Friday, November 30, 2007

NIST: "We are Unable to Provide a Full Explanation of the Total Collapse"

On April 12th members of the 9/11 Truth Movement, including such luminaries as Steven Jones, Kevin Ryan and Richard Gage, filed a Request for Correction(RFC) to demand that NIST correct some of their statements and findings in their report they issued in October of 2005. NIST stated that one of the goals of their investigation was to determine,

"why and how the WTC 1 and 2 (the WTC towers) collapsed after the initial impact of the aircraft, and why and how WTC 7 collapsed."

NIST never fulfilled their objective to explain "how" the buildings collapsed. They state clearly in their report that they do not analyze the "structural behavior of the tower after the conditions for collapse initiation were reached." In this sense, the report is merely a pre-collapse analysis.

In their response to the RFC issued by members of the 9/11 Truth Movement, they responded, "we are unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse." Why is this? NIST stated that they carried the analysis, "to the point where the buildings reached global instability. At this point, because of the magnitude of deflections and the number of failures occurring, the computer models are not able to converge on a solution."

In other words, the collapse of World Trade Towers 1 and 2 are to complicated to model. The individuals at the JREF forum can sum it up best:

Dave Rogers: "NIST can't model the collapse to a degree of accuracy that specifies exactly where every perimeter column ended up, what exact proportion of the concrete was pulverised to what particle size distribution, what proportion of the debris fell within the original footprint, or all the other insignificant minutiae of the collapse that the truth movement obsesses about..."

Wildcat: "No, there is too little data. There is simply no way to model such a chaotic event, likely never will be."

The Doc: "There is no reason to determine what happened during the collapse."

These statements seem to imply that it is not possible to model the collapse of the World Trade Centers and even if we could it would not be important. These comments seem strange coming from the James Randi Educational Forum, "a place to discuss skepticism, critical thinking, the paranormal and science in a lively and friendly manner." Are these people really saying that the collapse of two buildings will forever be beyond the ability of science to explain?

What types of problems, events and occurrences are computers modeling today? According to an article in Wired, "Scenario planning is not a waste; computer models can now game the behavior of millions of variables and render nuanced predictions of everything from bioterror attacks to massive earthquakes."

Mathematical software is also being used to solve complex linear algebra problems. "BCSLIB-EXT is used to solve these sparse linear algebra problems, which arise in many applications. It is used by Boeing application packages for circuit analysis, trajectory optimization, chemical process control, machine tool path definition, constrained data fitting, and finite element analysis (FEA) programs...BCSLIB-EXT solves problems arising out of static and frequency response analysis (which use Ax=b) and for buckling and vibration studies (using AX=BXΛ). Instead of taking days to solve problems of 50,000 variables, FEA programs using BCSLIB-EXT now solve problems in the range of 3 million variables in just hours!"

An article in the Newscientist from 2005 states, "An effort to create the first computer simulation of the entire human brain, right down to the molecular level, was launched on Monday."

According to CNET News, "The petaflop era has begun. IBM has devised a new Blue Gene supercomputer--the Blue Gene/P--that will be capable of processing more than 3 quadrillion operations a second, or 3 petaflops, a possible record. Blue Gene/P is designed to continuously operate at more than 1 petaflop in real-world situations."

Computer models are also being created to simulate nuclear explosions. "One of the first problems that scientists working on the ASCI project had to tackle was finding computers that could handle the large datasets necessary for simulating nuclear blasts. A typical model can be as large as tens of millions of elements, and over the next couple of years the simulations will grow to more than tens of billions of elements...the major focus of the ASCI program is terascale computational simulations, visualization is essential to understanding the terabytes of data produced."

In an interview with the Boston Globe, computer scientist Roscoe Giles was asked:

Boston Globe: "What are the most complex kinds of calculations made on high-performance machines?"

Roscoe Giles: "One is modeling weather and climate, which involves hundreds of millions of variables. In the microscopic realm, you get similarly big problems. I was involved in simulating patches of surface of the kind of magnetic material in disk drives, studying features on the scale of nanometers, which are billionths of a meter. The goal of the new Department of Energy program called [Advanced Strategic Computing Initiative] is to replace a lot of experimentation and testing of nuclear weapons and materials by computer simulations. That probably is the largest single supercomputing effort in the world and is driving machines on the 30-teraflop scale."

We can see from these examples that NIST's claim that the collapse of the two towers is to complex to model simply does not stand up to scrutiny. The collapses occurred in roughly 15 seconds. Can NIST model the first 3 seconds and see if the model correlates closely to the observable reality of the actual collapse? Would the number of variables be to many in just the first three seconds?

NIST cannot provide a full explanation of the total collapse, not because the event is to complex to model, but because their theories as to how the towers collapsed contradict basic laws of physics.

Monday, October 29, 2007

John Adams on the Iraq Attaq

John Adams once wrote a letter to his friend and rival, Thomas Jefferson, concerning their differences over the French Revolution. Here it is:

"The first time, that you and I differed in Opinion on any material Question; was after your Arrival from Europe; and that point was the french Revolution.

You was well persuaded in your own mind that the Nation would succeed in establishing a free Republican Government: I was as well persuaded, in mine, that a project of such a Government, over five and twenty millions people, when four and twenty millions and five hundred thousands of them could neither write nor read: was as unnatural irrational and impracticable; as it would be over the Elephants Lions Tigers Panthers Wolves and Bears in the Royal Menagerie, at Versailles. Napoleon has lately invented a Word, which perfectly expresses my Opinion at that time and ever since. He calls the Project Ideology. And John Randolph, tho he was 14 years ago, as wild an Enthusiast for Equality and Fraternity, as any of them; appears to be now a regenerated Proselite to Napoleons Opinion and mine, that it was all madness
."
July 13, 1813.

Now what country has roughly 25 million people, where the majority of the population is illiterate and inbred; its absolutist ruler was violently toppled with the goal of creating a flourishing democratic republic, but instead we have ethnic strife, civil war, and massacres on a daily basis?

If John Adams was alive today, his opinion of the Iraq Attaq would be the same, "It is all was Madness."

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Correcting Michael Shermer

Michael Shermer, the editor and founder of Skeptic Magazine, has made several media appearances recently attempting to "debunk" the claims of the 9/11 Truth Movement. His attempts are less than impressive. He made an appearance on the Colbert Report back in August, and a more recent appearance on The Glenn Beck show, with James Meigs, discussing the 9/11 Truthers heckling of Bill Maher. When Glenn Beck asked James Meigs and Michael Shermer, "What was the big claim that you found... and it's so easy to refute?"

Michael Shermer stated, "They claim that the World Trade Center Buildings fell exactly like buildings fall that are intentionally demolished... None of [ taped controlled demolition buildings] fall like the World Trade Center. They all fall from the bottom up and the World Trade Center Buildings fell from the top down."

He made a similar point on the Colbert Report when he stated, "They claim that the World Trade Centers fell from the top to the bottom, just like all controlled demolitions."

First of all, we aren't claiming that WTC 1 and 2 fell like a conventional controlled demolition. The purpose of a conventional commercial demolition, or an implosion, is to bring a building down in such a way as to minimize damage to adjacent structures. No one in the 9/11 Truth Movement is claiming that WTC 1 and 2 started from the bottom or that it was a classic looking implosion. "9/11 Mysteries", the most popular 9/11 Truth documentary addressing the destruction of the World Trade Towers 1 and 2 states, "We are seeing explosions, rather than implosions -- a first in demolition history."

James Fetzer, the founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, stated on Fox News, "We've discovered major indications that the Twin Towers were brought down by a sophisticated kind of controlled demolition, they were blown up from the top down."

Steven Jones, in his lecture at UVSC(Utah Valley State College) stated in regards to the WTC towers, "There the explosions were at the top, so it's a little different."

So I'm not really sure what Michael Shermer has debunked. Is this really his best argument against the 9/11 conspiracy movement? There are a few examples of a controlled demolition not starting at the bottom. One example, is the Reading Grain Facility, which was demolished in 1999. The explosions started roughly in the middle of the structure. A controlled demolition means that the explosions are precisely timed, where the explosions begin is not the deciding factor.

Michael Shermer, however, seems to pretend that he doesn't know about WTC7. World Trade Tower 7 did collapse in a manner that perfectly mirrored a conventional demolition. So what is his best argument against the claim that WTC7 was brought down via a controlled demolition?

Monday, October 22, 2007

The Bill Maher Episode

On "Real Time" this past Friday, Bill Maher finally had his show invaded by members of the 9/11 Truth Movement. Unfortunately, practically everything that they shouted out was unintelligible. Chris Matthews, the host of Hardball on MSNBC, didn't even know what the hecklers were complaining about. It seemed to turn into a "Jerry Springer" show with the audience applauding the entertaining spectacle. I don't know if this helped the 911 Truth Movement, but it certainly garnered us more attention. The story was widely reported and the video of the incident is extremely popular on youtube. Regardless of the consequences, I've watched the video over ten times and it keeps getting funnier and funnier every time I watch it.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Correcting Bill Maher

Bill Maher, on his talk show Real Time, stated the following regarding the 9/11 truth movement:

"How big a lunatic do you have to be to watch two giant airliners packed with jet fuel slam into buildings on live TV, igniting a massive inferno that burned for two hours, and then think 'Well, if you believe that was the cause...'Stop asking me to raise this ridiculous topic on the show and start asking your doctor if Paxil is right for you."

Well, first of all none of the fires burned for two hours. The South Tower was destroyed after only 56 minutes, and the North Tower after 102 minutes. The inferno was hardly massive compared to the size of the buildings. Other skyscrapers have burned much longer and hotter. As well, the jet fuel would have burned off in just a few minutes. The NIST report states, “The initial jet fuel fires themselves lasted at most a few minutes.” Engineering professor Forman Williams stated, "the jet fuel burned for maybe 10 minutes." It seems that people who critize the 9/11 Truth Movement do not seem to know the first thing about the attacks or what happened that day. A better statement would be, "How big of an idiot do you have to be to believe the official government conspiracy theory?"

Friday, September 14, 2007

HamNation: Out-Truthing the Truthers

Mary Katharine Ham, columnist, blogger and Managing Editor of townhall.com was in New York on Tuesday where she attempted to challenge the 9/11 truthers with the truth. Since the 9/11 truth movement has grown quite substantially since 9/11, the media can no longer pretend that we don't exist. We aren't yet taken seriously by the mainstream press, but the fact that they can no longer ignore us means that we are making progress. The truther counter-protest handed out pamphlets that read "Read the real, shocking truth about 9/11... how 19 Middle Eastern men flew planes into our buildings and brought down the towers and how it's NOT a government conspiracy."

The obvious purpose of her video was to suggest that the entire purpose of the 9/11 truth movement was to insult the victims and their families. This is a common refrain among people who continue to believe the official government conspiracy theory regarding 9/11. How does investigating a crime dishonor the memories of the victims of that crime?

If someone was investigating the murder of Natalie Holloway, Chandra Levy or any of the other thousands of unsolved crimes, no one would suggest that this is somehow insulting to the victims or their families. Yet, 9/11 truthers not only get tarred with this brush, we are also routinely compared to Holocaust deniers. We aren't denying that people were killed, only who was responsible for the killing.

Nevertheless, as Gandhi said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” We have certainly passed the point of being ignored, this means we are getting closer to winning.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Six Years Later.

The September 11th terror attacks killed almost 3,000 people, including people from over 80 countries. Yet how much do most Americans know about the attacks, and what have we learned since the then. Roughly 1/3 of Americans can't even remember the year the attacks occurred. Twenty-two percent of Americans believe that Bush knew about the attacks in advance and twenty-nine percent believe the CIA did. Among Democrats, 35% believe that Bush knew about the attacks in advance. As well, most Americans believe that we have changed for the worse since 9/11 and that we are now less safe than before 9/11. This was not true in early 2002 when 61% of Americans believed we were safer. What factors have led us to our current circustance?

George Bush is, no doubt, one of the most permanently unpopular Presidents in American history. Bush's approval rating has tended to stay just at or under 40% since early 2006. This is quite shocking as he had a 92% approval rating after 9/11, one of the highest ever recorded. Not only is Bush not popular in America, he is also intensely disliked across much of the globe. This is a far cry from a man like Gorbachev, who was, "a saint abroad, and a devil at home."(Gorbachev got less than 1% of the vote when he ran for Russian President in 1996.)

The collapse of the Bush Presidency can largely be ascribed to the neo-cons, who have essentially used Bush as their puppet since he took office. As neo-con intellectual Richard Perle once stated, "The first time I met Bush 43 … two things became clear. One, he didn't know very much. The other was that he had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know very much." As Voltaire once stated, "An infallible method of making fanatics is to persuade before you instruct." Bush was persuaded to the neo-con ideology regarding foreign policy, but seemed to know very little in the way of real world facts. For instance, Bush seemed to be unaware of the Sunni/Shia divide in Iraq until two months before the war. By surrounding himself with a bunch of neo-con advisors, Bush has become almost completely walled off from reality. Bush seems to believe that media manipulation and repeating the same mantras over and over will somehow change real world circumstances. If not, he might be able to fool enough people. When Bush was warned about the growing insurgency in Iraq he stated,

"Well, I don't think we're there yet and I don't want any of my cabinet officers saying there's an insurgency. I don't want to read about it in "The New York Times."

A true leader would ask advice on how to nip the insurgency in the bud, not deny it's existence.

As time has gone on, the number of people fooled by this President has gone steadily down. This is a good thing. The goal of this blog will be to expose all the lies of this Administration and their sycophants in the media.