Presenting... THE ASSHOLE FILES!!

Even MORE World Trade Center Conspiracy Assholes!  

   I've received yet another email from a loony conspiracy wonk. These days I try not to engage in battles of wit with those who are completely unarmed. It's really starting to get old. I should have just ignored this email and moved on, but this guy decided to try and give me a grammar lesson as well. I guess some folks learn by poking the grizzly bear.

Enjoy!

Original Email

From: m4040 [mailto:m4040@m4040.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2008 6:01 PM
To: Address Omitted
Subject: RE: website commentary

Ben,

First, thanks for the kudos on the survival topics... and now I get to tear into you a bit for the rest.

I’m really not that finicky about grammar, but I guarantee you... if you saw some of the illiterate and unreadable emails that land in my inbox, you'd be a bit picky as well. I get rants in all capitals, with zero punctuation and riddled with so many spelling errors it’s hard to even derive the message within. People have become quite lazy these days. With so many emails to answer, I can’t justify spending time translating content from gibberish.

HOWEVER... as long as you’re nitpicking the subject of grammar, here’s a little “research” for you. If you're going to correct someone's grammar, then you'd better know what you're talking about. Apostrophes indicate either of two things; a contraction of two words or a possessive case. In some situations they can even become a clitic possessive case. As you can see in the highlighted phrase above, I've used an apostrophe, but NOT to indicate that, “someone is grammar”. Instead, I’ve indicated that, "grammar", is possessed by, "someone"  (certainly not you though).

The proper way to indicate that I (Mike) possess grammar would be something like, “Mike’s grammar”. In the clitic possessive case, I might use the apostrophe a little differently and write, “The man from down the street’s dog”. The street doesn’t own the dog, the man owns it. If I want a more appropriate clitic possessive phrase, I might now criticize, “Ben, the crazy conspiracy theorist’s nonexistent grammar”. In this case, Ben is the owner of the nonexistent grammar, not the theorist. As you can see, the apostrophe is transferred to the end of the phrase and inserted prior to the item that is owned.

Now on to these fictional tales of 9/11... and if I sound a bit like I’m stereotyping you with the tin foil brigade, you’re probably correct.

First let's get one thing perfectly straight. The hijackers chose what may be the single most reinforced building in the world to crash into. The Pentagon is made of thick, steel reinforced concrete. It was designed to withstand all but a direct nuclear hit. There simply is NO conventional missile that could pierce those walls, and continue on through three inner rings of the building.

By the way, it may enlighten you a little to watch this video which clearly shows what happens when a fast moving airframe hits a reinforced concrete wall:

http://www.break.com/index/concreteplane.html

It's only due to the huge mass and momentum of a modern jetliner that the walls were actually pierced. There are plenty of pictures that show clearly where the airplane hit the building, and the area of destruction was far bigger than would ever be caused by a missile. For some reason, the creators of the conspiracy websites always choose those pictures that don't show it clearly.

Furthermore, they love to show a picture of a very small 12 foot hole. Unfortunately, this is not a picture of where the plane hit. It’s a picture of where one of the engines punched through the wall of C-ring. That's right... it's a picture of C-RING... the 3rd ring. As for the wings, photographs show indentations and massive damage to the facade about 100 feet wide. You can clearly see where the stronger, inner portions of the wings made impact, but the farther out towards the tips of the wings and the tail, the lesser the damage. Again, I refer you to that video! The wings almost totally disintegrated, and the disintegrating fuselage continued it’s trajectory in an almost fluid dynamic state. This is very similar to what happens in an avalanche where particulate solids travel very similar to a Newtonian fluid. As for the wings which are pretty much filled with fuel... there wouldn’t have been any large bits left. Most of the fireball you saw was from the wing tanks vaporizing and igniting. The fuselage tanks ruptured further into the building.



There’s almost a city block’s worth of damage to the façade just moments after impact. Most of the damage isn’t visible, but is inside the building, where vast areas were destroyed.

A few months later once the rubble was removed and construction could begin to repair all the damage, we can plainly see that there’s about a half a dozen city block’s worth of damage encompassing 3 rings of the structure:

Okay, so why don’t we see the jet coming in when we watch that crappy jumpy video? Simple answer is... because the video is from a crappy security camera at a Citgo station. While you may be used to watching NTSC video feeds on your TV at 29.96 frames per second, most security cameras record a frame every one or two seconds. This conserves tape, and in the case of computer feeds, it conserves drive space by using one 60th as much space.

In the one camera feed you refer to which caught the explosion but not the plane, you’re seeing frames that are at least 2 seconds apart. It’s not only possible... but incredibly likely... that the fraction of a second where the plane was visible happened to be between frames. This is a favorite of the conspiracy wonks. It’s been explained a million times over, but the theorists insist that the pentagon removed frames from this video and/or doctored the images. I’m well versed in video, graphics and animation, and I see no doctoring. I see a crappy security camera feed from a Citgo station. By the way, folks at that same Citgo station watched the plane pass. Were they part of the conspiracy? In reality, the FBI grabbed 83 different security tapes from many local businesses, hotels, etc. These are being held as evidence. Is the reason why they aren’t released to the press because there’s no plane, or is it simply the rules and laws regarding evidence? You know where the smart money is on this bet.

It's always the game of conspiracy nuts to ask the same stupid questions over and over again. They continue to demand answers until folks are sick of explaining things. When sane people shrug them off as the assholes that they really are, they claim it’s part of “the conspiracy” and “a cover up”. I think it's time for a few questions to be leveled back at the conspiracy theorists for a change...

Here's a few simple questions:

If it was not American Airlines flight 77 that hit the Pentagon, then where is the airplane and the 64 people who were aboard? Out of all the bits and pieces of bodies that were carefully picked from the rubble and wreckage, 63 out of the 64 sets of remains were able to be positively identified through DNA, dental and other means, not just by military coroners, but by county and state officials called in to help. The remains include passengers, crew and hijackers. Were these victims all sent through some sort of shredder and their remains quietly transported to the Pentagon and somehow embedded in the rubble over thousands of square feet? There were hundreds of people, military and civilian, involved in the gruesome task of cataloguing, removing, bagging and tagging remains... are these people all lying? Are they all part of "the conspiracy"? How about the 125 military personnel and construction workers that were working in that part of the building, and whose remains were positively identified? These folks were working in and around an area covering several acres of the building. Were they all killed by a missile? Fat chance, but it brings me to my next point.

Let’s discuss missiles. Missiles are lightweight and maneuverable. They need to be able to fly. As such, most missiles don’t carry a lot of explosive power like that which you’ll find in bombs. Because of this, missiles carry high explosives. These make a very short duration flash and bang, not a big, fuel laden fireball with lots of black smoke (like that seen at the Pentagon).

Bombs don’t fly, they simply drop like, ... umm... like bombs. A daisy cutter bomb (a.k.a. MOAB) can cause an explosion of similar size, but not in confined spaces. It relies on a vast amount of fuel mixing in an air dispersion with requisite volumes of oxygen. These are air burst, and cannot punch through buildings. Besides... it’s a gigantic bomb, definitely not a missile, and it cannot fly laterally.

A “Bunker Buster” bomb is capable of punching through reinforced concrete, but not 3 building’s worth. Add to this that a bunker buster punches a very neat one foot diameter hole in the exterior, and then explodes inside. Also, the explosion of a bunker buster isn’t all that big. It makes a very quick flash and bang (as mentioned above). Again, a bunker buster is a very large and very heavy bomb... not a missile, and it cannot fly laterally.

So... exactly what kind of missile can punch through multiple layers of reinforced concrete and then devastate several acres of area? Here’s a hint... IT DOESN’T EXIST. If you were to design a missile with those attributes, it would be about the same size as a medium to large sized airplane... and we’d be back to square one with plane vs. missile.

Were all of the hundreds of eyewitnesses (both in the Pentagon and in the surrounding area) lying? How about the civilians driving on Rt.27? Are they ALL part of the “vast conspiracy”? We're talking about hundreds of folks from all walks of life. Are those few "witnesses" who claim they saw something else somehow more reliable and trustworthy than the hundreds who clearly saw a plane? Isn't it much more likely that the few saw nothing, but are merely attention seekers and/or nut cases? There's always a few nuts in every crowd. If there were a thousand eyewitnesses on the scene, we’d most likely have at least one or two who would swear that they saw little green men in saucers shooting beams of light at the building.

Damaged cars along Rt.27 and the drivers who watched in horror as the plane passed right over them, clipping light poles and showering traffic with debris, and then slammed into the Pentagon:

      

Yes, there were hundreds of folks (most of them civilian) right there driving down Rt.27. There were cab drivers, construction workers, salesmen, secretaries, and every other walk of life. They all were stunned as flight 77 swooped low over the road, clipping road signs and light poles as it passed. They watched in horror as it hit the Pentagon. Nobody there reported a missile. Somehow, the wing nuts in the conspiracy movement conveniently forget to mention the testimony given by all these folks. They focus instead on a few fruit loops who were nowhere near the incident, but still claim they saw something else.

Finally, this is the freaking pentagon we’re talking about. Did you really expect them to swing open their doors and invite the world press to come in and have a look? Maybe they could have let them take pictures of body parts mixed with charred top secret documents? Did you expect openness, and sharing of facts? That’s not how the military operates, and for very good reason. The conspiracy theorists claim that the somewhat secretive investigations and closed-mouth attitudes of military officials are some kind of “proof” that this was a cover up. It’s not a cover up... it’s standard operating procedure for a highly classified facility.

All of this adds up to the simple fact that there are a few dumbasses who will disbelieve the testimony of thousands in favor of the confusion or stupidity of a few. They will ignore all the many facts that add up quite logically, while focusing on the few facts that are anomalous or which they simply don’t understand. They will abandon the laws of physics, and instead create their own laws to support their fallacies. They will then use all of these myths, lies and bent truths to spin yarns. These “theories” seem astoundingly uninformed to those of us who are structural and mechanical engineers. Every single engineer I’ve ever spoken with innately understands what occurred. They all see the theorist’s tales for what they are... the ignorant rantings of folks with an agenda.
 

M40 Copyright 4-2008, All Rights Reserved

Note: I have no idea who (if anyone) owns the rights to the pictures above, but will give credit if due. There are so many pages out there showing the same pictures that it's tough to find an original owner!

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