>>This is America! And one of the best things about us is mixing
stuff up, as in French-Asian hybrid cuisine<<
I think that might have been the Vietnamese and Laotians who invented that, with "help" from the French. (PS: Michael P is entirely correct on Thai table manners, but they were never colonised by the French or anyone else and are rather proud of the fact!)
Various people wrote:
[9/11 nuttery, for and against]
The consensus among the thoughtful members of the conspiracy theory mailing lists is:
1. Lies were told about 9/11, for all sorts of reasons (like the famous fireproof passports, which were presumably cooked up to avoid disclosing the real means by which the plotters were identified), not all of them necessarily illegitimate. There is some reason to believe that the official list of attackers is not the whole story, but I am personally not convinced by any particular theory (like some of them being "still alive". The official timeline taking the attackers from the hotel room to the planes via a strip club is an obvious work of fiction, only marginally better than Martin Amis' envisioning of the same story.
1a. The fact that lies were told is certainly irritating and to be condemned on general good government grounds, but probably not a reason to start believing any old crap you find on the internet; myself and a few others regularly make this point on the lists to surprisingly little effect.
2. Basically all engineering based 9/11 theories are crap - none of them really stand up to scrutiny, and a lot of the credentials of the various structural engineers who have done the rounds on these things are quite shaky. Theories based on the 9/11 plotters being "too good" as pilots also don't stand up well.
3. It is just about possible that flight 93 was shot down rather than crashing, although there is as yet no publicly available evidence that suggests this was the case, and the released cockpit tapes don't support the theory.
4. Explanations of why the fighter intercept defences did not work are really very unsatisfactory indeed. Obviously incompetence is the most likely explanation, but other possibilities (including some very sinister ones indeed) cannot be ruled out. A public inquiry would be valuable here if anyone thought that it would be carried out honestly (I don't).
5. The Pentagon crash conspiracy theories are almost certainly disinformation and probably spread by US military sources who don't like the idea of too much discussion about the Pentagon's security arrangements.
In general, conspiracy theorists should be neither dismissed out of hand (and various "fast way" arguments like "too many people would need to have been involved are just not valid) nor accepted unquestioningly. Rather like economists really.
Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed, who Joseph linked to, is an example of a sensible conspiracy researcher - his book on the 7/7 bombings is somewhat flawed in that it compiles every dodgy theory advanced (including the "bombs under the train" theory which is based on a simple misreporting) but is otherwise excellent and compendious in its use of primary sources; it's very good on the background to "Londonistan".
best dd
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