I went yesterday to ConspiracyCon, which is exactly what you’d guess it is: a convention of conspiracy theorists. UFO chasers, 9-11 deniers, tax protesters and this year’s big favorite, explainers of the current economic crisis.

Here are some of the things I learned:

• Obama and his administration are pawns of the international banking conspiracy, and it’s all led by former Jimmy Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and the many “secret societies” from the Trilateral Commission to the Bohemian Grove.
• The reason Ron Paul supporters also have UFO conspiracy DVDs at their booth is because if the government let us know about and learn alien technology, it could go a long way toward solving our country’s energy problems.
• No plane actually struck the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001; the damage was the result of planted explosives. This was vouchsafed to me by an extremely energetic and dedicated young man who was giving his DVDs away for free. He had a very elaborate set of xeroxed photographs with the “real” flight path of the airliner, a professionally-produced series of animated graphics which showed the difference between the fake flight path and the real one, and so on.
• If you experience sudden headaches or body heating as you walk down the street, this is called “electronic harassment” and is the work of the NSA, which can read your driver’s license from space.

This last was given to me by a very sane-appearing man, who said it in the same tones you might use to explain how Twitter works for someone who’s never used it. Everyone was very nice, and very talkative. All I had to do was say to someone, “You seem to have a lot of literature here,” and they’d talk for five minutes without taking a breath.

The best moment was during a presentation by one Webster Tarpley, an animated gent who made a presentation on the conspiracy between Obama and the bankers. At one point he showed pictures of the heads of Citigroup, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs. When no one in the audience could identify all three, he began ranting, “These are the people who rule the world! Never mind the politicians, these are the real rulers! Maybe if you put down your UFO book and paid attention we’d be better off!”

ConspiracyCon continues today at the Santa Clara Marriott.

According to the Washington Post, a bookstore window display in Coral Gables, Fl. has people outraged at the pairing of Obama books with one entitled “Monkeys.” But when Alexander Book Co. did something similar in January and SFist blogged about it, commenters yawned. “There reaches a point when pointing one’s finger and screaming ‘racism’ crosses the line into paranoia,” one wrote, while another said, “Only in overly sensitive San Francisco would something this obviously meaningless get any attention.” Hmm, maybe not.

In a town that loves people named Barry, the First Asian President visited San Francisco, cashing in to the tune of $7.8 million. Said Barack Obama to a heavily ethnic crowd: Ich bin ein desi.

The Giants’ Tim Lincecum struck out 10 over 7 2/3 innings, leading the Giants to a win over Atlanta, meaning that Georgia was having a bad day all over. Georgia does, however, have two golds and a bronze, one of the gold medals coming in women’s shooting. Maybe if that gold medal shooter were back at home, they wouldn’t have already lost the war.

One of the Dhaliwal brothers injured in the tiger attack is going to prison on a parole violation in a case that had nothing to do with the fatal mauling of his friend at the San Francisco Zoo on Christmas Day.