Well, instead of sending cash to AE911Truth and their buddies, why not spend some money and actually learn something about how buildings work?

The Teaching Company’s Great Courses are something I’ve enjoyed several of. Now they’ve released an engineering basics course that quite good. It’s called Understanding the World’s Greatest Structures: Science and Innovation from Antiquity to Modernity, and it’s taught by Stephen Ressler, an instructor at West Point. Boy, you can’t get any more government-sponsored than that, can you?

I’m on lecture 7 now, as Ressler works his way through the six basic structural pieces. Yes, he will eventually get to the World Trade Center buildings and even discuss their collapse, which I’m looking forward to. But he’s such a great instructor that you’ll be impressed by a late 19th century British textile mill as easily as the Brooklyn Bridge or the Great Pyramid of Giza. He occasionally wades out into the deep water, but not so far as to get completely esoteric. It’s true: the better your advanced math skills, the more you will get out of it (I also recommend the Great Course calculus fundamentals class). But you don’t have to know trigonometry to appreciate the way structures have grown and innovated over the years.

Anyone interested in the controlled demolition theories of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth will benefit immensely from this course. And if it’s full price, just wait a couple of months. They always put every course on sale throughout the year at some point. But it’s worth full price if you’ve got the room on your Visa!

The red/gray chips found in the WTC dust at four sites in New York City are consistent with a carbon steel coated with an epoxy resin that contains primarily iron oxide and kaolin clay pigments.

There is no evidence of individual elemental aluminum particles of any size in the red/gray chips, therefore the red layer of the red/gray chips is not thermite or nano-thermite.

The red layer is an epoxy resin containing primarily iron oxide and kaolin clay pigments. Paint, in other words. The gray layer is the carbon steel.

Many thanks to Chris Mohr who went out on his own to get this work done.

I envision a similar 9/11 scheme, but one where the passengers boarded under their true names. Indeed, the seat occupancies on all four aircraft allegedly hijacked on 9/11 were very much lower that industry average (averaging 26% of capacity vis-à-vis 71% for all domestic flights in July 2001). So, here I extend my “all passengers survived” postulate to all four 9/11 “hijacked” flights on the notion that this small number of passengers might have been considered by conspirators as the minimum number for public credulity, while at the same time not exceeding the maximum number of “true believers in the cause” willing to accept long separations from their loved ones (sweetened by handsome Swiss bank accounts).

Griscom shows a predilection toward loopy theories, as his revelatory blog post links to Jim Hoffman’s ceiling tile theory as a “very plausible scenario” of how the *therm*te could have gotten into the building.

It’s Stephen Jones’ reaction that is the most illuminating to me.

As one of the authors of this paper, I can say that Prof. Griscom’s twelve pages of review were very well thought-out and required us to do considerable further work on the paper, which improved the final version significantly.  This was one tough review, more challenging than any other review I have received, excepting perhaps peer-reviews of papers in Scientific American (1987) and Nature (1989) on which I was co-author.  I should also add that I have never met Prof. Griscom personally and that I just learned of his blog disclosing himself as a peer-reviewer today (thanks to Dirk Gerhardt).

And yet Griscom says that he couldn’t find anything to criticize about the ATM paper! 12 notes of suggestions he has that makes Harrit, et al. sweat and strain to meet (according to Jones), but none of these are criticisms? Just like the 9/11 Truth employs the famous Hush-a-Boom *therm*te whenever they wish to argue for explosive sounds or against them, we now have peer review that’s both rigorous and non-critical at the same time.

The bias of this “referee” of the ATM paper is palpable. Jones says that he has never “met” Griscom, nor knew explicitly that Griscom was a reviewer of the piece, but the Bentley Open review process allows, indeed requests, that authors suggest reviewers for the piece. Jones has not categorically denied that Griscom was not one of the suggested reviewers by the authors of the paper, and I’m afraid such a categorical denial is required in this case. If it turns out that Jones and Griscom have communicated over the Internet, or if Griscom is well-known by other authors of the paper (like Harrit) and was suggested by them, this will be another blow to the objectivity of the review process beyond what has already been revealed.

And here’s an idea! Why not have Griscom release his 12 pages of suggestions so that we can examine this rigorous non-critical review? It certainly would be interesting to read over.

(Please note: the term *therm*te is my own to keep from having to type out every iteration of thermite 9/11 Truth advocates employ in what I interprest as their shell game. We’ve seen nanothermite, super nanothermite, regular thermite, thermate, etc. It gets old qualifying every single statement about the thermite arguments.)

One of AE911Truth’s key talking points is a suggestion that the official story was inserted into the media with the use of people like this person. He’s called the Harley Guy because of his T-shirt, and his very vivid and precise way of describing the attack is seen as suspicious. However, only a short clip of this interview has ever been displayed by AE911Truth or other 9/11 Truth advocates.

Now the full interview is available, and Harley Guy is identified as Matt Walsh, a “freelancer for Fox.” So this is a person who has thought very carefully about how to describe the event he just witnessed because he works in the video news business and knows what is expected. His interview sounds like a sound bite because he works with sound bites all the time. There is nothing remotely suspicious about this, and suggestions that Mr. Walsh is a government plant dishing out the official story to fool the world are ludicrous.

ETA: A quick note – Mr. Walsh is used in the AE911Truth presentation. He’s part of the first 911Mysteries clip. As I recall, he’s also been used in other AE911Truth short videos, and that recently, like at the National Press Club vanity mock debate. I’ll check into it.

The total revenue for 2009 – $344,570. Salaries for Gage and others topped out at $107,417. That means salaries constitute 31% of AE911Truth’s expenses.

In other words, Richard Gage’s salary is 21% of all revenue received by AE911Truth in 2009.

I’ll post a more detailed analysis of this (and the 2008 Form 990-EZ) later.

ETA: My detailed look at the 2007 Form 990-EZ for AE911Truth is available at the link.

Thanks to Orphia Nay at JREF!

Building What is Up! – and it looks like a lie on every page.

7 Facts about Building 7 – and how cherrypicking gets you the answer you want every time.

Of course these family members deserve answers to their questions. However, they don’t deserve the answers that they prefer. We owe it to all the victims of the 9/11 attacks to deal with the truth, and the presentations of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and this front group simply are not dealing with the truth. Deception and craft followed by a way to donate money to promoting more deception and craft doesn’t honor anyone’s memory.

Meanwhile, NIST updated their FAQ about the WTC 7 investigation. Here’s one of the additions:

In June 2009, NIST began releasing documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the International Center for 9/11 Studies for “all of the photographs and videos collected, reviewed, cited or in any other way used by NIST during its investigation of the World Trade Center building collapses.”  One of the items released, a video obtained from NBC News , shows World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC 7) in the moments before it collapsed, then cuts to the collapse already in progress, with the building’s east penthouse “disappearing” from the scene (as it had already fallen in the intervening time).  Other videos of the WTC 7 collapse show the penthouse falling first, followed by the rest of the building. Did NIST edit the NBC News video to remove the collapse of the penthouse?

The video footage released under the FOIA request was copied from the original video exactly as it was received from NBC News, with video documentation of the WTC 7 east penthouse collapse missing.  The footage was not edited in any way by NIST.

This was something that I’d referred to before. Allegations from the 9/11 Truth movement that NIST is trying to hide the east penthouse are ludicrous. It has been everything debunkers could do to get 9/11 Truth advocates to even acknowledge that the east penthouse is a part of the actual collapse. Now suddenly that some in the movement think they can prove NIST shenanigans, this video is being used as evidence that the east penthouse is being covered up. Please, let’s discuss the east penthouse and the role it played in figuring out what happened to Building 7, Truth Movement!

Consider these two statements:

A – Fire can bring down steel structures buildings like Twin Towers.

B – The Twin Towers collapse was a controlled demolition.

It is quite possible to believe that both statements are true. If you believe that “B” is true you don’t need to believe “A”is false.

In other words, if you believe there is sufficient evidence that explosives were used in the towers, it does not mean that you have to believe that the collapse due to fire would be impossible.

So what are the arguments that support the claim that fire can not bring down buildings?

Before answering, let me remind you some facts:

1 – Steel does lose strength at high temperatures.

2 – The fire protection were removed from the truss on the floors where the impact occurred.

3 – It is not necessary to remove all fire protection to make the structure susceptible to fire.

4 – The failure of a structural element can cause the failure of others.

5 – Progressive collapse does exist.

This… is not about evidence of controlled demolition nor NIST findings. It’s about arguments that support the claim the towers (WTC 1 and 2) couldn’t have collapsed due to fire.

There is, of course, no reason to have to believe a simple collapse of a steel-framed building is not possible. This is what AE911Truth and Richard Gage have stated, though. It’s amazing to me that they consider it such.

But for the reasons Carlos puts forward, there’s no reason not to consider unassisted collapse a viable option. It is possible for buildings to collapse due to fire alone. That one has not before 9/11 or after is not evidence for the opposite, but evidence for the power of the social safety net that exists throughout cities that build such large buildings. Between design codes and firefighting operations, humanity has only let three buildings slip past the many safeguards meant to keep them up.

Indeed, the unassisted collapse of these buildings has already led to better design and resulted in at least one building being saved during a catastrophic fire –the Mandarin Oriental. The designers of that building had conducted an extensive internal study of the WTC collapses, and then designed the Beijing building from the lessons learned. However, AE911Truth uses this victory, a genuine instance of humanity learning from tragic mistake, to say the tragic mistake could not have been a mistake.

They could not be more wrong.