Mark Morford, SFGate
Nothing beats a flaming apocalyptic theory like a conspiracy theory...

This is how it starts. Everyone from paranoid Rapture-ready right-wing conservatives to mysterious Australian astronomers to weird alarmist economists all suddenly realize their various yelps and screams and chat-room rants are running parallel and that they're all ringing the same bell.

And all their stories merge into some sort of dazzling interconnected web, an impressive and slightly disturbing jamboree of destruction and mayhem and global economic collapse that, if all goes as predicted, will all come down within the next few weeks.

There is this underground doozy making the e-rounds right now, crazed and random and already being tossed about and bunked and debunked and rebunked like a conspiratorial salad as I write this.

It involves all the best ingredients listed above, along with plenty of genuine obtuse jargon and sparkling gems of actual truth (the hallmarks of any really good conspiracy theory), just enough to make everything resonate with possibility and imminence and wicked gobs of creepiness.

And you have to ask: It is in any way odd or suspicious or bizarre that all the following events are happening at the same time? Is there a common thread? And is that thread barbed and nasty and does it involve doom and destruction and scary lizard people running around eating human babies and speaking in funny clicking noises? You be the judge.


The synopsis: The Fed is suddenly acting very strangely, cranking up the nation's Money Supply (M-3) by "crisis proportions." A massive chunk of the U.S. Navy carrier fleet is suddenly deployed in a huge, never-before-attempted global maneuver, coordinated with the fleets of a dozen other major countries. Threats of some sort of massive terrorist attack loom like alarmist storm clouds. Unprecedented numbers of meteors and comet sightings splatter all over the globe.

The CIA director suddenly quits. Venus is hurling across the sun for the first time in 122 years. The light of the planet is dimming, 10 percent less sunlight all around since the 1950s. London is preparing for a mass evacuation. Many U.S. military bases abroad that were falling into disuse have been "frantically refurbished and restocked" over the last 18 months in preparation for ... something big.

And you know what? According to various legit news stories and various semi-legit Web sites and a few perfectly unreliable chat-room postings, this is all true. Mostly...

View the whole article at:
sfgate.com/columnists/morford/

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