Posts matching tags 'conspiracy'
2007/12/4
Allegations have emerged of a secret mailing list used by a cabal of Wikipedia admins to unaccountably ban people they suspect of being enemies of Wikipedia trying to infiltrate the site. (The evidence against one banned user was that they seemed too skilled and too productive for a new user, and thus were probably a troll or sleeper agent trying to infiltrate Wikipedia and win its trust before doing god knows what.)
Meanwhile, it turns out that "wikipedia" is an ingredient in the food at at least one Chinese restaurant:
In this case, "wikipedia" turns out to be a type of fungus. This is not the first time that a restaurant in Asia has listed "wikipedia" as an ingredient; some two years ago, a French restaurant in Taiwan listed cheesecake as "wikipedia", and there are other reports of another establishment using the word to denote squid. Could it be some quirk of novice attempts at Chinese-to-English translation that causes this word to be mistaken for so many culinary ingredients?
(via /., Boing Boing) ¶ [no comments]
2007/11/11
When the Bush administration recently extended daylight saving time in the US by several weeks, it claimed to be doing so for environmental reasons. Of course, not everybody believes this, and some claim it was due to lobbying by the confectionery industry for more trick-or-treating time on Halloween:
Sweet manufacturers wanted a Daylight Saving Time extension so that the clocks were turned back after Halloween. The extra hour of daylight on 31 October would mean more time when parents could safely let their children go trick or treating, with resulting enhanced sales for the basketfuls of candy traditionally handed out to them.
2004/4/5
It has emerged that Tony Blair committed Britain to war in Iraq 9 days after 9/11, in a secret pact with George Bush. Blair is said to have required no convincing to do the deal. Which is consistent with my impressions of Blair as one who positively bends over backwards to be of service to superior powers, be they the US Government (of either stripe; witness the deep personal philosophical kinship Blair had with both Clinton and Bush) or multinational corporations (for which, according to Greg Palast, Blair has personally intervened to bend foreign-ownership rules).
2000/8/15
Sometimes, in the course of protecting the public interest from dangerous deviants, the defenders of law and order must improvise. Details emerge of how the police used publicity to frame the Rolling Stones (who were sort of the Oasis of their day or something) on drug charges in 1967.