James Bond, the conspiracy starts in Petersburg

Sergei Malinkovich, the leader of the city [Communist] party, told The Times: “Everyone knows that the CIA and MI6 finance James Bond films as a special operation of psychological warfare against us. This Ukrainian girl sleeps with Bond and that means that Ukraine is sleeping with the West.”

The Communist Party has withered since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 but it remains the second-largest party in the Duma, the Russian parliament. The St Petersburg branch is a breakaway faction and a vocal opposition in Russia's second city.

From The Times.

Stress, control and conspiracy theories

Or why the Da Vinci Code sold so well in an era of war on terror, perhaps?

The researchers say that their experiments, which also tested people’s tendency to detect conspiracies and see superstitious lessons in stories, help explain why conspiracy theories and superstitions flourish when people are feeling out of control. Previous researchers have reported, for instance, that first-year business-school students are more prone to imagine conspiracies than are second-year students, and that deep-sea fishermen have more elaborate rituals and superstitions than ones who fish in more predictable conditions near shore.

From the NYT, there's a great visual experiment as well. It is something to do with the images above.

Misunderstanding Sarah Palin: the French links...

...the notion that Ethan Winner and his cronies — all of them PR professionals — are just “concerned Americans” who attempted to make the Palin smear video “go viral” out of personal conviction is patently absurd. The obvious question, then, is for whom were Winner and his “associates” working? The most obvious answer is: the Obama campaign. Another and at least equally troubling possibility, however, is that they were working for one of Publicis’s high-powered European clients.

Pajamas media on the "french connection..." This could go all the way.