"There are two type of prisons or dictatorships. There is the overt variety, which are clear dictatorships (communism, fascism, etc) and then there are the most effective variety of all - the covert dictatorship, the one that masquerades as freedom. People do not rebel against not being free when they think they are!"

David Icke, quite the cause celebre amongst conspiracy buffs, travels the world, and has created a small publishing empire to disseminate the truth about the shadow power controlling our lives.

"The Illuminati have been working to a long planned and coordinated agenda to create a world government, central bank, army, and a micro-chipped population linked to a global computer. Anyone with an operational brain can see that all these things are now emerging ever more rapidly."

All fairly straightforward so far, really. The Illuminati is using free trade to evolve a world government out of the United Nations, with NATO earmarked as an eventual as a police force to crush any countries that oppose them.

They accomplish this through the simplest form of brainwashing, which we can all try at home. They give the proles an event that they'll jerk their knees strongly to, say (as Icke does) the Gulf War or the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma or simply the rising crime rate. You then provide them with a scapegoat (the latest, according to a recent update of www.davidicke.com, being "this guy >from the mountains of Afghanistan with far more mouth than substance") and them tell them how to stop the terrible tragedy from occurring again - be that tougher surveillance laws, or harsher gun control. An interesting point is that Icke is a self-avowed pacifist who mentions his hatred of guns in every discussion of them - but with great reluctance, admits that there's not much alternative if we want to force the evil conspirators back to their own dimension.

Yes, you heard me - their own dimension. You see, where Icke diverges from your average survivalist lunatic is his utter certainty at the true power behind the Illuminati. Specifically, the Reptilian creatures from the hidden frequencies between the third and forth densities.

Don't make me repeat myself.

The reptilians have done their work - they created pretty much all religions as a form of thought control and manipulation to keep people as docile as the sheep we are. They've also proliferated endless drugs disguised as "medicines", which, rather than aiding healing, deny us access to the true recuperative power of the body. They feed us fast food for very much the same reason. Oh, and you thought reality tv and American sitcoms were part of a conspiracy to make us stupider? You were right. Hell, even Rhodes Scholarships are training camps for up and coming shadow governors.

As for the more overt forms of mind control, in the man's own words; "One of the key methods is trauma-based mind control. This is where people are traumatised through sexual abuse, violence, being forced to witness and take part in human sacrifice rituals, and countless other horrors. Such experiences activate the mechanism in the mind which shuts out memories of extreme trauma."

Their minds now being a honeycomb of separate chambers, certain parts can be programmed without the knowledge of the rest of the brain, making the ultimate sleeper agents, triggered to have sex with politicians, kill strategic people, and such forth. Apparently Josef Mengele (who was secretly spirited away by the Illuminati to continue his experiments after the war) was a major researcher into this technique.

So, where do these reptiles come from? Apparently, as well as invading >from what Icke call the lower fourth dimension, they can also be found in the star system Draco. And they drink blood. Yes, Bram Stoker was trying to tell us something... Well, I mean, they need to drink blood, don't they? Otherwise, they would lose their shape shifting ability, and revert back to their lizard forms, and we'd see exactly what we'd voted for in the last elections.

Now, visit Ickes site and you'll find surprisingly little raving. Oh yes, he goes on about, well, everything I've just mentioned, and more (no, really, I only touched on the parts of the conspiracy simple enough to paraphrase), but, you know, he does so completely lucidly and good-naturedly. His site even has a humour section - David Icke knows that you don't believe him. He's aware you think he's speaking a great deal of absolute rubbish. That's why he's so interesting - He knows the rest of us can't hear the voices. He doesn't expect us to believe him, because he knows his message is unbelievable...

Of course, for the meaty stuff, we cross the Atlantic - Nothing gives a conspiracy flavour like dipping it into the country that invented survivalism and the NRA.

"The source of this conspiracy will be found in the body known as the Illuminati. It is made up of the highest adepts of the combined total of the so-called fraternal orders and secret societies. They are bound together by blood oaths, a secret religion, and the promise of an elite status within regional government, or the world supra government. Their religion is based upon the Kabbalah, the Luciferian Philosophy, and the worship of the Sun. They are not bound by any oath or allegiance save their own. They are loyal to no government or People save their own. And they are Citizens of no country save their already in place secret world government. In their own words, "If you are not one of us you are nothing." To garner some sense of "feel" for the concept see the movie They Live."

Being that said movie (starring Rowdy Roddy Piper) is about a world-controlling cabal of lizards, it should come as no surprise that William Cooper is in the company of Icke as endorsing They Live as a revelatory text on how the world really works.

Cooper, on the website named after his right wing short wave radio show called The Hour of the Time, talks about powerful banking families the Rockerfellers and the Rothschilds as "illuminated" (or whatever the verb of Illuminati is) shadow rulers as Icke does, but, in contrast to the British Icke, he gives it a distinctly American feel - "But to give those who might understand a shortcut... Illuminism is COMMUNISM."

Remember the Knights Templar? A religious order of Knights, who’s symbol was two knights riding one horse. I always figured that was to symbolise camaraderie & loyalty, but you know, I've never researched that. Cooper, apparently did, and came to the unsurprising conclusion that you wouldn't share anything in this fashion unless you were living in a Marxist paradise.

The descendents of the Templar have their fingers in a lot of pies - not content to run one large secret society, their members in fact occupy strategic positions of power in all of the numerous secret societies that control the world (all conspiracy theories are true) - or at least, all of the important ones that, when co-operating (or, more properly, communing) to create a totalitarian socialist world government, are classified under the umbrella title of the Illuminati.

Now, one of the most famous Illuminati thinkers was one Albert Pike, who, upon spending a little while in the Lodge of Perfection, released his inner Jesus, so adopted the name Christopher ("Christ-like").

Now where have I heard the name Christopher Pike before? That's right, he was the Captain on the original pilot of Star Trek. Well, it should come as a surprise to no-one that Gene Roddenbury was in on the conspiracy. When the Pike episode failed to rate, do you really think the initials of the replacement Captain, when reversed, are a co-incidence? James Tiberius Kirk - Knights (of the) Temple (of) Jerusalem. When William Cooper looked at it, he didn't think so. "The Enterprise represents their (the Illuminati) great work or plan which if navigated properly will lead them to the realization of their dream of a united socialist utopian world."

Cooper showed the telling signs of an American conspiracy theorist - even going so far to die appropriately, being fatally wounded in a shootout with Apache County Sheriff's Deputies in November. An incident which his website says "appears at this time to be totally unrelated to the disputes he had with the federal government." The same website also urges readers to "Remain Calm! This is in no way a cause for action, but all patriots should be on high alert at this time."

Well, yes. Puts me in the mood for something a little less shadowy.

So we come to the Raelians...

"We are on the planet of the apes who worship the 'golden monkey', the Darwinian one !"

This one's pretty simple - The Bible says we were created by Elohim, translated these days as God. Followers of ex-racecar driver Rael believe that it is a mistranslation, and actually means "Those who come from the sky". Say it with me now, children - Humanity was created as a genetic experiment by a super evolved race of grey aliens.

Yes, the Raelians believe in aliens.

Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, and any number of other prophets are simply the extra-terrestrials maintaining communication with their children, who have, rather quaintly, misread just enough history to think they were gods...

The Elohim want to come back to establish contact with us, their creations. However, as is pointed out to waylay the fears of the paranoid, they are not invaders, and will only come back if invited.

So, of course, we need an Embassy.

It is the mandate of the Raelians to build this Embassy. They see it as necessary, because "Without the neutrality of an embassy, free air space and an official welcome, an unannounced and undesired landing would have enormous political, economic and social repercussions with disastrous consequences world-wide. Nor do they wish to endorse any government, religion or ideology other than that of the Raelian Philosophy, by contacting any other institution first. Thus they will only come when we build their embassy, such is their love and respect for us."

Of course, if they're so open and friendly, why haven't these aliens been more forthcoming? Why only communicate to us through parable-speaking messiah wannabes? Well, you see, it turns out that the geneticists, when they came up with technology to create life, had to submit it to an ethics committee, who declared it to dangerous to be done on their home planet, so only to be performed on uninhabited planets. In addition, this ethics committee also told them not to create anything higher than hamburgers on the food chain. When word was leaked back that they had defied the law and created a new species in their own image, their race was scandalised. Not wanting to terminate an experiment that now consisted of sentient beings, the mandate was handed down - the new creatures would have the secret of their origin concealed from them.

The Raelians seem awfully accepting of ideas that other religions are not. In the wake of the recent controversy over Advanced Cell Technology Inc. cloning the first human embryo, taking a different stance to most religious leaders, Rael was quoted as saying that the news made him "Very happy, and a bit amused because we did that some time ago."

Yes, Rael is the founder of Clonaid - a company that is trying to create cloned human life (and was forced to shut down it's American experiments by the FDA in March). Whereas the creation of life is seen as a theological dark area by most faiths, for the Raelians it is a natural progression - When life evolves to a certain point, the next logical step is to create more in your own image - I mean, that's how we got here...

For lunatics, they seem fairly harmless - They're surprisingly evangelical when they can scrape together sufficient numbers, but they don't discriminate against any groups within (or without) society, and they prominently display the message that it is an open organisation, who's members are free "to join or leave anytime" (most cults/sect/groups that dislike their members leaving wouldn't advertise the freedom to do so quite so loudly, if for no other reason than to not have it thrown back in their faces).

These are normal, rational people, who go to great lengths to sincerely point out that they are not a cult - They live normal lives like you or I, and just happen to believe that humanity is the invention of a benign race of alien geneticists with all the dispassionate certainty that we believe it isn't.

To end on, we'll get back to some good old fashioned insanity from the socially acceptable religions. Proving that you don't need to diverge from the major religions, or even to have a lot of friends, to be a board certified nutjob, is Tom Wells, former Christian, current Messianic Jew, janitor, Presidential candidate, and loving and obedient child of God.

"Do you know the worse song that has ever been sung? Do you know the song that has caused most people to turn away from the will of OUR BELOVED HEAVENLY FATHER? You know the song. You may be trying to fashion your life after that song. The name of the song is "I did it MY WAY.""

There's the old line about the relative who, for Christmas, sends you a Bible with every line highlighted. Visiting brother Tom's small website is a little like that.

God has graced Wells with a holy message - so long as the taxes of Americans are being used to fund abortion, they're not to pay any.

In order to make this plan of action slightly less, well, illegal, he decided to run for President in the last election - calling his campaign, what else, "The Tom Wells, loving and obedient child of GOD, Campaign"

"I have never had any desire to be the President of the United States. I am running because I was commanded to run by OUR BELOVED HEAVENLY FATHER, and I will do my very best to complete both the letter and the spirit of that command."

As president of the Family Values Party, he believes that it is wrong to teach religion as scientific fact to impressionable youngsters. Thusly, he promises to relocate the teaching of evolution to religious studies, presumably to plug the hole in the science curriculum with creationism.

These days, no one believes you if you claim to be an honest politician, but Wells goes out of his way to prove his claim, by having rather strict limitations on who can actually donate money to his party and his campaign.

The criteria include, among other things, that you must have written to your public officials stating your intention to no longer pay taxes that are being used to fund legal abortions. However, only males over the age of 20 have to follow through in this threat, given that "in our Holy Torah, in the book of Numbers chapter 1 OUR BELOVED HEAVENLY FATHER tells us, HIS loving and obedient children, that only males that have attained the age of twenty years of age can go forth to go to war."

Also, you cannot engage in, or support male homosexuality. However... "Please note that OUR BELOVED HEAVENLY FATHER clearly says that man shall not lie with man, that man shall not lie with beast, that woman shall not lie down with beast, but has most conspicuously said nothing about woman to woman. I may not like nor understand female homosexual behavior, but I cannot say it is an abomination against OUR BELOVED HEAVENLY FATHER because HE has been so conspicuously quite on this subject."

He also demands you take the Sabbath seriously, a quest he says has put him on the receiving end of a conspiracy run buy anti semites and possible Ku Klux Klan members such as Jeb Bush.

So.

Has there been a point to this ramble?

No, not really.

But there are a shiteload of lunatics out there, aren't there?

--Apathy Jack

davidicke

williamcooper

Raelians

Tom Wells