View From the Bushes

I haven't slept well the last couple of nights, and I'm wondering why, though there was plenty to contribute to last night's restlessness. The big thing was that it was incredibly windy last night. By itself this wasn't too bad, but I knew that I had left one of the windows down in my car. Since I was pretty sure that wind meant rain I was haunted all night by a soaked interior. Also, there was this weird buzzing sound that accompanied the wind. When I told a co-worker about it this morning he said it was probably loose shingles. My own house doesn't have shingles but the house next door (five feet away from the corner where the master bedroom is) was recently shingled so I guess that could be it.

Before the wind even started I had a hard time falling asleep, and a hard time staying asleep. My guess is that I fell asleep sometime around 12:30 and woke up at around 5:00. At that point I wandered out in my pajamas and rolled up the car window. After more tossing and turning I fell back asleep around 6:00 and got another hour or so in before the alarm went off at 7:00... It wouldn't have been that remarkable if the night before hadn't gone about the same, only without the wind. I wonder if my kids' new nightlights are contributing to it. I doubt it, but they are really, really bright...

Haunted by the howling winds of doom
Ross

Once again, I feel somewhat robbed by the weekend. Overall it was pretty good, but Sunday morning I got the 24 hour flu that the rest of the family had two weeks ago. It started just as I woke up Sunday morning and hit its zenith right about 10:15... By the time I went to bed I was mostly recovered, although I'm still hoarse from the vomiting. I think I should have drank more in college. My friends who get drunk a lot are apparently much better at puking then I am. Course then I didn't sleep well at all, which could have been due to the long nap I took on Sunday, but may just be my many sins and misdeeds coming to haunt me.

Over the weekend I did some reading on Charles Ponzi and the original Ponzi scam. There were a lot of interesting parallels between it and 12DailyPro (which as I've mentioned before, has an unholy fascination for me). One thing that I found particularly interesting is that the original Ponzi scheme promised a 50% return every 45 days. 12DailyPor promised 44% every 20 days, so a rate roughly double that of the original scheme. Another parallel is the fanaticism of the followers. It only takes a few minutes of browsing the forums of 12DailyPro before you encounter mindless adoration of the kind Charles Manson only dreamed of.

Another thing that many people wonder about is, if it is a huge scam why hasn't Charis just taken the money and run? Well Ponzi didn't, and in fact evidence would seem to indicate that rather than being some grand scheme conceived in malevolence from the very begining that Ponzi (and presumably Charis) had something of a business plan in the beginning and things just sort of got out of hand, leaving Ponzi trying to find some way to dig himself out of his golden coffin. A similar thing is happening at 12Daily. Of course, if there's a pyramid scheme or a get-rich-quick scam, Utah is sure to be at the center of it. I'll leave you with this article from Utah's channel four, and hope that next time Utah isn't the laughing stock of the nation.

One of those rare times when I'm embarrassed to be a Mormon
Ross

So I've been pretty busy the last couple of days. Today is no different so I won't post much, but as usual I need to give my critics a forum. My number one son (the one that beat me at chess, for those keeping track at home) started wrestling on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Tonight is his second class, and they have a competition a week from tonight. So far he seems to be doing pretty good. Wrestling when you're seven is not quite as brutal and sweaty as post-elementary wrestling, so I'm interested to see an actual match. Something tells me that a big part of winning might come down to dumb luck.

Waiting for the revolution
Ross

While I was at church on Sunday I got a call from a guy at work. I'm not sure if you remember me talking about a big, six-figure content management system we recently purchased and were bringing in-house, but he said, "You know the server you were using for the content management system?" "Yeah," I said warily. "It's gone." I said, "What do you mean it's gone?" And he proceeded to explain that he had somehow installed an operating system on top of the virtual partition of the CMS server and a bunch of other servers. In effect, he had formatted the hard drive of my server.

Fortunately we have a really nice backup system. Unfortunately he hadn't installed the backup client on this particular server. In January we had some consultants from the CMS vendor come out for a week and do a ton of custom work. When I initially heard that the CMS server went bye-bye I thought that the most recent backup we had was from before that week. And so there was about an hour and a half where I figured we were really in trouble. I later remembered that I had made a backup at the end of that week. So at least we didn't lose all that work. However that backup was still over almost a month old. Overall, kind of a messy situation.

My wife has been bugging me about blogging since Friday. See, every other Friday the elementary that my kids attend has a chess club, which I help out with. So last Friday I headed up there and wandered around while the kids played, and played a few myself. Right near the end I was playing with my oldest son. I wasn't taking the game seriously at all and was frequently pointing out to him where he could have done things differently. But after a while I decded it was time to end it and I prepared to mate him. All my attention was focused on his end of the board, and I was one move away from mate, when he said "What happens if I do this?" Well, as it turns out this consisted of moving his rook from one side of the board to the other, where my king sat unprotected in the center of a wall of three pawns. This was check mate.

I don't want the world I just want your half
Ross

We got a big snow storm yesterday, which lasted until this morning. It was pretty bad. I had co-workers tell me that it took them three and a half hours to drive home last night. Their commute is normally 45 minutes. I did pretty good on the way home last night, but this morning I evidently choose poorly and ended up in one of the many parking lots, which extended my 20 minute commute out to an entire hour. The worst of the storm is past, but not for me: I haven't done any shoveling, so that's what waits for me this evening.

Dreaming of a snow blower
Ross

I was going to blog yesterday but the time got away from me. The whole Cheney thing would be interesting to write about, but way too much already has. The press are fixitated on the whole thing, when I really think their primary concern as the press should be the "cartoon controversy." Political scandals come and go, but something this chilling to the entire idea of the press is less common and far more worrisome. And yet by and large the press has rolled over. Fortunately the WWW has taken up some of the slack, as witnessed by the Fark Photoshop Contest: Sitcom situations for Mohammed. (Some are real gems.)

In the continuing saga of 12dailypro, a man from Utah flew back east to confront Stormpay and 12dailypro about what's happening, followed by a crew from the local news station. On Monday they showed up at the Stormpay office and talked with the CEO and the owner for about an hour and a half. The two were evasive and couldn't offer a full accounting of everything, but they did sit down and talk to the guy. Yesterday he tried to track down Charis (the owner of 12dailypro). Despite driving to every address they could think of there was no sign of Charis, or anyone who worked with 12dailypro. The whole thing has devolved into a he said, she said between Stormpay and 12dailypro; given the behavior of both, I'd be inclined to believe Stormpay in this one. (For the curious, the full text of the WSJ article on this mess was syndicated by some other newspapers so you can now read it online.)

Saturday is my birthday, and as usual it falls near the three-day weekend created by President's Day, which at the moment is the only thing keeping me going. I'm planning on a long and relaxing weekend. There's even a game coming out that I'm quite excited about. Unfortunately it doesn't drop until next Tuesday, but it's still a nice little birthday gift. The game is Galactic Civilizations II, and I've got to say it looks pretty dreamy...

Plagued by bad dreams
Ross

Some weekends are so refreshing that you almost don't mind going back to work on Monday. Some aren't refreshing at all, but they're so fun that although you are ill-prepared to return to work on Monday, at least you feel like you got something out of the deal. And finally, there are weekends which are neither restful nor enjoyable, where you feel strongly that you are owed another weekend, because whatever it was that happened between Friday afternoon and Monday morning, it wasn't a weekend; certainly not in the classical sense.

As I mentioned earlier I came down with a cold last week, and I was still feeling pretty crappy when the weekend arrived. And in addition to being sick, my oldest son had started throwing up Thursday night. But last Saturday was the only Saturday when my friends could get together to play D&D, so I had to do that. "Had" may convey the wrong impression. I wanted to do it; it's just that if there had been some way to reschedule it, I probably would have. As it was, we were having a pretty good time, and it looked like it might be a decent weekend after all, despite being sick. But then it happened (Warning: sick kid story about to start).

When my oldest went to bed she said she didn't feel well so we gave her a bucket. By 9:00 pm she had thrown up. With that information we decided to end D&D early. Just as people were leaving at 10:00 pm my youngest threw up. Lacking the wisdom of age, she had given us no warning, so one might say... she missed. We had just gotten things cleaned up from her and I was laying down when I heard some more vomiting. I figured it was the oldest throwing up some more. No, it was the number two son, and once again he missed. Well in the midst of cleaning all of that up, my wife admitted that she was starting to feel pretty nauseated, and sure enough within the hour she was throwing up.

It wouldn't have been too bad except somehow in the midst of the melee I developed this excrutiating headache in my right temple, the kind where it feels like someone is trying to auger a hole into your brain. Needless to say, it was a bad night. The cherry on top of the whole miserable weekend was when I thought a meeting I had at 6:00 was actually at 7:00 so I was 50 minutes late. Anyone who knows me knows that I hate being late more than just about anything else in the world.

Death before tardiness
Ross

Normally I wouldn't even bother to post something this late but I feel like I should make some acknowledgement of the great comments on yesterday's blog. Also, there's an update on the 12DailyPro saga; they made it on the front cover of the Wall Street Journal (that's actually a link to CNN, the WSJ article is subscribers only). Generally, making it on to the front cover of one of the major national newspapers is either very good, or very bad. I'm confident that this is the latter.

I started coming down with a cold Wednesday night. It was pretty bad yesterday but I went to bed relatively early. Unfortunately, my number one son decided to start throwing up sometime in the wee hours of the morning. And I ended up getting vomit-duty (the parent who sleeps next to the sick child and lunges at them with a bucket the minute they start making gagging noises). I'm not sure how I wound up with this cherry assignment. I think I must have won the coin toss...

In any case, I initially left the bathroom light on so that I could see what was happening, but after an hour of unsuccessfully trying to fall back asleep I turned the light off. This allowed me to fall back asleep, but I still had to go from sleep to lunge every 45 minutes which is not conducive to deep sleep. As a result, I was pretty enervated today, so I sweet talked my boss into letting me go home early, blew off my last meeting of the day, went home and took a nap. Man, that really hit the spot.

Old man who needs his naps
Ross

For those of you who knew, I had six hours of meetings today (one three hour meeting before lunch, one after). I'm posting to let you know I'm okay (much the same way a relative might call after a long and dangerous journey). I have a headache the size of the Hindenburg, but I don't think it's fatal. Thanks for all of your well-wishes.

In critical condition
Ross

Well, after a vast output over the last few days I thought I'd take it easy today. The "Cartoon Controversy" still rages, much to the amazement of all sane individuals. As I was surfing my usual sites this morning I came across this article which explained how it all began. His explanation seems to leave out where one of the most controversial images came from (from the Muslim perspective, not from mine) of the prophet in a turban shaped like a bomb, but it's still a very big surprise as to where they originated...

Taking it easy
Ross

I heard something very funny on the radio this morning just as I was pulling into the parking lot. It was right about 8:00 and Steve Inskeep (at least I think that's who it was) was giving the teaser for what was going to be coming up on Morning Edition after the newsbreak. One of the stories was about the Islamic "Cartoon Controversy," and he said something like, "Muslims, upset about editorial cartoons protraying Mohammed as violent..." And at this point there was just the tiniest crack in his voice -- I'm not sure if he was about to lose it and start laughing or if he was merely cracking a smile, or if the irony had just struck him, but after the briefest of pauses he continued, "...burned the Danish Embassy and ransacked a Christian neighborhood." I guess it's the old, "We'll show you we're not violent, with... a... demonstration.. of.. violence... yeah that will show them!"

It actually was a pretty good weekend for blog material, particularly material I already covered. You may remember me mentioning 12dailypro, that miraculous system which pays 44% every 12 days. Well the bottom has finally started falling out and I was lucky enough (much like the Minutemen at Concord) to have a front row seat. The reason I say that is because it was a local Utah news station which fired the first shot and apparently the second and third as well. Of course, 12 Daily is claiming that business couldn't be better, that it's the payment service that is on the verge of collapse, and it's all their fault. It is unfortunate that it couldn't die cleanly and without leaving people feeling like they need an autopsy in order to figure out what the hell happened, but criminals rarely die of old age.

On the 9/11 front, my friend, while still keeping up with one front via private e-mail, has basically said that I am too obstinate to continue the fight in the public forum. I'm inclined to call that a win, but it's probably a Phyrric Victory if it is. The only thing I have to add is this excerpt from the website of Controlled Demolition, Inc. It's a description of the largest controlled demolition ever (though still of a building at less than half the size of one of the World Trade Centers). Rather than redact the page myself I'm going to use the redaction and commentary on the Wikipedia discussion page:

the J.L. Hudson Department Store is "At 439 ft. tall Hudson’s is the tallest building & the tallest structural steel building ever imploded. At 2.2 million square feet, Hudson's is the largest single building ever imploded."...the article goes on to state that, " Under CDI direction, Homrich/NASDI’s 21 man crew needed three months to investigate the complex and four months to complete preparations for CDI’s implosion design," and also discusses that they had to torch many steel columns to weaken them and, "CDI’s 12 person loading crew took twenty four days to place 4,118 separate charges in 1,100 locations on columns on nine levels of the complex. Over 36,000 ft of detonating cord and 4,512 non-electric delay elements were installed in CDI’s implosion initiation system, some to create the 36 primary implosion sequence and another 216 micro-delays to keep down the detonation overpressure from the 2,728 lb of explosives which would be detonated during the demolition."...now that sounds like a lot of work to implode one building less than half the size of either one of the WTC...and this company is the foremost one in the world in controlled demolition. There is no theory about controlled demolition that will explain how a project this massive would have gone undetected.

Preach on Brother!
Ross

Well, I've yet to receive any further rebuttal from my friend, so this might be the end of things, but before I wrap it up I did have one last point to make:

In my response yesterday I was particularly impressed by the Underwriters Labs (UL) letter my friend had linked to. Of all the points he made, it seemed to carry the most weight. Well, of course with all the time it took to craft my response, I didn’t have the time to really look into every source, but last night I started talking to my Dad about it and he started asking some questions, which led me to do a little more checking. It wasn’t too difficult to find the Wikipedia article on Kevin Ryan (the author of the letter) and discovered that all was not as it appeared.

My big misconception was that he wrote the letter as an official representative of UL, and certainly it appears that that’s the impression he wants you to get when he uses phrases like:

In requesting information from both our CEO and Fire Protection business manager last year, I learned that they did not agree on the essential aspects of the story, except for one thing - that the samples we certified met all requirements

He also uses the pronoun “we” repeatedly. The website(s) ( for example http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/RYA411A.html) which hosts the letter does nothing to correct this notion, and introduces it as follows:

by Kevin Ryan
Underwriters Laboratories
Thursday, Nov 11, 2004

The following letter was sent today by Kevin Ryan of Underwriters Laboratories to Frank Gayle of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) . Underwriters Laboratories is the company that certified the steel components used in the construction of the World Trade Center towers. The information in this letter is of great importance.

But Kevin Ryan was not speaking as an official representative of UL and was fired for pretending that he was, and in addition, the UL issued this statement: “UL does not certify structural steel, such as the beams, columns and trusses used in World Trade Center.” And additionally, they disavowed his expertise because he wasn’t even employed in the fire protection department (he was actually in the water testing business).

The big point here is that if Mr. Ryan would misrepresent his standing at UL, what possible reason do we have to assume that he wouldn’t misrepresent (or blatantly lie) about everything else in the letter? Certainly UL disavowed his central argument, that they had certified the structural steel and that because of that it could not have failed in the manner the government described.

Anyway... I'm sure I could go on, but I've kicked this horse enough, and unless it shows some signs of life over the weekend I'll probably move on.

It's a good thing it was Kevin Ryan and not Jack Ryan or I would have been in trouble.
Ross

I was hoping for more comments on yesterday's blog, but oh well, I'm guessing the sheer length of the two letters probably put off a lot of people from reading yesterday's entry, to say nothing of commenting on it. Despite this lack of popular support, I've decided to continue the debate in this forum, and offer a rebuttal of my friend's letter.

Ross,

In our conversation yesterday, what I said, and I stand by it, is that there were shenanigans. Here's my thesis:

Shenanigans... hmm... Interesting that you should choose that word. We both did debate in high school so I'm sure I don't need to remind you how often topicality, or the definition of words, becames important in a debate. By using this word you've set yourself a really low standard. Dictionary.com defines it as a deceitful trick or an underhanded act. Wow, a deceitful trick in world politics/terrorism, you truly do have a herculean task ahead of you. Still, all sarcasm aside, you do make some individual points that are worth looking at:

* The government had covert operatives, vast intelligence organizations, procedures and policies, and plenty of fighter jets. The Bush administration nevertheless allowed not one, but TWO identical attacks to be perpetrated by known enemies of US on the same day. The airplane crashing scenario was not widely known by civilians, but Washington had been aware of the possibility of for quite a while. It's their job to detect it, stop it in advance, and intervene once it starts. They failed. It ended in the worst possible scenario, with two gigantic buildings being completely destroyed. Total failure. At best it was unbelievable incompetence and a total lack of leadership.

By any reasonable estimate 8 months is not a lot of time to change all the "covert operations, vast intelligence organizations, procedures and policies." If you accept that and if you've ever dealt with the federal burearacracy I think you'd have to. Then the failure of these "resources" is probably a failure of the governments which came before Bush. So yeah, at best it was "unbelievable incompetence and total lack of leadership." But it is also myopic at best and a complete prevaracation at worst to lay all of the lack of competence and leadership at the feet of Bush. Also, this is a strange position for someone who hates the Patriot Act as much as you do. You blame the government for not stopping 9/11 but then when they want to increase the spying, you go ballistic over that as well. So which is it, are you comfortable with a certain risk, as long as your civil liberties are infringed, or would you rather give up all your liberties if it would prevent another 9/11? It's hard to have it both ways...

* The explanation given by NIST is complicated, hard to believe, and doesn't match the evidence very well. Until I did some background checking myself I believed it simply on the assumption that they wouldn't make it up. But after looking at it myself and looking at some past data, I doubt that their explanation is correct.

I don't think anyone's hubris is such that they profess to know every detail of what happened, but without more specificity about what exactly is "hard to believe" or "doesn't match the evidence," it's difficult for me to offer any better rebuttal than that.

Are our leaders conspiring terrorists, bumblers lying to cover their incompetent performance, or just so stupid that they actually have no idea what happened? I would put the odds on #2, but I hold it against them whichever it is.

So you think they're most likely "bumblers lying to cover their incompetent performance?" We're still talking about what caused the collapse of the tower right? Because while I can certainly imagine incompetant acts that would have led to the attack happening in the first place, I'm having a hard time seeing a connection between Bush's incompetence and the actual collapse. Did Bush own a company which manufactured the infamous angle clip?

**snip**

But it's clear that there are inconsistencies in the government explanation, and that occam's razor was NOT employed by FEMA and NIST in concocting the official government statement on what happened. Occam said: "one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything". There is no implication that an explanation is simple because it is a commonly held belief or because it is propounded by a source of authority.

At what point in our discussions have I implied that Occam's Razor had anything to do with popularity or correlated with government support? I'm merely saying that "The simplest answer is usually the correct answer," which is a reasonable translation of Numquam ponenda est pluritas sine necessitate. (Occam did not say "one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything," that was later authors) And in this case I think they definitely followed Occam. A plane flies into a building; it collapses. What caused it to collapse? The plane. It's the essence of Occam. Even if we use your version of the Razor, you're multiplying entities. Everyone agrees that a plane hit the building. If you add demolitions on top of that you're multiplying the entities, without any clear reason (that we've covered so far) why couldn't it just be the plane.

**snip**

(1) Skyscrapers have been hit by airplanes before--never with similar results. For example, a b-25 bomber full of fuel crashed into the empire state building and exploded. It was not destroyed, nor was the steel in the building melted.

http://history1900s.about.com/library/misc/blempirecrash.htm

***EDIT 2/3/2006 ***
Sometimes you're writing and thinking as fast as you can, and stuffs just pouring out, you start to lose key facts like the units after numbers, so at some point 10 tons and 10,000 gallons just became 10 and 10,000. As a result I made a major error. This is the original:

This is a really bad example. According to your own link the B-25 weighed only 10 tons. The planes that struck the WTC were carrying 1,000 times that much weight just in fuel. Let's be honest here, there's really no comparison.

Here's the new argument:

The B-25 wasn't going nearly as fast, it wasn't being driven with the intent to do as much damage as possible, but rather probably the least. While I was smoking crack with the 1,000 times, the 767 does weigh 20 times as much as the B-25, and look (since you are so found of visual evidence) at the picturethe picture is there really any comparison between the hole you see there and what you saw the morning of September 11th?

***END EDIT***

And if you read the Wikipedia Article on 9/11, they make the claim that the Empire State building is a lot tougher and might have survived the same strike that brought down the WTC ("...some engineers strongly believe skyscrapers of more traditional design (such as New York City's Empire State Building and Malaysia's Petronas Towers) would have fared much better under the circumstances, perhaps standing indefinitely.")

(2) Lots of steel-framed concrete buildings have caught on fire before, but a building like the trade-towers has not collapsed from a fire before, that I can find a history of using google. For example, venesuela's tallest building burned out of control for 17 hours without collapsing. You can find more stories this if you look for them. Meridian Plaza in Philadelphia caught on fire and burned for 24 hours, but still didn't collapse.

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=1389

According to your own link it did not burn out of control for 17 hours: military helicopters dropped water on it, which the article itself points out helped to reduce structural damage. Also, based on the article they did not know what caused it, but there certainly wasn't 10,000 gallons of fuel present, nor the complicating factor of losing all the structure bearing elements on one of the four sides because of a plane. Also, if you read the article I linked to yesterday he talked about how in conventional fires the "heat" (not the temperature) is much less and even though something might last 17 hours, parts of the building have a chance to cool when the fire moves on.

(3) 85 minutes my ass. Burning jet fuel would have to be really concentrated, and in massive quantity to melt steel, or even weaken it. And it would need to burn for a long time. The melting point of steel is about 2750 Degrees Farenheight, and there was a lot of steel supporting those buildings. Steel doesn't even start to soften until 1100 degrees or so. Those buildings were built specifically to withstand an airplane impact and subsequent fire caused by burning fuel.

You can google and find many reprints of that letter online. He is not saying the steel didn't melt--he is saying it wasn't from the planes or the fuel or from a structural defect in the steel.

No one with any sense is saying that the steel melted, and I agree this letter is powerful evidence that we don't know everything, and even goes to show that there may have been some shenanigans, but moving from this to secondary explosives is still a leap you can't rationally make. It only takes the failure of a single key component like the angle clips mentioned in the Nova article, for the whole thing to come down. You don't have to change the entire building into liquid.

(4) The very same Osama Bin Laden we allege is behind 9-11 snuck a big tank of cyanide and a huge truck full of explosives into that very same building and tried to blow it up back in 1993. So clearly it is possible to get explosives into the towers or at least parts of them without being detected. If you had an inside man, it seems it would be plausible to get explosives into the building lots of different ways.

Driving in a truck full of fertilizer is orders of magnitude less difficult than wiring explosives to bring a building down in a controlled demolition, and why did they wait the two hours; why not just bring it down when it would kill the most people? Why have the planes at all? This avenue is the portal to Moonbat land, turn around!! Save yourself!!

The official explanation is neither simple nor consistent with other evidence, which is what occam's razor is all about. According to NIST, two well-designed buildings collapsed within hours of each other due to the exact same "fluke." It would be the first time that a fire OR an airplane impact or both ever caused a steel-framed skyscraper to collapse uniformly and suddenly. And according to the official story, it happened TWICE, on one day, two times within literally a few minutes, and both towers were completely obliterated.

While I'm happy you no longer dismiss Occam's Razor out of hand, I still think you haven't quite caught the spirit of it. As far as the buildings being well designed, most of what I've read indicates that while it wasn't poorly designed, it wasn't without its weaknesses (the quote above about the differences in design between it and other skyscrapers are examples of this point). As far as the first time argument, well it's because it's the first time it's ever happened. All of the other examples are so different that direct comparisons are impossible to draw.

If you watch the videos in slow motion, you will see two buildings collapsing in what looks like a demolition. And so occam's razor would suggest that it was, in fact, a demolition. If you see something that looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and makes duck noises, then occam's razor suggests that it is probably a duck. And NIST asserts a far more complicated scenario that has NEVER happened before to any other skyscraper (and that the designers of the building took great cause to prevent.) While I don't believe that occam's razor proves anything (it's just an approach to looking for evidence) I certainly don't think that in this case it supports the official government statement on the matter.

It "looks?" Seriously, "looks?" Your concluding piece of evidence is that it "looks" a certain way? Could you be less scientific? Saying a platypus looks like nothing from this world does not make it an alien. And of course it looks like a demolition, because that's basically what it was, an accidental demolition. I guess what you really mean to say is that it looks like a controlled demolition. In the very next breath you say a similar accidental demolition has "NEVER happened," so how on Earth are you so confident that you can tell the difference between an accidental demolition and a controlled demolition, just by looking at it?

If you read carefully in the letter from the UL Exec above, you will note that he refers to an August 2003 reversal of position by the the inspectors who formulated the official government statement on the collapse of the towers.

Granted. The letter is far and away your best piece of evidence. You probably should have just stuck with that.

I think YOU want to use occam's razor to say: "Well, a government conspiracy or cover-up is much more complicated than an exceptionally unlikely double-disaster," but in fact I think we have plenty of evidence that incompetence could have (and has in fact in the past) allowed people to get explosives into the towers and that the government has covered up lots of incompetence.

You seem to be indicating here that the fact that both towers fell multiplies the improbablity of the event. On the contrary: if two identically designed buildings both get hit by an airplane and one falls and the other doesn't, that would be the head-scratcher, and I'm sure that you would using it as more evidence of conspiracy ("Why did one building fall and the other didn't?")

It's a pretty far-out suggestion that some faction of the government was responsible for the terrorist attacks. I don't have to believe something that sinister in order to think the government explanation is BS--and to hold them responsible for their failure to prevent or intervene. And that is the second reason why I am furious with the bush administration. Shenanigans.

You seem to be really back-pedaling here at the very end, and I'm not sure what to make of it. Yeah, we probably don't know every last detail of why the towers fell (particularly WTC7, which I'm surprised you haven't mentioned). Yeah, given that the government is engaged in shenanigans all the time it's fairly likely that there are some shenanigans involved with respect to 9/11. But to go from this to proving that something other than being hit by a 767 is what caused the towers to collapse is a whole different, and much more tenuous, conclusion.

The True Disciple of Occam
Ross

P.S. If you made it this far you probably deserve an award. I'm not sure how much longer this will continue, but unless I hear a lot of complaints I think I'll keep mining it for material. I should mention that after several months of effort I finally finished "The Closing of the American Mind" by Allan Bloom. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Wow! Anyway, that's all for today.

If you're just getting here, scroll down and read the first entry of today (the one at the bottom) before you read this one.

My friend e-mailed me a response last night, but apparently I missed it. He was kind enough to resend it, and give his permission for me to post it here:

Ross,

It's a pretty far-out suggestion that some faction of the government was responsible for the terrorist attacks. I don't have to believe something that sinister in order to think the government explanation is BS--and to hold them responsible for their failure to prevent or intervene. And that is the second reason why I am furious with the bush administration. Shenanigans.

Read this first

In the last few weeks I've been involved in a couple of really knock-down eye-gouging arguments. The first was about 12dailypro.com, the miraculous investment which would allow you to not merely retire in five years, but have all the money in the world (44% returns every 20 days, do the math). The second was last night when I got into an argument with my best friend over Iraq (probably because of the SotUA last night). He made a couple of points and I'd like to use this space to retort in writing.

One of the first things he brought up was what he called a "BBC Study" (I won't swear that he used the world study, but I was certainly left with the impression that I was being told about some kind of systematic analysis, anyway...) that showed that things were as bad in Iraq now as they were under Sadaam. He followed this up with a statment along the lines of "I know as someone from Utah you know a lot about what's going on in Iraq, but maybe the BBC has a slightly better idea." Whatever. The point is that my friend is a notorious exagerator so I asked him to send me a link to the "study" he was referring to. He pointed me to this article: Iraq abuse 'as bad as Saddam era' (notice the single quote, they'll become important, and the word "abuse"). If you read the article you'll discover that there is no study or anything like it. In fact, the BBC isn't saying anything (in the article) about the condition of Iraq -- they are reporting that former Iraqi prime minister, Iyad Allawi, said (here's where the single quote come in) was saying Iraq abuse was 'as bad as Saddam era.'

The other thing I told you to keep an eye on was "abuse." He's not saying the general situation is as bad, he's not saying as many people are dying or disappearing or being gassed, or hounded by the secret police. It's also important to consider who's saying it. Iyad Allawi was in power and (at the time the article was written) is trying to get back into power by running for office. In fact, the BBC offers this caveat:

The BBC's Jim Muir in Baghdad says Mr Allawi's remarks come as Iraq prepares for parliamentary elections next month, which he hopes could see him return as prime minister.

Now the argument isn't baseless; they did discover "170 detainees... at an interior ministry centre, some allegedly suffering from abuse and starvation." Certainly a secret prison is Saddam-esque and it appears that the abuse these prisoners suffered is as bad as the abuse prisoners suffered under Saddam, but clearly when Allawi is saying things are as a bad now as under Saddam he's talking about the degree of abuse, i.e. some prisoners have been as badly abused under this regime as they would have been under the last. He's not talking about the scale (i.e. he's not saying as many prisoners are being abused now as then).

Now as I've said before, there are lots of very valid arguments to be made against Iraq or at least certain aspects of it, but I never get to make those arguments because I'm always pitted against people who are so mad about Bush/Iraq that mentioning either word sends them into such paroxyms of rage that their animalistic howls end all possiblity of communication let alone rational debate. Which brings me to the other point my friend made.

He feels that it's improbable that the WTC (in particular WTC7) was brought down by the planes. Of course, he is too pusillanimous to take it to its logical end and ascribe blame to someone, like Cheney or the Jews, a favorite target of other conspiracy theorists. You probably remember when I linked to the BYU professor who was making essentially the same claim, and their arguments are eeriely similar, though my friend claims to have never read the BYU professor's stuff. One argument both of them make is that airplane fuel does not burn hot enough to melt steel. Well, it doesn't have to, all it has to do is weaken it (which happens at a lot lower temperature). They argue that other buildings have had fires and haven't collapsed. Well, how many had fires proceeded by a huge impact, and involving thousands of gallons of fuel? I could go on but Nova did a special on the subject, which I saw part of, and they have an excellent page on the Engineer's Perspective (Dr. Thomas Eagar, professor of materials engineering and engineering systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) on the collapse in which he answers all of these points and more (like why did the towers collapse so neatly).

Despite what most people think I don't actually enjoy really contentious arguments; in fact, they generally leave me feeling kind of ookie. But this entry has helped with some of that. Hopefully I wasn't too hard on my friend. I think not mentioning him by name should count for something. In any event, thanks for reading this super-sized edition of "View from the Bushes." And I'll catch you tomorrow.

Wandering aimlessly in search of my youth
Ross

PS One thing I forgot to mention, when my friend initially described jet fuel as kerosene I immediately said it's not kerosene, an answer I immediately doubted and my friend just as immediately used to justify calling me a moron. He was right (on this point) and I was wrong, as wrong as wrong can be (on this point).