House Oversight — Estate records
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From: Ed Sent: 12/19/2015 2:36:13 AM To: Epstein, Jeff [jeevacation@gmail.com] Subject: My review today in wsj of conspiracy theories Importance: High They're Not Really Out to Get You By EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN Dec. 18, 2015, Wall Street Journal 1 Conspiracy, a word derived from the Latin "to breathe together," has been a salient part of the darker side of recorded history ever since some 60 conspirators in the Roman senate, including Brutus and Cassius, plotted together to assassinate Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. Nowadays the "C" word does not always sit well with journalists, who commonly employ it in conjunction with "theory" to describe paranoid distortions of reality. Even so, a criminal conspiracy is not a rare phenomenon. Not only was a foreign conspiracy responsible for the monstrous 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center (as well as the previous attempt to blow it up in 1993) but, according to the Center on Law and Security at Fordham University, over 90% of routine federal indictments for terrorist attacks since 9/11 contain at least one conspiracy charge. The government's pursuit of conspiracies is by no means limited to terrorism. Conspiracy charges are the rule rather than the exception in cases brought against businessmen accused of fixing prices, evading environmental regulations, using insider information or laundering money. But there are also pseudo-conspiracies that exist only in a delusionary or misinformed mind. And some of them achieve a huge following. In Pakistan, according to public opinion polls, a majority of the population believes that the 9/11 attack was staged by President George W. Bush to launch a war on Islam. The claim that the 1969 moon landing was faked is still around. Just two days ago a crew from a Russian TV channel rushed to my apartment to interview me about a viral post on YouTube in which the deceased director Stanley Kubrick supposedly made a deathbed confession to having filmed the landing in a Hollywo […]