A well-intentioned friend sent me an e-mail link to a video on Google about the latest conspiracy theory being bounced around the Internet (Al Gore's invention) about the destruction of the World Trade Center. I sent him this reply:

I look at things this way: having been trained as a journalist "in the good old days" there was a certain censoring of whacky ideas. When i worked in the newsroom of a TV station in the early 80's I saw the stuff that was sent in by viewers -- some of it was legit, but some of it were concocted by whack jobs. Then came the king of crackpots, Art Bell, who would just put anyone on the air. Then came the Internet which democratized information flow and which allows every kook to post their whacked out theories, and now with camcorders available to everyone, individuals have to become their own censors.

As I experienced there are so many people out there with their own agendas and theories which have been legitimized. Heck, the grandaddys of them all are those who believe that we never landed on the moon and that it was all staged in a Hollywood movie studio. While I give a quarter of a listen to the crackpots just because I'm always in what other people think and these days I need a good laugh, I believe in the true experts, the true engineers. As for 9/11, I put my weight in the study which was published by Popular Mechanics. The link to the site is here
and well worth looking at. In my opinion most of these myths are being distributed by 300 lb. guys with long hair and don't regularly bathe who live in a single room apartment with dirty terry cloth material hanged on thumbtacks and a manegy cat.

Like my mom always said, just because something is printed on paper doesn't make it true.