Did you know that if you zoom in really close on photographs of the collapsing building, you can see thousands of tiny spaceships?
Cervaise, my friend of lo these many years, you should not be so dismissive. A close look shows they are not spaceships but DC-8s.
Any particulr reason why you decided to set up a straw man argument of ethnic slurs that do not actually appear in the other poster’s text?
Despite Cisco’s odd attack, you will not call other posters “dumb” in this thread.
[ /Moderating ]
Not necessary to imply dishonesty to make your point.
Stop it.
[ /Moderating ]
I wasn’t implying dishonesty, merely pointing out relative credibility. I don’t know or care what Alex’s religion is, just that it’s odd for him to take offense at the idea of being accused of a trivial lie (i.e. whether or not he is Jewish, I mean, seriously, who gives a fuck?) while simultaneously embracing the idea of an incredibly massive lie (hundreds or thousands of people are engaged in a cover-up about WTC7).
However, given how touchy a lot of posters are regarding the issue of honesty, you could have picked a less inflammatory way to convey your idea.
I must apologise for being such a ‘Doubting Thomas’. Having now seen the full press conference, it is completely obvious that the recently invented concept of ‘Thermal Expansion’ is adequate enough to explain the events leading to the collapse of WTC7, such that it is pointless even investigating the likelihood of a “controlled demolition”. Okay folks, nothing to see here. Move along.
Yes, there is a particular reason, but in fact it’s not a strawman at all. Larry Silverstein is an innocent businessman who has been mercilessly harassed and stalked - on and offline - to the point where he cannot walk from his car to his office unmolested - by these tinhatters for the last 7 years, because he is Jewish. Almost all modern conspiracy theories are ultimately rooted in the faked anti-Jewish document The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and no matter how hard the originators and perpetuators try to distract from that, the 9/11 conspiracy theory is no different. Why do you think Alex Dubinsky even “joked” that he knew what happened because he is Jewish?
In case you forgot the original quote, it was this:
Where Alex talks about Silverstein’s involvement in 9/11 and the destruction of his own buildings as if it’s a foregone conclusion. And later he posts this:
Which has been debunked and is generally just very widely known to be false.
Actually, ignorance on a subject is just about the prime reason to disregard anybody’s viewpoint. Which I think I’ll just do from now on.
To add at least a token amount to the debate: your firm ground consists of not knowing what the hell happened or how, but still distrusting the authorities for no good reason other than your own incredulity. Doesn’t this even, maybe just for a moment, spark a little doubt in your convictions? A little bit of ‘hmm, maybe I should critically evaluate the facts instead of jumping to outrageous conclusions based on my ignorance on the subject’?
Thermal expansion means that when metal gets hot, it expands. It’s not a “recently invented concept”, it’s a simple physical fact that has been known pretty much since humanity began using metal. You can even demonstrate it yourself - there’s a precision instrument for measuring thermal expansion that most of us have in our homes called a thermostat. Or go watch a barrel-maker put the hoops on.
That is not how it comes across in the press conference. He seems to state that it only came into consideration in 2007, so can you explain what I am misunderstanding?
My interpretation is that preparing for thermal expansion for many hours at very high heat over a large area is what is new, and what was not seriously considered. How many pieces of flaming wreckage from large planes have fallen into large buildings in the past, when there are no firefighters and the city water is unavailable? Not a reasonable scenario pre-9/11.
Architects and builders want to minimize their construction costs. Somewhere between “prepare for nothing unusual” (cheap) and “prepare for every goddamn possibility you can dream up” (prohibitively expensive) there has to be a compromise. In the past, preparing for a fire in someone’s trash can near a desk was reasonable, but preparing for a coordinated military attack on the whole city was not. Now the bar will have to be moved a bit to encompass more exotic threats to the integrity of the building, at an increase in cost, of course.
I recently watched a presentation by Bill Baker, head structural engineer for Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, about the Burj Dubai. He was asked is they designed the structure to resist an airplane impact. His response was that it’s basically impossible. It took years to figure out what exactly went on in a know event (9/11). To design for planes hitting in all sorts of configurations and with huge planes like the A380, you basically design a fairly robust structure and hope for the best. If safety dominated every other criteria we’d all be living in concrete bunkers.
In the investigation of the collapse of WTC7, an early (and plausible) theory was that steel members were softened in the fire that burned unchecked for several hours. As one member collapsed, the stresses were transferred to neighboring members, themselves softened, and they collapsed, spreading the stresses to other members and leading to a catastrophic failure. Metals do indeed soften well before they melt. There is no new science here.
This theory was found inadequate and on further analysis was supplemented by another theory - as the steel members heated up (in the fire that burned unchecked for several hours), they expanded. This pushed the structure out of alignment and broke numerous connections between the members and the columns. In combination, this damage greatly weakened the structure until a critical failure led to a catastrophic collapse. Again, there is no new science, here.
In comparison, the alternative theory that demolition charges were placed months or years in advance has no physical basis and does require new science, in the form of either:[ul][li]A new theory on group psychology in which thousands of people can keep a secret for years, or[/li][li]A new theory on chemistry that can make explosives invisible, explaining why they went unnoticed for years by the people who worked in WTC7.[/ul][/li]
Sometimes the more complicated solution is the right one. In this case, though, the complicated solution is so far-fetched that you will need much better evidence than “I don’t understand”, at least to anyone who isn’t already inclined to conspiracy theories. To people that are into conspiracy theories, the more complicated, the better. Did you know that the original blueprints for WTC7 called for a pattern of rivets on the 13th floor that spelled out SEPTEMBER 11 in Morse code? Did you know that the reason WTC7 was destroyed was to conceal evidence of the missile-launchers that were actually used to bring down WTC1 and 2? Did you know WTC7 was destroyed on Bill Gates’ order to stop to release of a revolutionary operating system that had been developed in secret in a software company on the ninth floor? Once you decide to believe what you want to believe, all beliefs are fair game.
My suggestion would be to surround the building with heat-seeking missile launchers and anti-aircraft guns manned 24 hours a day to destroy the plane before it hits, because aside from encasing the building in ten (no, thirty) feet of concrete, that’s pretty much the only defense you’ve got.
Wait, so you aren’t?
Yeah, I’m dangerous like that. Gets me all the ladies.
Then all you’d have to contend with would be burning debris falling from the sky onto adjacent buildings, like the Dubai7…
I think it was some sort of invisible ray that causes instant structural death (posibly invented in the 20s). Or maybe a giant invisible bigfoot. I don’t have a full theory on the whole thing, but I have a principle at work here.
You quite certainly COULD design a building that could resist an airplane strike. It’d be ludicrously expensive and (for business purposes) ill-designed to the point that there would be no commercial reason for building it, but it’s technically possible.