Conspiracy theorists finds just the perfect piece of damning information on a government web site. It totally proves their point! They link to it on a blog. Someone notices a few minutes later that the link leads to a 404 Page Not Found. Everyone is astounded how quickly things that prove their ridiculous point are disappearing from the internet … even from government web sites! They must be right!

A month later, I come along, well after they are convinced that even the military is wrapped up in the evil plan to turn us into a socialist-communist-hellhole of a country and scrubbing information from government web sites in order to hide the truth, and I read all the comments. I come to the link to the page everyone insists has been scrubbed off the internet, the very proof they needed to fill in the blanks in the “obvious” conspiracy. I click the link.

Sure enough, it does lead to a 404 Page Not Found. I look at the address bar and notice a wayward parenthesis at the end of the address. I remove the unwanted character, and behold … right there on the internet is the vanished web page, completely intact. It had, in fact, been there all along.

This didn’t happen on some tiny little blog run by a mental case typing away in their mom’s basement either. It was a big name. Someone who who writes for newspapers people would recognize and makes appearances on TV and radio programs. Great fact-checking, right? Can’t even make sure a web address is properly formed before going off the deep end.

And I should believe anything else they have to say why exactly?