NBA Finals conspiracy theories prove to be as durable as tinfoil

By David Aldridge, TNT Analyst
Posted May 28 2009 12:03PM

Another year, another run on tinfoil at your local Safeway, Piggly Wiggly or Ralph's.



Every year, every nutbag with a computer and a complete lack of imagination writes some version of the following: David Stern wants the Lakers and (fill in the blank team here) in the Finals. You know the refs are gonna make that happen. The NBA is rigged. It's no better than pro wrestling.

I can't tell you how many people have been on Facebook with some variation of this. Isn't David Stern gonna be mad if Orlando and Denver are in the Finals? David Stern wants Kobe and LeBron in the Finals. David Stern must really be ticked off.

Every year, these podunks say, Stern, an unnamed cabal of referees, executives from ESPN, ABC and Turner, Phil Knight, Craig Sager's tailor -- and, occasionally and just for laughs, Carrot Top -- get together and make sure that the only teams in the Finals are from major-market cities. The theory goes that the NBA, desperate to regain the ratings it had in the Jordan Era, manipulates the Playoffs to ensure its biggest stars play in its biggest series. Because only the NBA is concerned with high ratings for its championship series/game. Bud Selig couldn't care less if Toronto and San Diego are in the World Series. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman loves an Edmonton-Florida Stanley Cup Final. PGA commish Tim Finchem would be delighted if Tiger misses the cut at the Masters.

Now, you know where you're reading this, and you may know what I do for a living. So you can dismiss this as butt-covering by a league apologist who works for one of its television partners, or that I doth protest too much. Can't stop you if your car is already going down that road.

But over 25 or so years in this profession, I like to deal in things that us fancy-pants reporters call "facts." Here are some:

The San Antonio Spurs have won four NBA titles since 1999.

The Spurs are ratings death.

They are ratings death because you all, in the main, are rank hypocrites. More on that later.

The longer a playoff series goes, the more people watch. (You can look this up, or you can trust me. It's true.) So a seven-game series is ratings gold.

In the last 10 Finals series, there have been two 4-0 sweeps (in 2002 and '07), three five-game series ('99, '01 and '04) and four six-game series ('00, '03, '06 and '08). Only one series has gone the full, ratings-exploding seven -- San Antonio's 4-3 victory over Detroit in '05. Which, again, you didn't watch, 'cause the Spurs were in it. If the league is rigging the Finals for maximum viewership, it's doing a lousy job. (By the way, do you know how many times Michael Jordan's Bulls played a seven-game Finals series? Zero. Out of six.)

More facts:

• New York, the largest TV media market in the United States according to a 2004 Nielsen Media ranking, hasn't made the Finals since 1999, and hasn't won a championship in 36 years.

• Los Angeles, No. 2 in that Nielsen study, has lost its last two Finals appearances since its threepeat from 2001-03.

• Chicago, No. 3, didn't make a single Finals from 1966-'91, when Jordan, Scottie Pippen and company reached full maturity. And since The Last Dance in '98, the Bulls haven't been back.

• Philadelphia, fourth, has been to one Finals (2001) since '83.

• Boston, fifth, won the title last season -- its first championship series appearance since '86.

• San Francisco (the Warriors), No. 6, has been in three Finals series since the franchise moved from Philadelphia in '62. None of those appearances has come since '75.

• Dallas, seventh, has made one Finals in the Mavericks' 29-year history.

• Washington, eighth, has not only not made the Finals since '79, but hasn't been to a conference final since '79.

• Detroit, 11th, has been in two Finals since the Pistons' back-to-back titles in '89 and '90.

• And Miami, No. 17, has made one Finals since the franchise's inception in '88.

You would think someone as all-powerful as Stern -- who can, apparantly, control the tides -- would have a better batting average. How is it that a city like Portland (the 23rd-largest TV market) has been in as many Finals over the last 35 years (two) as New York City? How has Indianapolis (number 25) been in the Finals more recently than 'Frisco? Orlando (No. 20) with as many title cuts as Dallas? Salt Lake City's Jazz (ranked 36th) having been to more Finals over the last three decades than D.C.?

Which brings us to media market No. 37: San Antonio, Texas.

The Spurs are everything you say you want in a championship team. They are quiet and non-controversial, to the point of inducing sleep. They have no controversies in their locker room. They play a team game, though they have great one-on-one players like Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili. They don't preen or point, they play defense, they listen to their coach -- who is smart and crusty and profane and worldly. They play hard, are almost tattoo-free (Tim Duncan has a panther on his shoulder blade, I think) and their superstar, Duncan, took less money a few years ago so that the team could sign some other guys.

They have been in four Finals in the last 10 years.

Three of those were the lowest-rated of all time, in audience share, overall rating and average viewers.

"If we were in New York," Parker told me a couple of years ago, "they would love us."

So, why didn't you watch?

I'm not sure anyone did a poll, but anecdotally, you hear that the Spurs are (were?) "boring." No stars. No compelling personalities. No buzz.

Well, which is it? Do you want role models, or bad boys? If you can't stand Kobe, why do you keep watching him? And there's no question you do; the Lakers are the league's most popular team. People feel the Forum Blue and Gold. Which is probably why the Commish, for some reason, in the midst of perpetrating his massive fraud upon the public, said a few years ago that the ideal Finals matchup for the league would be "the Lakers vs. the Lakers." Now, I'm guessing he was kidding a little, but still, people remember things like that, which feeds the whole conspiracy beast.

Now, there's no question that Kobe and LeBron in the Finals would be good for business. That's why Nike's doing commercials featuring Kobe and LeBron puppets. It's why that vitamin water company has the whole "24 vs. 23" thing going, and why ESPN and NBA TV showed that special featuring the two of them. They are the two most popular guys in the game. But it's always been that way. The Playoffs are when the shoe companies and other high-end companies roll out the new ads featuring the game's superstars. They did it for Vince Carter; they did it for Tracy McGrady; they'll do it for Ricky Rubio or whoever the next flavor of the month is. Kevin Garnett didn't play a second in the Playoffs, but his new Gatorade spot has been in heavy rotation for weeks.

How, then, do the crazies explain away Orlando's 3-1 series lead over The Chosen One, and the Nuggets giving the Lakers all they can handle?

That's the best part about this nonsense. When it doesn't happen ... it's proof of an even-greater conspiracy!

The league doesn't really want the Cavs to make the Finals, see, 'cause that will cause LeBron to bolt Cleveland in 2010 ... for New York.

Pass the tinfoil.

http://www.nba.com/2009/news/features/david_aldridge/05/28/daily.dose/index.html

Fox Ambushes Bill Moyers

Obama officials gave Bilderberg briefings

POLITICO

By KENNETH P. VOGEL | 5/26/09

A handful of Obama administration officials attend the meeting of business, media and political leaders.


A handful of high-ranking Obama administration officials this month delivered private briefings at the annual invitation-only conference held by an elite international organization known as the Bilderberg group.


The closed meeting of some of the most powerful business, media and political leaders in North America and Western Europe heard from top Obama diplomats James Steinberg and Richard Holbrooke, who detailed the administration’s foreign policy, while economic adviser Paul Volcker, chairman of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, also gave a presentation at the heavily guarded seaside resort in Greece that hosted the event.


The Bilderberg group, which takes its name from the Dutch hotel where it held its first meeting in 1954, exists solely to bring together between 100 and 150 titans of politics, finance, military, industry, academia and media from North America and Western Europe once a year to discuss world affairs.


Its ultra-exclusive roster of globally influential figures has captured the interest of an international network of conspiracists, who for decades have viewed the Bilderberg conference as a devious corporate-globalist scheme.


This year’s closed-press meeting, held at the five-star Astir Palace hotel in Vouliagmeni on the Aegean Sea about 25 miles south of Athens, marked the 57th gathering of the opaque organization.


The publicity-shy Bilderberg group – which in a rare mass-circulation press release last year described itself as “a small, flexible, informal and off-the-record international forum in which different viewpoints can be expressed and mutual understanding enhanced” – has no website and participants are asked not to publicly discuss the proceedings.


But a meeting attendee tells POLITICO that Holbrooke, a State Department special envoy, briefed attendees on the Obama administration’s unified approach to dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan.


Steinberg, the deputy secretary of state, gave a presentation on the administration’s broader foreign policy and National Security Agency Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander also participated in the conference.


An assistant to Volcker said she did not know the subject of his presentation at this year’s meeting. A White House official stressed that Volcker is not a full-time employee and wasn’t representing Obama in Greece. The White House, State Department and NSA did not respond to questions about whether Alexander, Holbrooke and Steinberg – all repeat Bilderberger attendees – were representing the Obama administration at the meeting and whether tax dollars paid for their travel.


Steinberg, it should be noted, was in the region on official business for talks with officials from Greece, Macedonia and Montenegro, on the eve of Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to other Balkan states: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Serbia.


Though Bilderberg tends to attract mostly former U.S. government officials, it’s not uncommon for sitting officials to attend.


Bilderberg stalwart Henry Kissinger, who’s attended more than half of its meetings, reportedly went at least twice during his stint as Secretary of State, while Alexander attended last year’s session as NSA director. In 2004, then-Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) attended the Bilderberg conference in Stresa, Italy, and both TIME magazine and the New York Times reported that his performance at a debate there played a role in his selection one month later as the vice presidential running mate for Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.


But any suggestion that Bilderberg is secretly anointing world leaders or plotting global policy is the provenance of “the black helicopter crowd,” the attendee of this year’s conference told POLITICO.


The meetings are “one of the least well-kept secrets in the world” and “don’t have any decision-making authority,” said the attendee, who did not want to be identified breaching Bilderberg’s off-the-record rule. The attendee called Bilderberg “a useful group of people who are well-connected and thoughtful who put on these meetings and usually invite a few people from the [U.S.] administration to come so they understand what the administration is doing.”

Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, who attended the 2007 and 2008 Bilderberg meetings and until recently sat on the steering committee that picked invitees, did not respond to a request for comment about how invitees are selected.

Other American participants at this year’s conference included World Bank President Robert Zoellick, billionaire Bilderberg regular David Rockefeller, academic Barnett Rubin and leading neoconservatives Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, according to the attendee, who added that Greek Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis and Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis also attended.


British press confirmed that top U.K. official Peter Mandelson was there.


Representatives of Obama economic advisor Larry Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner – both of whom have participated in past Bilderberg meetings – refuted foreign press reports predicting their presence last weekend.


Geithner was in New York, said Treasury spokeswoman Heather Wong. “I don’t know how that [Bilderberg rumor] got out there. I had some foreign press calls asking me where he was last weekend, but I didn’t have any domestic calls.”


Indeed, the gathering produced barely a blip in the American mainstream media, with the only notable dispatches coming from a Wall Street Journal reporter who was barred entry to the usually publicly accessible Astir Palace hotel, and an Associated Press reporter who noted that it was being protected by “hundreds of police, navy commandos, coast guard speedboats and two F-16 fighter planes.”


As in past years, the near-absence of mainstream media coverage left Bilderberg-veil-piercing duties to a group of self-styled Bilderberg hunters whose reporting and speculation fill fringe, libertarian-leaning websites, newspapers and AM radio shows popular with those whose worldview is characterized by a deep and angry suspicion of the ruling class rather than any prevailing partisan or ideological affiliation.


“Leaked Agenda: Bilderberg Group Plans Economic Depression,” blared a headline early this month on the popular website Infowars, which is run by syndicated radio talk show host Alex Jones.


The story was based on reporting by veteran Bilderberg sleuth Daniel Estulin, whose sources told him Bilderbergers were torn between whether to initiate “a prolonged, agonizing depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline and poverty … or an intense-but-shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency.”


Estulin, the author of “The True Story of the Bilderberg Group,” claims to have infiltrated Bilderberg, and he told POLITICO that “in the end, the shorter-intense crowd within the Bilderbergers won out and so we’re going to be looking at a year, a year-and-a-half of really intense financial meltdown.”


Estulin, who was the first to report the precise location of Bilderberg 2009 (though in late 2007 he also reported that U.S. intelligence was considering assassinating Texas GOP Congressman and libertarian icon Ron Paul), declined to email POLITICO a copy of the pre-meeting booklet on which his story was based.


Both Estulin and Jim Tucker, another veteran Bilderberg hunter, insisted that Geithner—who Infowars reported was “to take orders from global elite at Bilderberg”—attended this year’s conference.


Tucker, who edits the nationalist American Free Press newspaper, traveled to Greece to report on last weekend’s Bilderberg meeting. He says he’s been on the sidelines of about 30 of the meetings. At this year’s event, two of his reporters were confronted by the Greek Navy when they rented a boat to try to take photographs of beachside Bilderbergers from the sea, he said.


“They don’t want the world to know how they’re planning our lives,” Tucker contended. “Obama is Bilderberg’s obedient little boy. He’ll follow orders.”



http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0509/22957_Page2.html

Soros Confirms Lindsey William’s Assertion Oil is a Weapon

If you scrub the above YouTube video to 3 minutes, 45 seconds, you will hear the globalist George Soros at the elite confab last month in Davos, Switzerland, admit that the price of oil is being used as a weapon against the “enemies of the prevailing world order,” i.e, the New World Order. Soros pegs these enemies as Venezuela, Iran, and Russia.

“Chavez,” declares Soros, “his days are numbered.”

In Iran, the price of oil will lead to the defeat Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and bring in a “more reasonable regime,” that is to say a regime that takes orders from the global elite.

In the case of Russia, Soros is worried. He believes the falling price of oil and the resulting social and political chaos in that country will prompt Putin and the Russian leadership into “some foreign adventure… to divert attention,” possibly in Ukraine or elsewhere in the neighborhood.

Soros confirms in spades the prediction of Lindsey Williams, who told Alex Jones on several occasions that the global elite have planned to drastically reduce the price of oil in order to take out the oil-producing states and also foment a world-wide economic depression. “America will see a financial collapse so great that it will take years to come out of it,” Williams told Alex Jones on November 21, 2008.

On February 18, Pastor Williams, appearing on Alex Jones TV, updated and added details to his prediction, based on insider information (see video below).



Listening to George Soros, one might get the idea that the radical drop in the price of oil is simply a result of market dynamics and a coincidental opportunity to deal a crushing blow to “enemies of the prevailing world order,” when in fact it is a carefully orchestrated event.

George Soros knows this, but he is not about to tell you.

http://www.infowars.com/soros-admits-lindsey-williams-assertion-oil-is-a-weapon/

Alex Jones: Bilderberg Club’s plan

Joe Biden Confronted With Nanothermite Evidence

The Syndrum Files covered this last month when the news came out and I felt it deserved a follow-up in light of Biden's sketchy response.

A team of international scientists published a paper based on extensive research, on how nanothermite explosives were found in the WTC dust and concluded that's what brought down the buildings. I haven't heard this covered by the corporate controlled mainstream media since, which is no surprise. Thanks to the alternative media on the internet, people are being exposed to the truth.

This is an amazing job from We Are Change LA to “educate” Vice President Joe Biden about the nanotermite that was found in the WTC dust.

We cannot let this fact go unnoticed. There is a blackout on this in the US mainstream media and we need to break the silence. Now that Joe Biden has been confronted to nanothermite, documents in hand, the US government cannot pretend they don’t know about it.

Start around 3 min..


http://world911truth.org/

So the question is: What is Joe Biden going to do? What is Barack Obama going to do? What is the US government going to do? Nothing? Or will they call for a new independent investigation and support the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth petition?

I don't think they're going to do a thing. This is high treason and they know it. Obama with his change rhetoric can give it a rest. He promised an investigation into this and the Bush/Cheney war crimes if he would get elected. Where is it?? Was that just to shut up the public and get gain their approval for his election? How are we to believe him if he’s not a man of his word?

Besides all the rest of the hardcore evidence, this is the most solid and cannot be debunked in any way. The senior council of the 9/11 commission, John Farmer, already admitted they agreed to lie. Obama can open another investigation and end this once and for all, but I feel this will just get brushed under the rug like the JFK assassination, Pearl Harbor and countless others.

Doesn’t it make you angry that this smooth-talking, charming character comes along; promising us he will bring change and get to the bottom of our most recent tragedy, when in reality he’s completely ignoring our cries for truth and just perpetuating the globalist agenda?

Obama Man

Too damn funny!