Verbal

Tut, tut, ESB. The correct Latin is ad nauseum.

Tin hats on - incoming from the moral police...

We will win, you miserable sods. Promise...

Interesting perhaps, but impossible. I mean, the laws of physics don't allow it. The team - finally - is a lot better than the one last year and is just about good and ready to wallop Yeovil 1-0.

Just seen Away We Go, the new Sam Mendes movie. Really puzzled by the good reviews it's getting. It seemed to drag on forever, with the occasional laugh, but was surprised to find its running time was a little over an hour and a half. Horrible, schmaltzy, but unexplained ending too, which I'm tempted to ruin - except that that would be extremely difficult.

So he had to go to the Moonie-owned Washington Times to come up with this guff? I think he's talking in code: the only way a 40,000 seat stadium will be 'green' is by not being built. And eight million fans?

Underwater golf?

This is what Derren Brown does to people.

We need more reserves with this attitude.

With my Derren Brown hat on, they said they're going to make some funny noises and then somehow forget all about it. (Written in the future-past tense.) Bet? Here's the beginning of that story. http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/sep/11/matt-le-tissier-betting-scam You won't hear about the end.

I see the moral philosophers are still out in force. After the initial day or so of tut-tutting, I'd have thought this would have died the death. But nearly two weeks later, here we still all are. And still, it seems, finding ways to paint MLT as corrupt, cynical and lazy to the bone.

You're thinking too hard benjii. He was just warning that he was going to give a flaky explanation (I can say with the benefit of hindsight...)

Oh, and here's another link I've only just found. This one got my attention because it mentions my film among many others - and makes the claim that we're all - obviously - American psyops officers peddling a Bush administration mass-brainwash. http://www.spingola.com/JULES%20NAUDET%20App%202.htm And you wonder, hulk, why I drop the odd 'paranoid' into my sentences? Sheesh, these guys are weird.

And actually, if people want to find out genuinely new and interesting stuff, the planes - and the events on board as they unfolded - are the still one of the most important places to look.

As I've already said, 911 research.org are among the 'moderates' - they're one of the very few in the truther movement in the US who acknowledge that the Pentagon was hit by flight 77. If you want the wilder stuff, you don't have to go any further than the links already offered up on this thread. Obviously it's that stuff, and the even freakier theories, I'm talking about - the theories about the illuminati, the Jews, robots flying the planes, shape-shifting technology to deceive eye-witnesses, missiles, and desert rendezvous to murder the passengers and crew and conceal the four planes.

Why did you think I was talking about you? It most certainly is a paranoid delusion to believe a great deal of the truther crap - not least the line about the four planes not being involved in any way. That's not being rude. That's just how it is. I'm interested too - in fact, it's the first time I've even thought about this stuff since working on it five years ago. And certainly there are all manner of contradictions. But to elevate those contradictions into a grand conspiracy that requires you to believe that four planes were spirited away and their crews and passengers secretly murdered and dumped by the American government in the name of god only knows what is nuts. And as I've said, the irony is that the truther movement tries too often to get its way with arguments by disregarding the most hard-to-discount evidence. Such as the copious photographic record of flight 77 wreckage at the Pentagon. If you're interested in the truth, whatever that may be, you won't get it from the truthers.

Mobiles certainly work at altitudes of 10,000 feet or more, as I've discovered to my embarrassment. In any case, they weren't only calling on mobiles. Flight 93 had several centre-seat airphones, which as I'm sure you know work at any altitude in extracting huge amounts of money from your credit card. Sometimes, myths build up around slogans like 'let's roll', but the fact is everyone on that plane knew what was happening - and what had already happened - and so had nothing to lose. If you listen to the recordings from the ****pit in the final moments of the flight, there is clearly a very desperate struggle going on for control of the plane - some blood-curdling screams, and a telling mix of Arabic an English, together with the 'voice' of the proximity-warning hardware. No one in their right mind believes anything emerging out of Bush HQ. What happened on those flights, however, is in many ways extremely well documented. But, as I say, the truthers won't listen to it because they're obsessed with the fantasy that the planes never had any part in 9/11. One of the reasons I get really peeved with these idiots is that I've been honoured to meet some of the plane victims' families - and to suggest their husbands and wives weren't even there is a gross insult in pursuit of a pathetic paranoid delusion.

And so it's proved, Mr Hamster. Still, at least I know who to claim compensation from when my baggage gets sat on at the airport.

So where did you get 30k from? And where is Flight 93 and its passengers? Rotting in the Nevada desert?

Quite.

But not there! Yet another example of how the truthers make their case by excluding and refusing to acknowledge the most obvious evidence - the dozens of photos of the crash site showing the plane wreckage and human remains from Flight 77. I find it repeatedly ironic that the truthers can only make their case by censorship of embarrassing - for them - evidence. The link I've given above is actually a truther site, but a relatively mild one. And even they have been forced to accept the blindingly obvious - including that the damage to the building WAS consistent with the crash of a large airliner. Their only quibble seems to be that they don't believe Hani Hanjour would have been skilled enough to pull off the move to hit the Pentagon. (To which the answer is almost certainly - you only need to do it once).

http://911research.wtc7.net/pentagon/evidence/photos/index.html

I was right then. There's a surprise.

Very funny. But what's Q33NY? It's not a flight code of any of the 4 planes as far as I know.

All of what was and wasn't known in advance is detailed in Larwence Wright's The Looming Tower - it's really the reference book for all this. But very long story short, the people sending up red flags in the FBI and the CIA got caught in the political crossfire that happens when organisations like these get into turf wars. You might also want to look at the actions and speeches of Clinton's anti-terror adviser, Richard Clarke, who, in the transition to Bush, found that his dire warnings about OBL were ignored, and he found himself demoted, because his warnings were a distraction from Cheney's and the neo-cons' obsession with Saddam.