With 9/11 just arriving on the US East coast, let's just get this out of the way:

It's not even the anniversary day in my American cousins' land, and already the conspiracy nutjobs are cropping up in the comments section on a certain front-page post. So let me just get this said to the conspiracy crowd, so none of the rest of us have to and we can all go back to browsing pictures of cats and clothed porn stars:

Yes, there *was* a conspiracy on 9/11. No, it wasn't perpetrated by the US gubmint, it was carried out by a group of men that had a vendetta against the US, mostly for complicated reasons that go beyond the scope of this post. That conspiracy was to hijack planes, full of people, and fly them into buildings, also full of people. To sow confusion and chaos to the utmost of their ability. Some might go so far as to say they succeeded pretty fucking resoundingly.

No, those weren't "holograms".

No, those weren't dummy planes on remote control.

No, those weren't fucking demolitions charges going off.

Those were real planes, filled with real people, flying into real buildings that were also filled with more real people, creating real goddamn explosions and ending hundreds of lives at once. For real.

Yeah, hey, guess what? I used to be one of you. I used to buy into the whole "the gubmint is lying to us" bullshit. And then I got a little bit older and realised all that crap I'd read and watched on the internet? Yeah, that was authored by people who don't actually have degrees in physics, engineering, metallurgy, aeronautics, architecture, and so on. No, I don't either, but when every single person who does is telling you "this is what happens when x", there comes a point where you have to take a step back and ask yourself "am I the the baddie here?".
But hey. Guess what further? A lot of people outside the US *don't like the US very much*. Some of them hate your goddamn guts, for a lot of reasons. Some of them don't even *have* a reason, they just straight up don't like your McDonald's-eating asses. Hey, maybe they're just jealous of your sweet Maccy D's, who knows.

My point is, however, that some of them hate you guys enough to do shit-nasty things like blowing themselves up, along with hundreds of innocent people. And I get it, that's scary. Hell, they did the same to us on a smaller scale a few years later (google "7/7 bombings" if you don't know what I'm talking about), so it's not like you're the only target here.

But I think that's the problem. You're scared. Not of the fact that people can, apparently, easily sneak into your country and perpetrate heinous acts of violence that would make Civilisation's Gandhi proud, but of the fact that people *want* to.

Because that would mean that America did something wrong. That America has done bad things. That America pissed people off. That America perhaps *isn't* the greatest country in the world you've been led to believe it is. Because that's not possible, right? Everyone loves America. You're the best. You're #1 in everything. You lead the free world (whatever that is in this day and age). You fight the bad guys, save the day and sleep with many beautiful women on top of a huge pile of money.

Except... there's these people coming over and flying shit into other, harder, shit. Killing people. And that shocked you. It shocked you that people wanted to and did do that. It shocked you that, by the power of Triple H's oiled pecs, America actually had a physically real enemy. So you went into denial. You concocted this elaborate fairy-tale of conspiracies and insurance fraud and "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" to protect yourself, and to protect the notion of "America is the greatest" you've had instilled in you since birth.

But it's time to stop now. It's over. It's been 15 long years and not a shred of proof has ever surfaced to back up a single one of your claims. If there *was* a conspiracy, someone would have blown the whistle by now. Someone would have talked, or made a mistake, or misfiled something, or any one of a number of different variables. Especially now, in a time when Wikileaks exists. Human beings are reliably unreliable at keeping secrets. We have a hard time keeping secrets on an individual level, never mind a collective one. Managing a conspiracy that would involve hundreds, if not thousands, of people keeping quiet would be harder work than Donald Trump convincing us his hair is real.

So for the love of God/Allah/Yahweh, Satan, The Force, The God Emperor of Mankind, Princess Celestia, The Great Flying Spaghetti Monster, Cthulu, GabeN or whatever the hell you pray to: Let it go. There is no conspiracy of old white men; just one of a few brainwashed, young brown ones. Time to nut up and accept the fact that bad people did bad things and, while that's not okay, it *is* okay that that scares the ever-loving fuck out of you.

And because, at the end of the day, the simplest answer to something is often the correct one, even if it's horrifying in its brutality.

Real planes. Real buildings. Real people.

A'ight, I'm climbing down off my soapbox now.

tl;dr: There *was* a conspiracy on 9/11, a conspiracy to fly planes into things. Time to stop the "9/11 was an inside job" bullshit.

Also: Yeah, I probably used the meme wrong, it's half-five in the morning. I'll expect letters from all your lawyers in my inbox by lunch.

Cat tax.

This is Cat Deely. She serves as my cat tax for the above wall of text, in lieu of a real cat, since I don't own one. No she doesn't, before anyone asks.