Dave, the Chemtrails group are another example of why the very term conspiracy applied to anything automatically gets that theory discounted as fringe lunatic stuff not worthy of any real consideration. Something that real conspirators hope for and rely on to get away with their acts. Conspiracy is however very real and common.
Conspiracy is one of those "loaded with connotations" words that evoke different images to different people. In essence a conspiracy is a secret plan made by two or more people to do something that is harmful or illegal. Ok, so far so good.
Now, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) states: An agreement to restrict production, sales, or output is just as illegal as direct price fixing, because reducing the supply of a product or service drives up its price.
OK, then they state: A uniform, simultaneous price change could be the result of price fixing, but it could also be the result of independent business responses to the same market conditions. For example, if conditions in the international oil market cause an increase in the price of crude oil, this could lead to an increase in the wholesale price of gasoline.
Now, our gasoline prices here were down to $1.39 per gallon a few months ago and are now $2.00 per gallon. At the lower price crude was $32 per barrel at the high the price is $38 per barrel. Supply and demand yes BUT several refineries have shut down reducing the supply to in effect hike the price. Conspiracy? Depend on what an "Agreement" is defined as. A couple of years ago when prices were approaching $5 per gallon the big oil companies were posting the largest profits in their histories.
Coincidence or conspiracy?
Let's look at another "Big" business, the Ford Motor Company. Records indicated that Ford had first conducted rear-end collision tests on the Pinto in December 1970, months after it was already in production. Initially, 11 carefully coordinated crashes were conducted, and in all but three of them, gas tanks ruptured and burst into flames. In the three tests that didn't result in fires, the cars had prototype safety devices that engineers had developed while working with suppliers.
Most effective was the use of a rubber bladder/liner produced by the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. Despite rupturing the exterior of the tank, no fuel was spilled, and no fire resulted. It was estimated that the unit cost of bladders would have amounted to $5.08 per car.
The second method that had been employed was an extra steel plate attached to the rear of the car just behind the bumper, isolating the tank from direct contact during impact. It successfully warded off a blow at 30 mph, helping to keep the tank intact. Experts felt that this part could have cost up to $11 per car to install.
The third successful fix was a rather simple plastic insulator fitted on the differential that would keep the bolts from ever making contact with the fuel tank. Cost of this item was less than $1 per car.
Several company memos presented as evidence during the civil trials revealed that these remedies were discussed, with the conclusion that to shut down production and retool would be too expensive. Most damaging to Ford were memos found that showed that Ford had done a detailed cost analysis of corporate liability in the event of having to compensate crash victims.
Company lawyers calculated the value of a human life at around $200,000, while a serious burn injury was worth about $67,000. Using an estimate of 180 deaths and 180 serious burns, while the cost to redesign and rework the Pinto's gas tank would cost close to $137 million, while possible liability costs worked out to around $49 million.
Needless to say the company continued to produce the unchanged Pinto. Conspiracy?
Conspiracy theories get a bad rap when the weird get on board:
Reptilian Elite
The 'reptoid hypothesis' is a conspiracy theory which advances the argument that reptilian humanoids live among us with the intention of enslaving the human race. It has been championed by former BBC sports presenter David Icke who believes that deceased American comedian Bob Hope, members of the Royal Family and former US Presidents George W Bush and Bill Clinton are part of the "Anunnaki" race who came to earth for "monatomic gold". Some critics accused Icke of anti-Semitism, alleging that his talk of reptiles was code for Jews – but he clarified that the lizards to which he referred were literal, not metaphorical.
Elvis Presley faked his death
In 1977, the world mourned the King as Elvis Presley died at the age of 42 – or did he? Many Elvis fans believe that he went into hiding and really died in the 1990s, although sightings continue to the present day.
The Holocaust never occurred
Despite overwhelming evidence and an admission and apology from Germany decades ago, conspiracy groups continue to claim that nearly 6 million Jews were not killed by Nazis during the Holocaust. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for one, has called the Holocaust a "myth" and suggested that Germany and other European countries, rather than Palestine, provide land for a Jewish state.
Now these groups do not deny that Jews were interned in prison camps during World War II; rather, they argue that the number of deaths was greatly exaggerated. Gas chambers are a particular sticking point: Holocaust deniers say they were purely a rumor or, if they indeed existed, were not powerful enough to kill And the photographs of emaciated and dying Jews? Attorney Edgar J. Steele, a revisionist, says, "All those pictures of skinny people and bodies stacked like cordwood were actually of Czechs and Poles and Germans who died of typhus, which was rampant in the camps.
Faked Moon Landings
The U.S. government, desperate to beat the Russians in the space race, faked the lunar landings, with Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin acting out their mission on a secret film set, located (depending on the theory) either high in the Hollywood Hills or deep within Area 51.
Their evidence is the film of Aldrin planting a waving American flag on the moon, which critics say proves that he was not in space. The flag's movement, they say, clearly shows the presence of wind, which is impossible in a vacuum. NASA says Aldrin was twisting the flagpole to get the moon soil, which caused the flag to move. (And never mind that astronauts have brought back hundreds of independently verified moon rocks.) Theorists have even suggested that filmmaker Stanley Kubrick helped NASA fake the first lunar landing, given that his 1968 film 2001: A Space Odessey proves that the technology existed back then to artificially create a spacelike set. And as for Virgil I. Grissom, Edward H. White and Roger B. Chaffee — three astronauts who died in a fire while testing equipment for the first moon mission? They were executed by the U.S. government, which feared they were about to disclose the truth.
Cover-up or Conspiracy?
Cigarette smoking and cancer
In 1950, a physician and epidemiologist, Dr. Ernst Wynder, published a landmark study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, pointing to cigarette smoking as a cause of lung cancer. In response, six major cigarette makers funded a massive research effort of their own — not so much to find out whether their product did indeed pose a risk, but to publically discredit the report.
In January 1954, the Tobacco Institute Research Committee, which later changed its name to the Council for Tobacco Research, ran full-page ads in 400 newspapers claiming that "eminent doctors and research scientists have publicly questioned the claimed significance of these experiments" and asserting that although the industry believed that smoking wasn't hazardous to health, it pledged to assist "the research effort into all phases of tobacco use and health".
In truth, the industry's own scientists already knew there was a possible link to cancers; a 1953 survey of scientific literature by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco chemist Claude Teague, for example, concluded that "studies of clinical data tend to confirm" a link between heavy smoking and lung cancer. Yet they continued to try to cloud the issue. A 1972 industry memo described an ingenious strategy of "creating doubt about the health charge, without actually denying it".
Eventually, though, attorneys-general from 46 states in the U.S. joined in a massive lawsuit against the industry. The tobacco companies agreed in 1998 to pay out a staggering $10 billion annually – indefinitely – to make up for the damage they'd done, especially in health care costs.
Chernobyl
In April 1986, a crew at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine —then part of the Soviet Union — ran a seemingly routine test to see how long a reactor's turbines would continue to supply power to its circulating pumps in the event of a loss of electrical power. The reactor malfunctioned due to an inopportune power surge, and the fuel rods got stuck, overheating the water inside the reactor and causing a buildup of steam. The resulting explosions caused massive amounts of radioactive gases and debris to spew into the atmosphere for 10 days — the biggest such uncontrolled release in history not from a nuclear bomb.
Two workers died immediately from the explosion. Twenty-eight more, including six firemen who struggled to put out fires on one of the plant's rooftops, died later from radiation exposure, and winds carried the radiation far and wide across the Soviet Union and even to other European countries. But despite the magnitude of the disaster, Soviet officials didn't publicly admit that the accident had occurred until two days later, when Swedish officials sounded the alarm about increased levels of radiation drifting westward.
Then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev waited an astonishing three weeks before even mentioning the accident publicly. He later claimed, somewhat implausibly, that the Kremlin had difficulty getting the full story, and "we realized the entire drama only later." But the rest of the world responded with such scathing criticism that Gorbachev felt compelled to lift information restrictions.
Pedophile Priests
In 1973, Massachusetts-based Roman Catholic priest James R. Porter, sent a disturbing letter to Pope Paul VI. Porter admitted that he had been sexually abusing children for years, and asked that he be relieved of his duties before he hurt anyone else. "I know in the past that I used to hide behind a Roman collar, thinking that it would be a shield for me," he said.
But Porter's personnel file, obtained in 1992 by the Boston Globe, revealed that Porter had considerable help covering up his crimes against roughly 100 young boys and girls. In the course of his 14-year career, Porter had been removed from his duties at least eight times by superiors because he had assaulted children, and sent to receive mental health treatment for pedophilia — only to be allowed to resume his work after they were satisfied that had been cured of his predatory predilections .
For decades, the Catholic hierarchy — both in the U.S. and in other countries — engaged in a systematic effort to cover up crimes by its clergy. But when victims of priestly abuse finally began going public in the 1980s, widespread outrage led the truth to come out.
A study commissioned in the 2000s by church officials in the U.S. revealed that between 1950 and 2002, 4,392 priests had been accused of sexual abuse. Some, such as Porter, ultimately were convicted and sent to prison. But the church itself also paid dearly for the cover-up. By one estimate in the late 2000s, various U.S. archdioceses have paid out more than $3 billion to settle lawsuits by victims.
For our Britisher members: Fleet Street Phone Hacking
The first revelations emerged in November 2005, when Clive Goodman, royal editor at the tabloid News of the World, wrote a story about a previously unrevealed knee injury suffered by Prince William. The Royal family quickly guessed that someone had hacked into the prince's mobile phone voicemail to get the scoop. Scotland Yard arrested Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator employed by the paper.
The pair was sentenced to jail in 2007 after revealing that they'd obtained back-door codes used by network operators and used them to listen in on several hundred messages.
In 2009, the Guardian, a rival newspaper, revealed that News of the World's parent company, News Group International, had paid out more than $1 million British pounds (about U.S. $1.5 million) to quietly settle lawsuits that might reveal the use of phone hacks and other data thefts to obtain inside information about important people. In 2011, the Guardian further reported that police had discovered that the phones of more than 5,800 people — including celebrities such as actor Hugh Grant — had been hacked by Mulcaire.
As a result of the scandal, international media baron Rupert Murdoch shut down News of the World in 2011 In 2012, he admitted that there had been a cover-up and publicly apologized, claiming that had he understood the depth of the misdeeds, he "would have torn the place apart"