Conspiracies: Real, Possible and Absurd

Riding on the Daypop Top 40 is a page with photographs that “prove” that the Pentagon explosion on 9/11 could not have been caused by an airplane. It was caused instead by a truck bomb, according to this site.

I can give you the name of a friend in DC who saw the airliner hit the building. He’s a journalist. He watched the plane come down. So, what the photos on that site actually prove is that we don’t have reliable expecations about what a plane hitting a slab of a building will do.

Hiawatha Bray has a good column on the return of the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act, Fritz Hollings’ extremist response to the entertainment industry’s demand to have their stranglehold on creativity backed by law and hardware. As Bray writes:

Read it and gasp: ”It is unlawful to manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide or otherwise traffic in any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies.”

This proposed law got derailed by public opinion in December. The addresses and phone numbers of the members of the Senate Commerce Committee are here. You can send an email to Hollings via a Web form here.

Chip writes:

Who would have thought that that bastion of yellow journalism, the Enquirer, would devote space to acquaint millions of ordinary Americans with Enron and the pipeline?

The article is quite provocative. But, the source of The Enquirer’s information is (yes, I’m about to go ad hominem) the Executive Intelligence Review, a Lyndon Larouche organ. Larouche is a paranoid, neo-fascist, anti-semitic nut job who believes that Israeli and British intelligence were behind the “failed coup” of September 11, the British monarchy was behind the Oklahama City bombing, and the Grateful Dead were “generated as a British intelligence operation by the Occult Bureau…” This would be funnier if Larouche weren’t so intelligent (in some sense) and didn’t have such a devoted following.

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