So what conspiracy theories do you believe in?

I agree.

The bad elements will keep on their antics and the rest of the MSM will use the results (like Pittsburgh) to generate more news stories. A vicious circle.

In "The Obama Deception" (an Alex Jones movie), Webster Tarpley says that global warming is not man made. It is caused by the solar activity and that all of the other planets are rising in temperature as well.

None of his theories have been proven true either. Nice try.

Um, Ricky, we don't do Stormfront links here.

And you obviously didn't read the post:

Typically, full-on subscribers to extremist beliefs view mainstream conservatives with distaste and distrust, since they believe them to be weak-kneed sellouts. They instead tend to trust the Joneses and the John Trochmanns and Lew Rockwells and Ron Pauls first.

So when the memes regarding "suppressed knowledge" that these extremists organize around suddenly appear in the mainstream media -- in places like Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs' and Sean Hannity's cable-network shows -- it has a real amplifying effect: Not only is it final and consummate confirmation of their beliefs in these conspiracy theories, but it induces an extreme apocalypticism, a fear that things must be even worse than they suspected.

beck was giving the floor to another conspiracy theorist.

..how was he able to buy a gun? You'd think the "well-regulated" militia he belonged to would have weeded him out.

Well, as we've already observed, tossing it off to mental illness -- especially when there's no evidence he ever was being treated for such an illness -- is a complete copout.

The case I often use to illustrate this clearly is the case of David Lewis Rice:

On Christmas Eve 1985, Charles and Annie Goldmark were at home with their sons Derek, 12, and Colin, 10, preparing for a holiday dinner when the doorbell rang. It was Rice, a 27-year-old unemployed transient, posing as a taxicab driver delivering a package. He brandished a toy gun and forced his way into their home, then set about using chloroform to render all four Goldmarks unconscious. He then proceeded to kill them slowly, using a steam iron and a knife that he used to insert into at least one of the victim's brains. Annie was pronounced dead on the spot, Colin pronounced dead on arrival, while Charles died there a short while later; Derek finally succumbed 37 days later.

But Rice wasn't just a deranged loony -- though he probably fit that description too. He also was a deranged loony who had been set into action by the malicious lies of a group of right-wing haters, whose venom became his inspiration, as the HistoryLink piece explains:

David Rice, a former steel worker from Colorado, joined an extremist group in Washington called the Duck Club. Although the Duck Club was almost defunct, the Seattle chapter still functioned. The group convinced Rice that Charles Goldmark was Jewish and a Communist. (Charles Goldmark's parents, John and Sally Goldmark, had won a highly publicized libel case in 1964 when they were accused of being Communists.)

The Goldmark case is a centerpiece of James Aho's study of the far right, This Thing of Darkness: A Sociology of the Enemy (which I've discussed previously). Aho goes into more detail about what drove Rice, as well as the circumstances surrounding his decision to kill:

Conversion (resocialization) ... occurs not through brainwashing of passive victims or through obsessive self-conversion. It takes place through active efforts of the disciple, sometimes indifferent to ideology or theology as such, to solidify and preserve social ties with his mentors.

... Ed Fasel [fictitious name] was head of the local Duck Club chapter. It was from Ed that Rice received the tragic misinformation that Charles and Annie Goldmark were leading Seattle Communists. In the course of discussions concerning local subversives and crooks who were presumably frustrating Rice's efforts to secure a job, Fasel, mistaking Charles for his father John, related to Rice that the Goldmarks had been investigated and that Charles was "regional director of the American Communist Party." Rice took this to mean that Charles was the "highest obtainable target I could reach, the greatest value informationally." After handcuffing the Goldmarks, Rice intended to interrogate them about the next person in the conspiratorial hierarchy, possibly to preempt at the last moment the impending invasion of alien troops [a conspiracy theory to which Rice subscribed].

What occasioned Fasel to dredge up a name associated with an event that had occurred two decades previously in another part of the state? In a Seattle Port Commission election during the summer of 1985, one of the candidates was Jim Wright, a Republican. Wright's campaign manager was none other than Ashley Holden, a defendant in the Goldmark trial. [Holden had been a leading torchbearer in the McCarthyite "Red fever" that swept Washington state in the late 1940s and '50s, and had been one of the people who falsely accused the Goldmarks in print of being part of the Communist Party.] Upon discovering this unusual link, the Seattle media jumped on it, and the name "Goldmark," with its unfortunate connotations, "got out again," to use one informant's phrase.

In my interview with him, Holden convincingly insisted that he knew nothing of the Duck Club nor any of its members. "I deplored the murder," he said. "There is no question," he went on, parroting local wisdom, "Rice was demented."

I have met some of the old leaders of the Duck Club, including "Fasel" -- whose real name was Homer Brand. They reminded me of Richard Butler: they had a moral stench about them like rotting corpses. Of course, they never faced legal liability for their role in the murders. But they had blood on their hands, just as surely as does the "Libertarian National Socialist Green Party" and whoever else gave Jeff Weise his inspiration.

This is why I talk about culpability in cases like these. No, there's not direct enough culpability in these cases to directly blame them for them. But there is an ethical and moral culpability involved, and we fellow citizens can make our own judgments about those.

Sadly, I first read this story and thought I was reading an Onion rip off. The sudden change in wind direction had as much to do with the shootings as Glen Beck.

people wear bulletproof vests and wield AK-47s?

[Knock it off with the flaming-by-infantilizing-nickname crap. If you hadn't noticed it, I axed all of that flaming you were part of earlier on this thread. If I see any more of this you'll be on the outside looking in. Site Monitor]

!!!!!!!!!!!!

when I feel stange urges in a tent on a mountain slope I often blame Heath Ledger.

no connection!

whattacrocKKKoschitt! certainly not news must miss beck something awful.

focusing on things which are true.

operator a rightwing nut job? If not, you then have your answer.

you came to that conclusion watching that video

Thanks in advance