Verbal

A bit silly, don't you think? Unless Al Qaeda sent out a press release, I doubt CNN had time to set up their cameras. So we're left with what little footage there is (security cams etc) But are you also saying there is no evidence that a 757 flew into the Pentagon?

i'm not sure what this means. Are you saying there is no evidence of 757 plane wreckage? Oh, and still want to know who you think did it if not Al Qaeda. Go on - have a stab (so to speak).

Aside from the links that Tim has offered you, above, which I'm sure you'll ignore but which easily debunk this nonsense, I'm even more puzzled as to why you won't answer my question. If it is, as you charmingly say, 'f**king obvious', then surely it must be equally 'f**king obvious' who the 'real' perpetrators are. Or at least, you surely have a pretty good idea. So let's assume your barmy idea is true. Who did it? What was the chain of command? And what was the motive? And no - my asking you this question is not a 'threat'. It's just a simple question (or three.) Is that okay?

How much are they going to pay people to attend?

The problem - or one of many - is that while 'truthers' won't accept that Bin Laden orchestrated the attacks, carried out by 19 zealots, they equally refuse to say out loud who the prime suspect is. I suspect this is because the answer will sound awfully like: 'the mysterons'. Who is your prime suspect? Or how about a list of the top three. If not Al Qaeda, who? Not so difficult a question is it? I'm only asking you for your informed guess.

So hazard a guess. You surely can't believe this stuff without some inkling that there must be some credible explanation - that this evil-doing inter-governmental-industrial-media complex has a name

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.