I am sian.

I was looking for the most god-awful, garish and tasteless blog template on BlogSkins.com to put up for a day or two, but couldn't find one disgusting enough.

At least someone shares my sentiments on blog templates:

"Y'know, there are an awful lot of .. well... AWFUL blog templates out there. Every time I get in the mood to change my site layout and go looking for templates, I always end up discouraged. I mean, I was browsing through literally HUNDEREDS of blog templates - and 95% of them were just pure shit. The other 5% were too girly.

Looks like I'm going to have to brush up my CSS formatting SKILZ if I want to modify my blog template ... not that I haven't modified it already, being the 3l33t h4x0rz that I am. Dude."

***

The readiness of Americans (more so than other people, seemingly) to believe out-of-this-world conspiracy theories is mystifying.

Americans seem fascinated with conspiracy theories. The theories seem to have a good deal of incontrovertible and irrefutable evidence behind them, but this ignores the overwhelming preponderance of evidence against them (see previous post on AIDS). For example, we all know that the UN is a sinister World Government controlled by the Illuminati, Freemasons and god knows who else, but for a world government they don't seem to be doing a very good job. Hell, they have enough trouble getting simple motions passed, so I doubt they can do a very good job in ruling the world.

There's also a delusion that "they", with the complicity of the media, don't want you to know the truth, but the "mainstream media" frequently does uncover scandals: eg Bill Clinton and his exploits with various women, Abu Ghraib, Iran-Contra and Watergate.

You can't fool all of the people all of the time, after all.

I would think that 99.9% of American conspiracy theories have about as much truth in them as the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

I'm guessing that it has something to do with the reasons why so many of them believed that Weapons of Mass Destruction have been found in Iraq, that they've been kidnapped by aliens and that Man was created in his current form 10,000 years ago. It must be pretty scary to live in such a world.

IMHO, religious apologetics, Creation 'Science' and conspiracy theoretics share most of the same techniques - misrepresentation of the other side, ad hominem attacks, selective interpretation of evidence, ignoring the sheer bulk of contrary evidence, absurd arguments and basically working backwards from a pre-determined conclusion to come up with theories and postulates that nicely fit the facts, rather than the other way around.

(See also: Why I hate the madness of these conspiracy theories)