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“Operation Paperclip”: 30 Things That Sound Like Conspiracy Theories, But Are Actually True
Most of us, hearing words like “secret,” “CIA” and “coverup” tend to immediately imagine tinfoil-hat wearing conspiracy theorists. More often than not then not, this is the case, but to paraphrase the old saying, truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. So the more facts you learn about different parts of history, science and technology, the more unusual you realize the world really is.
Someone asked “What’s something that sounds like a conspiracy theory but is actually true?” and people shared the best examples that they knew. So get comfortable as you scroll through, upvote your favorites and be sure to comment your own examples below. 
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
That corporations openly bribe politicians to get what they want
They call it lobbying to get away with it.
The Darkest Timeline 1 year ago
Anyone can lobby the government. Why not get a bunch of people together and do so yourself. And no amount of money can make a bad idea good. What we need are better citizens.
Forrest Hobbs 1 year ago
The thing about this "lobbying" is that it's always done in private. If it were done openly, it'd be a different matter - but is any of it recorded and published? No, of course not. It never has been and until this "lobbying" business *IS* carried out in public, it'll continue to undermine what we think of as democracy. I'm of the opinion that all discussions with politicians should be live-streamed so we can all see what's going on all the time.
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#2
In the 60s and 70s, thousands of Native American women were sterilized without their consent as part of a practice to sterilize poor and minority women to "help their financial situation and their family's quality of life" by preventing unwanted pregnancies in poor communities.
Some were not informed at all and had it done to them completely without their knowledge, others were threatened with having their healthcare taken away if they did not agree to have it done to them. Some studies estimate that as many as 25-50% of Native American women were sterilized in the 1970s, representing tens of thousands of victims.
This is essentially a modern day genocide in the United States.
Pernille 1 year ago
Happened to various native population in other parts of the world too, Danmark did it to the Inuit in Greenland.
TheElderNom 1 year ago
Also to people with mental issues. My grandmother's sister got sterilised in Denmark for being, and I quote, stupid. But they had similar initiatives all over the place.
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Lucifer 1 year ago
Federally-funded sterilization programs took place in 32 states throughout the 20th century. Beginning in 1909 and continuing for 70 years, California led the country in the number of sterilization procedures performed on men and women, often without their full knowledge and consent.
David 1 year ago
This program was actually started in the 1920's and 30s and was the brainchild of Margaret Sanger, who pushed for such laws. Planned Parenthood in its early years was very involved in the sterilization of those "Deemed unfit". The Virginia "Eugenical Sterilization Act" was the brainchild of a Planned Parenthood board member (Half of PP's founding board were either KKK or KKK Allies) and lobbied for by PP. It was not until 2016 that PP acknowledged this dark part of their early years (well into the 1950s).
Enoch is Enoch 1 year ago
You can bet your life they're still doing stuff like this with their de-pop agenda. To everyone, not just native populations. Take a look at infertility rates and falling birth rates.
#3
The McDonalds PR machine tried to ruin Stella Liebeck’s life. That coffee was so hot it melted her clothing to her genitals. People still believe she was at fault. I turn it around and ask how they’d feel if a parent accidentally spilled coffee on their child that was so hot it melted the child’s clothes to her/his body. Somehow it usually wakes people up.
Bob Brooce 1 year ago
Anyone who sides with McDonald's on this is either uninformed or a moron, IMHO. They deliberately make the coffee dangerous because they can get a bit more brewed coffee per pound.
Freya the Wanderer 1 year ago
I used to think her lawsuit was frivolous, but then I learned the truth. I blame corporate media and Big Business's stooges for pulling the wool over the general public's eyes.
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Beak Hookage 1 year ago
She wasn't driving around with a cup of coffee in her lap, by the way. She was sitting in the carpark and the car was not moving.
Cee Cee 1 year ago (edited)
Then there was the McLibel case in the UK. The corporation sued 5 activists for distributing flyers critical of McDonalds. Dragged on for years. Eventually after an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights they lost. Cost McDonald's a fortune in legal costs. Sledgehammer to crack a nut springs to mind.
Joe Reaves 1 year ago
And all she asked them for originally was the medical bills to be paid. They were the ones who insisted on taking it to court.
WonderWoman 1 year ago
For years I didn't look into the facts of this case, and I am ashamed that I didn't.
David 1 year ago
yes the coffee was at 190f, third degree burn temp, however the one question I always had was why would you place a paper coffee cup with hot coffee in your lap in your car and remove the lid while in a moving vehicle.
Sand Ers 1 year ago (edited)
I wonder why so many people still buy into the lies McDonalds propagated about this case.
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Huddo's sister 1 year ago
I think my sister should have sued McDonalds when she burnt her hand in a fryer while working there as a teenager. She slipped on oil that had been leaking from the fryer, which the manager had known about. The manager blamed my sister for having shoes that were too slippery and made her buy new ones before she came back to work. She quit not long after that. Thankfully the burns weren't as serious as they could have been, though that meant they were much more painful at the time. She doesn't even have scars now.
Sand Ers 1 year ago
McDonald’s. Unless you can prove that she knew it would cause 3rd degree scalding instead of pain, inconvenience, and briefly persistent irritation.
Load More Replies... #4
In 2016 a former reality tv show host vying for political office began working to convince citizens of the United States that the election he was participating in was rigged, only to learn that he had actually won the election. 4 years later in 2020, when seeking re-election, this same politician attempted to again convince the citizens of the United States that the very same election process that had given him his then current position was rigged... this time of course he lost the election. This time however he had in fact convinced a large number of people that the election was rigged.
...**And now I can't have a normal family dinner because its apparently a conspiracy that the United States of America has a voting system that works.**.
Skogsrået 1 year ago
Sorry to tell you americans but your voting system is rigged and have been so for a long time, it's rigged by the republicans and to their advantage.
Amy Manning 1 year ago
We know. We even have a fancy name for it: Gerrymandering. And there's not a damn thing we can do about it because of them until we vote every last one of them out of office with numbers too overwhelming to cheat. Unfortunately, we share our country with racists and idiots.
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Onan Hag All 1 year ago
The American political system is the least democratic in the developed world. The "electoral college" idea makes the rest of the world howl with laughter.
Forrest Hobbs 1 year ago (edited)
Shout out for the UK system as a contender for "least democratic"! We have the House of Lords - none of them are elected in any form at all - and an hereditary head of state who never exercises power any more, but only by convention. In law, the monarch still is in charge. (That's possibly a very good thing: I've heard a retired senior army officer explain that the UK PM can only request, nor order, a nuclear attack. And if the UK Joint Chiefs of Staff - a committee - think the PM's gone mad when requesting a nuclear attack, they can appeal to the monarch to sort things out, all legal and proper and above board.)
Load More Replies... Forrest Hobbs 1 year ago
Not particularly - when the electoral college system was created, all the white men involved in creating it were racist and most of them owned slaves or had done so. Pretty much everyone was racist one way or another back then. It's complicated - racist doesn't mean "in favour of slavery", for example.
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Verena 1 year ago
The voting system may have made sense during times of the pony express. However, every other big size country, sporting a type of democratic voting system, never needed a system like that. They just started off with a "every legitimate vote has immediate influence on the result of the election" AND they have dozens of parties, representing all opinions from far right to far left to choose from.
Sand Ers 1 year ago
You have to keep in mind that most of the men drafting the Constitution did not trust and did not want “democracy”. They created a system that was primarily intended to insure that only the “right” people could exercise power. The country was designed to serve the interests of rich, white men, and every step wresting that power away and delivering it to the population at large has been bitterly resisted, and is continually attacked and undermined. It’s gotten better, but it’s still mostly a country of and for rich white men.
Load More Replies... Enoch is Enoch 1 year ago
Left wing, right wing, same damn bird. Don't fall for this divisive rubbish. They are all puppets.
#5
In 2002 a cable technician named Mark Klein working for AT&T in San Francisco was sitting at his desk when he received an email from his bosses that a representative from the National Security Agency (NSA) would be coming to visit for some unspecified reason. He was to give this NSA technician access to a cable substation for him to perform some work. The tech did his thing and Mark moved on without thinking anything of it.
A year later in 2003, Mark was transferred to that cable substation and by chance was assigned to monitor the “Internet Room”. This was the room where all the fiber optic ocean cables that carry the countries internet traffic terminate. While he was reviewing engineering drawings, he realized that the schematics revealed a secret room. More importantly, the plans showed cabinets filled with fiber optic splitters coming off every cable and feeding into the secret room. And to make it even crazier, neither he nor anyone on his team had access to the secret room.
Through his investigation, he discovered that the NSA representative he had escorted the previous year had worked to install this system which was sending a copy of all the internet traffic that passed through the substation straight to the NSA. In other words, he had proof that the federal government had the capacity to tap into all internet traffic in the country. And I mean all of it. Every email, instant message, electronic sale, medical or criminal records, research databases. Everything. Complete unrestricted access.
Like any sane person, he was extremely disturbed by this discovery. He went to his higher ups but was essentially told to just keep it quiet. After retiring in 2004, he linked up with a group called Electronic Frontier Foundation and essentially blew the whistle. He did interviews and handed over all his evidence to reporters.
I watched one of these interviews in 2006 which is how I know about this story. I remember thinking it was so obvious once he explained it. Why wouldn’t the NSA tap into the internet traffic in the age of the war on terror? I’d watched Enemy of the State. But nothing happened. No one I spoke to seemed to believe it and Mark Klein’s story eventually seemed to just fade away.
7 years later, in 2013, Edward Snowden leaked documents essentially confirming EVERYTHING and then some. But to this day everyone looks at me like a crazy person when I talk about knowing about it as early as 2006.
maswartz 1 year ago
People knew the moment the Patriot Act was signed that it would lead to spying on Americans.
Sand Ers 1 year ago
They didn’t particularly try to hide that the intent was domestic electronic eavesdropping and spying.
Load More Replies... Panda Pandemic 1 year ago
Good one! Loved that show. The ending left a lot to be desired though. I was only a little disappointed though. Because the rest of the show was so good it made up for it. So the ending didn't really matter so much to me.
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Jon Penryn 1 year ago
Much of the USA internet traffic come across the Atlantic to the UK (To Cornwall) where the NSA intercept it and send it back.
Sand Ers 1 year ago (edited)
Edward Snowden exposed crimes on a scale so massive it would boggle the mind if it didn’t simply confirm what we always suspected. The Constitution exists to rein in the power of the government, not to constrain citizens. Condoning what he exposed puts you on the side of the wannabe dictators.
Load More Replies... #6
The chemicals in the water are turning the frogs gay.
Atrazine, a chemical produced by the pesticide company Syngenta has been proven to mess with the endocrine system of frogs and turn them into hermaphrodites and can even cause them to display homosexual behavior, preferring the company of other male frogs rather than females ones.
It can also cause prostate cancer and birth defects and is in the drinking water of several states, so yeah, there's that too.
cerinamroth 1 year ago
If there's one way to get conservatives behind the environmental movement, it's this!
Data1001 1 year ago
They'd just claim the "libs" were behind it all, part of an ongoing campaign to turn the whole world gay.
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UKGrandad 1 year ago (edited)
Funniest thing about this is what it says under the picture: "(not the actual photo)"! Is this so we don't think that the frog pictured is one of the gay frogs?
Janos Schumacher 1 year ago
Atrazine has a large warning on the side of the jug saying "Do not use near bodies of water". It's literally labeled like that and has been forever. It can change the gender of frogs and it kills or sterilizes fish. It's usually used for pre-emergence broadleaf and annual grass control.
Emie N. 1 year ago
But does it affect female frogs as well to prefer other females? Does anyone on BP know?
UKGrandad 1 year ago
Apparently not. Here's a very brief paper on a study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2842049/
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ROSESARERED 1 year ago
It becomes a problem when there are no frogs, because they are not mating, no tadpoles. Frogs are an important part of any natural environment...and sadly at the moment, a good barometer for the health of our earth
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Julia Mckinney 1 year ago
But the far-right conservatives claim that the reason why this is happening isn't because of pesticides but is because of women taking birth control pills and menopause hormones.
May 1 year ago
Nope. While it was indeed banned in the EU, other countries than the US use it. The (Swiss) company was bought by a Chinese group, I'd doubt they focus their exports on the US soil only.
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Bouche and Audi and Shyla, Oh My! 1 year ago
Everyone who drinks water of any kind will die.
Load More Replies... #7
**”Big Tobacco Cover-Up”** is a prime example. For decades, tobacco companies knew about the harmful and addictive effects of smoking but actively suppressed research, manipulated data, and marketed cigarettes as safe. It wasn’t until the 1990s, after internal documents were leaked, that the truth about their deceitful practices was fully exposed.
Rayne OfSalt 1 year ago
The exact same thing happened with climate change; the big fossil fuel companies knew about for decades before they were exposed. The difference is that politicians and the moron half of humanity still argue that climate change doesn't exist.
Stannous Flouride 1 year ago
They actually hired the SAME lawyers that had pushed the tobacco stories.
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General Anaesthesia 1 year ago
And Big Tobacco is now involved in selling vaping to minors, with more of the addictive nicotine than in cigarettes.
Amy S 1 year ago
The rise of vapes is so alarming to me. Not long ago smoking was dropping in young people my brothers generation thought smoking as disgusting. Now I see loads of 16-18 year olds vaping and wonder why on earth they would sign up for a lifetime of addiction.
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ENSJ 1 year ago
Teflon comes to mind as well. "Our own standards for safety are met". Evidence it's not. "Well we can''t be responsible since it"s actually the government who should decide on a safety threshold." How can they when you never disclosed to the government that this was a dangerous substance and was thus unregulated? And that type of stuff is still happening (M3 in my own country)
#8
The US and the UK conspired to overthrow Iran's democratically-elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and restore the autocratic regime of the Pahlavi monarchy. They did this because Mosaddegh tried to nationalize Iran's oil industry.
MaximumKarmaSaint 1 year ago
If the U.S hears about oil, nothing will stop them from getting it.
Verena 1 year ago
Not only oil, bananas too. And how Hawai'i became part of the US. Many countries did horrid things in the past - but many learned and stopped. Some didn't.
KillerKiwi 1 year ago
In Hawaii it was sugar, but yeah. That’s kind of how imperialism works
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Michael None 1 year ago
Oil is to the US what artifacts are to the British Museum. Genocide will not stand in the way of acquisition.
David 1 year ago
1) Not Democratically Elected, elected by a special body of the elites of society, not the masses, who wanted power 2) The US plan failed. It was not until nearly 5 months later that the coup that overthrew that government and put the Shah back in actually happened, without US and UK help (declassified CIA documents show they gave up after the original failed attempt), a Coup masterminded by the Shah's sister and led by her. However given the masculine nature of society the Mosaddegh people who fled couldnt admit they were outsmarted and overthrown by a woman, so they pushed the CIA myth. However it didnt go mainstream until the Ayatollah's, who wanted to keep women down during the Hijab uprisings, and realized if women knew the role a woman had in a earlier coup it might inspire them, and the CIA was already the devil in their literature, so it just fit. However the actual coup was not the CIA, but the Shah's sister.
Heras buddy 1 year ago
Didn't just happen with oil. Dominican Republic and several South American nations. Especially if large American companies interests were at stake. Think Bananas.
Colin Matthews 1 year ago
and by Nationalise you mean "Stole from the companies who legally owned the infrastructure and technology"
#9
Nestle's baby formula scandal
Nestle aggressively marketed baby formula to mothers in developing countries by giving free samples to hospitals and buying up billboards. The mothers would use them instead of breast milk and eventually stop producing breast milk. Then they'd need to buy formula to continue feeding their babies. Formula needed to be mixed with water but because they often didn't have clean water, they'd put their babies at risk mixing the formula with unclean water. Also, literacy rates were lower in a lot of those places so the mothers didn't know how to clean the bottles and couldn't read the instructions on the packaging. Those that did often didn't have the means to carry them out. A lot of them being poorer also resorted to watering down the formula to try and make it last longer but then it wouldn't have enough nutrients for the baby.
Nestle downplayed all of this and said it wasn't their responsibility that people here didn't really have access to clean water and that they were just giving people the freedom of choice.
GenuineJen 1 year ago
Interesting how Nestle was also involved in a bottled water scandal... Hmmm. Although it seems they weren't related, it definitely sounds fishy.
Xenia Harley 1 year ago
The CEO of Nestle said access to water is not a human right. They also use child slaves to grow cocoa beans for chocolate. Disgusting company.
Catpawsarethebest 1 year ago
Honestly, I wish Nestlé would go away forever! They are more evil than evil. And I dont get how anybody can work for them! I would feel so guilty all the time!
Freya the Wanderer 1 year ago
I avoid Nestlêvil products as much as I can. They have their filthy paws in a lot of companies.
Bouche and Audi and Shyla, Oh My! 1 year ago
I broke down for the first time since I learned about their owning Hot Pockets. I feel so guilty!
Load More Replies... Rayne OfSalt 1 year ago
Coca-cola used mercenary death squads to slaughter amazonian tribes for their land.
Tammy Leung 1 year ago
I am from Asia. Back in the 70s-90s, mothers were told that baby formula was better that breast feeding. So we all grew up on baby formula. In the 00s, government made it illegal to give out free samples and advertise baby formula. Nestle started to advertise supplement formula for kids & teens instead.
Barbara Burns 1 year ago (edited)
Saw a documentary where cheap powdered milk was introduced in the Caribbean, which ruined the dairy farmers, and after dairy was no longer available, they jacked up the price. Shocker, right? God help us all.
Zaach 1 year ago
Maybe this is why the rest of the world thinks Nestle's chocolate tastes of vomit
Bouche and Audi and Shyla, Oh My! 1 year ago
Hershey's, you mean. There's something added that causes that taste.
Load More Replies... #10
Many prisons in the US are private, for-profit companies. They get paid by the head, and also employ the prisoners for pennies per hour to do work like telemarketing. You've probably talked to a prisoner on the phone without realizing.
Johnny McFearless 1 year ago
Yes, slavery in the southern states was just replaced by prison system.
Forrest Hobbs 1 year ago (edited)
Worth bearing in mind that the USA kept slavery for prisoners. The 13th amendment reads: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Kraneia The Dancing Dryad 1 year ago
Think at one point of you called the tourism board for the US state of NC, you actually spoke to people in a women's prison....
Sand Ers 1 year ago
Private prisons are corporatocracy completely undisguised and in plain view. Any elected official who votes to permit them is axiomatically unfit for office.
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Montanavanna 1 year ago
Prisoners would bake the sliced bread we used in an elementary school kitchen.
#11
The Maxwell and Epstein stuff .. essentially the tip of the iceberg of high profile human trafficking and p*dophilia that goes virtually unmentioned.
Nils Skirnir 1 year ago
Except most of the users aren’t democrats or progressive. Most are over-wealthy right wingers
meeeeeeeeeeee 1 year ago
Doubt that, people are scum no matter their political leanings
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Beak Hookage 1 year ago
One of very few conspiracy theories I'm actually prepared to believe is that Epstein was murdered to keep his mouth shut.
#12
The Stolen Generation in Australia
Up until the f*****g 1950s the Australian government, euthanized, sterilised and ripped children from their parents in order to try to "civilise" the native Aboriginal people by educating the black out of them.
Rayne OfSalt 1 year ago
1950s? Try 1970s. It was an on-going program from the early 1910s and carried on until the late 1970s.
Lila Allen 1 year ago
In the US and Canada that was going on until the 1990s
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Montanavanna 1 year ago
Happened in the states too. I get so mad when someone says Natives should just get over it. In their minds these events happened "so long ago". Nope, they were forced from a way of life that worked for them for thousands of years, forced to assimilate then punished for struggling with it. Get real, they can actually talk to elders that were THERE!
Beak Hookage 1 year ago
Many of the victims are still alive today. I know one of them, in fact.
#13
That we know covid harms our brains, hearts, immune systems and that every infection does more harm
:(.
AndThenICommented 1 year ago
I lost a small bit of my hearing. I think I’m still in denial and think it will come back, but studies show if it doesn’t within a couples months then it’s gone - it’s been a year.
ENSJ 1 year ago (edited)
During the pandemic I never caught covid (lived alone). Only caught it after I started co-housing (got it from my housemate). Lost sense of smell (and thus taste) for a while. It came back, but I do have a feeling my sense of smell is diminished and not as good as it used to be.
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Rosie Bannister 1 year ago
i haven't been the same since i had COVID in June '22 but not sure how much is that and how much is grief as my beloved sister died from same infection incident.
Howl's sleeping castle 1 year ago
Husband usee to practice martial arts 3-4 hours a day. Now he feels weak just walking for 15 minutes
Sami-Jo Ross 1 year ago
My cognitive abilities have been impacted pretty badly. I have memory issues and lapses where I just can't process anything. But Covid was just the flu... /s
Cuppa tea? 1 year ago
Sorry to hear that. Hopefully it's just temporary. I had symptoms like this shortly after getting COVID in January 2021. It lasted few weeks, nothing nice. Going to make breakfast only to stand in kitchen and looking and slice of bread, trying to remedy what I was supposed to do - it sounds funny, but was scary as hell.
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Kangaroo 1 year ago
I had Covid in June for the first time. Then, about a month ago, I got a small cold. It’s turned into walking pneumonia. I’ve never had any pneumonia or respiratory issues at all before, and now it’s been a month of struggling to breathe and hacking up green goo.
Sand Ers 1 year ago
If you haven’t seen a doctor, do it now. I had pneumonia when I was 19. I recognized from the characteristic cough. Thought to myself “pneumonia still kills people” and got my aß to a doctor’s office.
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Sky Render 1 year ago (edited)
It's been weird for me. The first time I got COVID it lasted two weeks and took my sense of taste for a month... My sense of taste came back stronger than before. The second time I got it I lost nothing and it lasted a week. The third time I got it, COVID barely hung on for 3 days and left no mark. I know I'm an exception in this way, but still.
KillerKiwi 1 year ago
It jacked up my mum’s sense of taste. It’s crazy to think that’s it’s been four years already.
Donald 1 year ago
IDK if I'm extremely lucky or if I just can't get it but I've been working with the public through the entire pandemic because I am "essential" and I still haven't caught it. I have heard some absolute horror stories about the lasting effects from covid from co-workers and friends. Shoot, my co-worker is out for the 4th time in 2 years with it right now and they can't stabilize his oxygen levels because his lungs are so banged up from previous cases.
#14
I’m surprised that I haven’t seen Operation Paperclip yet. After defeating the N*zis, the US government gave 1600 of them government jobs here.
Lucifer 1 year ago
The US, UK & Russia all tried to get Nazi scientists into their country. Wernher von Braun, chief architect of the Saturn V rocket that took US to the moon was a Jr. SS officer of the SS equestrian unit.
Jrog 1 year ago (edited)
1) It's... complicated. Von Braun joined the Nazi Party in 1937 when he had to decide on whether falling in line with the Party or being kicked out of any research institution. He later joined the SS as an officer because he had to deal with confidential information and ranking him was a way to provide him with clearances, stipend and recognition. He never had an active role. Von Braun himself was never a big fan of the Nazi party, was moderate in his views. While he was plenty aware of the use of slave labor in Peenemunde, the decision was forced on him by Speer and he acted to provide his workers better treatment than most other camps, greatly increasing the food rations and improving the living facilities way above the original plans. Far from saying it was an holiday resort, it's significant that practically all the deaths in Peenemunde during it's operational lifespan were from RAF bombings and not from deprivations.
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Nikole 1 year ago
I’m just gonna go ahead and worry about how it seems to be cropping up in multiple countries as well.
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Luis Hernandez Dauajare 1 year ago (edited)
US also gave immunity to Chief Surgeon Shiro-Ishi of infamous Japanese Unit 731. Much of what we know about the functioning of the human body in combat situations comes from Japanese and Nazi human experiments. The Soviets did exactly the same thing, BTW. It was called Operation Osoaviakhim and it recruited around 2,400 Nazis scientists, including several rocket engineers of the Peenemunde rocket program, chemists and weapons designers. They were responsible of several advances in the Soviet nuclear reactors program and the design of the AK-47 Kalashnivok, as it was essentially copied from the German StG 44 assault rifle.
Forrest Hobbs 1 year ago
The AK-47 was developed from the German StG 44 and the American Garand M1 - not copied from either, but using features derived from both (and maybe earlier Soviet designs too). All rifles by then used features derived from earlier designs. By the way, the USSR had a rocketry programme of its own and the way it used German rocketry engineers was to deny them access to the Soviet rocketry programme itself, but basically use their existing information and when that was exhausted, mostly they got deported.
Load More Replies... JohninND 1 year ago
And the Vatican ran the "rat line", kidding them new IDs and passports to get away.
Luis Hernandez Dauajare 1 year ago
One of the Nazi officials that escaped that way was Adolf Eichmann, the essential architect of the Holocaust.
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Pferdchen 1 year ago
When I was a kid in the 1970's, we used to hang out at Fort Hunt park, which used to be part of George Washington's farm. We had no idea that the site was once part of Operation Paperclip. Specifically, it was PO Box 1142, an interrogation center for German POWs that might possess valuable intelligence. We had absolutely no idea, as the existence of the program wasn't revealed until the 21st century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._O._Box_1142
Kelly Scott 1 year ago
That's not a conspiracy theory. All you have to do is read James Michener's book "Space" or just look up the beginnings of the US space program.
Nimitz 1 year ago
They sat them in a corner and made them super pinky swear not to genocide again, and then gave them all high paying jobs and houses and the right to vote.
Forrest Hobbs 1 year ago (edited)
The German rocket project really didn't have anything to do with the genocide programme, for all that it did use slave labour, and for all that the actual engineers knew all about that side of things despite their public claims to the contrary. I find it hard to believe that I'm actually writing things in defence of actual paid-up Nazis, but there you go. Almost everyone involved in the rocket programme and the German nuclear power programme wasn't a committed Nazi.They just went along with things - which, of course, is how come the committed Nazis got away with it.
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Forrest Hobbs 1 year ago (edited)
The Battle of Castle Itter did indeed see this : https://www.history.co.uk/articles/the-day-germans-and-americans-fought-side-by-side-during-ww2. A small group of Germany army soldiers fought with a US army force to defend French POWs against the Waffen-SS.
Load More Replies... #15
Operation Snow White
Basically, during the 70s the Church of Scientology was concerned with all the bad press surrounding them and all the other dirt on them that could be released. So they used a huge number of contacts that they had in various US government agencies to destroy all negative information about the church of Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard. The crazy thing is, they succeeded with much of the plan before they were caught. There was a s**t-ton of negative info on Scientology in the 70s, possibly enough to destroy the church, and it'll never see the light of day because they used their huge influence to have it destroyed.
Beak Hookage 1 year ago
And yet this was apparently not considered grounds to shut them down anyway.
#16
The fact that major social media platforms use algorithms specifically designed to keep you addicted. They analyze your behavior to show you more content that will keep you scrolling, even if it’s not good for your mental health. It sounds like a conspiracy, but it's a well-documented reality.
#17
GM, IBM, and Ford played a major role in rearming Germany in the 1930s. George Bush's grandfather Senator Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of the German forces.
Geoffrey Scott 1 year ago
Or Nestle' continuing to trade with Nazi Germany after the rest said no.
Rayne OfSalt 1 year ago
That's all just true, it doesn't sound like a conspiracy theory at all. The USA was still selling iron and oil to Germany and Japan as late in WW2 as 1942.
David 1 year ago
We were at war with both in 1941, and the US cut off Germany in 1940. BTW the reason why Japan attacked the US in December 1941, was because we cut off their oil over atrocities in China. Get your facts straight. However Stalin was supplying most of Germany's iron and oil literally up to the day of the German invasion, German troops passed Russian trains still bringing supplies on the invasion day
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Bisha Moten 1 year ago
International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) had a number of factories in Germany during WW2. They produced Focke-Wulf aircraft for the German military. During the war, these factories were bombed by US forces. ITT petitioned the US government to help pay to rebuild the factories after the war, and the US government refused. ITT sued the government... and won. The court forced the US government to pay to rebuild the factories after the war. (The reason ITT won, was they showed how other companies like Ford, which had factories in Germany, were paid by the govt. to rebuild, but ITT had been singled out and not paid.)
Trisec Tebeakesse 1 year ago
In 1938, Henry Ford received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the Nazi regime's highest medal for foreigners
Freya the Wanderer 1 year ago
Coca-Cola created Fanta to exploit a loop hole and continue to do business with Nazi Germany. One could make a very long list of companies that kissed up to the Nazis.
#18
The U.S. Public Hearth “Service” chose not to treat 400 African-American with syphillis in Alabama so they could study the progress of the disease if untreated.
Rayne OfSalt 1 year ago
Worse, they deliberately infected black americans with syphillis to study the disease.
Crescent 3 1 year ago (edited)
If you're talking about the Tuskegee experiment, there is no evidence they they deliberately infected anyone. Do I think they could have done so? Yes, but there's no proof that they did. Choosing subjects because they were poor, Black, and mostly illiterate, not informing the subjects of the nature of the experiment, and withholding treatment once effective treatments were discovered is horrific enough on its own. This one event has made trust of government-led medical initiatives a real challenge in Black communities. That has led to more deaths and illnesses over the years, up to now including flu shots and the COVID vaccine. It was an absolutely AWFUL thing to do, but as a Black man, I want the criticism of it to be accurate, factual, and backed-up with evidence.
Load More Replies... Freya the Wanderer 1 year ago
Then there was the Japanese man who, after being exposed to heavy radiation, was kept alive for almost three months, in constant agony, so doctors could study the effects of radiation on his body.
MaximumKarmaSaint 1 year ago
This was called the "Syphilis" experiment, can't tell if this one was also Tuskegee or not.
Nelson Álvarez Sáez 1 year ago
And they infected New York gay men with HIV for the same reason
#19
The war in Ukraine started in 2014 but the media reports that it started in 2022.
Dragons Exist 1 year ago
I keep thinking that it's from 2022, but I also keep finding Imgur comments from 2014-2022 about it
Kangaroo 1 year ago (edited)
I was in Ukraine in 2016. The Canadian government had travel warnings for citizens - be cautious, always keep your documents on you, find the nearest Canadian/British/Aussie embassies so you can go there in an emergency, etc. I was in Kyiv and it seemed fairly peaceful to walk around but they had a lot going on in 2014 and there were armed guards everywhere. I hope I can go back some day, the people there were so kind to me. I hope they made it somewhere safe.
KillerKiwi 1 year ago
Yup. And it was everywhere, all people were talking about for a little over a month, and then it wasn’t interesting anymore and it was rarely ever brought up.
#20
Around a month ago russian state media got caught spending millions on american YouTubers to ensure they are worried about immigration n s**t. Tim pool, dave Rubin. .
Nils Skirnir 1 year ago
Russian oligarchs were the prime investors in PayPal, which gave us a whole slew of ultra right wing billionaires as Thiel and Musk
Rayne OfSalt 1 year ago
Russian oligarchs funded most of Elongated Muskrat's twitter takeover as well.
Load More Replies... Nimitz 1 year ago
Russia has been working on this for a long time. They invest in troll farms and domestic influencers the world over to drive the narrative to the right. They want conservatives to take over in every country. The far right is making gains in almost every developed country due to this influence. The "me first" isolationist policies are helpful in preventing the world from standing up to Russian aggression, but it's also about advancing the conservative anti-2SLGBTQIA+ anti-immigrant anti-progress agenda. The cold war never really ended
David 1 year ago
And according to the CIA nearly 2/3 of online activity pushing the 2020 riots came from Russia. In 2016 Russia actually spent equal on both sides (see CIA and FBI declassified documents from the congressional hearing. Russia doesnt care about one side or the other, they care purely about causing chaos in the US and pushing it by whatever means necessary.
HolyDiver 1 year ago
The amount of people on BP who don't have a clue that they themselves are victims of the same propaganda. Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, etc.. do not want a particular party in charge. They want to disrupt our entire political system and society. This has been happening for decades. They are getting great results.
Freya the Wanderer 1 year ago
So that's why tRump spewed that codswallop about immigrants eating dogs and cats.
#21
The CIA funded and organized the overturn of several south and Central American socialist governments.
Nils Skirnir 1 year ago
US is an empire and behaves no differently from other empires in history
Michael None 1 year ago
Cause "Socialism doesn't work". Except the US made sure it didn't because it would hurt big business'.
Freya the Wanderer 1 year ago
One of the reasons Venezuela is such a s--tshow is US interference in a socialist system that actually worked. Another is their over-reliance on income from oil.
Load More Replies... Luis Hernandez Dauajare 1 year ago
Operation Condor. The US government also funded the School of the Americas as a counterinsurgency training facility. CIA also prepared Operation Northwoods. It was a program of false flag attacks, which including the bombing of the Mercury Space Program, killing astronaut John Glenn, shooting down a US commercial airliner carrying college students, and attacking Cuban-American business in Miami to pin the attacks on Cuba, so the United States could have an excuse for an invasion. President Kennedy vetoed the operation, a little before his assassination, BTW.
Xenia Harley 1 year ago
Like Pinochet who was one of the most awful human beings ever. US government helped get him in power and supported his regime. Side note, "Unhumans" is a book J.D. Vance wrote a promotional blurb for. In case you need further proof what an awful human he is.
Forrest Hobbs 1 year ago
I never would have thought I'd say anything in favour of Augusto Pinochet, but I will now: he was nothing like the most awful human beings ever. If you think he was, you have no idea how bad people have been.
Load More Replies... #22
Your iPhone is designed to start getting worse as soon as the new models come out.
I remember this being a big deal like 7 or 8 years ago. Someone can fact check me as I'm hazy on the details, but I believe its related to the battery. Every year, the same week that the new iPhone comes out, the latest iOS becomes available for download. The new iOS is not optimized for your current device's battery, and as such the phone compromises performance in order to maintain a similar battery life. Coupled with the normal wear and tear on the battery, your phone will start sucking just so the battery can last a little longer.
Rayne OfSalt 1 year ago
It's not designed to get worse, apple software techs make firmware patches that degrade your phone's performance. Which is actually worse.
Beak Hookage 1 year ago
My last phone wasn't an iPhone, but after I'd had it for a few years I noticed more and more apps were suddenly becoming "incompatible" and couldn't be updated. If I hadn't come into some extra cash and decided to buy a new phone, the old one would have become all but useless sooner or later anyway.
George Costanza 1 year ago
Yet all my iPhones have lasted 5+ years with minimal problems. I'm only on my third iPhone/smartphone, the 12, and it has zero problems. Nothing seems demonstrably worse in any way from when I bought it.
Nimitz 1 year ago
This was their "final" update to ios 10 for most original Apple products. They are solid state devices and capable of lasting for decades. The firmware update massively downclocked the CPUs and made it so most of the devices can't even load a modern webpage. There are also multiple thread interrupts and other issues that prevent the devices from working properly. Apple was fined about $700 million for the fraud, which was much less than they earned from selling replacement devices.
5kfdvp8yjj 1 year ago
Well… I don’t know, can only speak from my own experience, but I just swapped a 12 Pro for a 16 Pro and both run the latest iOS beta. The 12 still works great and I will be passing it to our daughter. We’ve been passin along Apple devices to younger family for years and they keep working fine. Occasionally we’ve replaced batteries, but not a big deal
Anna Drever 1 year ago
I have an iPhone 8. At the time I bought it it had the best battery life of the iPhones, I think. Don’t hold me to it, it was a log time ago. I almost never update it, and certainly not my iPad. I’m going to get my money’s worth out of the durned things.
#23
Operation Northwoods
I believe it was called, back in the day was WILD.
The US government tried to plan a false flag attack on US soil as justification to officially declare war on Cuba.
They tried to make people look crazy or make us think "the government would never do that to us" then it turned out they actually wanted to do it/became public knowledge.
Lizzie Andricks 1 year ago
in the words of wendigoon, "if your first thought is 'the government wouldn't do that to us': yes they would."
Mike Loux 1 year ago
They would, and chances are, they have already tried several times.
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Enoch is Enoch 1 year ago
They've been doing this kind of thing for decades - problem - reaction - solution, The government ARE the problem.
KillerKiwi 1 year ago
The USS Maine blew up near Cuba and we blamed it on Spain, even though it was probably a boiler exploding or something like that. But we declared war on them anyway. Which is, if I remember correctly, similar to the way that the Vietnam war started.
Sven Horlemann 11 months ago
What N*zi Germany did with Poland "Now we strike back!" - to cover up their invasion.
#24
The Greenbrier Bunker. People love conspiracies about huge underground complexes built for the rich and famous to survive nuclear fallouts (think Denver airport), and that's *exactly what Greenbrier is*. The bunker was built under the Greenbrier Resort for congresspeople to escape to, and was kept a secret for 30 years, even though people suspected ("why's there a 7,000 foot air strip for a town of 3,000 people?"). For the entire time it was functional, every congressperson was assigned a bunk. These days you can take tours, and I'm sure we'll hear about the next bunker once it's defunct.
Bob Brooce 1 year ago
The Greenbrier is a legitimate luxury resort that was originally built in 1913. It just happens to be the location chosen for the bunker because several factors made it a good location. The bunker may have played a role in the airport's construction, but not long after the initial 6000' runway was built there were routine commercial flights using 737s that needed that distance for takeoff. The region has long been a tourist destination, and Lewisburg (a few miles closer to the airport than the Greenbrier) has been the site of the WV state fair since about 10 years before the bunker was built, and was preceded by almost 100 years of annual regional fairs.
Beak Hookage 1 year ago
Then once the dust settles the political elites emerge into a world where they can't survive anyway because all the people they once relied on to keep them fed and comfortable were left behind to die. Actually that would make for a good short story now I think about it.
#25
The pentagon has an insane number of bathrooms because as they were building it, the segregation of bathrooms ended.
ravn 1 year ago
We could flush all the toilets at the same time, rendering the military-industrial complex higgledy-piggledy.
Bisha Moten 1 year ago
This isn't true. The pentagon was built in the 1940's, during WW2. Segregation of bathrooms didn't end until 1964. Some 20 odd years after the building was completed.
#26
Government Surveillance: Whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in 2013 that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was conducting mass surveillance on citizens, collecting data from internet communications, phone calls, and other sources.
maswartz 1 year ago
Again, anyone who was paying attention when the Patriot Act was signed knew that was going to be the case.
UKGrandad 1 year ago
Did you know that the name, USA PATRIOT Act, is an acronym? Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.
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#27
Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Confirmed decades later by the ex secretary of defense as being entirely false, consequences of the incident were utterly appalling.
James Doe 1 year ago
False claims to justify the US war in Vietnam. "The National Security Agency, an agency of the US Defense Department, had deliberately skewed intelligence to create the impression that an attack had been carried out." [of north Vietnamese military attacking US Navi ships] "The resolution served as Johnson's legal justification for deploying U.S. conventional forces to South Vietnam and the commencement of open warfare against North Vietnam." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident
James Doe 1 year ago
On that note, whoever doesn't know about the false flag attack that started of the second world War : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident
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ArcanaPanda 1 year ago
I believe one of the generals or other military officers who helped plan or execute the Gulf of Tonkin incident happened to be the father of The Doors' lead singer Jim Morrison, which has led conspiracy theorists to claim that his band was a government ploy to funnel '60s revolutionary energy and thought away from the government and into entertainment. (Note: I can't see myself believing that theory, just repeating what some people believe.)
KillerKiwi 1 year ago
Again, same thing happened way earlier in Cuba and we declared war on Spain.
#28
Amelia Earhart landed on an uninhabited Pacific island and died as a castaway, making distress calls for days that were initially acted upon, then later disavowed by the Navy as 'hoaxes' after their botched search failed to find the plane.
Three years later, bones were found by the British military on the island next to parts of a woman's shoe. The bones were misidentified as male by an unqualified examiner and then lost. Measurements of the bones were later unearthed from the British records and when run through modern forensics were proven to be Northern European female.
Bob Brooce 1 year ago
The reason that this one sounds like bat s**t crazy nonsense is because it's bat s**t crazy nonsense.
brookeannsimmer 1 year ago
I mean, the plane likely crashed in the ocean and all, but if you research it the odds aren't too insane
Load More Replies... #29
That the Ministry of Information in the UK spread misinformation that eating lots of carrots could improve night vision during WWII. They made this up to confuse the Germans. They had a new radar tech that allowed them to pinpoint German bombers from greater distances than before, and the carrot story was a ruse.
That said, I don't know what's true on the internet these days, so I'm half waiting for the comment that this story in itself was a ruse...
UKGrandad 1 year ago
Partly true, although the reason for promoting carrots was nothing to do with RADAR (Germans also ate carrots and would know the claims were exaggerated). It was simply because of food rationing. Carrots are cheap, plentiful, easy to grow and healthy, high in vitamins and natural sugars. Encouraging kids to eat them was simply a way of maintaining health among children.
Taibhse Sealgair 1 year ago (edited)
IIRC, the story was promoted to explain not radar, but radar small enough to fit on night fighters. Specifically to help with night vision. Not to say the health/viability element isn't also true.
Load More Replies... Adam Jeff 1 year ago
What's interesting and less well known is that the Germans also had radar, and the British refused to believe it despite plenty of evidence. Essentially both sides developed it independently, and both thought themselves so intellectually superior that the other side couldn't possibly have done the same.
Forrest Hobbs 1 year ago
Both sides knew that the other side had radar perfectly well - they could detect each others' transmissions. The Germans attacked UK radar stations early on and concluded - based on inadequate evidence - that such attacks were a waste of time. Germany didn't have a proper national air defence system: its radar was purely localized, and the Germans had no conception of just how important radar was to UK air defence. The UK raided a German radar station in 1942 to learn its full details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Biting
Load More Replies... GenuineJen 1 year ago (edited)
Am I wrong in thinking this one is a little funny? Germans: How do you know all of this info? Spies? New tech? Ministry of Information: No way, it's uh... Carrots
#30
That the US Government actually had a Paranomal unit. That movie, "The Men Who Stare at Goats"? It was based on a true story - the US military was actively trying to see if they could find people with skills like stopping the heart of a goat, or dowsing, or psychic spying.
The whole thing pretty much fell apart when it was deemed that the people participating were not very effective (if you have to stare at a goat for hours in order to get it to fall over and die, how are they supposed to make use of it for assassinations?)
But, bottom line, it DID exist. Same with the Germans having a paranormal unit during the 40's. They believed in acquiring the Spear of Destiny because Mr. Mustache believed it would help him win the war, along with other Occult stuff. That's partly what the Wolfenstein games have made popular...
Luis Hernandez Dauajare 1 year ago
I believe that part of Project Stargate. Also, Project MK Ultra dabbled in extrasensorial perception and other paranormal "habilities".
#31
The CIA fed unreasonable amounts of d***s to people to document the effects and search for new weapons
I can't imagine taking heroic doses of LSD and then getting grilled by government scientists for days.
MaximumKarmaSaint 1 year ago
I was going to talk about this! They did at least 3 experiments involving LSD, the most famous one (which ABSOLUTELY sounds like an conspiracy) was "Project MK Ultra" in which they gave d***s to subjects and then made them watch U.S propaganda, to see if they could quite literally mind control them. There was an extension of this called "Project Midnight Climax" where the same thing happened but they lured innocent people off the streets to test it. The final one was labeled "Tusko the Elephant" in which they took an elephant, (Named Tusko) and fed him 300 milligrams of LSD (3000 times the normal dose for a human) to see if they could produce the feeling of "Musth", unfortunately, Tusko just died.
#32
In the Tuskegee experiment, hundreds of African American men were purposely selected, deceived and intentionally given fake syphilis treatments. 102 of them died.
#33
The government doesn’t let you accumulate assets when on welfare because they want you easily controlled and always poor.
Bob Brooce 1 year ago
Right. Because there's no way it could be explained by moron politicians that think having a reliable car and a few bucks to cover unexpected expenses means you're doing well enough that you don't deserve public assistance.
Michael None 1 year ago
To quote George Carlin "The upper class is there to take everything, the middle class is there to pay for everything, the lower class is there to scare the s**t out of the middle class to keep them working hard."
#34
The food pyramid was known to be wrong and detrimental to health but there was money to be made selling grain based products.
James Doe 1 year ago
I think a huge issue with it is the misconception of what is deemed "bread" (and "pasta"?) in some parts of the world. In Europe and especially Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Czech Republic,.. Bread is actually really healthy*. In most of rest if the world "bread" is either without nutritional value or basically candy (Toast bread with loads of sugar)
James Doe 1 year ago (edited)
*healthy : good ratio of nutritional value and ability to diminish feeling of hunger (quick and mid term) Of course everything in moderation. Much worse : White bread (baguette etc) but still not horrible. The opposite (actually unhealthy and should be treated as candy (doesn't kill you, but should be minimized)) : Toast bread, milk bread,.. (90+% of what I found in "Bakeries" and supermarkets in Canada, US, Ecuador, New Zealand,..)
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ArcanaPanda 1 year ago
It's not the amounts that's the problem, it's the percentage breakdowns of food groups that is. You can eat plenty of protein and fruits/vegetables, but you should be limiting your portions of breads, pastas, and other grains.
Load More Replies... #35
Look up the MKUltra project.
KillerKiwi 1 year ago (edited)
“Project MKUltra was a human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to develop procedures and identify d***s that could be used during interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.”
Load More Replies... #36
That your phone is listening to you. You talk about wanting a new pair of shoes, and suddenly every ad you see is for sneakers. It feels like a wild conspiracy... but algorithms and voice data collection are definitely a thing. Creepy, but real.
James Doe 1 year ago (edited)
Proven to be incorrect by very knowledgeable organisation's like the EFF (electronic frontier foundation) and CC (computer chaos club) that fight for privacy. BUT it's still the easiest explanation for those who can't grasp the power of meta data. There is no need for voice data collection when everyone just agrees to all optional (in EU at least) data tracking "services".
James Doe 1 year ago (edited)
Simple Example: Meta (formerly known as Facebook) is one of the two biggest online advertisers. It owns WhatsApp, hence owns one of the most valuable data assets through the phone books that are willingly shared by the users (and unwillingly by those who don't even use the app, but are part of others phone books): the web of connections of people. Hence you talk to someone, that someone looks for sneakers, meta assumes you might be interested as well. (almost all apps talk to meta by the way, unless you actively block those connections. Hence meta really doesn't care if you have a Facebook account or if you use it)
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Luke Branwen 1 year ago
I'm an English tutor. One time, I told my group of students a fun fact about how elephant skulls were mistaken for Cyclops skulls. Later that day, I got a facebook ad for a museum showing an elephant skull and this exact piece of trivia.
ADJ 1 year ago (edited)
I had two examples of this being true. One is when I was talking with my friend and he asked me for a recomendation of a new laptop - I only said the name of the laptop verbally, and never entered it in any search engine or looked it up, and boom, 2 hours later string of ads for this exact laptop shows up on my phone. . Second time I was on the phone with my coworker and he said to me he is on a construction site of new warehouse for SomeBigCompany, a name which i never heard before, because while it is a big and knows company it is not in my field of work. Boom, next day ads for SomeBigCompany started showing up on my phone.
Load More Replies... Nils Skirnir 1 year ago
Also tracks eyeball time. I.e. if dwell on an image, will start sending ads about that
James Doe 1 year ago
It tracks attention time, not eyeball time. Which can mean that you stop on a picture to wipe your behind and meta / Google analytics /... Thinks you must be really into that.
Load More Replies... Montanavanna 1 year ago
OK what I want to know is how can my phone tell when I am just thinking about something? I will think of something unrelated to whatever I am viewing then all of a sudden I get content of that thing. I don't like it!
Nimitz 1 year ago
The active mic is justified because the phone/home speaker needs to hear you say "Okay Google or Hey Alexa". This is why speech-to-text is so good these days and also how it works. The audio is sent to their data centers, converted to text (accurately), logged, and analyzed. The audio transcripts of everything you do in a month only takes up a few megabytes this way and allows them to keep a record for analysis and exploitation
#37
The "Got Milk" campaign is a government funded psy-op to help prop up the American dairy industry.
Heras buddy 1 year ago
It was an add campaign started by a dairy farmers co-op. I believe it was either California or Wisconsin. It was successful enogh that the National Milk Producerss made it a nationwide campaign. NPR had an hour long show all about it, it had nothing to do with government.
#38
The UK government secretly tested biological weapons on its own coastal towns to see how far they could make it inland.
Jrog 1 year ago (edited)
It's not like they spread biological weapons though. They used (mostly) harmless chemical compounds that had similar distribution dynamics and could be easily tracked by their fluorescence. The chemical used, Zinc-Cadmium sulfide, is harmless on small dose exposure, and was used for the same scope by the US and Canadian governments. They also ran tests with biological agents, by using different types of common bacteria to mimic anthrax. Multiple inquiries -both in the USA and UK- confirmed that the experiment were harmless enough and spread enough to pose no risk to public health.
Forrest Hobbs 1 year ago
The only UK government testing of biological weapons was anthrax on Gruinard Island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruinard_Island#Biological_warfare_testing. It was supposed to have been "safe" for the mainland, to which I say "Yeah, right."
Load More Replies... #39
Almost everything the CIA did in the 60s and 70s.
#40
Toss me any conspiracy theory about the government or corporations that doesn’t have to do with cryptids/aliens and I will generally agree with it at this point. I think you need to have a borderline mental handicap to trust the government or any corporation.
#41
Look up a phone called ANOM
FBI basically sold prehacked phones to crime organizations.
#42
Tiktok is a Chinese Trojan horse. In the future a lot of damage is going to happen to these young tiktokers when they try to run for political office, or try to work for a federal agency that requires secret clearance. If China sees them as a threat, they'll expose all their tiktok app Intel and all the data they've stolen in the background without the user's knowledge...and yes, I prefer a western company doing that to than a Chinese company....would you install a North Korean app? No? Well China is run exactly like north Korea. Companies answer to 1 person only.
Nimitz 1 year ago
I finally tried TikTok. I was astounded by how much of it is just teenagers engaging in what is definitely soft-core pornography. Slutty dances and pretending to give handjobs/blowjobs while moving to music. I looked around to see how f****d up things were, then deleted the app forever and bleached my eyes. It's not everything on the app, but it sure as f**k looked like a solid 10-20% of the content was just sexualizing children. I will never go back
Rayne OfSalt 1 year ago
Like meta, twitter, reddit and all the other socmed apps aren't doing the exact same thing?
#43
The CIA has been kidnapping and torturing (“experimenting”) on people ever since it was formed, and is likely still doing so.
#44
There are entire caves of cheese owned and operated by the US government.
MaximumKarmaSaint 1 year ago
I'd try it, it would probably be better than Kraft Singles "cheese".
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General Anaesthesia 1 year ago (edited)
To take the cheese off the market. There's too much production so storing cheese raises market prices for big agricultural corporations?
Load More Replies... #45
The company that is making the super secure encrypted phone for international criminals is actually a front and is a backdoor to the us government.
Listen to the podcast called search engine (former reply all host pj vojt) to hear the story (sorry for spoiling it. ) “What’s the best phone to do crimes on?” is the name of the episode.
M O'Connell 1 year ago
If I'm not mistaken the best phone to do crimes on has always been a pay phone.
#46
The Canadian government actually tried to fry peoples brains with ECT in order to fix their depression, thinking that the wiping of neurons that have a negative emotional event will fix their depression. Instead, people ended up losing their memory, suffered inconsistent, and forgot their name, all while still having depression.
This was in part funded by the CIA in an effort to understand memory alteration. .
UKGrandad 1 year ago
I think they missed a word. The rest is about memory so I'm guessing it should have read something like 'losing their memory, suffered inconsistent recall, and forgot their name'.
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Dragon mama 1 year ago
ECT is very much still an active treatment, reserved for particularly persistent cases.
ArcanaPanda 1 year ago
This basically is a rehash of the "Look up the MKULTRA project" post above. I believe one of the subjects ended up being Margaret Trudeau, Pierre's wife and Justin's mother, who exhibited signs of mental illness even in public life (see the scandal she caused at a state dinner hosted by Richard and Pat Nixon at the White House).
#47
Israel knew the USS Liberty was an American ship.
Skogsrået 1 year ago
Israel is comitting genocide in Palestina, the victims have become the perpetrators and nobody says or does anything about it. If you dare to critize them you are labeled as an antisemit and ostracized by everyone. They are now attacking and killing innocent people outside their borders and nobody bats an eye.
Nimitz 1 year ago
A large portion of the support for this comes from Christian Evangelicals. They believe the Rapture is coming and that the more death and destruction in the middle east, the better, because that means Jesus is coming soon to reward them. And let's all take a moment to remember that it's being carried out by a minority conservative government. The progressives in and outside Israel keep trying to put a stop to this, but they are shouted down at every turn. Nations do not make war anymore, it is just political parties
Load More Replies... David 1 year ago
This has long been debunked, thanks to 8 total investigations between 1967 and 1993 from the CIA , NSA, DoD, US Navy, 2 Congressional, a senate, and a Independent US investigations. In fact the CIA had their Israel liaison at military HQ at the time of the attack and his report played a big part. Further, Israel asked the US navy if they had any ships in that area before the attacks and the US Navy confirmed to Israel there wasnt, because the US navy thought the Liberty was 100 miles away from there where they ordered her, unaware the NSA, who she was loaned to, ordered them into the combat zone. There is a zero perecent chance Israel knew it was American, and we have all the reports and investigations (not to mention recordings of Israeli military radio chats at the time) that counter it. The KGB worked with American Neo-Nazi groups in the 1970s and 80s to push this.
Rayne OfSalt 1 year ago
Israel's been destroying civilian ships and slaughtering civilians for decades. Of course they knew a ship called the USS Liberty was an american ship.
#48
Free school lunch programs are being pushed in many areas by the large multinational corporations that own the contracts.
Sodexo is a multinational French company worth over 17 billion.
Compass is actually owned by chartwells which is UK based.
I am all for making sure kids eat healthy food and they should not have to pay for it.
But these companies don’t promote the healthy part.
They also do a lot of jail contracts as well.
Next time you hear think of the children look for the company who will provide the items.
Edit: **I am pro free lunch for kids** I am just anti large corporations making money off our government. That is the point some people are not getting.
GenuineJen 1 year ago
Pizza was considered a "vegetable" in 2011 thanks to certain guidelines.
M O'Connell 1 year ago
In my part of the US breaded french fries technically counted as a vegetable too.
Load More Replies... May 1 year ago (edited)
Dunno, my high school cafeteria was provided for by Sodexo. Not as tasty as restaurant meal, but you'd always have 2 choices of mixed salad for starters, vegetables/rice and meat or fish for main, cheese plater or dessert (fruit, yogurt or cake), and a piece of bread. No sodas, no juices, and french fries like once a month (best time !). I guess it depends on what 'package' the school chose and what it could afford to pay.
Nimitz 1 year ago
I'll always hate Chartwells. They owned the cafeteria when I went to the University of Calgary. If you live in the dorms, it is required that you have a meal plan. When I went in 2003 the cheapest plan was $1600/semester. Many students bought a kettle/microwave and tried to live on ramen thinking they could get unspent money back. Nope. The kicker was most of the program was not refundable. I spent about $600 of my plan and when I asked for my balance to be carried over or get a refund, I was told we can't have one for the first $1200 of the plan and that balances do not carry over into the next semester. So I had to buy bags of chips and bottles of pop at retail price through the cafeteria to try to get some value back. Dozens of 591 mL bottles of pop and 50g bags of chips. None of us used our meal plans because the food offered was pure garbage. One time they had mac'n cheese that was just penne with Kraft Singles slices melted on top...
#49
A main ingredient in the flavor of Coca-cola still only comes from processing cocoa leaves into c*caine. The extract goes to the Coca-cola flavor profile, and the c*caine that is produced as a by-product gets sold to the health industry for medicinal use. There is only one company in the US authorized to do this that has had a special arrangement with the DEA for nearly 100 years - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Company.
Justin Tyme 1 year ago
This one was never a conspiracy theory. i.e. it was not done secretly. Where do you think the "Coca" in "Coca-Cola" came from?
Annik Perrot 1 year ago
TIL that cocoa leaves could be processed into à dr*g. Well, chocolate *is* additive/j
Mere Cat 1 year ago
It is used as a numbing agent, like for people that are allergic to lidocaine.
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#51
Canada is attempting to increase its population to 100M by 2100 despite not even having enough homes for its current population look up the Century Initiative.
Nimitz 1 year ago
This is muddled. The birth rate in Canada is down to 1.2 per couple. 2.1-2.3 babies per couple is needed to maintain population and provide growth. So we need to rely on immigration. Buuuut every member of parliament owns a residence in Ottawa/their home town/the major city in their province, so they are HUGELY incentivized to do nothing about the housing crisis. They all sit back and profit off the exploitation of the people via REITs and corrupt landlords. Stable growth should see us hit 50 million by 2050 and 100 million by 2100, but it will just further increase income disparity until or unless we implement socialized housing, but that can't happen without proportional representation.
Freya the Wanderer 1 year ago
I yi yi yi yi - when did Canada become the USA?
Load More Replies... #52
The Black Sox Scandal was a major sports controversy that rocked the baseball world in 1919. It involved members of the Chicago White Sox, one of the best teams in the League at the time, who were accused of throwing the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. The scandal involved eight players, including Shoeless Joe Jackson, who allegedly accepted bribes from gamblers to intentionally lose games.
At first, many people thought the scandal was just a conspiracy theory as the players denied any wrongdoing, The team was arguably in the top position, some of the accused were insanely popular, and some fans believed that the accusations were just a way to tarnish the team's reputation. However, an investigation uncovered evidence of a complex scheme involving gamblers, team owners, and players. The investigation revealed that the players had definitely accepted bribes The tune of a couple million today.
I'm not a huge sports fan at all but I am a history not and this was one of the most significant scandals in sports history and it changed a lot of things for the entire sport including getting a commissioner of baseball. Even though they were technically declared criminally innocent, all eight players involved were all banned for life and they will never be inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame despite repeated attempts to do so over the decades.
Rayne OfSalt 1 year ago
I can still remember when sports gambling was illegal, and the subject of a lot of cop action movies/tv shows.
MagicJacket 1 year ago
I might have taken the bribe like Joe did if I wasn't earning enough from baseball to even buy shoes.
#53
10x more people died from supply chain/inflation jolts in countries that suffer extreme starvation (not merely hunger) because of economic consequences of covid than covid itself even if you use the highest estimated covid deaths.
#54
Legolas only ever says five words to Frodo: "And you have my bow.".
#55
That most reddit mods are vindictive adult babies that shouldn't have any sort of 'power' whatsoever. They essentially slowly turn their subreddits into hugboxes due to social corruption and by virtue of being part of a niche community. Im not saying all, but I've definitely felt communities cave in on themselves as a result. Especially in esoteric nerd communities.
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What do you think ?
Nimitz 1 year ago
Why is Jameson Vitamins not on the list? In developed countries there are frequently government issued warnings about products from Jameson not having the advertised quantities they claim their supplements contain. But it's much worse than that. In the early 2000s company whistleblowers pointed out that supplements they shipped to undeveloped countries frequently contained none of the medical ingredients they were supposed to have. What they would do is lobby those countries to undermine their laws requiring that vitamin supplements actually contain vitamins, then ship them chalk pills. They are responsible for scamming millions of poor people around the world out of money for things that cost almost nothing to produce in the first place.
Justin Tyme 1 year ago
The US government created false documentation of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq to justify an invasion and help President George W. Bush establish his legacy as “The War President” as he liked to call himself at the time.
cugel. 1 year ago
My highly local CT: An auction house that operates in my city takes a huge commission from the buyer when the item sells. But they are the ones who also control the online auctions, and therefore have insider knowledge of all the bids. It would be trivially easy to insert bogus bids to pump up the sale price, and hence their kickback.
Justin Tyme 1 year ago
The term "conspiracy theory" does not automatically indicate a falsehood. Obviously many of them turned out to be true.
Justin Tyme 1 year ago
After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the USA used that incident to establish a permanent military presence in multiple countries in the Middle East region. The US, led by President George H.W. Bush, used a fraudulent media campaign to justify Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm AKA the Persian Gulf War. https://www.democracynow.org/2018/12/5/how_false_testimony_and_a_massive
Nimitz 1 year ago
Why is Jameson Vitamins not on the list? In developed countries there are frequently government issued warnings about products from Jameson not having the advertised quantities they claim their supplements contain. But it's much worse than that. In the early 2000s company whistleblowers pointed out that supplements they shipped to undeveloped countries frequently contained none of the medical ingredients they were supposed to have. What they would do is lobby those countries to undermine their laws requiring that vitamin supplements actually contain vitamins, then ship them chalk pills. They are responsible for scamming millions of poor people around the world out of money for things that cost almost nothing to produce in the first place.
Justin Tyme 1 year ago
The US government created false documentation of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq to justify an invasion and help President George W. Bush establish his legacy as “The War President” as he liked to call himself at the time.
cugel. 1 year ago
My highly local CT: An auction house that operates in my city takes a huge commission from the buyer when the item sells. But they are the ones who also control the online auctions, and therefore have insider knowledge of all the bids. It would be trivially easy to insert bogus bids to pump up the sale price, and hence their kickback.
Justin Tyme 1 year ago
The term "conspiracy theory" does not automatically indicate a falsehood. Obviously many of them turned out to be true.
Justin Tyme 1 year ago
After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the USA used that incident to establish a permanent military presence in multiple countries in the Middle East region. The US, led by President George H.W. Bush, used a fraudulent media campaign to justify Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm AKA the Persian Gulf War. https://www.democracynow.org/2018/12/5/how_false_testimony_and_a_massive
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