Did you really just link to one building that everyone agrees had would have been a disaster except for the fire department and working fire suppression systems?
And another that had enough 'steel beams sag' that they had to work for six months to put in emergency braces to keep it from falling, and that everyone thought would fall?
And a third that actually did have concrete supports? (Not as a core, they instead had concrete pillars around the outside and concrete floors.)
Jesus Christ. I really shouldn't answer this again, but I will.
Paper doesn't burn at 451 F, it catches fire by itself at that temperature. 451 F is the autoignition temperature at one atmosphere, although that actually varies depending on the paper. The temperature of burning paper is much higher than that.
I can't find paper off hand, but a cigarette, without air being drawn through it, burns at fucking 585 C, which means you can deform steel by holding a lit cigarette to it. (And it will go almost twice as fast if you'll suck on the end to pull air through. Of course, you'd have to stick your face rather close to incredibly hot steel.)
Of course, you'd have to hold it there long enough to transfer enough heat, which you couldn't actually do with a single cigarette. And that's not some crazed exception. Candles are twice as hot.
In fact, to be visible at all, a carbon fire, which is basically every sort of fire you'll commonly run into and is the main ingredient of any building fire, has to be 525 C. Ergo, basically any fire you can see can deform steel if you put steel in it long enough.
Steel is useful because it is very strong and it is very hard and it's resistant to heat transfer, which means it takes a long time to deform, and even longer with insulation. It is not some magical unmeltable-except-by-God material.
I heard the announcement that WTC7 was going to be pulled shortly before it was.
You are incorrect. The 'and they decided to pull it' comment that delusional loons have decided was the owner of the building openly admitting to treason on television for some reason, was demonstratively made months after the fact.
And the Parque Central fire burned the top off the building. As opposed to the WTC fires, all of which had at least 30 floors above the fire. (Burning the top off a building without affecting the bottom is easy. Burning the bottom off without affecting the top, not so much.)
More to the point, the Parque Central, while not with a concrete core, had instead multiple concrete supports around the sides, and multiple concrete floors that said supports attached to. It was not a steel supported building. It wasn't even a concrete core. It was a much better and more modern design, using concrete support columns. It also used much better insulation on its steel.
But it's fun watching Truthers link to things that disprove another of their claims:
In the Parque Central fire, the steel beams bent, which is an interesting fact for the idea that steel couldn't buckle under the heat of jet fuel. Here, they bent under the heat of burning offices. No jet fuel, no thermite, the steel bent under the heat of a normal fire, and under the weight of a few floors, instead of a whole building.
As the buildings was not steel supported, it did not collapse. In fact, as the outside of the building has concrete supports, the floors didn't even collapse like on the Windsor Tower.
Don't ask me to do your homework for you. If you are too lazy, you are too lazy.
Nonsense again. I have no obligation to prove to you every claim I make.
And, amazingly, a victory for me. And I was about to give up.
Here's a hint: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Here's another hint: Asserting that things exist on the internet and not providing a link makes you look like a liar. It's one thing to assert things exist somewhere else, like in a book, but not on the internet.
More to the point, slashdot isn't filled with traditional Truther morons. They understand that if you assert a web page exists, and I assert it doesn't, your job is to link to it. It is logically impossible for me to prove such a video doesn't exist. (Of course, logic? Not your strong suit.)
WTC 7 burned for a good many hours, without active firefighting, without collapsing. The fire department actually gave up on the fire early in the day; the building was not brought down until almost 5:30.
Your example of a building that didn't collapse is a building that did collapse? Interesting. I think I'll let that example stand without any comment at all.
Hey, incidentally, how exactly did all those controlled demolitions charges and control cables required to precisely synchronize them remain intact during a several-hour fire?
While there are explosives that won't be set off by fire, I don't know of any that would remain intact during a fire.
Thermite, which is used to cut through supports, in theory wouldn't be set off by the heat, but, then again, because it's so hard to set off, it comes with magnesium to set it off...which would be caught on fire. Either setting off the thermite, or at least rendering it unable to be set off later.
The Windsor Tower did not burn uncontrollably, but it sorta proves my point.
It had a concrete core, and the steel parts of the building collapsed, but not the concrete parts.
Of course, the concrete part is steel reinforced, and thus eventually would deform and melt, but 'luckily' the floors that were burning collapsed before they could do so. (And luckily they were able to contain the fire tot he top of the building.)
So, I guess, I might be 'wrong' in the sense that, while any building would collapse, even steel framed ones, if the fire 'burned long enough', but that requires the fire actually burning long enough. In buildings with concrete cores the fire might actually not burn long enough before the rest of the building falls down, leaving the concrete core intact.
Even so, it was so damaged structurally by the heat melting the steel they had to tear it down instead of just rebuilding those floors.
Of course, this is rather unrelated to WTC7, which didn't have a concrete core, and wasn't just on fire at the top. So when the steel buckled, it just kept falling.
Although it does prove you don't need 'jet fuel' or any particular special substance to melt steel. The frame of that building is steel, and there it is, the upper floors clearly having collapsed from the heat of a normal fire of normal things. (Actually, there's a suspicion the fire was arson, because there were people seen around inside the building and a door was forced but we'll assume the arsonists used gasoline, and not, for example, a large amount of magnesium or whatever else that the Truthers claim is required to melt steel.)
You can think that if you want, but you're living in 1996.
The 'swing voters' who will be swayed by this were already Republicans in previous elections, and were tempted to the middle.
I.e, in every election there are people in the middle who can end up on either side. Sadly for the Republican party, the people in the middle on this election are...moderate Republicans. Or, they were before Bush.
If you would BOTHER to look these things up, you would know that. In fact, the head of the demolition crew that took down Building 6 later used EXACTLY that same term in reference to their explosive demolition, on public television. Regardless of your opinion of YouTube, you can find unaltered clips of his statement that they were about to "pull" the building using explosives.
No, he didn't. You didn't link to it, it doesn't exist.
I challenge you to show me even one supportable counterexample to show that is false.
Um, actually, buddy, the balls in your court to show a non-concrete core building that was allowed to burn for an hour without the fire being fought and didn't collapse.
There are plenty of buildings that didn't collapse. None of them did not have a concrete core.
Who is to say -- hypothetically only of course -- that the owner of the building did not tell the fire department, at that point, that there were demolition charges in place just for that kind of eventuality?
...that kind of eventuality? What kind of eventuality would that be? Why would the fire department, which works closely with building inspectors, silently accept the premise that the building was rigged with explosives?
Is this some common occurrence where you live, where buildings have self-destructs? I think I'll rig live explosives and a way to set them off in my house and then tell the fire department about them, and see what happens.
Hint: prior to 9/11, NO steel-structure skyscraper had EVER come down due to fire. And there have been plenty of fires, some of them much more extensive than in WTC 7.
Okay, first of all, it is impossible to have a fire 'more extensive' than one that destroyed a building.
Secondly, all those fires were fought. That's why they spray water on them even after everyone is out...at a certain point, the steel buckles. Keep it under that point, and the building is safe.
In fact, skyscrapers -- even much older skyscrapers -- have been completely gutted from fire before, leaving little more than the steel members left standing. But stand they did.
Thirdly, you loon, older buildings were built differently. They had a concrete core.
But more probable than the building coming down due to a cause that had NEVER been seen at any other time or place in the history of the world. Ever. Before or since.
Steel outside, concrete core. The steel outside part collapsed straight down onto itself, and the fire department was actually fighting that fire.
The WTC 7 building, in fact none of the WTC buildings, have a concrete core.(1)
The upper floors, if you notice, collapsed straight down, as if they were in a 'controlled demolition', or possibly subjected to a force called 'gravity' that mysteriously only operates directly downward. (Whereas in the real world, gravity is noticably random and pulls things in all directions.)
Of course, here the fire at the top, whereas in the WTC 7 the middle of the building was on fire, resulting the middle floors collapsing instead of the top. The upper floors, of course, should have hovered in midair, except for that 'gravity' theory I mentioned above. And the lower floors, apparently, weren't ready to have 2/3rds of a damn building come crashing into them.
Oh, and if we're talking about things that have never been done before, no building over 40 stories has ever been brought down by controlled demolitions, either.
1) If you claim the WTC buildings do have a concrete core, as some Truther loons are doing, so help me, I will bitchslap you into next week.
Obama being proactive on the topic could benefit his own chances of being elected (not that he necessarily needs that right now) but it could help the democratic party as a whole... but only if he does it before being attacked on the issue in the press.
It's really a 'Only Nixon could go to China' possibility. Only a black, urban-based Democratic leader could redirect the party on that issue.
However, watching McCain's rather painful campaign so far, I'm not convinced that McCain could actually successfully use this attack, simply because his campaign appears to be run by drunken buffoons.
I mean, it's almost painful at this point. Obama held off announcing his VP pick for a week simply because McCain handed him a loaded gun pointed at his own foot. For future reference: If you are trying to paint your opponent as elite, make sure you know how many houses you have.
Or, even better, don't use that damn line of attack. I don't care if it worked in 2004. Obama isn't Kerry. If anyone, McCain is Kerry. Using attacks that worked against Kerry means using attacks that don't work against Obama but do work again McCain, you imbeciles.
McCain's campaign is just hilariously bad at this point. I'd be astonished if they could actually find and promote any issue that would actually hurt Obama. Because they know they'd lose on issues in general, they appear to have entirely skipped that portion of the election and moved immediately to attacks, although for some reason they appear to be using rather dadaist ones.
I think you've mistaken me for a Truther. I don't think WTC 7 was 'pulled' in any manner, and I wish those people would learn some simple physics about how buildings fall.
I was just pointing out that, of all the terms that people who demolish buildings use, 'pulled' already has an entirely different meaning than 'controlled explosion', so it is unlike to ever be used to refer to such a thing.
To pull an example from my experience: It is like someone asserting that they heard a stage crew say 'We need to paint the flat.' in a theatre, and they were referring to the stage surface. That may sounds like some reasonable idea to people outside the theatre, the stage is, in fact, 'flat'.
But it's completely absurd, because 'flat' already refers to a specific thing in a a theatre, namely, vertical flat set pieces that are used as walls. The things people carry or lower into place at the back of the set. Those are 'flats'.(Well, if they lower, they are 'flies', but those are just a specific kind of flat.)
It's not only not theatre terminology to refer to the stage that way, it's inconceivable that it would ever be. The stage will not ever be called 'the flat'. Nothing will be a 'flat' except the things we're already calling the flat, because that would be too damn confusing.
Likewise, while 'pulling' a building by blowing it up sound reasonable to people outside the deconstruction industry, it's inconceivable that they'd start using that expression to refer to it, as that already refers to a specific, different thing!
A thing that quite obviously didn't happen to WTC 7.
You are, in fact, accusing the owner of the building of having said something that he's repeatedly denied saying. You've taken a word out of context (Actually, not even that. You've invented a new meaning of a word.), added in a failure to realize that almost all building collapses look the same, and and made up some absurd theory that the US government went and told the extremely liberal BBC about a building collapse before it happens, and the BBC has not questioned this.
And your theory requires the NYFD to participate in the attacks, killing their own people.
And as for your question, the reason there is not an inquiry is that EVERYONE KNOWS STEEL REINFORCED BUILDINGS FALL DOWN IF THEY REMAIN ON FIRE.
That's not an 'incompetent design', you idiot. All buildings fall down if they remain on fire long enough. That's why they keep hitting buildings with water long after people have been rescued, to keep the fucking building from falling down. Maybe some small brick or concrete buildings might end up a gutted frame, but not anything larger.
They ran out of water, or at least water pressure, on 9/11, and were dealing with other very serious problems at the time, and couldn't spend time or resources to put out a fire that was not endangering people. So they cleared the area and let it burn.
Well, yes, but reinforced concrete has steel in it, which was sorta my point.:)
I'm not sure that you could build a totally concrete building, except maybe cinder-block walls and wooden ceilings/floors. I'm sure someone has, at some point in time, built a totally stupid building that was essentially a concrete square with a wooden middle.
If that burned, the walls would manage to stay up in the fire.
In an uncontrolled and infinitely long fire, any wood will burn. Any steel will warp, which means if it's supporting anything, it will stop doing so. Any concrete will just stand there, although obviously if it's being supported by steel there are going to be some problems when that stops.
But, anyway, yes, almost all 'concrete' buildings of any size are actually reinforced concrete building, and hence out-of-control files pose structural risks.
Interesting fact: Coventry Cathedral, which was attacked during WWII, had its walls and ceiling 'reinforced' with steel girders before that, which caused even more damage when high incendiaries on the roof started a fire that buckled them, causing them to pull the walls down. Without that reinforcement, the incendiaries would have burned straight through the roof and the innards of the church, but left most of the roof and the walls standing, as they were made of stone and bricks. It, in essence, was the 'concrete walls with wooden innards' I was talking about above, but with bricks instead.
Your conspiracy requires that someone had decided to take down WTC7 weeks in advance, and, on 9/11, let all those fire fighters die needlessly in that building trying to save it.
Yet the singular quote you're relying on said the fire department decided to 'pull it', which you think means 'demolish' and 'it' is the building, as opposed to pull meaning 'scrub' and 'it' being 'the attempt to save the building'.
In other words, you are accusing the New York Fire Department of knowing in advance and actively participating in a conspiracy to murder their own people in a play-act where they pretended to try to save WTC7 for a while, even though they knew it was coming down.
Oh, oh, I know this one. Those were holograms of dead firefighters, right?
The only video I see is one where someone repeatedly asserts the 'pulled' means 'demolished'.
There are plenty of manuals on controlled demolitions, and they don't get quoted. You know why? Because they do 'pull' buildings. That means to pull over a building using cables hooked to the supports.
You couldn't do that to WTC 7, and it wouldn't have gone down like.
The fun thing about the 9/11 Truthers is that their conspiracies make no sense. They have holographic missiles flying around, explosives in advance, news media with a scripted story that sometimes jump ahead.
Do you want to know how the US government would have actually done 9/11?
They would have installed non-overriddable autopilots on the airplane, either some sort of sleeping gas, or cellphone/radio jammers to keep the people from contacting anyone.
They would have tapped the phones of some of the passengers booked on United 93, recorded some of their voices, and forged phone calls from them. Hard to do in real time, but they were in a hostage situation on a plane, so if anyone you're talking to asks a question you can't answer, well, the call would get 'dropped' or the hijackers would take the phone away or something.
Then they would have flown the actual airplanes into the actual buildings and let whatever happened.
They would have not contacted any media in advance. They would not have replaced any airplanes. They would not have rigged the twin towers buildings to fall. They would not have used this opportunity to take down an unrelated building. They would not have put the planes they stole back into service under a different number. They would not use actual terrorists who can be found alive later. (They wouldn't have made them all Saudis instead of Iraqis.)
Um, fires can pretty much bring down every building without some sort of suppression.
The sole exception is concrete, which can leave a hollow shell. Of course, no one on earth can build a 47 story concrete building.
Any building with steel as part of the support, on fire long enough, is eventually going to see that steel buckle, which will bring down the building. You can't just let tall buildings burn and then walk in the next day with new paint and furniture.
When they build steel buildings, they spray insulation on the steel to keep it intact during fires. For the WTC7, that was something called 'Monokote', which is rated for three hours for steel columns. (There is an entirely different 'Monokote' which is just a kind of plastic shrink wrap. Don't get confused.)
This would have been more than enough if the fire-suppression systems had been working, but they were not. It is also why the firefighters pulled out when they did...enough of the steel had started to buckle that the building was listing to the side.
Hey, dumbass, there's plenty of refutation on the use of the word 'pulled'.
To 'pull' a building is to attach cables to it and pull it down, not to blow it up. No one in the entire history of mankind has used the word 'pull' to mean 'blow up'. They use it to mean to actually pull something, or to withdraw from it. (Aka, 'pull out', in which you metaphorically attach cables to people and physically pull them out of where they are.)
The actual quote is that gets you truther morons in such a twist is 'And I said y'know we've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is, is pull it.'
Why you'd demolish a building to stop the lost of firefighter lives is hard to explain. A much more logical assumption is that he was talking about removing the firefighters from it, aka, pulling the attempt to get the fire under control.
Internet gambling is a tech issue? That's the only one that even slightly fits into 'tech', and even then no one voted for or against it because of 'tech', they voted for or against it because of gambling, period.
Yes, yes, there are plenty of reasons to be for or against gambling, some of them stupid and some of them pretty good.
I, for example, am against allowing it, not because 'gambling is wrong', but because all places that allow gambling in the US also have very very strict Gaming Commissions that control them. Or are state-run games to start with. Ergo, all legal US gambling is 'legit', you can basically trust it. (You want to film robbery heists? Vegas has no problem with it. You want to film a crooked casino? You won't find anywhere willing to let you film in Vegas.)
There's absolutely no way to guarantee that non-US gambling is legit...and before you say 'People could just choose not to go there'...it is very hard to determine that a site is not in the US for the average user.
Granted, some of the opposite to internet gambling is bogus...existing casinos want to retain their monopoly. And some is just people who hate gambling, or at least don't want gambling inside their state.
And some of the people 'for' it quiet rightly point out that, under the WTO, we legally cannot ban non-US companies from providing a service while allowing US companies to do so. So it doesn't matter what we want, we must allow it. (Or, indeed, withdraw from the WTO.)
But absolutely none of it is a 'tech issue'.
And voting against H1B visas is voting for tech. At least, for actual Americans who are in the tech industry and don't want to be underbid. It's only 'anti-tech' if you're talking about the tech companies who now have to pay actual real American wages.
I don't even know how voting against free trade is about. Quite a lot of Democrats are fed up with 'free trade', and that's one of the issues that hurt Hillary.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you really just link to one building that everyone agrees had would have been a disaster except for the fire department and working fire suppression systems?
And another that had enough 'steel beams sag' that they had to work for six months to put in emergency braces to keep it from falling, and that everyone thought would fall?
And a third that actually did have concrete supports? (Not as a core, they instead had concrete pillars around the outside and concrete floors.)
Jesus Christ. I really shouldn't answer this again, but I will.
Paper doesn't burn at 451 F, it catches fire by itself at that temperature. 451 F is the autoignition temperature at one atmosphere, although that actually varies depending on the paper. The temperature of burning paper is much higher than that.
I can't find paper off hand, but a cigarette, without air being drawn through it, burns at fucking 585 C, which means you can deform steel by holding a lit cigarette to it. (And it will go almost twice as fast if you'll suck on the end to pull air through. Of course, you'd have to stick your face rather close to incredibly hot steel.)
Of course, you'd have to hold it there long enough to transfer enough heat, which you couldn't actually do with a single cigarette. And that's not some crazed exception. Candles are twice as hot.
In fact, to be visible at all, a carbon fire, which is basically every sort of fire you'll commonly run into and is the main ingredient of any building fire, has to be 525 C. Ergo, basically any fire you can see can deform steel if you put steel in it long enough.
Steel is useful because it is very strong and it is very hard and it's resistant to heat transfer, which means it takes a long time to deform, and even longer with insulation. It is not some magical unmeltable-except-by-God material.
I heard the announcement that WTC7 was going to be pulled shortly before it was.
You are incorrect. The 'and they decided to pull it' comment that delusional loons have decided was the owner of the building openly admitting to treason on television for some reason, was demonstratively made months after the fact.
And the Parque Central fire burned the top off the building. As opposed to the WTC fires, all of which had at least 30 floors above the fire. (Burning the top off a building without affecting the bottom is easy. Burning the bottom off without affecting the top, not so much.)
More to the point, the Parque Central, while not with a concrete core, had instead multiple concrete supports around the sides, and multiple concrete floors that said supports attached to. It was not a steel supported building. It wasn't even a concrete core. It was a much better and more modern design, using concrete support columns. It also used much better insulation on its steel.
But it's fun watching Truthers link to things that disprove another of their claims:
In the Parque Central fire, the steel beams bent, which is an interesting fact for the idea that steel couldn't buckle under the heat of jet fuel. Here, they bent under the heat of burning offices. No jet fuel, no thermite, the steel bent under the heat of a normal fire, and under the weight of a few floors, instead of a whole building.
As the buildings was not steel supported, it did not collapse. In fact, as the outside of the building has concrete supports, the floors didn't even collapse like on the Windsor Tower.
Don't ask me to do your homework for you. If you are too lazy, you are too lazy.
Nonsense again. I have no obligation to prove to you every claim I make.
And, amazingly, a victory for me. And I was about to give up.
Here's a hint: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Here's another hint: Asserting that things exist on the internet and not providing a link makes you look like a liar. It's one thing to assert things exist somewhere else, like in a book, but not on the internet.
More to the point, slashdot isn't filled with traditional Truther morons. They understand that if you assert a web page exists, and I assert it doesn't, your job is to link to it. It is logically impossible for me to prove such a video doesn't exist. (Of course, logic? Not your strong suit.)
WTC 7 burned for a good many hours, without active firefighting, without collapsing. The fire department actually gave up on the fire early in the day; the building was not brought down until almost 5:30.
Your example of a building that didn't collapse is a building that did collapse? Interesting. I think I'll let that example stand without any comment at all.
Hey, incidentally, how exactly did all those controlled demolitions charges and control cables required to precisely synchronize them remain intact during a several-hour fire?
While there are explosives that won't be set off by fire, I don't know of any that would remain intact during a fire.
Thermite, which is used to cut through supports, in theory wouldn't be set off by the heat, but, then again, because it's so hard to set off, it comes with magnesium to set it off...which would be caught on fire. Either setting off the thermite, or at least rendering it unable to be set off later.
It burned for almost a full day, _uncontrollably_ ( the firemen couldn't get water up to the hoses, they let it 'free burn' ) and did not topple.
Because. It. Was. A. Concrete. Core. Building.
You. Fucktard.
The steel parts collapsed. The concrete core stayed up.
The WTC buildings were made entirely of steel so they entirely collapsed.
The Windsor Tower did not burn uncontrollably, but it sorta proves my point.
It had a concrete core, and the steel parts of the building collapsed, but not the concrete parts.
Of course, the concrete part is steel reinforced, and thus eventually would deform and melt, but 'luckily' the floors that were burning collapsed before they could do so. (And luckily they were able to contain the fire tot he top of the building.)
So, I guess, I might be 'wrong' in the sense that, while any building would collapse, even steel framed ones, if the fire 'burned long enough', but that requires the fire actually burning long enough. In buildings with concrete cores the fire might actually not burn long enough before the rest of the building falls down, leaving the concrete core intact.
Even so, it was so damaged structurally by the heat melting the steel they had to tear it down instead of just rebuilding those floors.
Of course, this is rather unrelated to WTC7, which didn't have a concrete core, and wasn't just on fire at the top. So when the steel buckled, it just kept falling.
Although it does prove you don't need 'jet fuel' or any particular special substance to melt steel. The frame of that building is steel, and there it is, the upper floors clearly having collapsed from the heat of a normal fire of normal things. (Actually, there's a suspicion the fire was arson, because there were people seen around inside the building and a door was forced but we'll assume the arsonists used gasoline, and not, for example, a large amount of magnesium or whatever else that the Truthers claim is required to melt steel.)
You can think that if you want, but you're living in 1996.
The 'swing voters' who will be swayed by this were already Republicans in previous elections, and were tempted to the middle.
I.e, in every election there are people in the middle who can end up on either side. Sadly for the Republican party, the people in the middle on this election are...moderate Republicans. Or, they were before Bush.
If you would BOTHER to look these things up, you would know that. In fact, the head of the demolition crew that took down Building 6 later used EXACTLY that same term in reference to their explosive demolition, on public television. Regardless of your opinion of YouTube, you can find unaltered clips of his statement that they were about to "pull" the building using explosives.
No, he didn't. You didn't link to it, it doesn't exist.
I challenge you to show me even one supportable counterexample to show that is false.
Um, actually, buddy, the balls in your court to show a non-concrete core building that was allowed to burn for an hour without the fire being fought and didn't collapse.
There are plenty of buildings that didn't collapse. None of them did not have a concrete core.
Who is to say -- hypothetically only of course -- that the owner of the building did not tell the fire department, at that point, that there were demolition charges in place just for that kind of eventuality?
Is this some common occurrence where you live, where buildings have self-destructs? I think I'll rig live explosives and a way to set them off in my house and then tell the fire department about them, and see what happens.
Hint: prior to 9/11, NO steel-structure skyscraper had EVER come down due to fire. And there have been plenty of fires, some of them much more extensive than in WTC 7.
Okay, first of all, it is impossible to have a fire 'more extensive' than one that destroyed a building.
Secondly, all those fires were fought. That's why they spray water on them even after everyone is out...at a certain point, the steel buckles. Keep it under that point, and the building is safe.
In fact, skyscrapers -- even much older skyscrapers -- have been completely gutted from fire before, leaving little more than the steel members left standing. But stand they did.
Thirdly, you loon, older buildings were built differently. They had a concrete core.
But more probable than the building coming down due to a cause that had NEVER been seen at any other time or place in the history of the world. Ever. Before or since.
Two words: Windsor Building.
Steel outside, concrete core. The steel outside part collapsed straight down onto itself, and the fire department was actually fighting that fire.
The WTC 7 building, in fact none of the WTC buildings, have a concrete core.(1)
The upper floors, if you notice, collapsed straight down, as if they were in a 'controlled demolition', or possibly subjected to a force called 'gravity' that mysteriously only operates directly downward. (Whereas in the real world, gravity is noticably random and pulls things in all directions.)
Of course, here the fire at the top, whereas in the WTC 7 the middle of the building was on fire, resulting the middle floors collapsing instead of the top. The upper floors, of course, should have hovered in midair, except for that 'gravity' theory I mentioned above. And the lower floors, apparently, weren't ready to have 2/3rds of a damn building come crashing into them.
Oh, and if we're talking about things that have never been done before, no building over 40 stories has ever been brought down by controlled demolitions, either.
1) If you claim the WTC buildings do have a concrete core, as some Truther loons are doing, so help me, I will bitchslap you into next week.
Obama being proactive on the topic could benefit his own chances of being elected (not that he necessarily needs that right now) but it could help the democratic party as a whole... but only if he does it before being attacked on the issue in the press.
It's really a 'Only Nixon could go to China' possibility. Only a black, urban-based Democratic leader could redirect the party on that issue.
However, watching McCain's rather painful campaign so far, I'm not convinced that McCain could actually successfully use this attack, simply because his campaign appears to be run by drunken buffoons.
I mean, it's almost painful at this point. Obama held off announcing his VP pick for a week simply because McCain handed him a loaded gun pointed at his own foot. For future reference: If you are trying to paint your opponent as elite, make sure you know how many houses you have.
Or, even better, don't use that damn line of attack. I don't care if it worked in 2004. Obama isn't Kerry. If anyone, McCain is Kerry. Using attacks that worked against Kerry means using attacks that don't work against Obama but do work again McCain, you imbeciles.
McCain's campaign is just hilariously bad at this point. I'd be astonished if they could actually find and promote any issue that would actually hurt Obama. Because they know they'd lose on issues in general, they appear to have entirely skipped that portion of the election and moved immediately to attacks, although for some reason they appear to be using rather dadaist ones.
I don't think we will. I think that effect has pretty much vanished over the last decade.
I think you've mistaken me for a Truther. I don't think WTC 7 was 'pulled' in any manner, and I wish those people would learn some simple physics about how buildings fall.
I was just pointing out that, of all the terms that people who demolish buildings use, 'pulled' already has an entirely different meaning than 'controlled explosion', so it is unlike to ever be used to refer to such a thing.
To pull an example from my experience: It is like someone asserting that they heard a stage crew say 'We need to paint the flat.' in a theatre, and they were referring to the stage surface. That may sounds like some reasonable idea to people outside the theatre, the stage is, in fact, 'flat'.
But it's completely absurd, because 'flat' already refers to a specific thing in a a theatre, namely, vertical flat set pieces that are used as walls. The things people carry or lower into place at the back of the set. Those are 'flats'.(Well, if they lower, they are 'flies', but those are just a specific kind of flat.)
It's not only not theatre terminology to refer to the stage that way, it's inconceivable that it would ever be. The stage will not ever be called 'the flat'. Nothing will be a 'flat' except the things we're already calling the flat, because that would be too damn confusing.
Likewise, while 'pulling' a building by blowing it up sound reasonable to people outside the deconstruction industry, it's inconceivable that they'd start using that expression to refer to it, as that already refers to a specific, different thing!
A thing that quite obviously didn't happen to WTC 7.
You are, in fact, accusing the owner of the building of having said something that he's repeatedly denied saying. You've taken a word out of context (Actually, not even that. You've invented a new meaning of a word.), added in a failure to realize that almost all building collapses look the same, and and made up some absurd theory that the US government went and told the extremely liberal BBC about a building collapse before it happens, and the BBC has not questioned this.
And your theory requires the NYFD to participate in the attacks, killing their own people.
And as for your question, the reason there is not an inquiry is that EVERYONE KNOWS STEEL REINFORCED BUILDINGS FALL DOWN IF THEY REMAIN ON FIRE.
That's not an 'incompetent design', you idiot. All buildings fall down if they remain on fire long enough. That's why they keep hitting buildings with water long after people have been rescued, to keep the fucking building from falling down. Maybe some small brick or concrete buildings might end up a gutted frame, but not anything larger.
They ran out of water, or at least water pressure, on 9/11, and were dealing with other very serious problems at the time, and couldn't spend time or resources to put out a fire that was not endangering people. So they cleared the area and let it burn.
Fine, changed 'died needlessly' to 'risked their lives needlessly'.
It still requires the NYFD to be in on the attack in advance.
Which still requires them to have deliberately killed or allowed to be killed 343 firefighters in the other buildings.
Well, sure, any previous vote on any issue will alienate some voters.
I just think the Democratic party has reached the point where they do not actually care about gun control at the national level.
And while Obama may take some flak for 'flip-flopping', McCain's going to have to do the same thing.
Frankly, in the end, none of it really matters. Obama, at this point, would have to be found in bed with a dead male goat to lose the election.
It's reinforced concrete...aka, concrete with steel in it.
Let it burn long enough, and it will fall down.
Well, yes, but reinforced concrete has steel in it, which was sorta my point. :)
I'm not sure that you could build a totally concrete building, except maybe cinder-block walls and wooden ceilings/floors. I'm sure someone has, at some point in time, built a totally stupid building that was essentially a concrete square with a wooden middle.
If that burned, the walls would manage to stay up in the fire.
In an uncontrolled and infinitely long fire, any wood will burn. Any steel will warp, which means if it's supporting anything, it will stop doing so. Any concrete will just stand there, although obviously if it's being supported by steel there are going to be some problems when that stops.
But, anyway, yes, almost all 'concrete' buildings of any size are actually reinforced concrete building, and hence out-of-control files pose structural risks.
Interesting fact: Coventry Cathedral, which was attacked during WWII, had its walls and ceiling 'reinforced' with steel girders before that, which caused even more damage when high incendiaries on the roof started a fire that buckled them, causing them to pull the walls down. Without that reinforcement, the incendiaries would have burned straight through the roof and the innards of the church, but left most of the roof and the walls standing, as they were made of stone and bricks. It, in essence, was the 'concrete walls with wooden innards' I was talking about above, but with bricks instead.
Larry Silverstein has repeatedly explained exactly what he was talking about when he said 'pulled'.
Your conspiracy requires that someone had decided to take down WTC7 weeks in advance, and, on 9/11, let all those fire fighters die needlessly in that building trying to save it.
Yet the singular quote you're relying on said the fire department decided to 'pull it', which you think means 'demolish' and 'it' is the building, as opposed to pull meaning 'scrub' and 'it' being 'the attempt to save the building'.
In other words, you are accusing the New York Fire Department of knowing in advance and actively participating in a conspiracy to murder their own people in a play-act where they pretended to try to save WTC7 for a while, even though they knew it was coming down.
Oh, oh, I know this one. Those were holograms of dead firefighters, right?
The only video I see is one where someone repeatedly asserts the 'pulled' means 'demolished'.
There are plenty of manuals on controlled demolitions, and they don't get quoted. You know why? Because they do 'pull' buildings. That means to pull over a building using cables hooked to the supports.
You couldn't do that to WTC 7, and it wouldn't have gone down like.
The fun thing about the 9/11 Truthers is that their conspiracies make no sense. They have holographic missiles flying around, explosives in advance, news media with a scripted story that sometimes jump ahead.
Do you want to know how the US government would have actually done 9/11?
They would have installed non-overriddable autopilots on the airplane, either some sort of sleeping gas, or cellphone/radio jammers to keep the people from contacting anyone.
They would have tapped the phones of some of the passengers booked on United 93, recorded some of their voices, and forged phone calls from them. Hard to do in real time, but they were in a hostage situation on a plane, so if anyone you're talking to asks a question you can't answer, well, the call would get 'dropped' or the hijackers would take the phone away or something.
Then they would have flown the actual airplanes into the actual buildings and let whatever happened.
They would have not contacted any media in advance. They would not have replaced any airplanes. They would not have rigged the twin towers buildings to fall. They would not have used this opportunity to take down an unrelated building. They would not have put the planes they stole back into service under a different number. They would not use actual terrorists who can be found alive later. (They wouldn't have made them all Saudis instead of Iraqis.)
More to the point, Fire Departments don't even know how to demolish buildings. They don't have demolition experts working for them!
Um, fires can pretty much bring down every building without some sort of suppression.
The sole exception is concrete, which can leave a hollow shell. Of course, no one on earth can build a 47 story concrete building.
Any building with steel as part of the support, on fire long enough, is eventually going to see that steel buckle, which will bring down the building. You can't just let tall buildings burn and then walk in the next day with new paint and furniture.
When they build steel buildings, they spray insulation on the steel to keep it intact during fires. For the WTC7, that was something called 'Monokote', which is rated for three hours for steel columns. (There is an entirely different 'Monokote' which is just a kind of plastic shrink wrap. Don't get confused.)
This would have been more than enough if the fire-suppression systems had been working, but they were not. It is also why the firefighters pulled out when they did...enough of the steel had started to buckle that the building was listing to the side.
Hey, dumbass, there's plenty of refutation on the use of the word 'pulled'.
To 'pull' a building is to attach cables to it and pull it down, not to blow it up. No one in the entire history of mankind has used the word 'pull' to mean 'blow up'. They use it to mean to actually pull something, or to withdraw from it. (Aka, 'pull out', in which you metaphorically attach cables to people and physically pull them out of where they are.)
The actual quote is that gets you truther morons in such a twist is 'And I said y'know we've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is, is pull it.'
Why you'd demolish a building to stop the lost of firefighter lives is hard to explain. A much more logical assumption is that he was talking about removing the firefighters from it, aka, pulling the attempt to get the fire under control.
But logic has never been you guys strong suit.
Internet gambling is a tech issue? That's the only one that even slightly fits into 'tech', and even then no one voted for or against it because of 'tech', they voted for or against it because of gambling, period.
Yes, yes, there are plenty of reasons to be for or against gambling, some of them stupid and some of them pretty good.
I, for example, am against allowing it, not because 'gambling is wrong', but because all places that allow gambling in the US also have very very strict Gaming Commissions that control them. Or are state-run games to start with. Ergo, all legal US gambling is 'legit', you can basically trust it. (You want to film robbery heists? Vegas has no problem with it. You want to film a crooked casino? You won't find anywhere willing to let you film in Vegas.)
There's absolutely no way to guarantee that non-US gambling is legit...and before you say 'People could just choose not to go there'...it is very hard to determine that a site is not in the US for the average user.
Granted, some of the opposite to internet gambling is bogus...existing casinos want to retain their monopoly. And some is just people who hate gambling, or at least don't want gambling inside their state.
And some of the people 'for' it quiet rightly point out that, under the WTO, we legally cannot ban non-US companies from providing a service while allowing US companies to do so. So it doesn't matter what we want, we must allow it. (Or, indeed, withdraw from the WTO.)
But absolutely none of it is a 'tech issue'.
And voting against H1B visas is voting for tech. At least, for actual Americans who are in the tech industry and don't want to be underbid. It's only 'anti-tech' if you're talking about the tech companies who now have to pay actual real American wages.
I don't even know how voting against free trade is about. Quite a lot of Democrats are fed up with 'free trade', and that's one of the issues that hurt Hillary.