Conspiracy Theory

I downloaded this show from a couple years ago called Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura. I'd heard it was a pretty one-sided show. They don't go out there with the intention of proving or disproving a conspiracy theory, so much as they try to figure out ways to prove it could be true. This, as it turns out, is exactly the case.

There's a few things I noticed immediately when watching the show. One thing is that everyone on the show calls Jesse Ventura "Governor." I can't figure out if it's a vanity thing, or an attempt to make him seem more credible. Or maybe it's like when you're President of the United States, and everyone is supposed to call you "Mr. President" for the rest of your life, even after you leave office. The show does a lot of things to make Jesse Ventura look like one brave man trying to discover the truth. But even with the biased perspective of the show, he still comes off as one nut job hearing what he wants to hear from other nut jobs.

Speaking of the other nut jobs, in each episode, Ventura finds a number of "experts" with information about whatever conspiracy theory he's tracking. I noticed that the show gives the viewer very little in the way of biographical information regarding these so-called experts. They're usually just referred to as a "respected scientist," or "has been studying this topic for decades." Unusually, these people have been fired from their positions at prestigious places like MIT, and they always insist it was because they asked the wrong questions or found out too much. I had a feeling that the show wasn't telling the viewer too much about these peoples backgrounds, since there'd probably be something in there that would cause us to doubt their claims.

Then I watched an episode about the Bilderberg Group, and my suspicions were confirmed. In a nutshell, the Bilderberg Group is an annual conference of some of the most influential people in the world. And by influential people, I'm not talking about secretive figures pulling strings behind the scenes. Heads of State (including several Presidents), Royalty (including Prince Charles), and other very high-profile personalities have attended the conference. These conferences are closed to the public, and attendees never tell anyone what they discussed during the conference.

Obviously, this sort of situation is all but tailor-made for conspiracy theories. The most popular are that these people are secretly controlling the world. Jesse Ventura decided to one up this and say that not only do these people want to control the world, but to do it they plan on reducing the population of the world to a manageable number, something like 500,000 million people. One of the people who confirmed this plan for them was a man named David Icke.

For those of you who don't know who that is, David Icke is a conspiracy theorist who even other conspiracy theorists call "a little weird." He's a former football (that's soccer to us Americans) announcer from the UK. For the last decade or so however, Mr. Icke has made a living touring around the Commonwealth (though mostly Canada) giving talks about his pet theory. That theory, and I hope you're sitting down, cuz it's a doozy, is that the most influential families in the world are actually shape-changing alien lizards. People like the House of Windsor, the Rothschilds, and the Rockefellers (I'm glad Americans weren't totally cut out of the loop there).

For some reason, Governor Ventura and his "team of experts" forgot to mention this about him on the show. It was a bit of a watershed moment for me. It confirmed my theory about most of the people being trotted out as experts. Jesse Ventura claimed that his show would answer questions for me. Well, he did, just not in the way he expected.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

A New Old Idea

About a month ago, a friend called me up, asking me if I wanted to go see the new Mission Impossible movie. To entice me, he told me that the showing in question was going to have a special preview: the first seven minutes of the new Batman movie. This probably would have shocked him if I told him, but that actually made me less willing to go see the movie.

Don't get me wrong, I want to see the movie when it comes out. But I want to see the whole thing. I don't want to see just the first seven minutes. But I can see why other people might. I keep thinking about the run-up to The Dark Knight. People were obsessively following every press release, and presenting the world with every photo of Heath Ledger as Joker with all the gusto of Colin Powell showing photos of supposed WMD sites in Iraq. Hell, I knew a guy who listed The Dark Knight as one of the best superhero movies ever made, months before he'd even seen it.

I thought about it, and realized that the producers of this movie are sitting on a potential goldmine, if they play their cards right. Let's say, for the purposes of this conversation, that the Dark Knight Rises is 140 minutes long (not too much of a stretch, The Dark Knight was 152 minutes). All they have to do is cut the movie up into 7 minute segments, pick 19 movies that may or may not do well in the box offices, and release the rest of the movie in installments. People will line up around the block to see the next seven minutes of The Dark Knight Rises. And they'll probably never stop to consider the fact that they're paying for one movie 20 times.

If you're saying to yourself "People would never go to the movies every week to see a short segment of a larger story," then you would be advised to look into the history of the movies. Theaters used to do that, and audiences clamored to watch them. They were called "serials," and were essentially the forerunner to television shows. Of course, now that we have television, people might be less eager to leave their homes for what's basically a seven minute TV show episode. But if something like the serial is going to make it's comeback, they could do worse than to pick something like The Dark Knight Rises to revitalize this concept. It's already got a devoted, ravenous fanbase. If the costumes I saw at the opening of The Dark Knight are any indication, the fans are more than willing to debase themselves publicly in order to watch a Batman movie. If they're willing to do that, I can't see why they wouldn't be willing to shell out 10 bucks every week for the better part of three months to see a Batman movie.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights