It's enough to make you paranoid

And Operation Zapata was the code name for the Bay of Pigs,
Like the Bushes' oil company - what a funny coincidence - Paranoid Larry

And sometimes, I think that's the idea.

Once you begin to smell something fishy, it's hard to smell anything else. And as soon as you start grasping the semiotics of conspiracy, you see tells, like inside jokes shared with the doomed, made on the dual assumptions that nobody is going to believe you and there's nothing you can do about it. Or at least I see them. (Hey, call me paranoid.)

Which brings us to the Zapata Corporation. You know the story: the Texas oil and gas company co-founded by George Herbert Walker Bush in 1953, which allegedly served the CIA well in both the ramp-up to the Bay of Pigs and its burgeoning narcotics business. (Those Caribbean platforms belonging to its future director - which intelligence agency could resist?)



In the 1990s Zapata got out of the energy sector and "became a top US producer of marine protein through its majority holdings in Omega Protein." It's no longer Texas-based; it's now headquarted in Rochester, New York. But a nod or two to its legacy remain.

Here is something I bet you didn't know: since August 19, 1998, Zapata Corporation is squatting on the domain name "paranoid.com." (Do a "whois" search and see.) Why a fish oil firm would hold onto paranoid.com, I can't imagine. Why a fish oil firm with Zapata's history would, I can only guess. It has the ring of another inside joke.

Like, say, a photograph of George HW Bush sharing a bed with his granddaughters. The picture is undated, but it appears to be of late-1980s vintage, when stories were being whispered about Bush's "problem", and his association with the Franklin Credit Union's Lawrence King was becoming an issue. But there he is. And something else besides:



I can hear his studied, folksy disgust at the inference that there is anything unwholesome about this image. But Mr President, the pyramid in your lap....

Even when we get the joke, it's not particularly funny, is it?