And yet we've seen more factual confirmation in the past few years of what might have once been called 'conspiracy theories' than even before.

All those tinfoil hat nutters who said that the government was listening to all of our communication and there was a small group of people working together to keep us ignorant - they turned out to be completely correct.

Those crazies who said that there really weren't any weapons of mass destruction and that it was all a clever ruse by those in power to pursue other goals in secret. Oh that turned out to be true too.

It took 40 years before the whistle got blown on the doctors who conspired to lie to hundreds of black men in 1932 Tuskegee, Alabama's syphilis experiments. The Scientologists really did infiltrate the government to destroy unfavorable records in Operation Snow White.

I see where this article is going, that there is a lazy tendency to attribute everything bad to shadowy malevolent cabals. He gives some great examples of the dangers of believing that the world is out to get you. And, generally, I tend to side with Terence McKenna's idea of "no one is minding the store" - that we should be even more afraid of the fact that no one really knows what they're doing and humanity is flying by the seat of its pants.

But I think that there is also a danger in calling any suspicion of conspiracy "just an ignorant conspiracy theory." The fact is that there are shadowy forces manipulating public perception and official stories, and we need to be more focused and skeptical than ever before if we hope to pierce through the mountains of bullshit that is today's infosphere.