Yes, indeed. And what lends great satifaction to those who are addicted to conspiracy theories is that there are, indeed, anti-Semites, racists, communists, terrorists, and corporate conspirators out there in the real world.

The discovery of some group of businessment who get together from time to time to have lunch and a few drinks and compare notes (not unlike the Rotary Club or the Kiwanis) sends these folks into paroxisms of delight over having discovered incontrovertible evidence for their paranoid delusions. Few things make a paranoiac happier than to find some minuscule bit of evidence that, if multiplied a hundred-fold, can allow them to feel that there's a small chance that they may not be actually completely wrong, and these businessmen really do want to take over the world. But when you consider the sheer number of such groups, all competing to take over, not the world, but the market, the chances of any one group being more than modestly dominant for any length of time are all but non-existent.

The trick is to be sufficiently aware of one's own predilictions and prejudices that one is in the habit of automatically viewing one's own urge to jump to a conclusion with extreme suspicion. And to view the leapt-upon conclusions of others with the same suspicion.

Solid evidence is what is essential. Not just some cut-and-paste rant from a blog that agree's with one's own prejudices.

Don Firth