When you get into nanothermites and thermal initiators and temperatures of melting steel, you lose a huge percentage of the public.
That seems so - except melting steel is easy. Jet fuel burns at 1800 F tops; steel melts at 2800 F. People naturally think there's something special about jet fuel, confuse it with rocket fuel. McVeigh's use of racing fuel in his fertilizer bomb in OK City helped to build this impression. I don't know why nanothermite fails to impress the public -- too far out of everyday experience, I guess. Truthers seem to find it fun. I'm amused when sociologists babble about "X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy" and "differential scanning calorimetry", all breathless for the Gee-Whiz Buck Rogersness of it all.
You shouldn't have to understand that stuff (and you don't have to) to understand the rock-solid case for government complicity in 9/11.
It's not complicated. The chips ignite energetically, they're not paint, and their microscopic structure suggests they're an engineered nanomaterial. We all know what an MRI does; we needn't worry about subatomic spin that makes it work. I think the "government complicity" line and the even more destructive "we've proven inside job" line lose the public and make us a cult. Nobody wants to think the world is that fucked up. Few Americans are ready to leap into a world where Batman and Commissioner Gordon plot to make the Riddler take the fall for a bank heist. My own awakening was a process of years, from incompetence theory to LIHOP to controlled demolition -- and I had the advantage of a thorough knowledge of modern German history and the evils of imperialism from the early 70's. Rather than peddling conspiracy theories we need to sell the mysteries, the widows' questions, the shoddy and dishonest investigations, the connections of the alleged hijackers to the intel community, and we need to let people formulate their own questions and come to their own conclusions.
[With CD] you are generally going to reach ... those with the lowest ability .... They may latch on to a little factoid or two .... [and] feel like they understand it.
Those whose enthusiasm exceeds their knowledge and communication skills are a constant problem in the movement. Every working group should do workshops in logical fallacies so that everyone learns to spot a false dichotomy, circular reasoning, ad hominem, argument from authority, ad populum, post hoc ergo propter hoc etc. etc. These could be presented in terms of spotting flaws in debunkers' arguments, but the more important effect would be to help our people spot logical flaws in their own arguments and in each others'. Somebody could develop a pdf booklet and a series of multiple choice tests (with an answer sheet that explains why the answers are wrong or right). If this tool were attractively presented, it might even find its way into high schools and colleges. Using 9/11 arguments as examples it could be very subversive while teaching logic.
The people you are generally going to reach with the CD argument are those with the lowest ability for broad critical thinking.... Lopsided, technical type thinking takes us further away from the truth.
Different people have different learning styles and different interests. Some people come to 9/11 Truth out of a political agenda -- they hated Bush, or they hate imperialism or the CIA or the gummint, or they're Nazis. Richard Gage came to the CD evidence because he was an architect. I was fascinated by the problem because I used to be a builder, though it took me over a year before I could take CD seriously. Some folks want to focus on the ISI, or on Florida, or Yemen or San Diego. Fine. CD interests me and I would do it for truth regardless of its political utility. And I think it has enormous potential.
The science of the collapses is where the biggest and most blatant lies are. Now maybe I'm wrong; maybe there aren't obvious violations of the 1st Law of Thermodynamics and Newton's 3rd Law and the Law of the Conservation of Angular Momentum that anybody can see in 45 seconds of video. Maybe the hundreds of thousands of engineers and college professors and engineering students who refuse to look at the issue are right and I'm an idiot and there's nothing there. Why then will not one of them do me the favor of showing me wrong so I can give up this CD stuff get on with my life? Emailing hundreds of college professors of engineering and physics to inform them when Richard Gage was appearing on their campuses, I got one technical response. It cited the Popular Mechanics book for authority and gave no indication that the guy had ever even looked at the NIST report. If I were an engineering professor and I thought Richard Gage was a con man traveling around the world corrupting impressionable young minds, I would get together with some of my buddies and go down to see his presentation with the intention of asking him devastating and humiliating questions after. And then I would write the whole thing up for The Nation or Atlantic or Scientific American or Skeptic. Nobody ever does this. Why not? All we get is silence.
The big chill surrounding the big lie is demonstrated by the reception of the FEMA report and the NIST report. Dr. Thomas Eagar's zipper/pancake collapse theory was adopted by the FEMA report and became the conventional wisdom despite obvious shortcomings: collapse symmetry requires that entire floor unzipped within a tenth of a second, the zipper mechanism is foiled by the lateral cross trusses designed to spread out those loads, and the theory requires that perimeter-side truss "clips" be so flimsy that the floors peel off the columns, and yet the core side clips must be tenacious enough that falling floors pull down the core. It never made any sense, but if any engineers aside from Jeff King spoke out about it, I never heard of it. So along comes NIST in 2005, and completely reverses the zipper/pancake theory. Now the truss clips are so freaking strong that saggy floors pull the columns down. And there's no comment in the engineering community, no controversy, no one will defend the FEMA theory, and now presumably no one will even admit that he was ever dumb enough to believe what was conventional wisdom for three years.
We have 1,100 architects and engineers for 9/11 truth now. How many architects and engineers will publicly express confidence in the NIST report? Just a handful, and almost all of them either worked on the NIST report themselves, or their firms have contracts with NIST. The thing about science is that you don't need a political agenda. All you need is to honestly look at the evidence, and when the shift in the engineering community's conventional wisdom comes, it will come fast. I think there are tens of thousands of college professors and engineers walking around with severe cases of suppressed cognitive dissonance, and I aim to make them aware of it.
There are still people out there desperately looking for a smoking gun to once and for all convince themselves and everyone else that it's true.
Many of them are driven by a wish for personal fame, and when these wishes are frustrated some of them get ugly, underhanded, and dishonest.
I'm not willing to claim that I can know one way or another.
You're not willing to claim that about CD, but you're willing to claim that about government complicity. I think that's a mistake. I think we need to give people information and invite them to think for themselves, not tell them what to think.
I've seen the reaction of skeptics when they hear this--they actually pause and consider that I might not be a fanatical, irrational conspiracy theorist.
I see exactly the same reaction, which is why I avoid carny claims and stick to provable facts: the widows' unanswered questions; foreknowledge of the attacks; Zelikow's dishonesty in the 9/11 report; and the failings of the NIST reports -- their dishonesty, unbelievability, incomplete nature; and the fact that by cutting off the report at the moment of collapse initiation they dodge all the mysteries of the "collapse": speed, symmetry, totality, the complete pulverization of the concrete and the steel floor pans, and the presence of molten iron in the rubble.
I don't claim I know, and I wish people would give up the shrill claims of "incontrovertible proof" that serve only to make us feel overconfident while we go around turning the public off. We need to model ourselves after the honest skeptical scientists and the fearless and rigorous journalists that this country so desperately needs in these times.
