This is brilliant and simple, and I think that it applies for mere passing knowledge of any highly technical field. Take that last sentence home. Think about it.
RJB
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Skeptical Humanities 
Very funny. It is also true. I’ve always found “conventional” conspiracy theories hard to take simply because they assume perfect or near perfect conspiracies. Given the human capacity to fuck up along with the human tendency to blab right and left, the idea of perfect or near perfect conspiracies involving vast numbers of people all of whom keep their mouths shut for eons of time strikes me as unbelievable.
Basically your right conspiracy thinking involves finding alleged anomolies that can be due to pretty mundane factors and elevating them to huge signifigance while ignoring the total lack of evidence for the actual conspiracy.
In the Middle ages Witch Hunters found vast amounts of “evidence” for a vast Satanic “conspiracy”, consisting of large numbers of witnesses who confessed to out rageous crimes and testified in detail about the Satanic conspiracy. The “evidence” was vast in scale, circumstantial, and coherent and fitted together very nicely. It also was a complete pack of horseshit.
Today we have conspiracies by the truck load but in many cases we don’t even have witnesses just paranoia.
Panel 2 reminds me of a line from a book whose title I don’t recall at the moment: “A device guaranteed to extend your life expectancy by fifty years, sold with a five-year warrantee.”
You know, an example I use often in my classes is that of the “c” rock from the Apollo landings. A “c” appears to be on a rock in one photo, prompting teh krazees to fabricate a story about how prop masters who dress sets mark their props with letters. In fact it is a mote of dust, a product of the printing process that disappears in other prints of the negative. Nonetheless the fact that someone would put up a mote of dust against the collective global record of the space race suggests how bad people can be at discerning what is important evidence.
RJB