I am a regular reader of 'conspiracy' web sites like xymphora, WhatReallyHappened, From The Wilderness and others. I really don't know if all the dire predictions (Americans facing economic catastrophe, everyone running out of oil, rushing headlong into WWIII due to a conflagration in the Middle East and so on) have any merit. I cannot deny that the arguments put forward do seem plausible. But I feel that, had the Internet been around twenty/thirty years ago, we would have seen the same sort of doomsday scenarios (which, of course, did not materialise). But does this mean that the 'conspiracy theorists' were just blowing smoke, or that things were somehow covered up and catastrophes averted due to actions by the powers that be that screwed over more helpless people?