Seven foot lizards (or is it eight foot?)Governments never secretly conspire to do anything that would harm some of their own citizens, there are no hidden agendas, the things governments keep secret don't concern us, there's no need to even consider evidence that contradicts the official story. . .
(Incidentally, I consider this article an argument for considering the arguments against the official account of 9/11, not an actual presentation of those arguments.)
Long Live The 9/11 Conspiracy!
Anyone still care about the heap of disturbing, unsolved questions surrounding Our Great Tragedy?
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Here is your must-read for the month. Here is your oh-my-God- I'm-sending-this-piece- to-every-smart-person-I-know hunk of outstanding, distressing, disquieting media bliss.
Here it is: an absolutely exceptional inside scoop on the white-hot world of Sept. 11 conspiracy theories, writ large and smart by Mark Jacobson over at New York magazine, and it's mandatory reading for anyone and everyone who's ever entertained the nagging thought that something -- or rather, far more than one something -- is deeply wrong with the official line on what actually happened on Sept. 11.
See, it is very likely that you already know that Sept. 11 will go down in the conspiracy history books as a far more sinister affair than, say, the murky swirl of the Kennedy assassination. You probably already know that much of what exactly happened on Sept. 11 remains deeply unsettling and largely unsolved -- or to put another way, if you don't know all of this and if you fully and blithely accept the official Sept. 11 story, well, you haven't been paying close enough attention.
But on this, the third anniversary of the launch of Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq by way of whoring the tragedy of Sept. 11 for his cronies' appalling gain, what you might not know, what gets so easily forgotten in the mists of time and via the endless repetition of the orthodox Sept. 11 tale, is the sheer volume, the staggering array of unanswered questions about just about every single aspect of Sept. 11 -- the planes, the WTC towers, the Pentagon, the fires, the passengers and the cell phone calls and the firefighters and, well, just about everything. It is, when you look closely, all merely a matter of how far down the rabbit hole you are willing to go.
Verily, Jacobson, in his New York mag piece, encounters crackpots and fringe nutballs and those who think Sept. 11 was connected to aliens and electromagnetic fields and the Illuminati. It can, unfortunately, get a little crazy. But there is also a very smart, grounded, intelligent and surprisingly large faction -- which includes eyewitnesses, Sept. 11 widows, former generals, pilots, professors, engineers, WTC maintenance workers and many, many more -- who point to a rather shocking pile of evidence that says there is simply no way 19 fanatics with box cutters sent by some bearded lunatic in a cave could have pulled off the most perfectly orchestrated air attack of the century. Not without serious help, anyway.
Whose help? This, of course, is the biggest question of all, one which many of the more well-researched theories go a surprisingly long way toward answering.
You have to sift and sort. There are disturbing questions about collapse speeds and controlled demolitions and why the towers fell when the all-steel infrastructure was designed to easily withstand the temperatures of any sort of fire, even burning jet fuel. There are questions of the mysterious, media-documented blasts deep in the WTC towers that took place after the planes hit. There are questions of why there was such a short-selling spree on shares of American Airlines and United Air Lines the day before the attack, huge doubts about the failures of NORAD and the FAA, the bizarre case of the missing plane in the Pentagon crash, and also the downing of Flight 93 where, according to the coroner, no blood or major plane wreckage was actually found. There is, ultimately, the stunning failure of the entire multi-trillion-dollar American air-defense system. Just for starters.
There is also the very big question of what happened to 7 WTC, the only building not hit by anything at all, but which collapsed anyway, in a perfect controlled-demolition sort of way, for no reason anyone can sufficiently explain. But which just so happened to contain vital offices for the IRS, the Department of Defense, the CIA, the Secret Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission and more.
But perhaps Jacobson's article is insufficient for you. Perhaps you have heard much of it before, or you're more of the visceral type and need to actually see the proofs in order to delve deeper, have them laid out like gruesome body parts in a mesmerizing autopsy. Fair enough.
For you, we have the surprisingly compelling indie documentary "9/11 Loose Change" (Google it), freely available on the Internet and produced by three very astute and very young and very strong-willed dudes who managed to cobble together a truly astounding array of proofs and interviews and evidence, a full 1 hour and 20 minutes' worth of mesmerizing footage you will not be able to easily forget.
Or maybe you should peruse one of the countless Sept. 11 conspiracy sites, many of which link to relevant video and one of which -- scholarsfor911truth.org -- claims to be "a non-partisan association of faculty, students, and scholars, in fields as diverse as history, science, military affairs, psychology, and philosophy, dedicated to exposing falsehoods and to revealing truths behind 9/11." Start there.
Now, it's very true that some of the more specious conspiracy claims have been largely discredited and proved false. Some of the more radical "evidence" gathered by theorists is quite suspect and easily placed in the category of no-way-in-hell. This is valid. This is as it should be. You have to chew through a lot of skin and gristle to get to the real meat.
But oh the meat. The overwhelming quantity, the bloody, deadly stench of it. Fact is, it is quite impossible to watch the entire "Loose Change" documentary and not come away just a little shaken, a little awed by the sheer number of perversely interrelated facts and aberrant coincidences-that-aren't-coincidences, shaking your head at how it all seems to irrefutably prove there is far, far more to the Sept. 11 tragedy than just crazy Osama and his band of zealots, as you begin to sink into a sighing morass of rage and frustration and suspicion and mistrust. You almost can't help it.
Of course, there is another option. There is another way out. You may, as is the standard cultural default, simply ignore it all, scoff and roll your eyes and shrug it all off because it's just too bleak and distasteful to entertain the idea that the dark Sept. 11 thread winds all the way through the NSA and the FBI and the White House and the Project for the New American Century and Dick Cheney's mangled soul and God only knows where else.
But then again, no. You have to look. You have to try. Knowledge is power, and while the truth may be spurious and slippery and messy and deep, the pursuit of it is just about the only thing we have left. Give that up, and all that's left is spiritual numbness, emotional stasis and death. So what are you waiting for?
http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/
― Rockist_Scientist (RSLaRue), Thursday, 30 March 2006 14:03 (nineteen years ago)
referring specifically to that "loose change" film, I cut and patsed this, which I wrote on a mail list I'm on, when someone brought it up:
I watched a bit of it. I noticed:
1/the claim that the wtc building 7 would have been the 3rd building
in history to have collapsed b/c of a fire. What on earth is he on
about. Buildings that have caught fire often collapse, it's not even
remotely unusual.
2/according to the next sequence, in 1945 a B52 bomber crashed into
the empire state building - That's wrong, because the prototype B52
first flew in 1954.
http://www.boeing.com/history/boeing/b52.html
The empire state building plane crash was a B25, a much smaller
aircraft than either the B52, or the jet liners that flew into the
WTC.
http://history1900s.about.com/od/1940s/a/empirecrash.htm
Using Google, I got this information in less than a minute. Yet the
blurb by the side of the screen on the page linked describes this piece as being "heavily
researched". The B52 is one of the best-known warplanes in the world.
Even people who aren't interested in aircraft know what a B52 looks
like, and how big it is. Only WW2 aircraft enthusiasts know that a
B25 is a small twin-engined light bomber. If a B52 were to fly into
the empire state building, the empire state building would collapse.
If a B25 were to have flown into the world trade center it would have
done only a small amount of damage, probably three floors or less
burnt out.
Further on, the narrator describes a bunch of other skyscraper fires,
pointing out that in none of these cases did the buildings collapse.
This is irrelevant - in none of these cases did a jet airliner loaded
up with kerosene fly into the building. In none of those cases was
there any damage inflicted by a large aeroplane striking the building
at high velocity, in none of those cases was there thousands of
gallons of kerosene burning at very high temperature.
Further on still, they show footage of the second WTC building being
hit by the aircraft. As the plane strikes, it scores a direct hit,
about 2/3 of the way across the face of the tower. The narrator
describes it as "barely hitting the south-east corner" despite the
fact that YOU CAN SEE THE ENTIRE WINGSPAN OF THE AIRCRAFT HITTING THE
TOWER, WTF? That isn't "barely hitting the south-east corner"!!!
That's a direct hit.
(further stuff snipped for brevity)
These links are useful:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/defense/1227842.html?page=6&c=y
http://paulboutin.weblogger.com/2002/03/14
― Pashmina (Pashmina), Thursday, 30 March 2006 15:02 (nineteen years ago)
Yes, I did, in fact. No, you didn't. There are too many people in America for you to have done that.
And just because some of these ideas were called "conspiracy theories" doesn't in fact make them so.
So I suppose someone is conspiring to have those those non-conspiracy ideas labelled 'conspiracy theories' so as to discredit all those _real_ conspiracy theories?
(JOKE)
Unless, of course, you happen to believe the companies who make violent video games are conspiring to destroy children's minds,
No I don't. But some things, like the idea that being goths is a cause, _are_ conspiracies because they claim that there is this goth 'culture', an organising and motivating force, that guides the kid's acions. When there isn't. Goths like Love Cats, dressing in black and too much make up. They are not sinister.
which generally only applies to Christian fundamentalists who equate everything with Satan.
So Christian fundamentalists aren't alowed to have conspiracy theories, but you are?
Why?
Also, the idea that these kids are "bad people" is just ignorant. There's no such thing as a bad person.
So the people that conspired to kill thousands in the twin tower attacks aren't 'bad people'?
(Or the islamic terrorists, delete as applicable to your beliefs). What do you mean by 'bad people'? You are disagreeing with it's usage so the phrase must have some meaning for you to disagree with.
Me saying "For some definition of 'bad'" hints at what you're getting at BTW, it's a vast oversimplification - WHICH IS WHY I SAID IT.
However...
There's hardware and software issues that make up people (genetics and education). Richard "Iceman" Kukluwski was a product of both. Bad person? The psychologist who analyzed him didn't seem to think so.
So the psychologist thought he wasn't a bad person? Thereby admitting that there is such a thing, but that Kukluwski wasn't an example of one? And why is this one person (the psychologist) allowed to decide if there is such a thing as a 'bad person' or not?
He's a product of genetics and abuse.
Whatever caused him to be what he is, he _is_ what he is. Calling him a 'bad person' is making no statement about how he became one.
Should no one ever take personal responsibility for anything?
Would you let your 5 year old watch hardcore butt-sex and bukkakki porn? No? Well, then surely you must believe what we watch has some effect on our personalities. You must be afraid your 5 year old would be somehow "warped" by the experience and you must fear what such exposure might encourage the kid to do.
Agreed.
The idea that violence in the media is somehow NOT influential to impressionable kids is a conspiracy-- brainwashing bullshit fed to you be the media owned by the corporations that want to continue to profit by violent entertainment.
Your premise is wrong there, because the media in fact feeds us the opposite view, generaly reporting that violent videogames _are_ bad for young people. That's the case in the UK anyway, don't know about the US, what was the coverage fo GTA like over there?.
But, to label them as "bad" people is about as idiotic as Bush calling terrorists "evil."
Even given that I was deliberately oversimplifying the matter (and I thought that would be clear) and that Bush was deliberately bringing religion into it for his own ends (the ideas of 'good' Vs 'evil' being religious ones), there is something in this.
In your life how do you decide between courses of action? Aren't there some things that are 'good' to do and some things 'bad'. Why are they good or bad? Above you suggest that kids shouldn't be shown certain types of porn, if there is no such thing as 'good' and 'bad' then why not? What does it matetr if they're minds are warped, or if they grow up to be mentally ill, or killers or rapists or anything else? If there is no good or bad then those are just as valid occupations as chef or bee-keeper.
― mei (mei), Saturday, 23 September 2006 08:33 (eighteen years ago)
three months pass...