I was reading up on the new Supreme Court nominee to try and determine when (not if) Roe v. Wade will be overturned, and came across the following:
One Roberts case receiving particularly close attention involves a 2003 challenge to the federal Endangered Species Act. At issue was whether the act could be invoked to protect a certain species of toad that exists entirely in California and was being threatened by a development project. The appeals court ruled that under Congress’s commerce-clause powers, the Endangered Species Act extends protection to the toad.
Parties in the case asked the full appeals court to reconsider. All but two judges declined to take up the case.
Roberts was one of the two.
In his dissent, he said the full court should agree to hear the case to more faithfully apply two Supreme Court precedents establishing limits on Congress’s commerce-clause powers. He noted that the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals had recently adopted a similar, more restrictive, reading of commerce-clause authority and the Endangered Species Act.
That Roberts, who routinely appears to side with big business (and also appears to reject any restriction on presidential power–gee, hard to see what makes him attractive to Bush) wanted to take on the case isn’t the issue for me.
What bugs me is that if someone wants to build a development on MY home, and I protest that, then it’s tough beans. I lose my home. I’m screwed. But if someone wants to disenfranchise a freakin’ toad, THAT’S where the line is drawn? What the hëll–?!?
That’s it. I’m building a small enclosure in my back yard and getting me some of those toads. Either that or I’m going to lobby for Jews and/or liberals to be considered an endangered species.
PAD
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I read an interesting story about the WTC a while back. Just as they were building the towers in the early 70s, New York outlawed asbestos insulation. Because of this, the builders stopped using asbestos at the 64th floor. The architect of the towers allegedly complained that if there was ever a fire about the 64th floor, the towers would collapse.
I’m not sure if it’s true, but it’s something to think about.
One more thing (as Uncle would say): Fires certainly can burn underground. Just ask the residents of Centralia, Pennsylvania. That underground fire turned 40 this year.
Bill and Den, both your posts highlight the main issue, which, to me, really isn’t whether the conspiracy nuts are on to something: it’s that we don’t know. No in depth investigation was performed, the NTSB didn’t spend months putting the airliners back together piece by piece like they have in the past. Architects weren’t called in to determine just why the towers collapsed, when there’s a good deal of the architecture community saying that they shouldn’t have collapsed. But instead of using this tragedy to learn some answers, all we get are questions. And here, I guess, is where it comes back to either incompetence or duplicity: was the evidence pusposfully destroyed to hide something, or was it done because the people at the top didn’t recognize the potential lessons to be learned from this tragedy?
For example, just thinking out loud, I can imagine that all that steel, glass, concrete, etc. falling thousands of feet would generate a lot or pressure on the bottom-most steel supports…and that pressure would translate into heat, which could have melted the steel and started the underground fires. But I don’t know…and I think we should have known.
Architects weren’t called in to determine just why the towers collapsed, when there’s a good deal of the architecture community saying that they shouldn’t have collapsed.
I’ve heard people say that the towers shouldn’t have collapsed, but I haven’t seen much logic behind the statement.
I have watched a show about why the towers collapsed, and alot of it was based on the fact that, when the Twin Towers were built, there weren’t 757’s flying the skies carrying the amount of jet fuel that they do now.
“I have watched a show about why the towers collapsed, and alot of it was based on the fact that, when the Twin Towers were built, there weren’t 757’s flying the skies carrying the amount of jet fuel that they do now.”
That’s true…but there were 707s, 727s, and the 747 first flew in 1969, 2 years after the second tower opened. So jets of this size were on the board, and a collision with one the size of a 757 would not be unthinkable (the larger 707s were just as heavy as the 757, and the 747 was much larger).
It’s just another example of a statement that seems to make sense, yet doesn’t really stand up to any sort of even casual scrutiny. There are a lot of sources that today say the collision should not have cause a collapse, and even when you add in fire, it should not have resulted in the kind of collapse we saw. Granted, no one’s testing these kinds of things…but neither is anyone checking the official account. Why is this important? Because it suggests that there was additional damage done to the towers in order to bring them down…and if it wasn’t someone on *our* side, that means that the terrorists planted additional explosives on the buildings. Terrorists that likely did NOT die on the planes.
My feeling/hope is, the farther away from 9/11, and the Bush administration, we get, the more people will start to ask more questions like this. Not that I want to see Bush implicated…that’s actually the last thing I want. But I want the facts and the truth known, because knowing the truth is only going to prepare us to prevent this from happening again.
“Because it suggests that there was additional damage done to the towers in order to bring them down…and if it wasn’t someone on *our* side, that means that the terrorists planted additional explosives on the buildings. Terrorists that likely did NOT die on the planes.”
It just totally strains my credibility to suggest that in addition to flying two airplanes into the towers they also managed to plant bombs on just the right floors to make it not obvious that there were bombs going off…
Similarly, the frames of film that show that just miliseconds prior to the plane hitting there was a flash–while one can certainly speculate that a missle was fired doesn’t it make a hëll of a lot more sense that it was just a flash of light? A reflection? Anything has to be more likely than the idea of a missle fired that close to the moment of collision.
And while I can appreciate Craig’s statements about how it would be nice to know all the details, I can’t expect them to waste too much time debunking the way out theories–any more than I expect every paleontologist to waste any time proving that the T. Rex fossil he found is NOT 6000 years old
Okay, here’s an article from Scientific American that pretty well sums up the argument, then shoots it full of holes –
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=13&articleID=000DA0E2-1E15-128A-9E1583414B7F0000
Don’t know the tag style for inserting a link – sorry!
That’s more or less the official line. And that seems to have been satisfactory enough for everyone else.
Me? I’d rather have had an exhastive NTSB-style investigation so we’d have more reliable facts, rather than a bunch of competing theories. because that’s what the “weakened steel caused a pancake effect” is…just another theory.
From that article:
Kausel also reported that he had made estimates of the amount of energy generated during the collapse of each tower. “The gravitational energy of a building is like water backed up behind a dam,” he explained. When released, the accumulated potential energy is converted to kinetic energy. With a mass of about 500,000 tons (5 x 108 kilograms), a height of about 1,350 ft. (411 meters), and the acceleration of gravity at 9.8 meters per second 2, he came up with a potential energy total of 1019 ergs (1012 Joules or 278 Megawatt-hours). “That’s about 1 percent of the energy released by a small atomic bomb,” he noted.
If true, and I’d assume it probably is, that might explain the melted steel.
Um, the Court didn’t overturn slavery. The XIII Amendment did that. Hopefully you’re being facetious on that issue.
No, not facetious, just a little ignorant. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the court uphold the rights of slave owners? They also allowed states to segregate schools, no? Could you imagine the Court making a ruling that favored slavery or racism today? I know I couldn’t. Hopefuly in a few years we won’t be able to imagine the court supporting the right to murder innocent life either.
“It just totally strains my credibility to suggest that in addition to flying two airplanes into the towers they also managed to plant bombs on just the right floors to make it not obvious that there were bombs going off…”
If I had told you, on September 10, 2001, that a terrorist organization had spent the better part of the past 5 years sneaking into the US at least 20 members, cased our airports, learned the basic skills needed to operate and navigate a jetliner from our own flight schools, and would successfully use cash to purchase several one-way tickets on at least 4 different jetliners, plant enough members on each plane to successfully hijack them, hold them for close to an hour, deviate them from their plotted course, and then fly them, unchallenged, not once, not twice, but three times into significant buildings on US soil, you’d call me crazy. Yet that extremely preposterous event happened. Why is it so hard to image that this same organization is incapable of doing the same with explosives? And they wouldn’t necessarly need to do so before the planes struck. In the ensuing panic, it would have been relatively easy to have some other operatives disguised as fireman join the throngs of firemen racing into the buildings, with explosive devices disguised as oxygen tanks, plant those devices around the steel cores of the buildings, get out, and detonate them.
The thing is, again, there was no public investigation. TV programs stopped showing the footage, at the request of the government, because it might be “damaging” to the American psyche. By the time we all started coming out of our shock, the time when we could start analyzing the footage, it was gone.
“Similarly, the frames of film that show that just miliseconds prior to the plane hitting there was a flash”
The flash isn’t really the bothersome thing about those images. If you can find them, go back and take a close look at the underside of the right wing of that plane. There’s what can only be described as a “pod” of some kind that appears to be slung under the wing. It’s too big to be a cargo or landing gear door, and the cargo bulge on those 757/767 aircraft is not that large. And that flash appears to come directly out of the pop. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that it could be a clever use of digital editing/SFX. I’ve no idea, really. But it’s something that needed to be investigated, and never was.
Bill,
The only problem I see with the “potential energy converted to KE” analysis you list above is that it looks like it’s treating all the building’s mass as being up at 1350 feet, which is wrong. Even so, though, the correction factor for that cuts the total energy in half (assuming an even mass distribution), so that’s probably still enough to account for the melted steel.
I do agree with Bobb to the extent that it would’ve been nice to have a more extensive investigation, though — why invite conspiracy theories when you don’t have to?
TWL
The only thing that needs a more extensive investigation is your mom’s fruitcake recipe.
You guys blame the lack of- in your mind- an “extensive investigation” for the abundance of conspiracy theories?
The reason there’s so many conspiracy theories is due to a neat little confluence of events: a party in power many of you hate and think is evil, a president that those on your side think is stupid, a catastrophic and unprecedented event.
Many religious people ran to their churches and places of worship to seek refuge from that which they couldn’t easily explain in their personal turmoil and fear. May I kindly suggest that much of the discourse in this thread is a similiar phenomenon? That it’s your version of a “religious experience” ?
When I dig into moonbat discussions like these I can easily imagine the lot of you at your own personal altars, in some kind of spiritual epiphany. It’s been addicitive, for sure. You lost a presidential election that could have been easily won because the most of you couldn’t get off this kind of crank.
Come back down to reality guys. Occam’s razor. Planes hit buildings. Steel melted. They fell. Lots of people died. The President/Republicans/The Jews aren’t behind this. We have an enemy we have to unite to fight. Let’s roll…shall we?
Tim, I agree with you on the need to leave conspiracy theories out. Which is why I’m not behind the “It was BUSH” witch-hunt that most of the authors of books like The New Pearl Harbor seem to belong to.
But that doesn’t mean that the questions they raise are not important. I can watch the sun go overhead, day after day, and offer all kinds of interesting theories on why it does so, what it is. History is full of them. And until they were proven wrong, they were all valid theories. The official account of why the towers collapsed pretty much says “we don’t know why, but here’s our best guess based on very little examination of the evidence.” And that best guess is pretty empty, in that it fails to account for a lot of unawswered questions. It’s akin to sticking with the “sun orbits around the earth” theory, because that’s all the time you want to spend thinking about the problem, even though you’re ignoring all the evidence that indicates that maybe that’s not the correct theory.
The thing that’s been amazing to me over the past week hasn’t been the so-called relavations of the conspiracy theorists…I’m more amazed at how much the general public just doesn’t seem to care to know what really happened. Sure, close to 3000 people died on that tragic day…but close to 100 times that died last December, and 4 months later we had 10 different programs on Discovery showing how it happened, why it happened, and, heck, we even had footage of people being washed away by walls of water, to their deaths. The major difference? Despite the catastrophic death count from the tsunamis, we (meaning humans in general) use the information available to us to learn how to prevent such a tremendous death toll from future events like that. Compare that to the lack of lessons learned from 9/11. If steel buildings are really that susceptible to damage from collision and/or fire, shouldn’t we try to learn why and how? And what we can do to prevent/lesson those impacts?
If not, from now on, every time there’s a high-rise fire (there have been 2 significant high-rise fires here in Chicago over the past 2 or 3 years) is there going to be a concern/panic that the building will collapse?
The only thing that needs a more extensive investigation is your mom’s fruitcake recipe.
Well, aren’t WE just the little bundle of fun?
Fella, you haven’t been around here particularly long if you think Bobb and I are conspiracy-minded nutcases. You want to believe otherwise, feel free — but given past evidence, it does suggest that we’re not the ones worshiping at the altar of moonbattishness.
And do have a nice day.
TWL
Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to do some research on how the US caused the December tsunami through underwater nuclear detonations in an attempt to create a Godzilla-like creature that they could train to track and eliminate terrorist cells with it’s atomic fire breath.
Bobb and Tim: I understand where you’re coming from, and you’re right, it’s the responsibility of people to ask questions. But let me ask you a question: If the clean-up of the site was done too quickly to allow for what you would call a thorough inspection, does the reason have to be either incompetence or something more sinister? For one, I doubt the families of those who died really wanted to wait to dig through the rubble to find their loved ones while the NTSB conducted a thorough investigation that, most likely, would have said “well, these large planes filled with jet fuel and traveling really fast crashed into the upper floors of buildings that were designed to handle impacts from jetliners up to just about the same size.”? At the time a lot of the talk about the clean-up centered on getting it done, getting the bodies out in a respectful time so people could mourn and move on. Are there questions? Yes, there’s always going to be unanswered questions about 9/11, and they should be asked and answered where possible. But it’s much more than a plane crash; the black boxes on the planes really won’t tell us much about what happened in the buildings while they fell, will they? And disecting the site, piece by piece, would have taken years and years. I don’t think the psyche of lower Manhattan could have handled a perpetually open wound with police tape around it. So you have to treat it like a disappearing crime scene; you get as much as you can in terms of pictures and key pieces of evidence before conditions and public standards require the scene be decontaminated and cleaned up. Is it possible we missed something? Yes, but we’ve learned a lot, and while I’m not saying future terrorist attacks aren’t possible (hëll, they’re actually more likely), an attack using the same methods is highly unlikely in the U.S. I mean, who’s going to sit back the next time a hijacker tries to tell you that if you behave, you’ll survive?
Ok, I’m ranting… sorry… probably need to get back to work anyway.
Jason, I’ve worked with some of the people that handled the clean up. A significant number of the vitims’ famlies want the site preserved as a gravesite…which would have meant leaving the rubble as is, where it was.
It’s not the cleanup that gives me concern, it’s the disposal. You’re right, an investigation probably would take years. I thought the cleanup would take years, because we’d want to ID everything we took out of the pile. Instead, we hauled it all out to essentially a landfill, checked for remains, and if we didn’t find any, the material was disposed of. Believe me, I understand the immense nature of the task I’m thinking of…the force of the collapse compacted floors (yes, multiple) worth of material into balls of matter the size of an easy chair. But while I fully understand the need to get the site cleaned, where was the extra need to quickly dispose of the evidence once it had been removed from the site?
And to be fair, I realize neither of you are conspiracy theorist nutbags or anything; I guess I’m just throwing an alternative view of why the site was cleaned up so quickly that I haven’t seen or somehow missed being expressed here. I mean, I wrote my major research paper for my history degree on Thomas Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, which is considered the book that birthed the theory of relativism in the last 50 years. Some people cite Kuhn as saying “we always seem to find out things that contradict what we assumed are the truth, so everything we know must be wrong,” while what he was really saying is that we continually work to prove what we consider the paradigm of our time, and only when enough evidence suggests otherwise do we develop a new paradigm, i.e. you have to go with what you know until it’s no longer feasible. Truth isn’t relative; our ability to quantify it can be, however, in the context of our ability to do so. So I know we have to keep asking questions or we stop learning.
Um, so, lhiob? (I hope Tim and Bobb are Entourage fans…)
I think you answered your own question, though, Bobb; it’s not really feasible to store two of the largest skyscrapers’ worth of material for the years it would take to completely analyze everything like you’re suggesting. And while I sympathize with the families that wanted to keep it a gravesite, aren’t there a lot of family members that wanted a clean memorial like what they’re proposing, too?
You’re correct on the second, Jason, which is why we have a new building proposal with memorial included, rather than just a huge memorial site. Emotions can and will get people to make requests that more objective minded folk recognize as unacceptable.
Any storage site(s) would of course have to have been large…but not unheard of. There’s a nuclear disposal site under a mountain out in the desert that’s not being used…could have shipped everything out there. We build landfills all the time that would have enough acreage to contain the WTC investigation. It would have been expensive, sure, but not moreso than other government projects. So, I accept the need for speedy cleanup. But speedy disposal? That’s another story.
the Scientific American article refers to this piece:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/defense/1227842.html?page=1&c=y
Jason,
But let me ask you a question: If the clean-up of the site was done too quickly to allow for what you would call a thorough inspection, does the reason have to be either incompetence or something more sinister?
No, of course not. I expressed regret, that’s all. It’s along the lines of “a slightly different approach might have taken slightly more time but knocked down more than half of the conspiracy theories, so it would’ve been nice if that had happened.” Not really a huge deal.
I think Bobb’s given whatever other response I might have come up with (with the benefit of more firsthand knowledge, too), so I’ll leave it to him.
TWL
Ok, I think I’m arguing a one-sided fight at this point, since I agree that the need for speedy clean-up and disposal would not preclude additional investigation, if feasible (which, I’m deferring to Bobb on the logistics of that on the ground in New York), but I’m under the impression that the rubble was shipped directly to salvage or final resting places, mostly via ocean and water, which would be way more economical than shipping it overland across three-quarters of the country to a storage facility. Keep in mind that while the clean-up was commencing, the economy was collapsing in the wake of the attacks. Money was being throw hand over fist at the human fallout, but I doubt there was much thought on redirecting billions and billions of dollars to a physical investigation of what seemed a pretty clear case of big planes + tall skyscrapers = massive destruction. Sure, they spent money on investigating the events that led to all of this, but I imagine most felt at the time the results of those events didn’t need further dwelling upon.
To be honest, I have no idea why I’m so taken with this issue; I guess I’m drawing cognitive parallels to a discussion I had with some family about the veracity of the Davinci Code. They were like “sure, some of it is fiction, but it makes you think about the Church,” to which my reply was “no, it’s a work of historical fiction, which uses a mixture of facts, commonly known but not (previously) seriously taken out-there theories, and outright fabrications to create what even the author admits is a mystery novel, no matter how compelling.”
So:
1. Yes, further investigation would have dispelled some of these theories.
2. I would debate the physical and economic feasibility of doing more investigation that they attempted to do.
3. Tim and Bobb are good guys I love discussing things with, no matter if we agree or not.
I think the rubble was first examined for human remains, but then loaded and shipped for recycling overseas. Which is of course more economical than finding a site capable of hosting what would have been the world’s biggest CSI production. I guess that’s what bothers me about that aspect of how things were handled: when faced with the world’s single biggest criminal act, we just apply mostly common sense and after-the-fact examination of the little video that exists to determine what happened.
I think partly the easy availability of information on the internet has spoiled me (despite missing the PM article). I’ve gotten so used to finding the answers to things quickly now, that when I can’t find the answers, I kinda makea big deal about it. That, and I’ve picked up the curiosity of my three cats combined.
those endangered spiecies things are crazy. while i was living in albuquerque, the mayor was fighting tooth and nail to be allowed to let farmers have water from the rio grande river, even though it meant endangering the ever-so-rare silvery minnow. when i left in august of 2003, his last option was to have the issue looked at by a “god panel” which was a congressional group that had the power to say, “this spieces cannot be saved.”
i dunno how it turned out, though, cause i moved away.