<While most conspiracy theories are just that......."theories", they often draw from facts and look at varying scenarios. It's a mental exercise, similiar to listening to music or learning to draw.

It may be fun as a mental exercise, and I would be the first to admit that I get amusement from websites that claim that the Queen of England is a giant lizard, the fact remains that many people are dead serious about them, and to their fevered brains it's just a short step from believing the President is an alien bent on conquering the Earth to getting a rifle and trying to do something about it.

The important thing is to keep common sense about you. Many well-constructed and elaborate theories fall flat in the face of simple common sense. The most common flaw with most "Illuminati Conspiracies" is that they would require the secret cooperation of about a quarter of the population of the United States.

A good example is the "4000 Jews Didn't Come To Work at the WTC on Sept. 11" lie. This pantload is fervently believed by MANY in the Mideast.

Never mind that one can find out from the lists of victims and other sources that about 400 Jews died in the WTC, including seven Israeli citizens. We're just talking about using common sense on the concept itself.

A few minutes thought and it starts to break down. Who told these 4,000 Jews not to show up? Did they get a phone call from Mossad? Does Mossad have all the phone numbers of American Jews? What were they told? To stay home? Why? If they were told of danger, of approaching death, would every last one of them have kept it secret? Not ONE would have told his gentile buddies to skip work that day? Not ONE would have called the FBI? And EVERY ONE of these 4,000 randomly selected Jews would have kept their mouths shut after the buildings collapsed? Every last one of them is so fervently Zionist that they wouldn't blow the whistle?

See how easily it falls apart? It's not only not true, you can't even assemble a logical scenario that would MAKE it work.

And this applies to almost all the Great Conspiracy Theories.