Sunday, April 15, 2007

StillDiggin's "The Earth is Not Flat"

StillDiggin is back with three strong arguments that no planes hit the World Trade Center, and an explanation - repetition and social fear - why we think we saw a plane.

http://911logic.blogspot.com/2007/04/earth-is-not-flat.html

I'm not as sure as StillDiggin that all the witnesses were lying, as I wonder whether repetition acted quickly that day to influence people's perceptions, and I don't want to discount those witnesses that were in position to see or hear a plane and did not. I am speaking mainly of non-media witnesses that StillDiggin does not discuss. Regardless, there were not "hundreds" or "thousands" of people that saw a plane, and there are fireman that were in a position to see a plane and/or plane debris and did not.

But maybe I'm just unwilling to accept that so many people would lie.

Regardless, the images shown by StillDiggin are incontrovertible evidence of faked videos, which means no planes.

I agree that this is the most important fact about 9/11, and that the blowing up of the towers has been proven and how it was done is not nearly as important as this issue of the planes.

I have tried to prove no planes with equations, or at least by interpreting the equations of others. StillDiggin has more qualifications to do that than me, yet says:

As an engineer, [the ghost plane picture is] what got me thinking about what would really happen if a plane were to actually strike the World Trade Center. Even with equations, I wouldn’t be able to convince most people that this image can’t possibly be real. This is why I do my best to steer clear of that and appeal to people’s common sense.

I understand better now what he is saying in his comments to my first blog post:

Reverting to my use of layman's terminology, comparing the energy that would be required to shear cleanly through those steel beams with the energy that any part of a Boeing 767 traveling at 500+mph is essentially like trying to compare the size of an elephant to the size of an atom.

When ignoring the nature of the shear and imagining that the beams were bent and torn, we can then upgrage the atom to a mosquito and perform the elephant comparison again.

Do we really need equations to prove that the elephant is bigger?


Experts use equations, and the assumptions they plug in, to deny their own common sense.

Here is a quote by MIT experts on impact engineering:

To the casual observer, it would appear that the facade of the Twin Towers did not offer any resistance at all, and that the plane's wings and fuselage slice through the exterior columns as if they were made of cardboard. . . How was it possible that the relatively weak, light, and airy airframe damaged the apparently heavy lattice of high strength steel columns? The devastating result of this encounter came as a surprise to the engineering and scientific community or at least to the present authors.

From: Wierzbicki and Teng, How the airplane wing cut through the exterior columns of the World Trade Center, Int'l J. of Impact Engineering 28 (2003) 601-625

Yet their article purported to prove that the wings could slice through.

Then other engineering professors purported to show that the planes could penetrate the columns, but in their model, had the delicate front of the fuselage penetrate the columns as an assumption, not a proven fact. Like Wierzbicki, they took the video evidence for granted, and found a way to "prove" what defies common sense.

Karim and Hoo Fatt, Impact of the Boeing 767 Aircraft Into the World Trade Center, J. of Engineering Mechanics, Vol. 131, No. 10 (October 2005).

A copy is available here for fair use:

http://ningens-blog.blogspot.com/2007/02/engineering-article-on-which-i-relied.html


I wrote more about this phenomenon here:

http://ningens-blog.blogspot.com/2007/01/jim-hoffmanns-critique-of-manuel.html


I think that StillDiggin's theory of social fear may apply to these experts, and that we can't rely on experts but have to use our common sense.

Thank you StillDiggin. I've been waiting for your next article, and it's a fine one.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Physicist Greg Jenkins responds to Morgan Reynolds

Interpreting the Boeing-767 Deceleration During Impact with the WTC Tower: Center of Mass Versus Tail-end Motion, and Instantaneous Versus Average Velocity (April 11, 2007) Gregory S. Jenkins, PhD

http://journalof911studies.com/letters/Boeing767DecelerationTowers.pdf

This article is mainly a response to Morgan Reynold's Request for Correction to the National Institute for Technology and Standards under the Information Quality Act (or Data Quality Act), found here:

http://www.ocio.os.doc.gov/ITPolicyandPrograms/Information_Quality/PROD01_002621


or here:

http://911scholars.org/Media/DEW/070308_MR_RFC.pdf

[Update: I should say that this is a limited response to Morgan Reynolds, because Dr. Reynolds makes a number of points that are not addressed by Jenkins. Jenkins' article is more complete as to me, because I have relied much more heavily on the deceleration issue.]

Jenkins' article also destroys a major premise of several of the articles on this blog, including my first article:


http://ningens-blog.blogspot.com/2006/11/911-pound-gorilla-in-catos-room.html


Or maybe it doesn't. I haven't figured that out yet, and it's going to take me some time. The method I used, which was agreed upon by writers on both sides of the debate, was much simpler for someone like me with limited math skills.

So far, I wonder whether Jenkins' comparison with the Sandia experiment is valid, because the plane in that experiment was disintegrated against a reinforced concrete
wall which it did not penetrate at all.

Video of that experiment is here:

http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/video-gallery/index.html#rocketsled

True, the tail of the fighter plane doesn't slow, but the plane also is all left outside the wall. This is more like what I would expect to have happened when a Boeing hit the South Tower. I suspect that the answer is that the South Tower is less rigid than the reinforced concrete wall in the Sandia test, which was designed to shield a nuclear reactor from plane impact, but is still quite rigid and would certainly stop the front fuselage of the plane from entering. The big question for me is what would happen when the most massive part of the plane -- the engines and the fuel-laden portion of the wings between the engines -- hit the building. I am thinking of this as partial penetration that would result in a combination of deformation and deceleration, as opposed to the complete fragmentation resulting from a plane dashed to little pieces against a impenetrable concrete wall. I'm thinking there would be a lot more debris outside the WTC tower than observed, and a lot more deceleration than observed, and presumably an explosion.

I also can't understand Jenkin's argument that all the deceleration takes place inside the tower. That's a given if it didn't take place outside, since the plane
did not come through the other side. But I don't see it got inside intact, then disintegrated.

I'm going to try to get further with this by looking at Jenkins' physics and math arguments, but this may be all I can do with it. I've always been grokking this thing the best I can.

Comments on Jenkins' article are most welcome. I begin with my comment on another letter by Eric Salter at Journal of 9/11 Studies on my criticism of him and Steven Jones not citing contrary data. However, I would like comments to focus on the merits of Jenkins' article, which is far more significant. If Jenkins is right, the blatherings of Salter and I mean nothing.

Saturday, April 7, 2007

What you have, according to Dan Rather

"What you have, is a miniature version of what you have in totalitarian states. They produce films about the great leader and how he's greater in every way every day."

http://www.sonyclassics.com/whywefight/

Totalitarian states murder citizens for the good of the state. That's a fact. Perhaps "miniature" totalitarian states murder fewer citizens -- 3,000 is not many compared to Stalin's Soviet Union.

This state compensated the victims, so what's the problem?

http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/defenseandsecurity/a/randon911.htm

President Eisenhower called it in 1961

Susan Eisenhower quotes her grandfather as follows:

"God help us when someone sits as this desk that doesn't know enough about the military as I do."

From "Why We Fight"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Fight_(2005_film)

Friday, April 6, 2007

Milosevic found not guilty by the International Court of Justice

After years of incarceration ending in his death, with no finding of Milosevic's guilt for war crimes in Kosovo and genocide in Bosnia and Croatia by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Court of Justice found that Serbia was not responsible for genocide in Bosnia.

Here is an excellent article on the bias of the New York Times in reporting on this ICJ ruling and Yugoslavia in general:

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12321

Marlise Simons and the New York Times on the International Court of Justice Decision on Serbia and Genocide in Bosnia: A Further Study in Total Propaganda Service
by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson

The article concludes:

On these two gravely important issues—"genocide" and the "supreme international crime" or aggression—the ICJ has shown a troubling proclivity to run in parallel with the ICTY. For its part, the ICTY does not concern itself with the "supreme international crime," the Nuremberg-class crime that the ICTY's sponsors committed when they attacked Yugoslavia in 1999 (and, later, Afghanistan and Iraq as well);[46] but it is very aggressive in pursuing lesser crimes, as it has done on a selective basis in the case of Yugoslavia. Similarly, Yugoslavia in 1999 failed to persuade the ICJ to hear its case against NATO without first securing the consent of the military alliance then attacking it; needless to say, none was forthcoming. But several years later, this time cast in the defendant's role, Yugoslavia was brought before the same ICJ, and a verdict rendered. What this plainly shows is that the international system, even at the highest level embodied by the International Court of Justice, the "principal judicial organ of the United Nations," systematically fails to address crimes against the peace when committed by supreme international criminals, but somehow or other makes itself available to pursue lesser criminals, even those whose crimes occur as they resist the perpetrators of the “supreme international crime.”

It is remarkable that with all the mass killings of the post-war period, the ICJ and the world media featured Bosnia - Herzegovina, and Srebrenica in particular, as the first test-case in which the application of the Genocide Convention to armed conflict was adjudicated. In the case of Bosnia, the grand total of civilian deaths in the years 1992-1995 was on the order of 66,000; and in the case of Srebrenica, the ICTY's "likely" total was a “majority” of 7,000 - 8,000 (i.e., some indeterminate value over 3,500), mainly or entirely military-aged men. So this still counts as “genocide,” and worthy of concentrated attention. But the 200,000 mainly civilian deaths in East Timor, a million deaths from the “sanctions of mass destruction” in Iraq, the possibly half-million Iraqi deaths in the wake of the U.S.-British invasion-occupation of 2003-2007, the several million killed during the U.S. aggression against Vietnam and all of Southeast Asia, 1962-1975—each of these fail to qualify for adjudication and punishment for “genocide.”

This harks back to the wise aphorism that “The greater the crime, the smaller the penalty.” But that, in turn, rests on a simple rule—that the powerful define whom the terrorists and genocidists are, and exempt themselves and their allies. This is why, in John Laughland’s words, contemporary adjudications are a “travesty” and “corruption of international justice.”


For a radically different view of the events in Yugoslavia from that of the New York Times, see the articles linked here:

http://emperors-clothes.com/yugo.htm#6


Others articles on Yugoslavia by Herman and Peterson:

http://www.electricpolitics.com/2007/02/human_rights_watch_in_service.html

http://www.electricpolitics.com/2006/05/milosevics_death_in_the_propag.html

John Laughland also sees through the lies:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Laughland

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2023025,00.html

John Laughland is also a 9/11 skeptic:

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/conspiracies.html

Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Purdue Boeing Crash Simulation

The second animation in the YouTube video below is more what I imagine would happen when a Boeing hit the World Trade Center.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJFdlaUZT3M&eurl=http%3A%2F%2

The fuselage entering smoothly without deformation or fragmentation strikes me as strange. Was it assumed?

The Purdue study is described here:

http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/cmh/simulation/phase3/Riera.htm

More on the Purdue studies here:

http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/cmh/simulation/index.html

Face it - we're all kooks - Part 2

A few months ago I argued that questioning whether the planes hit the WTC towers was no more "kooky" to believers in the 9/11 official story than other theories like controlled demolition of the towers.

http://ningens-blog.blogspot.com/2006/12/face-it-were-all-kooks.html


Pat at ScrewLooseChange recently made a statement that supports my point:

http://screwloosechange.blogspot.com/2007/04/message-for-commenter.html


I don't agree with the no-planes stuff. I don't agree with any of you folks on 9-11. You may think that you represent the "responsible" wing of the Truth Movement, but you're almost all kooks to me, and the idea that "no-planers at the Pentagon" are somehow more reasonable than "no planers at the WTC" is just risible.

Question the planes at the Pentagon is acceptable at 9/11 Blogger, and you will get a real debate, with some people arguing that it will discredit the "Truth Movement," but attacking those who raise the issue only mildly if at all. Question the planes at the WTC towers, however, and you are likely to be called a disinfo agent, and your arguments will not be addressed.