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I wonder if artists being present isn’t so much about “intellectual pretension” as it is about the powerful trying to influence culture, in the spirit of politics being downstream of culture.

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who gives a literal poo about Clarence Thomas "shady connections". His judicial philosophy is so clear and consistent, far more even than Scalia or RBG, so if you are looking for undue influence affecting a Supreme Court Justices, you are barking up the dumbest tree possible.

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There certainly are plenty of real conspiracies.

The FBI runs drugs into African-American neighborhoods to destabilize them and prevent political organizing.

The CIA smuggles drugs to fund illegal programs like starting Evangelical Protestant churches in Latin America to undermine the influence of Left-wing Roman Catholic clergy.

The CIA illegally donates millions of dollars to right-wing parties in every country in Europe to help them win elections.

The Army hires journalists to plant favorable stories in the news media, deceiving the public.

Every police car in America carries a "throw-down gun", an unregistered cheap handgun with one shot fired, to throw down next to a body of someone they have shot to prove they killed him in self-defense.

The FBI taps phones of members of Congress to get information to blackmail them into passing laws the FBI wants passed.

Local police forces are often pressured into following orders from Federal agencies, despite the lack of Federal legal authority to give them orders.

The Forest Service conspires with Earth First! leaders to divert potential environmental activism into "harmless" channels like civil disobedience instead of more effective actions like sabotage.

The Bureau of Printing and Engraving adds cocaine to the ink used in printing paper money to give the police legal grounds to sieze any stash of banknotes the find.

The American prison system has been privatized and the prison companies spend millions each year on lobbying and campaign contributions to get as many laws passed as possible, with the longest possible sentences for every offense, to get more prisoners.

A researcher who found a mistake in the method of DNA identification, proving the method ineffective, was threatened by the FBI to keep him from publishing his data.

Fingerprinting is a hoax. Each year, for the past 100 years, thousands of people all over the world, are convicted on a basis of fingerprint evidence, but there is not a single peer-reviewed scientific study to show that no two people have identical prints. The claim that fingerprints are positive identification rests entirely on folklore, not science.

Government documents dealing with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln are still classified. There are reasons to suspect they reveal the involvement of the British Secret Service, and the U.S. government fears damage to the Anglo-American alliance if the American public found out, even at this late date.

Could it be that someone is trying to distract attention from real conspiracies and prevent them from being taken seriously by spreading deliberate rubbish about nonsensical false conspiracies around to discredit anyone who claims to have uncovered a conspiracy?

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