The January edition of Scientific American magazine includes a new column by Michael Shermer. In it he gives his theory on how conspiracy theorists delude themselves and how to effectively respond to them. It makes for interesting reading. The comments are also fun.

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-minds-compartments-create-conflicting-beliefs

"Experts Speak Out" will air three times this week in Greenville, NC, on the public cable channel, channel 23. Show times are 11 pm tonight (Mon., Jan 7th, 2013), 9 pm Thursday (Jan.,10th), and 2 am Friday (Jan., 11th). It is only available to cable subscribers (Suddenlink Cable) and probably only subscribers in Pitt County (Greenville is county seat).

The news accounts for this fire do not indicate whether this is a steel superstructure or not. However, I'm guessing from its height and from the fact that it's still standing that it has a steel framework.

http://gulfbusiness.com/2012/11/tamweel-fire-at-jlt-the-day-after/#.UKuE44dX2K4

Truthout.org posted an article yesterday (Sat., 29Sept12) describing the success of Colorado Public TV 12's airing of the "Experts Speak Out" documentary. The article also made the headlines on the Buzzflash.com website (a subsidiary of Truthout). Here is a link to the article: http://truth-out.org/news/item/11851-colorado-pbs-runs-9-11-film-sponsor... . The writer points out that supporters of the film are asking public TV viewers everywhere to ask their local PBS station to air the documentary.

Wikipedia has a relatively new feature.  Since July of last year it allows readers to rate pages.  The rating feature is found at the bottom of each page.  Ratings reports like the one below apparently don't reflect every rating of a page since this feature was turned on.  I haven't been able to find a description of exactly how the ratings are accumulated, but when pages change (are edited) I believe the ratings start over again.   Following is a snapshot of the page ratings for Wikipedia's page describing the September 11 attacks. The page is little more than a thoroughly detailed and totally documented rehash of the reports from NIST and the 9/11 Commission. It's interesting to observe that 1182 people rated the page's completeness (on average) a 1 on the 1 to 5 scale (with 1 being least and 5 being greatest).  

Scientific American magazine, through columnists like Michael Shermer, has supported the notion that the World Trade Center was destroyed by fire, just like the government said it was. However, a recent article in the magazine, "Castles in the Air" (September, 2011), discusses the building boom in high-rise steel superstructure buildings and does point out how ironic it is that these buildings continue to be built.

A letter to the editor about the article was published in the January 2012 edition from Luke Bisby, a Senior Research Fellow in Structures and Fire at the University of Edinburgh (see the link below). His letter comes to the conclusion that architects and engineers need to face the reality of what a fire can do to a high-rise building. Neither the letter writer, nor the editorial staff of Scientific American bothered to note that over 1,600 architects and engineers have faced the notion that fire destroyed all three buildings at the World Trade Center and rejected it.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=letters-jan-12

The truth about 9/11 has been visible for too long. Every day that the speed and symmetry of the collapses of those three buildings goes unexplained increases the danger of discovery for the people who carried it out. And, for these criminals, it is the execution of 9/11--that is, the part that nearly everyone on the planet can still see in their mind's eye--where the real danger exists.

There are actually two reasons why 9/11 itself is a danger to the perpetrators...

First, on 9/11 the planners made a very risky choice, they decided to totally destroy the World Trade Center (WTC) towers. Completely destroying the towers had real benefits over simply crashing aircraft into the buildings. A complete destruction gave a great deal more drama to the event and would be accompanied by enough additional deaths to bring the level of the attack to an act of war. Planes crashing into and burning a part of two of the towers, while dramatic, would have left most of the WTC still standing and more importantly, would have allowed lots of people to escape. A smaller disaster on 9/11 might not have had enough emotional weight to carry the aggressive political agenda the planners had in mind.

I don't remember when exactly I decided that the destruction of the World Trade Center (WTC) was undoubtedly an inside job. I'm certain that it wasn't long after 9/11 because the videos of the collapse raised real questions early for me. However, it's now a decade after the event and a large portion of the US population hasn't seen the physical problems connected with the government's explanation of how those buildings fell. I'm beginning to think that my "seeing" the impossibility of the government's conspiracy theory (GCT) when looking at videos of the falling buildings is largely a wiring thing.

Some people have brains that always seem to know where they are in physical space, others couldn't find north with a compass. So it must be with understanding how physical forces work together. It's totally obvious to me that the symmetry of the debris falling straight down through what should have been largely undamaged lower floors of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at free fall speed (the path of most resistance) means that none of these buildings fell because of fire or because planes hit two of them. Some other force had to remove the support extremely symmetrically in the lower floors. However, most of the people I know don't seem to have the same reaction to this evidence.

A petition has been set up on the White House's website calling for a new investigation of the events of 9/11 by an independent prosecutor. (The petition can be found at http://wh.gov/b1N . Complete text of the petition is below.) Petitioning the White House directly is a new tool to empower more direct input to the government. While internet-based petitions are certainly not new, it is new for the White House and it has a benefit that no other online petition can claim. If enough signatures are collected (25,000), the website rules state that there will be an official response from the appropriate agency emailed to every signer. That is something no other internet petition can even come close to doing.

On the down side completing the petitioning process is not easy. First, in order to sign a petition, people must complete the account set up process at the White House website (www.whitehouse.gov). Setting up an account requires a name, zip code, and email address. And the email address must be verified (by successfully receiving and responding to an email from the WhiteHouse.gov website) before the account set up is complete. Petition signers are not directly identified on the website, however, each signer's first name, date signing, and city are shown in the signer list.

Richard Dreyfus' character in Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind, Roy Neary, struggles with an obsession to recreate a mountainous shape out of anything malleable he touches. During the movie he regularly interrupts some normal, everyday event by suddenly falling into an artistic obsession to represent a vision apparently burned into his brain. His struggle to bring meaning to his vision doesn't end until he completes a perfect model of the Devil's Tower in Wyoming, recognizes it for what it is, and then succeeds in reaching the tower in spite of cordons of troops and helicopters.

The real life version of that Close Encounters' moment, that instant when there is a perfect vision of what happened, is nearly here for 9/11.