For the past few months, Rigorous Intuition has been publishing a series of interviews, articles, and art of survivors of childhood torture, purportedly at the hands of the CIA, with cooperation (and participation) from other high level government officials.

As readers here probably know, I tend to be pretty cynical about governments and bureaucracies; even so, the very thought, considered seriously, that this country (and others) are effectively being run by a cult of child molesters reaches the edge of my acceptance zone. It is stupefying to the point of triggering cognitive dissonance. Beyond that, anyone who openly talks about such stuff is likelt to be called a "conspiracy nut" and dismissed by both liberals and conservatives. In his latest post, Jeff Wells discusses the justifiable motivation for such denial:

There's something to be said for ignorance. Not the slack-jawed yokel variety, but the purposeful kind, that looks away from something unbearable, and seemingly implacable, and pretends it isn't there. As survival strategies go it's not such a bad idea to whistle past a graveyard, especially when there's a monster in the graveyard who wants you to believe there are no such things as monsters.

Do I believe it? Does it even matter whether I do? For me, what practical difference is there between believing that George Bush and his friends want the world to live in a state of perpetual war and poverty (pretty obvious), and believing that they (and their predecessors for the past several decades) have overseen a secret network of ritualistic child abuse and horrendous mind control experiments (so-called "conspiracy lunatic" territory). Frankly, in terms of my life, I can't find any practical difference. The latter is simply a few orders of magnitide more disturbing.

So why do I read such stuff, while constantly attempting to find a balance between being skeptical and open-minded? I guess I just want to know the truth. It is out there somewhere, isn't it Scully?