The 'Tin Foil Hat' insult shows the poor quality of the 'rationalist' thinking. The insult originates from a TV documentary which featured among other things a man who wears a tin foil hat to protect himself from the microwave radio signals being beamed into our heads by covert government agencies to control our thoughts and actions. Surely the writer must agree that is nutty, you might well be thinking. Well yes, I would but nuttiness, or paranoia to be accurate, does not constitute a conspiracy theory. People, rich, powerful people, who engage in conspiracies to further certain mutual interests may well be paranoid but they are not nutty. And they are not likely to leave a trail of evidence leading to their crimes.

I've often thought evidence is very overrated. The "hard facts" brigade are often not good communicators because although they hate being accused of trying to turn science into a religion they share with the most zealous followers of religions a tendency to read everything absolutely literally. They are blind to nuance, deaf to metaphor and absolutely insensate when asked to extract contextual meanings from language.

Here's an example that comes up from time to time. A claim often made is that during the European witch hunts sponsored by the Holy Inquisition between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries approximately five million women were killed as witches. Now the hard facts brigage will always pipe up, "That is an absolute fallacy, there is absolutely no evidence that five million women were executed having been convicted as witches. Documented evidence suggests only about twenty thousand exectutions of women found guilty of withcraft were carried out. (from QI (quite interesting) - a book of fallacies and facts.

What's wrong with that? Two things, first there being no documented evidence from that chaotic era proves nothing. Secondly the "hard facts" gang are nothing if not ambivalent; note how they pull a neat little switch from killed to executed. The point here is though very few women were executed having been found guilty of being witches most of those arrested on suspicion of being witches were killed for being innocent.

A witch trial was quite a spectacle, the accused could not be tried by a jury of her peers because the Devil would surely influence the jurors to ignore such smoking guns of evidence as: she's ugly; she has a big nose; she has a wart on her chin; she talks to herself; she has a third nipple; she owns a cat and base their judgement on (Monthy Python and the Holy Grail - Witch Trial) emotive irrelevancies like the accused being Dickin the Cidermakers' Dear Old Granny. (You should try Dickin Cider, it's a really good drink) No, trial by jury would not do for a witch trial. What they had to do was trick the Devil into revealing himself.

To achieve this the inquistors had several infallible techniques. In some areas inquisitors would bind heavy stones around the woman's body and throw her in a pond or river. If she was a true witch the Devil would make the stone weighless and the woman would float on the surface of the water. Once her guilt was thus proved she was pronounced guilty and executed. Witches were often executed even though they were dead. Youy can never be too careful when dealing with the devil.

Another favoured method of determining guilt was trial by fire. The accused would be tied to a stake, a big pile of kindling placed round her, soaked with pitch and lit. If she was guilty she would be protected from the flames by diabolical magic. If she was not guilty however she would be burned to death but pronounced innocent of all charges.

There were many other ways of trying witches, all equally infallible in establishing guilt or innocence. Medieval justice may have ben harsh but they were at least fair about it, the same rules applied to everybody. Even a gentlewoman or a Noble accused of witchcraft would be tried by ordeal. My favourite ordeal is trial by Church Tower. The accused woman would be taken to the top of the chrch tower and thrown off. If she floated gently to the ground, borne down in the arms of the devil, she was guilty and could be executed. If she smacked into the hard paving stones at the church entrance she died without a stain on her character and the one on the paving would soon fade.

Evidence then is not always what it seems to be which is why we must always examine what it presented as evidence both objectively and forensically. And when that is done very little is left standing and we are left with perceptions, beliefs, prejudices and gut feelings.

There are several long running controversies that occasionally make headline news at present. One is the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre. Many people ask how could it have happened, were all the security services sleeping on the job? Others go further and conclude the attacks could not have happened without the collusion of people in government. Others dismiss these allegations as malicious gossip - mongering.

Questions remain of course, why did the Towers fall so neatly, what brought down the third tower and why did nobody act on the alleged warnings from British security services of an imminent attack. The answers to those questions are: we don't know, we don't know and the warning given was that an attack was imminent, it was not specific about when or where or even what form the attack would take. OK, that's one unanswered question dealt with at least.

Another long running conspiracy theory concerns the lack of deatail in public records about President Obama's past, his birth details, educational records and even evidence of past friendships with people who attended the same colleges at the same time as he. Fair questions, all of them. In Britain we knew almost everything about Prime Minister David Cameron's personal history and those of his predecessors in the job, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. We know where and when they were born, what hospital (or private address in Mr. Brown's case) the names of the doctors attending, in which Churches they were baptized, we know of their junior and senior school records, how Gordon Brown lost an eye playing rugby, Tony Blair's not very successful rock band career, David Cameron's youthful misdemeanours involving herbal cigarettes and some disgraceful behaviour as a member of Oxford University's Bullingdon Club. We know that Nick Clegg, Liberal Democrat leader and Cameron's coalition partner slept around before he was married.

These details are important for establishing trust, we want to know our politicians are human, not cardboard cutouts or worse, creations of the mass media or even worse still, creations of their own solipsistic, narcissistic imaginations. We can forgive our politicians for behaving badly before they held high office but not, it seems for shrouding their past in mystery.

Obama's supporters however, among them many Twin Towers 'truthers' do not see any wrong in Obama having spent considerable amounts of American taxpayers' money on blocking attempts to investigate his past. The main plank of their argument is that all criticism of him has its roots in racism. The argument is then taken further by asking could a conspiracy so great and necessarily involving so many people as would be needed to propel an inelegible person to the Presidency of the world's most powerful nation ever be perpetrated.

The people who like to think of themselves as reasists, rational, convinced only by hard evidence sneer at the suggestion that a nation could have foisted on iut a leader whose legitimacy to lead that question was in doubt. Poor deluded fools, we should pity them for their irrational belief in reason order and logic. England has not had a legitimate King for over five hundred years. I'm talking about the Blaybourne conspiracy of course.

While Richard Duke of York was engaged in a dispute with the French over where England's territories on mainland Europe should end his young wife Cecily Neville became bored with life in the military compound. (Kings and Lords took their wives along with them to battle in those days) To help pass the time she amused herself with a lusty young archer called Blaybourne. Though when the young Prince Edward (later King Edward IV was born he was accepted by the Duke, rumours of his illegitimacy persisted even after he had assumed the throne. When Edwards died his surviving younger brother became King Richard III but he died childless Britain's real monarch and the throne was claimed by Henry Tudor (King Henry VII) who had a tenuous claim via Cecily Neville but could muster the best army. Various people came forward claiming to be the rightful monarch, most notably Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck but they were easily dealt with according to the custom of the day and their supporters executed for treason. In more recent times when people have tried to dispute the legitimacy of the monarchy they have been blocked by the courts simply preventing the case being heard by ruling that the complainants did not have stnding to bring such a case. Does any of that sound familiar?

So could the same be done today? Why not? In this age of electronics, of networked computers, it is easy for 'the party' to, as Orwell put it, reach into the past and alter history. In many ways to carry off such a deception in the medieval era would have been much more difficult as news was based on eye witness reports, not on what could be fgound in easily edited computer files. There have been many much bigger conspiracies throughout history. The biggest and most controversial even after 2000 years is Christianity. We do not have a shred of reliable evidence that Jesus existed as a real person yet many millions will not even consider the possibility he did not.

"Ah but you're wrong," supporters of the Jesus conspiracy will say, "the archives of the Roman Empire show Jesus was a real person in history."

Do they? The only contemporary reference to anyone who might have been the model for this 'real historical character' is a short reference in the imperrial annals to the effect that in the province of Judea a preacher and rabble rouser proclaimed by his followers as the messiah who it was prophesied would lead his people to form a great empire had been executed for the crime of sedition. For the rest we have to rely on the testimony of of St. Paul as written by Luke and of a Jewish scribe Josephus. Both were written decades after the events.

If we remember there were any number of seditionists running round the middle east claiming to be messiahs and urging people to rise up against Roman rule, promising they could overthrow the empire because God was on their side. Yet many people still believe in the veracity of the gospels and will argue that much of the concrete evidence of the life of Jesus has been destroyed by anti Christian conspirators who were now in a position to create whaever history they believed would best serve their interests.

Even if we accept that Jesus was real there are still controversies. A lot of people have been dismissed as conspiracy theorists because they think novels like The Da Vinci code are onto something when they suggest Jesus did not die on the cross. It is doubtful that Gildas Britannicus, an English monk had read The Da Vinci Code or the speculative works of Baigent and Lee when in the fifth century AD he wrote, "We know beyond doubt that Jesus visited England in 38AD."

Now Gildas was a Christian and an educated man, a monk, so why is he writing such heresies? And how can we explain the existence in Britain of the Minster Churches, Westminster, Canterbury Minster York Minster and many others. A Minster Chuch has a very specific distinction, they were churches (the sites not the current buildings which are a mere 900 to 1000 years old) that had been visited by one of the apostles. This is a legend maybe, but why would somebody invent such a story?

The great Minster Churches, Cathedrals and Abbeys were symbols of wealth, power and control so perhaps the stories served a similar purpose, adding awe and wonder to the secular weight of the great buildings, wealth and power. What we do know is the Church of Rome reinvented a lot of history in ways that helped shape nations. There is no way of knowing whether things would have been better or worse had that not happened.

The important thing to remember about Jesus, I must point out because I am not trying here to reignite that insoluble argument, is that 2000 years ago they had a very different way of transmitting history to ours in the modern world. Most documented evidence that does not deal with the lives of Kings, generals, noblemen and traitors is simple records of crime and punishment and tax records. Stories were old in a styleized way to impart the essential meanings rather than the dry, dusty facts.

A good example of rewritten history is the belief that the Druids, the North European priestly sect practiced human sacrifice. Almost everybody knows this is fact and yet there is virtually no evidence to support it. We even have 'factual accounts' of how the Druids would take their intended victims to "sacred groves" to be sacrified to their nature Gods. We cannot know the Druids side of the story because these ignorant, superstitious heathens had not developed any written language according to the early Christian scribes who chronicled the conquests of Britain and the Germanic tribes several hundred years after the actual events.

The Druids did actually have a written language, The Oghams (this is the name of the characters they used) which consisted of sets of lines something like this: \\\ III ///. It is surprising how many characters can be made with combinations of those strokes arranged above and below a central line (learn more about Oghams.)

There was another Druidic alphabet too, think back to the sacred groves for a moment. Trees, beth, luis, nion (birch, rowan and ash), the tree alphabet. Known only to initiates though now you can follow the link and discover the full 22 letter alphabet, it was used to convey information between learned members of the three ranks of Druidry. People have been conspiring since pre - Roman times. So why did we lose the Druidic Oghams script? Easy, "the party" wanted people to think that before Christianity people had been ignorant savages. There was no evidence of human sacrifice until in the 1980s a well preserved body was discovered in a Lyndow Moss just to the south of Manchester and Liverpool. The corpse had been mummified by the highly acidic peat soil in which it was entombed. Pete Marsh (moss, aka marsh, swamp, geddit?) as the 2000 year old man was named yielded many clues about life in Britain in the Roman era. And he was cited as proof or Druidic barbarism, a sacrificial victim. The basis for this, the scientific evidence was that he had died as a result of a blow on the head and strangulation after having enjoyed a good meal which contained sacred (medicinal) herbs. Think about that 'evidence.' He was hit on the head and simultaneously garrotted. That could indicate ritual murder but we have always been told Druids sacrificed their victims by slicing them open with a golden sickle and disembowelling them. Old Pete was in possession of his bowels two millennia later in fact they were sufficiently well preserved to reveal what he had eaten in his last meal. His death could equally be execution for a crime or maybe he was a prosperous man who had been set on by robbers.

The medicinal herbs? Could be they were to purge his soul so he could enter Caer Sidhe though that would not be consistent with Druid belief. Or maybe he had not been very well.

Evidence should always be treated with scepticism unless there are eye witness accounts.

Another great conspiracy involving governments, the Church and the academic communitiy is the one that insists the Romans were the great early civilising influence in Europe. The Romans in fact were so civilised they referred to non - Romans as 'barbarians.'

Does that make them civilised? Erm, no ... Oh sure, they had maginifent buildings but that was because they hired Greek and Egyptian architects and engineers. The underfloor heating systems they imported from the middle east, the great civil engineering techniques that delivered clean water to the cities again owed much to Greek and Egyptian societies and also to Babylonian and Assyrian. Roman baths owed a lot to the middle eastern civilisations too.

In some technologies the Romans were no match for the north European savages they loved to deride. Smiths among the Celtic tribes of Spain, France and Britain had, like the Assryians and Indians learned that iron was made stronger if it was heated to almost white hot and then cooled suddenly by being plunged into cold water. Thus Celtic warriors had long bladed, well balanced swords while the Roman legionaires had the short, heavy Gladius.

The barbarian smiths also knew that the quality of wrought iron could be greatly improved by adding to the molten ore small quantities of other materials. Another archaeologial find in Britain in the 1980s was a 1700 year old sword that after seventeen centuried buried in peat (wonderful stuff peat) was rusty but still solid and so well preserved that after cleaning the ornamental markings on the blade were clearly visible.

In Chariot technology too the Celts had the advantage. While the Romans could only build wheels with an easily damaged wooden rim the Celtic smiths had learned how to put a metal rim onto a wooden wheel and shrink it into place. I don't know how they did that 2000 years ago but well preserved war chariots discovered at burial sites prove they did.

The other thing that elevated the pagans above Rome was the political sophistication, pagans lived in democratic communities rather than oligsrchies. Nobody starved, everybody was fed from the common store, a child was prinicpally the responsibility of the parents but should anything happen to them the whole community became uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins, guardians. The old and the sick wre cared for too. it was a humanitarian society. The middle east was even more advanced. At around the time Rome was just starting to build its power base the Persians had electricity. It is well know that the technical specification for the Biblical Ark of the Covenant describes how to build a huge and very effective capacitor that would attract static electricity from the atmosphere, store it until a certain level of charge was reached and then discharge. What is less well know is references to electrical gadgets are not confined to The Bible. It is not know for certain that the artefacts known asThe Baghdad Batteries were in fact used to produce an electrical charge but at the link shows it is hard to imagine what else they might have been for. The ancients certainly did not have electric light or power and when filled with grapfruit or lime juice (acid) would not have produced enough electricity to kill anyone as The Ark is reputed to have, but they could have been used in a process similar to electroplating. Or perhaps they were part of a technology completely lost to us. The Romans were superstitious and defensive. They did not like conqered peoples to have mastery of things the Empire's bureaucracy did not understand.

If these other societies, the Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Celts, Dacians (Heard of them? No? Thought not, the erasure of the Dacian civilisation from history is another Roman conspiracy subscribed to by the Empire's successors,) were so far ahead of Rome how did the Romans defeat them? Easy, the rivals of Rome were technological, scholastic, seafaring and agrarian societies, Rome was militaristic - the first Fascist tyranny except for Sparta maybe. In fact the fasces was the symbol of Roman authority. It an axe with a bundle of sticks bound around it depicting the unbreakable power of the central state.

When Julius Caesar set out to conquer Gaul he was actually struggling against the Gauls led by their overking Vercingetorix. The legions were slow and clumsy, huge groups of foot soldiers that had to be moved around as a unit. Vercingetorix (if you are wondering where that name is familiar from he was first cousing to Asterix the Gaul) could command his supporters from various tribes to rendezvous at a certain place of his choosing where the Gauls could mount a surprise attack before melting away into the countryside.

What saved Caesar's campaign and enabled him to finally defeat the Gauls at the battle of Alesia was that the Celts were part time warriors, they made their living as farmers and herdsmen or craftsmen. When Vercingetorix and his troops took refuge in the fortified town they assumed the Romans would give up and go away. The Celts had no concept of what it meant to have a standing army, professional soldiers who did not have to think about tending the livestock, getting the harvest in or taking care of the family. Vercingetorix had assumed Caesar would lanch a series of suicidal attacks to try to penetrate the fortification but Caesar knew he had only to stay in the field. His men were being paid and with Vercingeorix trapped in the fortress Roman supply lines were reasonably secure.

And when the Gauls let the women and children out of the beseiged citadel thinking the Romans would do the honourable thing and allw them to leave, the Legions simply slaughtered the non combatants.

It's a good story so why don't we hear much about it in school. Well to tell the truth would undermine the idea that Rome was the great civilising empire of the ancient world. And the conspirators would not want that.

For the evidence fans then there is ample evidence that the whole of western history is a vast conspiracy theory.

Bankers embarked on irrational lending sprees, the newly created markets in debt enabled high risk loans to be bundled with other debts and sold on. People with no money and no jobs, people living on state handouts, were given huge mortgages that they could never hope to service because the banks reasoned that property values would rise infinitum and even if the borrower defaulted the bank would profit.

Take a look at this extract from an article in Rolling Stone if you still feel inclined towards the view of Dr. Pangloss, the philosopher in Voltaire's novel Candide; "All's for the best in this the best of all possible worlds."

History will look back in amazement and wonder how we couldf have been so stupid, how almost the whole populations of great nations could have been taken in by what was obvuiously an act of collusion beyeen various interest groups, some wanting to control the wealth, others more interested in controlling minds.

Look at how the supporters of climate science who post their propaganda online chant impressive sets of statistics, mostly obtained from satellite sureveys or mathematical models in a way very similar to Hindu monks chanting mantras. They repeat over and over again the same staististics untl it is hard to distinguish what is fact and what is speculation, mere mathematical modelling, linear models of a non linerar system. Very often the people on the ground observing, taking readings and analysing samples report that different things are happening to what the statistics suggest. But the statistics are supreme we are told, the computers are infallible, two and two makes five.

Yes, your head is probably spinning now. And so the easy option would be to go along with the conspirators and dismiss me as just another conspiracy theorist. That of course is what the vested interests behind the conspiracy want you to do. Want to hear from the other side?

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