Phil, love your link on conspiracy theories. This is just what I've been looking for.
The point I was basically trying to make is that, regardless of the who-knew-what-when, who-did-what-to-whom, NC and Collins are both agreeing on US reaction. They are disagreeing on the means, and tho I think the means are important, they are converging on the ends. In the context of personal activism, it is the ends of our political foes that we must focus on, and our means of interrupting those ends. In the underlying causes they are disagreeing, but in the overall patterns of US action they agree. When I say we must not get caught up in deductive as opposed to inductive reasoning, what I refer to is not squabbling over the differences in those subterranean motives, but that we should instead focus on the emergent patterns. Of course Chomsky does use deductive reasoning - he culls events, numbers, uses them to create a framework. In fact, deductive and inductive reasoning is truly a false dichotomy, as one cannot exist without employing the other. The only point I tried to make is that, regardless of starting point, the patterns are the same. In truth I guess I misspoke separating them in the categories I did, but anyway that's what I was getting at.
One note on the conspiracy theories - they can be a useful lens for viewing certain events in the world, but as soon as they talk about the future they lose most if not all of their validity. As a good example, check out this site, the home of a conspiracy-minded shock jock in America. He has some good political analysis despite the fact that he has some wacky ideas about who commited all sorts of the atrocities in the states and abroad (hint: he's a New World Order sorta guy). Our job is to separate his often wrong views of the cause of events, and use the patterns he legitmately sees growing out of the events in question. Regardless of the causes, his interpretation of the drifts in political discourse is not bad. However, as he's using false assumptions regarding motivations, he goes to strange places in his predicted future. Hence, he's got a New World Order enslaving the population, enforced id chips in arms, etc the whole nine yards. One just shouldn't follow his reasoning in that direction. Indeed, I would posit that one should never follow another's reasoning in predicting the future. All we can do is observe the patterns and decide for ourselves.
To use another example from history, let's take the emergence of the belief that the earth orbits the sun. At the time, had there been widespread discourse of the type that is now available, you would have a bunch of theories about why the church was against it. Some would argue straight down the line that the church simply couldn't believe it due to their interpretation of the bible. Others would argue it was the church's fear of a loss of face. Some would say the church was much more worried about a loss of power and control. Probably there would be some who say the church knows all this and more, but if information gets out then there's gonna be a major paradigm and power shift, and the church won't allow that.
As an observer at the time, I would listen to all those various theories and, in the end, not care about those motivations. I would (hopefully in this disgustingly hypothetical world of rationalist thought applied to a completely different culture) simply observe Copernicus and Galileo have got an idea, the church doesn't want us to hear it and is suppressing it, and we should try to reverse that. I wouldn't listen to all the predictions of what's to come, tho. I would develop my own theories, certainly, but I wouldn't worry about tales of a vengeful God or a genocidal pope. Oy, this analogy has gotten quite out of hand, but do you see what I'm driving at? It's the patterns that emerge from the convergence of many theories that we should concern ourselves with. Only thru finding the things that all sides are agreeing on can we hope to approach an objective truth. Sometimes the objective truth we can be sure of will be simple and small - ie Kennedy was killed - and sometimes we wil be able to get larger patterns - ie the US is turning into an imperialist power. This is the point I clumsily approached on the last post.

As to the link from the list of the Reaction Paradigm page, I don'y know what to say about that. My reason for introducing that page was not to say "Look, this guy's got it all figured out" but merely to show the objective truths of political reaction and the turning of tragedies to other ends. The cause of the tragedy is not the important piece - nor is the dialectic mangling - but the list has good uses in observing just what it is all concerned parties are agreeing on. That's the important stuff. That's the path out of the victor's history - for even the victor's history will have kernels of truth that can be more correctly interpreted if we listen to all sides of the story, including the conspiracy nuts. Thus, when I say we gotta be inductive, what it truly means is deducing the overall patterns from the multiple theories out there, and then inducing the causes and reactions after we've decided on the larger picture. If we won't listen to the larger structures a theory posits because we quibble with the smaller parts, then we're gonna end up with solipsism owing to the fact we will always start with the same building blocks, some of which are likely to not fit objective truth. We need to listen to everything in order to cleanse our hermaneutic.
Now, one could argue that if the initial building blocks are false, then the larger patterns will be even worse. This is, of course, true. But as I think every single theory out there is gonna have false building blocks, we must absorb them all and see where they all agree. Only after doing that can we go back and see which building blocks are likeliest to be true from each theory. Repeat the process an infinite number of times, and you will arrive at a place which subscribes to no one theory, but which hopefully merely exposes the truth of the situation. Chomsky does this - he, like everyone else, rejects certain "facts" because they don't make sense in the framework he's discovered, or they make more sense reinterpreted with truer unstated goals in mind. That's part of his process of uncovering propaganda, as it is for us all. He's great at it too, of course. I think we all pretty much agree with nearly everything he has had to say. However, we shouldn't blindly follow any one person's reasoning; we must collect all, and reason for ourselves. Likewise, we shouldn't reject all of what someone says just because we disagree with much of it - the truth hides in the funniest of places.