Conspiracy theories are really interesting. But wait... before you pass judgment, I'll clarify what I mean. I find it most interesting how the social and technological conditions that determine how widespread their persuasive power spreads. Perhaps it is just the scenes I have been hanging around with too uch lately, but conspiracy theories about 9/11 seem to be running rampant. I remember gatting some wingnut emails just weeks after the event from the "9/11 Truth Committee", but now I think they have really gone mainstream. Now, I'll acknowledge that this might be due to the very strange political climate America is in right now, especially for people on the left. They feel the way the world has been working lately is both irrational and outright wrong (more than usual), but know they have failed to change anything substantial about the situation. Plus they feel cheated, as groups consistently out of power constantly must to keep the spirit alive. However, there is something more to the 9/11 theories. Surveys show that most people outside the US think the US government was complacent in the attacks, or actually planned and carried them out independently.

I am not especially captivated in the merit or specific truths that the theories espouse, but I find the persuasive format of a video like Loose Change (which popped up on Google Video almost a year ago) to be most interesting. Almost no viewers have the capacity to confirm or refute the facts and arguments made in that film... and that is the usual basis for conspiracy theories in general. But the overall superstructure of the argument sounds plausible to those looking for something else they want to believe. Conspiracies of this nature are nothing new. Such things ran rampant on battle fields before the speed communication caught up with them. We all remember The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, right? These arguments rely on the existence of a highly identifiable, yet somewhat secretive group of devious and morally corrupt individuals. Still, I believe the most important condition today is the general fragmenting of the way people see the world. It was possible fifty years ago in America to accurately predict with high confidence not just the voting patterns of people in a specified area, but also their lifestyles (beliefs, consumer habits, values, etc.). Today, even with much improved data sources, this task has become much more difficult.

What magnifies the effects of social fragmentation, however, is the explosion of information we have seen in the past decade or so. Anyone with access to the Internet can present to the world any information on any matter they feel like. This has led to the fragmenting of a our social and historical narratives. There are not just a handful of explanations for why people do the things they do or why the world looks the way it does today, there are probably hundreds for any given subject. However, the process of weeding out the BS has become more difficult. Our high quality information sources have not kept up and have not really become much more accessible over the same time period. So, people turn to what is most easiest to find, even if there is nothing close to a definitive finding on a matter. We accept confusion about the world around us as a general consequence of post modern life. I have no idea how I will explain the last ten (or 50!) years of history to my children in a definitive sense like my parents could. And I think that is a distinct loss in many ways. What are the implications? My kids will probably care even less about understanding the world because ignorance is only marginally worse than confusion. I know a lot of people will say that this is and has been the predominant mindset in America. Whether or not this is so, I am unwilling to abandon my concern that it will further worsen as ambiguity continues to grow.

One night in Nara, Mayumi and I went to a presentation on the effects of nuclear radiation. I tried to google the featured speaker, one Lauren Mose, but since at the time I had only Japanese pronunciations of her name, I was unable to gather the requisite background info one needs when attending such talks. I didn't know what I was getting into, but at least it was in English. I practiced patience while waiting for the Japanese translations of her talking points to be finished and practiced controlled outrage when I became aware of the thrust of her proposals. Basically, her message was that nuclear radiation is a very bad thing, whether it is emitted from bomb tests, power plants, depleted uranium weapons, or other more covert sources.

I wholly agree with this fundamental point from the basis of the precautionary principle. We know radiation does damage to all forms of life on this planet, but we do not yet now exactly how or at what specific levels. I advocate not finding out by exposing lots of people to it is the interests of science, militarism, or cheap electricity and then trying to find out what damage it has caused later. One one hand, you get folks who are backed in one way or another by a nuclear constituency... maybe a formal lobby or a constellation of ideological and economic parties. These people consistently either tell us that to the best of their knowledge, no harm is coming to humans via their radioactive emissions. They of course must do so to further their interests and protect themselves from litigation. However, the nuclear issue is a particularly sticky sort of health affair because a lot of data about the location and amount of radiation is suppressed in the interests of security. This is a bad thing! In my opinion, dangerous activities should always be the most transparent, regardless of the multiple scenarios one can imagine where such transparency can lead to vulnerability. Constantly using the guise of foreign threats to keep citizens ignorant about important things in their lives is hazardous to the interests of democracy and the adequately informed public it requires to function.

However, Lauren went ahead and substantially discredited multiple proponents of such arguments by taking a wingnut position. She started out by telling us that she is a geoscientist, but also a whistle-blower who had been blacklisted in her profession. That is a difficult position to start from because one would need alternative sources of credibility to fill such a vacuum. She didn't really have any, so she just got right into the meat of her thesis. Nuclear radiation is responsible for just about any problem you can imagine: birth defects, cancer, leukemia, diabetes, stupid people, and bad government. There is a distinct discipline called social epidemiology... they look at how and why diseases occur in particular population. There were none in the audience, but had there been, someone would lost their temper. According to her, most post WWII problems with disease in developed nations are almost totally attributable to radiation. The upward trend in incidence of disease roughly matches the amount of nuclear radiation in an area or a nation. I could be more harsh on a number of specific points, but lets just say she had shoddy data. Correlation is not equivalent to causation. There are things called control variables most scientists find to be mandatory when extending these sorts of global arguments... that is, when they are put forth at all. She controls for nothing... not diet, exercise, access to health care, exposure to other pollutants, changes in age demographics, etc. Even if she is right in her intial hypothesis, this is a terrible way to go about arguing for it... that is, unless you are standing in front of group of people with no such understanding of social or physical sciences, but who are already convinced anyway.

The arguments about intelligence and government were the most entertaining and telling.. She had a slide showing mean SAT scores for American students over the past fifty years. She attributes fluctuations in the scores to bomb tests in the Nevada desert, most of which were carried out in the early sixties. When the scores show a downward trend, that means the US had tested to more bombs in the time surrounding a cohort of children's birth years. When they rebound, that means the effects from radiation were wearing off. This is why “Asians have taken over the sciences in America”... because Asians test less bombs. First off, this is not how the SAT works... it is always weighted to a specific mean score: 1000. The difficulty of the test is adjusted for how much an average student needs to know to score 1000. We don't measure the overall intelligence of American young people by their SAT scores, we measure them individually against the set group average. In fact, we don't measure this at all, but if we did, it would likely be randomly sampled IQ tests, which have never been administered. No matter, she quickly went ahead and contradicted herself in the next slides by showing how Japan, the world's leader in standardized international math aptitude, operates a full quarter of the world's nuclear power plants.

The talk really started to devolve at the end into a political tirade, the kind of thing most scientists, even black listed ones, have trouble respecting. After telling the audience that the Mossad, MI6, and the CIA carried out the 9/11 attacks and that it was all for financial gain (a theory that has thus far completely refuted by analysis of profits in the executive branch), she changed her mind and told the audience that the Bush administration had been exposed in the womb to excessive levels of radiation, which had caused them to grow up to be criminally inept policy makers. At this point, I made Mayumi get up and leave the room with me. I had thought about engaging the speaker and her assistant (a young man with a book entitled “Welcome to the USSA) in some pointed debate, but given the opinions already stacked against me and the fatigue the translator was showing, I thought it best to just vent here. Anyway, the next day we were out in the mountains picking wild mushrooms and laughing about radiation contamination. Still, there may well be something substantial to this issue, but the thought that we really cannot much about the damage already done makes it a less troubling one to me.