I tend towards looking for three elements for explianing unusual events -
1) Human Stupidity, incompetence, and laziness.
2) Coincidence and Accidents.
3) Conspiracies (often multiple) and planning.
If I look at the energy crisis in California, we see all three :
1)NIMBY policies stop building of power plants and power lines.
Energy deregulation written by the clueless Steve Peace, because he was a junior legislator who was stuck with the task.
2)The El Paso pipeline explosion, and a very hot summer on top of the dot-com boom
3)Enron, Dynergy, and LA Water & Power grabbing the ball and running with it.
I think it is an error to ignore any of the possible causes, or other causes. It is just as much an error to attribute all events to one class of causes.
The hardest events to understand will the major political ones - Sinking of the US Battleship Maine in Havana harbor, Zimmer telegram , sinking of Lusitania, Reichstag fire, Gulf of Tonkin attack, etc.
These events often have biased reports, phoney evidence, cut outs, red herrings, etc.
******
A good example of the phoney stuff was the "records" of GW Bush's pilot evaluations from the 1970s which showed up in 2004. Careful examination by various experts on the internet showed them to have been done in Microsoft Word, and not possible on any typewritter in use by the Air National Guard at the time.
These forgeries were done by one person with moderate knownledge of the Air Force terminology in use, and access to Kinko's (a chain of retail copy shops with computer workstations) |
