I had already heard about since the late 1990's.

Echelon is (supposedly) a global spy network more powerful than the CIA, NSA, etc. It records ALL voice telephone calls, ALL faxes, ALL emails, perhaps even all Internet traffic. It's barely possible to store all this stuff, much less search through it in real time. The idea is when they find a suspected terrorist or other seedy character, they sift through everything stored looking for what he did on the Internet, who he called, etc.

There's supposedly some laws that prevent certain governmental organizations from spying on its own citizens. Having other countries' spies do it conveniently gets around any such laws, thus there's cooperation among many of the world's investigative organizations.

Shortly after 9/11/2001 I noticed (because I bought a couple) that a 40 gigabyte hard drive cost about $100. It can store 2,000 times as much info as the 20 megabyte drive I bought used circa 1986. Now for $100 you can now buy a 1 terabyte drive that stores 25 times the 40 gig, or 50,000 times that 1986 drive.

There's no problem storing a huge amount of data, though nowadays a lot of disk drives are used to store TV programs and movies (they're in TIVO's and other brands of DVR's). In the near future they will be used to store even more video information (from cameras in virtually every public location - any terrorist attack, crime, or odd/questionable event will be recorded and the perps identified through such recordings. There's actually very little doubt this will happen/is happening).

You can check current hard disk prices here:
http://www.pricewatch.com/hard_removable_drives/

One of the driving forces of the huge improvement in disk drive storage technology is the large R&D funds the disk drive manufacturers have, a result of profits from huge quantities of sales, not just from the popularity of hundreds of millions of personal computers, but also allegedly from large numbers of disk drives being purchased by organizations such as Echelon to store the info they collect.

In reality, there's been a lot of discussion of whether Echelon exists and how big it might be. Here's WIkipedia's "Fair and Balanced" article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
Here's a site with some "good info:"
http://www.fas.org/irp/program/process/echelon.htm

Even if Echelon were total fantasy when I first heard of it, there are so many other groups and technologies coming into being (speech recognition and face recognition are just two pertinent technologies that are coming right along) that appear to do many of the things nutjobs theorists claimed Echelon was doing that it's becoming harder and harder to separate fact from fantasy.

Have fun discussing the Kennedy assasination and what are the best tinfoil hats. Uncle Sam and The Dear Old Queen are listening.

stevie wonder isn't really blind, he just doesn't sing well enough to sell records without a handicap. really, swear to god. my ex neighbor believed this--s6

Echelon - so that's what everyone else calls it...

oh--and wait till you hear this gem:

if they handed out handguns at the beginning of every flight--picture a stewardess going up and down the aisle with a laundry basket full of handguns-- there would be no more hi-jackings. this crackpot theory belonged to my late father. and he'd get really pissed off if my sibs or i said it was nuts---s6

shakeysix said:

oh--and wait till you hear this gem:

if they handed out handguns at the beginning of every flight--picture a stewardess going up and down the aisle with a laundry basket full of handguns-- there would be no more hi-jackings. this crackpot theory belonged to my late father. and he'd get really pissed off if my sibs or i said it was nuts---s6

Click to expand...

That was a joke by Archie Bunker on the show "All in the family." It's a classic.

I believe that there is a cure for old age. If you search the internet you will notice that billionaires don't pass away from natural causes anymore. Of course with overpopulation they can't share that little diddy with the commoners, but I don't want to live with boring ass billionaires anyway.

For those of us who need the protection of the tin foil hats in ben's post, here's a site dedicated to DIY. I give you: the Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie!

You're welcome.

another one of my dad's armchair lunacies: seat belts kill more people than drunk drivers. when my kids were toddlers we would go around and around because he had this peeve about the gov. making seat belts mandatory. another example of big gov intruding into our private lives.

he swore seatbelts were unsafe and he had these insane statistics to prove his theory. i quoted some statistics once about the number of children who died in the front seat because they were in their mother's laps. my dad's rebuttal? what better place for a kid to die than her mother's arms?

he really was a caring grandfather. i blame his cloudy reasoning on too much limbaugh---s6