clocker bob wrote:Well, if you think that only those who take a minority position are obligated to know the evidence of the case, I feel sorry for you. It is incumbent upon you to have the facts also. You can't just say, "I'm in the majority, so nyah nyah nyah". That's pretty stupid of you.

It's not necessary to call names. This isn't a kindergarten playground.

clocker bob wrote:Of course you're in the majority. You're on the side of a multi-trillion dollar industry...

You're making assumptions about my personal beliefs that have nothing to do with the discussion at hand, and attempting to use that to characterize me and thereby discredit my position. In forensics, that is known as a "straw-man" argument, and it's an unfair tactic that doesn't support your position, it just makes you look bad. There are no "sides" here. We are discussing an issue, and we happen to disagree on some points. That "you're on the wrong side" argument is the same sort of demagoguery that GW Bush employs, when he says "If you're not with us, you're on the side of the terrorists."

clocker bob wrote:...that needed a rationale to begin an open ended clash of civilizations to fund the military-industrial complex, and the minority position states that the evidence points to an inside job orchestrated by rogue factions within the shadow government.

That is another assumption based on no evidence. Conspiracy theorists like to assume the existence of grandiose, sinister plots as a given, and claim that "the lack of evidence is the evidence." That type of circular reasoning is of course completely fallacious in terms of critical thinking.

Please note that I do not mean to put words in your mouth. It's just that you've shown no solid evidence of such a conspiracy. Without any substantial proof, the existence of such an organized plot is pure conjecture.

Now I don't doubt that many organized plots exist at the highest levels of government (and all the way down the to the municipal level as well) to exploit public resources for the conspirators' own ends. Enough such conspiracies have been exposed in the past to show that organized exploitation is a rule rather than an exception. But to explicitly state that a particular plot definitely exists to murder thousands of Americans, at extremely high risk of exposure and for uncertain gains, for the purpose of hoodwinking the entire world, with absolutely no solid evidence? That's the difference between realistic analysis and loopy, crackpot postulation.

Remember, in critical examination, there's a rule: the more extraordinary the claim, the more definitive proof it requires. This goes back to one of the fundamental laws of scientific analysis, that of Occam's Razor, a.k.a. the Law of Parsimony, which states that the correct theory will always be the simplest one that the known evidence supports. The more you start to incorporate additional factors and assumptions for which you have no solid evidence, the further you are moving away from the truth of the matter. Skepticism must be the order of the day, the default state of mind from which you make your analysis. The more complicated and far-flung your theory becomes, and the harder you have to search to substantiate it, that's when you should start to consider that it may not be a very good theory in the first place.

clocker bob wrote:You're not comparing people who like the Cubs to people who like the White Sox. Those are both socially acceptable positions in American society. The majority and minority positions regarding who planned 9/11 are not both socially acceptable positions in American society. A scientist who supports 'al Qaeda did it all' is one more voice in the chorus of manufactured consent. Someone who looks at the impacts and the fires and says, "That collapse shouldn't have happened" is demonized.

That argument is making politics the central issue here, and not the known, observable facts and scientific understanding of the forces involved in the event.

Whether or not the collapse should have happened, it did happen. From the perspective of a building engineer, it definitely shouldn't have happened, but then those buildings weren't specifically designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 777 jet airliner carrying a full load of jet fuel, either.

A scientist is bound by a system of laws and rules by which he can discern the truth of the universe around him. These laws and rules are not arbitrary, they have been devised and refined over centuries of human progress as the best possible method (to date, anyway) by which the truth can be discerned. The so-called "scientific method" has been applied to every area of human endeavor, with the result that human progress in all fields is in a constant state of cumulative acceleration. Scientific theories are subject to endless scrutiny by peer review and repeated experimentation.

I don't deny that politics enters into the process of peer review and the like, but think about what you're saying. You are proclaiming to know the truth about this situation (a supposed conspiracy by the US government to blow up the WTC using explosives) without any hard evidence--only mere speculation--and based only on this speculation, you are trying to discredit many people with specific expertise who have directly analyzed the material evidence and released their findings. Your reason for discrediting them? Because their report is the generally accepted version, is accepted by the US government and it was reported in the mainstream media.

I ask you now to analyze your sources. Who are the people who advocate the position that Bush & Co. did it. Are they perhaps promoting this opinion because of some political bias? Scientists are generally concerned with finding the truth. It's their job. All their methodology and procedures, their reputations are built on their clear understanding of the data at hand and the veracity of their claims. Who is more likely to be truthful? Teams of scientists, individuals who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of the truth, or some guy on the internet who put up his own web page to promote his slanted political views?

clocker bob wrote:You should have the guts to admit that we are not measuring scientific interpretation vs. scientific interpretation on a level playing field. Not only does the majority view have the advantage of *being* the majority view, and therefore, granted all the power of peer pressure on its side, but it is the view of the side that controls the government, the media, and the evidence chain. So recognize that when you say, "I have more engineers who agree with me", nobody cares, except for those who began with made-up minds. For those who want to decide for ourselves, we don't care what the majority says.

I am only applying critical analysis. I am making no assumptions of a fantastically complex conspiracy by the government to murder thousands of Americans, with no evidence to back it up. You are implying that the Bush administration has total and complete control of everything in the United States and that is just not possible. Though they are a powerful force, there are limits to their influence and control. If you just step back from your political position and examine the facts in an objective way, you'll see that the conspiracy you are implying is just not feasible in the real world.

clocker bob wrote:You should take it upon yourself to look at and learn the facts of the case. If you say, "My government has done all my looking and learning for me", then you're just one more sucker on the government's fishing line.

I do not assume that the government has all the answers. You should know that by the contents of my other posts on the subject of politics. However, there have been tens of thousands of people involved in the cleanup and investigation of the WTC site, and most of those workers were private contractors, not government operatives. Even if there were a large number of government employees involved in the investigation, I would not assume that every single one of them is sympathetic to the Bush administration or would approve of a plot by the US government to murder 3000+ of its own citizens. I am sorry, I just can't buy that. That seems a tad bit paranoid to me. I believe that if any one of the workers or investigators (who scrutinized every inch of that site, every day around the clock for months) found any evidence of chemical residue, exploded supports, the type of wiring used in the demolition industry, or anything of that nature, they would have gone public with it. It's not possible for the Bush administration to control everything.

clocker bob wrote:

colonel panic wrote:Besides, it has been exhaustively proven that steel melting temperatures do not have to be reached for the structural integrity of supports to be sufficiently weakened to allow a collapse.

Right. For the only three times it has ever happened to a steel framed skyscraper, all on 9/11, it has been proven.

The WTC was not a steel-framed skyscraper. It was created using "tubular construction," with all the support beams concentrated in the central core. The outside walls were very thin 14" steel columns that only served to hold the windows in place and gave negligible support to the overall structure of the building.

clocker bob wrote:

colonel panic wrote:They only need to soften to the point where they can no longer support the millions of tons of weight of the 10+ floors above. Once that happened, the added weight of each collapsing floor caused the entire structure to come down like a house of cards.

Right, and then when a mass that is outweighed by the mass opposing it by a ratio of fifty to one ( the caps of the towers vs. the bases of the towers ), the kinetic energy of a cap dropping at low velocity causes it to blast through the floors below at the same rate as if it was driving through open air.

The steel-reinforced concrete floors were held into place only by the central core and tied into the outer by small steel supports which provided virtually no resistance to collapse, once the floors started pancaking one upon the other. The towers were built to withstand high winds and sway laterally, not to withstand the sequential collapse of each floor into the ones below it.

clocker bob wrote:That reminds me of all the times I've seen two-door sedans on the highway drive into the backs of stopped tractor-trailers, and just push the stopped tractor-trailer forward at the same speed that the car was traveling at before the impact. And the car causes the 18 wheeler to explode, too, throwing debris laterally for the distance of football fields. Happens all the time. The Law of Conservation of Momentum was apparently suspended on 9/11.

You're forgetting to factor in the force of gravity. Things tend to fall downward as a general rule. Besides, the structural composition of a tractor-trailer is completely different from that of the WTC towers.

clocker bob wrote:Keep on rolling with your trust and faith, colonel.

Faith in the US government has nothing to do with it. I have absolutely no confidence in the current US administration.

clocker bob wrote:Except it didn't pancake down. It exploded.

Everything else aside - inside job, fires, Bin Laden, Bush, bankers, whatever - it looks like it pancaked.

Antero wrote:

clocker bob wrote:Except it didn't pancake down. It exploded.

Everything else aside - inside job, fires, Bin Laden, Bush, bankers, whatever - it looks like it pancaked.

Yeah, that's what the guy on Fresh Air said.
Aside from theories, security breaches, etc.

A controlled implosion would pancake the building, but a building that has a chunk taken out of one side, even if it's well built, is in danger of acting like a tree that has had a wedge chainsawed out of it.
His point was it was the best possible collapse anyone could have asked for, if the building was going to collapse.
Could have been worse and all that.

Sounded reasonable to me.

-A

Yeah, I don't think it looks like a controlled demo either. In a demolition, the charges are set off in successive stages, that take out key supports in an orderly fashion.

alex maiolo wrote:A controlled implosion would pancake the building, but a building that has a chunk taken out of one side, even if it's well built, is in danger of acting like a tree that has had a wedge chainsawed out of it.
His point was it was the best possible collapse anyone could have asked for, if the building was going to collapse.
Could have been worse and all that.

Sounded reasonable to me.

-A

That's going on the assumption that a 100+ story skyscraper has similar structural characteristics as a tree. This is not the case. A tree is basically homogeneous in its composition, and is a very stiff and rigid structure with a very high center of gravity due to the spread of its branches.

The WTC towers were not homogeneous structures. They were more like a stack of 100 dinner plates made of a very heavy, yet fragile and crumbly material, and held together by pipecleaners. It was a structure designed for flexibility in high winds rather than rigidity. The towers' center of gravity was at their base, and they failed from a point near the top. Due to the tenuous nature of their construction, there was not enough structural support around the edges of the floors to allow the upper portion to topple over.

In such a case, if the pipe cleaners on one side failed, the very crumbly material that comprised the plates would pulverize and the weight would pull the plates on top straight down into the other plates. The entire structure would collapse straight down the way the towers did.

Colonel Panic wrote:

clocker bob wrote:Well, if you think that only those who take a minority position are obligated to know the evidence of the case, I feel sorry for you. It is incumbent upon you to have the facts also. You can't just say, "I'm in the majority, so nyah nyah nyah". That's pretty stupid of you.

It's not necessary to call names. This isn't a kindergarten playground.

I didn't call you names. You made a post that boiled down to "I, colonel Panic, don't have to know the facts of the case. The majority of engineers support the side that I agree with, so therefore, Colonel Panic's work is done. Anyone who disagrees with the official myth must bring evidence, but I do not".

Or, the short version: "I'm in the majority, so nyah nyah nyah".

clocker bob wrote:Of course you're in the majority. You're on the side of a multi-trillion dollar industry...

colonel panic wrote:You're making assumptions about my personal beliefs that have nothing to do with the discussion at hand, and attempting to use that to characterize me and thereby discredit my position. In forensics, that is known as a "straw-man" argument, and it's an unfair tactic that doesn't support your position, it just makes you look bad.

It's not a strawman argument. It is pointing out that, no matter what path you took to get to your agreement with the official myth, where you end up is synchronous with the story that is promoted by the military-industrial complex. There is no space available for agreement with the official myth that does not land you solidly in the camp with the military-industrial complex, because the official myth is a product of the military-industrial complex. It is the justification for their agenda. The official myth is not just an explanation of why the towers collapsed- it is that *and* a complete assignment of blame for the attacks on al Qaeda, to the exclusion of all other perpetrators. It is a complete bargain that you make with the devil when you accept the official myth. If you accept the myth, then you must accept the killing tool made from it. This seems obvious to me.

You can't say, "I support the official myth but I disagree with the course of action that has become the 'solution' component in the Hegelian dialectic made from 9/11, the problem-reaction-solution synthesis." There is no support for the myth of 9/11 without endorsement of those who benefit from it, because they built the myth for you. It didn't spring out of a vacuum. Turn it around. Do you think there are those who support the conspiracy theorists' conclusions about 9/11 who would ignore their personal stance to grant the MIC carte blanche anyway? The coherent positions are:

The official story is accurate, and therefore, I endorse the wars and the police state made from it.

The official story is false, and therefore, I reject the wars and the police state made from it.

Are you claiming a third wave position, that endorses the myth but rejects the wars??

colonel panic wrote:]There are no "sides" here. We are discussing an issue, and we happen to disagree on some points.

Of course there are sides- what the hell are you talking about? An unbiased investigation is impossible. Everybody sees things and tunes into evidence that agrees with their pre-conceived notions about what crimes are and are not possible in our world. Are you telling me that those who support the official myth began from a stance that both "al Qaeda did it" and "the shadow government did it" were given equal weight as possibilities? Of course not. Look at the 9/11 commission report- there was no investigation. There was assembly of a back story to fit the thesis that al Qaeda executed the attacks. Anything that contradicted that thesis was filtered out.

colonel wrote:That "you're on the wrong side" argument is the same sort of demagoguery that GW Bush employs, when he says "If you're not with us, you're on the side of the terrorists."

You can't make that case, because when making that statement, Bush is obviously ruling out the possibility that he himself is a terrorist. If you convert Bush's statement to this, "If you're not with my administration, then you are with those who are against my administration", then he would be making a logically coherent truthful sentence. If I say, "If you are not with the Conspiracy theorists regarding 9/11, you are with the military industrial complex", that is absolutely true. The lines are clear. The only way for common citizens to disarm the military is to dispute their claimed rationales for war. Anything other than stripping them of their rationales perpetuates war. Support the myth, support the wars. You have to. The public's acceptance of the myth has no value to the MIC unless they can convert your acceptance into permission for them to make war. That is the prize earned by the creation of the myth. If they didn't want to sell you a war based on the attacks, then they would stand aside for an honest investigation. The opposite is true. The attacks are a wellspring of political capital that is coveted and guarded by the mythmakers. That's why they killed to create it.

colonel wrote:That is another assumption based on no evidence. Conspiracy theorists like to assume the existence of grandiose, sinister plots as a given, and claim that "the lack of evidence is the evidence." That type of circular reasoning is of course completely fallacious in terms of critical thinking.

Who put you in charge of the rules? Your bias is clear. You are unable to accept sinister conspiracies behind the scenes, so you declare 'there is no evidence'. When I show you evidence, you say 'that isn't evidence'. The only answer you will accept is 'there are no grand conspiracies' so you dismiss anything that points you towards recognition of them. What you need to understand is that you cannot deny the existence of conspiracies just because you yourself are unable to spot them. You are entitled to believe there are no conspiracies, but you are only one man's opinion, and no matter how much you huff and puff, you can't blow my house down- in my house, I see conspiracies regularly. Tough break for you, if you have some big emotional investment in changing my opinion. Your opinion doesn't diminish my opinion. Not only that, once I figure your opinion out, it ceases to exist in my world. You become just background noise.

colonel wrote:Please note that I do not mean to put words in your mouth. It's just that you've shown me no solid evidence of such a conspiracy.

I fixed your sentence by adding one boldfaced word. I'm already completely tired and bored with your objections to my theories. I may return to the rest of your post later, if I feel like using your objections as a platform to further publicize my opinion on 9/11.

Colonel Panic wrote:

clocker bob wrote:Well, if you think that only those who take a minority position are obligated to know the evidence of the case, I feel sorry for you. It is incumbent upon you to have the facts also. You can't just say, "I'm in the majority, so nyah nyah nyah". That's pretty stupid of you.

It's not necessary to call names. This isn't a kindergarten playground.

clocker bob wrote:Of course you're in the majority. You're on the side of a multi-trillion dollar industry...

You're making assumptions about my personal beliefs that have nothing to do with the discussion at hand, and attempting to use that to characterize me and thereby discredit my position. In forensics, that is known as a "straw-man" argument, and it's an unfair tactic that doesn't support your position, it just makes you look bad. There are no "sides" here. We are discussing an issue, and we happen to disagree on some points. That "you're on the wrong side" argument is the same sort of demagoguery that GW Bush employs, when he says "If you're not with us, you're on the side of the terrorists."

clocker bob wrote:...that needed a rationale to begin an open ended clash of civilizations to fund the military-industrial complex, and the minority position states that the evidence points to an inside job orchestrated by rogue factions within the shadow government.

That is another assumption based on no evidence. Conspiracy theorists like to assume the existence of grandiose, sinister plots as a given, and claim that "the lack of evidence is the evidence." That type of circular reasoning is of course completely fallacious in terms of critical thinking.

Please note that I do not mean to put words in your mouth. It's just that you've shown no solid evidence of such a conspiracy. Without any substantial proof, the existence of such an organized plot is pure conjecture.

Now I don't doubt that many organized plots exist at the highest levels of government (and all the way down the to the municipal level as well) to exploit public resources for the conspirators' own ends. Enough such conspiracies have been exposed in the past to show that organized exploitation is a rule rather than an exception. But to explicitly state that a particular plot definitely exists to murder thousands of Americans, at extremely high risk of exposure and for uncertain gains, for the purpose of hoodwinking the entire world, with absolutely no solid evidence? That's the difference between realistic analysis and loopy, crackpot postulation.

Remember, in critical examination, there's a rule: the more extraordinary the claim, the more definitive proof it requires. This goes back to one of the fundamental laws of scientific analysis, that of Occam's Razor, a.k.a. the Law of Parsimony, which states that the correct theory will always be the simplest one that the known evidence supports. The more you start to incorporate additional factors and assumptions for which you have no solid evidence, the further you are moving away from the truth of the matter. Skepticism must be the order of the day, the default state of mind from which you make your analysis. The more complicated and far-flung your theory becomes, and the harder you have to search to substantiate it, that's when you should start to consider that it may not be a very good theory in the first place.

clocker bob wrote:You're not comparing people who like the Cubs to people who like the White Sox. Those are both socially acceptable positions in American society. The majority and minority positions regarding who planned 9/11 are not both socially acceptable positions in American society. A scientist who supports 'al Qaeda did it all' is one more voice in the chorus of manufactured consent. Someone who looks at the impacts and the fires and says, "That collapse shouldn't have happened" is demonized.

That argument is making politics the central issue here, and not the known, observable facts and scientific understanding of the forces involved in the event.

Whether or not the collapse should have happened, it did happen. From the perspective of a building engineer, it definitely shouldn't have happened, but then those buildings weren't specifically designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 777 jet airliner carrying a full load of jet fuel, either.

A scientist is bound by a system of laws and rules by which he can discern the truth of the universe around him. These laws and rules are not arbitrary, they have been devised and refined over centuries of human progress as the best possible method (to date, anyway) by which the truth can be discerned. The so-called "scientific method" has been applied to every area of human endeavor, with the result that human progress in all fields is in a constant state of cumulative acceleration. Scientific theories are subject to endless scrutiny by peer review and repeated experimentation.

I don't deny that politics enters into the process of peer review and the like, but think about what you're saying. You are proclaiming to know the truth about this situation (a supposed conspiracy by the US government to blow up the WTC using explosives) without any hard evidence--only mere speculation--and based only on this speculation, you are trying to discredit many people with specific expertise who have directly analyzed the material evidence and released their findings. Your reason for discrediting them? Because their report is the generally accepted version, is accepted by the US government and it was reported in the mainstream media.

I ask you now to analyze your sources. Who are the people who advocate the position that Bush & Co. did it. Are they perhaps promoting this opinion because of some political bias? Scientists are generally concerned with finding the truth. It's their job. All their methodology and procedures, their reputations are built on their clear understanding of the data at hand and the veracity of their claims. Who is more likely to be truthful? Teams of scientists, individuals who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of the truth, or some guy on the internet who put up his own web page to promote his slanted political views?

clocker bob wrote:You should have the guts to admit that we are not measuring scientific interpretation vs. scientific interpretation on a level playing field. Not only does the majority view have the advantage of *being* the majority view, and therefore, granted all the power of peer pressure on its side, but it is the view of the side that controls the government, the media, and the evidence chain. So recognize that when you say, "I have more engineers who agree with me", nobody cares, except for those who began with made-up minds. For those who want to decide for ourselves, we don't care what the majority says.

I am only applying critical analysis. I am making no assumptions of a fantastically complex conspiracy by the government to murder thousands of Americans, with no evidence to back it up. You are implying that the Bush administration has total and complete control of everything in the United States and that is just not possible. Though they are a powerful force, there are limits to their influence and control. If you just step back from your political position and examine the facts in an objective way, you'll see that the conspiracy you are implying is just not feasible in the real world.

clocker bob wrote:You should take it upon yourself to look at and learn the facts of the case. If you say, "My government has done all my looking and learning for me", then you're just one more sucker on the government's fishing line.

I do not assume that the government has all the answers. You should know that by the contents of my other posts on the subject of politics. However, there have been tens of thousands of people involved in the cleanup and investigation of the WTC site, and most of those workers were private contractors, not government operatives. Even if there were a large number of government employees involved in the investigation, I would not assume that every single one of them is sympathetic to the Bush administration or would approve of a plot by the US government to murder 3000+ of its own citizens. I am sorry, I just can't buy that. That seems a tad bit paranoid to me. I believe that if any one of the workers or investigators (who scrutinized every inch of that site, every day around the clock for months) found any evidence of chemical residue, exploded supports, the type of wiring used in the demolition industry, or anything of that nature, they would have gone public with it. It's not possible for the Bush administration to control everything.

clocker bob wrote:

colonel panic wrote:Besides, it has been exhaustively proven that steel melting temperatures do not have to be reached for the structural integrity of supports to be sufficiently weakened to allow a collapse.

Right. For the only three times it has ever happened to a steel framed skyscraper, all on 9/11, it has been proven.

The WTC was not a steel-framed skyscraper. It was created using "tubular construction," with all the support beams concentrated in the central core. The outside walls were very thin 14" steel columns that only served to hold the windows in place and gave negligible support to the overall structure of the building.

clocker bob wrote:

colonel panic wrote:They only need to soften to the point where they can no longer support the millions of tons of weight of the 10+ floors above. Once that happened, the added weight of each collapsing floor caused the entire structure to come down like a house of cards.

Right, and then when a mass that is outweighed by the mass opposing it by a ratio of fifty to one ( the caps of the towers vs. the bases of the towers ), the kinetic energy of a cap dropping at low velocity causes it to blast through the floors below at the same rate as if it was driving through open air.

The steel-reinforced concrete floors were held into place only by the central core and tied into the outer by small steel supports which provided virtually no resistance to collapse, once the floors started pancaking one upon the other. The towers were built to withstand high winds and sway laterally, not to withstand the sequential collapse of each floor into the ones below it.

clocker bob wrote:That reminds me of all the times I've seen two-door sedans on the highway drive into the backs of stopped tractor-trailers, and just push the stopped tractor-trailer forward at the same speed that the car was traveling at before the impact. And the car causes the 18 wheeler to explode, too, throwing debris laterally for the distance of football fields. Happens all the time. The Law of Conservation of Momentum was apparently suspended on 9/11.

You're forgetting to factor in the force of gravity. Things tend to fall downward as a general rule. Besides, the structural composition of a tractor-trailer is completely different from that of the WTC towers.

clocker bob wrote:Keep on rolling with your trust and faith, colonel.

Faith in the US government has nothing to do with it. I have absolutely no confidence in the current US administration.

I've had this argument a few times.

Basically these people don't trust structural engineers if they appear in some mainstream form, but if they have some a website and no supported evidence they're a much more trustable source.

I don't understand the political gain from destroying the towers if the American government did? The country is worse off now than it has been for a long time, probably ever.

clocker bob wrote:

Colonel Panic wrote:

clocker bob wrote:Well, if you think that only those who take a minority position are obligated to know the evidence of the case, I feel sorry for you. It is incumbent upon you to have the facts also. You can't just say, "I'm in the majority, so nyah nyah nyah". That's pretty stupid of you.

It's not necessary to call names. This isn't a kindergarten playground.

I didn't call you names. You made a post that boiled down to "I, colonel Panic, don't have to know the facts of the case. The majority of engineers support the side that I agree with, so therefore, Colonel Panic's work is done. Anyone who disagrees with the official myth must bring evidence, but I do not".

Or, the short version: "I'm in the majority, so nyah nyah nyah".

clocker bob wrote:Of course you're in the majority. You're on the side of a multi-trillion dollar industry...

colonel panic wrote:You're making assumptions about my personal beliefs that have nothing to do with the discussion at hand, and attempting to use that to characterize me and thereby discredit my position. In forensics, that is known as a "straw-man" argument, and it's an unfair tactic that doesn't support your position, it just makes you look bad.

It's not a strawman argument. It is pointing out that, no matter what path you took to get to your agreement with the official myth, where you end up is synchronous with the story that is promoted by the military-industrial complex. There is no space available for agreement with the official myth that does not land you solidly in the camp with the military-industrial complex, because the official myth is a product of the military-industrial complex. It is the justification for their agenda. The official myth is not just an explanation of why the towers collapsed- it is that *and* a complete assignment of blame for the attacks on al Qaeda, to the exclusion of all other perpetrators. It is a complete bargain that you make with the devil when you accept the official myth. If you accept the myth, then you must accept the killing tool made from it. This seems obvious to me.

You can't say, "I support the official myth but I disagree with the course of action that has become the 'solution' component in the Hegelian dialectic made from 9/11, the problem-reaction-solution synthesis." There is no support for the myth of 9/11 without endorsement of those who benefit from it, because they built the myth for you. It didn't spring out of a vacuum. Turn it around. Do you think there are those who support the conspiracy theorists' conclusions about 9/11 who would ignore their personal stance to grant the MIC carte blanche anyway? The coherent positions are:

The official story is accurate, and therefore, I endorse the wars and the police state made from it.

The official story is false, and therefore, I reject the wars and the police state made from it.

Are you claiming a third wave position, that endorses the myth but rejects the wars??

colonel panic wrote:]There are no "sides" here. We are discussing an issue, and we happen to disagree on some points.

Of course there are sides- what the hell are you talking about? An unbiased investigation is impossible. Everybody sees things and tunes into evidence that agrees with their pre-conceived notions about what crimes are and are not possible in our world. Are you telling me that those who support the official myth began from a stance that both "al Qaeda did it" and "the shadow government did it" were given equal weight as possibilities? Of course not. Look at the 9/11 commission report- there was no investigation. There was assembly of a back story to fit the thesis that al Qaeda executed the attacks. Anything that contradicted that thesis was filtered out.

colonel wrote:That "you're on the wrong side" argument is the same sort of demagoguery that GW Bush employs, when he says "If you're not with us, you're on the side of the terrorists."

You can't make that case, because when making that statement, Bush is obviously ruling out the possibility that he himself is a terrorist. If you convert Bush's statement to this, "If you're not with my administration, then you are with those who are against my administration", then he would be making a logically coherent truthful sentence. If I say, "If you are not with the Conspiracy theorists regarding 9/11, you are with the military industrial complex", that is absolutely true. The lines are clear. The only way for common citizens to disarm the military is to dispute their claimed rationales for war. Anything other than stripping them of their rationales perpetuates war. Support the myth, support the wars. You have to. The public's acceptance of the myth has no value to the MIC unless they can convert your acceptance into permission for them to make war. That is the prize earned by the creation of the myth. If they didn't want to sell you a war based on the attacks, then they would stand aside for an honest investigation. The opposite is true. The attacks are a wellspring of political capital that is coveted and guarded by the mythmakers. That's why they killed to create it.

colonel wrote:That is another assumption based on no evidence. Conspiracy theorists like to assume the existence of grandiose, sinister plots as a given, and claim that "the lack of evidence is the evidence." That type of circular reasoning is of course completely fallacious in terms of critical thinking.

Who put you in charge of the rules? Your bias is clear. You are unable to accept sinister conspiracies behind the scenes, so you declare 'there is no evidence'. When I show you evidence, you say 'that isn't evidence'. The only answer you will accept is 'there are no grand conspiracies' so you dismiss anything that points you towards recognition of them. What you need to understand is that you cannot deny the existence of conspiracies just because you yourself are unable to spot them. You are entitled to believe there are no conspiracies, but you are only one man's opinion, and no matter how much you huff and puff, you can't blow my house down- in my house, I see conspiracies regularly. Tough break for you, if you have some big emotional investment in changing my opinion. Your opinion doesn't diminish my opinion. Not only that, once I figure your opinion out, it ceases to exist in my world. You become just background noise.

colonel wrote:Please note that I do not mean to put words in your mouth. It's just that you've shown me no solid evidence of such a conspiracy.

I fixed your sentence by adding one boldfaced word. I'm already completely tired and bored with your objections to my theories. I may return to the rest of your post later, if I feel like using your objections as a platform to further publicize my opinion on 9/11.

There are plenty of ways a person could believe that the towers came down as a result of terrrorist attack yet going to war was a dumb idea.

Even if there was absolute iron-clad proof of terrorist involvement in the tower attacks, I still would have seen no sense in going into Iraq.

Even if there was absolute iron-clad proof of Iraq's involvment in said terrorist attack, I would have been against military action in Iraq based on the likelyhood of the mess the country would wind up in.

How is it one has to go with the other?

Colonel Panic wrote:The WTC was not a steel-framed skyscraper. It was created using "tubular construction," with all the support beams concentrated in the central core. The outside walls were very thin 14" steel columns that only served to hold the windows in place and gave negligible support to the overall structure of the building.

For your own good, go beyond what wikipedia has, and read their sources. "only served to hold the windows in place"??????Where did you get that from, the PBS animation from America Rebuilds? You have no concept of the redundant load bearing capacity of the exterior and core columns, in tandem with the floor plates and the spandrels and trusses.

All excerpts below from the book:

Multi-Storey Buildings in Steel, Godfrey, GB (Editor); Second Edition; Collins, London, England, 1985

WORLD TRADE CENTER, NEW YORK, USA; Pages 162-4.

Architectural design: M. Yamasaki and Associates, Troy, Michigan; E. Roth and Sons, New York.
Structural design: Skilling, Helle, Jackson, Seattle.
Built: 1966/1973.

Structural features

The structural design of the two towers is determined by the method of absorbing and transmitting the wind forces. On each of the facades a Vierendeel girder type wall is formed by 59 box-section columns (spaced at 1.02 m centres) which are rigidly connected to spandrel panels at each floor level. At the corners of the building these walls are interconnected to transmit shear, so that, together with the floors of the building, they form a torsionally rigid framed tube which is fixed to the foundations and transmits all wind loads. The floors span without intermediate columns between the external columns and the core, the 44 box-section columns of which have to carry vertical loading only.

External framework and facade

The external columns are of constant overall cross-section, 450 x 450 m. The spandrel panels interconnecting them comprise steel plates, 1.32 m deep. 12 m above the entrance level the columns are combined in groups of three to form single base columns, spaced at 3.05 m centres and with an overall cross-section of 800 x 800 mm.

Diagram : Vertical section through a tower block

Diagram (above): Framed tube construction principle: load-bearing external walls stiffened by the floors to form a torsionally rigid tube.

Note that the buildings are stiffened by the composite steel-concrete floors. The floors are an integral part of the structural system.

The wall thickness and grade of steel in the external columns are varied in successive steps in the upward direction: wall thickness decreasing from 12.5 to 7.5 mm, yield point of the steel from 70.0 to 29.5 kg/mm2. To ensure that the floors remain plane, i.e., free from warping distortion, the external columns are so designed that the stresses, and therefore the strains, produced in them by vertical loads are equal to those produced in core columns (mild steel with yield point of 24 kg/mm2). The reserve stress capacity in the external columns which is provided by the progressively graded qualities of steel serves to absorb wind load. The design value adopted for wind pressure over the entire height of the building is 220 kg/in2. The calculated maximum deflection at the top of the building is 28 cm.

Although the calculated maximum deflection at the top of the building may be 28 cm, the measured deflections were considerably larger. In Robertson [1] we find information concerning the World Trade Center when subjected to a 95 mph (153 kph) wind. It turns out that the static deflection is 45 inches (114 cm) from the vertical and that the building then oscillates some 33 inches (84 cms) either side of the point of static deflection (with a period of eleven seconds). Thus a 95 mph (153 kph) wind induces a maximum deflection of 78 inches (198 cms) from the vertical.

The external framework was erected using prefabricated three-storey units, each comprising columns interconnected by spandrel panels. These units, ranging in weight from 22.3 to 6.0 tonnes, were fitted together, alternately staggered in one storey heights, and spliced with high-strength friction-grip bolts.

The external cladding to columns and spandrels consists of aluminium sheet. The window openings, 1.98 x 0.48 m, are infilled with bronze-tinted solar-heat rejecting glass fitted into aluminium frames and sealed with Neoprene gaskets. Automatic window cleaning is by means of rotating brushes guided along rails fitted on the column cladding.

Composite floors comprise 900mm deep bar joists (spaced at 2.04 m centres and braced transversely by secondary joists) and a 10 cm thick lightweight concrete slab laid on steel trough decking as permanent formwork. Composite action between the concrete and the steelwork is ensured by extending the diagonal web members of the joists through the steel decking and embedding them in the slab. Dead weight of floor 50 kg/in2, imposed load 488 kg/in2.

Assembly of the external wall units (alternately staggered in one-storey heights) and floor units

Colonel Panic wrote:Yeah, I don't think it looks like a controlled demo either. In a demolition, the charges are set off in successive stages, that take out key supports in an orderly fashion.

alex maiolo wrote:A controlled implosion would pancake the building, but a building that has a chunk taken out of one side, even if it's well built, is in danger of acting like a tree that has had a wedge chainsawed out of it.
His point was it was the best possible collapse anyone could have asked for, if the building was going to collapse.
Could have been worse and all that.

Sounded reasonable to me.

-A

That's going on the assumption that a 100+ story skyscraper has similar structural characteristics as a tree. This is not the case. A tree is basically homogeneous in its composition, and is a very stiff and rigid structure with a very high center of gravity due to the spread of its branches.

The WTC towers were not homogeneous structures. They were more like a stack of 100 dinner plates made of a very heavy, yet fragile and crumbly material, and held together by pipecleaners. It was a structure designed for flexibility in high winds rather than rigidity. The towers' center of gravity was at their base, and they failed from a point near the top. Due to the tenuous nature of their construction, there was not enough structural support around the edges of the floors to allow the upper portion to topple over.

In such a case, if the pipe cleaners on one side failed, the very crumbly material that comprised the plates would pulverize and the weight would pull the plates on top straight down into the other plates. The entire structure would collapse straight down the way the towers did.

I, like you, defer to the engineers.
A world renowned structural engineer who writes books on the subject said that it could have fallen over like a tree that had had a wdge taken out of it.
Me? I have no idea.
But I'm deferring to the engineer, and I agree with him that a collapse is probably the best you can ask for.

That's pretty much all I have to say on the subject because I really don't know about these things.

Look up the show and listen to it. It was really good.

-A

sphincter wrote:
I don't understand the political gain from destroying the towers if the American government did? The country is worse off now than it has been for a long time, probably ever.

A terrorist attack is the perfect excuse for furthering an Imperialist agenda. There's no way the public could've been swayed to get behind this crock of shit war unless something like 9/11 happened. PNAC (project for a new american century) the neo con think-tank, said in one of their writings back in '99 or 2000 that what they need is something like a pearl harbor-like attack to advance their agenda. It's all about greed.