Well, It might not be QI but my neatest experience was going through a speed trap on a moderatly travelled quasi-rural road with a 35 mph speed limit at 106 - on my way to 110mph. The cops never tired to flag me down :). I took a round about way back home.

Fair enough. BTW, I am over 60 and have been, ah...very active. Still am.

Simple inaction is going to do in billions of people, Ron, and even if we started today on a focused, technically workable approach I still think we'd lose two of every three alive today. I don't think there is any Skull and Bones/Illuminati sort of driver behind this, its just a simple fact. Some people are inclined to see an invisible hand in all things, but I think causes and conditions leading to effects is a much more sensible explanation. We've talked before about a need for triage, a polite way of separating those who will live from those who will die. This exercise has certainly been completed at high levels by all industrialized country governments ... we're collectively stepping back from spending resources in places that are doomed, no matter what we do. So ... a conspiracy of omission? Or is it, if trying to pick up those survivors in an already overloaded life boat drowns the would be rescuers, too?

How about global warming being the conspiracy to mask and excuse the necessary powerdown required by the reality of peak oil?

I have always struggled to embrace gloabl warming, not intellectually but emotiobnally. The effects of it seem so far away and incrementally snail paced that it seems rather dificult to get too excited about any quick action. But if you told me tomorrow that the world ill heat up by 10 Deg and therfore i have to turn off my lights and power and quit driving my car, then I'm liklely to get very excited and start exhibiting all sorts of strange behviour. Thats the trouble with peak oil - once you understand it intellectually, you can't help but change your (consuming) behaviour and that could be disastrous for business if it became too widespread. Global warming on the other hand is a way to mildly steer people inot a lower energy, more efficient way of living which in theory will allow BAU.

I happen to be engaging in a massive conspiracy long with most here at TOD to spread the peak oil message. If we succeed, we will upset the balance of economic thinking among the masses and that is going to piss a lot of cornu-people right off. Not sure what the result will be but it should be fun to watch. Even if PO is not real, the perception of it is the dangerous idea that the elites are afrai of.

I think what's going on is that the people who run this country (including people like Gore, Clinton and Bush) know that peak oil and bad times are coming. So they are dedicated to getting control over the earth's resources for themselves and their friends (e.g. by invading Iraq), and in the process, whole societies are going to suffer and probably billions of people are going to die. They don't consciously intend to kill anybody (by itself, what would be the purpose of that?); it's that if those people are denied access to the resources that we have stolen, many of them are going to die. And they don't care; they may even be glad, because those people won't be competing against them for those resources.

darwinian -

You ask how could one conspire to kill billions of people without having to engage in a conspiracy involving the trust of thousands of people?

Well, I think the answer is simple: to provoke a war that would accomplish just that. As we have seen from the Iraq war, it only takes a small number of people in high positions of power to start a war contrary to the will of the people.

The whole trick is not to micro-manage such an event, but rather to set the stage and to create the conditions for it to happen 'all on its own." Arguably, an example of such an occurrence is the manner in which the US entered WW II. It is now quite clear that FDR desparately wanted the US to enter WW II so as to save his chums, the Brits. He couldn't do this outright as the US was in no mood to get invovled in another European war.

So, there was the backdoor via Japan. FDR did everything he could to antagonize the Japs, and the final straw was his oil embargo against Japan (perhaps the first major use of the 'oil weapon'). He got his wish (and then some) in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Did this require the confidence of thousands of co-conspirators? Of course not. It just required setting up the right set of conditions and then letting nature take its course. Was this an outright conspiracy? Maybe, maybe not. But the end result was the same: a course of action directly contrary to what the American people wanted. FDR was one of the most duplicitous politicians in American history, and he prided himself on never letting his right hand know what his left hand was doing.

My whole point, perhaps clumsily stated, is that a clever politician does not need thousands of co-conspirators to set evil things in motion .... just the right hands on the right controls and pulling the right strings.

I predict that it will eventually come out that the events of and leading up to 9/11 will be found out to be quite different from what the official government version would have us believe. But time will tell one way or the other.

The real agenda of government is often very different from what is publically portrayed. Is this a conspiracy? Of course it is! There are fools and knaves conspiring against the common good all the time. Always have, always will.

I suppose it is possible that Gore, Clinton, and Bush are each involved in a conspiracy to do some evil thing, such as killing billions of people. But I find it really hard to believe that these three are involved in the _same_ conspiratorial group. It just doesn't seem reasonable that these three guys would join the same group. So maybe there are three giant conspiracies. And maybe they all have the same goal, but don't let the other conspiracy groups know of their existence or true intensions. Just a thought.

Also - surely there must be limits on the size of a conspiracy. One person cannot be a conspiracy. For the upper bound there is a hard upper bound at the total population of the world. How many people must be left out in order to have a proper conspiracy? Can a conspiracy of six billion keep their intension secret from the remaining half billion? In the development of a giant conspiracy there comes a time when more people must be recruited into the conspiracy. When this happens, the conspiracy morphs into a religious sect or other non-secret fringe group. From there, if it continues to grow, it can become a great religion, but not a 'great' conspiracy. IMO, the nature of human group dynamics makes a giant conspiracy unthinkable.

From:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3553#comment-296116

con·spir·a·cy
5. any concurrence in action; combination in bringing about a given result.

Conspiracies that require thousands or even hundreds of co-conspirators to do enormous evil deeds, like murdering billions of people, simply do not exist.

Is not the Army a group of people who have concurrence in action that bring about a given result?

Children, grow up!

*looks about* *sighs*