When you dream, you have a couple billion brain cells firing. When you're dead, you have none.
Living on after death gets a bit complicated, if you ask me. Will you miss the sensory pleasures (food, sex, music, breathing) now that you have no nerve endings? Will you be the person that you were just before you died (i.e. grumpy, bored and senile)? And will you see your sweetheart again, only to discover that she found the love of her life after you died?
It's comforting to think that in the majority of dimensions we are never born at all.
You guys talk as if the development from microbial life to intelligent beings is inevitable.
Life on Earth has existed for 3.5 billion years, and has fared pretty well without intelligence for 99.99% of that time, and without interplanetary flight for 99.999999%. And it remains to be seen if we won't drive ourselves into extinction before we can reach beyond our solar system.
Saw the pic below as someone's avatar in another forum. Took me a while to figure it out, then I LOLed. (Warning: offensive images may enter your mind as you read the T-shirt. )
Check the cookie settings (Privacy tab in Options dialog window)
Check the system clock. If it's all wrong, Firefox may think the cookies have expired.
Crop circles are made by aliens who like to mess with our minds. They create a circle, retreat to a pub on Jupiter, have a beer and laugh about the confusion on Earth.
Dude, I honestly hope that you wrote this in a euphoric state. Or that you were joking. Because if you always think like that, your mind is bordering on the paranoid, and you should look for help.
I'm leaving this discussion. I hate to think that this is driving you over the edge.
It's not idiocy. If one man believes in a conspiracy he is called paranoid, if millions of people believe it, it is called religion.
Afaik 30% of the US population believes in a conspiracy. As Juls pointed out, such a massive following can be harmful for a country. It's important to know how this works in the human psyche. If you google you can read some interesting articles about it.
An interesting question, but then you'd be losing your religion.
The center of the controversy is the claim that it wasn't planes that destroyed the WTC and the Pentagon. That is what the conspiracists have been hammering on for 7 years. If you forget controlled demo, you end up with the "official" explanation except that the government knew about it and didn't stop it. An entirely different discussion, and a complete change of course.
I won't contest that governments can lie and deceive to drag their country into a war (WMD, anyone?) I can even imagine that they would not prevent slaughter like 9/11, Pearl Harbour or the Lusitania, if it serves their purposes.
But their is a large ethical gap between not preventing deaths and actively causing them. This is supported by scientific research. And actively causing the death of 1000s is exactly what follows from the "controlled demolition" theory.
I wouldn't think it far-fetched if you stated that Bush just allowed Bin Laden to go ahead. But the claims of the Truth Movement imply that the 3000 victims of 9/11 literally fell at the hands of Bush and his pals. That would rank GW on a level of immorality that even surpasses great leaders like Hitler, Stalin and Mao. And that's just ludicrous... Unless you already believe that every government is a bunch of psychopaths.
The Tonkin incident is incomparable with 9/11 because there were no casualties. It was propaganda, but they didn't kill their own citizens.
The theory about Pearl Harbour is highly questionable. And if it were true, it was still the Japanese army that did it ("allowed" by the US goverment). To make it comparable to the 9/11 conspiracy, you would have to claim that the bombers were in fact disguised American planes. illepall
Take the passenger list of the missing planes and pick every muslim foreigner. Simple. BTW, you are misquoting. At issue was the identities of the hijackers, not who organized the attack.
You missed the point. Your man "proved" that the firemen had foreknowledge of demolition. The link you gave contains technical arguments why fire can't have been the cause of collapse. Do you mean to say the firemen had considered all that when they were at the scene? Or did they perhaps use the rule of thumb that says a building that burns out of control is likely to collapse?
how do you explain the WTC owner insurance against terrorist attacks prior to the attack?
Of course, that has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with the 1993 bombing... :rolleyes:
I took the trouble to read it. It's basically the same stuff that you were posting here: references and repeats of "evidence" from the conspiracists. No original research.
And it's a load of rubbish. A couple of points (first pick):
The author also tries to prove government conspiracies behind the JFK asassination and the McVeigh bombing. This only weakens his case: it shows he is biased towards believing in conspiracies. (He probably thinks it makes his case stronger, because it shows governments are crooks.)
First he states that the temperature was too low to weaken the metal structure, next he claims there was liquid metal. Self-contradictory.
He asks "How is it that the 19 supposed hijackers [...] were identified almost immediately, when the other side of the official story is we were taken by complete surprise?" He doesn't see the obvious answer.
He mentions that "policemen and firemen clearing people away saying the building [WTC7] was going to come down." Could that be because it had been burning heavily for while, so it was bound to collapse?
In short, the usual bending of the facts towards the desired conclusion.
Of course I'll stick to my guns if I believe I'm right.
Yes, I can see you are a true believer.
Once again, everyone seems to think the official story is unquestionable, when, in fact, it is also a theory.
Nope. I don't think the official story is unquestionable. I do wonder about your inability to see the fallacy in your thinking. If it was proved that the NIST report contains hundreds of errors and omissions, then that is still not one shred of support for the conspiracy theory. You need to prove YOUR theory, while all you do is try to disprove the other theory. This is the same epistemological mistake that creationists make. It's simply bad science, and you are blind to it.
Another thing you have in common with creationists is that you claim that you are looking for the truth, while you cling to a theory that fulfillsa psychological need.
From now on I'm only going to respond to posts with aspects of 9/11 in them, not conspiracy theory bashing comments.
You shouldn't stop, I mean, if a family member of yours died in the attacks and you knew what you know now, would you stop questioning?
As a matter of fact, yes. It doesn't matter much if there was a conspiracy or not: the fact remains that your loved one died because some other folks wanted a mass killing. If you keep on hunting for "the truth", you won't be able to grieve. The pain of losing a loved one will go on at maximum intensity, so you can't get on with your life. You'll be ready for the shrink if you do this.
And I can very well imagine that, if it was someone else who kept bugging me with his theories, disturbing me in my mourning, I'd get very angry. SamH explained it very well. If you can't understand it, you must be totally blinded by your beliefs.
I feel it disrespectful to the dead that we just take the Comission Reports word for it and don't even question the inconsistancies in their story.
No, YOU are being disrespectful by dragging the dead into this discussion.
can you imagine the burden if you knew that you could stop 5000 of your citizens being killed and not do anything about it?
Excuse me for being cynical, but the burden is not such a problem. You only need to believe it's all for a just cause. When the US was planning wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was obvious that there were going to be 1000s of innocent victims. The American voters could have stopped the war, but they didn't. The burden seems to be fairly light, if you ask me.
like a regular Austin Allegro but with a poncy name and grille
Yup. The Allegro was a contender for TopGear's Worst Car of the Century award. The Vandenplas was mechanically identical, but with a posh grille. The interior's nice though (if you like a Rolls but can't afford one).
Perhaps this could be put in a stickied thread, so anyone who asks a question about this can be referred to the thread. (Much like the "I was banned" thread.)
Ok, what about the power downs the weekend before 9/11 happened?
AFAIK a weekend is not enough to prepare a controlled demolition. Especially one that needs to look exactly like it was caused by a crashed airliner.
Also, do you think it's possible that, during the fixing of the trade towers after the first bombing, that devices could have been planted?
Naw, they were probably planted right when the WTC was built.
C'mon, seriously. Doesn't the "9/11 truth movement" have any explanations, documents or videos at the ready? Surely you must have come across some.
In you eyes maybe Bin Laden fits better, not in the FBI's eyes though. He's not even wanted by them over 9/11.
Oh, I got the impression that the US invaded Afghanistan just to catch the guy. Granted, that's probably outside the FBI's jurisdiction.
Ok, for [2] there wasn't enough energy produced at the beginning of the collapse to [...]
And [3] If you look at the towers and honestly believe that all that debrit and sections of the building were propelled by a gravity colapse [...]
You were misreading my post. Your remarks are still about point [1], i.e. why the standard theory is supposedly wrong. At point [2] and [3], you prove that it was possible to smuggle large quantities of explosives into the building and place them carefully on the crucial points in the structure, all without raising suspicion.
I can't understand this, just because a theory is simpler it automatically gets the vote of everyone? That's crazy.
Not precisely. The simplest theory becomes the default. You can overturn it, but you need to have a good case.
For example, I could claim that the towers fell because they were shot down by an invisible Martian UFO. (Or by the hand of God/Allah. ) It would be a perfect explanation -- except that it goes against Occam's razor.
So bin Laden is an enemy of the US? Do you think he is responsible for 9/11? The organising and funding of the operation?
Bin Laden, or any other terrorist would do as an explanation of the facts. They are a much fit than the Bush administration.
Hah, you can't fool me! I know the "9/11 truth movement" is just a government setup, cunningly constructed to hide the REAL truth. Bring all the "evidence" you want, but I ain't fallin' for it! I've seen South Park.
Since Obsolum mentioned it could someone tell me why scawen doesn't want anyone to help out with developing?
Maybe he has seen how life can be in the sweatshops of games development. I don't know how things were at Lionhead (where both Scawen and Eric worked), but for an impression of the dark side, read the EA Spouse story.
No, you are the one trying to tell me how it is, so you show me any document which clearly states what happened each floor, after the collapse began.
I don't have to prove anything.
The default explanation is simply this: a plane flew into the tower - there was an explosion and a fire - a bit later, the tower collapsed. No complicated math, no report from no commission, just a basic chain of causes & effects. It's the simplest explanation.
Anyone who claims that there is another cause underlying the events, such as controlled demolition, is going against Occam's razor. And because of that, the burden of proof is on him. He will have to come up with a decent underpinning of his hypothesis. Not only must he show that [1] the default cause is not sufficient, he must also prove that [2] the alternative cause was present (there were explosives), and [3] it was sufficient to cause the effects (lots of explosives, well-placed). The conspirationalists have only concentrated on [1] afaik.
And they have the same burden when it comes to human actions and motives. The default explanation (a known enemy of the USA) is so much simpler than the alternative (a government suddenly killing thousands of its own citizens). That makes 2 mountains to climb.
BTW, it's odd that they embraced the "controlled demolition" story. They could have made it easier on themselves by accepting that it was the planes that brought the WTC down, and only claiming that Bush allowed Bin Laden to do his dirty work.