considered to be no threat at all and will be instructed as to how to behave and will most likely do whatever they are told. Unfortunately there are too many of these to be effectively controlled, so many will be killed or starved.
Black List—I have recently heard that the red and blue lists have been combined into one, and is called the Black List. All black listed citizens will be marked for execution.
Trying to prove or disprove the existence of FEMA camps and coffins is one of the internet’s busiest industries. But:
Fact: The plastic “coffins” in Madison, Georgia, are actually burial liners, used to protect caskets when placed underground. The much snapped depot in Georgia is actually the storage facility of the manufacturer, Vantage Products. And there are more in the region of 50,000 rather than half a mill of the liners.
Fact: Most of the so-called concentration camps are nothing of the sort. One camp much featured on conspiracy sites, Beech Grove, is actually an Amtrak repair depot.
Fact: FEMA has in the past (and might well in the present) enjoyed powers prejudicial to civil liberties. When President Reagan was considering invading Nicaragua, he issued a series of executive orders that provided, in the event of mass internal dissent, for the suspension of the constitution, the imposition of martial law, the construction of mass prison camps, and the turning over of government to the president—and FEMA. Other scenarios in which FEMA has been touted as playing a leading repressive role are combating a national uprising by black Americans and incarcerating Arab Americans sympathetic to al-Qaeda. It should be pointed out that sections of the American establishment vigorously opposed the granting of Draconian powers to the Agency. At the time of the Reagan initiative the then attorney-general, William French Smith, wrote to the national security adviser, Robert McFarlane: “I believe that the role assigned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the revised Executive Order exceeds its proper function as a co-ordinating agency for emergency preparedness… this department and others have repeatedly raised serious policy and legal objections to an ‘emergency czar’ role for FEMA.”
Since 2003, FEMA has been part of the Department of Homeland Security. New notepaper did not mean new efficiency: the agency was much criticized for its slowness and incompetence following Hurricane Katrina. Which must be a crumb of comfort to those who fear FEMA’s intentions. If FEMA can’t set up tents after high winds and high water could it actually round anybody up in a national emergency?
B.A. Brooks,
Linda A. Burns,
“The Evidence: Debunking FEMA Camp Myths”, 10 April 2009, www.popularmechanics.com
FOO FIGHTERS
Is it a bird? A plane? No, it’s a Foo Fighter.
In late 1944 Reuters press agency reported that strange spheres, resembling the glass balls that adorn Christmas trees, “have been seen hanging in the air over German territory, sometimes singly, sometimes in clusters. They are coloured silver and are apparently transparent.”
Numerous sightings of these weird balls were recorded by Allied aircrews throughout German airspace, and later in the war over the skies of Nippon. Dubbed “Foo Fighters” (from the French
And there the matter lay, until conspiracist Renato Vesco decided that the Foo Fighter was actually the forerunner of the Kugelblitz, the Ball Lightning Fighter. And then “alternative historian” Jim Keith determined that the Kugelblitz was actually a… flying saucer, launched from sites in Prague and Breslau in early 1945. A “confidential Italian document” given to Keith by an unnamed, untraceable source described a dogfight between a flying saucer and Allied planes: “A strange flying machine, hemispherical, or at any rate circular, in shape, attacked them at a fantastic speed, destroying them in a few seconds without using any guns.”
Without using any guns? Surely only ray-wielding aliens didn’t need guns to destroy… and so, by a false syllogism, other conspiracy theorists came to believe that the Foo Fighters were actually helmed by aliens.
Of course,
Clever chaps those aliens. But not, seemingly, clever enough to win the war on behalf of their earthling Nazi collaborators.
Henry Stevens,
FORD PINTO
Named after the horse, the Pinto was Ford’s rival to the Toyota Corolla, the Chevy Vega and VW Beetle in the US in the seventies. With gas prices on the up, manufacturers were desperate for a slice of the “runabout” end of the car market. Yet were Ford so desperate that they knowingly hid deadly design faults on the Pinto?
One evening in 1972, Lily Gray, pulled on to a Minneapolis highway in her new Ford Pinto. Alongside her in the car was a young boy, Richard Grimshaw. As Gray entered the merge lane, her car stalled. Another car bumped into her Pinto at twenty-eight miles per hour. The Pinto’s gas tank ruptured, then the car went up in a ball of flames. Gray died hours later; Grimshaw suffered burns over much of his body.
The Pinto lacked a heavyweight bumper, or proper reinforcement between the rear panel and the petroleum tank. So when a Pinto was rear-ended in even a minor fashion, as with Gray, the fuel tank ruptured. The Pinto had another flaw: due to its cracker-box construction the doors jammed easily when heated.
The Pinto was a firetrap on Goodyears.
When Gray’s Pinto exploded into flames in Minneapolis, Ford already knew about the Pinto’s fuel tank defect. Indeed, the company had been alerted to the weakness during pre-production, but, because retooling the Pinto lines to fit a safer tank would cost money, did nothing about it. As many as five hundred people may have died in Pinto explosions, but all the while Ford kept schtum about the fuel tank problem. The truth only came to light because of a 1977 report by Mark Dowie in the muckraking magazine
Against this, modifying the tank of 11 million Pintos at $11 a go would cost $121 million.
The bottom line ruled: Ford decided it would rather pay out for death, damage and injury than save its customers lives. When Richard Grimshaw took Ford to court, the California Court of Appeal upheld punitive damages of $3.5 million against the company, partly because Ford had been aware of the design defects but had determined against altering the design (see Document, p.159).
The