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| "Truthers" are stranger than fiction |
| 2007-04-30 |
| James Taranto, "Best of the Web," The Wall Street Journal Saturday afternoon found us at UCLA for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, where we had been summoned from New York to sit on a panel discussing "the future of news" with L.A. Times editor Jim O'Shea and ABC-TV's Mark Halperin. The moderator was the Times's foreign editor, Marjorie Miller. All agreed: The future of news is uncertain, though the Web is likely to be an important factor. The audience questioners, though, were a hoot. One woman brought up the famliar left-wing trope about the dangers of corporate control of the media. She told Halperin she worried that Disney, which owns ABC, dictated the network's news coverage, especially during the run-up to the war in Iraq. After Halperin assured her that this was not the case, we chimed in: "Why the hell would Disney want to go to war in Iraq? It doesn't make sense." She looked chastened and returned to her seat. Then there were the "truthers," members of a cult that believes 9/11 was a government conspiracy. They are easy to spot because they all wear black T-shirts with pictures of the twin towers and slogans like INVESTIGATE 9/11. (We encountered some of them near Ground Zero on Sept. 11, 2006.) Two truthers, a man and a woman, were standing in line to ask questions. The man prefaced his by saying, "I'm not going to ask the 9/11 question again." (We don't remember what he did ask.) When it was the woman's turn, she went into a long disquisition about how FDR had advance warning of Pearl Harbor, and "buildings don't fall at 10 stories a second," and finally she asked, "Where is our Bob Woodward to bring the story out?" Our answer: "Rosie O'Donnell." The woman started speechifying again and finally was shouted down by the crowd, which was strongly left-leaning but apparently not insane. When you think about what the truthers are saying, it makes even less sense than the Disney-invaded-Iraq theory. They want us to believe that the government staged 9/11 and is now using totalitarian means to cover it up. But if the government were really suppressing dissent, these people would be in prison, not walking around in public wearing T-shirts identifying them as dissidents. Unless. What if the truthers themselves are in on the conspiracy? Maybe they are agents of the government who deliberately act crazy in order to discredit the idea that it is a conspiracy. As one of our fellow panelists put it, "So far, it's working." |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #16 Shhh!! We don't want them to know it's part of a project to separate San Francisco from the mainland and tow it out to sea... |
| Posted by: Halliburton Earth-Moving Div. 2007-04-30 20:57 |
| #15 I'm waiting for the Truthers to claim that a controlled demolition caused the collapse of that I-580 highway section in Oakland, the tanker truck fire being part of the government coverup. |
| Posted by: Kirk 2007-04-30 20:43 |
| #14 Angie, 204 mph, if my calc is correct This would be maximum velocity if there were no upwards forces from the ground transmitted into the building, which you know can't be the case. Collapsing those floors that are hitting the ground takes force: Upward force from the ground, which is transmitted into the rest of the building, competing with downwards force from the weight of the intact portion of the building. This upwards pressure is about constant - equal to whatever it takes to crush the lowest floor- but the building downwards force diminishes as the weight of the remaining intact portion of the building diminishes. I wouldn't be surprised if the top floor had reached at about half of this maximum velocity, which would work out to be roughly 10 floors/second if you have a story height of about 10-12 feet or so. Just a rough calculation based on my feel of the situation, no real expertise. One disclaimer: This assumes that Rosie O'Donnel is not on the top floor of the building, in which case we could ignore the effects of the diminishing weight of the portion of the building remaining intact because it would be insignificant compared to Rosie's weight. And of course even this is ridiculous and sort of an ideal calculation because everyone knows that Rosie could not have heaved her bulk up there anyway because the building wouldn't support her weight, the elevator cables would have snapped, she can't fit through the door, and a Skycrane helicopter would have snapped its rotor off trying to lift her. Hmph. |
| Posted by: gorb 2007-04-30 19:36 |
| #13 I don't think of Truthers as "strange" so much as just the natural-- and intended-- product of an education system which is not merely broken, but which has been intentionally vandalized so that it churns out an endless stream of ignorant, gullible idiots with little understanding of the world around them, little mental discipline and a high degree of susceptibility to demagoguery. We've gone from having schools that provided a liberal education, to schools that turn out good little liberals. |
| Posted by: Dave D. 2007-04-30 19:34 |
| #12 Occam's razor - the simplest answer that satisfies all the aspects of the question is usually the correct one. One thing most of the moonbats don't think about (if they think at all, which is doubtful) is that if someone was planning to crash four jets into the WTC on 9/11/01, the planning would have had to have begun around June, 1999. There was no way anyone who started planning in 1999 would have known that George Bush would be elected President in November, 2000. Our answer: "Rosie O'Donnell." THAT's got to hurt! |
| Posted by: Old Patriot 2007-04-30 17:55 |
| #11 What if the truthers themselves are in on the conspiracy? Most likely paid dissenters from MoveOn.org to make the LA Times and other liberals present look moderate. |
| Posted by: Danielle 2007-04-30 17:49 |
| #10 Angie, 204 mph, if my calc is correct. Certainly possible but I would have thought terminal velocity was much less. Actually, I suspect the actual last thirty or so floors were not visible due to the dust cloud. What these loons need is to climb in to some turnout gear and SCBA and crawl around a room at 1000 degrees F for ten minutes or so. Somewhat nervous making for me, but other firefighters manage it all the time. |
| Posted by: Chuck Simmins 2007-04-30 17:43 |
| #9 "buildings don't fall at 10 stories a second," Everything falls at 32 feet per second per second. If I did my calculations right, the top of the WTC hit the ground at 300 feet per second (ignoring drag). That's (roughly) twenty stories per second. |
| Posted by: Angie Schultz 2007-04-30 17:23 |
| #8 PS: Truthers are intellectual bottom feeders. Only previously digested and decomposed matter can enter the narrow inlet of their mental scope. They are a pinnacle of victim culture thought and could not exist without the shelter provided by more functional and productive entities. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-04-30 15:03 |
| #7 "buildings don't fall at 10 stories a second," Quite obviously this woman has never seen a controlled demolition. I say give her a participatory role in one real soon. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-04-30 14:59 |
| #6 check em out: www.911truth.org |
| Posted by: Cyber Sarge 2007-04-30 13:55 |
| #5 I went to the truth 911.org site and watched a video of one of their idiots being shouted at to "Shut up and Sit Down" after ranting about a conspircy. This is presented as proof positive of the coverup/conspiracy. Too funny. |
| Posted by: Cyber Sarge 2007-04-30 13:54 |
| #4 Notice how they snuck in the corporate media oligopoly with the kooky conspiracy theories, as being a left-wing fantasy? Hah. That's a debate trick. Put something real in a list of silly fantasies, as if it were a silly fantasy, too. Takes away from its credibility with "guilt through association." "That's ridiculous, like Bigfoot, Hillary being elected President, the Loch Ness Monster, and UFOs!" |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2007-04-30 13:46 |
| #3 Unless. What if the truthers themselves are in on the conspiracy? Maybe they are agents of the government who deliberately act crazy in order to discredit the idea that it is a conspiracy. The government can't even plan a goat orgy with any amount of success. Remember that when people talk about how the government is trying to control everything. |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2007-04-30 13:28 |
| #2 Unless. What if the truthers themselves are in on the conspiracy? Maybe they are agents of the government who deliberately act crazy in order to discredit the idea that it is a conspiracy. Wheels within wheels within wheels within wheels within wheels... |
| Posted by: tu3031 2007-04-30 13:18 |
| #1 But if the government were really suppressing dissent, these people would be in prison, not walking around in public wearing T-shirts identifying them as dissidents. Or put another way: if Bush WERE Hitler, they'd all be lampshades by now. |
| Posted by: eLarson 2007-04-30 13:15 |