http://conflictiran.blogspot.c…..eople.html

http://conflictiran.blogspot.c…..-life.html

But frankly, I think Iran should have the bomb. In this I agree with historian Emmanuel Todd who sees it as creating a balance of power.

Whatever you’re hoping to accomplish, George — besides high oil prices — I don’t think you’re getting it.

Bingo! That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? I was saying as far back as 1988 that the Bush family regards the entire country as a private fiefdom for themselves and their friends to plunder at will. The only place I was wrong is that they regard the entire WORLD as a private fiefdom.

Oil men make money when the price goes up. Those with oil interests have zero motivation to keep prices down. It’s not an accident or an unforeseen circumstance that oil is now over $90/barrel — it’s all by design.

Nolo, at what point do you recognize the fact that the system has been so gamed that the phrase “rule of law” is nothing more than a rationale for inertia.

this is a very illuminating line of
argument, bluetoe. for i am
certain you do not intend it in
this way, but you must see that
declaring the rule of law to be
no more than a cover for “inertia“,
is to agree with the neo-con notion that
we should bend, or break, the rules when
the wheels of justice turn too slowly
for our tastes. . . that is how we came
to have torture memos, and rendition policies.

now — to be clear — part of the wisdom
of our justice system is that it moves at
a deliberate [glacial?] pace. it takes
the time to get it right, most of the
time. . . so i will respectfully, but
vehemently, disagree with the idea that
leahy, conyers, waxman, whitehouse, tierney,
schumer, et al. are doing nothing.

i, for one, believe the principles must
be adhered to, even if it yields an unfair
advantage to those who would disregard them
to acheive their ends — cheney, bush, gonzo,
rice, rummy, wolfie — and on and on. . .

i really enjoyed catching up on
this thread, little bear and bluetoe!

thanks!

p e a c e

For sure there’s nothing original I could say on the subject, but this point, which could probably be verified by a dogged search through accounts of fires and other incidents in modern structures, stands out for me:

No building in the United States has ever been subjected to the massive structural damage and concurrent multi-floor fires that the towers experienced on Sept. 11, 2001.

My stumbling blocks concern the events before the actual day. But maybe some other time.

Debunk 9/11 Myths

http://www.tms.org/pubs/journa…..-0112.html

http://images.google.com/imgre…..e&cd=2

LS – RE: the woman waving in the window.

The airplanes fuel is in the wings. It’s close to kerosene (diesel). It doesn’t explode like gasoline. The take is that the (fairly heavy) fuel got soaked up in the (very flimsy, by sky-scraper standards) insulation on the i-beams. Kerosene, though harder to ignite, burns hotter than gasoline. When it finally caught, it had soaked down the building, and down to the girders.

I’m (seriously) not taking sides, but it took a long time before the buildings collapsed – so it was not an explosion. Therefor, the woman waving in the window is not a contradiction to the establishment story.

The Trade Center was built using very unusual techniques for a skyscraper (and my grandfather was a concrete engineer, so I’ve heard a thing or two about building skyscrapers).

If you want to find something weird from an engineer’s standpoint, look at WTC7.

There’s a ton of scientific studies on what happened in the Structural Engineer literature. They point out the collapse didn’t require heat to a “melting temperature” since much, much lower “bending temperatures” can cause structural failure. After that the overburden tonnage of the building causes collapse.

The key to understanding the collapse of WTC7, according to these studies, is to realize that the WTC complex was essentially a single building with a shared 7-story underground base, and an additional foundation of another 8 stories. When the two towers collapsed they basically removed the substructural “flying buttresses” that helped support the other WTC units…further damage was done by debris blown through the substories at tornado force winds.

That’s why the WTC7 collapsed from the base…the point of maximal structural failure…rather than from the higher impact points as in WTC1 and WTC2. The damage to the foundation was also why they had to demolish other WTC units, though these were still left standing…they were deemed hazardous and had to be brought down. Hard to think that anyone that wanted to destroy all these units by demolitions would have failed on these other ones and left all the evidence behind to be found.