I Love a Good Conspiracy Theory

Conspiracy theories are fun. They are a wonderful blend of history, science fiction, science fact, and wild-ass crazy thinking. The very best conspiracy theories have gobs of research. They have scores of photos with hand drawn arrows and circles pointing out some random array of pixels while concluding the resulting indistinct blotch is conclusive evidence. They scour historical documents looking for some telling details that most people have overlooked because it is totally meaningless. The conclusions, in those immortal words of Tommy Magliozzi, are "unencumbered by the thought process." Some favorites.

A Half-Million Coffins
Oddly, I got exactly 500,000 hits on Google for this (certainly a conspiracy in itself). The story is that FEMA has stored a half-million cheap plastic coffins in central Georgia preparing for some mass death event. Exactly what event is vague and ranges from terror attack to pandemic. This story is often matched with...

FEMA Concentration Camps
Going by the code name Rex 84, this is a government plan for the mass internment of millions of Americans. According to the theory there are some 800 (some moderates say 600) camps complete with barbed wire, rail access, and machine gun towers. Halliburton allegedly got $385 million to build some of these camps. Some include a story about 102,000 prison boxcars (photo) having been ordered by FEMA (actually, these are automobile transport boxcars). This was a fear among liberals (like me) during the early years of the Bush II reign. Now, conservatives have resurrected it as part of the Obama-fear.

North American Union
Most of the nuttier mainstream conservative pundits subscribe to this. They claim there is a conspiracy to unite Canada, Mexico, and the United States into a single country. NAFTA, they say, was the first step of this plot. A cute twist to this plot is the 1000 foot wide superhighway that is allegedly supposed to be built from Larado, Texas to Winnipeg.

The New World Order
Drawn from a 1990 speech from George Bush I, this is the Holy Grail of right wing conspiracy theorists. It joins everything from the Protocol of the Elders of Zion to Communism to the Illuminati and Masons into a Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory. One world government, destroying Christianity, and the Anti-Christ, NWO has it all.

Barack Obama's Birth
This is the newest conspiracy theory. This theory contents that Obama's mother faked his birth location while he was an infant so Barack would be eligible to run for president 45 years later. Beyond that belief in prescience, the theory relies on computer analyses of microscopic kerning differences between Obama's birth certificate and others to prove that Obama was actually born in Kenya to an American citizen which would have still have made him a natural-born American citizen by law. Then there is the alternative theory that Obama is actually the illegitmate son of Malcom X. Note: the same blogger manages to hold both these theories to be true which shows an open mindedness so wide her brain may fall out.