Right, it happened. That’s a fact. And, no, it isn’t too ridiculous to think was intentional. But that’s just a single incident in a single state. Surely, someone intent upon stealing a presidential election would have done much, much more than purge a voter roll of 8000 people. What happens, is that people see a small fact here, a small fact there, and conclude thost isolated incidents constitute a massive conspiracy. My point being, that if such a massive conspiracy indeed existed, digging into those isolated incident in as great as depth as has been done, should reveal some evidence of something linking all those things together.
Right. All of which fails the test of time. It’s preposterous to think that the Bush Machine knew far enough in advance that they’d have to stack the FLA Supreme Court with Republicans so that they could use them in 2000. And that they’d get enough people on the State Election Board (which was controlled by Democrats anyway) to approve a misleading ballot.
Ah, the old “The towers collapsed straight down! It must have been a controlled demolition!” theory.
Um, you know what caused the towers to collapse? Gravity. Even in a controlled demolition, gravity is what causes the building to collapse. A skyscraper CAN’T fall over like a domino, or in a Godzilla movie, it doesn’t have the strength to hold its shape while it’s tipping over. If Godzilla pushes a building over it’s not going to tip sideways and crash into another building, it’s going to break apart exactly like a house of cards. The falling cards from higher up knock down the cards below. Once something–fire, hurricane, Godzilla, airplane crash, missile, controlled demolition–weakens the structure enough for it to collapse, it’s going to collapse straight down. Simple high school physics. What force was acting on the tower? Gravity. What direction does gravity act in? Straight down. So what way is the building going to collapse? Straight down.
Even if the towers had collapsed exactly when the planes crashed into them, they still wouldn’t have toppled over, because the sideways vector provided by the mass of the plane is dwarfed by the downward vector provided by gravity. More debris would have been thrown farther, but the vast majority of material would have collapsed straight down.
As for the contention that no other building has collapsed like this, well, no other building has had a fully-fueled jumbo jet crash into it before either. The fire couldn’t have been hot enough to weaken the steel? Well, why not? Can you say precisely how hot a fire was needed to heat that particular section of the towers precisely where the plane crashed into it? You can’t exactly replicate the experiment, can you?
And that’s leaving aside the notion that the controlled demolition theory MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE. So, you’re going to wire the buildings with explosives, THEN fly planes into them, THEN trigger the explosives? If you can wire the buildings with explosives, why bother driving planes into them? How are you going to hide crews going throughout the towers and wiring them with explosives? Who did the wiring? Why weren’t they noticed? The longer you wait, the greater the chance that the explosives will be discovered, if you’re going to demolish the buildings with explosives then you want to set them off as soon as possible, why would you need to wait for planes to crash into the building. And why do you need the planes? For a cover story? But why can’t your cover story be: “Terrorists wired the buildings with explosives!”
If you’re going to conspire to blow up the towers and the pentagon, doesn’t it make sense to pick ONE method, not two? Why two? If you have the resources to have a second method of destroying the target if the first one fails, why not destroy more targets? We know for a fact that four planes were hijacked that day. Two of them went into the world trade center. One of them crashed into Pennsylvania after the passengers told people on the ground they were going to storm the cockpit, no one knows for sure what the target for this plane was. One of them crashed into the Pentagon. Oh, wait, you claim there’s no video footage of the plane crashing into the Pentagon, so therefore it didn’t happen. Or if it didn’t crash into the Pentagon, just disappeared along with all the passengers, and someone went to a lot of trouble to make it SEEM like the plane crashed into the Pentagon, including trucking in tons of smashed airplane parts.
Why would someone make the plane disappear and pretend it crashed into the Pentagon? That makes no fucking sense. Either the goal was to blow up the Pentagon, and the plane was the cover story…in which case why bother with the plane in the first place, or the goal was to disappear the plane…in which case why bother blowing up the Pentagon? Why not just make the plane disappear with no cover story, like the airplane that disappeared from Africa a few years ago?
We know for a fact that four planes crashed into three buildings that day, and one crashed into the ground. A non-ridiculous conspiracy theory would question exactly why those planes crashed and who was behind the hijackings and why they did it. An ridiculous consipiracy theory is one that alleges that the hijackings never took place.
This probably would make no practical difference to anybody but I’m curious: If a nuclear weapon detonated in a major urban area (one with skyscrapers), would the blast wave provide enough “sideways vector” to make skyscrapers topple over, rather than collapsing straight down?
Yes, that’s a single incident in a single state. And the Palm Beach thing wasn’t by design. Agreed.
However, that’s just one we know about. Rove was involved in the original - well, not Watergate - but all the illegal things Nixon did in the 1972 election that I think of as Watergate. And he went down to Florida when this stuff broke in 2000, and was personally advising Katherine Harris.
I’m not saying the election was stolen - however, the idea is a long way from preposterous.
Not to disparage you, but this sounds suspiciously like the claims of the Roswell freaks. “We can’t find any evidence, so the gov’t must be covering it up.”
I doubt it; I’d think that their framework is designed so as to not topple over easily. Skyscrapers are built to withstand ridiculous forces; the twin towers were designed to survive massive, year-long storms, explosions and even airplanes flying into them.
Lemu866, you’re just reasoning with yourself and, for what it’s worth, I aggree on pretty much everything you said. There was, however, molten steel in the basements of the WTC buildings three weeks after 9/11, which doesn’t make sense, given that the heat was not sufficient to melt steel. That’s just one if the several strange things about the collapses of the buildings (I’m by far most interested in WTC7, myself), all mentioned in Prof. Jones’ paper.
Why are you taking about the Pentagon? No one else here is, you know.
Couldn’t have been more than three days after the attacks when I saw an interview with Mark Loizeax of Controlled Demolition, Inc. I recognized him from the video in an exhibit about buildings that the science museum I was then working for was hosting. There were several hours of him describing specific demolitions his company had done. The man is probably the leading expert on explosive demolition in the world. He was asked what he thought as he saw the buildings come down. He responded that he was horrified to know that the terrorists had exploited what he and every other structural engineer already knew: that the nature of the central-core structure of the World Trade Center towers 1 ans 2 made it fairly easy to bring the them down.
So: I’ve got two inherently-collapsible buildings which have undergone 30 years of the stresses associated with being the tallest New York skyscrapers, and I ram a hundred-ton aircraft into each of them at high speed, after which the fuel ignites.
Later, the experts tell me that the structure of the towers gave way due to the impact of the planes and the subsequent fires. Well, duh. Sounds creidble to me.
Now along comes your man Jones, with different claims. Hmm, physics professor. Could know his stuff. However, according to his Curriculum Vitae, he’s a particle physicist, and so is unlikely to have made a formal study of structural physics since his undergrad days. Ergo, he has ony a couple more units of structural physics under his belt than I do.
Furthermore, it is clear from some of his other work that he is not above drawing wild conclusions in areas outside of his expertise. So his credibility in this area is not so high that one should automatically give creedence to his claims.
Still, a broken clock is right twice a day, hmm? Skimming through his paper, his claims seem plausible but far-fetched. Sure, experts in explosive demolition can make a building do just about anything they want it to, so they certainly could make one look like it wasn’t controlled.
But bringing the world trade center towers down isn’t simply a matter of sticking a wad of explosive underneath them and lighting a match. If that were true, the towers would have been gone since 1993. In order to demolish them just so, in such a precise a way that it appears to be a simple uncontrolled collapse to all eyes but those of the hip and with it, they would have had to place dozens if not hundreds of charges at mutliple levels of the building, all wired up to go off in a particular sequence, which is how explosive demolition is done.
Where are the eyewitness reports from people who worked in the towers saying they saw the monumental preparations for this going on in the days before the attack? Where are the accounts of workmen inexplicable drilling holes in outer walls and installing lord knows what?
As for Jones’ claims about the “unlikely” vertical collapse of WTC7 “into its own footprint” (complete with pictures showing spillover into the streets and missing chunks of surrounding structures), let’s just say that it’s clear he lives in a state without very many tall buildings. How does he imagine demolition goes on in New York? That they bring down the building as vertically as they can, and pay the astronomical insurance claims on the part of owners of the surrounding buildings?
Demolition experts can and routinely do bring every chunk larger than a can of peaches straight into the basement, not the surrounding area. Observation of some other outcome is indicative of an uncontrolled collapse.
Repeatedly, Jones urges the reader to see the videos. As mentioned, I have watched several hours of demolition footage of over a dozen buildings, with commentary by experts. I know what the telltale sequential puffs of smoke and squibs look like (as opposed to minor collapses occuring on an outer wall - smoke doesn’t fall with the structure, doncha know), and I know in general what a building looks when it’s being brought down under control. Even with my very limited knowledge, it is clear to me that neither phenomenon is in evidence in those videos. According to reports of an e-mail by Jones’ department chair, none of the actual structural engineers in Jones’ department agree with his findings.
Which brings me to your molten metal quandary. The pictures in Jones’ paper show molten metal that is still glowing, not just having melted in the past. One must remember that burning smoke rose from the debris for a month. The fires could have had ample oxygen through the open-air entrances to the underground parking structures, clearly in evidence on any vist to the site (I’ve been there three times in the past four years myself). They had, as fuel, every flammable material in the WTC, including the pulverized remains of over 3000 carbon-based life forms, fabric, furniture, auto fuel, and lord knows how much grease and oil from the subway tunnels underneath. Pardon us for being too involved with recovery efforts to monitor the specific temperature at all times, but the still-glowing metal is not that hard to explain.
In short, if a schlub off the street like myself can immediately see the deep flaws in Jones’ “hypothesis”, why should any tax-supported authority waste their time on it?
Well, I don’t know what others are claiming…but I am not claiming some “massive conspiracy”. I am merely claiming that Katherine Harris did her job very well as an official of what even before the election was thought to be the most important swing state. As I said before, “Think globally, act locally.” I agree that the fact that this local approach paid off so handsomely is a bit of good fortune on the part of the Republicans and unlikely part of any massive conspiracy. It is just a matter of pulling out all the stops…whether they be legal or not.
Another ridiculous theory is that Saddam Hussein was behind the events of 9/11. Of course no one with half a brain would have believed that nonsense for more than half a minute.
A great deal of those stops were pulled after the fact on election night, after it had become clear that the Florida count would decide the election, well in time to steer the count in an appropriate way, and with the simultaneous political campaign to spin the news coverage of it underway in consultation with Fox’s coverage head, John Ellis, aka George and Jeb’s first cousin. That’s who made the call on TV that made Bush the presumptive winner, ya know - and it’s hardly a secret, Ellis has been quite public that he was in constant phone contact with his cousins. The mission by the GOP House staffers that DeLay sent to Miami to disrupt the vote count there was an example of the improvised effort to not only prevent Gore votes from being counted but to denigrate the effort to do so.
Yes, much of this shit was *not * planned ahead; much of it was improvised on the spot after the fact and virtually in public at that. Unc’s suggestion that it couldn’t have happened at all is not in accordance with the facts that we knew right at the time, much less the ones revealed later on.
[QUOTE=ElvisL1ves]
That’s who made the call on TV that made Bush the presumptive winner, ya know - and it’s hardly a secret, Ellis has been quite public that he was in constant phone contact with his cousins. QUOTE]
I think we ll are old enough to remember that Gore was the presumptive winner called before voting was even closed. Who made the call on that?
The exit-poll consortium paid for by the networks, based on actual voters’ actual responses when asked who they voted for. The nets rescinded their calls when the reported votes didn’t match the exit polls, for the first time ever at that.
Ah, so the Gore faction tried to steal the election by somehow confusing the exit polling? Fox called Florida for Gore after the others did. Upwards of 15000 votes in a heavy GOP area where determined to be not cast because of the early call. Do I have to find a Liberal exec in the networks before you believe my conspiracy theory? I am confident I can find you quite a few.
Um, no, the meaning is that the official count didn’t match what voters thought they had done and reported to pollsters in statistically-selected precincts, unlike normal experience. Why would Gore do what you suggest?
Based on the same data from the same operation. Your point?
Cite? Here, I’ll help - the first network call for Gore was eleven minutes before poll closing time. Exactly one (1) person has come forward to say that dissuaded them from voting. Now whaddaya got to the contrary, to support this claim that 15,000+ people hadn’t yet left home to go vote with only 11 minutes left? Where? Who else says they didn’t bother besides this one reporter in Pensacola? Here’s another hint: don’t post bullshit here; it *always * gets called.
What conspiracy are you suggesting? That Gore was looking for a way to lose? You’re not making sense at all here. Oh, btw, we don’t have a Liberal party in the US.
C’mon, UncleBeer, where you gettin’ this massive conspiracy shit from? Bush didn’t need a “conspiracy” to steal the election, all it took was Rove.
You seem to think the election could only have been stolen if there was some fabulously detailed conspiracy that involved all the characters sitting in a backroom with Bush saying something like, “OK, Karl, you steal those Miami Beach ballots and mark ‘em up for Buchanan, Katherine, you get those ChoicePoint rolls purged of any names that sound even remotely black, Jeb, you make sure those military absentee ballots for me get counted, whether they’re actually cast or not, Rehnquist, you make sure that the othre guys on the Court understand that it’s payback time for gettin’ nominated. With the help of God, who will surely overlook these crimes, we’ll win this thing!”
Of course it didn’t happen like that. It’s obvious that what did happen was that Rove, in the course of planning Bush’s election strategies, noted that Florida was going to be a very close state – he does pay a LOT of attention to the numbers, by all accounts – that the overall election would be close and that through the offices of good brother Jeb, Rove had his hands on some of Florida’s electoral machinery.
Now, under those circumstances, what would be more natural for an old dirty trickster like Rove to come up with a few stratagems that bent the law, to ensure that Bush had every possible advantage in Florida? I believe Rove did talk with Harris, and said something like this, “Katherine, y’know, Dubya thinks it’s very important … EXTREMELY important … that EVERY felon be purged from the Florida voter registration rolls. And if in the course of that, we remove the names of people who’ve only committed misdemeanors, or whose names only sound like those of felons, that’s OK> Even if something like 10,000 people were purged erroneously, that’s OK. Well, more than OK if you know what I mean. Of course, we’d never knowingly purge voters deliberately, because that would be wrong … Just be sure and let those ChoicePoint people know that a list that includes even a single felon will be unacceptable, that they should make every effort to be safe rather than sorry, if you know what I mean.”
Or those military absentee ballots: “Jeb, we need to make sure that there aren’t any bureaucratic hang-ups in allowing Florida’s servicemen who are overseas blocking their absentee ballots. Make sure your registrars know they shouldn’t be at ALL finicky in inspecting those ballots … if it looks anything like a military absentee ballot, let it through. Because most of those ballots are gonna be for your brother.”
No, what’s preposterous is YOUR theory that ALL of these suspicious occurences (even BUCHANAN said he didn’t believe he got all those Palm Beach votes!) and so forth are mistakes, misconstrusions, coincidences, and swamp gas.Your theory is far from beautiful, UncleBeer, but it’s still been mugged by a gang of ugly facts. It’s all so much more easily explainable as machinations both before and after the fact by a candidate whose chief campaign architect is a known dirty trickster.
Facts? Where? I didn’t see any facts. Just a bunch of wild, unsupported speculations. Which wild, unsupported speculations to believe? Well that depends on which side you’re on, doesn’t it?
Maybe to influence voter turnout? Like you said, this had never happened before. Why are the democrats less suspect of foul play in your eyes than the republicans.
Let’s play it your way. You said that one of the tactics used by Bush in Florida was that Ellis presumptively called for Bush in some lame attempt to steer the election count. Yet you are flabbergasted that I would bring up the fact that Gore was presumptively called 7 hours before Bush’s 2am erroneous call. You know, when the voting was still going on in 75% of the country, including the same state it was called in without correction for 2 hours.
Here’s another hint:
NBC “lead the way” for calling for Gore before the polls closed based on bad data. All of the networks, including Fox, followed close behind.
Fox “lead the way” for calling for Bush at 2am based on more bad data> . All of the networks, within 5 minutes, followed.
So your argument is either bullshit or bad faith. And IIRC, both “always gets called”.
Keep up.
And, btw, there is a liberal party. I’ll have to say the capitol was a typo since it wasn’t obvious to you.