Would You Conspiracy Theorists Just Please Keep Quiet and Let the Grownups Get on With Things? Thank You

Today in my inbox were three appeals from my buddy "Big Jim." Jim is a nice guy, plays poker reasonably well (but not so well that I don't take him off the table oftener than he does me), and makes a fine beer. However, he's a full-on kook.

He's a New World Order conspiracy theorist, and is entirely serious about it. He sees the shadowy hand of the Illuminati or someone behind every new piece of legislation, in every apparently innocent tragedy. I have no doubt he believes Natasha Richardson was smuggled from the country to facilitate translplanting her brain into a fembot clone of Michelle Obama, which will use its fantastic sexaliciousness to keep the US president under control.

Or perhaps Obama's part of it all, in which case he ordered the Secret Service to bump off Richardson so that when he ordered the hit on Michelle, her absence would go unnoticed. After all, Richardson's an actress, right? Who better to replace a very public woman on the world stage?

You get the picture. You only think I'm joking. I have only the slimmest doubt that Jim believes Richardson's death was engineered.

Last week he was fulminating on the new rules coming in for food in Canada. In a piece of legislation specifically stating that Natural Health Products are not regulated by said legislation, Jim saw an iminent threat to the availability of such quack remedies as colloidal silver.

As I said: The law he was worrying about, Bill C-6, specifically exempts "Natural Health Products". The text is available online, and it's the work of a moment to read.

When I took Jim to task in a public forum, we traded shots a couple of times until he finall said, in essence: "I know you've read the bill. I know what it says. Despite that, I take a completely different meaning from the text sepecifically exempting NHPs."

He then cited a definition within the text and claimed that this would allow "foreign agencies, corporations, and governments" to dictate what Canadians could or couldn't put in their bodies. In context, this was like saying that all of theatre is a conspiracy because plays have something called "plot".

This week he's off again. The G20 meeting is the harbinger of the new age of the New World Order. Don't let politicians do this to us!

In saying he opposes the G20, which has managed to work something pretty amazing, Jim is opposing:

Outing countries that create secret tax havens, contributing to money laundering, tax fiddling, and like chicanery, often by the corporations he seems to so despise;

The public shaming of nations that breach trade rules, such as China, and Jim's bete noir the USA, and;

An injection of $100 billion in capital to help the poorest countries (who are not represented in the G20) weather the current economic crisis, which may be a matter of life and death to their people.

In saying he opposes the deal, Jim also manages to put himself into the same camp as Rush Windbag--I mean Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity, who openly mocks NWO conspiracy nuts until it's good for his ratings.

There's a saying: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." Jim seems utterly onboard with this.

And another, which Jim really needs to keep in mind: "With friends like this, who needs enemies?"

Much less all those powerful dudes with connections to the NWO, eh?

So I asked specifically what he expects to happen, now that the deal's gone through. His response was "Everything's fine. Just go back to sleep. LOL"

No Jim: You shout "fire" in a crowded theatre. I asked "Where? What fire?" And you responded with "Never mind--you're too thick to understand anyway."

So you go post to your internet bulletin boards about the Illuminati, the New World Order, and the space aliens, the "truth" about "9/11", the faked moon landings and similar paranoia-inducing drivel, and let us grown-ups try to get on with living in the real world please.