{"id":9559,"date":"2015-06-01T02:47:30","date_gmt":"2015-06-01T02:47:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=9559"},"modified":"2015-06-01T02:47:30","modified_gmt":"2015-06-01T02:47:30","slug":"conspiracy-theories-are-for-the-birds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=9559","title":{"rendered":"Conspiracy theories are for the birds"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Conspiracy theories drive me nuts.<\/p>\n

I mean it. I think I’m going crazy listening to any and all of them.<\/p>\n

The latest spate of conspiracy theories centers around downtown Amarillo. There’s a segment of our city population — and I’m not convinced it comprises even a significant minority of residents — who keep concocting nefarious schemes dealing with business relationships within (a) city government (b) the business community or (c) between them both.<\/p>\n

These theories are coming from individuals — or perhaps small groups of individuals — who don’t believe the city’s master plan for reviving downtown is going to work. They won’t give it a chance. They are willing to toss it out at the front end because, by golly, they just know<\/em> something underhanded is going on.<\/p>\n

I forged a fairly decent career in daily journalism over the span of 37 years. I am wired to be skeptical of matters at a lot of levels. However, I am not such a cynic as to believe out of hand that a high-dollar business deal is simply a bad thing because it involves a fair amount of money.<\/p>\n

And yet, that’s what I keep hearing.<\/p>\n

Conspiracy theories have this way of growing legs and even wings. They feed on themselves. They produce conspiracy spawns<\/em>, that themselves grow into full-fledged conspiracies.<\/p>\n

Here’s one that came to me today — second-hand to be sure, but I trust the source who mentioned this tidbit to me: A young member of my family told another member of my family that “it has been proven” that a Secret Service agent killed President Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. It wasn’t Lee Harvey Oswald. It wasn’t any of the other so-called conspiracy theories: the mob; the Cubans; hell, it wasn’t even Lyndon Johnson.\u00a0The killer was a member of the Secret Service, the agency charged with protecting the life of the president of the United States. And it’s been proven<\/em> that the Secret Service did it.<\/p>\n

I’m glad I didn’t hear my young family member\u00a0make that idiotic assertion. I would have stroked out.<\/p>\n

That’s the kind of thing that has infected much of the discussion surrounding the downtown Amarillo story.<\/p>\n

How about we just keep our eyes peeled and our ears open and actually witness and listen carefully to the things being discussed?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n\n

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Conspiracy theories drive me nuts. I mean it. I think I’m going crazy listening to any and all of them. The latest spate of conspiracy theories centers around downtown Amarillo. There’s a segment of our city population — and I’m not convinced it comprises even a significant minority of residents — who keep concocting nefarious … Continue reading Conspiracy theories are for the birds<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[276,1135,1207,1239,1436,2460,2464,2751,2755,4171,4770],"class_list":["post-9559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-amarillo","tag-conspiracy-theories","tag-cubans","tag-dallas","tag-downtown-amarillo","tag-jfk","tag-jfk-murder","tag-lbj","tag-lee-harvey-oswald","tag-secret-service","tag-the-mob"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9559\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}