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"...have there ever been proven conspiracies?..."

JayUtah said:
Or the AARP. :o
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I've looked through the ARRB report linked above, and fail to see anything that concludes anything about a conspiracy. In fact, it is not about that at all, but about getting the evidence available.

Am I missing something?
 
pgwenthold said:
Am I missing something?
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There was some legitimate flap about Robert F. Kenney's handling of some of the autopsy materials, namely specimens. But that was all cleared up way before ARRB. The board certainly did not (and could not) find that Bobby had acted illegally. First, he didn't. And second, they did not have any such charter to do so.

Gee, what a shocker that the family of a deceased person should want the remains back after the autopsy and inquiry are over with. They act like they're somehow entitled to them. [sarcasm] But yes, I bet that if he knew the furor that would be raised later, he might have handled it differently, and with greater transparency. The notion that Bobby colluded with someone to destroy autopsy evidence comes largely from the conspiracy theorists' expectation that all the evidence should be preserved for decades in order to address their endless stream of concerns.

The larger issue with the ARRB is that (gasp!) lots of stuff was kept secret in the 1960s. Maybe it had something to do with that Cold War thingy everyone was talking about, and the odd desire not to publish things like intelligence-gathering methods, investigative methods, explorations of weaknesses in protective methods, and so forth. As a result a lot of stuff got routinely classified. Conspiracy theorists develop the talent of spinning this as a conspiracy within government to hide the "truth" of their nefarious activity from the public. So the mere fact that ARRB had to exist, and that it uncovered previously hidden documents, is proof enough for most conspiracy theorists that some conspiracy is afoot. That's the difference between history and gossip.

To make this less Kennedy-centric, we run into the same issues with Apollo. Authors say, "Where are the blueprints to the spaceships?" and then go ballistic when they find out that not all of it was kept. The National Archives reports that they have "sufficient" design documentation from Apollo, but it's in the unindexed portion of the archives and thus not open to unsupervised research.

To conspiracy theorists this is tantamount to it being inaccessible. But of course that judgment is based on naive expectations, as it always is. The volume of design documentation in an aerospace project is unbelievably enormous. For just one vehicle, the Lunar Module, the prime contractor was at one point producing 4,000 design drawings per week. The documents for each individual LM shipped to NASA literally filled a railroad boxcar.

So no, not all of it was kept. Details of test results, assembly floor logs, numerous revisions -- all these ephemeral documents met various fates. Their historical value is dubious, and at no time did a complete set of them exist at any one place and time. The detailed design documents for Apollo 13's ill-fated oxygen tank were never in Washington DC (NASA headquarters) or in Huntsville, Alabama (NASA's center for spacecraft engineering), or Downey, California (the contractor's assembly facility). When it came time to investigate what broke, they had to get all the relevant documents from Beech Aircraft, the subcontractor who made the tank.

That's how that industry works. And each company has its own retention policy. By law they have to retain certain documents for each article in use, and they do so at their own expense. But after a particular article has gone out of service, they can (and most often do) destroy the individual records pertaining to that one article. Retention of general design information is generally at the company's own discretion. It's considered their property and while the government (the customer) can certainly request copies of it for archive purposes, there is no mandate to store every single scrap of paper that a project generates.

But conspiracy theorists still have this romantic notion that "the blueprints" for the Saturn V rocket are a roll of paper that you can tuck under your arm and spread out on the hood of your truck at the construction site to see whether it's being done right. They don't have the more realistic notion of a building's worth of documents, only some of which are of lasting relevance. So they prattle about talking about "destroyed documents" in one case, or "hidden documents" in another case.
 
Border Reiver said:
Defence Scheme No. 1 can be updated quickly. We'd be over the border and halfway to Washington before you figured out we were serious.
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On the other hand, if you stopped at taking Fargo,no one would notice.......

Serioulsy, my father's home town is Breckenridge, Minnesota, located on the Red River of the North about twenty five miles south of Fargo;in fact it;s where the Red River begins.
 
Border Reiver said:
There's one team from a country other than the US that can compete.
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I'll also add the fact that on MLB opening day in 2014 there were 224 players born outside the U.S. (26.3 percent), from a pool of 853 players (750 active 25-man roster players and 103 disabled or restricted Major League players), from 16 countries other than the USA.

Besides, it's been called the World Series for 112 freakin' years!:D
 
Jango said:
Sarcasm aside -- California will not be alone in coming after the Great Lakes.
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Discussed extensively in a California drought thread. General consensus being that it's too far, too expensive and The Rockies are a real nuisance to get over. Piping water down from WA/OR was seen as a much more sensible option, along with abandoning Californian agriculture if the situation persists (iirc).
 
GlennB said:
Discussed extensively in a California drought thread. General consensus being that it's too far, too expensive and The Rockies are a real nuisance to get over. Piping water down from WA/OR was seen as a much more sensible option, along with abandoning Californian agriculture if the situation persists (iirc).
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He was talking about the Reptilians.
 
I get really tired of conspiracy nuts saying "there have been real conspiracies!" as if that makes their mythology credible. I sometimes reply "New York has been proven to exist, therefore Oscorp really is after Peter Parker!"
 
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