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Node
Dear oh dear.
Ben Goldacre’s God has spoken. First Goldacre said godlike figure not God. Secondly the pronouncements were made on a serological study of 3000 individuals selected through a facebook ad campaign on a serological test on which we are told little and know not if it is validated, in a pre-peer reviewed internet publication. That is the smoking gun? So all it has postulated is that we still do not know what the actual death rate from Covid-19 is but it is less than that of seasonal influenza. That in itself is not surprising and maybe a bit encouraging, but it does not explain why there are so many people dying all over the world. Yes of course they are all old and frail and would have died anyway in 2 weeks, 3 months or two years, so why worry? But hang on a minute Ioannidis says we are OK so we must be OK. But what about the 80 or so healthy caseworkers who were healthy and expected to live for a few more years, productively saving lives, they have died with Covid-19 not because of it? Well of course because of the panic produced, a stampede is always a possibility that may kill innocent passerbys.
To be fair to Ioannidis all he is saying is that there is hope at the end of the tunnel, mankind is not going to be wiped our by this disease and at worse we might cull the oldest and weakest and perhaps that is not worse than saving our economies. If this sounds familiar, it is because it is a reiteration of what Boris-take-it-on-the-chin-herd-immunity-Johnson also said at the outset.Anyway. I am not keeping on this 911 thread because frankly it is going round in circles. The introduction of Covid19 discussions interwoven with others means that I cannot keep up with the comments being made. I will not make further comments here but if you want to share your thoughts on covid-19 you will find me here if you are interested that is.
Node, 13:53 – “You are scared and fighting for what you believe”
WRONG again Node; pure psychological projection. You are fighting. You have beliefs. I am arguing for acceptance of evidence and minimisation of suffering. The death rate is going through the roof, unless you maintain that all the graphs you’ve been shown of overall mortality are under the control of the secret conspiracy you peddle – not that you’re a conspiracy theorist, of course.
I have proportional fear, but AS you know, or should, I have been suicidally depressed for over a decade. I have my way out, I will not die in agony, and I won’t particularly care, I’ll be glad to have escaped the wilful liars intent on wrecking our beautiful little world.
@ Clark
“Yes, Dave, I do observe the restrictions.”
Well be careful, as “self-isolation” can drive you mad!
– “I have every bit as much right as you to voice my concerns”
Does free speech give you the right to convince the ignorant to escape an some monster, real or imagined, by running in panic across a busy motorway?
The “banksters” are as threatened by covid-19 as anyone else; more so if they are old.
Your beliefs are as nothing against the weight of evidence. Have humility.
I share your concerns about businesses, but it is a matter of priority. I’d have more respect if you’d undertake to participate in direct non-violent action, in due course when congregating ceases to be a mortal threat to others. But I have NEVER seen you advocate direct action, all you do is harp on about your supposed superior knowledge, in defiance of all evidence and reason.
What ACTION do you recommend?
Your beliefs are as nothing against the weight of evidence.
Whose evidence? Mine or yours?
No, Node. What ACTION do you recommend?
– “Whose evidence? Mine or yours?”
The preponderance of evidence.
But the very fact that you ask that question implies that you acknowledge only opinion. Anyone can cherry-pick and quote mine; that’s why the overall mortality figures were cited to refute your initial claims. The fact that you have never retracted shows that you have no respect for the rationalist method. There is simply no point in attempting rational conversation with you; QED.
So what action do you recommend?
Asking that question shows that you do not respect evidence and rationality, so your appeal the the UAF report is mere hypocrisy; had it contradicted your opinion you would have dismissed it, presumably as work dictated by “the elite”, a claim you can make of absolutely anything. Your claims to respect science constitute intellectual dishonesty. You resort to mere conspiracy theory, because all the evidence you reject you can attribute to the conspiracy.
So let’s move on.
What action do you recommend?
“Whose evidence? Mine or yours?”
I’ve explained my reasons for trusting the Ioannidis evidence. He is an expert in that field with everything to lose if he gets it wrong.
I’ve explained why I distrust the evidence you get through the MSM – it is subject to pressure from those who I believe are making the biggest power grab in history.
So it’s fair to ask “my evidence or yours?” You claim I’m cherry-picking. I claim you’re doing the same.so your appeal the the UAF report is mere hypocrisy; had it contradicted your opinion you would have dismissed it, presumably as work dictated by “the elite”, a claim you can make of absolutely anything.
No. I’ve also explained why I trust that evidence. It comes with the data, workings, and an invite for anybody to challenge it. Unlike the official narrative.
You resort to mere conspiracy theory, because all the evidence you reject you can attribute to the conspiracy.
I always know when you’re on the ropes – you resort to name calling 🙂
What action do you recommend?
I’ve told you this too. It’s too late for macro action, they are too powerful. They have you on their side, after all, shutting down the opposition. A continuing tactic of theirs for decades has been to attack families, communities, culture, religion – to break bonds that encourage people to stick together, to support each other. Therefore I put my energy into strengthening my community. Micro action – it is the only defense left.
Clark
“Pooh, I do apologise; I’ve ended up fielding other stuff.”
“and I owe Pooh some of my time.”It’s kind of you to say that. Please don’t worry. I’m doing fine reading comments at the 911 link a mod kindly provided. It’s been quite a while since I paid attention to the ins and outs of 911. I can see you are very busy. Do carry on with the discussion and forget me for now, I have enough info from the comments and links to get on with. If I have a question that can’t wait, I’ll ask.
Keep well. Many thanks.
– “Therefore I put my energy into strengthening my community.”
That’s a good thing to do. I praised you for it as soon as you revealed it.
– “Micro action – it is the only defense left.”
I know you think XR is “controlled opposition” (an idea popular with conspiracy theorists) and that global warming is a hoax (a conspiracy theory), or unimportant or whatever, but we certainly had an effect, as revealed in polls. We also affected the corporate media.
(and I can’t help it if you can’t tell proper scientific arguments from astroturf; read Bad Science.)
Craig’s blog has also forced issues into the corporate media, and my actions improved policy at Wikipedia. So here are two other methods that work – non-violent direct action, and using the independent micro-media. At least you haven’t recommended removing or breaking the restrictions, but your arguments encourage others to do so, eg. Dave.
– “You claim I’m cherry-picking. I claim you’re doing the same”
You haven’t addressed the sharp rise in overall mortality, now seen in multiple parts of the world. This refuted your “no worse than seasonal flu” cherry-pick, yet you made the same argument yet again today, complete with a cherry-picked quote-mine of a quote-mine, another common conspiracy theorist’s technique.
Of course you’ve claimed I’m cherry-picking because you don’t know how to assess an argument rationally and scientifically, so opinion versus opinion is all you have left. Read Bad Science.
– “I distrust the evidence you get through the MSM”
I don’t have a telly, I don’t listen to the radio, I don’t get a “news”paper and I only use their websites occasionally when following commenters’ links. My info was coming, privately and publicly, from Squonk. In your very own link above at 13:53 (where you claiming to be banned though you weren’t), Squonk told you:
– “I quote true experts in the field. […] I’ve been a member of two disease tracking forums for over 10 years including during the whole swine flu thing. […] I didn’t just start paying attention now with SARS-CoV-2.”
Node: – “..the MSM – it is subject to pressure from those who I believe are making the biggest power grab in history.”
It’s the corporate media; all of it is funded by advertising and much of it is owned by billionaires, so of course it projects the narrative of corporatism and the extremely wealthy. That doesn’t invalidate all reporting; you can’t just say “the Guardian says there’s global warming, therefore it’s a hoax”. Even corporatism and billionaires are right about some things, and a very few of them (one? two?) have funded XR (a tiny bit from their perspective), but maybe those few are fond of our lovely biosphere, or maybe they just have a bit more sense. Your assumption of monolithic evil is blinkering you.
And why call it the MSM, “MainStream Media”? That’s something were trying to change, isn’t it?
“Conspiracy theorist” isn’t an insult; it’s a description. Not a complimentary one, I agree, but it is a functional one; your theories are based on your assumed objectives of your purported conspiracy. Maybe your “elite” are as worried about getting covid-19 as everyone else is, so they’re encouraging media overdrive to slow it down until a vaccine is developed. Maybe they’re worried about it decimating the wage slave consumers. You don’t know what their objective might be, so you’re just seeing your own assumptions.
How they will attempt to exploit the crisis can be explored with political and economic theory, but attempting to use conspiracy theory is bound to be circular – all you’ll be able to see are your own assumptions about the “elite”. Example:
Option 1: global warming is a hoax, or unimportant.
Option 2: global warming is a major threat to humanity.Option 1: the elite hype global warming to increase taxation.
Option 2: the elite hype global warming because they want a future for them and their kids; they want their dominance to continue.So the elite hype global warming either way.
Political, economic and conspiracy theories are all incorrect methods for assessing global warming. You need a scientific theory, because global warming is a physical issue. Same goes for covid-19.
– “I’ve explained my reasons for trusting the Ioannidis evidence. He is an expert in that field with everything to lose if he gets it wrong.”
But you didn’t really listen to Ioannidis. He said there are grounds for hope, that society can return to normal eventually; you only heard the bit you wanted to “no worse than flu”. He failed to make clear the difference between CFR Case Fatality Rate and the always lower IFR Infection Fatality Rate.
But this is all besides the point. You’re starting from a political/economic assumption about the objectives of the elite, and working backwards to infer the nature of a virus and the epidemic it causes, and cherry-picking on that basis. But politics and economics don’t determine the epidemiology of a virus; the converse is true.
And Ioannidis hasn’t produced any evidence. He gave an interpretation, of one paper. You’d know the difference between evidence and interpretation if you’d read Bad Science, because that’s the sort of thing it teaches. And you’d be wary of anything based on one paper, because that’s cherry picking. But Ioannidis didn’t use the paper to invalidate the restrictions; he merely cited it as a hope for the future.
Pooh, thanks for your reply.
As best I remember, I got Nikko to do the momentum calculations with his spreadsheet model; it’s probably around comment page 100. But Nikko had started wrong, by letting the topmost floor assembly fall onto the one beneath, and he got a collapse that stopped. In fact the damaged zone was over ten floors down. I pointed this out and Nikko corrected his model such that the top ten floors dropped, and he got a collapse that accelerated.
But Nikko also had an arbitrary ejection of mass each time the falling material entrained another floor. I think he chose 5% or 10%, which is way too much, see this comment above. It took me a while to persuade him, but he eventually reduced the ejection to nothing, and thereby got the limiting case. It was well within the collapse as estimated from the video record, and accorded quite well with my manual guestimate, which might be around page 93 or 95 – basically a falling mass of ten units hitting one stationary unit slows the collapse by only one eleventh, and thus a twelfth at the next floor down, then a thirteenth, and so on.
The spare energy calculations come later.
Many thanks, Clark. I take note of what you’ve said.
To begin with, it seems that for your calculations to come close to being correct, you would have to demonstrate that at the relevant time the live load bearing capacity of the floors you consider was zero, that is to say that each floor could support no more than its own weight + whatever other weight it was already supporting, and, therefore, its reaction to what was falling on it was due to just its own inertial mass (<b>1</b>/11, <b>1</b>/12, etc.).
I have been under the impression that, according to NIST, I think, the live load bearing capacity of a non-service floor was, for a static load, 12 non-service floors, and for a load dropped – 6 non-service floors. These numbers might be wrong, but the live load bearing capacity of all the floors at the time of collapse is most unlikely to have been zero unless some other factors you have not taken into account had been at play.
I will read in due course all the comments you’ve mentioned.
Keep well.
Pooh, I was developing and refining my understanding of the Twin Tower collapses as I went along, mostly from watching the collapse videos, sometimes frame by frame, and occasionally by reading engineers’ comments, and some of the academic papers. So my ideas changed and evolved as the thread progressed.
One thing I did that seemed to help me a lot was that I read up on the structure and construction of the Twin Towers, including dimensions of steel columns, floor assemblies etc., and then visualised it as a 1/100 scale model. The Twin Towers were just too big for me to think about directly; imagining the scale model helped me to fit it into my mind, my experience, as it were.
Something that really disappointed me was that no one anyone else really joined in with trying to work it out, for instance no one shared my wonder at the delicacy of the 1/100th scale visualisation. Nikko was occasionally helpful with some basic calculations, but mostly it seemed that everyone had already decided upon pre-rigged demolition, and just wanted to shut me up or ridicule my efforts. The ridicule in particular really pissed me off, and I got in a very bad mood at times; there was just more every time I returned to the thread.
Once I’d got a handle on it, the Twin Tower collapses made perfect sense. Not so WTC7; I still don’t know what happened to that. I’m not surprised that it fell down, but its relative neatness seems decidedly odd. Weird building, weird circumstances, weird collapse.
That said, I had another look at Chandler’s measurements last night, and that gave me another new idea. But it’s not likely to reveal anything about intent.
Morning, Clark
“… if WTC7 was indeed brought down by thermite, and residue was found in New York dust, then the thermite residue isn’t specific to the Twin Towers.”
Not necessarily so. One sample was collected by a Manhattan resident about ten minutes after the collapse of the second WTC Tower, two the next day, and a fourth about a week later.
See The Open Chemical Physics Journal, 2009, 2: 7-31 ‘Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe’ Niels H. Harrit, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones, Kevin R. Ryan, Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R. Gourley, Bradley R. Larsen3
(This paper is still unchallenged as far as I’ve been able to ascertain)Clark
April 21, 2020 at 09:32“The ridicule in particular really pissed me off, and I got in a very bad mood at times; there was just more every time I returned to the thread.”
I’ve noticed. You won’t get any of that kind of attitude from me, I promise. My word is my bond. I admit I like smiling and having a laugh, but ridiculing another is an absolute ‘no’.
Take care.
I doubt I have the background knowledge to assess a chemistry paper.
But thermitic materials make no sense for the Twin Towers. If structural failure were to occur across a full cross-section, there’s no way they could not collapse. If an aircraft had failed to arrive, there’d be a tower full of thermite and detonation equipment, so it’d make more sense to dispense with any destructive materials and just let them burn, even if they didn’t collapse.
If the paper is right, the thermitic material presumably came from somewhere else. It would seem more likely that it was deliberately added to the dust; a psi-op to help protect the Saudi-jihadi-NATO collaboration.
Thank you, Clark
“I doubt I have the background knowledge to assess a chemistry paper.”
I understand. No problem.
Selected excerpts from the article at GlobalResearch.Full text. Have a look. It’s not difficult to follow the argument if you are interested and have a bit of time to spare.
http://aneta.org/NielsHarrit_org/BenthamOpenThermite.pdfNiels Harrit interview, 10min
“But thermitic materials make no sense for the Twin Towers. If structural failure were to occur across a full cross-section, there’s no way they could not collapse.”
I’d like to reserve judgement on this for the time being.
With respect. The Open Chemical Physics Journal is a peer-reviewed publication. It is available to everyone to read, find errors and make them public. As far as I know, no valid criticisms have come to light in the eleven years since its publication.
Please don’t think I’m trying to blind you with science. Reading through many of your comments, I’ve noticed that you have cited many academic papers. Am I now to understand that you neither have personal knowledge of their contents, nor are able to follow their authors’ arguments? Say, for instance, I peruse a paper you cite, find errors and tell you about my findings. Will you reply that you are not in a position to judge, and if so, what’s the purpose of your citing the paper? The way I see it is that we got talking about something we both are interested in, and I presumed that it would be ok to accept your format of discussion. Now it appears that I might’ve been mistaken.
If you really would like to continue our discussion, perhaps it would be a good idea for you to tell me how you would like me to go about it.
Incidentally, I was in the Oxford Circus-Marble Arch area on 15 April last year.
Stay safe.
In Newtonian physics and engineering, I may have something useful to say. Chandler’s Downward Acceleration of WTC1 is well within my understanding. I have pointed out many papers, as part of some lists, to show that the collapses have not been ignored by the physics and engineering community, as had been claimed. On other occasions I read some papers, in which case I probably commented about them. If you cite a paper I will read it, and I’ll tell you how much of it I understand.
Some years ago I read the Harrit paper, but I didn’t understand enough of it to have anything useful to say.
I was on the Marble Arch camp April 2019 for nine days. I was leafleting at the Pink Boat on the first Monday. The April Uprising was one of the best experiences I have ever had. October was far more difficult and stressful. I have been with XR since the Halloween action in 2018. It is a wonderful organisation.
Pooh, sorry, I’ve only just noticed your April 21, 03:51 comment #52251; don’t know how I missed it.
Yes, I ignored mechanical resistance because I couldn’t do those calculations. So I went a different route.
I had a look at the truss seats (the connection of horizontal floor assemblies to the vertical frame), and they seemed pretty insubstantial, I thought they wouldn’t really slow things down much. But momentum transfer might, so I checked that manually for the first floor assembly below the damaged zone, and that didn’t slow things much either (~9%, and less each subsequent floor). Then came the discussion with Nikko and the spreadsheet, the one floor / ten floor correction, then eliminating Nikko’s arbitrary ejections, and it came out within the measured / estimated* collapse time (*we can’t quite see the end because the big dust cloud is welling up).
Then I calculated the energy available for deformation of materials when the falling stuff entrained another floor assembly. I chose a high collision for that because there’s more mass and velocity the lower you go. You know; you calculate the final velocity from the momentum equation, and then from the initial V and the final V, and the mass, you work out the kinetic energy before and after, subtract one from the other, and you’re left with the energy dissipated into deformation of materials, sound etc.. Convert that to TNT equivalent, and it looked plenty to break the truss seats. It doesn’t matter whether it breaks the floor assembly or the truss seat because this is a collapse, a failure; either will do.
I still didn’t have a conclusive collapse time, but then I realised, so what? Who’d run the risk of getting caught by lacing the towers with thermite or TNT or anything, just to make a tower collapse four seconds or whatever faster than it would have done anyway, without? They’d have to be stupid beyond comprehension.
So I put myself in their position and thought, what am I trying to achieve? An atrocity; loads of dead people. Well structural failure across a cross section would achieve that; the buildings will be a write-off anyway, everything’s well fucked, that’ll do. I don’t really care how big a stump of unusable building is left after, it’s going to be a massive problem to clear up no matter what. No, I don’t feel any need to lace the building with explosives or thermite or whatever, and all the hassle and risk that would entail. Just ensure structural failure across a complete cross-section; job done.
And then I found this:
