Conspiracies Declassified by Brian Dunning

• Too often, proposed conspiracy theories are so uselessly vague that they are always going to be true.
• The ultimate conspiracy theory is that the Illuminati runs the world, and that all governments and corporations are willingly subservient to the secret powers that be. It is the conspiracy theory that best satisfies our most primal need to believe that everything happens for some reason, according to some place; that there is a method to every apparent madness; and that we ourselves are the ultimate targets of this simmering malevolence.
• Whenever the rich, the powerful, or world leaders gather, a natural reaction among the more paranoid is that they're up to something malevolent.
• Overgrown government control is the ultimate validation of our native paranoia.
• Vaccines are the single most important and successful public health initiative. They are responsible for saving more lives than any other medical intervention in history.
• Throughout the twentieth century, schools began requiring vaccinations before students would be allowed to attend. Because children are the most vulnerable to disease, and schools are where children are most likely to infect one another, this policy is actually one of the most important public health initiatives on the books.
• Vaccination is science's greatest achievement in the fight against disease. No other public health measure comes close.
• It turns out that vaccines are among the least profitable products that pharmaceutical companies make.
• Is it true that autism is more common now than it used to be? No. Or more accurately, there is no evidence of that. It is true that far more cases are being diagnosed today than used to be. There are two reasons for this. First is that the definition of autism spectrum disorders keeps getting broadened as we recognize more and more cases to be connected. Second is that the stigma of being autistic is going away, and parents are more likely to allow their children to be tested and diagnosed than they used to be. So while we do indeed have more diagnoses being reported, there is no reason to suspect that the actual prevalence of autism is higher today than ever before.
• Just because a compound is natural does not mean that it's safe, but the toxicity level of every compound is determined by the dose.
• The contrails you see behind airlines are normal and unavoidable condensation created by the plan burning hydrocarbon fuel in certain high-altitude conditions. No chemtrails are needed to explain them.
• Whenever some person of prominence dies, there's almost always somebody whose agenda is accidentally satisfied. This, of course, makes it really easy to paint anyone who's benefited from the death as a murder suspect. This is the basic genesis of every conspiracy theory surrounding the mysterious death of someone famous.
• A crucial point is the conspiracy theorists' use of the phrase "official story". These are weasel words, used disparagingly to cast doubt without actually saying anything of substance.
• Anti-semitism is, sadly, a cornerstone of many conspiracy theories.
• Holocaust denial is often done by citing vast stores of trivial minutiae: factoids or extrapolations that are so many and varied as to give the impression of comprising an impregnable vault of proof.
• The only driver common to all Holocaust-denying authors is anti-Semitism.
• Any scientist knows that science is a continually self-correcting process. In good science, all conclusions are provisional, and they are always subject to change if new information turns up.
• As with all large conspiracy theories, we should consider the number of people who would have to be in on the truth in order to make it happen.
• Although many obvious fats don't seem to be worth explaining it's always interesting to learn how we know what we know.
• Free energy machines do not and cannot exist, as the laws of physics make them impossible. Specifically, the laws of thermodynamics state thaw when energy is drawn from a system, the system is left with less energy. You can't drink water from a glass and have the glass still remain full.
• The fundamental reason that free energy machines can never work is hinted at in their name. They produce something from nothing. The way the universe works is defined by physical laws--and those laws don't work that way.
• Cancer is not a single disease, but many hundreds of different diseases with different causes and different treatments. There could never be one single cure for all cancers any more than there could be one single fox for all possible automobile mechanical problems, so this idea that there is a single wonder drug in some pharmaceutical company's vault is simply fiction.
• Area 51 is an actual place. Formally, it is called the National Classified Test Facility inside Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, and its existence has always been public. The large, flat surface of dry Groom Lake makes it an ideal place for long runways.
• In order to sustain a thermonuclear reaction, a star needs to have a mass greater than about 0.08 solar masses, otherwise it will to have enough gravity to squeeze its core into a mass hot and dense enough.
• Conspiracy theorists typically take evidence that disproves their theory and say it's falsified, and then point to it and say, "Look! It's a cover up!"
• In science, we often point to the law of large numbers when confronted with a manifestation that appears unlikely. This law refers to the mathematical probability of highly unlikely events popping up at predictable intervals.
• The tendency of our brains to spot faces in ordinary objects is called pareidolia. It is an evolved trait in all animals to help us recognize our parents and others of our kind. If we didn't have pareidolia, we would never be able to recognize cartoon characters as being people.