In the ocean exists an ancient god Cthulhu, sleeping in his stone house in R’yleh under the sea. He sleeps and telepathically invades our dreams, turning them into nightmares. There is a cult that follows the ancient god, and they relate the details of this ancient being and his intentions:
The HP Lovecraft Wiki 2014 [“Cthulhu,” at http://lovecraft.wikia.com/wiki/Cthulhu]
The most detailed descriptions of Cthulhu in "The Tale of Cthulhu" are based on statues of the creature. One, constructed by an artist after a series of baleful dreams, is said to have "yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature [...] A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings."[6] Another, recovered by police from a raid on a murderous cult, "represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind."[7] When the creature finally appears, the story says that the "thing cannot be described," but it is called "the green, sticky spawn of the stars", with "flabby claws" and an "awful squid-head with writhing feelers." Johansen's phrase "a mountain walked or stumbled" gives a sense of the creature's scale[8] (this is corroborated by Wilcox's dreams, which "touched wildly on a gigantic thing 'miles high' which walked or lumbered about"). Cthulhu is depicted as having a worldwide cult centered in Arabia, with followers in regions as far-flung as Greenland and Louisiana.[9] There are leaders of the cult "in the mountains of China" who are said to be immortal. Cthulhu is described by some of these cultists as the "great priest" of "the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky."[10] The cult is noted for chanting its horrid phrase or ritual: "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh C'thulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn," which translates as "In his house at R'lyeh dead C'thulhu waits dreaming."[11] This is often shortened to "C'thulhu fhtagn," which might possibly mean "C'thulhu waits," "C'thulhu dreams,"[12] or "C'thulhu waits dreaming."[13] One cultist, known as Tim Sonnek, provides the most elaborate information given in Lovecraft's fiction about Cthulhu. The Great Old Ones, according to Castro, had come from the stars to rule the world in ages past. They were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape [...] but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them.[14] Castro points to the "much-discussed couplet" from Abdul Alhazred's Necronomicon: That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die.[15] Castro explains the role of the Cthulhu Cult: When the stars have come right for the Great Old Ones, "some force from outside must serve to liberate their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented them from making an initial move."[14] At the proper time, the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from his tomb to revive His subjects and resume his rule of earth [...] Then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.[16] Castro reports that the Great Old Ones are telepathic and "knew all that was occurring in the universe." They were able to communicate with the first humans by "moulding their dreams," thus establishing the Cthulhu Cult, but after R'lyeh had sunk beneath the waves, "the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse."[17
It is also possible that Cthulhu is a starship or UFO or human-made faster-than-light travel technology. The conspiracy of Cthulu is a reality – though Lovecraft’s informants purposely deviated from the truth to hide the real existence of the cult of Cthulhu,
Shalizi No Date (Cosma Shalizi, Associate Professor Statistics, also was a published academic for the Santa Fe institute Department Baker Hall 229C Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890 USA http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/story-so-far/cthulhu-project.html, -BRW)
Appendix: The Cthulhu Project We note the following from H. P. Lovecraft's ``The Call of Cthulhu'': There exists a conspiratorial organization of global reach; It is centered around ``the undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China''; ``Remains of Them [according to the ``deathless Chinamen''] were still to be found as Cyclopean stones in islands in the Pacific''; ``When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live''; ``the center [of the organization] lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Iram, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched''; ``It was not allied to the European witch-cult''; The center of the interests of the cult has moved under water; Biological abnormalities are of great interest to the cult; so is non-Euclidian geometry. We conclude that Lovecraft was misinformed --- his informants do not appear to have been the most stable individuals --- and that Cthulhu did not come from the stars, it will go to them. Cthulhu is a starship. The ``cult'' is in fact the conspiracy; the links to China and Arabia are clear evidence of this. The ``deathless Chinamen'' are obviously successful Chinese alchemists, and in the Arabian Nights, Irem (or Iram) is reached by an alchemist with an astonishing ability to perform biological transformations. The ``Cyclopean'' structures in the Pacific of which Lovecraft wrote must be then ruins known as Nan Madol (also called Nan Matol), on the island of Ponape in the Carolines. These were constructed when the Islamic and Chinese branches of the Conspiracy were at their height. The non-alliance with the European witches is also explicable --- those who were not merely a local reaction against Christianity were a splinter group, isolated and thrown on its own resources during the Dark Ages, and detached from the Conspiracy as such. We may take the identification of the Cthulhu cult and the Conspiracy as established. ``Plunging from world to world'' and the intense interest in the stars and non-Euclidean geometry suffice to show that the project is about interstellar travel, and at speeds greater than c at that. The link with biology is not so strange as it might seem. Evidently the Conspiracy decided against human or mechanical control; instead, it is seeking to create a living starship whose nervous system is already adapted to a wide range of non-Euclidean geometries and the intricacies of space travel, as ours is adapted to Euclidean geometry and throwing things. The "when the stars are right" formula is a misunderstanding; when it is working properly, Cthulhu will plunge from world to world, from the Earth to the stars. When they are not right, Cthulhu is quiescent, inactive, in a state of suspended animation - dead. The possible incorporation of more conventional mechanical elements may have contributed to the notion that Cthulhu is somehow at once alive and dead. Evidently the Cthulhu project began in Irem, but was forced, for some reason, to relocate to the east --- much further east. The Kitab al-Azif, later known in the west as the Necronomicon, is evidently a product of the research carried out at Irem. The Greek name translates as the ``Book of the laws [or rules or science, etc.] of the dead.'' It may thus either refer to those syntheses which were not fully ``alive,'' or to unsuccessful projects. Some hundreds of years after the relocation to Ponape, that site too was abandoned, being left to the native (or perhaps encroaching) Micronesians. We believe it unlikely that the Cthulhu project went to Easter Island or the still unexplored highlands of Papua New Guinea. Instead, it is probably that they moved under water. The sea, after all, is a free-fall environment, abundant in resources and energy, and even possesses some insulation against the seismic activity of the Pacific, as the survival of coral reefs attest. Reports of Cthulhu indicate a tremendous size and an at least partially cephalopod nature. Octopodes are the most intelligent of the invertebrates, and in addition possess dexterous limbs. It is not implausible that the Conspiracy as altered some of them sufficiently to make them valuable graduate students, if not researchers, and may even have incorporated cephalopod elements into the starship. Under water, huge structures may be assembled, such as blue whales, giant squid, and starships, ignoring the constraints of gravity, no more relevant there than in space. This hypothesis explains some otherwise quite puzzling data. The relationship of the Cthulhu cult to the Deep Ones and shoggoths is now plain as a pikestaff, as is their preference for remote areas, where the Conspiracy could work on them undisturbed by priests, princes and people in general. (There are other, and quite obvious, advantages to situating research facilities in the South Pacific.) The elucidation of a fact which has perplexed scholars for decades - namely, that Nan Matol means in space --- is now trivial. Further, it is in full accordance with local tradition. The common belief of the Cargo Cults that European wealth was due to the migration of their ancestral magicians to England and Holland is, in a sense, perfectly true. So, rightly viewed, are the Ponapean legends about the origin of Nan Matol: ``The story that Hambruch [A German anthropologist who visited Ponape in 1908-10] heard about the building of Nan Matol tells how two young wizards, Olo-Sipe and Olo-Sopa [or: Olo-Shipe and Olo-Shaupa], set out from Jokaz [a nearby island] to build a great cult center to the gods, demons, and ghosts. They tried several places on the coasts of Ponape, but each time the wind and the surf destroyed their handiwork. At last they found their ideal site at Temuen. A mighty spell made the basaltic prisms on Jokaz fly through the air and settle down in the right positions to form Nan Matol.... ``Until recent times Nan Matol was used as a center for the worship of the turtle god Nanusunsap. Whenever the Ponapeans caught a sea turtle, they brought it to Nan Matol and kept it in one of the buildings. ``In the reign of the Nan-Marki Luk-En-Mueiu, about 1800, the ritual was brought to an end in a ridiculous fashion. At one ceremony, a priest got no roast turtle. He walked out in a rage, howling curses, and went off to live by himself on a sand bank and eat eels. [Compare the American children's song: ``Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I'll go eat worms.'' It goes on to describe the gastronomic delights of annelidophagy in detail.] The Metalanimians [i.e. natives] feared that he had so profaned the ceremony that they could no longer hold it. ``The Ponapeans also had myths about a dragon or giant lizard. In one version, the dragon lived in Jokaz and gave birth to two girls. When the girls grew up, they married the reigning Satalur and asked their husband to let their mother come to live in Nan Matol. When he assented, the dragon moved into one of the buildings, excavating the canals of Nan Matol in the process. ``Next morning, when the Satalur brought some food for his mother-in- law, he saw the dragon for the first time. In terror he burned up the house and the dragon. His wives jumped into the fire and burned themselves up too; and in his grief the Satalur did likewise. The likeliest explanation for the dragon myth is that Ponape was once visited by the New Guinean crocodile, a large man-eating species often found swimming in the open sea, where one would never expect to see a crocodile.'' (pp. 233-235 of L. Sprague and Catherine de Camp, Ancient Ruins and Archaeology.) The last sentence of rationalization is easily explained. L. S. de Camp was a protege of Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Howard Carter. Undoubtedly his researches into the roots of these men's ideas lead him to the Conspiracy. If he is not a member, he is at least a pawn, attempting to cover the traces of the Secret Masters of the Conspiracy..) The insanity of Lovecraft's informants is thus quite rational. The creation of a living starship, hardwired to make sense of quantum gravity and general relativity, would have been incomprehensible to any non-Conspirator before this century; and communication with such an entity --- especially a not-fully-debugged prototype --- as good a way as any of frying one's neurons. In fact, the testing of FTL starships appears distinctly hazardous. Things go wrong in unpleasant ways. One of them was the Krakatoa explosion - ominously, right on the Pacific. Another was the Tunguska event. It went up; it came down; it did horrible things to large parts of Siberia and spawned new religions among the aborigines. According to Lovecraft, the later test in the 1920s merely drove thousands of people insane. We may observe that the Conspiracy has been making progress. His published date does not match that of the start of the great stock market bubble, but he may have fudged matters a little. No doubt subsequent tests have been responsible for other instances of wide-spread lunacy --- the re-election of Ronald Wilson Reagan springs to mind. Lovecraft evidently misunderstood the Conspiracy, if in fact he was deliberately fed disinformation by its enemies. The divergence between an ancient and unspeakable alien deity and a man-made starship boggles the mind. Nonetheless, he was right about one thing: Nothing will ever be the same after Cthulhu rises. Incidentally, based on his interest in space travel, the deep oceans and giant squid, we can confirm that A. C. Clarke is a Conspirator.

Thus we affirm that the United States federal government should increase its exploration of the Earth’s oceans near R’yleh in order to find Cthulhu.
The affirmation of conspiracy theories regarding extra-human or non-human sovereignties breaks down the state’s monopoly on governmentality. This governmentality is the root cause of violence and exclusion.
Wendt and Duvall 08 [Alexander Wendt, professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University, August 2008, “Sovereignty and the UFO”, http://ovnis-usa.com/DIVERS/Wendt_ Duvall_PoliticalTheory.pdf, page 618]
Authoritative insistence on knowing the UFO only through ignorance is necessitated by the threat it poses to the anthropocentric metaphysics of modern rule. Within modern rule we focus specifically on sovereignty, but in our conceptualization sovereignty cannot be understood without reference to governmentality, which sets the normative context of sovereign decision. Thus, in what follows we both begin and end with governmentality, while keeping our remarks to a minimum in order to focus on the metaphysics of sovereignty perse. I’m doing so we recognize that the relationship between govermnentality and sovereignty is contested among political theorists. Focused on the specific problem of the UFO taboo, we do not take sides in this debate except to accept the View that the two aspects of modern rule are intertwined. In thinking about the problem of rule, political scientists have traditionally focused on either individual agents or institutional structures, in both cases treating government as a given object. In contrast, Foucault's concept of governmentality is focused on the "art of governing," understood as the biopolitical "conduct of conduct" for a population of subjects." Thus, governmentality concerns the specific regime of practices through which the population is constituted and self-regularized. "Modern" governmentality marks a shift in discourses of rule away from the state's sovereign power- its ability to take life and/or render it bare-and toward its fostering and regularizing of life in biopolitics. The object of government is no longer simply obedience to the king, but regulating the conditions of life for subjects. To this end biopolitics requires that the conditions of life of the population be made visible and assayed, and practical knowledge be made available to improve them. As a result, with modern governmentality we see the emergence of both panoptic surveillance and numerous specialized discourses-of education, political economy, demography, health, morality, and others- the effect of which is to make populations knowable and subject to the regularization that will make for the "happy life." A constitutive feature of modern governmentality is that its discourses are scientific, which means that science and the state are today deeply intermeshed. Through science the state makes its subjects and objects known, lending them a facticity that facilitates their regularization, and though the state science acquires institutional support and prestige. Despite this symbiosis, however, there is also an important epistemological difference between the two. Science seeks, but knows it can never fully achieve, "the" truth, defined as all apolitical, objective representation of the world. To this end it relies on norms and practices that produce an evolving, always potentially contested body of knowledge. The state, in contrast, seeks a regime of truth to which its population will reliably adhere. Standards for knowledge in that context privilege stability and normalization over the uncertain path of scientific truth. Although science and the state are allied in the modern UFO regime, we suggest in conclusion that this difference opens space for critical theory and resistance. Modern governmentality directs attention away from sovereign power and toward the socially diffuse practices by which it is sustained. Yet as Agamben reminds us, 46 sovereignty remains important, because every regime of governmentality has outsides, even while exceeding the capacity for regularization. This outside is both external, in the form of actors not subject to normalization, and internal, in the form of people’s capacity to do otherwise (hence their need to be “governed”). Ordinarily these limits do not severely threaten modern rule, but some exceed the capacity for regularization. Schmitt calls such situations “states of exception”: “any severe economic or political disturbance requiring the application of extraordinary measures,” including abrogation of law by those who govern in its name. 47 Extending and modifying Schmitt’s analysis, Agamben emphasizes a “zone of indistinction” between the juridical order and the state of exception, which is neither fully in nor outside the law. Thus, while sometimes constitutionally recognized, the state of exception is “not a special kind of law,” but necessarily transcends the law. 48 In Sergei Prozorov’s terms, the state of exception is a “constitutive outside” or “excess” to law that is the latter’s condition of possibility. 49 As such, for Agamben (if not for Schmitt) a state of exception is always potentially there, even when not actually in force, permanently contaminating the law. On the other hand, the state of exception also belongs to the law, since it is by the latter’s limits and/or failure that it is known. States of exception cannot be declared willy-nilly, but must make sense within the regime of truth they would uphold. Thus, law and the exception are co-constitutive rather than mutually exclusive. “Sovereign is he who decides the exception.” 50 Like the state of exception it decides, sovereignty is both outside and inside law. On the one hand, it is the ability to found and suspend a juridical order. To that extent sovereignty transcends the law, its decisions seeming to come out of nowhere, like a “miracle.” 51 In saying this Schmitt emphasizes sovereignty’s omnipotence, if not to realize its intentions then at least to decide them. However, even Schmitt recognizes that sovereign decision is not literally a miracle, but has conditions of possibility. Among Agamben’s contributions is in showing that those conditions include the very corpus of law that is to be suspended in the decision of the exception. In this way sovereignty is also inside and limited by law.
Epistemic ethics demands that we evaluate conspiracies as such and on their own terms. The affirmative creates a space for critical dialogue about belief-forming strategies which enable us to better engage with politics and the world. It is through this exploration of the Cult of Cthulhu that we discover something more sinister, something capable of rupturing the epistemological structures that surround debate, it is through the production of the conspiracy of cthulu that we uncover the faulty systems of knowledge production that enlightenment has handed down to us, that instead the pursuit of truth amid the chaos of the world only reveals more intricacies, more abstractions, this opaqueness that we believed delineated what is “true” and “conspiracy” we are always already conspiracy theorists in debate, however our failure to recognize this has led to a distancing of our pedagogical model from the reality of the world
Pigden, 2007 (Charles, Philosophy professor at the University of Otago, “Conspiracy Theories and the Conventional Wisdom.” Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 4.2 (2007) 219-232)
The conventional wisdom on conspiracy theories is that they ought not to be believed. To call something "a conspiracy theory" is to suggest that it is intellectually suspect; to call someone "a conspiracy theorist" is to suggest that he is irrational, paranoid or perverse. Often the suggestion seems to be that conspiracy theories are not just suspect, but utterly unbelievable, too silly to deserve the effort of a serious refutation. It is a common ploy on the part of politicians to dismiss critical allegations by describing them as conspiracy theories, a tactic of which Tony Blair was a master. The idea that the invasion of Iraq was "all about oil" or that President Bush had considered bombing Al Jazeera were both "conspiracy theories" and therefore not worth discussing. This tactic would only be honest if Blair genuinely supposed that conspiracy theories as such ought not to be believed (except perhaps if proven up to the hilt) and it would only be respectable if Blair's apparent belief were correct. Thus the tactic relies on the epistemic principle that in general, conspiracy theories ought not to be believed (that it is irrational to believe them), and indeed that they are mostly so irrational that they ought not to be discussed, except perhaps as symptoms of some ideological malaise. Thus the conventional wisdom seems to be that we have an epistemic duty not to believe conspiracy theories, a duty which conspiracy theorists conspicuously neglect. I shall be denying that we have any such duty, and shall be arguing, on the contrary, that we are rationally entitled to believe in conspiracy theories if that is what the evidence suggests. Some conspiracy theories are sensible and some are silly, but if they are silly this is not because they are conspiracy theories but because they suffer from some specific defect – for instance, that the conspiracies they postulate are impossible or far-fetched. But conspiracy theories as such are not epistemologically unclean, and it [End Page 219] is often permissible – even obligatory – to believe them. For sometimes the case for conspiracy can be rationally overwhelming, "proved beyond reasonable doubt", and even when it is not, belief in a conspiracy is often a rational option. Thus my dispute with the conventional wisdom is a debate about the ethics of belief. It is common ground in this debate that it makes sense to say that we ought to believe something (that believing it is right or rationally required), or that we ought not to believe it (that believing it is wrong, a sort of crime against reason). It also makes sense to say that we are entitled to believe something (since believing it is permissible). Furthermore, all these claims can aspire to truth – though whether they actually are true is another matter. Thus Tony Blair's rhetoric carries some fairly heavy philosophical baggage. The point of dismissing the allegation that Bush considered bombing Al Jazeera as a "conspiracy theory" was to suggest that we are under some sort of intellectual obligation not to believe it. But we can't be obliged not to believe conspiracy theories unless we have epistemic obligations. But although the idea of epistemic duties may be common ground in the context of the current dispute, it is in fact a highly debatable. The difficulty derives from the Ought-Implies-Can principle (which presumably applies to the ethics of belief) combined with the idea that belief is not a voluntary business. The claim is that we cannot decide what to believe or disbelieve. When faced with certain considerations we are either moved by the evidence or we are not. Decision and choice do not enter into it. Even with practice we cannot decide, like the White Queen in Alice Through the Looking-Glass, to believe six impossible things – or even six possible things – before breakfast. And it is equally impossible to decide not to believe six things before breakfast, whether the things in question are possible or not. But if Bloggs cannot help believing that agents of the Bush family detonated the Twin Towers, then it is not only pointless but actually false to say that he ought not to believe it. For you cannot have an obligation to do what you cannot do, and, ex hypothesi, Bloggs is incapable of disbelieving that it was Bush family agents that did the deed. Thus the whole idea of an epistemic ethic is fundamentally cock-eyed, since it presupposes (wrongly) that we can control our beliefs.¶ This conclusion depends on two premises: Ought-Implies-Can and the idea that we cannot choose to believe. I am inclined to dispute them both. Ought-Implies-Can is not a logical thesis but a plausible ethical principle that holds (with restrictions) in some systems of ethics but not in others. It is not clear that it has to be incorporated into a plausible ethics of belief. And though we cannot bring ourselves to believe just anything it seems to me that within limits we can often decide where to place our epistemic bets. The same thing goes for disbelief. Those who think otherwise sometimes counter by producing a random thesis and challenging you to believe it. When you can't, they claim victory, and if you insist that you can, their tendency is to scoff. But just because we cannot always chose to believe, it does not follow that we can never choose to believe, and where choice is a possibility, "oughts" are not excluded.¶ But though my first instinct is to challenge the premises, there is a better way of dealing with the argument that an epistemic ethic is a non-starter. For though we[End Page 220] cannot always choose to believe, we can often choose which belief-forming strategy to adopt. This is Pascal's response to those free-thinking gamblers who agree that it would be good idea to believe in God (since according to the Wager Argument, this would be the best bet), but who can't quite bring themselves to do so. Perhaps you cannot choose to believe in God, he suggests, but you can choose to adopt a belief-forming strategy that is likely to bring about the desired result. If you go to church, hear masses and generally lead the life of a religious believer, the chances are that belief will follow – you will "make yourself stupid". Other belief-forming strategies are less mind-numbing. For example, you can cultivate the habit of thinking up objections to claims that you would like to be true – a strategy that will make you less likely to confuse wishes with facts (a vice to which philosophers are peculiarly prone). Thus the best way to save an epistemic ethic is to take the deontic operators as applying, in the first instance, to belief-forming strategies rather than beliefs.¶ What the conventional wisdom demands is not so much that we disbelieve this conspiracy theory or that, but that we adopt the intellectual habit of discounting, dismissing and disbelieving conspiracy theories (indeed of "dissing" them generally). Rather than running around trying to evaluate the evidence, the sensible strategy is to shut our eyes to their intellectual charms. I advocate the alternative strategy of not dismissing conspiracy theories out of hand, simply because they are conspiracy theories, but of being prepared to investigate them and even to believe them if that is what the evidence indicates. Perhaps some conspiracy theories are too way out to be worthy of investigation, but this is not because they are conspiracy theories but because the specific conspiracies that they postulate are absurd or improbable. For conspiracy theories as such are no less worthy of belief than theories of other kinds. Thus the dispute is primarily a debate about which belief-forming strategy to adopt rather than which claims to believe. Hence we can discuss the question sensibly as an issue in the ethics of belief even if we grant, what seems to me to be false, that we cannot choose to believe.¶ But what is the status of these epistemic "oughts"? Are they categorical imperatives (Requirements of Reason) or hypothetical imperatives pointing out the means to achieve some widely shared but intellectually optional end, such as achieving an adequate understanding of the world? I incline to the latter view, though I suspect it would be a difficult business to specify the ends to which a respectable epistemic "ought" prescribes the means. But whatever the precise status of epistemic "oughts", the claim that we rationally ought to adopt a belief-forming strategy (such as not believing in or not enquiring into conspiracy theories), would appear to presuppose that the strategy in question is conducive to truth and the avoidance of error, at least under a wide range of circumstances. Thus the rationale for the strategy of conspiratorial skepticism is that it is more likely to get it right or less likely to get it wrong than its epistemic rivals. It rests on the presumption that conspiracy theories are unlikely to be true, so unlikely that they are generally not worth discussing. Indeed, it requires something stronger than the simple assumption that conspiracy theories as such are unlikely to be true. The space of possible theories is large; the space of true theories, small. But it would be [End Page 221] silly to conclude from this that we ought to abstain from theorizing to avoid the risk of error. The fact that theories in general are more likely to be false than true does not mean that we should give up theorizing or enquiring into theories. By the same token, the fact that conspiracy theories are more likely to be false than true does not mean that we should give up conspiracy theorizing or enquiring into conspiracy theories. For that to be a sensible strategy we would have to suppose that conspiracy theories were much more likely to be false than their non-conspiratorial rivals. And since he seems to think that we ought not to believe or enquire into conspiracy theories, that is, presumably, the opinion of Tony Blair and his allies amongst the punditocracy.

Thus we affirm that the United States federal government should increase its exploration of the Earth’s oceans near R’yleh in order to find Cthulhu

Conspiracy Impacts
Biopower
Governmentality and totalizing control over regimes of truth forms the basis of oppressive state power
Marshall, University of Auckland - Emeritus Professor School of Education, 95
(James D, Foucault And Neo-Liberalism: Biopower And Busno-power, http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/EPS/PES-Yearbook/95_docs/marshall.html)
Foucault also develops the notion of governmentality as the art of government or, as it is sometimes referred to, the "reason of state." This notion "refers to the state, to its nature and to its own rationality." He sees the technologies of domination and the self as being the techniques used "to make of the individual a significant element for the state." By "government" Foucault should be understood as meaning something close to "the conduct of conduct." This is a form of activity which attempts or aims at the conduct of persons; it is the attempt to shape, to guide, or to affect not only the conduct of people but, also, the attempt to constitute people in such ways that they can be governed. In Foucault's work this activity of governance could cover the relations of self to self, self to others, relations between institutions and social communities, and the exercise of political sovereignty. Governmentality is obtained not by a totalizing deterministic or oppressive form of power, but by bio-power directed in a totalizing manner at whole populations and, at one and the same time, at individuals so that they are both individualized and normalized. Here one locates the human sciences and their "truths," and the institutions or disciplinary blocks (including education) in which these truths have been developed, played, and continue to play, a crucially important role.
Unchallenged sovereign power makes extinction possible
Rabinow, Professor of Anthropology, Berkeley, 84
(Paul, The Foucault Reader, p. 260)
It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battle-that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living-has become the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modem powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.

Conspiracy Impacts
Biopower
The state manipulates knowledge and science as an attempt to strengthen biopolitical control, discussing conspiracy theories and our inability to understand them challenges that
Wendt and Duvall 08 [Alexander Wendt, professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University, August 2008, “Sovereignty and the UFO”, http://ovnis-usa.com/DIVERS/Wendt_Duvall_PoliticalTheory.pdf, page 618]
Authoritative insistence on knowing the UFO only through ignorance is necessitated by the threat it poses to the anthropocentric metaphysics of modern rule. Within modern rule we focus specifically on sovereignty, but in our conceptualization sovereignty cannot be understood without reference to governmentality, which sets the normative context of sovereign decision. Thus, in what follows we both begin and end with governmentality, while keeping our remarks to a minimum in order to focus on the metaphysics of sovereignty perse. I’m doing so we recognize that the relationship between govermnentality and sovereignty is contested among political theorists. Focused on the specific problem of the UFO taboo, we do not take sides in this debate except to accept the View that the two aspects of modern rule are intertwined. In thinking about the problem of rule, political scientists have traditionally focused on either individual agents or institutional structures, in both cases treating government as a given object. In contrast, Foucault's concept of governmentality is focused on the "art of governing," understood as the biopolitical "conduct of conduct" for a population of subjects." Thus, governmentality concerns the specific regime of practices through which the population is constituted and self-regularized. "Modern" governmentality marks a shift in discourses of rule away from the state's sovereign power- its ability to take life and/or render it bare-and toward its fostering and regularizing of life in biopolitics. The object of government is no longer simply obedience to the king, but regulating the conditions of life for subjects. To this end biopolitics requires that the conditions of life of the population be made visible and assayed, and practical knowledge be made available to improve them. As a result, with modern governmentality we see the emergence of both panoptic surveillance and numerous specialized discourses-of education, political economy, demography, health, morality, and others- the effect of which is to make populations knowable and subject to the regularization that will make for the "happy life." A constitutive feature of modern governmentality is that its discourses are scientific, which means that science and the state are today deeply intermeshed. Through science the state makes its subjects and objects known, lending them a facticity that facilitates their regularization, and though the state science acquires institutional support and prestige. Despite this symbiosis, however, there is also an important epistemological difference between the two. Science seeks, but knows it can never fully achieve, "the" truth, defined as all apolitical, objective representation of the world. To this end it relies on norms and practices that produce an evolving, always potentially contested body of knowledge. The state, in contrast, seeks a regime of truth to which its population will reliably adhere. Standards for knowledge in that context privilege stability and normalization over the uncertain path of scientific truth. Although science and the state are allied in the modern UFO regime, we suggest in conclusion that this difference opens space for critical theory and resistance. Modern governmentality directs attention away from sovereign power and toward the socially diffuse practices by which it is sustained. Yet as Agamben reminds us, 46 sovereignty remains important, because every regime of governmentality has outsides, even while exceeding the capacity for regularization. This outside is both external, in the form of actors not subject to normalization, and internal, in the form of people’s capacity to do otherwise (hence their need to be “governed”). Ordinarily these limits do not severely threaten modern rule, but some exceed the capacity for regularization. Schmitt calls such situations “states of exception”: “any severe economic or political disturbance requiring the application of extraordinary measures,” including abrogation of law by those who govern in its name. 47 Extending and modifying Schmitt’s analysis, Agamben emphasizes a “zone of indistinction” between the juridical order and the state of exception, which is neither fully in nor outside the law. Thus, while sometimes constitutionally recognized, the state of exception is “not a special kind of law,” but necessarily transcends the law. 48 In Sergei Prozorov’s terms, the state of exception is a “constitutive outside” or “excess” to law that is the latter’s condition of possibility. 49 As such, for Agamben (if not for Schmitt) a state of exception is always potentially there, even when not actually in force, permanently contaminating the law. On the other hand, the state of exception also belongs to the law, since it is by the latter’s limits and/or failure that it is known. States of exception cannot be declared willy-nilly, but must make sense within the regime of truth they would uphold. Thus, law and the exception are co-constitutive rather than mutually exclusive. “Sovereign is he who decides the exception.” 50 Like the state of exception it decides, sovereignty is both outside and inside law. On the one hand, it is the ability to found and suspend a juridical order. To that extent sovereignty transcends the law, its decisions seeming to come out of nowhere, like a “miracle.” 51 In saying this Schmitt emphasizes sovereignty’s omnipotence, if not to realize its intentions then at least to decide them. However, even Schmitt recognizes that sovereign decision is not literally a miracle, but has conditions of possibility. Among Agamben’s contributions is in showing that those conditions include the very corpus of law that is to be suspended in the decision of the exception. In this way sovereignty is also inside and limited by law.
Critical Pedagogy
And this examination is not just an 8-minute FYI of Lovecraftian horror – the reading of Cthulhu in the 1ac is a direct challenge to the knowledge that is produced by hegemonic think tanks in the status quo - the pedagogy of conspiracies allows us to break down the structures of oppressive power that render modern violence invisible
Giroux, 2005 (Henry A., Waterbury Chair of Secondary education @ Pennsylvania State University, Fast Capitalism, “Cultural Studies in Dark Times: Public Pedagogy and the Challenge of Neoliberalism,” http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/1_2/giroux.htm)
In opposition to these positions, I want to reclaim a tradition in radical educational theory and cultural studies in which pedagogy as a critical practice is central to any viable notion of agency, inclusive democracy, and a broader global public sphere. Pedagogy as both a language of critique and possibility looms large in these critical traditions, not as a technique or a priori set of methods, but as a political and moral practice. As a political practice, pedagogy is viewed as the outgrowth of struggles and illuminates the relationships among power, knowledge, and ideology, while self-consciously, if not self-critically, recognizing the role it plays as a deliberate attempt to influence how and what knowledge and identities are produced within particular sets of social relations. As a moral practice, pedagogy recognizes that what cultural workers, artists, activists, media workers, and others teach cannot be abstracted from what it means to invest in public life, presuppose some notion of the future, or locate oneself in a public discourse. The moral implications of pedagogy also suggest that our responsibility as intellectuals for the public cannot be separated from the consequences of the knowledge we produce, the social relations we legitimate, and the ideologies and identities we offer up to students as well as colleagues. Refusing to decouple politics from pedagogy means, in part, creating those public spaces for engaging students in robust dialogue, challenging them to think critically about received knowledge and energizing them to recognize their own power as individual and social agents. Pedagogy has a relationship to social change in that it should not only help students frame their sense of understanding, imagination, and knowledge within a wider sense of history, politics, and democracy but should also enable them to recognize that they can do something to alleviate human suffering, as the late Susan Sontag (2003) has suggested. Part of this task necessitates that cultural studies theorists and educators anchor their own work, however diverse, in a radical project that seriously engages the promise of an unrealized democracy against its really existing and greviously incomplete forms. Of crucial importance to such a project is rejecting the assumption that theorists can understand social problems without contesting their appearance in public life. More specifically, any viable cultural politics needs a socially committed notion of injustice if we are to take seriously what it means to fight for the idea of the good society. Zygmunt Bauman (2002) is right in arguing that "if there is no room for the idea of wrong society, there is hardly much chance for the idea of good society to be born, let alone make waves" (p. 170). Cultural studies' theorists need to be more forceful, if not more committed, to linking their overall politics to modes of critique and collective action that address the presupposition that democratic societies are never too just, which means that a democratic society must constantly nurture the possibilities for self-critique, collective agency, and forms of citizenship in which people play a fundamental role in shaping the material relations of power and ideological forces that affect their everyday lives. Within the ongoing process of democratization lies the promise of a society that is open to exchange, questioning, and self-criticism, a democracy that is never finished, and one that opposes neoliberal and neoconservative attempts to supplant the concept of an open society with a fundamentalist market-driven or authoritarian one. Cultural studies theorists who work in higher education need to make clear that the issue is not whether higher education has become contaminated by politics, as much as recognizing that education is already a space of politics, power, and authority. At the same time, they can make visible their opposition to those approaches to pedagogy that reduce it to a set of skills to enhance one's visibility in the corporate sector or an ideological litmus test that measures one's patriotism or ratings on the rapture index. There is a disquieting refusal in the contemporary academy to raise broader questions about the social, economic, and political forces shaping the very terrain of higher education—particularly unbridled market forces, fundamentalist groups, and racist and sexist forces that unequally value diverse groups within relations of academic power. There is also a general misunderstanding of how teacher authority can be used to create the pedagogical conditions for critical forms of education without necessarily falling into the trap of simply indoctrinating students. For instance, many conservative and liberal educators believe that any notion of critical pedagogy that is self-conscious about its politics and engages students in ways that offer them the possibility for becoming critical—what Lani Guinier (2003:6) calls the need to educate students "to participate in civic life, and to encourage graduates to give back to the community, which through taxes, made their education possible"—leaves students out of the conversation or presupposes too much or simply represents a form of pedagogical tyranny. While such educators believe in practices that open up the possibility of questioning among students, they often refuse to connect the pedagogical conditions that challenge how and what students think at the moment to the next task of prompting them to imagine changing the world around them so as to expand and deepen its democratic possibilities. Teaching students how to argue, draw on their own experiences, or engage in rigorous dialogue says nothing about why they should engage in these actions in the first place. How the culture of argumentation and questioning relates to giving students the tools they need to fight oppressive forms of power, make the world a more meaningful and just place, and develop a sense of social responsibility is missing in contemporary, progressive frameworks of education.

Critical Pedagogy is Key to Rebelling Against Conservative Reactionary Ideology and Questioning Modern Power Structures and Societal Normalcies in In Capitalist Society
Giroux 6, Henry. Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department. “Academic Freedom Under Fire: The Case for Critical Pedagogy” Page 31-33
While most defenders of the university as a democratic public sphere rightly argue that the right-wing assault on the academy levels a serious threat to academic freedom, they have largely ignored the crucial issue that the very nature of pedagogy as a political, moral, and critical practice is at stake, particularly the role it plays in presupposing a view of the world that is more just, democratic, and free from human suffering.^4 Robert Ivie has argued rightly that academic freedom in its basic form "means unfettered scholarly inquiry, a scholar s fundamental right of research, publication, and instruction free of institutional constraint" (Ivie 2005). But it is pedagogy that begs both a more spirited defense and analysis so that it can be protected against the challenge that Horowitz, ACTA, SAF, Campus Watch, and others are initiating against what actually takes place in classrooms devoted to critical engagement, dialogue, research, and debate. Pedagogy at its best is about neither training nor political indoctrination; instead, it is about a political and moral practice that provides the knowledge, skills, and social relations that enable students to expand the possibilities of what it means to be critical citizens while using their knowledge and skills to deepen and extend the possibilities of living in a substantive and inclusive democracy. Rather than assume the mantle of a false impartiality, pedagogy recognizes that education and teaching involve the crucial act of intervening in the world and the recognition that human life is conditioned not determined. The responsibility of pedagogy amounts to more than becoming the instrument of official power or an apologist for the existing order. Critical pedagogy attempts to understand how power works through the production, distribution, and consumption of knowledge within particular institutional contexts and seeks to constitute students as particular subjects and social agents. It is also invested in the practice of self-criticism about the values that inform our teaching and a critical self-consciousness regarding what it means to equip students with analytical skills to be self-reflective about the knowledge and values they confront in classrooms. What makes critical pedagogy so dangerous to Christian evangelicals, neoconservatives, and right-wing nationalists in the United States is that central to its very definition is the task of educating students to become critical agents actively questioning and negotiating the relationship between theory and practice, critical analysis and common sense, and learning and social change. Critical pedagogy opens up a space where students should be able to come to terms with their own power as critical agents; it provides a sphere where the unconditional freedom to question and assert is central to the purpose of the university, if not democracy itself (Derrida 2001, 233). And as a political and moral practice, pedagogy should "make evident the multiplicity and complexity of history," as a narrative to enter into critical dialogue with rather than accept unquestioningly. Similarly, such a pedagogy should cultivate in students a healthy skepticism about power, a "willingness to temper any reverence for authority with a sense of critical awareness" (Said 2001, 501). As a performative practice, pedagogy should provide the conditions for students to be able to reflectively frame their own relationship to the ongoing project of an unfinished democracy. It is precisely this relationship between democracy and pedagogy that is so threatening to conservatives such as Horowitz. Pedagogy always represents a commitment to the future, and it remains the task of educators to make sure that the future points the way to a more socially just world, a world in which the discourses of critique and possibility in conjunction with the values of reason, freedom, and equality function to alter, as part of a broader democratic project, the grounds upon which life is lived. This is hardly a prescription for political indoctrination, but it is a project that gives education its most valued purpose and meaning, which in part is "to encourage human agency, not mold it in the manner of Pygmalion" (Aronowitz 1998, 10-11). It is also a position that threatens right-wing private advocacy groups, neoconservative politicians, and conservative extremists because they recognize that such a pedagogical commitment goes to the very heart of what it means to address real inequalities of power at the social level and to conceive of education as a project for democracy and critical citizenship while at the same time foregrounding a series of important and often ignored questions such as: "Why do we [as educators] do what we do the way we do it"? Whose interests does higher education serve? How might it be possible to understand and engage the diverse contexts in which education takes place? In spite of the right-wing view that equates indoctrination with any suggestion of politics, critical pedagogy is not concerned simply with offering students new ways to think critically and act with authority as agents in the classroom; it is also concerned to provide students with the skills and knowledge necessary for them to expand their capacities to both question deep-seated assumptions and myths that legitimate the most archaic and disempowering social practices that structure every aspect of society and to take responsibility for intervening in the world they inhabit. Education is not neutral, but that does not mean it is merely a form of indoctrination. On the contrary, as a practice that attempts to expand the capacities necessary for human agency and hence the possibilities for democracy itself, the university must nourish those pedagogical practices that promote "a concern with keeping the forever unexhausted and unfulfilled human potential open, fighting back all attempts to foreclose and pre-empt the further unravelling of human possibilities, prodding human society to go on questioning itself and preventing that questioning from ever stalling or being declared finished" (Bauman and Tester 2001, 4). In other words, critical pedagogy forges both critique and agency through a language of skepticism and possibility and a culture of openness, debate, and engagement, all elements that are now at risk in the latest and most dangerous attack on higher education.
The Educator and the Role of Pedagogy Being Attacked by Conservative Ideologues Is Absolutely Crucial to a Functionally Critical and Democratic Society
Giroux 6, Henry. Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department. “Academic Freedom Under Fire: The Case for Critical Pedagogy” Page 33-34
The current attack on pedagogy is, in part, an attempt to deskill teachers and dismantle teacher authority. Teachers can make a claim to being fair, but not to being either neutral or impartial. Teacher authority neither is neutral nor can it be assessed in terms that are narrowly ideological. It is always broadly political and interventionist in terms of the knowledge-effects it produces, the classroom experiences it organizes, and the future it presupposes in the countless ways in which it addresses the world. Teacher authority at its best means taking a stand without standing still. It suggests that as educators we make a sincere effort to be self-reflective about the value-laden nature of our authority while taking on the fundamental task of educating students to learn to take responsibility for the direction of society. Rather than shrink from our political responsibility as educators, we should embrace one of pedagogy's most fundamental goals: to educate students to believe that democracy is desirable and possible, and that they can shape its outcomes. Connecting education to the possibility of a better world is not a prescription for indoctrination; rather it marks the distinction between the academic as a technician and the teacher as a self-reflective educator who is more than the instrument of a safely approved and officially sanctioned worldview. The authority that enables academics to teach emerges out of the education, knowledge, research, professional rituals, and scholarly experiences that they bring to their field of expertise and classroom teaching. Such authority provides the space and experience in which pedagogy goes beyond providing the conditions for the simple acts of knowing and understanding and includes the cultivation of the very power of self-definition and critical agency. But teacher authority cannot be grounded exclusively in the rituals of professional academic standards; it is also a space in which commitment, passion, and teaching provide students with a sense of what it means to link knowledge to a sense of direction, a practice rooted in an ethico-political vision that attempts to take students beyond the world they already know, in a way that does not insist on a particular fixed set of altered meanings. In this context, teacher authority rests on pedagogical practices that reject the role of students as passive recipients of familiar knowledge and views them instead as producers of knowledge who not only critically engage diverse ideas, but also transform and act on them (Mohanty 1989,192). Pedagogy is the space that provides a moral and political referent for understanding how what we do in the classroom is linked to wider social, political, and economic forces. It is impossible to separate what we do in the classroom from the economic and political conditions that shape our work, and that means that pedagogy has to be understood as a form of academic labor in which questions of time, autonomy, freedom, and power become as central to the classroom as what is taught. As a referent for engaging fundamental questions about democracy, pedagogy gestures to important questions about the political, institutional, and structural conditions that allow teachers to produce curricula, collaborate with colleagues, engage in research, and connect their work with broader pubhc issues. Pedagogy is not about balance, a merely methodological consideration; on the contrary, as Cornelius Castoriadis reminds us, if education is not to become "the political equivalent of a religious ritual," it must do everything possible to provide students with the knowledge and skills they need to learn how to deliberate, make judgments, and exercise choices, particularly as the latter are brought to bear on critical activities that offer the possibihty of democratic change (1997,5). Democracy cannot work if citizens are not autonomous, self-judging, and independent—qualities that are indispensable for students to make vital judgments and choices about participating in and shaping decisions that affect everyday life, institutional reform, and governmental policy. Hence, pedagogy becomes the cornerstone of democracy in that it provides the very foundation for students not merely to learn how to be governed, but to be capable of governing.