(Couple of weeks old, but my mobile blogging technology's proving difficult to get up and running...) Just finished Jon Ronson's book 'THEM'. It's about conspiracy nuts, their crazy theories about how there's a group of the most powerful people in the world who meet up regularly. The most malicious, nasty of the lot was certainly The Rev.d (spits) Iain Paisley, a raving power-hungry bigot but overall it had about as much impact on my life as Foucault's Pendulum.

Y'see, I'm sure that there are millionaire financiers running the world, and I'm sure they socialise. At these gatherings they reaffirm their shared beliefs like the Lords' shared belief in the supremacy of aristocracy back in the C19. They have the power to enforce their world view, if they remember and can be arsed. So what? Their world view is confused, incoherent and unplanned, which is fine; they're just big kids dressing up in the woods and worshipping a stone owl. More interesting is their accessibility, that Ronson got that close to them and they were complacent and unbothered; the idle rich are hard to enthuse, so there will be no great plan to save the world, neither positive from my viewpoint (e.g. an liberal green utopia) or negative (facist world state). Seeing the latter as worse than the former, I'm glad they're complacent.