Les Jones

Yeah, I have to explain this kind of esoterica to regular folks who are 'not in the know' of such things all the time.

Being an architect, I have a rather jaundiced view on these conspiracies, as you can probably guess, and most people who believe in the crap like Loose Change look at you with a straight face when telling you about it.

I can talk till I'm blue in the face about how steel reacts with heat, and that you don't have to melt it to make it fail, but it's something that just falls on deaf ears. They've heard what they want to hear, and that is the end of it. Reason and science can not make them change their minds about these things.

Oh well, another step further into the "endarkenment", as Billy Beck says.

Seriously. Is this woman our national court jester?

Of course I will always loathe her over the gun thing, so pretty much anything she's said from that point on has been mentally underscored with a laughtrack in my head.

I think you only qualify as a serial killer if you kill more than 3. I'm not there yet. But I'm not giving up!

uh Rosie, it's called a blast furnace.Fire melts steel. As a liberal I am sad she's speaks with her foot in her mouth.There was no 9-11 conspiracy.There was a conspiracy to get us into a war in Iraq, Bush and Cheney engineered it but it had nothing to do with 9-11.

If Rosie wasn't on "The View" she would be passing out torches in a village somewhere. Aparently people with ill concieved bumper sticker philosophies don't have time research things. She is a tribute to hasty opinions, incomplete logic, and fast food.

What if the four planes had been fully loaded Russian bombers headed for New York and Washington? Would it have been that easy?

Why aren't there any images of the Pentagon plane from a highway cam, a weather cam, or other similar device in a city as large as Washington? Additionally, if I had taken off in a run across the lawn of the Pentagon carrying a rocket launcher, wouldn't there have been either stills or video of my approach?

I think what most skeptics are getting at is the large number of troubling questions that have come out of the events and conditions surrounding the attacks. It's not impossible, for example, that an incident far less elaborate could have been allowed to play out, but somehow was taken in a more sinister direction. Consider the possibility that what might have been planned as a multiple hijacking (on the day an Air Force hijacking exercise was in progress) was commandeered by the hijackers who had greater plans of their own.

By multiple hijacking I mean an incident involving only the planes and passengers.

B, does it matter that one plane struck perpendicularly one of the buildings, carrying all of the plane and fuel deep into the interior of that building, and the other cut through a corner, ejecting a significant portion of the plane and fuel outside the second building, yet the failure and destruction of the two structures was almost identical?

what annoys me is these nutcases are imagining the wrong conspiracy.

seriously, i can think of several "the gubmint engineered 9/11" conspiracy theories i would easily believe. all the way from "the CIA meddled in al-quaeda to make them attack the US" to simply "the NSA knew about it all along but deliberately ignored it", all for nefarious reasons of getting us into a profitable war, or whatnot. the hijacked planes would be very handy tools, the hijackers useful pawns, in any number of such conspiracies, and none of them require special magical non-meltable steels.

but what do the actual 9/11 conspiracy theorists come up with? fire that doesn't burn. some of 'em come up with airliners that aren't airliners. a few of 'em imagine huge, yet completely secret, efforts to rig the WTC with explosives for controlled demolition. all of which, of course, is entirely pointless in an entirely frustrating way. argh!

SemiPundit,

To answer your question, NO.

SemiPundit,

You said;

"ejecting a significant portion of the plane and fuel outside the second building"

You are trying to argue here that this was the case, which it isn't. Sorry, but you are wrong.

Yes, the first plane did hit at an angle that was far more incident than the second, and yes, there was less damage done because of that. THAT is precisely why the north tower stood longer than the south tower. This shouldn't be too difficult to understand.

The south tower was hit more squarely, as you mentioned, and at a much more advantageous spot (lower) for the highjacker's intentions. That the south tower collapsed sooner was almost a given, depite being hit about 20 minutes later than the north.

The collapse thing is really a matter of physics, and really can easily be explained with a firm understanding of Newton's laws, but most people don't understand physics, so all I can say is that the whole conspiracy regarding the "controlled demo" of the building is horse-dung. In fact, the only way for the buildings to have behaved in any other manner would have been with the use of high explosives. It's simply quite impossible for a building to be toppled (pushed over, to one side) like the conspirators are suggesting, except with structural shape charges at the base of the building.

There's a lot more ground to cover on this, but I don't want to write another novel on this subject, and it's Les's site, not mine.

http://ramblingsfromoz.blogspot.com/2006_08_01_archive.html

Just say no? Is there a further, concise statement that can be made to suggest that the manner of their similar collapse is well within what should have been expected?

I don't care much for conspiracy theories in this matter. However, my life's work has centered on scientific investigation in which we have attempted to explain phenomena as exhaustively as possible in order to understand the processes we have observed. I still say there are far too many troubling questions remaining.

Every American should be outraged that those planes could have been in the air for that long, with no transponders, without being challenged-- on a day when a major hijacking training exercise was actually underway. Paine Stewart's plane was quickly intercepted and escorted halfway across the country.

Don't forget, too, that Mr. Bush claimed that he saw the first plane strike the first building, commented on how bad the pilot must have been, then went on into the classroom where he said that Andy Card later whispered into his ear that the second plane had struck.

No video of the plane hitting the first tower was available until much later, I believe the next day, taken by a tourist.

Yes, and Les has to approve it before it's posted, but I've written about this before, and for the layman, in an easy to understand kind of way.

August 1, 2006, over at my place, I posted a response to several questions at A View from the Porch that a few rabid conspiracy types had 'asked', suggesting that the whole thing was setup.

Your 'troubling questions' may never get an answer, at least one that is acceptable to you, but I want to point out that the doubt that these unanswered questions may raise is not proof of any sort of conspiracy. Sorry, but that is all that I have seen from that lot of people since this whole Loose Change thing began a couple of years ago.

Enough.

SP,

"No video of the plane hitting the first tower was available until much later, I believe the next day, taken by a tourist."

And there is a good reason for this, if you think about the circumstances. I'll leave the rest up to you.

Much to my embarrassment, I must admit that I can't figure out what that reason is; I'm afraid you'll have to help me out with this one. I suppose Bush was just confused as well about how he recalled that day's events.

Not gonna happen SP, with that 'help' I mean. You've been mentally polluted by something or by someone in regards to this subject, and you've got your mind made up, and that is that. You'll never be convinced, no matter how truthful or accurate the resolution of the problem being presented is, so let's just part ways on this, and be gentlemen shall we?

I have the observable evidence and education of the exact kind needed to evaluate these things, and it is indeed part of my job to do similar constructs and rebuilding of failures. I know what happened, and watched almost all of it unfold, albeit from a distance (through the tube), but my conclusions from about 15 after beginning to watch things unfold were almost precisely what came to happen.

How did I know this?

Lots of education on past failures.

Sorry, I've spent too many hours getting worked up over the sheer stupidity of these 9/11 conspiracies and the number of people who follow and believe in them. It's all pretty similar to the JFK thing, and I wasn't even alive at that time to have experienced it first hand. I am well aware of the truth about that debacle, and I am seeing that this instance is no different. It's mostly a bunch of stupid, irrelevant questions asked by a bunch of folks who couldn't find their way out of a paper bag.

Have a nice life.

That is my intention.

We'll have to leave the resolution of the matter of the tourist's video and Mr. Bush's recollections unresolved, since I really do not have a clue about what you were getting at.

Goodbye.

No clue.

Gotcha.