Yeah, that's it. Maybe if you lived here and experienced what the NDP go through every election cycle, you'd get it.

Describe these people for you? Well some are fat, some are skinny. Some eat ice-cream, others are lactose intolerant. I'm sure that covers all of 'em.

The reason no one takes the NDP all that seriously, is kind of a shame because I usually will vote for them. Like Republicans and Democrats, Liberals and Conservatives are the two parties that hold the real power. The NDP will sometimes get enough seats in Parliament to get in the way of key desicions and this is pretty much the limit of their influence. The problem is that people who would rather vote for the NDP believe they won't get in and so, rather than having a Conservative majority, they'll vote for the Liberal party. That's how the NDP get shut out every time and that's one reason why no one takes them seriously. I guess it's actually the dumbest self-fullfilling prophecy a country could have. I get yelled at for voting NDP everytime.
THe other reason they don't get taken very seriously by a lot of liberals is because the NDP often seem to elect real innefective boobs as leaders.
Let me just say that i'm pretty stupid when it comes to political discussions and I regret ever shooting my mouth off in this thread. Please allow me to bow out now. Carry on.

The Guardian, Monday July 14, 2008 wrote:I've got a theory - an untested, unprovable theory - that the more interesting your life is at any given point, the less lurid and spectacular your dreams will be. Think of it as a balancing procedure carried out by the brain to stop you getting bored to death.

If your waking life is mundane, it'll inject some thrills into your night-time imaginings to maintain a healthy overall fun quotient. So if you work in a cardboard box factory, and your job is to stare at the side of each box as it passes along a conveyor belt, to ensure they're all uniform and boxy enough - and you do this all day, every day, until your mind grows so dissociated and numb you can scarcely tell where the cardboard ends and your body begins - when your daily routine is THAT dull, chances are you'll spend each night dreaming you're the Emperor of Pluto, wrestling a 6ft green jaguar during a meteor storm in the desert just outside Vegas.

All well and good in the world of dreams. But if you continue to believe you're the Emperor of Pluto after you've woken up, and you go into work and start knocking the boxes around with a homemade sceptre while screaming about your birthright, you're in trouble.

I mention this because recently I've found myself bumping into people - intelligent, level-headed people - who are sincerely prepared to entertain the notion that there might be something in some of the less lurid 9/11 conspiracy theories doing the rounds. They mumble about the "controlled demolition" of WTC 7 (oft referred to as "the third tower"), or posit the notion that the Bush administration knew 9/11 was coming and let it happen anyway. I mean, you never know, right? Right? And did I tell you I'm the Emperor of Pluto?

The glaring problem - and it's glaring in 6,000 watt neon, so vivid and intense you can see it from space with your eyes glued shut - is that with any 9/11 conspiracy theory you care to babble can be summed up in one word: paperwork.

Imagine the paperwork. Imagine the level of planning, recruitment, coordination, control, and unbelievable nerve required to pull off a conspiracy of that magnitude. Really picture it in detail. At the very least you're talking about hiring hundreds of civil servants cold-hearted enough to turn a blind eye to the murder of thousands of their fellow countrymen. If you were dealing with faultless, emotionless robots - maybe. But this almighty conspiracy was presumably hatched and executed by fallible humans. And if there's one thing we know about humans, it's that our inherent unreliability will always derail the simplest of schemes.

It's hard enough to successfully operate a video shop with a staff of three, for Christ's sake, let alone slaughter thousands and convince the world someone else was to blame.

That's just one broad objection to all the bullshit theories. But try suggesting it to someone in the midst of a 9/11 fairytale reverie, and they'll pull a face and say, "Yeah, but ... " and start banging on about some easily misinterpreted detail that "makes you think" (when it doesn't) or "contradicts the official story" (when you misinterpret it). Like nutbag creationists, they fixate on thinly spread, cherry-picked nuggets of "evidence" and ignore the thundering mass of data pointing the other way.

And when repeatedly pressed on that one, basic, overall point - that a conspiracy this huge would be impossible to pull off - they huff and whine and claim that unless you've sat through every nanosecond of Loose Change (the conspiracy flick du jour) and personally refuted every one of its carefully spun "findings" before their very eyes, using a spirit level and calculator, you have no right to an opinion on the subject.

Oh yeah? So if my four-year-old nephew tells me there's a magic leprechaun in the garden I have to spend a week meticulously peering underneath each individual blade of grass before I can tell him he's wrong, do I?

Look hard enough, and dementedly enough, and you can find "proof" that Kevin Bacon was responsible for 9/11 - or the 1987 Zeebrugge ferry disaster, come to that. It'd certainly make for a more interesting story, which is precisely why several thousand well-meaning people would go out of their way to believe it. Throughout my twenties I earnestly believed Oliver Stone's account of the JFK assassination. Partly because of the compelling (albeit wildly selective) way the "evidence" was blended with fiction in his 1991 movie - but mainly because I WANTED to believe it. Believing it made me feel important.

Embrace a conspiracy theory and suddenly you're part of a gang sharing privileged information; your sense of power and dignity rises a smidgen and this troublesome world makes more sense, for a time. You've seen through the matrix! At last you're alive! You ARE the Emperor of Pluto after all!

Except - ahem - you're only deluding yourself, your majesty. Because to believe the "system" is trying to control you is to believe it considers you worth controlling in the first place. The reality - that "the man" is scarcely competent enough to control his own bowels, and doesn't give a toss about you anyway - is depressing and emasculating; just another day in the cardboard box factory. And that's no place for an imaginary emperor, now, is it?

Italics for Tom/Bob/Rick

For Earwicker:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html

That Guardian article above is really lame. Reads like something written by a love-spurned high school student. Just a bunch of oversimplified stereotypes about conspiracy theorists. Surely, Gramsci, you can make your point better than that, no?

9/11 Covers Up Rear Ends: Conspiracy Theory as Castration Fear

Dr. O' Nothing wrote:That Guardian article above is really lame. Reads like something written by a love-spurned high school student. Just a bunch of oversimplified stereotypes about conspiracy theorists. Surely, Gramsci, you can make your point better than that, no?

Yes I can,

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html

Kind of surprised bob wasn't all over this. Or is it just in another of the gazillion threads?

Reuters UK 7-23-08 wrote:But prosecutor Timothy Stone, in an attempt to draw a link between Hamdan and the al Qaeda leadership in the first Guantanamo war crimes trial, told the six-member jury of U.S. military officers who will decide Hamdan's guilt or innocence that Hamdan had inside knowledge of the 2001 attacks on the United States because he overheard a conversation between bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

"If they hadn't shot down the fourth plane it would've hit the dome," Stone, a Navy officer, said in his opening remarks.

The tribunal's chief prosecutor, Col. Lawrence Morris, later explained that Stone was quoting Hamdan in evidence that will be presented at trial. Morris declined to say if the "dome" was a reference to the U.S. Capitol.

"Virtually no one knew the intended target, but the accused knew," Stone said.

Dr. Venkman wrote:

"When we reached the 6th floor the landing that we were standing on gave way, there was an explosion and the landing gave way, I was left there hanging, I had to climb back up and walk back up to the 8th floor," said Jennings.

So this guy was hanging by a pole. He looks like he's 300+ lbs.

Do an experiment for me. Try hanging by a pole with one hand for more than two or three seconds. You can't. It's fucking impossible. This fat fuck, with the bullshit title of "Emergency Coordinator"???, is not supporting his own body weight under any circumstances. He certainly isn't "climbing back up". This guy sits in an office all day, eating donuts, and he gets to WTC7 to, you know, coordinate the emergency and stuff, and all of a sudden he's Indiana Jones hanging between floors.

Now with that theory debunked, I'm off to solve the mystery of that host guy's personality, which has inexplicably disappeared in the wake of 9-11, along with his front tooth.

How old is this host guy? If he's twenty-three, he was 16 when 9-11 happened? Fuck him and his tracksuit.

Actually, his story had me thinking Die Hard.

Not only is his weight/hanging line fishy, he just happens to have enough boiler knowledge to know the difference between a boiler explosion and exploisions that are clearly the work of some sort of dirty Jew Steven Segal black ops-type fella.

The problem is the story relayed by the fellow they are interviewing seems every bit as fishy as the government's explanation/myth.

Not to mention that the person conducting the interview doesn't even attempt to question this fellow's questionable claims as to hanging from a pole and pulling himself up.

It's always troubling to me when people who question the goverment's take refuse to scrutinize the possible counter claims that are presented.

Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report

Popular Mechanics examines the evidence and consults the experts to refute the most persistent conspiracy theories of September 11.

The World Trade Center The collapse of both World Trade Center towers — and the smaller WTC 7 a few hours later — initially surprised even some experts. But subsequent studies have shown that the WTC's structural integrity was destroyed by intense fire as well as the severe damage inflicted by the planes. That explanation hasn't swayed conspiracy theorists, who contend that all three buildings were wired with explosives in advance and razed in a series of controlled demolitions.

Widespread Damage

Claim: The first hijacked plane crashed through the 94th to the 98th floors of the World Trade Center's 110-story North Tower; the second jet slammed into the 78th to the 84th floors of the 110-story South Tower. The impact and ensuing fires disrupted elevator service in both buildings. Plus, the lobbies of both buildings were visibly damaged before the towers collapsed. "There is NO WAY the impact of the jet caused such widespread damage 80 stories below," claims a posting on the San Diego Independent Media Center Web site (sandiego.indymedia.org). "It is OBVIOUS and irrefutable that OTHER EXPLOSIVES (... such as concussion bombs) HAD ALREADY BEEN DETONATED in the lower levels of tower one at the same time as the plane crash."

FACT: Following up on a May 2002 preliminary report by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a major study will be released in spring 2005 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce. NIST shared its initial findings with PM and made its lead researcher available to our team of reporters.

The NIST investigation revealed that plane debris sliced through the utility shafts at the North Tower's core, creating a conduit for burning jet fuel — and fiery destruction throughout the building. "It's very hard to document where the fuel went," says Forman Williams, a NIST adviser and a combustion expert, "but if it's atomized and combustible and gets to an ignition source, it'll go off."

Burning fuel traveling down the elevator shafts would have disrupted the elevator systems and caused extensive damage to the lobbies. NIST heard first-person testimony that "some elevators slammed right down" to the ground floor. "The doors cracked open on the lobby floor and flames came out and people died," says James Quintiere, an engineering professor at the University of Maryland and a NIST adviser. A similar observation was made in the French documentary "9/11," by Jules and Gedeon Naudet. As Jules Naudet entered the North Tower lobby, minutes after the first aircraft struck, he saw victims on fire, a scene he found too horrific to film.

"Melted" Steel

Claim: "We have been lied to," announces the Web site AttackOnAmerica.net. "The first lie was that the load of fuel from the aircraft was the cause of structural failure. No kerosene fire can burn hot enough to melt steel." The posting is entitled "Proof Of Controlled Demolition At The WTC."

FACT: Jet fuel burns at 800° to 1500°F, not hot enough to melt steel (2750°F). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn't need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength — and that required exposure to much less heat. "I have never seen melted steel in a building fire," says retired New York deputy fire chief Vincent Dunn, author of The Collapse Of Burning Buildings: A Guide To Fireground Safety. "But I've seen a lot of twisted, warped, bent and sagging steel. What happens is that the steel tries to expand at both ends, but when it can no longer expand, it sags and the surrounding concrete cracks."

"Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100°F," notes senior engineer Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction. "And at 1800° it is probably at less than 10 percent." NIST also believes that a great deal of the spray-on fireproofing insulation was likely knocked off the steel beams that were in the path of the crashing jets, leaving the metal more vulnerable to the heat.

But jet fuel wasn't the only thing burning, notes Forman Williams, a professor of engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and one of seven structural engineers and fire experts that PM consulted. He says that while the jet fuel was the catalyst for the WTC fires, the resulting inferno was intensified by the combustible material inside the buildings, including rugs, curtains, furniture and paper. NIST reports that pockets of fire hit 1832°F.

"The jet fuel was the ignition source," Williams tells PM. "It burned for maybe 10 minutes, and [the towers] were still standing in 10 minutes. It was the rest of the stuff burning afterward that was responsible for the heat transfer that eventually brought them down."

Puffs Of Dust

Claim: As each tower collapsed, clearly visible puffs of dust and debris were ejected from the sides of the buildings. An advertisement in The New York Times for the book Painful Questions: An Analysis Of The September 11th Attack made this claim: "The concrete clouds shooting out of the buildings are not possible from a mere collapse. They do occur from explosions." Numerous conspiracy theorists cite Van Romero, an explosives expert and vice president of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, who was quoted on 9/11 by the Albuquerque Journal as saying "there were some explosive devices inside the buildings that caused the towers to collapse." The article continues, "Romero said the collapse of the structures resembled those of controlled implosions used to demolish old structures."

FACT: Once each tower began to collapse, the weight of all the floors above the collapsed zone bore down with pulverizing force on the highest intact floor. Unable to absorb the massive energy, that floor would fail, transmitting the forces to the floor below, allowing the collapse to progress downward through the building in a chain reaction. Engineers call the process "pancaking," and it does not require an explosion to begin, according to David Biggs, a structural engineer at Ryan-Biggs Associates and a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) team that worked on the FEMA report.

Like all office buildings, the WTC towers contained a huge volume of air. As they pancaked, all that air — along with the concrete and other debris pulverized by the force of the collapse — was ejected with enormous energy. "When you have a significant portion of a floor collapsing, it's going to shoot air and concrete dust out the window," NIST lead investigator Shyam Sunder tells PM. Those clouds of dust may create the impression of a controlled demolition, Sunder adds, "but it is the floor pancaking that leads to that perception."

Demolition expert Romero regrets that his comments to the Albuquerque Journal became fodder for conspiracy theorists. "I was misquoted in saying that I thought it was explosives that brought down the building," he tells PM. "I only said that that's what it looked like."

Romero, who agrees with the scientific conclusion that fire triggered the collapses, demanded a retraction from the Journal. It was printed Sept. 22, 2001. "I felt like my scientific reputation was on the line." But emperors-clothes.com saw something else: "The paymaster of Romero's research institute is the Pentagon. Directly or indirectly, pressure was brought to bear, forcing Romero to retract his original statement." Romero responds: "Conspiracy theorists came out saying that the government got to me. That is the farthest thing from the truth. This has been an albatross around my neck for three years."

Seismic Spikes

Claim: Seismographs at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., 21 miles north of the WTC, recorded the events of 9/11. "The strongest jolts were all registered at the beginning of the collapses, well before falling debris struck the earth," reports the Web site WhatReallyHappened.com.

A columnist on Prisonplanet.com, a Web site run by radio talk show host Alex Jones, claims the seismic spikes (boxed area on Graph 1) are "indisputable proof that massive explosions brought down" the towers. The Web site says its findings are supported by two seismologists at the observatory, Won-Young Kim and Arthur Lerner-Lam. Each "sharp spike of short duration," says Prisonplanet.com, was consistent with a "demolition-style implosion."

ACT: "There is no scientific basis for the conclusion that explosions brought down the towers," Lerner-Lam tells PM. "That representation of our work is categorically incorrect and not in context."

The report issued by Lamont-Doherty includes various graphs showing the seismic readings produced by the planes crashing into the two towers as well as the later collapse of both buildings. WhatReallyHappened.com chooses to display only one graph (Graph 1), which shows the readings over a 30-minute time span.

On that graph, the 8- and 10-second collapses appear — misleadingly — as a pair of sudden spikes. Lamont-Doherty's 40-second plot of the same data (Graph 2) gives a much more detailed picture: The seismic waves — blue for the South Tower, red for the North Tower — start small and then escalate as the buildings rumble to the ground. Translation: no bombs.

WTC 7 Collapse

Claim: Seven hours after the two towers fell, the 47-story WTC 7 collapsed. According to 911review.org: "The video clearly shows that it was not a collapse subsequent to a fire, but rather a controlled demolition: amongst the Internet investigators, the jury is in on this one."

FACT: Many conspiracy theorists point to FEMA's preliminary report, which said there was relatively light damage to WTC 7 prior to its collapse. With the benefit of more time and resources, NIST researchers now support the working hypothesis that WTC 7 was far more compromised by falling debris than the FEMA report indicated. "The most important thing we found was that there was, in fact, physical damage to the south face of building 7," NIST's Sunder tells PM. "On about a third of the face to the center and to the bottom — approximately 10 stories — about 25 percent of the depth of the building was scooped out." NIST also discovered previously undocumented damage to WTC 7's upper stories and its southwest corner.

NIST investigators believe a combination of intense fire and severe structural damage contributed to the collapse, though assigning the exact proportion requires more research. But NIST's analysis suggests the fall of WTC 7 was an example of "progressive collapse," a process in which the failure of parts of a structure ultimately creates strains that cause the entire building to come down. Videos of the fall of WTC 7 show cracks, or "kinks," in the building's facade just before the two penthouses disappeared into the structure, one after the other. The entire building fell in on itself, with the slumping east side of the structure pulling down the west side in a diagonal collapse.

According to NIST, there was one primary reason for the building's failure: In an unusual design, the columns near the visible kinks were carrying exceptionally large loads, roughly 2000 sq. ft. of floor area for each floor. "What our preliminary analysis has shown is that if you take out just one column on one of the lower floors," Sunder notes, "it could cause a vertical progression of collapse so that the entire section comes down."

There are two other possible contributing factors still under investigation: First, trusses on the fifth and seventh floors were designed to transfer loads from one set of columns to another. With columns on the south face apparently damaged, high stresses would likely have been communicated to columns on the building's other faces, thereby exceeding their load-bearing capacities.

Second, a fifth-floor fire burned for up to 7 hours. "There was no firefighting in WTC 7," Sunder says. Investigators believe the fire was fed by tanks of diesel fuel that many tenants used to run emergency generators. Most tanks throughout the building were fairly small, but a generator on the fifth floor was connected to a large tank in the basement via a pressurized line. Says Sunder: "Our current working hypothesis is that this pressurized line was supplying fuel [to the fire] for a long period of time."

WTC 7 might have withstood the physical damage it received, or the fire that burned for hours, but those combined factors — along with the building's unusual construction — were enough to set off the chain-reaction collapse.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technol ... 27842.html

More evidence that the nuts love their false flag attacks:

thinkprogress, 7-31-08 wrote:Speaking at the Campus Progress journalism conference earlier this month, Seymour Hersh — a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for The New Yorker — revealed that Bush administration officials held a meeting recently in the Vice President’s office to discuss ways to provoke a war with Iran.

In Hersh’s most recent article, he reports that this meeting occurred in the wake of the overblown incident in the Strait of Hormuz, when a U.S. carrier almost shot at a few small Iranian speedboats. The “meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. ‘The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,’” according to one of Hersh’s sources.

During the journalism conference event, I asked Hersh specifically about this meeting and if he could elaborate on what occurred. Hersh explained that, during the meeting in Cheney’s office, an idea was considered to dress up Navy Seals as Iranians, put them on fake Iranian speedboats, and shoot at them. This idea, intended to provoke an Iran war, was ultimately rejected.