Nixon's Resignation Anniversary and Conspiracies

Today marks the fortieth anniversary of the resignation of President Richard Nixon because of his role in the cover-up of the break-in of the Watergate Hotel in September of 1972.  This blatant failure of a true conspiracy illustrates why anything likewise done on massive scale is prone to failure: there are too many opportunities for people to betray the plot, especially in a time such as now in which communication is so readily available and instantaneous.  Yet it seems that all around us we have supposed conspiracies about just any area in which the government, banking, and/or big business seem to play any significant role.  Take what I've been hearing lately about the Ebola virus crisis on George Noory's late night Coast-to-Coast AM radio show...

Ever since they transferred that Ebola-infected American health worker to Atlanta from West Africa, George Noory has been vocal in his questioning of the wisdom of bringing the Ebola virus into the United States like this, all precautions being taken in this process for the isolation of the virus from the general population notwithstanding.  Then he had on as a guest someone who quite rationally emphasized that the Ebola virus isn't easily transmitted from person-to-person and that he would have no problem sitting next to an infected person on a plane.  This guest said that the malnutrition, scarcity of clean water, pollution, general poverty, war, and political oppression common to the lands where the Ebola virus had grown to epidemic proportions had compromised the general population's immune systems and made them much more susceptible to infection.  He also speculated that the aid worker and his colleague who were being sent for treatment in the U.S. probably were just fatigued and weren't actually infected with Ebola.  That's a reasonable opinion, as I see it...whether it is right or not is another matter.  But this guest went further with his argument to claim that the reason that there is now so much media coverage of the Ebola outbreak is due to the development within the American pharmaceutical industry of a new Ebola vaccine which they are anxious to produce and market.  Only one problem: those African nations are too poor to buy it.  But a panicked American public wouldn't be, and isn't it convenient that Ebola is now here on our shores?  So to him, there is a conspiracy to overdramatize the Ebola crisis so that the drug companies can make big bucks.  O.K., that's one conspiracy.  But the following night...

The following night on Noory's show, a different guest came on with his own spin about Ebola.  He claimed that the U.S. was obtaining patents on all the various strains of the virus and that nefarious elements within our government were using those lands in Western Africa to test their effectiveness (supposedly at wiping out human life).  You see, this guest claims to believe that there is an ongoing conspiracy in some parts to kill off nine tenths of the human race on the proposition that this is the optimal population level for planetary sustainability.  But with both conspiracy theories, there is no real proof...just shadow groups working behind the scenes to manipulate the media and the government.  My take on these ideas is that were there true conspiracies, either as the first or second guest had expressed them, then they would have been exposed long ago, with witnesses coming out and documents released.  Instead, conspiracy theorists like Noory's two guests paint a picture of a sealed group of people who have a tight control of all of the information concerning their "plots" and on all the people involved in them.  Not plausible at all, I say...