Becks stomps on Stanley's threads to keep him motivated to excel.
Hippies package honey in non bear-shaped packaging to disguise the honey nature of bears.
The Modern Language Association was behind the assassination of John F Kennedy. After the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs, they were terrified that he would end US involvement in Vietnam instead of (the reason they put him in power in the first place) escalating it to a major war. They wanted a war because some of the greatest works of literature in history - "The Red Badge of Courage", "The Naked and the Dead", "War and Peace", "Vanity Fair", "The Red and the Black" and so on - have come out of war, and they were worried that the comfortable suburban America growing up in the 1950s would be spiritually flaccid and unable to produce any more great books.
The belief that "war is a force that gives us meaning" is more widespread than you think. In 1900s Europe, it was widely believed that a glorious war would invigorate a tired nation. Is it so unlikely that a cabal of litterateurs in the cultural desert of 1950s America would look to the transformative force of war to bring the voice of American writing to life again?
Starbucks provides seed capital for bars to open up near their shops in order to increase the chances that people do not feel adequately awake in the morning.
The UN causes droughts and famines (via weather control stations based in Canada) in order to punish the leadership of countries who refuse to fall in line with the New World Order.
(I said 5 before but it's my favorite conspiracy.)
(are we allowed to be saying real actual conspiracy theories?)
The YKK company makes zipper-front pants to ensure that, at a certain secret signal, a large portion of the male population can be successfully gelded without any other supplies on hand.
In Massachusetts, all public transportation stops at 1AM, all bars close at 2AM, and drunk driving laws are strictly enforced: blame lies with the cab driver's lobby.
The EPA is conspiring with doctors to slap all babies on the back as they're born to make them breathe, and get them hooked on oxygen. This allows them to pass draconian air pollution laws, which would be entirely unnecessary if we were allowed to remain naturally anaerobic.
Republicans lie in order to get elected so that they can exercise unconstrained greed and corruption. Do I have the hang of this?
The Republicans picked Sarah Palin as their nominee for the sole purpose of destroying Unfogged.
I've already seen the "John McCain chose Sarah Palin as the V.P. nominee so that his loss wouldn't ruin the career of another Republican Presidential contender" theory stated seriously, which has so many problems it makes 10 look like a model of sanity.
For instance, it assumes that McCain cares about the fate of the Republican party outside of it's ability to give him the Presidency.
11: This theory is vastly improved if you take it that McCain was maneuvered into choosing Palin so that his loss wouldn't, etc.
O'Douls and green beer are manufactured by out-of-work members of the Screenwriters' Federation somewhere south of Los Angeles in order to reinforce the popular association between Irish-Americans and alcoholism, allowing them to continue to write about the poll-tested most popular character in America, the drunk Irish uncle/grandfather who is by turns loving and abusive.
Most movement conservatives are being secretly paid by the Canadian government, which wants to accelerate climate change in order to make Canada habitable in winter, enhance its wealth and power through control of the Northwest Passage, and lure B back.
World of Warcraft is a secret program of Russia and China to addict the children of America and reduce worker productivity.
Accountants wear green eyeshade and visors because it enables to see the manifestations of G-d's Shekhina in the numbers they balance more easily.
Wait, that's not really a conspiracy yet, is it?
They do this, and engage in non-best practice program activities, in order to hasten the rediscovery of the true pronunciation of Hashem.
The lime industry pays Corona to make shitty beer, so that people want to put limes in it.
There exists technology to allow one to put multiple gears on a bicycle and change which is in use on the fly, but the American Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons is paying big fixie to sit on it.
The fixed-gear bicycle, much like the flash mob, is a conspiracy engineered by Harper's editors to make fun of hipsters.
19: My understanding is that all clear-bottle beers have that off taste and need limes. When I was young there was a rumor that Miller had formaldehyde in it as a preservative, but my understanding now is that sunlight degrades the beer. There must be some people genetically incapable of tasting the difference. (I'm not a fussy beer drinker at all).
Whole Foods secretly pays Mexican migrant workers to contaminate produce with feces in order to produce food toxicity scares that drive consumers to abandon their conventional supermarkets.
The Partnership for a Drug-Free America is secretly funded by the Mexican drug cartels, which are eager to maintain the monopoly profits they enjoy as a result of drug prohibition.
Eli Lilly deliberately engineers its drugs to produce impotence as a side-effect, in order to boost demand for Cialis.
Roger Kimball anonymously bankrolled Andres Serrano and Damien Hirst when they were just starting out.
The wedding-industrial complex secretly promotes fossil fuels to encourage global climate change and increase the outdoor catered events season.
Seth Rogan only acts so he can buy weed.
but my understanding now is that sunlight degrades the beer
Correct, sunlight will cause beer to go skunky faster so it isn't necessarily true that all clear bottle beers will taste off, but they are more likely to be bad than a brown bottle beer of a similar age.
The guy who writes SWPL isn't a grad school dropout after all; the website is actually part of research for his dissertation, which is being supervised by Jason Fort/ny. The book deal was just a happy accident.
Weight Watchers is secretly owned by McDonalds.
Unfogged was started by democratic operatives in order to reduce productivity and harm the economy, paving the way for an eventual retaking of the white house.
Levi does Bristol so he can meet John McCain?
29: too close to the non-secret that Jenny Craig is a wholly owned subsidiary of Nestle.
Non-conspiracy clarification to 22, 27: UV, including in sunlight, breaks down one of the bittering compounds in hops into the chemical that makes skunk spray so pungent (not just a similar smell; it's the same compound). Dark glass or cans is the best defense against this; clear bottles under supermarket lighting or sunlight are pretty much doomed. Miller, as far as I know alone among large beer makers, uses a processed hop extract that is light-stable, and so their beer avoids this problem.
Chang beer from Thailand uses formaldehyde, though.
GE wants you to be afraid of the dark. (They had a series of commercials some time in the past with pretty much that theme—women walking to cars in dark parking lots etc.)
Knecht half-assed this thread, because it's actually what he does for a living.
It's the queers. They're in it with the aliens. They're building landing strips for gay Martians.
You know what, Stuart? I like you. You're not like the rest of the people, here, in the trailer park.
The UK ISPs keep the internet down until midday to prevent the local secessionist commentariat from communicating with the mothership, because they really hate cowboy hats.
35: along the same lines, I have long suspected that the Mayor of London was in the pocket of Big Taxi. Evidence: his immense campaign to tell every woman in London that if you step inside an unlicenced minicab OMG YOU WILL BE RAPED BY TEH SWARTHY DRIVER perhaps you should talk to your bank about taking out a loan in order to pay for a taxi home instead??
This would also explain why he won two elections by promising to have the Tube run later and then didn't do anything about it, meaning that people who actually want to go out later than about 10.45 in the evening have no other way to get home.
The motive is, of course, to get the most important opinion formers in the city on his side.
The US government subsidises the production of high-calorie low-nutrition foods to ensure that low-income Americans tend to be obese and inactive: neither their bodies nor their brains function well.
What the British Foreign Office intended by its deployment of its George Soros, in eastern Europe (and other places), was an undermining of a system of sovereign nation-states in favor of a "globalized" world empire of so-called "free trade" run by predator financier interests centered in the Anglo-Dutch Liberal financial-monetary interests centered in the British empire. To bring that evil state of world affairs into being, two targets must be destroyed: the U.S.A. and Russia; without peaceful cooperation centered on a network of nations united around those two keystone powers of the present moment, there is no hope for a civilized life of mankind for generations yet to come.
People who have a different agenda, are effectively idiots, or worse.
Lyndon LaRouche, summing up the Georgian crisis (what it takes to turn "pro" in this area).
Dogs only pretend to like you in order to secure food, shelter, and physical affection.
Same deal with your spouse.
Here's a bet.
1. Lock yourself and your dogs in a room with no food.
2. Die.
3. If they don't start eating you in three days, I lose the bet.
Stanley deliberately conflated the American Postal Workers Union with the National Letter Carriers so that I would be forced into correcting him, thus spuriously making me appear to be a one-note pedant.
Stanley and Sir Kraab conspired to post 47 in order to lure me into linking to this article, thus giving exceptionally diligent sleuths a clue as to my RL identity.
Conspiracy is just another word for business.
Congress enacts tax cuts that automatically expire in order to turn campaign donations from the benefitted industries into an annuity.
49: You're Walker Evans? I never would have guessed. Aren't you dead?
John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vp candidate because her last name is shorter than his, so that his name looks bigger, and therefore more important, than hers on the campaign logo. Romney might have worked (like Obama/Biden) barely, but Pawlenty, Hutchison, etc. would have forced McCain to use a ridiculous font combination.
a ridiculous font combination
The slightly smaller typeface for Biden's name on the Obama/Biden stickers looks weird to me. It sort of looks like someone forgot to fix the point size before clicking "Print".
exceptionally diligent sleuths
By this, KR means anyone who would slog through 10 pages of that article. Good Lord! did Jason DeParle go on to edit the New Yorker? "How about another 6000 words on that, McPhee? I don't think you've quite captured the atmosphere in all its detail."
Osama bin Laden has not released a video encouraging people to vote for Obama, because he thinks Barack is a murtad.
Unfogged is purposefully hosted on an unstable platform so the cobloggers can shutdown comment threads that they don't like by claiming they don't want the server to crash.
58: Oh man, this thread's making the server all creaky...
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Stanley. Stanley, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a... fraid.
The town of Lincoln, Massachusetts deliberately undermaintains its arterial roads so as to discourage through traffic.
Berkeley, CA does that, and makes absolutely no bones about admitting it publicly.
I assume KR is talking about what "appears" to be pure negligence, but the principles of "Traffic Calming" are indeed not far different.
KR is hosting an Unfogged get together so he can lure everyone into viewing his massive collection of librarian porn.
61 is not a conspiracy theory. It is true. They also make it very hard to get to Lincoln from certain neighboring towns and highways. Weston has a similar philosophy.
63: I'm actually a big proponent of traffic calming. In fact, I am proud to say I was something of a traffic calming pioneer in PDBS (long story). But undermaintaining roads as a form of traffic calming is wack. Speed bumps in general are deprecated by contemporary traffic calming practitioners, and haphazard arrays of potholes are even worse than speedbumps.
I'm partial to chicanes, myself.
Fake bridge on-ramps that drop the car into the river are good too. Gotta play hardball with those guys.