I love the no-planers in the Michael Powell story on 9/11 conspiracy theorists:

For an hour he's shown videos of planes hitting the towers. If you note the glinting sunlight and angle of wings and you're honest about vectors and maybe the hashish is kicking in, you'll realize there were no planes .... Reynolds, the former Labor Department economist, also is a "no-planer." "There were no planes, there were no hijackers," Reynolds insists. "I know, I know, I'm out of the mainstream, but that's the way it is."

Believing is seeing. Or not seeing, in this case. With the right mindset you can make the glaringly obvious turn invisible. I asked Michael Powell how, exactly, the "planes" were faked, according to the conspiracy theorists. His answer:

"They say it was holograms and cloaking devices (The Vulcans!) all designed to distract us from the fact that the bombs were primed to go off inside the bldg."

Yes, everything is a lie. Trust no one. Certainly you can't trust anything that calls itself a "docu-drama." That's code for We're Making Stuff Up. Was the truth not interesting enough? (I'm still irritated that "Capote" had William Shawn going with Truman to the execution of the killers. Didn't happen! It was a different editor!)

Via Josh Marshall, we see in the Miami Herald that 10 Miami journalists were on the government payroll. Did they believe the things they were paid to say, or did they say the things they thought would get them paid?

Now, to follow up yesterday's rant: Conceivably we were a tad strident and possibly even dyspeptic. Perhaps we should have applauded the excellent new research on extrasolar planetary dynamics, rather than fire a spitball. But there was all this talk about oceans and even storms on these unseen planets, and if you've been around here a while you know we are touchy, touchy, touchy on matters involving habitable worlds in outer space. Not because we doubt that they're there (gotta be), but because speculation about ET has always outpaced the hard data. We like to remind people that this topic is a huge unknown with a wide range of possibilities. [From CBA: "You could take everything conclusively known about extraterrestrial life and fit it on the period at the end of this sentence (with room left over for about seventeen angels)."] What we do here is defend not only Truth, but its maligned cousin, Uncertainty. Also we defend the Royal We, sometimes.

By Joel Achenbach  |  September 8, 2006; 1:24 PM ET
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