THE C NSPIRASPHERE
The Baltimore Key Bridge disaster is a black swan event offering an embarrassment of potential theories and villains. NOEL ROONEY finds himself suffering from conspiratorial overload...
It managed to get a Mayday signal out before the collision
A BRIDGE TOO FAR?
The Key Bridge: a name resonant with a plethora of curious associations. It really is (was) a key bridge; not so much for commercial shipping (although the port of Baltimore is the second largest in that respect) as for the military support vessels that are now trapped upstream of the tangled wreckage. And Francis Scott Key, for whom the bridge was named, was, of course the person who wrote ‘The Star Spangled Banner’.
Perhaps that helps to make the tragic events of 26 March more surreal; that, and the name of the ship that crashed into the bridge supports being Dali. However you slice it, the whole affair is the darkest of black swan events (the phrase has been used by a number of commentators, mainstream and otherwise). And the omens have not gone unnoticed in the C-sphere.
The ship lost all power, twice, between being released by the tugs and crashing into the bridge. It managed to get a Mayday signal out, three minutes before the collision; enough time, mercifully (or suspiciously for some commentators), for the emergency services to clear the bridge of traffic. Then it appeared to make a 30 degree course correction, which took it directly onto one of the main support pylons.
Now the Dali sits, disabled, on the ruins of the bridge and, more ominously still, athwart a high-pressure gas pipeline. The salvage operation cannot get underway until the bodies of those who perished are recovered, and the exact status of the pipeline is assessed. It’s a mess, clearly; but is it more?
Within minutes of the collision, voices were raised claiming an attack on US infrastructure by powers unknown; which is another way of saying that conspiracist
Democrats have blamed the Russians and their Republicans counterparts the Chinese. This is, according to some, the opening salvo of the Third World War (if one doesn’t count Gaza, Ukraine, Somalia and various other theatres across the globe). At the very least it’s sabotage, since in the US these days, accidents don’t just happen.
It was all too convenient. The warning, from a ship otherwise disabled; the police presence on the bridge, ready to clear traffic; the change of course, to set the Dali directly on target; the choice of the gas pipeline as the locus of the crime. In the C-sphere, such details don’t stack up on the side of the angels. And if you have followed the ongoing saga of food processing plants going up in flames, and train wrecks spilling hazardous materials, you will know that the bridge disaster is part of the obvious plan to destroy America from within.
In fact, there are so many reasons for assuming the worst of the catastrophe that it is beginning to suffer from a phenomenon I have come to think of as conspiratorial overload: a situation with so many anomalies and loose ends that conspiracists are swamped with potential theories and villains. This phenomenon is not new. Consider the assassination of JFK. If you belong to the camp that does not accept the lone nut killer version of events (which puts you in the majority, in the US at least) then you have a theoretical problem stemming from a surfeit of evidential riches. The difficulty is not working out who else was in Dealey Plaza that fateful day; it’s working out who wasn’t.
At the other end of the scale you get incidents where the relevant conspiracy theory is served up, garnished and seasoned, right from the off. The terrible events in the Crocus concert hall in Moscow, on 22 March, are a tragic case in point. Before the incident had finished, the media already knew that IS was responsible, not least because IS had already claimed responsibility.
But doubts began to surface almost as quickly. The terrorists, rather than stay on the scene and accept martyrdom (considered by most security experts to be an integral part of the Jihadi job description), set off in a car that was intercepted on a road that only went to one place. Ukraine is not usually listed as an IS stronghold. And these Jihadis, it transpired, were being paid: not in virgins (or raisins if you prefer) but in dollars. They were apparently on their way to collect when they were apprehended.
More strangeness turned up in the following days. The attackers had made the standard video reciting the Shahada and their willingness to die (though not immediately, it appears). Except there were the fingers – the wrong fingers. Jihadi videos follow trends, and for some years now the trend has been to raise one’s right hand, index finger extended, when reciting the words. In the video of the Crocus attackers, they all raised their left hands. This is, by all accounts, tantamount to blasphemy.
I think the iconography of that gesture would keep a professor or two busy for some while. The question that occurred to me was: who was it for? Who would see such a flagrantly blasphemous, or just egregiously wrong, gesture and be pleased by it? It is hard to imagine any sect of Islam being amused by it. That doesn’t mean, of course, that the Russian accusations against Ukraine and the US are correct; but it surely suggests that the fast-food delivery of blame – something some observers have been noting since 9/11 – was in this case at least rather less accurate than advertised.
So that is the choice for the budding conspiracist: either so many suspects that you don’t know who to choose; or a quick resolution that is, to paraphrase H L Mencken, popular, simple and dead wrong. In a detail economy, certainty is a scarce commodity.
https://allnewspipeline.com/ This_Sabotage_Was_Clearly_ An_Act_Of_War.php
https://thepeoplesvoice. tv/5-hidden-facts-that-provebaltimore-bridge-collapse-wasan-inside-job/