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Former conspiracy believer here

Round and round Red goes, where Red stops, nobody knows. I think your name should be Merry-Go-Round.

How about answering my specific question?

How would you like a debate and discourse which questions the sincerity of the OP to ensue?

Are there any parameters with which you are comfortable?
 
How about answering my specific question?

How would you like a debate and discourse which questions the sincerity of the OP to ensue?

Are there any parameters with which you are comfortable?

So far your proof that he's disingenuous is that you disagree with his ability to realize that the truth movement is a joke?

Classic. Sounds like a cultist deriding a former cultist as being "not really a believer."
 
How about answering my specific question?

How would you like a debate and discourse which questions the sincerity of the OP to ensue?

Are there any parameters with which you are comfortable?

What's the purpose Red?

You're like a forum Mobius Strip. You go on and on and on, with no end in sight, never admitting to someone else being right.

You repeatedly backpedal when caught in a contradiction or untruth using word games. Just take a look at this thread. It's the perfect example.

I think I'd rather put my testicles in a vise and let a monkey turn the handle than go through the torture of debating you.
 
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Hi PM,

We had some discussion of this over on the JREF Zeitgeist thread, beginning around [http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=3025982#post3025982 here]. It may have started before but my case was basically this...
Thanks. The problem is, you are talking about events that you think show signs of central control. There is no actual evidence of central control, and in fact, the ways in which such systems can and do self-organise is a subject of considerable scientific and mathematical study.

Take ants, for example. There is no central control in an ant colony. The queen is no smarter than the other ants; she's just a big ant that lays eggs. All the complex behaviours we observe in ant colonies - farming, construction, wars, and so on - arise from the interactions of individual insects that are all but mindless.

I don't watch so much TV these days so the cases I cited to substantiate these points were a little old. For the first - the Leah Betts ecstasy incident in the UK. For the second, things like Pino Arlacchi's 10 Year Plan to Eradicate Heroin and Cocaine Production, and Cassini. For the last, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 - jingoism and no media dissent.
I can't speak specifically to the first, though I know of the event. I don't know what the second is about at all. As to the third, your claim is laughable; no such thing happened.

If you want to go deeper into these things, I'm happy to discuss more. The basic case I'm trying to present does not relate so directly to these specific cases, rather the pattern of activity in media. And, of course, the apparently covert political policy being pursued.
There are indeed patterns of activity in the media, but there is not the slightest evidence of central control, much less by some spooky NWO. Journalists are lazy, and have personal biases. News reporting is lousy across every field, and in every part of the world, and always has been.

I'm discussing the heaps of loans given to dodgy leaderships which drag the country's population into "strategic adjustment programs" aka compulsory global consumerism. More from around [http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=3055415#post3055415 here]
There is, and has always been, constant jockeying for influence between nations. This reached new heights during the Cold War, and has persisted beyond that. It is not in any way evidence of any central covert agency.

One globalised network of trade with centralised control.
Centralised control of what? By whom?

But we don't hate them now, because they're not communists.
They are not communists, their empire has collapsed, their economy is in ruins (always has been, but they were better at hiding this fact in the past), the gulags are long closed, and they are not directly threatening Western Europe with nuclear holocaust. This seems sufficient reason for no longer hating them.

Check the moves of the oil business into pharmacology around 100 years ago. The aggressive policies they applied to competition in healthcare.
A hundred years ago? A hundred years ago, pharmacology barely existed. We had, what, aspirin and laudanum? The first modern medicines, the sulfa drugs, only appeared in 1932.

100 years down the line and all there is, pretty much, is drugs and surgery.
And radiotherapy for cancer.

No one looks at holistic perspective, it's 99% reductionist science, and it doesn't keep people healthy. Scientists don't want to look for systemic causation in ill health, they just want to find something that doesn't work and try and fix it in isolation.
That is a simple falsehood. Systematic causation of ill health - whether of specific diseases or of less well-defined syndromes - is the subject of considerable long-term scientific study.

What's more, people are healthy, certainly, far healthier than a hundred years ago.

For a majority of cases this doesn't work because the cause is not being addressed. Ergo the emergence of SSRI and other prozac-related medications. There's no addressal of cause. People just sit on citalopram or whatever the latest ssri is and that's their life. Pharma companies absolutely will not develop an effective medication because it's bad for business. This is may be purely a capitalist issue, but the underlying effect is consistent with negative synarchy.
What cause? People are unhappy and anxious. People have always been unhappy and anxious. Psychotherapy can help sometimes. Drugs can help other times. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's advisable to take those drugs; that's a more complex question. What it certainly isn't is a purely capitalist issue, a deliberate failing of the pharmaceutical companies or of science. After all, what do you want - a drug that you take once and you're never unhappy or anxious again? That scares the hell out of me.

The US government has consistently refused to apply known effective policies to drug addiction, especially for drugs such as heroin, which just keeps people doped up and not voting.
And yet... people keep voting.

They have refused to back plans to terminate heroin and coca production, pretty much covertly.
They have also taken actions to destory heroin and coca crops.

they have blockaded the development of effective medications.
Evidence?

They have tacitly approved the demonisation in the media of drug addicts and drugs, (heroin is just a narcotic analgesic, a painkiller, not the work of the devil).
This is actually incorrect, but I don't disagree with it in the way you might suspect. The US government has gone out of its way to demonise drugs, not just heroin and cocaine, but marijuana as well. Oh, and there was this thing called Prohibition a while back. It's not tacit or covert, it's overt puritanism, and is and has always been counter-productive.

The underlying consistent pattern is to keep people drugged up, legitimately or otherwise, and anyone who tries to change this will be blocked from doing so.
No.

The basic thing is to keep people busy, doped up, and convinced there is a serious threat to their "freedom" somewhere "out there" from which they need the protection of government. You keep people living in fear, not living out their dreams. You deprive them of their birthright and manipulate so that they vote to not have it anyway.
Nick, World War I happened. World War II happened. The Japanese really did bomb Pearl Harbor. The Soviets really did occupy Eastern Europe, and point missiles at the West. None of that is made up.

Meanwhile, drug addicts - neglecting caffeine and nicotine - still make up a small percentage of the population. People keep right on voting. Who exactly is living in fear today? I see not fear, but mild irritation at having to remove your shoes before boarding your flight.

It simply doesn't hang together. There's a bit over here, and a bit over there, and all these boxes of stuff that don't fit anywhere.
 
I will revise my opinion of the 911 attacks to reflect that for an Arab based terrorist org it wouldn't necessarily be exceptionally complex task. I still don't really buy that they orchestrated it...
Similar to before, I'll ask what seems like a natural follow-up: What's the basis for assuming they didn't have the capacity to orchestrate it? What information are you using for that assessment? There must be something you can point to which says that orchestrating the attack was beyond their capabilities.

Also, if you think about it, your comment can be viewed as being somewhat contradictory. You can accept that the attack was not necessarily a complex task, but not that they orchestrated it? If it wasn't an overly complicated task, then why would there be any difficulty in Al-Qaeda organizing the attack?

...as the what happened in its wake, in the context of what myself and other CTist believe preceded it, is just too pat. Afghanistan, Iraq, new Western hate figures, social control, and weapons sales - it's too pat for me.
You're assuming the result caused the event. Why can't it simply be the result being caused by the event? That's how things usually unfold in the world. Something happens, and then governments react to that.
 
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Oh, so you're one of those types who always needs someone to hang whenever something goes wrong ?

When 3,000 people die, yes I believe there is a need for placement of guilt. I do not feel that someone should be hung but terminated or censured in some form or fashion; absolutely.

Let me ask you this; do you think the system that we had in place on the morning of September 11 was flawed?
 
Let me ask you this; do you think the system that we had in place on the morning of September 11 was flawed?
I think you're going to have to be more precise. "System" covers an awful lot of ground.

Do you mean FAA regulations? NORAD operational procedures? The communication and sharing of information between the FBI, CIA, and other intelligence agencies? Customs & Immigration and the checking on visas? Domestic airline security? Firefighters and their radio equipment? Air Traffic Control? These are just a few possibilities.
 
Without getting into too much detail in the debate between holycanoli (welcome, by the way, if belatedly) and gumboot, I have to weigh in on the subject with my experiences. Gumboot is entirely correct in every post of his, in my humble opinion, holy; the plain fact of the matter is, this attack was completely unprecedented in many ways. I work in the United States Intelligence Community; I am also a reserve Army officer, MOS 35D, or All Source Intelligence officer. In the year or so since I've begun working for the private company I work for who does contracting for the IC, I have brought the question of pre-knowledge of 9/11 up to nearly every intelligence professional I've met, and all of them have said the same thing; looking back, they can see the red flags and spot the links that they missed before, but PRIOR to 9/11, we assumed, erroneously I might add, that no one would attempt to again attack us on our own soil SUCCESSFULLY. Given that the last successful attack from an outside source (and by successful I mean caused the loss of dozens of lives and had a PROFOUND effect on policies and procedures) was Pearl Harbor, and more than fifty years had passed since then, can you blame us for becoming complacent? It's human nature to, in essence, forget that these things happen, especially if there is a long stretch of time between instances. I call this theory (with thanks to TAM, who I believe coined the term) LIHOIA, or Let It Happen Out of Ignorance and Arrogance.

I've seen you mention the 45 minute time frame on several occasions, but as gumboot stated once, that timeframe is, in fact, erroneous in that the FAA did not inform the military (whom, I might add, did NOT have access to the radar coverage the FAA did; their radar was focused outward, not inward) until approximately 16 minutes before flight 77 struck the Pentagon that it was hijacked. The second that word came down, fighters from Langley AFB were scrambled, but as (once again) gumboot stated, the average time from scramble orders being received to the planes getting in the air is around fifteen minutes.

That being said, I can understand your point, I think. Please correct me if I'm making the wrong interpretation, but you are saying that there should have been preventative measures taken immediately after flight 175 struck the second tower, in the form of a CAP being put into place over Washington, yes? I'm not so positive about the CAP portion of that, but I do feel that measures should have been taken more quickly, such as evacuating all potential target buildings nationwide (which would naturally include the Pentagon, the Capitol, the White House, etc) as quickly as was feasible. If that had occurred, we could have had a couple hundred less casualties, perhaps, but I'm not sure why you think a CAP over Washington would have been a deterrent. As several people here have stated, it would require a humongously desperate situation for the military to order a civilian aircraft to be shot down, especially if it were over a huge metropolis area like DC and the surrounding towns. The debris raining down would likely have killed more people than WERE killed in the Pentagon and would have had the added effect of having a giant hue and outcry against the government and the military for making that decision.

As for who is to blame in terms of the government, I'm of the opinion it has been established already, and I'm not sure what good a full on court martial or inquest would do, as there were so many involved. You've got the analysts, their supervisors, the military, and at least two branches of the government that all bear some measure of blame for allowing 9/11 to occur. I'm of the opinion that bearing the responsibility for nearly three thousand deaths that COULD have been prevented is punishment enough, and now efforts should be turned to finding what was wrong with the system and fixing it. The position of the Director of National Intelligence was created in response to the 9/11 attacks, and Director McConnell is making every effort to put all of the recommendations of the 9/11 commission into place. The Transportation Security Administration was formed in response to the attacks, and having worked with them temporarily on a project for my company, I can tell you they are making every effort to fix the holes in transportation (which includes aviation) security. The intel agencies are now making every attempt to work together and to share their information so as to avoid the circumstances that could lead to one agency having part of the information and another having the other part, and neither agency knowing that the remainder of the puzzle is in the other agency. Ultimately, in my considered opinion, the blame game does no one any good; it's better to focus on what we now know was wrong with our system and fix it.

My two cents. Oh, and a belated welcome to the other new folks as well.
 
Gumboot, in the intrest of bandwidth I responded without quoting your eloquent and finely crafted response to my posts. It deserves repeating, believe me.

Perhaps you know...when was the last time a plane was hi-jacked in the US? I can't remember a time it happened. I'm not pleading ignorance to be a smart-ass but I really cannot remember a time it happened where a flight leaving a US city was hi-jacked over the US.

To me, this would ring one hell of a loud bell that in my previous opinion should have sat off a hair-trigger response that something is up. I can see where you were coming from with the (unfair synopsis warning here) "blame Congress" message.

But still, if I'm in the Command Bunker and I hear the word hijacking, I'm launching whatever I can to secure the capitol airspace. "Just go take a look." We waste trillions upon trillions every year on all sorts of stuff. Sending Maverick up there to take a look may be expensive but we'll pay for the jet fuel later on.

Having read your posts, I can now say that you're right. But I still cannot believe that we are so vulnerable and apparently still are unless we have crews sitting cockpit ready on the tarmac which we do not have. If the best we could do is what we did, that isn't good enough in my view. Something needs to change.

Thanks for the informative, lively, and good debate.
 
When 3,000 people die, yes I believe there is a need for placement of guilt. I do not feel that someone should be hung but terminated or censured in some form or fashion; absolutely.

Who do you blame if a meteor wipes out L.A. ?

Let me ask you this; do you think the system that we had in place on the morning of September 11 was flawed?

Yes. And if you ask me, the people who are to blame are THE ENTIRE WESTERN CIVILISATION.

Having read your posts, I can now say that you're right. But I still cannot believe that we are so vulnerable and apparently still are unless we have crews sitting cockpit ready on the tarmac which we do not have.

Argument from personal incredulity.
 
Gumboot, in the intrest of bandwidth I responded without quoting your eloquent and finely crafted response to my posts. It deserves repeating, believe me.

Perhaps you know...when was the last time a plane was hi-jacked in the US? I can't remember a time it happened. I'm not pleading ignorance to be a smart-ass but I really cannot remember a time it happened where a flight leaving a US city was hi-jacked over the US.

To me, this would ring one hell of a loud bell that in my previous opinion should have sat off a hair-trigger response that something is up. I can see where you were coming from with the (unfair synopsis warning here) "blame Congress" message.

But still, if I'm in the Command Bunker and I hear the word hijacking, I'm launching whatever I can to secure the capitol airspace. "Just go take a look." We waste trillions upon trillions every year on all sorts of stuff. Sending Maverick up there to take a look may be expensive but we'll pay for the jet fuel later on.

Having read your posts, I can now say that you're right. But I still cannot believe that we are so vulnerable and apparently still are unless we have crews sitting cockpit ready on the tarmac which we do not have. If the best we could do is what we did, that isn't good enough in my view. Something needs to change.

Thanks for the informative, lively, and good debate.

Hijackings to and from Cuba...

D.B. Cooper - hijacking for fun and profit...

In th 1970's skyjacking became something of a cottage industry. Metal detectors and airport security screenings were put in place as a reaction to the spate of skyjackings in the late 60s and early 70s. Before then there were virtually no security checks of passengers boarding planes...
 
Ok, you showed it to me. What does this show fire? I already have read the reports of the fires. This proves that the building should have fell through itself?

What about the debre or smoking coming out of floors not reporting fires as the building emplodes?

What you should post is the other picture of the backside of wt7 that shows the damage it took from the collapse of the north tower.

That does more for your argument then that video. Ill try to find it.
 
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Gumboot, in the intrest of bandwidth I responded without quoting your eloquent and finely crafted response to my posts. It deserves repeating, believe me.

Perhaps you know...when was the last time a plane was hi-jacked in the US? I can't remember a time it happened. I'm not pleading ignorance to be a smart-ass but I really cannot remember a time it happened where a flight leaving a US city was hi-jacked over the US.

To me, this would ring one hell of a loud bell that in my previous opinion should have sat off a hair-trigger response that something is up. I can see where you were coming from with the (unfair synopsis warning here) "blame Congress" message.

But still, if I'm in the Command Bunker and I hear the word hijacking, I'm launching whatever I can to secure the capitol airspace. "Just go take a look." We waste trillions upon trillions every year on all sorts of stuff. Sending Maverick up there to take a look may be expensive but we'll pay for the jet fuel later on.

Having read your posts, I can now say that you're right. But I still cannot believe that we are so vulnerable and apparently still are unless we have crews sitting cockpit ready on the tarmac which we do not have. If the best we could do is what we did, that isn't good enough in my view. Something needs to change.

Thanks for the informative, lively, and good debate.
Good point.
 
wtc7-sw-corner1.jpg



Here it is.
 
Ok, you showed it to me. What does this show fire? I already have read the reports of the fires. This proves that the building should have fell through itself?

Please complete the following:

fire + explosives = ___________

What about the debre or smoking coming out of floors not reporting fires as the building emplodes?

Please rephrase.

What you should post is the other picture of the backside of wt7 that shows the damage it took from the collapse of the north tower.

That's what I posted.
 
Listen, if someone is starting this whole "fire doesn't call steel structures to fail" line again then I'm going to want to start a proper technical debate. We'll be looking at detailed fire testing results generally, how this has been translated into various building standards and codes (notably the UK Building Regulations and Buildings Standards, but also the Eurocodes), modern test results from the likes of Edinburgh or Sheffield Universities, and some practical examples.

And I'll be expecting any proponents of the "steel is inherrently fireproof" school of thought to be responding in similar depth, rather than simply shouting the "no steel skyscraper has ever collapsed" rubbish that is usually trotted out.
 

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