Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

This chapter is a cheat. It's one page, and Cooper is purporting that this isn't even his writing...again. The title of this chapter is, " ARE THE SHEEP READY TO SHEAR? Oklahoma H.B. 1750 TEST CASE FOR THE POLICE STATE." Two things thwarted my attempts to research this subject: paywalls and time. Oddly enough, I had plenty of time to do the research but the documents in question are not online. The Oklahoma legislature's website only goes back to 1993 and I need 1988. The University of Oklahoma which also maintains an archive returned a 404 error. So I decided to just find what I can about the bill and move forward. The further problem is that Cooper's source, Gary North , a new name to add to our gallery of conspiracy theorist; maintained a website but his own archives do not go any earlier than 2004. The article that North wrote, is on a website called the " McAlvany Intelligence Advisory " but that article is locked behind a paywall. For people i

Last week we introduced Cooper's poor understanding of the omnibus drub bill of 1986. This followed his poor understanding of a series of executive orders. That's not counting the Dr. Pabst contribution which also misunderstood the legal system. Cooper is going to finish his analysis of the drug bill this week, and as a spoiler--it will not get better.  The way to understand works like this is to become familiar with certain topics that conspiracy theorists are obsessed with. It helps put things into perspective. For example, the Cooper strain of conspiracy theorists obsess over the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. The reason is that they don't quite understand what it does (regulate the money supply through interest rates--I'm being very simplistic, but that little blurb is profoundly more informative than anything they can claim about it). They do so because it is something you can point to, we don't elect the board of governors, and a bank has probably

We have finally returned to Cooper's own writing...allegedly. My suspicion that Dr. Pabst was really Cooper cannot be confirmed, but let's give Cooper the benefit of the doubt and welcome him back for chapter 7: Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 H.R. 5210 P.L. 100-690 Preparation for the Police State An Analysis. Right off the bat, we should know that we are in for a treat. Cooper, has already tried to read laws and executive orders and failed to understand them. I suspect that this will continue here, but we might be in for a surprise. While Cooper wrote this book in the early 90s the majority of legal regulations that he's been referring to have been from the Nixon administration. My assumption here is that he had this stuff lying around for use when he was a big name in the UFOlogy circuit. He would have needed "evidence" of the FEMA camps for the eventual UFO takeover so he just had it lying around. When the UFO conspiracy ebbed away he switched it over to this New

The more people claim to have read and love three documents the more you know that they have not read them. The three documents are the Bible, 1984, and the Constitution. Sure, your average conservative probably knows the three parts in the Bible where God hates gay people but is blissfully unaware of the three dozen parts where that same God commands them to take care of and shelter immigrants without qualification. They are somewhat aware that surveillance was bad in 1984 but couldn't at all explain the meaning of the two minutes of hate. And I'm not even going to be charitable on the Constitution, they know it begins with We the People...but dollars to donuts they get the rest of it confused with the Declaration of Independence. When conspiracy theorists talk about the Constitution, they just mean the Bill of Rights...the part that the founders had to add later. Pabst/Cooper titles this section "Ignoring the Constitution," and that title is going to be ironic. Pabs