A comment on the JFK thing. You feel people who believe in conspiracy do so because it's the most "comforting" scenario - better than chaos. I'd say the lone gunman argument is actually more comforting. After all, what could be more frightening than to have secret, but enormously powerful groups who are able to eliminate those who want change?

The massive use of the easy and dismissive label "conspiracy label" by the half-educated cynics of our age strikes me as worse than most New Age mumbo-jumbo. After all, can you name a single major position of political or religious power on this Earth which has NOT been subject of secretive maneuvers by small groups/cliques/parties? I don't believe there is. Which would make those who insist (against global history) on long gunmen in American politics - again/JFK and again/MLK and again/RFK - utterly deluded, would it not?

thanks for the ups.

Scientologists here in Los Angeles are some of the wealthiest members of the community

it turns out James Arthur Ray has paid for Scientology auditing sessions, which are known to be thousands of dollars a pop. he describes his experiences here in his blog.

I remember leaving my Scientology "auditing" sessions being totally exhausted! (As well as much lighter in my wallet with many more multiples of sessions to go).

these new age culties feed off each other in addition to fleecing the public.

JFK, RFK and MLK all meeting a violent and untimely end makes people wonder if there isn't more there. People notice when this happens to persons having a certain profile. When it happens to three, all in the same generation who share a political and social profile, there will be questions. The events may not be at all connected but it serves to identify a larger notion of something amiss that alarms people.

One thing for sure is people often operate on a level where they derive illogical answers for questions that seemingly have no answers but for which answers are required. I suspect the larger share of this has to do with closely held decisions of powerful persons who would be at risk were their decisions or motivations truly known and revealed. People intuitively know the answer in these instances but also know it will never be addressed. Bush is a perfect example.

I clicked on the Skeptic link; it looks like no reading without buying. I was tickled to see that the Coriolis effect was going to be discussed. As luck would have it, I was watching sink water drain yesterday, and I couldn't even tell which way it was draining. There seemed to be an almost optical illusion of it switching directions. For now, I'll stay ignorant on the subject.
As to pseudo-science, belief in non-provable theories, etc. I am reluctant to sign on to all your assertions, but I am wobbly on putting my thoughts into coherent order. One difficulty is that I don't know how broad a brush you are painting with your categorizations.
Faith is the belief in the unprovable. Okay. That includes most religions, and while I don't know anything about Scientology or Dianetics, I do know at least a few tenets of other religions, and at their base, aren't they all a bit comical when stripped down? It's easier for me to laugh at say, Mormon beliefs, but is it because I have come to accept Christian tenets as a background to living in this country? Meaning that some of them don't offend me, while others do, like Creationists and Rapturists and believers in Prosperity Doctrine.

As far as the 'New-Age', I wonder what the dividing line might be in your mind between the borderline of New Age dementia and alternate medicine. Thirty years ago, alternatives were mocked whole-heartedly by doctors, but now some have changed their minds. You cite aromatherapy as a giggle-worthy; and it may be. Now many cancer hospitals that put ads on the teevee say they have 'wholistic treatments,' including mind-body therapies (that's hilarious, i just typed mind-money instead of body, hello, Dr. Freud?).
For me, the big bright red dividing line of scams had to do with money and concrete guarantees of the efficacy of some practice or treatment. When people ask me my opinion about a particular chiropractor, say, I usually advise them to see what kind of car he/she drives, and how many times that practitioner expects you to come each week. Ask yourself, do you want to help make payments on that car, or just go when you think you need to go. I cringe at some of the (to me) quacks that PBS airs over and over during their pledge drives. Having said that:
I spent 30 years doing corrective massage therapy. I am not a quack, and would always refer people out if I thought it necessary. I also had a good success rate, as much pain is simply a matter of neuro-muscular tension and spinal distortion, and some very concrete chemical muscular/neural problems that were correctable. One local physician and I became friends, and she came to learn a few hand-on techniques and theories to add to her practice.
Some beliefs are not true until they are proven by studies, but there aren't people to pay for the studies, except in the case of say, in-house studies for products or techniques that are making a lot of money already. It's frustrating; I always wanted to be part of a measurable, quantifiable study.
The last point I would address is the nature of individual reality; my intuitions says there may be more than one absolute reality, the way there physics say there are other timelines occurring at once. Quantum physics opens up some pretty odd possibilities, which I am woefully unprepared to grasp. I have tried reading a few books, like The Quantum Brain, but I can literally only let the words wash over me without really grasping any of it. String theory is that way for me; I can get how tickled scientists are about it, but I haven't the background to understand it.
I'm a little loth to press the 'Submit' button here; I had to let my Humiliation Insurance lapse a couple years ago...

I thought of your post after reading the following, and think you might also enjoy it if you have a subscription (digital or dead tree.) It's not about garden variety conspiracy theories but related, on various cycle theorists in finance.

Nick Paumgarten, “The Secret Cycle/Is the financier Martin Armstrong a con man, crank or genius," The New Yorker, October 12, 2009, p. 66

Especially this excerpt:

They say that, like the length of women's dresses and the release of new horror films, tolerance of cycle theory increases in down markets. We tend to ascribe rising markets and an expanding economy, as long as they last, to our own ingenuity--to progress, experience, rationality, a generational refinement in the ability of economists to manage our affairs. Bull markets are seen to be incarnations of human perfectibility. (Home prices would rise forever, because we had invented a new form of debt, one that didn't ever have to be repaid.) When things go to pieces, we shirk responsibility and seek other explanations. Fatalism creeps in. It can't be merely that we are as ever, greedy, short-sighted creatures, prone to self-delusion, incapable from learning from the past. There must be something, or Something, else at work, beyond our understanding or control.

Actually, the entire article didn't just focus on Armstrong, but went through a short history of cycle theorists and what others thought of them, and I thought it did a good job of giving examples of both those people who simply work a pattern theory as intriguing, along the lines of "this looks like a useful exercise that might take me somewhere in finding out a truth or two," and those who go over the line to a fundamentalist belief in a simple explanation for complexity, or vice versa, and/or fatalism, and/or creating a scapegoat for human woes. It was challenging that way, got me thinking that general conspiracy theorizing has a similar mix of practitioners, even though I am usually as "anti-conspiracy theory" as you are.