I'm in Beijing and I always get this problem when trying to use Google's Language Tools site. I search Google with Scroogle Scraper, one way around the problem. * also no cookies, no search-term records and access the log is deleted within 48 hours :)

I went to school in a small town in Ontario, Canada. There was a man in town who drank about two 2 litre bottles of aspartame sweetened Coke almost every day. I don't know the details surrounding his (early) death, but I remember hearing that the official cause of death was "aspartame poisoning".

Btw, I've heard airline pilots cannot drink beverages containing aspartame prior to flights, because of it's negative effects.

Infotainment and the New Mythology

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
Albert Einstein

Even though the 9/11 debate has become cliché and highly polarized, there are still a lot of good questions based on facts that have been left unanswered, too many to simply condemn all dissenting views to the same category as the infotainment tabloid conspiracies. I think (read as hope) the overall message here is that individuals should strive to make intelligent decisions based on the information at hand. However, its not the same thing to say intelligent people should have “right views” and we should talk about "more important" things, but I’m right and to prove it let’s avoid major issues and focus on small absurdities with racist jingoisms added for emphasis:

“What, exactly, is this supposed to mean? …Or was the hijacker bigger than his passport suggests? Or is it implausible that a small dark man from an undeveloped country was able to overpower a big, trained, white man from a Superpower?”

I’m not trying to say that the article is wrong, bad or even that I disagree with it. In fact a lot of very important points are made. However, the incendiary tone will only serve to polarize factions of belief instead of encouraging benevolence and productivity. I agree with Antinous that “Successful movements always have a very broad range of views and interest groups, each of whom plays a vital role at a given point in the movement's history.” To lump all views different from yours into one category and then attempt to debunk its legitimacy based on the weakest links is foolish. The challenge here is to be able to hold more than one opinion in your mind at the same time.

As Squashy points out, “The neo-cons (have) already publicly stated that they WANTED a Pearl Harbor-type event that they could use as a smokescreen to invade Iraq.” That as well as tighten the screw on freedom in the “totalitarian tiptoe”.

"Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do."
Rudy Guiliani

By definition, not all theories are correct theories. Profiteers and political agendas have infiltrated counterculture. But you won’t improve the situation by ridiculing the mythologies of the alleged ignorant. We have too much at stake here to be infighting!