Conspiracy Nuts Ignore Prosaic, Real Conspiracies

Cockburn/Counterpunch intellectually flay 9/11 conspiracy theorists

Alexander Cockburn (eminence grise of the most exciting US political magazine) has a good 9/11 piece pointing out that the simple venality and inefficiency of Rudy Giuliani's local administration and Bush's national administration are being hidden behind a smokescreen created by illogical conspiracy nuts.

Cockburn draws attention to evidence presented in "Grand Illusion" which contradicts some of the most common theories, and also mentions in passing his own brother's (Patrick Cockburn, recently returned from Baghdad) reported viewing of photographs clearly showing a burning aeroplane at the pentagon crash site. More disturbingly he also shows a sinister link between the two most cited conspiranoids: Griffin and Tarpley.

Also of interest is this excellent article
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/ar...l.DTL
by Cinnamon Stillwell _The Truth About 9/11 Conspiracy Theories_ April 19th, 2006, which generalises categories of conspiracy types from some of the more common conspiranonsense and provides copious links to both the originators of this nonsense and some debunking of it.

"The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking (as well as creationism, Holocaust denial and the various crank theories of physics)" writes Michael Shermer in ScientificAmerican:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=13&...F0000

Shermer goes on to cite a Popular Mechanics article
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/defense/1227842...age=1
which explains for example why, although aeroplane fuel only burns at 1,517 F (why can't they use SI units?) and steel requires a temperature of 2777F to burn, steel nevertheless loses 50% of it's strength at 1,200F.