by Jon E. Lewis
Further Reading
Dr Leonard Horowitz, Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola: Nature, Accident or Intentional?, 1996
FEMA
“Are you familiar with what the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s real power is?” Kurtzweil asks. “FEMA allows the White House to suspend Constitutional government on declaration of a national emergency. Think about that!”
Dr Alvin Kurtzweil to Agent Mulder in
The X Files: Fight the Future, 1998
Beside a highway outside Atlanta, Georgia, are stacked approximately 500,000 plastic coffins. The coffins, which are in full view of anyone passing by, are owned by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). FEMA is best known for handing out hot soup and blankets after national disasters. So why does it need half a million coffins? Or six hundred prison camps?
Provision of post-disaster aid is only part of FEMA’s brief. It is also entrusted with the “Continuity of Government” in the event of a national emergency. At its simplest, “Continuity” entails hustling the President, the Cabinet and Executive to an underground base beneath Mount Weather in Virginia, and dispersing alternative constitutional leaders to safe havens around the US. But successive Executive Orders have also given FEMA police state-like powers to round up US citizens and detain them without trial if they are considered a threat to national security.
What some conspiracy theorists speculate is that FEMA (founded in 1979) is actually an arm of the New World Order, and when the NWO’s head honchos give the order for martial law and the imposition of the North American Union, dissenters will be rounded up and incarcerated in those six hundred concentration camps. The coffins are for those who die fighting the imposition of the New World Order. Your fate, according to FEMA researcher B. A. Brooks, will be determined by which colour list your name is on:
We are all on a Red or Blue list somewhere, those on the red list will be woken at 4.00 a.m. and taken to the camps and probably killed.
Red List – These people are the enemies of the NWO. They are the leaders of patriot groups, outspoken ministers, outspoken talk show hosts, community leaders, and even probably NET leaders. These people will be dragged out of their homes at 4:00 a.m. and will be taken to FEMA detention centers and killed. This will take place approximately two weeks before martial law is enforced.
Blue List – These are also enemies of the NWO, but are followers of the Red List folks. These people will be rounded up after martial law is in place, and will be taken to the detention centers and “re-educated”. Various mind-control techniques will be used on them. Most will not survive this …
Yellow List – These are citizens who know nothing about the NWO and don’t want to know. They are considered to be no threat at all and will be instructed as to how to behave and will most likely do whatever they are told. Unfortunately there are too many of these to be effectively controlled, so many will be killed or starved.
Black List – I have recently heard that the red and blue lists have been combined into one, and is called the Black List. All black listed citizens will be marked for execution.
Trying to prove or disprove the existence of FEMA camps and coffins is one of the internet’s busiest industries. But:
Fact: The plastic “coffins” in Madison, Georgia, are actually burial liners, used to protect caskets when placed underground. The much snapped depot in Georgia is actually the storage facility of the manufacturer, Vantage Products. And there are more in the region of 50,000 rather than half a mill of the liners.
Fact: Most of the so-called concentration camps are nothing of the sort. One camp much featured on conspiracy sites, Beech Grove, is actually an Amtrak repair depot.
Fact: FEMA has in the past (and might well in the present) enjoyed powers prejudicial to civil liberties. When President Reagan was considering invading Nicaragua, he issued a series of executive orders that provided, in the event of mass internal dissent, for the suspension of the constitution, the imposition of martial law, the construction of mass prison camps, and the turning over of government to the president – and FEMA. Other scenarios in which FEMA has been touted as playing a leading repressive role are combating a national uprising by black Americans and incarcerating Arab Americans sympathetic to al-Qaeda. It should be pointed out that sections of the American establishment vigorously opposed the granting of Draconian powers to the Agency. At the time of the Reagan initiative the then attorney-general, William French Smith, wrote to the national security adviser, Robert McFarlane: “I believe that the role assigned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the revised Executive Order exceeds its proper function as a co-ordinating agency for emergency preparedness … this department and others have repeatedly raised serious policy and legal objections to an ‘emergency czar’ role for FEMA.”
Since 2003, FEMA has been part of the Department of Homeland Security. New notepaper did not mean new efficiency: the agency was much criticized for its slowness and incompetence following Hurricane Katrina. Which must be a crumb of comfort to those who fear FEMA’s intentions. If FEMA can’t set up tents after high winds and high water could it actually round anybody up in a national emergency?
Further Reading
B.A. Brooks, Things You Never Knew About FEMA, 2009
Linda A. Burns, FEMA: An Organization in the Crosshairs, 2007
“The Evidence: Debunking FEMA Camp Myths”, 10 April 2009, www.popularmechanics.com
FOO FIGHTERS
Is it a bird? A plane? No, it’s a Foo Fighter.
In late 1944 Reuters press agency reported that strange spheres, resembling the glass balls that adorn Christmas trees, “have been seen hanging in the air over German territory, sometimes singly, sometimes in clusters. They are coloured silver and are apparently transparent.”
Numerous sightings of these weird balls were recorded by Allied aircrews throughout German airspace, and later in the war over the skies of Nippon. Dubbed “Foo Fighters” (from the French feu, meaning fire) the balls of light made no attempt to attack, although they could out-fly conventional aircraft. Allied boffins assumed that the Nazis’ sky balls were a secret air defence weapon, along the lines of exploding high altitude balloons, or anti-aircraft missiles. Sifting through Nazi records after the war, investigators found all manner of interesting secret devices being plotted, from the Feuerball (a missile that emitted signals to disrupt Allied aircrafts’ radio and radar) to the Wasserfall (a radio-controlled anti-aircraft missile), but none had been deployed. The consensus was that “Foo Fighters” were actually natural phenomena, such as ball lightning or St Elmo’s fire. Or, later in the war, Luftwaffe jet fighters, principally the Me262.
And there the matter lay, until conspiracist Renato Vesco decided that the Foo Fighter was actually the forerunner of the Kugelblitz, the Ball Lightning Fighter. And then “alternative historian” Jim Keith determined that the Kugelblitz was actually a … flying saucer, launched from sites in Prague and Breslau in early 1945. A “confidential Italian document” given to Keith by an unnamed, untraceable source described a dogfight between a flying saucer and Allied planes: “A strange flying machine, hemispherical, or at any rate circular, in shape, attacked them at a fantastic speed, destroying them in a few seconds without using any guns.”
Without using any guns? Surely only ray-wielding aliens didn’t need guns to destroy … and so, by a false syllogism, other conspiracy theorists came to believe that the Foo Fighters were actually helmed by aliens.
Of course, someone had to theorize that the aliens were helping the Nazis. According to Vladimir Tersiski the occult pan-German Thule Society and Vril Society made contact with extraterrestrials, who accordingly helped the Nazis mount a moon mission and, in 1945, enabled Hitler and the other Nazi bigwigs to escape by saucer to Antarctica.
Clever chaps those aliens. But not, seemingly, clever enough to win the war on behalf of their earthling Nazi collaborators.
Further Reading
Henry Stevens, Hitler’s
Flying Saucers, 2003
FORD PINTO
Named after the horse, the Pinto was Ford’s rival to the Toyota Corolla, the Chevy Vega and VW Beetle in the US in the seventies. With gas prices on the up, manufacturers were desperate for a slice of the “runabout” end of the car market. Yet were Ford so desperate that they knowingly hid deadly design faults on the Pinto?
One evening in 1972, Lily Gray, pulled on to a Minneapolis highway in her new Ford Pinto. Alongside her in the car was a young boy, Richard Grimshaw. As Gray entered the merge lane, her car stalled. Another car bumped into her Pinto at twenty-eight miles per hour. The Pinto’s gas tank ruptured, then the car went up in a ball of flames. Gray died hours later; Grimshaw suffered burns over much of his body.
The Pinto lacked a heavyweight bumper, or proper reinforcement between the rear panel and the petroleum tank. So when a Pinto was rear-ended in even a minor fashion, as with Gray, the fuel tank ruptured. The Pinto had another flaw: due to its cracker-box construction the doors jammed easily when heated.
The Pinto was a firetrap on Goodyears.
When Gray’s Pinto exploded into flames in Minneapolis, Ford already knew about the Pinto’s fuel tank defect. Indeed, the company had been alerted to the weakness during pre-production, but, because retooling the Pinto lines to fit a safer tank would cost money, did nothing about it. As many as five hundred people may have died in Pinto explosions, but all the while Ford kept schtum about the fuel tank problem. The truth only came to light because of a 1977 report by Mark Dowie in the muckraking magazine Mother Jones, which quoted an internal Ford memorandum entitled “Fatalities Associated with Crash-Induced Fuel Leakage and Fire”. According to a “cost-benefit” analysis in the memo, the Pinto problem would likely lead to 180 burn deaths, 180 seriously burned victims and 2,100 burned-out vehicles – all of which would cost Ford $49.53 million in out of court settlements.
Against this, modifying the tank of 11 million Pintos at $11 a go would cost $121 million.
The bottom line ruled: Ford decided it would rather pay out for death, damage and injury than save its customers lives. When Richard Grimshaw took Ford to court, the California Court of Appeal upheld punitive damages of $3.5 million against the company, partly because Ford had been aware of the design defects but had determined against altering the design (see Document, p.159).
The Mother Jones article and Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Co. led to the end of the road for the Pinto. There were lawsuits, recalls and a tarnished reputation that could never be made better, no matter how hard the ad men at Dearborn slaved.
A number of other cars by other manufacturers on the US market were no safer than the Pinto, and also had unprotected fuel tanks behind the axle. Ford was merely unlucky enough to be exposed.
Further Reading
Mark Dowie, “Pinto Madness”, Mother Jones, September/October 1977
DOCUMENT: GRIMSHAW V. FORD MOTOR CO. (1981)
Court of Appeals of California, Fourth Appellate District, Division Two [May, 29, 1981]
CARMEN GRAY, a Minor, etc., et al., Plaintiffs and Appellants, v. FORD MOTOR COMPANY, Defendant and Appellant.
RICHARD GRIMSHAW, a Minor, etc., Plaintiff and Appellant, v. FORD MOTOR COMPANY, Defendant and Appellant.
Opinion by Tamura, Acting P. J., with McDaniel, J., concurring. Separate concurring opinion by Kaufman, J.
OPINION: TAMURA, Acting P. J.
[...]
Design of the Pinto Fuel System:
In 1968, Ford began designing a new subcompact automobile which ultimately became the Pinto. Mr. Iacocca, then a Ford vice president, conceived the project and was its moving force. Ford’s objective was to build a car at or below 2,000 pounds to sell for no more than $2,000.
Ordinarily marketing surveys and preliminary engineering studies precede the styling of a new automobile line. Pinto, however, was a rush project, so that styling preceded engineering and dictated engineering design to a greater degree than usual. Among the engineering decisions dictated by styling was the placement of the fuel tank. It was then the preferred practice in Europe and Japan to locate the gas tank over the rear axle in subcompacts because a small vehicle has less “crush space” between the rear axle and the bumper than larger cars. The Pinto’s styling, however, required the tank to be placed behind the rear axle leaving only 9 or 10 inches of “crush space” – far less than in any other American automobile or Ford overseas subcompact. In addition, the Pinto was designed so that its bumper was little more than a chrome strip, less substantial than the bumper of any other American car produced then or later. The Pinto’s rear structure also lacked reinforcing members known as “hat sections” (two longitudinal side members) and horizontal cross-members running between them such as were found in cars of larger unitized construction and in all automobiles produced by Ford’s overseas operations. The absence of the reinforcing members rendered the Pinto less crush resistant than other vehicles. Finally, the differential housing selected for the Pinto had an exposed flange and a line of exposed bolt heads. These protrusions were sufficient to puncture a gas tank driven forward against the differential upon rear impact.
Crash Tests:
During the development of the Pinto, prototypes were built and tested. Some were “mechanical prototypes” which duplicated mechanical features of the design but not its appearance while others, referred to as “engineering prototypes,” were true duplicates of the design car. These prototypes as well as two production Pintos were crash tested by Ford to determine, among other things, the integrity of the fuel system in rear-end accidents. Ford also conducted the tests to see if the Pinto as designed would meet a proposed federal regulation requiring all automobiles manufactured in 1972 to be able to withstand a 20-mile-per-hour fixed barrier impact without significant fuel spillage and all automobiles manufactured after January 1, 1973, to withstand a 30-mile-per-hour fixed barrier impact without significant fuel spillage.
The crash tests revealed that the Pinto’s fuel system as designed could not meet the 20-mile-per-hour proposed standard. Mechanical prototypes struck from the rear with a moving barrier at 21 miles per hour caused the fuel tank to be driven forward and to be punctured, causing fuel leakage in excess of the standard prescribed by the proposed regulation. A production Pinto crash tested at 21 miles per hour into a fixed barrier caused the fuel neck to be torn from the gas tank and the tank to be punctured by a bolt head on the differential housing. In at least one test, spilled fuel entered the driver’s compartment through gaps resulting from the separation of the seams joining the rear wheel wells to the floor pan. The seam separation was occasioned by the lack of reinforcement in the rear structure and insufficient welds of the wheel wells to the floor pan.
Tests conducted by Ford on other vehicles, including modified or reinforced mechanical Pinto prototypes, proved safe at speeds at which the Pinto failed. Where rubber bladders had been installed in the tank, crash tests into fixed barriers at 21 miles per hour withstood leakage from punctures in the gas tank. Vehicles with fuel tanks installed above rather than behind the rear axle passed the fuel system integrity test at 31-miles-per-hour fixed barrier. A Pinto with two longitudinal hat sections added to firm up the rear structure passed a 20-mile-per-hour rear impact fixed barrier test with no fuel leakage.
The Cost to Remedy Design Deficiencies:
When a prototype failed the fuel system integrity test, the standard of care for engineers in the industry was to redesign and retest it. The vulnerability of the production Pinto’s fuel tank at speeds of 20 and 30-miles-per-hour fixed barrier tests could have been remedied by inexpensive “fixes,” but Ford produced and sold the Pinto to the public without doing anything to remedy the defects. Design changes that would have enhanced the integrity of the fuel tank system at relatively little cost per car included the following: Longitudinal side members and cross members at $2.40 and $1.80, respectively; a single shock absorbent “flak suit” to protect the tank at $4; a tank within a tank and placemen
t of the tank over the axle at $5.08 to $5.79; a nylon bladder within the tank at $5.25 to $8; placement of the tank over the axle surrounded with a protective barrier at a cost of $9.95 per car; substitution of a rear axle with a smooth differential housing at a cost of $2.10; imposition of a protective shield between the differential housing and the tank at $2.35; improvement and reinforcement of the bumper at $2.60; addition of eight inches of crush space a cost of $6.40. Equipping the car with a reinforced rear structure, smooth axle, improved bumper and additional crush space at a total cost of $15.30 would have made the fuel tank safe in a 34 to 38-mile-per-hour rear-end collision by a vehicle the size of the Ford Galaxie. If, in addition to the foregoing, a bladder or tank within a tank were used or if the tank were protected with a shield, it would have been safe in a 40 to 45-mile-per-hour rear impact. If the tank had been located over the rear axle, it would have been safe in a rear impact at 50 miles per hour or more.
Management’s Decision to Go Forward With Knowledge of Defects:
The idea for the Pinto, as has been noted, was conceived by Mr. Iacocca, then executive vice president of Ford. The feasibility study was conducted under the supervision of Mr. Robert Alexander, vice president of car engineering. Ford’s Product Planning Committee, whose members included Mr. Iacocca, Mr. Robert Alexander, and Mr. Harold MacDonald, Ford’s group vice president of car engineering, approved the Pinto’s concept and made the decision to go forward with the project. During the course of the project, regular product review meetings were held which were chaired by Mr. MacDonald and attended by Mr. Alexander. As the project approached actual production, the engineers responsible for the components of the project “signed off ” to their immediate supervisors who in turn “signed off ” to their superiors and so on up the chain of command until the entire project was approved for public release by Vice Presidents Alexander and MacDonald and ultimately by Mr. Iacocca. The Pinto crash tests results had been forwarded up the chain of command to the ultimate decision-makers and were known to the Ford officials who decided to go forward with production.
