2007-01-12

old greedy

I have been considering a response since new year's, when Andy pointed out your diary entry to me. and it has weighed heavy on my mind, to try to come up with some new creative way of looking at this. I like to think of myself as someone who listens to all sides and sees the different point of views as well as I can. Maybe I'm just easy to pursuade in that regard to some of the more viscious ideas floating around. But I like to keep an open mind.

and to settle on the 911 debate, is to have closed your mind to certain other possibilities. For instance, people who think it was an inside job usually find no way to admit into their heads that Osama and AlQueda are the sole perpetrators. They are settled on that.
Without re reading what I have written before, and i hope i don't contradict past statements here, I want to say that for me, 911 is not settled. I am an agnostic, perhaps. I don't know what happened. Strange questions arise that warrant examination. At least in the old days, when things weren't so dire, we as citizens could examine things like plane crashes if we wanted to. For example, all of the pieces, even from an ocean crash, would be drudged up and laid out in a warehouse somewhere. This was part of every investigation.

Ah, i hear you say already, "But we did have an investigation, the 9/11 Commision..." Yes. An investigation that cost a very small fraction of, say the Lewinsky investigation, that was started some 400+ days later, an investigation that picked and chose which information to include into its reports. I have had the priviledge of meeting some folk who have testified for this investigation, and have heard accounts of how their testimony was brushed over. This is a personal story, and I draw personal belief from it. I can't ask you to believe what I believe . . . I have just had the curiousity to go and look under rocks. You could read David Ray Griffin's second book on 911 : "9/11 Commission Report - Ommissions and Distortions" and draw your own conclusions. At the very least, it calls into question many results the investigation comes up with as well as the contorted means by which they are found.

There is a huge cognitive dissonance here. Where I say, "Oh, these questions are really interesting," others will say "You are a conspiracy theorist." What? Who said anything about a theory? Your mention of Socrates reminds me, I am trying to draw out what you know by asking questions. Socrates says, "I don't know anything, but ..." and then expertly dismantles his friend Meno or Phaidrus, or whoever; and makes them look like fools. I'm not that much an expert, and I am sincerely looking to be proven wrong.

For instance, the only scientist I have found to go on record supporting the government story, who is not on a government payroll, MIT's Thomas Eager, contradicts himself strangely. He talks about how, when you think about it, the building has no where to go but down, (OKay...), and it's mostly made of air, (yes...). But he admits that the 'truss failure' theory cannot account for the 47 structural beams in the middle of the building. He predicts that they should remain standing, and can't explain their disappearance. Well that's what we're all wondering, those steel vertical beams in the center of the building present a large amount of the integrity of that building. Now in the Commission's final report, it basically says that the building has a hollow center, with the strength coming from the outer lattice. Can you see how this SEEMS to be some sort of mythmaking? Why would the report say that? a hollow core is very different from 47 steel beams, isn't it?

Well, really, me talking about science and engineering is pretty silly. I'm no expert, just an ignoramous who doesn't trust his government/corporatacracy/major media outlets. And that's what this really comes down to, right, is trust. Who do you trust?

Actually, re-reading over my last post, I think I included enough little bits of info to get the ball rolling, if you are curious to look into these ideas. If you are not, then no amount of effort I make will make you any more curious. I, on the other hand, am completely willing to disparage alternative ideas if you can prove them wrong. In fact, I have gone back and forth a few times between official and alternative ideas, and have personally discounted what I thought to be true before. So, its really like a vacuum that I am presenting you with. No answers right now, just plenty of questions.

I agree with your complexity model, and the car hitting the tree. My thoughts, though (stolen from Judy Wood), would add that after the tree is hit (not by a car, but by an arrow drenched in kerosene) that it collapses into a pile of sawdust.

You ask, when speaking of WTC 7, "Where is there a similar scenario of a tall building raging on fire for seven hours, with no attempts to put it out?" Number one, the fires in WTC7 were not raging, they were relatively small. A good question is why it was decided not to fight them, while other buildings were fought in the complex. (WTC4, 5, 6...). Perhaps you've seen the images of highrises burning on 'conspiracy' videos . . . Fires raging for 18 hours in Philly (1991), over 24 hours in Madrid (2003), and the steel frames remained standing.

The difference between the towers being hit by planes, and the towers collapsing is Not just a "marginal psychological difference," as you conjecture. After all, a building was hit by a plane last year in New York. And by a Yankees pitcher no less! Yet who remembers that? We aren't going to war with drunken baseball players, or whatever.
And we are at war with Terror (a means of fighting, not an actual thing or place), and this war will stretch through our lifetimes, we are told. (And why was it necessary to tell us that so early on, when things are so uncertain?) And we have already guaranteed that our children and probably our grandchildren will be paying the debts of this war, nearly 5 years old. Excuse me if I don't believe everything I'm told anymore. There is more to this rebuttal, but it will be in the next post...