http://www.gamelizard.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=565#565
There’s a post on my own forums to keep a political rant from exploding here 
I’m curious to know what other people think of this clip. I dunno if I believe it, but I wanna know what you guys think 
No, load of rubbish. Just yet another conspiracy theorist making uneducated comments about something they know nothing about.
For similar kinds of arguments, see Google.
;D
interesting. Could you be more specific? It’s one thing to refute blindly, it’s another thing to say, “here’s one thing he said and here’s proof that it’s wrong.” I’m curious to see someone actually show one of his facts to be false.
Well, here’s a few comments for you:
[]Over-sensationalisation.
[]Basic physics presented in a slow and careful way, encouraging the viewer to start believing the narrator. “Hey, he’s right about that - he must be right about all of it!”
[]No information about the narrator - why should I believe his opinion on the behaviour of high explosives?
[]And is he a civil engineer? Why believe anything he says about construction and the behaviour of materials like concrete and steel?
[]Analysing a really grainy, over-exposed, low-resolution frame from a low-framerate security camera, and complaining that the explosion looks “too white”.
[]Narrator compares flames caused by burning solid fuel (a candle) to the Pentagon crash, and complains that they don’t look the same. Never considers that a huge thrown-up mist of flammable liquid that rapidly evaporates and ignites behaves slightly differently to a stick of wax.
[]Overly pretentious - “You’ll be roasted by the infra-red radiation”. How about saying “heat”?
[]“Why hide this video?” Who said anything about hide? It was one of the first things I saw on the day, and was available frame-by-frame on the CNN website.
[]Never bothers to come to any conclusions or opinions about the Pentagon crash.
[]Building 7 collapsed into a small pile; demolitions experts try to make buildings collapse into a small pile. Therefore it must have been deliberately demolished! Uh…
[]Narrator repeatedly states that building 7 only had small fires it in, and never backs it up with proof. Then proceeds to base the rest of the argument on this opinion being a fact.
[]Shows picture of one end of a steel beam (presumably from building seven) and thereby proves that all the beams in building seven were massive. No, without further analysis you can only say that at least one beam was this size, for at least four feet of its length.
[]Never considers that different materials have different properties. Oh, well.
[]“The destruction of the rubble was illegal” Well, okay. you find somewhere to store tens of thousands of tonnes of concrete and twisted metal then. No? Fine.
[]Narrator doesn’t seem to appreciate cause and effect. First, two aeroplanes filled with jet fuel crash into the buildings. Third, they collapse. Is he really trying to say that step two wasn’t the impact of the planes and the burning of the jet fuel weakening the structure? See Ockham’s Razor.
[]“The specifics of the fires in building 7…” Yeah, see that word “specifics”? That’s a good indication that the report said a lot more about the fires, not quoted by the narrator. Get hold of the report and read it first-hand before believeing one persons one-line summary.
[]“Installing bullet-proof glass on one floor of a building is like installing bullet-proof glass in one window of the president’s car!” No, far from it. The two situations are totally different.
[]Why did the floor have its own air supply? Why not? Why is that so suspicious? Oh, the narrator doesn’t say.
[]“The flight paths of the two airplanes appear to have been on a course towards building seven, as if this building was broadcasting a homing signal”. Complete with curious diagram showing the predicted (curved) path of the plane which crashed before going anywhere near building seven. Um, you could devote an entire page to ripping this comment apart.
[]Continual repetition of “as I explain further in my book”.
[]“How can buildings made of massive steel beams shred themselves into pieces? This is as ridiculous as an automobile crashing into a wall and then shredding itself into pieces!” No comment.
[]Comparing jet fuel burning inside the core of the twin towers to a metal grate placed over a line of candles - and thereby prooving that fire doesn’t destroy steel. Wha?
[*]Comments that the buildings didn’t fall outward, but collapsed inward. Also carefully describes the 300-odd steel columns that ran up the side of the building and the hundred-odd thick steel bands that ran around the outside. Doesn’t consider that there may just be a connection there…
Etc etc etc. It’s really not worth going on. :
I think conspiracy theorist and religious nuts have the same personality type. ie obsessing over stupid sh*t.
[*]Over-sensationalisation.
Well it seems that you didn’t have any points I was hoping for. Your last one was interesting, as you actually alluded to a fact, but then the point didn’t actually hold as I explained.
This is not me trying to say the narrator is right. This is JUST me saying that you didn’t give any good arguments against it. I don’t want a long list of opinions on why people think it’s bad. I want ONE FACT that does well to argue against him. Let’s come up with some real proof so that we can show people why this conspiracy is wrong. I don’t WANT to believe he’s right, however that doesn’t mean I’m going to agree with you either. I won’t agree with anyone unless their facts are good, and well, his facts were STILL much better than yours cfmdobbie. That doesn’t make me feel good 
This is very very OT indeed. So much so I’d recommend deleting it. But whilst we’re on the subject, here’s something I really think you ought to hear about:
Given how incredibly poor humans are at making computer programs that work, it’s obvious that human’s didn’t invent the computer (no way we could manage that) and therefore Intel must in fact be a cover for the CIA’s Alien-technology program (you see? Intel == short for extra-terrestrial-INTELligence? Wow. It’s all so obvious when you think about it…). And Microsoft, well…it begins with “M”, so I guess it must be the Martians that run it. Yeah, and, did you know that Micrsoft is a REAL PERSON according to the US Law? It’s like, a special law, they made just so that when the Martians want to start exercising power they can do stuff like vote and even run for President.
So, in fact, computers are alien technology and martians are trying to take over the world by getting voted in to the White House. It’ll be like no-one can even expose them because they’ll just say they were “democratically elected”.
…
The net + modern tech + modern libraries make it incredibly cheap for any bored student to concoct a beautifully believable “theory” and peddle it across the globe.
So, thousands of people do. Every year. And I’m glad they have such fun doing it; no, really, I am glad. But…that means that we each hear a dozens of dumbass conspiracy BS every year even if we try to avoid it, and frankly most of us are bored of it.
Hence, don’t be surprised if people get annoyed and can’t be bothered to “argue seriously” if you start thrusting one such theory at them, no matter how interesting it may be to you.
[quote]I don’t WANT to believe he’s right, however that doesn’t mean I’m going to agree with you either. I won’t agree with anyone unless their facts are good
[/quote]
I think cfmdobbie showed conclusively that the shiester in questions facts ARE NOT good. And fortunately for us, reality doesn’t require your belief.[/edit]
LOL I like blah’s theory.
That is an interesting idea though, the first sentence:
[quote] Given how incredibly poor humans are at making computer programs that work, it’s obvious that human’s didn’t invent the computer
[/quote]
Is it just a coincidence that the developement of the digital computer in the mid to late 40’s coincides with the Roswell ‘incident’?
Godel, Turing, Von Neumann and others were all a bunch of REALLY smart people. Godel posed the question, Turing invented the theoretical machine and Von Neumann built it (the computer you’re using today is a ‘Von Neumann architecture’). Or did they?
One thing almost all the early workers in computer science had in common was spending time at Princeton in the 30’s. This is obviously when they were replace with Martian pod creatures. :
For me, fact that gamma(1/2) = sqrt(PI) is one of biggest conspiracy thingies out there - on the scale of universe. When you start to consider that both sides of equation are defined by natural properties (you can argue about gamma, but it is based on natural numbers factorials and Kronecker said natural numbers were given by God ) - then such coincidence cannot be random. This is a BIG thing for me. On the other hand, worrying if building 7 was shown not enough times on national TV hardly seems like a global conspiracy (BTW, have you noticed how often buildings 3 and 4 were mentioned ? Even author of this conspiracy-busting raport avoided giving any details about them).
Author seems to got few points right. If he would just present them and leave a food for thoughts, it would be ok. But he tries to force very specific answers to questions, using cheap manipulation with images/sentences on screen/etc - and I don’t think that any truth needs to be imprinted like this.
Just to try some counterargument. Let’s suppose that investigation team have discovered some major weakness in way buildings are done in US - which caused buildings to fall. Maybe some kind of interaction of concrete/steel/jet fuel ingredients. Maybe add natural gas/electricity to it. Maybe contractors were cheating on components when buildings were done. Anything - but something that could be easily used by terrorists to cause havoc in US. I doubt - but there is a remote possibility for that (same remote as for some ideas autor presented in movie). Shouldn’t the government try to silent these revelations and prepare some years-spanning plan to fix it quietly ? Probably it should. But of course, if government is not telling something to public, it must be Bush nuking the buildings himself to be able to nail Saddam…
There might be something wrong with the way buildings collapsed. But jumping from that to conclusions blaming the government, just because neighbour buildings had air-supplied government floor…
You are, of course, free to come to your own conclusions, but I strongly advise you to make sure they are your own, not someone else’s. I’m afraid I have little interest in this topic because I really do believe it’s complete balderdash, so I’m not really keen on a huge discussion about it - but I’ll address a few of your comments below out of courtesy:
[quote][list]
[*]Over-sensationalisation.
However, I must concede that it’s probably exactly right for the target audience he’s aiming for.
[quote][*]No information about the narrator - why should I believe his opinion on the behaviour of high explosives?
When examining evidence you have to consider the reporter of that evidence. While things may be exactly as the narrator describes, he gives me no reason to trust his words, or references for me to follow things up afterwards.
It really comes down to reputation and expertise. I expect my doctor to be well-versed in medical matters, and trust him to prescribe the correct medicine - I do not expect him to correctly diagnose a fault in my CPU fan. Likewise, I wouldn’t take medical advice from an employee of PC World.
Granted, references may be included in the book he keeps mentioning - so maybe the video isn’t the best source material for this discussion.
[quote] - as a matter of fact, the flame type comparison was not off the wall. Even if it’s not perfect, he did compare the explosion of the Pentagon crash against the explosion of a plane into one of the Twin Towers. Plane vs Building explosion compared to Plane vs. Building explosion… what’s wrong with that?
[/quote]
Different plane, different building. A good comparison is really hard to determine - unless you’re an expert in the field. I’m certainly not qualified to make that judgement call, and I have no reason to believe that the narrator is either.
[quote][*]“Why hide this video?” Who said anything about hide? It was one of the first things I saw on the day, and was available frame-by-frame on the CNN website.
[quote][*]Building 7 collapsed into a small pile; demolitions experts try to make buildings collapse into a small pile. Therefore it must have been deliberately demolished! Uh…
The flaw in the comment is that there isn’t necessarily any link there. Buses are red, postboxes are red. But that doesn’t mean all buses are postboxes.
[quote][*]Narrator repeatedly states that building 7 only had small fires it in, and never backs it up with proof. Then proceeds to base the rest of the argument on this opinion being a fact.
[quote][*] - considering basic architectural knowledge… no architect is going to stick a random big beam in a building just for fun.
[/quote]
No, not at all. But what if that beam is the foundation beam supporting the lift shaft? What if there are only two of them in the whole building, on the ground floor? I’m not saying that either of those possibilities is true - I’m saying that the narrator presents that one uncredited, unreferenced, and unlabelled picture as proof that all the beams in building 7 were that big, which just doesn’t follow.
[quote][*]“The destruction of the rubble was illegal” Well, okay. you find somewhere to store tens of thousands of tonnes of concrete and twisted metal then. No? Fine.
I’ll say something more useful to you instead:[quote]They DID break the law. If I hit someone’s car and say, “well there was nowhere else for me to go,” no one says, “well that’s a pretty good excuse I’ll let you off the hook.” You can’t make up a silly excuse to break the law. Especially considering your excuse has no basis or fact.
[/quote]
I don’t know the law in this area, but I could well imagine that only a representative selection of rubble need to be kept for further analysis - the problem then is how different people define “representative”. Even if they did get rid of everything - I can well imagine that they don’t need to keep evidence if there nothing mysterious about the circumstances - in the opinion of most people in the world, the twin towers collapsed because two planes crashed into them.
I think the overriding drive at the time was to be seen to move on - the authorities didn’t want to appear to have been beaten, they didn’t want people to demand the site turned into a permanent memorial, the site owner didn’t want to lose out on several years of premium office rent. The decision was made to clean things up as soon as possible.
[quote]BTW, no image showed any metal being twisted. That was actually part of his argument to show that it was most likely a demolitions work. Recalling my own view over the fences at the ground zero also agree with that. I saw absolutely no twisted metal.
[/quote]
It was only a turn of phrase, and free to be ignored. But on the point of a lack of twisted metal, I have no reason to believe that gigantic beams of steel should twist in that situation - I’m no civil engineer. The narrator says “surely the metal would twist?” in the same way that the Moon conspiracy theorists say “surely a cloud of dust would be thrown up?” They are applying their own experience of one thing to a very different situation - and their assumptions may no longer be valid.
[quote] - did you see the buildings sway? No, neither did I. I guess that impact didn’t really do much. When someone throws a ball at me, and I don’t move, chances are, I’m not going to fall over 5 minutes later.
[/quote]
But we’re not talking about a purely mechanical reaction - the building didn’t collapse because something hit it, it collapsed because the jet fuel created a furnace that softened the poorly-insulated steel framework.
I guess a suitable analogy is feeding someone a hundred paracetamol - they’ll be walking and talking for a while, but sooner or later their stomach will rupture and they’ll fall down dead.
[quote] - does that mean you’ve read it and you can give us an actual quote instead of quoting the narrator and just saying it wasn’t good enough?
[/quote]
Nope, I’ve not read it. And I don’t suppose the narrator has either. That just means neither or us are qualified to comment on its contents.
[quote][*]“The flight paths of the two airplanes appear to have been on a course towards building seven, as if this building was broadcasting a homing signal”. Complete with curious diagram showing the predicted (curved) path of the plane which crashed before going anywhere near building seven. Um, you could devote an entire page to ripping this comment apart.
And a “homing signal”? Please. What was that for, exactly? I can just imagine the terrorists in the cockpit saying, “Right, the homing signal is coming from that building there, so the twin towers must be those two bloody great buildings dominating the skyline then! Good thing we had that homing signal - we would never have recognised them otherwise…”
[quote][*]“How can buildings made of massive steel beams shred themselves into pieces? This is as ridiculous as an automobile crashing into a wall and then shredding itself into pieces!” No comment.
[quote][*]Comparing jet fuel burning inside the core of the twin towers to a metal grate placed over a line of candles - and thereby prooving that fire doesn’t destroy steel. Wha?
[quote]This is not me trying to say the narrator is right. This is JUST me saying that you didn’t give any good arguments against it. I don’t want a long list of opinions on why people think it’s bad. I want ONE FACT that does well to argue against him.
[/quote]
But so far I’ve seen no facts that are on his side, at all. Currently all the facts seem to point towards the generally-accepted sequence of events.
Amusingly, I didn’t know this when I made the humourous “faked Moon landings” comment in my first post, but after tracking down Eric Hufschmid’s website, I find a document titled Did Anybody Really Land On The Moon?
Naturally, his book “Painful Questions” was going to be reviewed on CNN, but at the last minute FBI agents “burst into the room, confiscated the video, and locked it up in the Suppressed News Vault at FBI headquarters”. But wait, it got worse:
[quote]A few hours later a team of heavily armed Homeland Security agents arrived to confiscate all copies of the book “Painful Questions”. The CNN staff was told to either keep quiet about the incident, or end up in Guantanomo Prison for experiments in mind-control.
[/quote]
Classic! :
cfmdobbie, that second attempt was 10 times better you’ve definitely adequately shown that this guy didn’t offer enough to confirm any conspiracy. He has ideas that maybe we alone don’t have the knowledge to completely disprove, but you’ve definitely given enough to show his points aren’t proven either. Very cool
Now I wish I had some clips of other buildings coming down to see what they look like or anything to compare they way they fell and “shredded”… that one thing still weirds me out.
I’m not a demolision expert or architect so I can’t say if this is true or not (blah is right - there’s way to many theories like this for one to really bother).
It wouldn’t really surprise me if it were tho, since the US gov lies about other important stuff.
Oh man. Maybe its just because I have a degree in Architectural Engineering but I just dont understand how some people can take this junk seriously ???
heat + load = collapse
Thats why the second building hit collapsed before the first. It was hit lower, so had a larger load sitting on the floors that were on fire.
Its obvious to anyone. Those 2 buildings couldnt possibly be built by man. Aliens built them after they saw how bad the pyramids have gotten and they needed new landing markers. Think about it. The pyramids fall into disrepair. The spaceship crashes at Roswell. So they build new landing beacons. Since they were built there have been no more alien crashes.