@marbles:

First you need to acknowledge what a conspiracy is. When two or more people agree to commit a crime, fraud, or some other wrongful act, it is a conspiracy. Not in theory, but in reality. Grow up, it happens.

Thanks for the vocabulary lesson, but I used the term conspiracy theory, not conspiracy. Conspiracy theory has a separate and more strongly suggestive definition (this one from Merriam-Webster): "a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators."

I openly acknowledge that the government of the United States has and does commit conspiracies, as you define the word. (You mentioned Operation Northwoods in a separate comment; a post on Letters of Note from few weeks ago may be of interest to you, too, if you haven't already seen it: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/08/possible-actions-to-provoke-harrass-or.html.) The actions described therein, and other such actions, I would aptly describe as conspiracies (were they to be enacted).

Definitions aside, my problem with posts like that of @blastido_factor is that most of their so-called conspiracies are easily debunked. They're old chestnuts. A few minutes' worth of Google searches can disprove them.

It may be helpful to distinguish between what I see as the two main "conspiracies" surrounding 9/11: (1) that 9/11 was, to put it briefly, an "inside job," and (2) that certain members of the government of the United States conspired to use the events of 9/11 as justification for a series of military actions (many of which are ongoing) against people and countries that were, in fact, uninvolved in the 9/11 attacks. The first I find no credible evidence for. The second I consider a more tenable position.


The Pentagon is the most heavily guarded building in the world and somehow over an hour after 4 planes go off course/stop responding to FAA and start slamming into buildings, that somehow one is going to be able to fly into a no-fly zone unimpeded and crash into the Pentagon without help on the inside?

Once again, much of what you mention can be attributed to poor communication between the FAA and the government agencies responsible for responding to the attacks (and, for that matter, between the various levels of government agencies). And again, this is one of the major criticism levied by the various 9/11 investigations. From page forty-five of the 9/11 Commission: "The details of what happened on the morning of September 11 are complex, but they play out a simple theme. NORAD and the FAA were unprepared for the type of attacks launched against the United States on September 11, 2001. They struggled, under difficult circumstances, to improvise a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never before encountered and had never trained to meet."

Furthermore, it seems to me that one of the biggest mistakes made by a lot of the conspiracy theorists who fall into the first cateory (see above) is that they judge the events of 9/11 in the context of post-9/11 security. National security, on every level, was entirely different before 9/11 than it is now. That's not to say that the possibility of this kind of attack wasn't considered within the intelligence community pre-9/11. We know that it was (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks_advance-knowledge_debate). But was anyone adequately prepared to handle it? No.

In any event, when's the last time you looked at a map of Washington, DC? If you look at a satellite photo, you'll notice that the runways at Ronald Reagan airport are, literally, only a few thousand feet away from the Pentagon. Was a no-fly zone in place over Washington by 9:37 AM? I honestly don't know. But it's misleading to suggest that planes don't routinely fly near the Pentagon. They do.


And how did two giant titanium engines from a 757 disintegrate after hitting the Pentagon's wall? They were able to find the remains of all but one of the 64 passengers on board the flight, but only small amounts of debris from the plane?

In truth, I don't know enough about ballistics to speak for how well a titanium engine would withstand an impact with a reinforced wall at hundreds of miles an hour. But, if you're suggesting that a plane never hit the building, here's a short list of what you're wilfully ignoring: the clipped light poles, the damage to the power generator, the smoke trails, the hundreds of witnesses, the deaths of everyone aboard Flight 77, and the DNA evidence confirming the identities of 184 of the Pentagon's 189 fatalities (64 of which were the passengers on Flight 77).

Regarding the debris: It's misleading to claim that only small amounts of debris were recovered. This from Allyn E. Kilsheimer, the first structural engineer on the scene: "I saw the marks of the plane wing on the face of the building. I picked up parts of the plane with the airline markings on them. I held in my hand the tail section of the plane, and I found the black box ... I held parts of uniforms from crew members in my hands, including body parts." In addition, there are countless photos of plane wreckage both inside and outside the building (http://www.google.com/search?q=pentagon+wreckage).


Black boxes are almost always located after crashes, even if not in useable condition. Each jet had 2 recorders and none were found?

You help prove my point with this one: "almost always located." Again, I'm no expert on the recovery of black boxes, but here's a point to consider: if the black boxes were within the rubble at the WTC site, you're looking to find four containers that (undamaged, nonetheless) are roughly the size of two-liter soda bottles amidst the rubble of two buildings, each with a footprint of 43,000 square feet and a height of 1,300 feet (for a combined volume of 111,000,000 cubic feet, or 3,100,000,000 liters). (You might want to check my math. And granted, that material was enormously compacted when the towers collapsed. But still, it's a large number. And it doesn't include any of the space below ground level or any of the other buildings that collapsed.) Add to that the fact that they could have been damaged beyond recognition by the collapse of the buildings and the subsequent fires. To me, that hardly seems worthy of conspiracy.


Instead we invaded Afghanistan and started waging war against the same people we trained and armed in the 80s, the same people Reagan called freedom fighters. Now we call them terrorists for defending their own sovereignty.

Here, finally, we find some common ground. I couldn't agree more. You'd be hard-pressed to find a more ardent critic of America's foreign policy.

>> ^marbles:
First you need to acknowledge what a conspiracy is ...

>> ^luxury_pie:

Please let me have some insight in the glorious recycling system of the US.
Don't you have mandatory refunds for plastics and small glass bottles?
Or is it that you can get the refund for i.e. the scrap metal ?
Recycling... HOW DOES IT WORK!?!?!


There's about 8-10 states that have a deposit on things like beer/soda bottles/cans. In most of them it's 5 cents but I think it's 10 cents in 1 or 2.

I also just realized I selected the wrong poll option. I live in MO now which has no refunds, so those bottles and cans just go in with the regular recycling.

Oh, here you go: http://www.bottlebill.org/legislation/usa.htm

Freudians rejoice... I think he sees flying penises every night. Next he's probably stating that screwdrivers, soda bottles, roll'on deodorants and what not are phallic.. "We nust destroy every object that has a cylindrical longitudinal shape".. I read somewhere that majority of men dislike those shapes and prefer round vertical forms for ex. bowls and vice versa for women.. Not sure i agree..

Exact same thing happened in a local supermarket with all soda bottles a few years ago.

@RhesusMonk quote about it : " They should put up signs 'Now with 25% less'"

Well said.>> ^mfsteele:

I noticed when Fanta went from 2L to 1.5L bottles in Canada. It's too bad, I liked their grape and cream sodas.

I did not know that! Thank you for putting an urban myth to rest in my noggin.

In reply to this comment by mauz15:
>> ^raverman:
This reminds me of the millions of dollars NASA spent trying to perfect a pressurized pen that would write in zero gravity on space missions.
The Russians used a pencil.


False. Both the americans and the soviets initially used pencils, but it is dangerous if a piece of graphite broke and floated around inadvertently. It could affect instruments, get into your eyes, etc. Also, a free oxygen environment makes the wood of the pencil and probably also the graphite more prone to burn or combust.

Good analogy on seeking simple solutions to a problem, but completely made up and incorrect.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fiction-nasa-spen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen#Uses_in_the_U.S._and_Russian_space_programs

>> ^raverman:
This reminds me of the millions of dollars NASA spent trying to perfect a pressurized pen that would write in zero gravity on space missions.
The Russians used a pencil.


False. Both the americans and the soviets initially used pencils, but it is dangerous if a piece of graphite broke and floated around inadvertently. It could affect instruments, get into your eyes, etc. Also, a free oxygen environment makes the wood of the pencil and probably also the graphite more prone to burn or combust.

Good analogy on seeking simple solutions to a problem, but completely made up and incorrect.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fiction-nasa-spen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen#Uses_in_the_U.S._and_Russian_space_programs

>> ^raverman:
This reminds me of the millions of dollars NASA spent trying to perfect a pressurized pen that would write in zero gravity on space missions.
The Russians used a pencil.


I would also like to add I actually used a couple of those pens in the Navy. They hardly work for shit. Maybe you have to be in zero g for them to work. Bring on the pencil.

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>> ^Bhruic:
It's a nice idea, but I'd like to see what happens with them on a cloudy day.


I suppose they turn the electric lights on then.

That is actually a very nice way of saving energy. I wonder if this kind of technology could be used in buildings that have more than just a thin sheet of metal for a roof. Natural light in a room with no windows is just cool!

*Discuss *ban

No response to accusations of sock puppetry. And these videos are of limited value to the sift. Bonked on the head with a soda bottle, demonstrations of gravity, etc.

Previously...

http://wtf.videosift.com/talk/Um-yeah-hows-this-for-fishy

man i just saw this about 2 weeks ago on the disovery channel. still an all time favorite.


P.S.- they also trieds the nitrogen gas+2 litter empy soda bottle, plz dont try i dont want you to get hurt :-), the "chip can deal wit two matches explosion/ getting chip put without harming chips" and a little trick i like to call "catastrophy day". It was a fun episode that it was.(in other words, they tried bubbles and fire torch, again plz dont try thi at home). if bsna watched the show you can ask him about the rest of the show.

-Kyle