Some of the lenses and filters I sometimes look through
personal note
I have tried, for the 16 years of using this pseudonym, to build a reputation of consistency: of being consistently random and unpredictable, advocating opinions I don't have, of trolling the Socratic way, of interjecting with irrelevant factoids, always admitting, even if often reluctantly, when I'm wrong and never be ashamed to confess ignorance. I have never shied from a debate, make a point of turning each encounter a fair and respectful duel of the minds as if in a friendly sparring among equals, not the mudfights of the egos so often beheld. I don't want you to look at me or my finger, I'm begging you to look into the direction I'm showing you by pointing at it.
It so can happen from time to time that I do make an argument for hollow earth, for example. Or point out the superrotation of Earth's atmosphere to poke a hole into heliocentrism. Or simply take the position of the Machian Principle and ask why Tesla defense of the aether was never heard. There is method to the madness:
I understand and agree with most of all arguments for the Galilean view, but objectively, some counter-arguments and observations seem very valid to me, so my strategy is a simple one: if I need help understanding something, need external input to unstuck me, so I make a claim on the internet and expect someone to know better. If the argument is sound, that person has won the argument, and I the understanding, wisdom and knowledge. So when I encounter such a fallacious or plain wrong and half-baked argument myself the next time, I can refute it with a clear conscience. Win-win. Fookin' great game.
Try this, for example:
LM approaches CSM for docking / earthrise in b.g., AS11-44-6642 (Apollo 11). nasa.gov
Earthrise viewed from lunar orbit prior to landing, AS11-44-6550 (Apollo 11). nasa.gov
Crescent Earth, Apollo 17, nasa.gov
From a Million Miles Away, NASA Camera Shows Moon Crossing Face of Earth
Do your Thales and good luck making a convincing argument in defense of "conventional wisdom".
See what I'm getting at?
then let us continue
with an epilogue of sorts to my previous post, The Case For an Independent and International Investigation Into The Terrorist Attacks of September 11th, 2001, my own, personal view on the matter, which strictly has nothing to do with anything any other organization or group thinks or represents.
i don't like to speculate who did 9/11,
how and why although I have ideas which threads to reasonably follow. I don't even like to speculate so much on the mode of destruction:
I am deeply impressed by Niels Harrit's intellect and regularly refute unfair slandering of his study, which famously found thermitic residue in the WTC dust.
Assuming the dust samples have not been tampered with by evil agents before the researchers received them, that is still not proof, and that again is not the point. Harrit himself says that it is the mechanics that give the game away, that the finding of high-tech, military-grade, self-assembled nanothermitic explosives merely supports the suspicion that those towers must have been blown up, and that skyscrapers don't just naturally or even "inevitably" disintegrate an hour after being hit by an airplane.
And maybe some PETN or other skunk works black lab techniques played a role too, and it indeed seems the rabbit hole goes much deeper.
Even highly respected 9/11 researchers leave out many aspects of the evidence, IMHO; sometimes openly to not become vulnerable to the accusation of crackpottery.
Those without a fvck to give for such considerations, for example the space beamers around Dr. Judy Wood are interesting because they are crazy good at collecting circumstantial evidence torturing the weirdness scale like the toasted cars, seismic readings, the hurricane that veered round in the last minutes, the readings of the earth magnetic field and such.
The subbasement nuke crowd around Khalezov really doesn't know how to convince. Whenever challenged to explain why the towers would crumble top-down from an explosion under the fundament, they begin t.t.t.t.o stutt.t.t.ter. "Jeff Prager" at least is honest enough to admit:
In fact, the analysis should be done the other way around: there is very little if any public data available on what mixture of fallout, fission products, isotopes and stable end products are produced when an atomic bomb explodes.
My take-away is simply that I cannot even rely on the experts who seem to support my case. Too often, their explanations are complicated as well, work from wrong premises, or outright commit the same fallacy I condemn the "offical experts" for: the appeal to their own authority. I had a terrible dispute with Rob Balsamo, the Founder of Pilots for 9/11 Truth, because of this stance on /r/911truth. The simple fact of the matter is that AE911T are a fringe minority among millions of architects and engineers who simply remain silent, and with their silence, support the "consensus".
Reality however is not an exercise in democracy, it is utterly tyrannic even.
toldyaso, conspiracy theories are nonsense!
The official non-explanations for the "collapse" mechanics still constitute conclusive proof for a conspiracy of silence of academia.
The implications are outrageous: somehow, the Towers must have been pre-rigged with thousands and thousands of cutter charges and kicker charges to cut the steel into the chunks that would fit on the trucks for transport.
With pure intellectual honesty, it is not so easy to make the jump to the conclusion that "the government" was in on the plot from the beginning. It is not even credible:
there is complete understanding and agreement for the argument "government is bureaucratic, slow, incompetent, inefficient and unable to conspire its way out of a wet paper bag". Of course, "the government did it" is lazy. But undeniably government did its best to cover up the evidence for its own failure while yelling "hold the thief!" and harrassing brown-faced people for calling their imaginary god mode friend a different name. BUT if government is good at anything, it is the systemic irresponsibility and institutionalized covering of arses.
Suddenly, the picture becomes much clearer:
all it takes is twenty good men [scnr] in key positions who make the best use of the already existing compartmentalization of government bureaucracy and its agencies.
why would even the best constitution be immune against a coup d'état from within, by nationals with inter- and paranational interests?
I understand 9/11 best if seen as a stage magic trick (and those who have watched The Prestige might follow me without spoiling the Great Reveal for all others). I also believe the magicians botched the presentation, that the trick was supposed to be even more grandiose, you know, with Flight 93 and WTC 7 and Cheney getting all snappy and stuff.
And there is truly no quest for revenge, satisfaction or justice in my intentions, although it would be cool to hear it from of the horses' mouth one day. I like novels with closure. And my motivation is not political or ideological in any way, about which country or its representatives did what and similar considerations or this whole beef between the Abrahamic religions, which is a completely different story which shall be told elsewhere. Stop mutilating babies, arseholes.
for the first ten years, I felt torn between the "official" and the "tinfoil" conspiracy theories.
A little background: at the time, I had finished school and for 3 years written on a novel I knew would take the world in a storm and become an instant classic. It was the SciFi-Spy-Teenage novel of a pimply, nerdy, virgin geek with ugly glasses whose Marty Stu married the alien beauty in the end, of course, but I took care that my "aliens" would travel under light-speed, that they had artificial centrifuge gravity and so on. I must still somewhere have the calculations for the rotations of their planetary system and the diameter of their 40-year travel centrifuge; and even a POV-Ray render of their spaceship.
More Star Trek than Star Wars, if you get my meaning.
A minor element in the plot was a car that violently crashed into a pedestrian bridge. I heard somewhere that a platoon will break stride when they cross a bridge to prevent additive oscillation, so I wondered if a similar excitation on the fundamental frequency effect could occur from such a crash. The example of Galopping Gertie only proved to me that there must be a continuous inflow of energy, a single hit would not be enough.
It was from that perspective that I was curious for the explanation that would be given for the indescribable phenomenon I saw on the TV screen. FEMA released their report, some "truthers" published their rebuttals, there was that complicated-looking paper which only said "once it goes, it goes", more waiting for the NIST report which, by its own admission, didn't treat the mechanics at all. And finally, the Bazant/Verdure paper 2007 disintegrated all hope that there would ever be some honesty in this debate. Let Jon Cole aka physicsandreason summarize the state of the debate.
I just found it unfair, I guess, that I took such measures to make the story, plot and devices of my nerdy novel believable, and they got into the history books with these absurd evasions. That is worthy of some serious table-flipping, is it not?
As already mentioned: I was torn, but mostly argued against weak arguments for the official one, like "the jet fuel melted the steel beams", because I wanted the argument against the conspiracy theorists to be sound at least.
What I really tried to do was disprove one of the tinfoil theories: the tower collapse mechanics. I was sure that it must be somehow possible to demonstrate that such a domino effect is easy to reproduce, but always failed in thought experiment phase. Of course I was aware of Cube-Square law, so one would have to make the "floors" really heavy and the "columns" really weak, perhaps, like balancing pavement slabs on chicken wire or something...
In 2011, I had an epiphany of sorts first watching, and then replicating, a series of simple experiments, reading up on the maths and physics, discussing with a bunch of people on gulli:board and finally writing an open letter to Prof. Bazant.
It is, without additional springs or other forms of well-balanced tension, almost impossible to make a tower reliably collapse in such a manner, no matter its size or density because it would always buckle over first. Some form of additional energy must have been present.
it is hard to describe the cascade of thoughts which, in the following two weeks, self-collapsed in the domino deconstruction of my whole world view.
What if other "conventional wisdom" was just as wrong, what if other completely crazy "conspiracy theories" are actually true and provable fact? And how did "they", whoever they were, know they would get away with such a great deception - literally bending the laws of physics, abusing science, to get their way?
Physics teachers all over the world should have written letters to their newspapers and parliamentary representatives with references to the angular velocity of Newton's rotation in his grave over the obvious blunders of the official math!
That's when I understood the term "rabbit hole".
It has become a sort of lens for my view on the "reality" around me. They got away with 9/11, heck, they fooled me into believing in "domino effects due to Cube-Square law" for a while - why exactly am I so sure that man walked on the moon, the earth revolves around itself and the sun, that Einstein's abolition of the aether is justifiable, how can I trust them not to fake the results of vaccine and GMO studies, how can the Piltdown Man prove there is no consciousness greater than that of our feeble human minds...?
9/11 broke the trust I had in learned, studied experts and the academic rituals of scientific truth-finding.
The whole concept of peer-review has proven a farce in the debates between Professor Bazant and those who found schoolboy blunders in his work. The strongest discussion never made it into print even, with threadbare excuses.
the media have proven just as untrustworthy
Already in 2003, the venerable weekly "Der Spiegel", the "assault gun of democracy", as it was once known, a medium I trusted to form my opinion on world politics and the tidings of reality, brought out this:
"Conspiracy September 11th:
How Conspiracy Theorists turn reality on its head"
I paid them to insult my intellect. More evasions, ridicule, strawman arguments, no mention whatsoever of the strong points made by those alleged "conspiracy nuts". Is it too much to expect at least an attempt to pass the Ideological Turing Test?
State and private TV fell over each other in their attempts to brush the real issues under the carpet, while making a show of a bunch of kids who took the facts, mixed them up with a lot of speculation and turned it into the highly enjoyable, but useless fantasy movie "Loose Change".
so that's how children feel when they find out there's no santa and no easter bunny - on the same day
My last attempt to prove that I am merely a conspiracy nut, to calm myself, to not fear that the whole world is in the hand of a few select psychopaths who have turned my fellow humans, friends and family into unthinking, zombie-like creatures, to make sure there is simply a knot in my threads of thought.
I went to Metabunk and abused their politeness policy, by politely making my case, analytically and experimentally - the same I always make: #towerchallenge. Built a tower, drop top 1/4 on the rest, observe, report, repeat. I used Prof. Bazants Fig. 3&4 from the 07 work to refute the claim that progression of collapse is inevitable: it can be arrested.
From years of lurking, I was sure that all the experts - Tony Szamboti is a regular contributor! - had just failed to explain the matter as simply as possible. In my arrogance, I thought I could help one or another user there see the error of h(is|er) ways if I could just break the whole matter down into simple high school physics.
Sadly, he has hidden my threads Claim: "There is no way to deny the inevitability of progressive collapse" (only 4 pages to consensus, 9 pages in total!) and How does this Domino Tower Collapse relate to 9/11 Collapses (only 2 pages!!) in an invisible "Rambles" forum now, but still stands proudly behind Towards A Replicable Physical Model Illustrating Aspects of the Collapse of The WTC Towers on 9/11, a magnetic book shelf of sorts and worth a watch if you want to know how modern skyscrapers are engineered.
The second thread got me banned because I - politely! - insisted that
- F=ma
- forces and accelerations, momentum and velocities are vector quantities that add up according to parallelogram law
- momentum is conserved in a closed system
- classical mechanics are applicable to the "collapse" of the Twin Towers, whether intentional or "natural"
...and the ban was justified. Not for that. No, for another crime I committed. I rolled on the floor laughing all the way through the thread, where Mick posted video clip after video clip of models that refused to collapse the way he claimed should be the most natural way. Delayed Karma punished my egoistical, arrogant Schadenfreude.
To summarize the argument: although the tower stood on the ground and each storey on another, they claimed E=mgh, which is true for the CoG of course, but only in the second the bowling ball is beginning to fall freely will all this gravitational potential energy be converted into kinetic energy. Otherwise, the normal force provided by the "elastic-plastic potential energy" E=.5kx² - the tower's stiffness - has the sum of all mechanical energy remain a stable ZERO. The system must be extremely metastable to fall into a more stable state in such a powerful manner.
I am sure there is a simple thermodymaxwellnamical way to express this energy balance, but, alas, I am afraid to make the attempt because...
...i take this matter seriously
and don't want to spread false rumors with it. Too often laypeople see something and copy it unquestioningly, and certainly, I have fallen prey to such accidents or traps as well too often in the past. But if you could follow me so far, you know where this is going.
what this means is
do not let my jests about flat earth, expanding earth or illuminati reptilian aliens distract you from the very serious message encrypted therein:
Think, people, THINK.
There is a difference between noise and signal, between accident and intent.
It's not just about 9/11. It's about the veil that has been pulled over our eyes, about the hypnosis, about our dependency and engineered ignorance, our illusion of knowledge. It is about how OBVIOUS it all is.
it's not that I feel a religious calling or something
far from that; if Jehovah's Witnesses couldn't keep me although they got me from birth, no other organized form of "religion" shall entrap me, not the false atheism, nor the wrong ideas of democracy, and least of all the misconceptions about Utopia and and "true" anarchy. Forgive an old man for giving up on trying to save the whole world at once anymore, the days I run knocking at every door are over.
No, this is still all part of the argument-building, and we're still only in the basement, so stay tuned, follow, and stick your data snorkels into the #dugarun streem from now on because this is not going to be a sand castle.
Three eyes wide open, hail Eris and five tons of flax,
may the Force be with you and Qapla'
Aka
The very first thought I had watching 911 live was "Nero/Rome". That original thought has only intensified in the intervening years.
That the very same men who lied about WMD should have told us the truth about 911? I'll just leave it there.
Well put........ "government is bureaucratic, slow, incompetent, inefficient and unable to conspire its way out of a wet paper bag". It's easy to get sucked into the conspiracy theories but it's somehow easier to get sucked into the propaganda governments offer us. The first thing to ask is .... who's profiting? follow the money. The middle east is a good example. Create a boogyman (ISIS) and destabilize the world and feed everyone a bunch of BS based on fear.
Thank you, @trendwizard, you have your way with words too, I see:
Precisely. With the proviso that I wouldn't call it "government propaganda" because I see it as evident government has been hijacked and has itself become a shadow on Plato's cave wall, not the player itself. It is the propaganda of big banks, corporations, media, the military-industrial complex, in short, if you forgive my lack of a better word, the "illuminati elite".
Oh, the 9/11 Commission did just that, but they found this trail only leads to law-abiding American citizens, not to a bunch of desert mountain cave dwelling ragheads, so they did not pursue that venue further... ;)
These messages hurt at first, but liberate from the fear and hopelessness in the long run.
Simply Great Information and Presentation
Simply Great Information and Presentation
Cool.