Your belief about September, 11th, 2001

[CaptainCrunch]

I'm not trying to convert anyone to my cause, I enjoy the debate.

I don't think any of the so called truthers are going to convert because the conspiracy is much more interesting then real life.

I'm certainly not going to convert because I find the mass majority of real conspiracy theories to be laughable, and the inequitable burden of proof when it comes to 9/11 conspiracy arguments facinates me to no end.

While there have been legitimate conspiracies out there, Iran Contra, some of the amazing governmental overthroughs the interesting thing is that the truth eventually leaks out.

In the case of 9/11 the only conspiracy is that we had a poor intelligence effort and a government that was far too complacent in its border security, there's not much more to that.

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by Stimpy

Speaking of subscribing to unique narratives and myths.

Wouldn't it be something if he was on the money and it was those of us who think he's a bit batty who are out to lunch. Remember, many great thinkers of their times were considered heretics or loons.

I remember reading a short story about a planet where people with rational thought were locked away in an mental hospital, and all of the blathering lunatics were considered normal and sane.

They had one court house scene where the judge decided on a pysch evaluation for a criminal by talking to an invisible prosecutor.

[valo403]

Originally Posted by Stimpy

Thanks for the links. They're interesting but they really don't prove anything more than the links that the truthers are using in this thread. They pose a premise and then make a definitive claim at the end of the page even though they have no evidence one way or the other.

I appreciate your enthusiasm for the subject matter, but I have to know why this is so important to you that you would try and convert someone to your position with so much vigor? As you mentioned to another poster, you're not changing your mind so why do you think other people should change theirs to align with your perspective?

As I said earlier, the truth is somewhere between your narrative and that of the truthers. I have no idea where that truth is but I am certain neither camp is correct in their assumptions of what happened on that September morning. What I am 100% certain of is that the details of the story behind the attacks broke way too early, with too many concrete details, and the government in power at the time had trouble with the truth. That in itself is more than enough to know that the official story is not what it appears and not worthy of recognizing at truth.

So why exactly are you using phrases such as "cold hard facts"? Which one is it? You claim you think the truth is in the middle, yet you use definitive terminology when presenting arguments. Make up your mind.

[Stimpy]

Originally Posted by pylon

So you are saying the media was in on it too? Just clarifying here.

In a round about sort of way I guess you could say I am saying that. I would say they were part and parcel to the way the events unfolded simply because they did what media does these days and refused to think twice about a story or fact check in any shape or fashion. Let's be honest, the news agencies were stumbling over each other trying to break the next big angle on this story as it was unfolding. They took anything given to them and put it on the air, especially if it came from a remotely credible source. This was the fog of war in action, except this war was the competition between news rooms to generate ratings. I hope that this is a point that we can all agree upon. The media did a spectacular job broadcasting the images that day, but they did a horrible job maintaining any level of journalistic integrity.

[Stimpy]

Originally Posted by valo403

So why exactly are you using phrases such as "cold hard facts"? Which one is it? You claim you think the truth is in the middle, yet you use definitive terminology when presenting arguments. Make up your mind.

Yeah, you got me on semantics. That was probably poor wording. Score one for you. Doesn't change anything I said though.

[Rathji]

For the record, I believe that Sept 11, 2001 happened shortly after Sept 10, 2001 and shortly before Sept 12, 2001.

[photon]

Originally Posted by COGENT

But to answer the question what I think "shoud've" happened.

This is the root of many problems, and again is a well known cognitive bias. We but FAR too much trust in our mental models of the world around us. In the same way that Newton's theory of gravity only works with specific ranges of reality, our mental models of reality are informed by a limited subset of reality.

This is because evolved and grew up dealing with situations where the material strength far exceeds the stresses placed on that material by gravity and mass (for example). Our experiences do not equip our common sense to deal with extreme situations. This is easily seen by the hilarious videos on youtube where people try to move or lift heavy things.

This cannot be overstated, and this is why math is used to build buildings, not "I think this will work" guessing, and this is why math MUST be used to analyze the collapse of the structures as well.

Originally Posted by COGENT

To start, Neither of the planes hit straight on and they hit near the tops of the buildings. I would think that if anything, the top of the building would tip to one side either breaking off or causing the rest of the building to tilt to one side while collapsing. I guess my idea of this comes from something as simple as jenga or a tree being chopped. take out one side of it, it falls to the side. Although I do understand that the engineering of two of the largest buildings in the world and jenga are very different.

VASTLY different. This is exactly what I mean, your experience is informed by small things, and you extrapolate (as any reasonable person would) out based on that. The problem is things don't extrapolate like that. Acceleration due to gravity is a square relationship. Mass and volume have a cube relationship. These aren't things we model very well mentally.

So in the case of the tops of the buildings, even though the planes were quite big and going quite fast, the actual energy involved still wasn't that big compared to the sheer inertia of the building. In order for something to tilt you have to overcome the inertia of the part that's tilting, and you have to have something rigid to support one side of the tilt as one side rotates and not the other.. the building was not designed so that the supports on one side of the building could fully support the weight of the above structure while the other side were 100% compromised (which is what would be required to have the top tilt). When the mass is so huge and the forces due to acceleration due to gravity dwarf all the other forces, straight down is pretty much the only option.

Originally Posted by COGENT

Furthermore. How does a fire on the 93rd floor cause building to completely collapse in on itself within an hour and thirteen minutes? I would think that this would require serious structural problems throughout the whole building below the 93rd floor. You would think if the buildings were desinged/able to withstand a plane flying into it at 500 mph it could handle a fire on 6 of it's floors and not weaken it's structural strength throughout the building.

The structural strength of the lower 93rd floors is pretty much irrelevant in this case.

The reason the whole building collapsed is because one single floor collapsed, that's it. Again without math it's hard to understand because we don't usually deal with the kinds of forces involved in every day life, but this is one case where I can use an analogy that we do deal with.

Take a 25lb bag of sand. If I'm holding it in my arms, I'm stopping it falling right? That load on my arms is its static load. Now if I pass that to you and you take it, nothing bad happens because we do it in a way to make sure the dynamic load is minimized. But if I raise that bag 10 feet in the air and drop it
into your arms, are you going to try and catch it? Of course not, because you know the dynamic load is going to be enough to injure you.

So same thing here. We've got 14 floors of building putting a static load on the next floor down. The fires burn, steel weakens, the floor trusses expand and sag, and eventually enough structural integrity for one floor erodes that the top 14 floors drop. Once this happens it's all over, because remember the sandbag; the forces involved due to acceleration of that mass due to gravity FAR exceed the structural integrity of the next floor fully built.

I've worked through the math on this one myself and even taking into account the support of partially compromised steel supports, the dynamic load on the floor below as a result of the 14 floors above falling just one floor is more than 30 times the static load.

So unless the 92nd floor can support 30 times the force it normally has to deal with, it will collapse. It does, and its mass is added to the falling mass, the mass accelerates further through the 92nd floor, and the 91st floor has to deal with even MORE force, which it can't, etc etc..

Originally Posted by COGENT

Exactly.... magnets.... what's their deal anyways?

Feynman said this: "One part of the force between moving charges we call the magnetic force. It is really one aspect of an electrical effect."

Magnetism is what you get when you combine electricity and special relativity. Lorenz transformations across inertial frames of reference and all that stuff I don't understand nearly as well as I wished.

[bizaro86]

I'm not sure I have any "beliefs" about Sept 11, as the thread title would imply. I'm aware of some of the facts regarding the attack.

What are your beliefs regarding the sum of 2 and 2?

[valo403]

Originally Posted by Stimpy

Yeah, you got me on semantics. That was probably poor wording. Score one for you. Doesn't change anything I said though.

Sure it does, if your arguing that either possibillity is equally likely or plausible the presentation of something as a "cold hard fact" goes well beyond semantics. That's flies completely in the face of what you claim your position is.

On the issue of the individiuals identifed as the hijackers still being alive I'm curious what the argument actually is. Is it that the actual people on board were misidentified, making these guys essentially accused of a crime they didn't commit? That I can see as a possible argument based somewhat in reality.

Beyond that though, I don't really see what the argument could possibly be. They're still alive because they parachuted out and landed safely at the Hyatt acroos the Hudson in Hoboken? Are they the inspiration behind M. Night Shalyman's kind of decent, not great but I'd watch it again, movie Unbreakable? I mean, I guess I could see that. It happened in a movie, and as a product of late 20th Century American culture I know that what happens in movies is totally possible in real life.

[valo403]

Originally Posted by bizaro86

I'm not sure I have any "beliefs" about Sept 11, as the thread title would imply. I'm aware of some of the facts regarding the attack.

What are your beliefs regarding the sum of 2 and 2?

Wife swapping?

[Burninator]

Originally Posted by Stimpy

As I said earlier, the truth is somewhere between your narrative and that of the truthers. I have no idea where that truth is but I am certain neither camp is correct in their assumptions of what happened on that September morning.

I don't understand your reasoning behinds this statement. Evidence is not a democracy. Not all evidence is equal. You have arbitrarily made both sides an extreme and therefore null and void. How could you deduce anything from this?

With your logic you would assume that the earth is saucer shaped because one extreme believe it to be flat and the other to be round.

[Cecil Terwilliger]

I don't believe there are any massive conspiracies afoot but 9/11 was a major intelligence failure.

US governmental agencies didn't work together, refused to share vital information and at least 1, probably 2 agencies knew an attack via planes crashing into buildings was coming from Al Queda.

[Phaneuf3]

I like your analogy here. To be honest, this is an aspect I probably take for granted if I ever decide to talk to some truthers about this whole mess - the fact that they might not have the same background as me. What seems obvious, they may not have thought through.

Originally Posted by photon

The reason the whole building collapsed is because one single floor collapsed, that's it. Again without math it's hard to understand because we don't usually deal with the kinds of forces involved in every day life, but this is one case where I can use an analogy that we do deal with.

Take a 25lb bag of sand. If I'm holding it in my arms, I'm stopping it falling right? That load on my arms is its static load. Now if I pass that to you and you take it, nothing bad happens because we do it in a way to make sure the dynamic load is minimized. But if I raise that bag 10 feet in the air and drop it
into your arms, are you going to try and catch it? Of course not, because you know the dynamic load is going to be enough to injure you.

However, to make your analogy more accurate to the situation, the person trying to catch the sandbag should have one arm tied behind their back.
The floor below the one that collapsed (and so on) had already had it's structural integrity partially compromised by the whole having an airplane crash into it and having a fire burn for hours thing...

[rururu]

I was sceptic about the conspiracy theory until I saw this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUkvnfV606wa
It shows the WTC7 collapse. Knowing a thing or two about the engineering I can say that this type of collapse wasn't originated by fire. The penthouse of the building fell apart seconds before the building collapsed - clearly it was exploded by professionals.

[Northendzone]

could whatever was supporting the penthouse collapsed, causing the penthouse to fall in and the rest of the building dropped down on itself.....

i guess to me the way the buildings collpased is the only thing that makes me think about the possibility that ti was an inside job - but once again the number of people and resources required to pull this off.....

[Weiser Wonder]

Originally Posted by rururu

I was sceptic about the conspiracy theory until I saw this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUkvnfV606wa
It shows the WTC7 collapse. Knowing a thing or two about the engineering I can say that this type of collapse wasn't originated by fire. The penthouse of the building fell apart seconds before the building collapsed - clearly it was exploded by professionals.

Explain how your knowledge of engineering allows you determine that this was a controlled demolition.

[Stimpy]

Originally Posted by valo403

On the issue of the individiuals identifed as the hijackers still being alive I'm curious what the argument actually is. Is it that the actual people on board were misidentified, making these guys essentially accused of a crime they didn't commit? That I can see as a possible argument based somewhat in reality.

The argument is that if any information is wrong it changes the narrative and kills the myth. What difference would that information have on things? How about if the guys misidentified were really named Bob and Chuck, and were actually third generation Americans? What ramifications would that have on the whole myth and the precipitates of the narrative have on the past nine years? Everything would change, especially the attitudes of Americans and the attitude towards Americans.

Originally Posted by Burninator

I don't understand your reasoning behinds this statement. Evidence is not a democracy. Not all evidence is equal. You have arbitrarily made both sides an extreme and therefore null and void. How could you deduce anything from this?

Your interpretation is that all evidence is equal. I said the truth lies somewhere between the official story and that of the truthers. That could mean to the middle or to either extreme. The only way to find the truth would be to examine the evidence thoroughly, but that is no longer possible. Much of the physical evidence was removed from the sites and immediately sealed and classified, or shipped to Japan for scrap metal. Even if someone wanted to open an inquiry, which citizens of New York state have considered, there is no evidence to even examine. That is an interesting predicament considering this was considered the crime of the century.

With your logic you would assume that the earth is saucer shaped because one extreme believe it to be flat and the other to be round.

No, using my logic you would actually get an opportunity to do the research to answer the question. I'm uncertain what the answer is. There are so many questions that need answers, but the investigation never took place and the evidence was destroyed prior to any testing. It is because of this that I believe the truth lay somewhere in the middle and we will never likely find it. I'm not taking the story from a government that lied at every turn as truth. It just isn't logical to think they would be truthful and forth coming when they lied at every other opportunity.

Oh, and the earth is an oblate spheroid.

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by Weiser Wonder

Conspiracies happen all the time. The Bush administration went to Tony Blair with the idea to dress up an American plane as a UN one and fly it really low over Iraq to get Iraq to shoot at it. That's true and it's a conspiracy theory. The US also conspired to successfully overthrow South American regimes. The US President has resigned in the past due to taking part in several conspiracies to illegally undermine political opponents.

So they couldn't keep this conspiracy under wraps, but the conspiracy involving flying airplanes into the WTC, kidnapping and executing passengers while flying a dummy plane into the Pentagon was not a problem for them?

Huh?

[COGENT]

Originally Posted by photon

This is the root of many problems, and again is a well known cognitive bias. We but FAR too much trust in our mental models of the world around us.

Magnetism is what you get when you combine electricity and special relativity. Lorenz transformations across inertial frames of reference and all that stuff I don't understand nearly as well as I wished.

Who invited this guy? Talk about bringing a Boeing 767 to a knife fight.

In all seriousness though I will go ahead and say my thoughts and ideas in this matter are no where near the level of factual math and science that has been stated in this and other posts. Very much appreciate the explanation.

[photon]

I didn't really want to get involved in details in this thread, I've gone through that stage and have no desire to do so again, mostly because of what I said earlier, you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

However in your post I saw some things that could be used to illustrate some of the things that have to be considered when making judgments about "what really happened".

This just showed up in my RSS feeds, and is somewhat relevant I think:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/no...ger-advocates/