Home | Hegemony | Archives | Blogroll | Resume | Links | RSS Feed | subscribe by email    

Flagrancy

to Reason

 

blog roll


    15 years of decline in armed conflict..., 2005-05-25 08:38:07 | Main | worlwide system of injustice and torture..., 2005-05-25 10:52:44

    I don't remember who was trying to convince me of this one a couple weeks ago but it rings a bell:

    For example, according to www.911research.wtc7.net, steel melts at a temperature of 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit, but jet fuel burns at only 1,517 degrees F. No melted steel, no collapsed towers. "The planes did not bring those towers down; bombs did," says www.abovetopsecret.com. Wrong. In an article in the Journal of the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society and in subsequent interviews, Thomas Eagar, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explains why: steel loses 50 percent of its strength at 1,200 degrees F; 90,000 liters of jet fuel ignited other combustible materials such as rugs, curtains, furniture and paper, which continued burning after the jet fuel was exhausted, raising temperatures above 1,400 degrees F and spreading the inferno throughout each building. Temperature differentials of hundreds of degrees across single steel horizontal trusses caused them to sag--straining and then breaking the angle clips that held the beams to the vertical columns. Once one truss failed, others followed. When one floor collapsed onto the next floor below, that floor subsequently gave way, creating a pancaking effect that triggered each 500,000-ton structure to crumble. Conspiricists argue that the buildings should have fallen over on their sides, but with 95 percent of each building consisting of air, they could only have collapsed straight down.

    Etc. It is a little insulting to cast Michael Moore in with this lot of conspiracy artists, at worst he could only be accused of vapid innuendo.

    update: I don't think the story bothered linking to the Popular Mechanics story, so I will.


:: posted by buermann @ 2005-05-25 10:17:00 CST | link


    Comments:
      After the lst plane hit the building, firemen @ the crash scene said the fires were small and would soon be put out. There's a photo of a building occupant standing very near the fire. So where is this inferno? The official version of this simply will not withstand any sustained scrutiny.

    posted by Dickfitzgerald @ 2005-05-25 12:57:10 | link

      This is a good one, thanks.

      You're absolutely right, the raging inferno I watched on TV that day, have seen countless times since, from multiple eyewitness and network angles, corroborated by thousands of New Yorkers who were there - many of whom barely escaped said raging inferno with their lives - simply does not stand up to these claims of some firemen arrived at the scene before a 2nd airliner filled with tons of jet fuel hurtled into the building. My mistake.

      Have you read any of the 9/11 conspiracy material? They have your answer in pictures.

    posted by buermann @ 2005-05-25 15:31:19 | link

      Leaving aside the Mexican and Spanish-American Wars, @ least 2=previous wars have been started by conspiracies. Stinnett's Day of Deceit, using FOIA, shows that Pearl Harbor was just that (eg., the Japanese exercised no radio silence @ all and the US had broken the codes). All the information now released by Vietnam indicates that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was staged by the US as a pretext for war. So it has happened before. One has every reason to be speptical of the official version of 911, esp. since crucial issues were not discussed (WTC 7 was hit by no planes yet was demolished, the firemem telling people hours ahead of time that they were getting ready to set off explosives. Even Giuliani admitted that.). Dismissing such skepticism with grad student sarcasm about "conspiracy theories" is adolescent.

    posted by Dcikfitzgerald @ 2005-05-25 20:38:49 | link

      I'm familiar and then some. The Gulf of Tonkin wasn't staged so much as illicited, they sent the boat where they knew it would be fired upon. The Pentagon Papers refuted any pretensions held by folks who denied or continue to this day to deny that consecutive US administrations, along with congress, from the 1950s on, were willfully lying to the American public every step we took into the quagmire. Various hoaxes were perpetuated to arouse public support for the first Gulf War. Closest to the mark were plans made in the 60s to blow up American civillian aircraft as a pretext for invading Cuba. They never did that one though, by the way, probably because they knew they'd never be able to hide it. They couldn't even hide the plans, and the guys that made them are probably still alive.

      One thing you'll note about all these incidents - including the Spanish-American war - were that they were, a) conspiracies, and b) shortly discovered once committed. Final, irrefutable confirmations might not come in until decades after the fact, but they never stay very quiet.

      I'm not being sarcastic about the skepticism, the skepticism I'm sympathetic to. I understand that. What I don't understand is why the folks working to prove the US blew up the WTC are making about the same quality of examination of the evidence as the conspiracy of dunces that lied and bullshitted us into Iraq. I sometimes wonder what they're trying to lie and bullshit us into.

      In the meantime an actual conspiracy to start a war was organized and has had no shortage of leaks and whistleblowers - the British memo that's been public for a month now was nailing the coffin pretty thoroughly. They all but announced it before taking office alongside the "another Pearl Habor" quote that is thrown around on the 9/11 websites as evidence that the US government was engaging in a conspiracy to get us into a war. And here were are talking about whether or not a fire millions of Americans saw with their own eyes four years ago ever happened.

      All due respect sir, but I take your adolescent and raise you one fool.

    posted by buermann @ 2005-05-25 23:11:48 | link




    go ahead, express that vague notion
    Name:
    Email:
    Homepage:
    Comment

    your turing test:

journals, notes,
and
other curmudgeonry

Enforcing
American
Hegemony
- A Timeline -

Oil for Nothing:
US Holds On Humanitarian Supplies
Iraq: 1997-2001


the good book
and other cultural
artifacts


The Autobiography
of
Mother Jones


Contact Info:
buermann@mastodon