The four Iranian missiles blasting off in unison sure looked impressive in a photo that appeared on July 9. They should have. The photo was digitally altered.

The blog Little Green Footballs (LGF) spotted the digital fakery that same day. One missile that had apparently failed to launch had been removed and replaced with a faked composite made from images of the other missiles and smoke trails.

In a “corrective refile” note to its editors, Agence France Press stated that the four-missile image released by Sepah News, the public relations arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, had been “digitally altered to show four missiles rising into the air instead of three during a test-firing.” It added, “the second right missile has apparently been added in digital retouch to cover a grounded missile that may have failed during the test.”

In a July 10 post, “Reality vs. Photoshop,” LGF cites another blog, Kamangir, which says another recently released Iranian photo appears to have actually been taken two years ago.

In the 1950s, Soviet leaders had their long range bombers fly over Red Square repeatedly during military parades in an effort to make their fleet appear larger than it was. But that was before Photoshop.

Our normal, primitive caveman mentality predisposes us to look for villains as the cause when bad things happen to good people (aka us). This leads to the widespread belief that greedy speculators are causing high food and oil prices.

(For more on our “caveman mentality,” see Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer, which argues that “the mind is a set of information-processing machines that were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors.”)

For a different view on what caused recent steep food and oil price increases, see today’s Wall Street Journal article by Harvard economist Martin Feldstein. Feldstein proposes a different villain. He says supply and demand did it.

One problem in comprehending this is that the human mind does not do math very well. We can handle simple arithmetic, but do not have an accurate intuitive grasp of more complex relationships, like exponential increases.

Feldstein says relatively small increases in demand (for items we really need, like food to eat and gas for our cars) can cause large price increases in a very short period of time. This challenges the simple arithmetic model our mind can easily understand, but makes sense when you consider we eat food several times a day but the food industry can’t just add an extra shift at a manufacturing plant to produce more food right away – it’s a little more complex than that.

Read Feldstein’s article; he’s almost always informative.

Newsweek journalist Robert Samuelson agrees that supply and demand did it.  See his column “Let’s Shoot the Speculators.”

The conspiracy theorist’s natural inclination is to answer “Yes!” In their mental/emotional world, bad things are caused by powerful, evil people acting behind the scenes. Speculators fit this profile perfectly.

For a different perspective, see the June 13 New York Times story on speculators. It cites “people with years of knowledge about how commodity markets work” as saying that “without speculators these markets do not work at all.”

Farmers, miners, oil producers and others involved in producing or consuming commodities – such as food and oil – use futures contracts (a contract to buy or sell commodities at a specified price at a certain time in the future) to decrease uncertainty about the price for which they will eventually sell their production or, if they are consumers, buy it. Without futures markets, there would be much more uncertainty about future prices. This would likely scare some producers away. And if the supply of a commodity goes down, its price goes up. So, future markets make costs lower than they would be otherwise.

Speculators pour additional money into these markets, making them larger and, experts say, less volatile. They argue this makes likely lower, not higher, prices.

If speculators are not the “bad guys,” who are? The article cites several factors causing higher food and oil prices:

• High-growth economies in China and India
• Bad weather
• Increased demand for corn-based ethanol, which drives up corn prices
• The weakening U.S. dollar, which drives up the cost of commodities, such as oil, that are priced in dollars.

In other words, increased demand and decreased supply drive up prices. That’s economics 101.

Unfortunately, complex, abstract causes don’t fit with the very human need to find a villain when things go wrong. So, conspiracy theories, which meet this need, multiply.

Conspiracy theories are a peculiar form of belief.

They assume the existence of an omnipotent and evil group of conspirators who are, at the same time, powerless to protect their secrets from rather ordinary observers – those who champion conspiracy theories.

Instead of eliminating those who have pierced their veil of secrets, the supposed conspirators, who allegedly know all and control all, do nothing.

This contradiction makes no sense, but conspiracy theorists do not seem troubled by it. They have a ready explanation for everything.

In a way, conspiracy theories are the lazy man’s monomyth.

Folklorist Joseph Campbell, who studied heroic myths from different cultures, concluded that, at their core, they all tell the same story, which he called the monomyth.

In his 1949 book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell described the monomyth’s basic narrative, followed by mythical heroes in all world cultures:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

Conspiracy theories resemble the monomyth, in some ways.

Both types of fables derive their drama from the threat posed by wicked evil.

The monomyth calls for the hero to challenge evil, risking his life to best it in battle.

But the conspiracy theorist does not challenge evil; he just complains, without actually doing anything. And the imagined evil forces don’t do anything to him, either.

We all recognize the myths of other cultures for what they are – stories based on their power to inspire, not on fact.

But many do not recognize that conspiracy theories are a similar type of fable – the lazy man’s monomyth.

In July 2006, a Scripps Survey Research Center poll found that 12 percent of Americans “suspect the Pentagon was struck by a military cruise missile in 2001 rather than by an airliner captured by terrorists.”

This mistaken belief is largely based on the fallacy that the attack on the Pentagon created a small hole consistent with a cruise missile strike, rather than a large hole, as a commercial airliner would make. The wildly popular conspiracy theory video Loose Change made this mistake, among many others.

But the “small hole” was really a large hole, most of which was obscured by fire-fighting foam during the 19 minutes between when the airliner struck the Pentagon and when that section collapsed, forever obscuring the impact site. See this State Department photo gallery for selected photos of the Pentagon on 9/11.

Also, the remains of the 64 passengers on the plane were found at the Pentagon crash site. 184 of the 189 people who died in the attacks (64 on the plane and 125 in the Pentagon) were identified by DNA analysis. In addition, massive amounts of plane debris were found at the site. More than 100 eyewitnesses reported they saw a plane.

See the Pentagon page of Links for 9/11 Research for a wealth of information debunking this conspiracy theory.