Enlightenment

G.M. Trevelyan says in his biography of Macaulay that the Nineteenth Century agreed that there were three subjects that were not to be discussed in company: sex, religion and politics. Whatever the benefits of the prohibition in peace, it can't be said that it resulted in much progress in understanding the subjects.

Freud wrote of "The Sexual Enlightenment of Children." In Australia there is or was a tribe which brought up children in its traditional religion until they reached a certain age. Then they were told, privately, that the whole thing was just a myth designed to get them to act like good members of the tribe---the religious enlightenment of children.

In dealing with 9/11 Truth, activists are undertaking the political enlightenment of individuals of all chronological ages, and like the other enlightenments it is not a thing to be taken lightly.

Religion and politics are more like each other than either is like sex. Religion and government can be seen as simply systems for controlling people. One uses real sanctions, the other imaginary ones (or invisible ones, if you prefer). These systems of control are outward manifestations or counterparts of what seem to be deep psychological structures in humans. These structures can be conceptualized in terms of "belief systems."

If arguing the merits of one religion versus another is like discussing ordinary politics, then discussing deep politics is like debating the existence of God. The possibility that the people might need to be protected from their own government (instead of some other government) is one which is unthinkable for many citizens of the United States today, although it provided the Founding Fathers of the Country with their source of energy.

David Livingston Smith, as I mentioned earlier, points out the usefulness of self-deception in the task of deceiving others. Since it is apparently apart from the evolutionary perspective, he does not mention the usefulness of establishing a community of self-deceivers, each helping the others in the task of self-deception. However this phenomenon is to be accounted for evolutionarily, there is no doubt of the notion's usefulness in the study of sociology and history.

Ruppert's Approach II

Both Ruppert and his opponent Victor Thorn use a judicial model to "argue the 9/11 case." It is natural to think of what that requires in terms of trying to convince an audience of a proposition. Showing something to a person one-on-one is one thing, and showing it to twelve persons in the same room with you is not very different. But showing something to the population of the USA is not necessarily the same.

Instead of dealing with a person, where techniques of persuasion and argumentation are known to us from antiquity, dealing with a mass of people of a size unthinkable to the Greeks and Romans may well require very different methods.

On the Coast to Coast AM radio broadcast of June 16, 2005 (available to be listened to anytime at http://www.coasttocoastam.com/ for the price of subscribing) Mike Levine said that his boxing instructor advised him (presumably a while back) to "open a cut," then work on it. Levine applied the advice to 9/11 activism. George Noory thought he was correct. I do too, at least in part.

"Opening a cut" in our context means finding something unexplained and incontrovertible, which can be described or pointed out briefly, and empasizing that it must be followed up, it must be answered, it must be explained. This thin end of the wedge relies upon the traditional and familiar techniques of rhetoric and logic---the techniques suited to interpersonal, face-to-face persuasion. We are forced to start small because the mass audience, and the media which address them, will not sit still long enough to consider everything pertinent.

"Justification is holistic. Support for a conclusion comes not from a single line of argument but from a host of considerations of varying degrees of strength and relevance. Indirect evidence and weak arguments, which alone would bear little weight, may be interwoven into a fabric that strongly supports a conclusion. Each element derives warrant from its place in the whole," says Catherine Z. Elgin (Considered Judgment, Princeton University Press (1996) p. 13); and everyone knows that she is right. But a host of considerations is invisible to an audience which will only consider one at a time. That audience must first be persuaded that it is a reasonable thing to devote time and attention to.

When this cut has been opened a different model than the judicial one will become appropriate. Because journalists tend to confine their reading to journalism, the media will then constitute a phase space in which that cut will become an attractor, creating its own basin of attraction. When this happens, then activists can supply the media in plenty with facts they themselves have provided and failed to connect. It will become a matter of quantity instead of quality, as in the first phase.

Priestly pedophilia was not that long ago something inconceivable (at least to the media). When once the cut was made, or the story broke, things changed rapidly.

Many activists think that in order to talk to others about 9/11 there must be no mistakes in what they say. If it turns out that indeed it was Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon, and they have espoused the no-plane theory, then they have hurt the cause. This is thinking in the traditional, one-to-one setting. Activists do not have to be 100% right about everything. It is enough if we are right about just one thing, if that one thing is enough to open a cut. Perhaps Flight 77 did hit the Pentagon. I don't know for sure, but I do know that Hani Hanjour didn't pilot it, because "he could not fly at all." So I was misinformed. Why? And how did it become a matter of no interest?

Ruppert's Aproach

Every cop and criminal lawyer knows that technical evidence, whether physical or psychiatric, can always be disputed. The winner will probably be the side that can afford to pay for the testimony of more experts. Much more weighty is testimony placing the defendant at, or displacing him from, the scene. As a former cop, Mike Ruppert is well aware of this. He structures his book accordingly, eschewing physical evidence, and advises others to do the same.
I can't agree.

What is technical changes with time. Fingerprints were technical when they were first used. DNA evidence is certainly technical, and it has passed beyond the stage where it can be disputed. It has resulted in any number of decisive outcomes and will prevent many future disagreements, investigations and trials.

The WTC events can be described plainly enough to be comprehensible to the average man, without the use use of terms that are even remotely technical.

The leading contender for an official account of those events, the pancake theory, when put into plain and accurate words, consists of the assertions that an airplane hitting an immense steel-framed concrete building caused that building to crumble into dust in a perfectly symmetrical fashion at the rate of ten floors per second, and that the plane's burning fuel melted the building's steel girders into equally long segments, of a size convenient for hauling away quickly, and then, in its fury, tossed those girder fragments three hundred feet sideways from the building. (Or perhaps the powdery floors, somehow, did the tossing.) A public defender of this theory must rely on the footage of the actual events being kept out of the public eye, because putting the relevant images in the public eye with appropriate information would have an effect that cannot be counteracted by all the bullshit in the world.

Did the Towers Collapse?

Images of the Towers being struck on 9/11 were played and replayed continually on TV for a brief period, then disappeared never to return. Images of the Towers coming down were not, at least in my memory, nearly so prominent. [In fact, I have learned, they were shown only once.]

We have all seen (pictures, at least) collapsed buildings. Think of the ones you have seen. Did any of them look like what was left of the Towers? In fact, yes, the ones brought down by controlled demolition looked like that, but not ones that just fell down, or, as one says, collapsed. When we say that the Towers collapsed, we speak popularly, but not accurately. Saying that they collapsed reinforces people in their belief that the Towers fell down. Their sketchy memory of the sight is labelled with the word 'collapse', which then takes on an evidentiary force.

In fact, the Towers did not collapse, they disintegrated, floor by floor, from the top down.

We have all seen buildings crumble too, but always from the bottom up, when they fell into their footprint as a result of the carefully designed explosion. In the case of the Towers, having them crumble from the bottom up, that is, disintegrate at the bottom and allow the building to disappear into the disintegration, like Building 7 and every other controlled demolition, would have been a bit much.

Go to http://www.implosionworld.com Click on Cinema Explosif' on the left. Then look at the videos of the Southward Towers (second row, third left) and the Schuykill Falls Tower (second row, fourth right). Watch the puffs of smoke come out before the buildings move. Then compare that with Hufschmid's video, Painful Deceptions, and watch the same puffs come out of the WTC Towers.

Update from Kevin Ryan

Kevin Ryan's new communication of June 9 is so good it deserves to be here. I reproduce it in part below:

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"Anyone who honestly looks at the evidence has difficulty finding anything in the official story of 9/11 that is believable. It's not just one or two strange twists or holes in the story, the whole thing is bogus from start to end.[3] In my previous job I was in a position to question one part, the collapse of three tall buildings due to fire. But this isn't really a chemistry or engineering problem, and may be best approached initially through statistics.

The three WTC buildings in question weren't all designed the same way and weren't all hit by airplanes. The only thing they seemed to have in common were relatively small and manageable fires, as indicated by the work of firefighters right up to the moment of collapse. From the government's report we know that only a small percentage of the supporting columns in each of the first two buildings were severed, and that the jet fuel burned off in just a few minutes.

To follow the latest "leading hypothesis", what are the odds that all the fireproofing fell off in just the right places, even far from the point of impact? Without much test data, let's say it's one in a thousand. And what are the odds that the office furnishings converged to supply highly directed and (somehow) forced-oxygen fires at very precise points on the remaining columns? Is it another one in a thousand? What is the chance that those points would then all soften in unison, and give way perfectly, so that the highly dubious "progressive global collapse" theory could be born? I wouldn't even care to guess. But finally, with well over a hundred fires in tall buildings through history, what are the chances that the first, second and third incidents of fire-induced collapse would all occur on the same day? Let's say it's one in a million. Considering just these few points we're looking at a one in a trillion chance, using generous estimates and not really considering the third building (no plane, no jet fuel, different construction).

How convenient that our miraculous result, combined with several other trains of similarly unlikely events, gives us reason to invade the few most strategically important lands for the production of oil and natural gas. As I said, this is not about chemistry or engineering. Our continued dependence on this highly improbable story means that we have a desperate need to believe it. It is, in fact, a psychology problem."
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David Livingston Smith's book, Why We Lie, examines deception from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology, and emphasizes that self-deception is a valuable tool in the work of deceiving others. His observations are very valuable for anyone interested in 9/11, and his insights applied to mass self-deception would be helpful.

An Easy Way to Refute the Conspiracy Theorists

Have an assistant with a video camera ready while you hold an object at arms length and let go of it. When it falls, not down, but in an arc, videotape that event and publish it on the Internet. Or better yet, videotape it falling up.

New Thoughts on the Pancake Theory

The Pancake Theory is the theory that the WTC Towers turned into dust because fire weakened the steel support columns, which allowed the floors of the buildings to fall on top of each other, turning the concrete floors into dust. Certainly, there is no disputing that the buildings were turned into dust.

So far as I know, no one has yet remarked publicly that according to this theory, each concrete floor, by falling twelve feet onto the next floor, turned both that floor and itself into dust. It is apparent from the photography and videography that the dust originated not at the street level of the buildings, when all the falling mass arrived on the earth, but rather floor by floor.
Thus the theory postulates that most of the concrete floors were turned into powder, not by concrete falling on them, but by concrete powder falling on them.

Added July 5, 2005:

Further reading and listening has shown me that the claim of novelty for the above thoughts is somewhat exaggerated. However, I have decided to leave them in place because I think that even a slightly different presentation of the same facts will increase the liklihood of their striking someone as significant.

Collapse? Or Implosion?

Fire? Or explosion?