Verbal

No. The trouble with the debate is that it is distinctly lopsided. Conspiracy theorists simply will not accept a shred of evidence that points to the crazy notion that the attacks on 9/11 were the work of well-funded Islamic exptremists. Every scrap of tenuous evidence has to be twisted into an argument that, bizarrely, they themselves cannot bring themselves to utter explicitly. It's why I asked the question, to which you and your co-theorist John Smith failed to respond (JS even taking the question as a 'threat'!): who was responsible for the attacks on 9/11, and what was the chain of command? Why won't you spell it out? And don't you think you're embarrassing yourself by retailing the guff about a mistaken BBC report? A report in which the reporter says: 'the details are very, very sktechy' and then gets it wrong? So much more credible that the reporter - as your co-theorists believe - was given a script by the mysterious figures who were behind the real attack on the towers. So to sum up, your theory, as you now express it, implicates not only an entire national government, but the foreign news media as well. You have an impressive capacity of suggestibility. But once again, to you and JS: please answer my question. It's not a difficult one, surely.

It's already been done, by Ben Johnson.

Convincing? How so? What convinces you? And why is to more convincing than the obvious explanation, given by many, including the experts called upon by Popular Mechanics, that the building was brought down as a consequence of the collapse of the towers? And no, my stance isn't 'explain all or don't bother'? Surely, if your dearly held theory is that building 7 was brought down by a controlled explosion, it's reasonable to ask by whom? Otherwise what the hell is the point of constructing such a hypothesis if the motive and means are absent? It just seems plain weird for the absurdly named 'truthers' to constantly avoid these questions.

Regardless of their 'profession', the same question ALWAYS goes unanswered. If buildings were deliberately demolished, then demolished by whom? Why? And what was the chain of command? Incidentally, Building 7 comes up all the time, despite the fact that there have been plenty of evidence that it was brought down as a result of collateral damage from the collapse of the towers. It's a bit like the rubbish about the absence of plane wreckage around the Pentagon. (Here's a test: see how long it takes you to find dozens of high-quality images of AA plane wreckage around the Pentagon. I bet you can find it in less than 30 seconds.)

What? My credentials for what? I'm asking you the simplest of questions. You've started a thread on the subject, and yet like an awful lot of conspiracy theorists appear not to know who exactly is at the heart of the conspiracy. So once again: can you say exactly who was really responsible for 9/11, what the chain of command was, and what was the motive for this murderous conspiracy?

Clearly unfair. A great deal of research went into starting this thread. Can't add any more 'cos am on the phone.

I can do quite a long list just for the US, but the top three there would be: 1. The assassination of JFK (yes, I remember where I was...) 2. The resignation of Richard Nixon (I heard it live on my first trip to the US) 3. 9/11 (which was very inconvenient)

Cheers!

There's quite a bit out there, but here's something from the BMJ in October 2005 - or a precis of it. Early retirement, as is commonly believed, does not help retirees to live longer and it may even shorten one's life. This is the conclusion of a study published on October 21 by the British Medical Journal. The research involved tracking more than 3,500 employees working for Shell Oil in Texas over a 26-year period. The workers retired at 55, 60 or 65 and were monitored to see what effect their age at retirement had on their lifespan. Researchers considered factors such as gender and socioeconomic status in ascertaining whether retiring early is associated with better survival. It seems the findings have displaced the myth that spending our golden years at a leisurely pace away from the daily grind of the nine to five will increase our longevity. It appears that retiring later provides for a longer life. The results were astonishing. The life expectancy of employees who retired at 55 was significantly reduced compared with those who retired at the age of 65. The researchers concluded that: “Retiring early at 55 or 60 was not associated with better survival than retiring at 65 in a cohort of past employees of the petrochemical industry. Mortality was higher in employees who retired at 55 than in those who continued working.” Leader of the research team Shan Tsai said: “Although some workers retired at 55 because of failing health, these results clearly show that early retirement is not associated with increased survival. On the contrary, mortality improved with increasing age at retirement for people from both high and low socioeconomic groups.”

Good grief.

It's a vicious circle though. Working on beyond 65 will itself increase the average age at which people die - there's long been an association with earlier retirement and earlier death. And the converse is true: people who work longer are healthier and live longer. So we'll constantly be chasing our tail. Of course, the problem that will never be solved by this is that the pensions industry, public and private, is a giant Ponzi scheme - however you do the numbers, they'll never add up, and the only people who can feel secure about their pensions are the ones already on them. The only people getting rich from it are the fund managers and traders who see pension funds as a vast source of personal wealth.

Oh dear. This is all very odd. Let me try again: can you tell us exactly who was really responsible for 9/11, what the chain of command was, and what was the motive for this epic conspiracy?

Why are you so scared of giving a straightforward answer to a simple question?

Okay, John, so why don't you spell it out. Tell us exactly who was responsible for 9/11, what the chain of command was, and the motive for this gigantic, presumably 'world-governmental' conspiracy. By the way, that website is one of the slightly less notorious of the 'truther' organisations. Consequently, it tends to cover a multiplicity of viewpoints - from full-on, tin-foil-hat conspiracy nuts to those calling for the release of remaining documents and recordings, which the FBI in particular have somewhat mishandled over the intervening years, on the somewhat pointless grounds that some information is withheld because it is part of an active investigation. (However, the most decisive omission - the cockpit recordings of Flight 93 - has been withheld because of objections to relatives of those killed in Shanksville.)

I think the streets in the Hanover area are still permit-free (there's been talk of starting a permit scheme) - reasonable walking distance to the seafront and most things in the centre of Brighton.

Mrs trousers. I bet you'll get bashed for calling her that - twice, if it's the trouser-in-law as well.

Some things have to be kept secret for security reasons. There is an anniversary you know.

The top 1% of earners each possess an average household wealth of £2.6 million. The bottom 10%, by comparison, have an average household wealth of less than £8,800. I imagine that's why the top 1% pay as much as they do.

It's only got two good restaurants apparently, which must be tough if you've got to somehow burn through £250,000 a week.

As someone who's made films about 9/11 and the aftermath, I can tell you that the people whose lives have been most directly affected by events that day are extremely unhappy about the paranoic fantasies of the conspiracy theorists. To give a couple of straightforward examples, I've interviewed the wife of the captain of American Airlines 11 (the plane that hit the north Tower) and the husband of two flight attendants who managed to make detailed calls to the ground as AA11 headed towards the Twin Towers. The film itself was denounced by a number of conspiracy loonies as a 'Zionist psyops operation' (partly because we were the first to tell the story of Daniel Lewin), and the relatives rubbished because in the weird world that is the conspiracy fantasist, no planes hit the Towers, or if they did, they were empty and remote-controlled. The fantasists account for the missing crew and passengers by claiming they were offloaded at Area 51 and executed by the Bush administration. Or some variant on this rubbish. But the relatives themselves, who've had far more access to secret information than anyone outside official circles, this is hurtful garbage. It devalues and diminishes their lost husbands and wives, some of whom - even on AA11 - put up as much resistance as they could in the circumstances and paid for it with their lives.

This sounds like another one of your 'stories'.

Of course, there are many 'high earners' who are not entrepreneurs. But the flannel over the last few days has been that the 50p rate is killing off at source the entrepreneurs setting up small innovative companies that will drive the country out of recession - which is nonsense. What it is, in reality, is a bit of hypocritical special-pleading by extremely wealthy commentators, professional, higher civil servants, and banking and other corporate executives to contribute much less to digging this country out of a hole. The special pleading, in other words, comes from precisely some of those deeply implicated in creating this mess in the first place. What kind of 'entrepreneurs' are these?

I heard the author of this, Richard Murphy, on Radio 4 yesterday, making a property 'entrepreneur' look silly. Murphy talks a lot of sense.

The weirdest thing about those who argue that 'entrepreneurs' are being deterred in some way by the 50p tax on income is the assumption that these same entrepreneurs are salary slaves. They're not - the idea is ridiculous. They own companies, and are rewarded through corporate status in a number of ways - being paid dividends, paying corporation tax at MUCH lower levels, etc., etc.

Exactly so. No surprise that the Met higher-ups continue on the face of it to be staggeringly stupid.