Tag Archives: Conspiracy

NZ’s Tampa and a week of political and media spin

Posted on by Brad Heap

On Monday night news broke that a boat of asylum seekers supposedly destined for New Zealand had been detained in Indonesian waters. Immediately the NZ Prime Minister, John Key, came out with a hard-line ‘we won’t take illegal boat people’ stance. Since then the continuing news stories on both sides of the Tasman has left me convinced that the majority of this story is spin and the group of asylum seekers currently being used as political prawns by both politicians and the media.

Over the last week I have been collecting some of the news stories to piece together the bigger picture, starting with Tuesday:

‘No evidence’ asylum seekers heading to NZ (stuff.co.nz)

New Zealand Immigration Minister Jonathon Coleman said there was “no concrete evidence” that the Sri Lankan people were actually trying to reach New Zealand.

“When they had a look at the boat, there was no evidence that they were truly intending to come here, so I’m sure there is a range of things that the people on that boat are trying to do to leverage their position,” Coleman said.

“While there is obviously the capacity for them to come to New Zealand, we feel in this case it was pretty unlikely that that was their intended destination.”

“The reality is that you would expect there to be things like maps on board, charts that would indicate that that was their true destination and I haven’t had any information that any of that material has been found on that boat.”

Asked why they had been holding signs indicating they wanted to come to New Zealand, Coleman said: “Obviously, if they could create a wave of political pressure to come here, I’m sure they would be pretty keen to get to somewhere but look, they won’t be coming to New Zealand.”

So on Monday night we had Key telling us these people were definitely coming, however, on Tuesday morning we have the immigration minister telling us they weren’t. What is most interesting is the last line where Coleman even suggests these people were set up to create a political storm.

Of course Key wasn’t happy about his hard-line stance being undermined by the truth so he came out with this gem (via nzherald on Wednesday):

“He hasn’t had an intelligence briefing, he’s had a briefing from his officials, there’s a difference.”

One wonders if his intelligence briefing was run by his political and media advisors… anyway… this hardline approach by Key then saw all the vested interest groups and individuals (Amnesty International, Kiwiblog, Helen Clark, etc) come out to add their 2c into the debate.

The most interesting of these comments came from the United Sri Lanka Association who claimed Sri Lanka was “as peaceful as Wellington” and “There’s no violence there right now, the violence there caused by Tamil terrorism has been quelled, it’s been put to rest two years ago.”

Well if this was the case then you would expect Sri Lanka to be somewhere near NZ in the Global Peace Index right? Last year NZ ranked 2nd most peaceful country in the world, Sri Lanka ranked 126th, and as for their argument it has improved, sure the year before they ranked 133rd, but the year before that they ranked 125th so their peace ranking isn’t improving, and it is certainly nowhere near the same as NZ.

Also by this time the Australian media commentators had picked up on the NZ asylum boat story claiming it as proof that the Gillard Government’s Malaysia Solution was working. The best of these stories was the SMH with “Message received: asylum seekers give Australia a wide berth” which claimed that the boat supposedly headed to NZ may have also tried to go to Canada!

Then yesterday the nzherald had an article about how a person who came from the Tampa has been caught up in a car rebirthing ring.  A story that was worded in such a way that it clearly made out that this guy was bad because of the country he had came from – not because bad apples can occur in any country or situation.

And now a week after the story first broke, the Sunday Star Times is claiming they have got a reporter onboard and reporting there is a stalemate going on about where these people should go… the saga continues…

Right now there is a conspiracy filled cynic in me saying the Nats and the media is feeding us bullshit. Yes there is a refugee boat in Indonesia, yes these people are in need – and we should help them!

But instead there is a whole lot of media and political spin going on to make it look like these people are evil zombies out to destroy everything we hold dear. Of course that is crap, but if you read enough stories about how these people will steal your cars, are secretly violent terrorists, and are so lazy they will use all your taxpayers’ dollars on welfare you’ll believe it right?

Climategate. Yeah Right.

Posted on by Brad Heap

I have been watching the whole climategate saga for a few weeks now. So far I have not blogged on it because I was hoping that it would either be shown to be such the stupid smokescreen that it really is, or that there would be some truth to it and there would be some form of outcome. However, as it stands at the moment both sides are claiming victory over a situation that has become very messy.

If you are not already up to play on the situation Wikipedia (as always) provides a good overview of the mess: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_e-mail_hacking_incident

In a nutshell: sometime in November (or earlier) the computers are the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were hacked and a large amount of emails and other data were then selective leaked onto the internet. The right wingers/nutcases/conspiracy theorist/deniers claim that this stolen data shows collusion amongst climate researchers in deliberately trying to prove climate change is man made when the data shows a decline in global temperatures. Of course this is complete and utter nonsense, the content of the emails that have been leaked are damaging to the reputation of a few scientists. However, they completely fail to prove any worldwide conspiracy.

There are two great articles that have been produced dismissing the points that have attempted to be made by climategate. The first is from New Scientist:

We can be 100 per cent sure the world is getting warmer

Forget about the temperature records compiled by researchers such as those whose emails were hacked. Next spring, go out into your garden or the nearby countryside and note when the leaves unfold, when flowers bloom, when migrating birds arrive and so on. Compare your findings with historical records, where available, and you’ll probably find spring is coming days, even weeks earlier than a few decades ago.

You can’t fake spring coming earlier, or trees growing higher up on mountains, or glaciers retreating for kilometres up valleys, or shrinking ice cover in the Arctic, or birds changing their migration times, or permafrost melting in Alaska, or the tropics expanding, or ice shelves on the Antarctic peninsula breaking up, or peak river flow occurring earlier in summer because of earlier snowmelt, or sea level rising faster and faster, or any of the thousands of similar examples.

Is it possible that tens of thousands of scientists have got it wrong? It is incredibly unlikely. The evidence that CO2 levels are rising is irrefutable, and the idea that rising levels lead to warming has withstood more than a century of genuine scientific scepticism.

The second is from the academic journal Nature:

The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda windfall (see page 551). To these denialists, the scientists’ scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial ‘smoking gun’: proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe.

This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country’s much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.

Back in New Zealand we have had our own little mini conspiracy theory with Ian Wishart among others trying to claim that NIWA have deliberately altered their data to artificially create a warming trend. The truth is they have deliberately altered their data but only to adjust changes in the physical locations of weather stations. NIWA has close to a 100 years of data and over time both the way in which you collect data and the instruments use change as a result the data collected by one method has to be adjusted to match up with the data collected through a different method. This is standard scientific practice. In fact if you didn’t do this any analysis done over time would be wrong! But because the scientists at NIWA have done the right thing the crazy climate change deniers are claiming a conspiracy.
So here we have NIWA with this plot of adjusted data:

and the deniers with this plot of unadjusted data:

The most interesting thing about both of these plots is in the end of both of them I can see an overall rise trending!

A few days ago NIWA responded to the nutcases who are claiming conspiracy everywhere by producing a plot of only the 11 weather stations that have not been moved or adjusted (see below) note that the rise is 1C and the P-Value (extremely small this an absolutely confirmed rise there is no arguing with it). Now the conspiracy crazies are claiming the graph should include all weather stations and thus a circle begins.

For more on the stupidity of Climategate there are some good blogs on Open Parachute:

Finally I will leave the last word with Jon Stewart’s take on the whole saga:

The conspiracy gets deeper

Posted on by Brad Heap

Last month I blogged on the missing Russian Cargo Ship. (http://www.brad.net.nz/blog/2009/08/conspiracy-anyone/)

Today the story gets deeper: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10595173

Voitenko posted an article about the ship’s disappearance on 8 August and later speculated that the ship might have been carrying a secret cargo, possibly weapons.

Russia’s government sent naval vessels to search for the ship in the Atlantic Ocean on 12 August.

Days later, the government said it had found the Arctic Sea and arrested eight hijackers but many questions remain.

Speaking to the BBC from Turkey, Voitenko said he had received a threatening phone call from someone he suggested may have been a member of Russia’s intelligence agency, the FSB.

Dubunking 9/11

Posted on by Brad Heap

In a weeks time it will be 8 years since the 2001 attacks on the states. Today the herald published a list of top 10 conspiracy theories: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10594797

It makes for interesting reading but the best link in it is a popular mechanics article on debunking 9/11 myths, the article is 4 years old but still very interesting: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html?page=1

Conspiracy Anyone?

Posted on by Brad Heap

Okay so first a grumble about the fact that NZ news media never seem to pick up the big international news stories… at least not for a few days anyway.

Has anyone seen the news that there is a missing Russian Ship in the Atlantic? Yes a cargo ship has vanished into nowhere. And now there is about 5 Russian warships hunting for it. And no this is not the plot from The Hunt for Red October this is reality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Arctic_Sea

The MV Arctic Sea is a timber-carrying cargo ship that disappeared between late July and early August 2009. It is owned by the Malta-based company Arctic Sea Ltd. and is operated by Solchart Management AB of Helsinki, Finland. On July 24, 2009, it was allegedly boarded by a group of men wearing police uniforms off the coast of Sweden, between the islands of Öland and Gotland. They left after about twelve hours, having searched the ship, removed some items and assaulted a few crew members. The incident was not immediately reported, and the ship continued to sail towards its destination in Algeria. However all contact with the ship was lost between July 30 and 31, and it never arrived in Algeria. On August 14 the ship was reportedly located near Cape Verde, but remains missing. Finnish Police stated on August 15 that a ransom, amounting to a “considerable amount”, has been demanded, but did not specify who is being extorted – the ship’s owner claims they have not received any ransom demand.

Okay now you have the back story, I have a question, and so does The Telegraph (UK) Newspaper:

How on earth has the ‘Arctic Sea’ vanished?

In the age of satellite technology, the disappearance of a 4,000-ton cargo ship raises more questions than it answers, reports Andrew Alderson

IT is nearly 100 metres long, more than 17 metres wide and weighs almost 4,000 tonnes. Yet, even in a hi-tech world of satellites and Google Earth, the Arctic Sea has vanished without trace in busy European shipping lanes.

A possible sighting of the Turkish-built “ghost ship” off the Cape Verde Islands was dismissed, meaning the disappearance of the cargo vessel has, in the words of one insurance expert, left “far more questions than answers”.

A huge international search is under way this weekend for the vessel, which vanished more than two weeks ago amid fears that pirates, similar to those now operating off Somalia, had seized the 15 Russian crew and its timber cargo valued at £1.3 million. Finnish police said they had received a ransom demand for a “large sum” of cash, but declined to give further details or say whether the demand was authentic.

Okay so story sounds okay so far, a little odd but okay.

The Arctic Sea set sail from Finland on July 23 and had been due to arrive in northern Algieria on August 3 or 4. However, there were unconfirmed reports that it had been boarded in Swedish waters by armed and masked men on July 24, although this was not said to have been notified to the authorities for several days.

So you get boarded but tell no one for a few days… odd.

The crew are known to have made contact with Dover coastguards on July 28, but at this point there had been no international alert over the “attack” and so there was no hunt for the ship. Two days later, the Arctic Sea was spotted in the Bay of Biscay and at 1.30am on the same day its AISLive gave off its last signal in the same area.

And then just continue as per normal…

However, shortly afterwards, the ship appears to have changed direction, apparently bearing towards the western Atlantic rather than Algiers.

And then vanish…

Solchart, the operator of the merchant vessel which flies under a Maltese flag and is based in Valetta, has blamed piracy for the ship’s disappearance. “My view is that it is most likely that the vessel has been hijacked,” said Viktor Matveyev, the director of the Finnish company.

Mikhail Voitenko, the editor of Russia’s Sovfracht maritime bulletin, has suggested that the ship might have been hijacked because it was carrying a “secret shipment”, such as drugs or arms, unknown to its crew or owners. “The only sensible answer is that the vessel was loaded with a secret cargo apart from timber,” he said.

Now that is starting to sound a little more believable given the circumstances.

Nato has reported that armed gangs have already seized 29 merchant ships this year and carried out 114 attacks – more than in the whole of last year.

However, Mr Davis, the British maritime security expert, thinks piracy on the high seas is unlikely. “I suspect this is either some sort of ‘inside job’ involving the crew, or it’s some sort of insurance or commercial dispute.”

So is it piracy or is it not piracy?

Mr Davis believes that the ship will be traced within days, and thinks its most likely destination is west Africa. “The vessel had just under 300 tonnes of fuel and it burns 13 tonnes of fuel a day. So it had sufficient for 40 days steaming. It would probably have had 30 to 60 days of food on board.”

He expects the ship to turn up, possibly as far south as Cameroon, in the next “48 to 100 hours” and that it will then be boarded by a foreign navy or police force. “The odds are it will have headed for somewhere like Sierra Leone,” Mr Davis said.

He speculated that it would be difficult for the vessel to be retrieved from such a remote, lawless area, where it might be kept until the financial, or other, demands of those controlling the ship were met.

Well if that is the case then my bet is it is piracy.

The ease with which large ships can travel around the world undetected has raised fears that al-Qaeda, or another terrorist group, could use a vessel packed with high explosives to mount a terrorist attack on a Western country, such as Britain or the US.

Dmitri Medvedev, the Russian President, is said to have “the situation under control,” according to his spokesman. He has ordered Anatoly Serdyukov, the Defence Minister, to take “all necessary steps” to find the ship and, if necessary, to free its crew.

All necessary steps? Makes it sound like it isn’t piracy but something much more sinister.

According to a state-run Russian news agency, the ship’s owners have not filed a claim with its insurer, Ingosstrakh. Vladimir Kleimenov, a spokesman for the insurers, said of the ship’s disappearance: “There are far more questions than answers.”

Odd.

On Friday, French officials were responsible for reports that the ship had been seen about 520 miles off the Cape Verde islands, a former Portuguese colony off Africa’s westernmost coast. However, Russian sources were dismissive of those reports yesterday.

Double odd. They don’t know where it is but are claiming that it has not been sighted? Weird.

To add to the puzzle, the Arctic Sea’s tracking system was reported to be broadcasting signals from the Bay of Biscay off France yesterday, according to the Russian maritime website, Sovfrakht. It said the signal appeared on a tracking service at about 8.30 am but added that it was not known if the AISLive equipment was still actually on the ship.

The Royal Navy has said that it has not been asked to get involved in the search. Source say its rules of engagement for international waters mean it could act only if there was evidence that the ship was about to be hijacked, or pirates were endangering lives on board.

But before it was being said it was pirates.

One senior shipping source said: “There is obviously lots of speculation. The fact that a ship is late is in itself not a huge story, but added to the fact that the vessel was ‘attacked’, and yet at the same time the owners are saying ‘don’t worry, it is sorted’, it is very odd. It is an old fashioned mystery.”

Conspiracy one thinks… I think there is a lot more to this then meets the eye. And I doubt it was just timber on board.

I will leave the final quote with Wikipedia:

The Jakobstad fire department conducted radiation measurements on August 14 at the departure pier of the ship, but the investigation was stopped by the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority, stating that there was no reason to conduct measurements.

Birthers Debunked Yet Again. NBC.

Posted on by Brad Heap

Okay a week or so ago I blogged about Jon Stewart and The Daily Show taking the mickey out of WND.com and a variety of other nutcases.

However the issue will just not go away so here is another news article that shows the reality of the situation.