Conspiracies

Before hitting the sack last night, I was doing my usual snooping through the "papers" and blogs. Once again, I come across more conpiracies. I had no idea the belief that the government was responsible for 9/11 was so wide spread. Moonbattery must be contagious. 9/11 conspiracy theories persist, thrive

Kevin Barrett believes the U.S government might have destroyed the World Trade Center. Steven Jones is researching what he calls evidence that the twin towers were brought down by explosives detonated inside them, not by hijacked airliners.

Where are the planes? Where are the people who were on those planes? Are they being hidden in some secret bunker?

These men aren't uneducated junk scientists: Barrett will teach a class on Islam at the University of Wisconsin this fall, over the protests of more than 60 state legislators. Jones is a tenured physicist at Brigham Young University whose mainstream academic job has made him a hero to conspiracy theorists.

A college degree does not guarantee common sense. Many extremely "book learned" people seem to be short a few transistors.

Five years after the terrorist attacks, a community that believes widely discredited ideas about what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, persists and even thrives. Members trade their ideas on the Internet and in self-published papers and in books. About 500 of them attended a recent conference in Chicago.

Which goes to show ya, the internet can be dangerous!

The organization says publicity over Barrett's case has helped boost membership to about 75 academics. They are a tiny minority of the 1 million part- and full-time faculty nationwide, and some have no university affiliation. Most aren't experts in relevant fields. But some are well educated, with degrees from elite universities such as Princeton and Stanford and jobs at schools including Rice, Indiana and the University of Texas.

All those "institutions of higher learning" have dropped in my estimation. Yes, even UT. The more we hear about what students are being taught in those classrooms across the country, the more I question the standards.

"Things are happening," said co-founder James Fetzer, a retired philosophy professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth, who maintains, among other claims, that some of the hijackers are still alive. "We're going to continue to do this. Our role is to establish what really happened on 9/11."

It's not a bad thing to question. It is dangerous to continue spouting such nonsense after credible evidence has been presented to the contrary.

"It's science, but it's politically motivated. It's science with an ax to grind, and therefore it's not really science."

So, it's not really science. It's mouth frothing hatred of Bush.

However, "with academic freedom comes academic responsibility. And that requires them to teach the truth of their discipline, and the truth does not include conspiracy theories, or flat Earth theories, or Holocaust denial theories."

Isn't it the responsibility of the administration of universities to ensure the best education possible to the student? The 18 to 22 years old brains of mush are being molded. Even if they aren't actually teaching these theories in the classroom, the students are still absorbing the information.

"Tenure gives you a secure position where you can engage in controversial issues," Fetzer said. "That's what you should be doing."

Perhaps it's past time to rethink this whole tenure business.

"I have not run into many who have read my paper and said it's just all hogwash," Jones said.

Well, I'll say it - "Hogwash!" But then, I'm not an academic, so that doesn't count. Related commentary: The Dangers of 9/11 Conpsiracy Theories