I learned all about the Illuminati from band camp. It involves significant amounts of badgers and bumsex.

Except for the fact that our money seems to be be supporting the forefront of capitalism

@sinistaragent: There has been a massive cultural shift. In my day ( I am 30 in 2 months) people didn't buy what they couldn't afford. Now they stick everything on the never never. Banks are the ones to blame for this with high risk lending. I really fail to see how we should be responsible for bailing them out.

Err, I don't know how to approach this, for fear of ridicule, but I do think there is a lot more going on behind what we are told is going on. Senior civil servants stay in their jobs when government changes and they are the ones who really control things. So how do we feel about this?

We shouldn't be responsible for bailing them out, but the government needs the economy to function, so what else could they do? We also shouldn't be spending billions on killing foreign people for the heinous crime of being foreign in Iraq, but we do anyway (the US in particular could have rebuilt every school and hospital, funded universal healthcare and a handful of enormous research projects into renewable energy sources with that money, but hey ho).

Err, I don't know how to approach this, for fear of ridicule, but I do think there is a lot more going on behind what we are told is going on. Senior civil servants stay in their jobs when government changes and they are the ones who really control things. So how do we feel about this?

Can someone explain to me how people who have savings can be gauranteed £50000, but people with mortgages aren't let off at all? A £150000 will still be honoured? That is not even a small mortgage these days. It just seems like one rule to keep assets of one group and another another to screw the assets out of the other.

The big Freemason building ( lodge? temple? ) in Covent Garden is one of the ugliest buildings I've seen. It also has a few crazy shops next door selling bonkers Freemason medals and aprons and hat's with feathers. It's all fairly odd.


Whilst I don't doubt that there are groups trying to scratch each others backs, stories of super-mega powers behind the throne that run everything strike me as fairly unlikely, mainly because the world has been a bit of a screw up for pretty much all of history, and if you were clever enough to have a shadowy cabal running the world, surely you'd do a better job of it than this?

I think it's fair to say that not everything is quite as it seems

This is one of those "never attribute to malice something that's just as easily explained by stupidity" situations. I've got less difficulty believing that old-boy-network cronyism is bailing out idiot lenders and borrowers than I have believing in some overarching Grand Design shaping the world.

More to the point - even if we were governed by a shadowy conspiratorial cabal, who really cares? What practical difference would it make to our lives?

Occam's razor is a useful tool, but it can sometimes cut your throat rather than cut through bullshit.

See, the Evil Grand Design People *want* you to not believe in them, and they've propogated this "ahhahaha, silly conspiracy theorists, aren't they funny! This is all just incompetence and tawdry back scratching. Nothing special to see here!" line as a cover. And you've fallen for it.

See, this is the thing though. If they're really THAT clever and devious then to be honest I want them running the world.

But they're not running it for your benefit, see. You could be much wealthier, healthier and happy if they weren't being all devious and evil all over yo'socio-economic system.

I don't think you really need to invoke secret organisations to be worried. Why would big business need to corrupt democracy in secret, when they can do it right in our faces, all the time?