Presenting... THE ASSHOLE FILES!!

World Trade Center Conspiracy Assholes  

I'm sick of getting emails from you fucking wack-job, idiot, conspiracy geeks, essentially saying, "I've uncovered a vast conspiracy... I have zero real evidence, but i'm sure it's the (government, new world order, skull and bones, Bush, aliens,  UN, Jews, etc etc... take your pick) that did it. I'm going to uncover the conspiracy and therefore I'm smart and everyone else is clueless... take that X-Files! Fox and Mulder got nothing on me! Forget the fact that I just emailed you a steaming pile of shit devoid of any factual content or logic, just trust me... I've got it all figured out!   

 - These emails have several things in common. They are usually from middle aged folks living in mom's basement, and they always try to use the melting point of steel vs. jet fuel burning temperature argument as their "kicker". This "evidence" is supposed to blow my mind with the apparent wisdom and science behind their argument. Their logic chain goes something like this:

      "Yeah, M40, but the reports say the steel melted in the fire causing the World Trade Center to collapse. Jet fuel burns at 1400 degrees, but steel melts at 2500 degrees... I Googled this stuff, so therefore I'm suddenly the world's foremost metallurgical and structural design expert. Those buildings just couldn't have fallen because of the planes hitting them. Ah-HA!!! Try to argue my infinite wisdom!!!"

  Okay, this has so many holes in it, it's tough to find a logical place to start, but here goes.  No expert has ever said that the steel in the WTC "melted", just that it was weakened by the extreme temperatures. Saying that the steel "melted shows utter ignorance of steel. Steel is not an element (check your periodic table folks!). It's an alloy of iron, carbon, and typically several other elements including vanadium, chromium, manganese, silicon, etc. What all this means is that it doesn't have a traditional melting point like ice transitioning to water at 33F. It actually has what are known as solidus and liquidus points, as well as a rather large "plastic" range in between.

As steel is heated through the plastic range it undergoes a lot of transformation as the alloying elements shift within the structure. During these shifts, the whole alloy varies widely in its strength and hardness. Let's examine what happens to the strength of steel at various temperatures.   

As you can see, between 1000 and 1400 degrees F, the steel undergoes a drastic transformation from a martensitic to an austenitic structure. In austenitic form, the steel is essentially Play-Dough. It's not melted, it's just in a plastic state and is thus incredibly weak. If it were not for this state, your average blacksmith would be out of business. The blacksmith heats the steel into this plastic state so that he can easily hammer, bend and twist it to the desired state. He doesn't "melt" the steel.

Once the steel is fully austenitic, it then planes out somewhat, but continues to weaken until around 2500 degrees where it is at 0% of it's original strength. This is the approximate liquidus point of most steel alloys. It is fully "melted" at this temperature (as the idiots point out, while ignoring the past 200 years of established materials science about steel).

I could get into the tensile, shear and ultimate hardness of steel as well, but just trust me on this... steel is fucking weak when it gets hot. Someone spouting the argument that burning jet fuel is unable to account for the WTC falling is vomiting verbal diarrhea in your face and expecting you to admire it.  At the burning point of jet fuel, the steel would have about 10% of it's original strength... not nearly enough to hold up the structure. My guess is that the steel reached only about 1000 degrees F before bending, buckling, twisting and finally giving out. I say this because most building designers make their structures about twice as strong as they actually need to be, and by just over 1000F, the structure would have lost half it's strength.

  Let me discount this in another way... THE PLANES HIT THE BUILDINGS YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES!   That's a 500 mile an hour collision between a couple hundred tons of aircraft and an immovable object.

Okay... let me make this even simpler for the conspiracy jerkoffs among us. You may not melt in 100 degree temps, but if I walk up and punch you right upside your overly thick skull, you're going to fall down anyway. Is it a conspiracy? Maybe.

  Before I write an encyclopedia here, I'll conclude by saying that a couple (typically un-named) folks claiming they saw (take your pick - missiles, demolition charges, Mossad agents or little green men) do not convince me of anything. These people are fucking psychotic imbeciles and should be locked away so they can't hurt themselves or anyone else with their ignorance.  Billions of people watched 2 planes hit the World Trade Center. Most of us watched it from about a thousand different video feeds, BUT... millions saw it in person. Everyone is pretty damned sure what they saw. Nobody saw any missiles or any secondary explosions from a "controlled demolition". Thousands of eyewitnesses watched a plane hit the pentagon, pure and simple.   

A crack-head crockumentary created by some dumbfuck who ignores a million pieces of evidence and tens of thousands giving eyewitness testimony is NOT proof of anything except how demented some jerks really are. Digging up some loopy bitch (who may or may not have been anywhere near the event) to say that she saw a missile is NOT hard. There's a few in every crowd. Claiming that the remaining 99.9% who were there watching are lying or engaged in some massive cover up because of the word of a couple wack jobs is beyond insane. I'm running out of synonyms for "stupid" and "insane" so I'll leave it at that.  Nuff said?  

 - M40 - 10-28-2007  

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