Conspiracy!!!!

I think one of the best ways to go about things is to discuss the concept of the welfare-warfare state and how both parties use different means to achieve the same ends, which is ultimately, control.

Also, another good little quip I have is that freedom cannot be legislated, it can only be taken away through legislation.

If they are die hard liberals, I would bring up the topic of the federal reserve and why Obama isn't doing anything about it, War in Afghanistan, broken campaign promises, etc.

I don't think anyone on this board hangs out with die hard Republicans haha (except for our parents and racist grandparents)!

""Your belief systems limit your reality to a sub-set of the solution space that does not contain the answer.""

The reason most conspiracy theories are dismissable is that most of them are ludicrous. However, just like other aspects of high strangeness like flying saucers, a certain percentage have that aura of plausability around them. Now, your corporate conspiracies mentioned above, yeah, they're highlly likely.

Jesse Ventura has "Conspiracy Theory" on TRU (cable TV channel) on Wednesday nights. Last night was on 9/11 and very interesting...

I'd like to point out that even as we realize that 'our' institutions are serving those with the most influence over them at the expense of everyone else, we need not make the leap that the people who are using that system to their advantage are all in cahoots with the intention of devouring our planet's surplus.
I'm going to stand out on a limb and say that, if you're reading this, chances are you were raised in a consumer culture. Remember, then, your first experiences with money. If your parents were middle class like mine were, you probably enjoyed buying some of a sprawling variety of mass-produced toys that are advertised all over our only universal (among consumer cultures) tradition, the television. I remember that when I was watching one of the particularly long advertisements (Beast Wars, it was called) I would purchase a toy from the show as often as I could. However, I realized that I particularly enjoyed being able to ponder what I should purchase, and being able to do so, more at times than I enjoyed my purchases themselves. So, when I thought I could get away with it, I would try to get more money out of my parents by a variety of tactics that boil down to mostly lying.
Perhaps if you think of someone whose status depends on their possession of wealth, and you consider that to get there they either profited (which means taking advantage of the people you traded with) to get there or were placed in such a situation by someone they've inherited from who profited; in either case the temptation to self-gratify by purchasing is much stronger than it was for some boy living in suburbia.
Now the staunch conspiracy theorist says: But James, you've just shown that The Elite are greedy - all the more reason for them to conspire!
So it would seem, but I recall, around the time of the story above, that, though the neighborhood kids and I would share our toys, there was at the same time an attitude of competitive acquisition. If someone had a particularly cool toy, others would ask to use it, and even though there was a bit of anxiety that the borrower would break the toy, there was also a feeling of power that came from having the coolest toys.
The fact I'm trying to point to with these stories is that people can seem to be in conspiratory collaboration when they simply play together; that it is far more likely that the system we have created for ourselves, and which we raise our children in, tends to create people who have certain traits, and though these traits appear differently depending on what position the person in question serves in the system, they hold us more in common than we give them credit for, because we refer to things like greed as bad and therefore don't look for how it ties us together because we'd often rather not. Our system places money in the hands of the people who are best at spending it to obtain more, and if you don't have the money or the knowhow and luck to turn it into more money, you are at a disadvantage. The people some of us see as planning against the general public are surely focused more on their advantage than on our disadvantage; unfortunately the two are equivalent in our system.
Most of all, we have to be very careful when we start assigning blame to individuals for catastrophes. Seeing an individual as willfully responsible for an event which we are angry about transfers our anger to that person, so when conspiracy theorists do mobilize it smells a lot like a lynch mob. Does this mean that the revolutionaries are just as 'evil' as the establishment they resist? Or, could it mean that just "The Elite" is an abstraction to describe people who tend to make things worse due to the alterable rules we use to structure our society and economy, the revolutionaries/lynch mob makes things worse due to an alterable mindset that is more interested in assigning blame than in making things better. Certainly this scapegoating tendency can be traced back to the roots of human culture as we know it: the Semai of south-central Malaysia, whose mitochondrial DNA traces directly back to the first group of humans to leave Africa, have a concept called terlaid, which means "an improper action that deserves to be met with natural disaster." When a thunderstorm loomed over these dwellers in the jungle, the villagers try to figure out who has committed terlaid and get them (most likely children) to confess their wrongdoing to the thunder spirit. And in the west, we have Global Warming, which, as anyone with a nit of skepticism will admit, we do not know with certainty that we are even causing. Among the Semai (you may know them as the Senoi, the people to whom a highly advanced dream theory was mistakenly attributed), there is a lot of social cohesion and an infinitesimal rate of premeditated murder: perhaps because they live in a dangerous jungle, but the way that these traits are imparted is by using boogeyman-like scare tactics to teach the children to fear their emotions. Likewise on the globalist scale, if we did implement a carbon counting policy or whatever other invasive measure, it might help bring people together to against global warming, but bringing a bunch of fearful people together with plans to scare them into action sounds like a dreadful plan.
And then there are those who think that the environmentalists are using the concept of global warming to manipulate their world. Stated as such, without the implication of an explicit scheme, the notion of people using concepts to change their world is about as revolting as the wheel, humanism, and the printing press. So we should not run out and kill the Bildebergers or Al Gore, nor should we create an ideology that ultimately advocates such things. Conspiracy theories capture attention because they are sensationalist; what we need is a more practical outlook to explain the phenomena we previously described as conspiracy theories.
Magical work with entities lends itself as a natural way to deal with these titans: an entity in magic is anything that you decide to treat as an entity, normally implying some notion of where the entity starts and ends, but only in a tentative sense. If we wanted to recognize that the actions The Government takes are based on previous actions (law serves as memory in this way) or that, though The Government is made up of individuals, it also consists of the patterns of interactions of those individuals, and the relationships of those patterns of interaction, and so on - just as a human being is more than a pile of cells, The Government is more than a cluster of people; and not only through the interactions of the people within it but through the interactions it has with its environment and all of its constituents can we come to understand The Government as an entity. By animating these entities, we can recognize that the individual does not necessarily see all the effects of hir decisions, and by looking at the patterns of interaction we can start to puzzle about patterns that might work better. People don't fail, but sometimes the plans people use do - that only means it's time to try another plan.

Relax, "nothing is under control".

The more intelligent and open-minded you are, the more ways you can 'connect the dots'; thus why psychedelics cause paranoia; they increase your creativity temporarily.

This has nothing to do with knowledge (understanding). Be careful how you connect the dots, because a lot of these conspiracies have been proven wrong.

Nobody knows quite what's going on, but I'm pretty sure the planet isn't run by reptile aliens.

Nobody can possibly control the entire planet because they cannot anticipate the unfolding of events. It is the most complex system we know of, and chaos theory says even the smallest change in such a system (e.g., your choices) can have absolutely massive and unpredictable effects; it's the butterfly effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

This is why Terence Mckenna won't spout a load of paranoid nonsense, because he understands complexity theory and epistemology. I've always felt epistemology has kept me on the wagon at least.

This clip is really good:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubDnEWHkjBc&NR=1

Another good clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHXWvqDofRg

Now, on the other hand, i'm pretty sure many of the people 'in power' who have a large top-down influence on us are pretty materialistic, ego-driven and selfish. Those who control the media, for example. Yes, the media influence what you think. This is far from a global conspiracy, far form mind-control, it's just the way things have unfolded. In the UK people are starting to get sick of this. They really are waking up.

I don't think you can or should be angry at these people, whether or not they are 'controlling the world' as some people think. They are ignorant, they don't know how to do it any better. It is out of control, and out of their control. If it's in anyone's control it's in the control of the people of this planet.

They only have what is called 'top-down influence'. We have a mixture of both bottom-up and top-down influence, because we can communicate on a global level. This is what it's about, optimistic communication and positive transformation. Dialog, followed by change. Talk to everyone. Every scientist, artists, writer has to know what's going on. What we need is a new world-view (e.g., Web of Life, by Fritjof Capra). Once we see what is real, what is true, what the politicians simply don't know or can't use due to existing infrastructure, then we will make dramatic progress. I am extremely optimistic.

Don't live in fear. Conspiracy theories are a waste of time. It's hysteria. It's blinding people from the truth. It's all contradictory wishy-washy hand-wavy, and I haven't seen a single coherent site with a solid set of evidence. Often these theories fail to account for evidence that falsifies what they claim. This is the problem with most controversial claims, and this is why we invented the scientific method. Pity scientists aren't following it at the moment! Things are about to change.

We all need to be leaders now. It's us who needs to write the self-help books and make the conspiracies! Blimey, are those hidden messages in sci-fi films and music? It must be a conspiracy, it's like they're telling us to WAKE UP! :D