Getaway special for 9-11 conspiracy theorists

[gillianren]

Don't forget the delays in treatment from those who considered it a punishment for a lifestyle and therefore didn't put any money into, you know, helping dying people.  I'm certainly not an AIDS denialist, but it's one of the few real-world conspiracies I believe in on any kind of large scale.  I believe that there were people in the US government in the '80s who just didn't care that Those People were dying and therefore systematically denied funding to people who were asking for it, knowing it wouldn't matter at election time because most of their base didn't like Those People, either.

[Allan F]

A conspiracy implies an agreement to do (or not do) something. I don't think the AIDS situation was a conspiracy, just a bunch of people who thought the same and therefore didn't allocate funds when needed.

[Echnaton]

It also highlights the reactive nature of government and its tendency to deal with situation where contractors can get involved. 

[twik]

There were indeed some strange scientific theories during the original outbreak. My favorite was an otherwise respected researcher who "proved" that AIDS could be spread by casual contact. The proof - he'd done a survey of it's spread in a Florida town, and determined that (gasp) people in their fifties and sixties were contracting it! Even a few men in their seventies.

As he argued, we know that people that age don't have sex, so it must be spread by some other mechanisms.

[gillianren]

And certainly none of them had had surgery and therefore required blood transfusions, either.

[twik]

Well, it sounded funny at the time, but there was a tragic story up here, where a man contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion, and passed it on to his wife, who also died of the disease.

His doctor admitted in court that he had not advised the couple on avoiding unprotected sex, because "he was in his sixties, and she was in her fifties, and I just didn't think it was necessary."

[gillianren]

I doubt that's the only time it happened.  The willingness to let Those People die killed a lot of people who weren't Those People.

[bknight]

I agree, with measles and mumps on the rise it is truly sad that these idiots walk the Earth.

Darwinian natural selection should take care of vaccine deniers. Or at least, it will help to prevent their dumb-ass genes polluting the gene-pool..... 

That is true but there are the unsuspecting innocents that may spread diseases because their guardians didn't get them shots.

[bknight]

Darwinian natural selection should take care of vaccine deniers. Or at least, it will help to prevent their dumb-ass genes polluting the gene-pool..... 

Sadly it is the children of the deniers and those gullible to believe the nonsense that are the most inflicted, and are denied vaccines at an age where they do not have the ability to make a conscious decision about what is right for them.

Precisely my previous post.

[gillianren]

I agree, with measles and mumps on the rise it is truly sad that these idiots walk the Earth.

Darwinian natural selection should take care of vaccine deniers. Or at least, it will help to prevent their dumb-ass genes polluting the gene-pool..... 

That is true but there are the unsuspecting innocents that may spread diseases because their guardians didn't get them shots.

The US just recently had its first measles death in some time; she was a woman with an immune deficiency.  That's the other kind of people at risk from vaccine deniers.  As well as a friend from high school's son, who still isn't old enough for the MMR but got measles from the Disneyland outbreak.  Naturally, there are now videos on YouTube claiming that my friend and his wife and son are all actors trying to brainwash people into getting vaccinated for reasons.  Now, I freely concede that my friend is an actor; we first met more than twenty years ago, when he was playing Rooster in his junior high production of Annie.  However, his wife is a nurse and his son is legitimately his son who legitimately had measles.

[bknight]

I have a friend who thinks there are "unanswered questions."  The irritating part is that she's a scientist and has fallen for the "no melting steel" bit.

Still, my favourite (and I wish I could remember whose idea this one was) has long been the exploding rebar idea.

I found a YT video made by a group of architects that said basically the same thing.  Their theory was thermite planted on the inside.  Up until this video I was totally unaware of any conspiracy views of 9/11.
Do you have links to some debunking information, especially the melting steel?

[grmcdorman]

Best place I know of to find resources is the International Skeptic's Forum (formerly James Randi's Educational Forum, or JREF). Resources: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/local_links.php?catid=18
Discussion: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=64
However, discussion these days consists of trolls and irredeemably delusional idiots; there is basically nothing else left.

Issues with thermite (or thermate, a similar material) are that it's an incendiary, not an explosive (which means the timing required for demolition isn't present); its burning gives a very bright light; and there's no evidence for it being placed, present, or in the debris pile afterwards (despite a "scholarly" paper to the contrary: it's littered with errors).

There is no evidence for melting steel; there is some evidence that there were molten materials of other compositions, such as lead or aluminum. Witness quotes tend to say "molten steel" to mean either "any molten metal" (and many metals have melting temperatures easily reached in fires) or "softened" (i.e. bent by heat) metals - again not necessarily steel.

The generally accepted mechanism (in a nutshell, planes weakened structure, caused massive multi-storey fires, fires weakened the structure to collapse - and collapse, once started, will not arrest) is well supported and accepted internationally by all countries' safety engineers. It's also accepted by the vast majority of engineering professionals in the relevant disciplines.

[bknight]

Seems like one could train a spectrograph at the molten metal videos and get a rough chemical composition.  At least maybe eliminating steel as the component.  As with all conspiracies, a little knowledge may lead to completely incorrect/unsubstantiated view points.
Anyway, thanks I'll give them some reading.

[grmcdorman]

I don't think a spectrograph would work. Solids and liquids, unlike plasma, emit black-body radiation, as far as I know. What's more, the materials in question are very likely to be a witches brew of everything from metals, other inorganics, burnt plastics, and whatever else was in the fire.

The truthers do try to claim that they can determine temperature - and even composition - from photographs. Problem there is even worse: you don't know what the original camera's colour fidelity was like, not to mention what's been done to the picture afterwords (e.g. JPEG compression) - and then viewing it on an uncalibrated monitor. Composition is right out, too (one of the regulars at ISF posts a picture of fire cinders falling off a cliff - it looks like molten metal due to exposure and colour reproduction).

[Allan F]

Seems like one could train a spectrograph at the molten metal videos and get a rough chemical composition.  At least maybe eliminating steel as the component.  As with all conspiracies, a little knowledge may lead to completely incorrect/unsubstantiated view points.
Anyway, thanks I'll give them some reading.

You'd get the composition of the screen.