@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 ...

Fixed.>> ^critical_d:

I think this is dead?

Good call. on 22) If you'll remember they did it in both movies. That said, I wonder if both of them were improvised.>> ^Boise_Lib:

22) says 40 Year Old Virgin--the movie is Knocked Up.
18) says Tootsie--the movie is Stripes (I think, it's been a long time).
08) Annie Hall--can you really call it improvisation when Woody Allen wrote the movie?
I've also heard what @quantumushroom said about Being John Malkovich.
I love picking movies (and videos about movies) apart.
Thanks, Grimm
(Hey, I just learned what "8)" does )

I hate improvised scenes in movies for the most part. Everybody get so actory-y.

I fucking hate Matt Damon's stupid monologue about home life in Saving Private Ryan. I like Damon as an actor. I like the movie as a whole. But I hate that scene and now I know why it always bothered me so much.

22) says 40 Year Old Virgin--the movie is Knocked Up.
18) says Tootsie--the movie is Stripes (I think, it's been a long time).
08) Annie Hall--can you really call it improvisation when Woody Allen wrote the movie?
I've also heard what @quantumushroom said about Being John Malkovich.

I love picking movies (and videos about movies) apart.

Thanks, Grimm

(Hey, I just learned what "8)" does )

I would assume that it along with the movies made by Christopher Guest which are by design a mostly improvised script (much like Curb Your Enthusiasm on TV) were excluded from the list.>> ^Duckman33:

Strange to see nothing in here from Spinal Tap since a lot of the scenes of that movie were improvised from what I understand.

Strange to see nothing in here from Spinal Tap since a lot of the scenes of that movie were improvised from what I understand.

I don't think that this was entirely scripted either. Rob McElhenney starts to lose it a bit, thanks to Charlie Day's improvisation.

Thanks for the quality!

Although.... Brian Williams is pretty consistently great. I always zero in on a Brian interview -- smart and dry and improvisational.

Oh! And Canadian! I'll have to change the tags!

In reply to this comment by Sarzy:
Ha! That was surprisingly good. *quality

>> ^10677:

Can someone please explain Jazz to me? So much of it just sounds random and dissonant to me - like that entire stretch from 1:00 to 1:17 or 1:53 to approx 2:50. It just sounds so gross. I'm almost physically repulsed by the ugly sounds coming from that sax, and it is a startling constrast with the beautiful intro of this song. What is the merit and reasoning behind Jazz?


It's improvisation. Sometimes you have to really be in the musicians head, so to speak, to get it. Because it mostly depends on how they feel at that time. Listen to the one in Norsueleffanti's link, that one is a little more melodic.

>> ^residue:

The clip where the guy on the bike is spraying water through the windows of a passing train... It's the second to the last clip.
>> ^robbersdog49:
>> ^residue:
wow what a fucking asshole at the end.. nice "win" shithead

What video are you wantching?


Could be wrong, but I think that dude is improvising a way to wash the train. I didn't see any open windows.

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I don't think it's from any particular song. Even when he's playing Octavarium live with this thing it doesn't sound exactly like the album version so he's probably just improvising:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqUk1e7kxuw

selling it as improvisation killed half the fun for me.

^Actually, theater mode, as far as I've heard, records the match entirely from the host's perspective, as he explains in the video.

>> ^probie:

I used to play Quake 2 with tremendous amounts of "leg", and I still placed #1 in most matches. You improvise, adapt and overcome.
Or you could just whinge about it.


Hey man, there's a difference between saying "there is a legit problem with how this is being done and it's ruining the functionality of the game" and "WHAT THE FUCK FUCKING BULLSHIT LAG OH MY GOD LAG FUCKING SHITTY HOST"

Notice that the second one is whining (I'd go so far as to say "bitching," even), but the first one is not.

Edit: why is this text here all above the quote box? Only the first sentence should be.