"Tekeli-li, or Hollow Earth Lives": A huge (comprehensive?) annotated bibliography of Antarctic and hollow earth fiction. Wow. (Thanks, Jonah!)
A GM conspiracy theory: The House of Rothschild is trying to put GM out of business! The Chevy Tahoe hybrid engine isn't a hybrid engine! Rick Wagoner cut himself a sweetheart deal on a pension!
The Yakuza turns to outsourcing: To get around -government regulation-. No lie. Japan is -deeply weird-.
Dublin's 'Millenium Spike': What is the Irish tourist attraction really for? "There is a MASSIVE amount of energy being harnessed by it, absolutely MASSIVE."
Ben Stein jumps the shark.: Because Deep Throat is not like a Nazi war criminal who took refuge South American, even if Ferris Buehler's science teacher says so.
Ben Stein jumps the shark.: Because Deep Throat is not like a Nazi war criminal who took refuge South American, even if Ferris Buehler's science teacher says so.
Deep Throat outs himself: He's former FBI assistant director Mark Felt, who was considered the leading candidate by Slate's Tim Noah (but not by the huge U of I Deep Throat survey).
The Magi Society - Helping People Understand Benevolent Design: This page devoted to "Magi Astrology" may be the most insane thing I've seen in 2005.
Christian Century: New world order, old world anti-Semitism: Pat Robertson, populism, Christian anti-usury movements, economic unrest, and the Elders of Zion.
Jack Abramoff's mobbed-up gambling cruise business: A third-rate screenplay featuring Tom DeLay's lobbyist friend, a Gambino family bookkeeper, bank fraud, Congressman Bob Rey, and a gangland hit.
Tweaking life: A six-part piece on the intersection of small-town politics, prostitution rings, meth addiction, and the reshaping of Montana.
Some Like It Hot: Chris Mooney outlines the TechCentralStation/JunkScience.com/Exxon effort to throw chaff up in response to scientific consensus on global warning.
Ordinary Least Square: The Puck Stops Here: Ongoing analysis of the forces determined to kill hockey.
If it had not been for 15 minutes...: "In 1979/80 my family took part in the biggest espionage scandal that the former country of East-Germany ever saw in its 50 years of existence."
The Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy: "Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice."
Wall Street Scandals, complete in one drawing: If only it worked the Templars in there somewhere... (via the Big Picture)
Endgame IV: Stargate 2003: Martian faces, crop circles, the Templars, and "The Shepherds of Arcadia": it's like the Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory
Profile of a BzzAgent: This ruins a lot of my ideas about social networks and trust metrics (and explains a lot about the 2004 election). Creepy.
"This is the voice of your Communist government speaking.": A 1961 Catholic comic fantasy of a dystopian Soviet America.
The Real Moon Landing Hoax: Were Russians trying to reach the moon in 1968?
Slate on JFK Reloaded: What could Ted Kennedy find so objectionable?
The Edelweiss Pirates: A semi-criminal long-haired folk-singing proto-hippie anti-Nazi youth movement. (via)
Mathematicians Against Terror: Using game and network theory to study the makeup of terrorist organizations -- and where the weak points are.
The brewers' conspiracy: White slavery, breeding vice, and serving slop: For a crazy man, he talks good sense about cheap lager. (via)
The mysterious wealth of Sun Myung Moon: "'I deny categorically these accusations and also the barbarities that are said about drugs and brainwashing. Our movement responds to the harmony of the races, nations and religions and proclaims that the family is the school of love.'" (via)
Richard Perle and Lord Conrad Black's excellent adventure: How a neo-conservative defense policy analyst and a conservative Canadian media baron became friends, then enemies, then figures in a huge financial scandal. (see also)
The Strange Case of Lous de Branges: It's as if Galileo had been suppressed for claiming that the earth is borne through the heavens on a great sky turtle; he may still be a great mathematician, but de Branges is a crank, and his crankishness has been increasing steadily for years.
Maggie Thatcher's son arrested in coup plot: Did Mark Thatcher want to play Kermit Roosevelt in Equitorial Guinea?
Shortwave Espionage: The almost-complete text of a 1991 book on numbers stations, posted by the author.
Amazing Revelations timeline: Like a Paul Laffoley poster put together in MacPaint; alternately, it's the religious version of every UI and design "don't" ever conceived.
The Conet Project: Recordings of the mysterious numbers -- coded messages to spies? -- transmitted over shortwave radio throughout Europe for forty years.
"Bill Clinton was a Jesuit, determined to carry out the Jesuit plan of Chieri.": "The Monroe Doctrine was America's response to the Jesuit's Congress of Vienna and Verona," and more truths from Bizarro Earth.
Final Generation: "Prophecy Experts Spill The Beans!": "So what does September 11 have to do with Bible prophecy? Simple." All the dispassionate analysis of a stock tout, all the credibility of a guy handing out pamphlets at the bus depot, in one paid newsletter!
Barak Obama the Antichrist: "And it saddens me that if a politician plans to influence society positively instead of merely padding his wallet and ego, you immediately assume he's being influenced by Satan, as if servanthood and the demonic were one and the same."
The Masons and Oak Island: Was the purported pirate treasure buried on Oak Island actually some sort of Masonic allegory? (see also)
The Order of the Occult Hand: "If true, the letters from Smith and Flanders reveal the origin of the Order of the Occult Hand. In the fall of 1965, several Charlotte News reporters had been drinking...."
Creation Safaris: "Creation Safaris™, now in our 20th year, take you to unusual and beautiful places where you can have fun, fellowship and worship God while enjoying the Great Outdoors. And while you’re at it, you will learn important evidence for creation and against evolution."
Hacking MasterLocks: When I was in high school, I thought Phrack-esque stuff like this was about the coolest thing EVAR. (via)
Giving new meaning to the term "enforcer": "Danton has been jailed since his arrest April 16 in San Jose, Calif., a day after the San Jose Sharks eliminated the Blues from the playoffs. The Blues released Danton on July 1." And hey, I bet he's looking for a new agent!
What MLA panels really look like: Damn those radical postmodernists! Propaganda like like "Aphra Behn's Religious Libertinism" and "Revisiting the Indian 'Renaissance': Vernacular-Anglophone Relations in Colonial India" will not stand! (see also) (via)
Making teenagers disappear: Tranquility Bay is disturbing and creepy. It is somehow unsurprising that they would hire someone a little bit disturbing and creepy to bring them their charges. (see also) (and this)
"...accused of bludgeoning and dismembering five people in an elaborate extortion racket intended to hasten the second coming of Jesus Christ.": "The culmination of Helzer's plan was to have been an operation codenamed 'Brazil', in which he would send South American orphans to Salt Lake City to kill the 15 elders who run the Mormon church."
Rev. Moon vs. the Washington Times?: "Insiders said that Japanese backers of the church had been especially unhappy with the Times's huge losses and with its right-wing positions on global political issues."
Stephen King had John Lennon killed: The proof is in Playboy magazine! (via)
Walking is for Communistic one-worlders: If John Galt were in charge of urban planning, he, too, would make sure that there were no neighborhood markets or six-block walks. (via)
Lobster: The Journal of Parapolitics: Issue 43 contains such articles as: Parafinance: Enron and drilling for red ink; Blair and Israel; How to fix an election; Mind control etc; The corporate ex-spook business; and Into the Whitehall maw: The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), The Norman Baker case, the Information Tribunal, and MI5 certificates.
The Reptoid Hypothesis: "In other words, we feel that a diagnostic critique of a newly emergent global phenomenon like David Icke is itself part of a larger utopian project..." (via)
Six Degrees of Ahmed Chalabi: And not in the sense you might think. More badass than Erdös numbers because we never paid Erdös three hundred large a month to feed us Iranian disinformation. (see also)
Famous unsolved codes and ciphers: From the Indus Valley to Bedford County, 4000 years of untranslatable messages.
The music is God's, but the beat...: Personal hero Johnny Marr on the rise of the Christian anti-rock treatise.
The Talmudic scholarship of tax protestors: Actually, the analogy to the world of subterranean world of s.f. fandom seems really, really apt. Tax code parsing as fanwank! (via) (see also)
Pictures from bejeweled crowning of the Washington Times publisher at Senate office building: "And Moon gives a speech announcing that it's time to recognize him as the Messiah..."
The Farewell dossier: How the U.S. destroyed a Russian pipeline without firing a shot.
Why David Hockney Should Not Be Taken Seriously: I have some problems with this piece -- I don't care for the anti-revisionist stance at the end, the counter-evidence is almost entirely from after the period of Hockney's concern, and I think Hockney's photo collages are actually pretty good -- but I can't argue with the conclusion. (see also)
Bob Stupak and Me: One man's experience with the life's work of Bob Stupak, the Strip's sketchiest casino owner.
THEN: A history of British s.f. fandom. (via)
The Reptillians: "Each new generation of the Illuminati bloodline families is exposed to the appropriate ritual to activate their possession by the reptilian entities and so the cycle goes on."
Scaremongering about Google Mail: I'm carrying no water for Gmail -- I think it's a dumb idea, in fact -- but I didn't have to get past the headline to know that this was by The Register's resident lunatic Googlehater, Andrew Orlowski.
The missing Faberge eggs: One was in a minerals museum, misfiled as a lamp. Way to go, jewel thieves!
The Widows' Sons Masonic Motorcycle Riders: These guys may have the most badass t-shirt I've ever seen.
Disinfopedia: Who writes the stories that the media sells?
Al Sharpton, Republican catspaw?: If true, it's both diabolical and strangely predictable.