Umm…no, I don’t. I know what the universal rate of accelleration for falling objects is. I watch the videos. I see objects falling in a way that seems to me to be consistent with the lawas of physics, as I understand them. I am not being wilfully obtuse here: I don’t understand what you’re saying. Can you rephrase?

“Regarding the owner of the buildings – who knows if he was involved, maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. The point is he could have been, and he had alot to gain from their destruction.”

My point was this: any alternative explanation has to be weighed for plausibility against the current explanation. Your suggestion that the building owner was a co-conspirator introduces a level of complexity to the “conspiracy” that approaches the utterly ludicrous (see response 29), as do any of the other interesting conspiracy theories I’ve read.

So to state the obvious, one more time, I have two choices: accept that the most obvious explanation is the correct one, with some anomalies that are currently under investigation: or accept that an administration incapable of covering up its own corruption somehow pulled off, in PERFECT secrecy, a plan involving thousands of people, dozens of government agencies, tons of explosives carefully placed throughout one of the most heavily populated and highly secured pieces of real estate on the planet, and have kept it perfect secret for six years. Naw.

“You quote the Nationa Institute of Standards & Technology, which sounds like an awfully legitimate and edumacated organization…”

Ummm…I’m sorry, is that phrasing supposed to somehow diminish their legitimacy? Would you like to call them poopy heads, too? Will that strengthen your argument?

“…who attributed building 7’s fall to ” a local failure in a critical column”.

More correctly, whose preliminary findings do, and whose final report is due later this year after an addition year of data analysis. Yes.

“Have you even watched the videos?”

Yes, several times.

“Check them out, and let me know if you believe that damage to a single, even critical, column would make a building like this collapse at a uniform speed, in an almost perfectly even pattern.”

Throbbin, ever see the video of the collapse of the Tacoma bridge? New engineering principles, tortional stress, unanticipated resonances…the bridge appears to be literally dancing itself to death. New engineering subjected to new stresses do things no-one can anticipate; it took about thirty years for them to figure out why Tacoma collapsed the way it did.

I’ll say it again: thousands of engineers, presumably not all neoconservative conspirators, have watched this video, poked through the site, and analyzed what happened. So far there is NO evidence for a deliberate demolition, beyond the fact that the building collapsed in a way that reminded some observers of one. (Funny…you’d think a conspiracy able to deceive ALL the world’s media, and ALL those investigators, would have figured out a more convincing looking collapse, eh?)

“Also – wanted to ask you what your definition is of a “theory” in this case…”

Any alternative take on the events that doesn’t involve a greater leap of credibility than the existing version.

“I am trying to show how the maintstream version fo events just isn’t plausible”.

Well, your key argument seems to be something about the speed of falling objects, so I look forward to your restatement of that so I can get your point.

The biggest evidence for some sort of controlled demolition is the fact that they faell at free fall speeds. No collapsing building with their structure should have been able to do that. You know damn well what I was trying to say in my post.

Regarding the owner of the buildings – who knows if he was involved, maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. The point is he could have been, and he had alot to gain from their destruction. You still haven’t given us a reasonable explanation why building 7 fell.

You quote the Nationa Institute of Standards & Technology, which sounds like an awfully legitimate and edumacated organization, who attributed building 7’s fall to ” a local failure in a critical column”.

Have you even watched the videos?

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/wtc7.html

Check them out, and let me know if you believe that damage to a single, even critical, column would make a building like this collapse at a uniform speed, in an almost perfectly even pattern.

Also – wanted to ask you what your definition is of a “theory” in this case, so that we may know what your criterion are for the strength of a theory. I am not trying to develop my own theory here, I am trying to show how the maintstream version fo events just isn’t plausible, so that people smarter than I can go forth and find out what really happened.

Oh, but he must have been. Think about the implications of your scenario. He was obviously in league with Al Qaeda, because their pilots flew the planes. You don’t deny that, do you? And with Bush, because he’s behind it all, right? And with the air force, because, as remarked above, it couldn’t just have been a coincident that they were conducting exercises on 9/11. And with ALL the engineers and investigators and journalists who combed through the wreckage and carefully eliminated any trace of the demolition. Not to mention the designers of the demolition, the suppliers of the tons of explosives, the workies who actually smuggled the tons of explosives into the buildings, placed them, wired them, and programmed the detonation, all without a single detectable trace, before or after. And of course, the insurance investigators were totally hoodwinked as well.

So…were all these thousands of conspirator neo-conservative republicans, completely sworn to secrecy? All the investigators and cops and journalists and engineers too? Phew. That must have taken a heck of a lot of work. And not a single leak or trace of evidence in six years. Damn, that’s a good conspiracy. Especially for an adminstration that has shown itself incapable of covering up relatively minor misdemeanours like the Plame affair. But they’ve managed to keep this completely under wraps. Astonishing, really.

“as Jesse and thousands of others have observed, the buildings toppled at free fall speeds, and no steel structure in the history of the planet has ever collapsed due to a strike by a plane.”

This sounds like mock-science copied from someone’s conspiracy website. I actually don’t understand what you’re talking about here. Could you explain in plain talk?

My sensitivity? You’re one of the good guys, dude. You can say what you want.

If he WAS in league, then that would kinda alleviate any problems conspirators would have with security – “Excuse me fine security gentlemen…I own these buildings…take a hike for 20 minutes will ya? Here’s $50, don’t tell anyone”. Just a possibility. An oversimplified possibility, but a general portrait of what may have happened. Either that, or the NSA, CIA, or whoever is just really good at circumventing security (that IS what they are trained to do, isn’t it?).

I’d say the strongest evidence of controlled demolition is the fact that, as Jesse and thousands of others have observed, the buildings toppled at free fall speeds, and no steel structure in the history of the planet has ever collapsed due to a strike by a plane. This is “circumstantial evidence”, but compelling nontheless.

(Was kinda worrying about the sensitivity thing.)

Welcome, Jesse, by the way…always excellent to get a new perspective.

Okay, so in your scenario:
- Was the owner of the WTC in league with Bush, the CIA, the Air Force, NSA, and all the other “conspirators”?
- By what method were the buildings (presumably the key three buildings) rigged to detonate in the weeks before 9/11 without the notice of any of the hundreds of thousand of people who work or pass through the building…especially in light of the fact that security in the buildings was incredibly tight following the first bombing attempt in 1993?
- How do you account for the fact that absolutely not trace of any evidence of artificial demolition has surfaced, despite at least eight major criminal and engineering investigations?

BTW – no one (on this blog) thinks you are an asshole, or would call you one if you are wrong. After reading your writings, we would expect nothing less of you than your very best in defending your rationale and convictions.

As a totally unrelated aside – I just finished watching Sicko. If you haven’t seen it, go watch it! I know Balb has misgivings because of Moore’s style, but it’s just too provocative and common-sense to miss!

Sorry, folks. I don’t like Bush either. But cherrypicking bad arguments from your favourite conspiracy sites doesn’t amount to an argument.

Here’s a challenge for you. Provide a scenario for the collapse of building seven that’s more plausible that the model currently favoured by the two major investigations so far. I’m very curious.

There is positively no reasonable explanation for WTC building 7 falling down. Which is why the administration has not even tried to offer up an explanation, believing (wisely) that saying nothing is far more convincing than saying anything that could be refuted.

And finally, there is a growing number of 747 pilots, some with 30 years of experience, who say that the Pentagon attack by an Arab who couldn’t fly a twin Cessna engine, to somehow commandeer an airplane, fly to the Pentagon, orchestrate a perfect 333 degree turn, and fly along the lawn without so much as disturbing the grass, and then land in the shape of a Cruise Missile without any airplane wreckage whatsoever.

The main refutation I’ve heard that Bush can’t be behind 9/11 is because he’s an idiot. Nobody said Bush had to be behind 9/11. All that is necessary to know is that he and many of his friends stood to gain by this attack, and the subsequent invasion of Iraq. In fact the belief that Bush was behind 9/11 is so mainstream that I hear major news programs insinuate so almost every day that passes. They go almost to the extreme edge of simply saying “the neo-cons masterminded 9/11″ without actually saying it. At this point it’s not even whether they did, but how they did it.

One last thing. No building made of structurally reinforced steel can fall at the speed of gravity (as the WTC buildings did) without each and every support column failing simultaneously. The idea that 2 airplanes knocked down 3 buildings at free-fall speed is not only unlikely. It’s utterly and irrefutably impossible by the laws of physics. Oh and, did I mention it would be the first time in history that a fire or airplane did collapse a building? Yes. It would.

I don’t think that the 9/11 conspiracies are all that far fetched though when you consider the billions of dollars that are spent but not accounted for every year by organizations like the Pentagon and the CIA and if you look at what these organizations have done in the past around the world. I believe that executing the attacks on 9/11 was certainly within the capability of these organizations.

It’s difficult to comprehend the incredible luck for Bin Laden and his crew that NORAD just happened to be in the middle of a massive training exercise leaving most of the country almost undefended when the attacks took place… or that the 9/11 commission thought that following the money trail that funded the attacks was of ‘little practical value’…

It just seems a bit fishy to me, is all. I hope that someday we will know what really happened. At this point it looks pretty unlikely that we will, but I really don’t know why anyone takes what the American government says seriously anymore these days, they’ve lost all credibility.

But hey…some would say it’s not that big a stretch.

I’m a sceptic (I really am, you know), and I am examining two hypotheses.

One says this was an Al Qaeda initiative, pretty much start to finish. In support of that hypothesis, we have the their claim of responsibility, every major inquiry conducted to date, the fact that they had conducted other terrorist attacks, links between the attackers and Al Qaeda, and so on.

The other hypothesis is…well, there isn’t one, really; just that somehow several thousand people from several dozen orgnizations and agencies somehow managed to stage and then cover up a mass murder on a scale completely unprecedented, and somehow hoodwinked hundreds of thousands of investigators (many of whom were, presumably Democrats, or folks who’d be delighted to expose a conspiracy, and media (including all the best investigative reporters on the planet, many of whom would be delighted to expose a conspiracy) and the world at large.

Believe what you like. For me…well, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. I await the extraordinary proof. Haven’t seen it yet.

Believe what you want, Balb, but I for one just can’t reconcile all the ‘coincidences’. I haven’t made any claims that I know what happened on 9/11, I have simply stated that the evidence the US government has presented to prove it’s assertion that a handful of Arabs in a cave in Afghanistan pulled off such a complex attack unassisted is very weak.

Exactly. Carl Sagan was as scathingly funny in his writings on conspiracy theorists in the pages of Sceptical Inquirer and Sceptic Magazine as he was about those who blindly accept the government press release in The Demon Haunted World. He believed in critical thought…applied to EVERY side of an argument.

So…present a hypothesis here, and we’ll weigh your evidence against the evidence supporting the conclusions of the 9/11 inquiry and the NIST study. And then we’ll decide which scenario is more probable.