Is this one of the entrance criteria?

10 11 things I learned from the Eurovision Song Contest:

When picking sides for Eurovision, leave the lounge singers at home.

Germans still like Groenemeyer, even when he's Polish.

The world isn't ready for an Estonian-led 80's revival.

Sweden has not exhausted its supply of Abba.

Britney Spears has a twin in Romania.

The hills of Greece are a sight to behold.

The Multi-Culti has run through all existing cultures and has to invent new ones to promote.

Teeny-bopper lesbianism still sells. Even if the music sucks and they don't kiss.

Profound-seeming pseudo-multiculturalism sells even better than teeny-bopper lesbians. Go figure.

A Eurovision-style voting system (in which people can't vote for representatives of their own country) would be much better than any of the propsals for the new EU constitution.

The continent is still sore at the UK, but they're really sorry about that whole NATO/Turkey thing

Leading Indicator

Do you find it hard to stay ahead of the tin-hat crowd? Don't have the time to wade through DU or Indymedia to find the latest paranoid conspiracy? Don't have the stomach for Ted Rall? Have I got a blog for you!

Horst Prillinger (The Aardvark Speaks) seems like a smart enough guy who reads a lot and makes lots of connections (he is a librarian, after all). He also seems to have a blatantly paranoid anti-American streak.

What that means to you, dear reader, is that you now have a bellwether for the tin-hat crowd -- a resource who will comb through the news and the nonsense to find the most spinnable pieces, from which he constructs clever and interesting conspiracy theories.

When he isn't engaged in flights of fancy, he provides an interesting window into the kind of paranoid anti-Americanism that's being spoon-fed to the European public. When his imagination kicks in, you'll be treated to some of the more interesting and superficially plausible anti-American conspiracy theories on the web.
His track record for spotting the theories with legs is pretty good:

On April 16, Horst asserted that looting at the Baghdad Museum was instigated by American troops at the behest of a shadowy cabal of American art collectors that apparently controls the Pentagon. With that, he jumped straight to step seven of the logic chain predicted by Jaed at Bitter Sanity (sadly, she's apparently on hiatus).

A full month ago, he was pimping today's hot anti-American gossip item - that the rescue of Pfc Lynch was staged. He even alluded to the possibility a week earlier. Sadly, nobody picked up on this little gem at the time.

Unfortunately for Horst, his track record for theories that, say, correspond with reality is less than stellar. The looting of the Baghdad Museum turns out to have been much less serious than originally reported and was likely conducted by members of Saddam's people. The Pfc Lynch "Wag the Dog" smear campaign is a fantastic concoction even further from the facts than the Museum story was and will likely die a quick and painless death.

But not quite quick or painless enough. Blogosphere fact-checking can kill a story within days, but a prebuttal like Jaed's can spike it before it emerges. And that's one good reason that it's useful to monitor blogs like "The Aardvark Speaks."