966: Jet Fuel

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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Jet Fuel
The 'controlled demolition' theory was concocted by the government to distract us. '9/11 was an inside job' was an inside job!
Title text: The 'controlled demolition' theory was concocted by the government to distract us. '9/11 was an inside job' was an inside job!

Explanation

This comic is a reference to the "9/11 Was An Inside Job" theory that the World Trade Center in New York City was blown up by a "controlled demolition". Hairy uses the typical argument and Cueball one ups the craziness and of course Hairy eats it up. The Chemtrails conspiracy theory is a completely different conspiracy theory which says that (exactly as Cueball does) the US Government puts chemicals and mind control agents in jets and airliners to subtly have US citizens ingest the agents.

And the title text is the natural "double down" on a theory which says that the conspiracy theory itself was concocted by the government and was supposed to distract from the truth, a parodic theory already seen in South Park episode Mystery of the Urinal Deuce.

For those wondering: it is true that kerosene does not burn hot enough to melt steel, but it does burn hot enough to cut the steel's supporting strength roughly in half, which is more than enough to collapse a building weighing thousands of tons. (Although standard engineering practice is to use a safety factor of three, and a safety factor of two is sufficient to allow for a 50% reduction in strength, several columns were severed in the initial impact, increasing the stress on the remaining columns.)

Cueball messing with 9/11 truther conspiracy theorists was also the subject of 690: Semicontrolled Demolition.

Transcript

[Two people are having a conversation.]
Person: 9/11 was an inside job! Jet fuel can't burn hot enough to melt steel!
Cueball: Well, remember — jet fuel wasn't the only thing on those planes. They would've also carried tanks full of the mind-control agents airliners use to make chemtrails. Who knows what temperature that stuff burns at!
Person: Whoa. Good point!
My Hobby: Playing conspiracy theories off against each other.


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Discussion

I always thought it was the aliens trying to sabotage our civilization, but the inside job theory also works. Davidy²²[talk] 08:25, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

That's what 'They' want you to think. The 'They' being the aliens who brought you the Wormhole X-Treme episode of Stargate, the Visitors From Down The Street episode of Babylon 5's 'Crusade' spin-off and the whole of the X-Files (pre-retrospectively spun off from the latter, thanks to time-travel technology). 178.105.151.131 06:24, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

I don't know how may crazy conspiracy theories the government actually does come up with (probably not many, if any), but you gotta admit that they like them, and perpetuate existing ones simply because it, as the explanation says, distracts from real issues, but also because it makes all criticisms against them sound crazy.76.29.225.28 19:52, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

Frankly, that sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory to me. Brettpeirce (talk) 20:42, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

South Park did the "conspiracy was a conspiracy" idea first. 173.245.63.180 04:20, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

South Park also did the "[other show] did it (first)" meme first. --BigMal27 // 173.245.55.88 17:16, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

So where are the steel beams now? I used Google News BEFORE it was clickbait (talk) 20:35, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

I think they are hidden away in Area 51. --Lupo (talk) 12:14, 30 April 2020 (UTC)