Ghosts - 2

(Continued from Ghosts - 1...)
So here’s how it really is. The world you perceive is all-of-a-piece with your sense of you as the experiencer of it. It is you and you are it. The two are indissolubly one, outside of which there is nothing, for nothing can be meaningfully said to exist until you experience it. Subjects and objects are conventions which arise out of this experience; useful, undoubtedly, but conventions nonetheless. What we call “the real world” are the projections of our imagination onto the inchoate data flooding us every moment of every day – ghosts, in fact. They are our attempt to make sense of the world – a wonderfully literal expression for what we actually do. Ghosts are not the exclusive property of the uneducated. Ghosts are, precisely, the concepts with which we all handle all primary experience all the time, taking these concepts as reality, and fighting each other, sometimes to the death, over them when our interpretations don’t coincide – which of course they mostly don’t.

When something entirely fills your field of vision, indeed constitutes the very substance of your consciousness, it is extremely difficult to detect. Indeed, the very act of “encountering” our world is what gives rise to the distinction between us as subjects and the world as object in the first place.  The inferential supposition that the world as we see it is separate from ourselves, and goes on with or without us, is a convention powerfully reinforced by a Western upbringing, and all but impossible to dispel. The tautological fact that this world we comprehend – which is the only one we know, or can know – is the sum total of our personal experience, and nothing else, is as invisible to us as water presumably is to a fish.

That we (and by we I mean our community) invent the meaning we find in the world around us – “This is a clock; that is my husband/wife…” – is lost in the familiarity of our collective creation. The West does not believe in ghosts because we have a label for everything we’ve invented; “A place for everything, and everything in its place”. Once a label has been assigned it’s almost impossible thereafter to dissociate the image from that label, wherever it occurs. But we occasionally get an inkling of the essentially ghostly nature of all our creations when our imaginations rush in to fill a conceptual void. Pattern – order - is the foundation of meaning. Gazing up at the random shapes of clouds on a summer’s day, or patterns of stars in the night sky, or the craters on the Moon, our compulsion to impose meaning on the world around us stamps on them the patterns of everyday objects we carry in our heads. Since we know these patterns are not “really up there” we have less difficulty in calling them figments of our imagination than we do “clocks” and “spouses” – which are nevertheless concepts every bit as imaginary as faces in clouds; the experiences to which we have applied the labels “spouse” and “clock” just recur more consistently, and are confirmed as real by the recurrence of other associative experiences the lack of which alerts us that shapes in clouds are not faces.  Everything we know and everything we are is comprised, not of earth, air, fire and water, or the contents of the Periodic Table of Elements, but of experience.

But even at the level of abstraction offered by a cloud it’s hard to grasp that the image we imagine (note the similarity of the two words) is not up there, but “in here”. The face we see in the cloud is, we insist, there to be seen by anyone who cares to look. “Ok, it isn’t a real face, but it’s still the image of a face! How else could I see it?” Among the uneducated it may even be that, lacking the straightjacket of schooling, the face in the cloud may be thought literally real – the manifestation of a celestial being, perhaps.  But we who pride ourselves on our objectivity should finally be able to figure that there is no face or image of a face of any description in that damn cloud. It is we who do the imagining, stimulated to do so by the application of memory to raw data, into the vacuum of whose intrinsic meaninglessness ghosts must rush, to fill it.  That others may also see the image of a face tells us only about the concepts we share. It says nothing whatever about any universal reality “out there”.  What we see is the reflection of our own previous experience, our recognition, lacking which we would see no pattern at all.

“So how come cameras can now recognize faces? Doesn’t that prove that there’s something out there to see?”  Well now, aren’t we a clever clogs? This riposte may seem significant, but in point of fact I think you will see that it’s diversionary. We have assigned meaning to a vast range of shapes, colors, sounds, and so on – almost to everything that can be identified from anything else. The recurrence of a particular arrangement (of shapes, say) is announced in you by a flash of recognition, as you involuntarily associate it with your previous experience of that arrangement, and – unless you have Alzheimer’s - the name you have come to associate with that experience identifies it as a remembered “thing”. It is now labeled and “known”. Instantly you and it are separated. But you are only aware of yourself as separate from what you see because of your obsession with labeling what’s in your head as something “out there”.  Were you not to have come across that pattern before it would have no effect on you whatever. You would not see it. The pattern is what identifies you as you. The pattern is part of you. It is you! Without all those patterns built up in your head who would you be?

For the camera, the salient elements that we call “face” were fed into its visual recognition program, not with any embedded meaning, but as a series of algorithms whose parameters will mindlessly register a match whenever one enters its field of view, just as a data mining program picks key words from the internet out of the billions that it sightlessly scans, or, more prosaically, the wheels of a train register a click whenever they cross a joint in the rails. Nothing else – that it was not programmed to recognize – is visible to it at all. But when you look through the viewfinder, all the faces are ringed – just in case you’d forgotten how to recognize them! 

Seeing patterns in the stars gave rise to the Zodiac. Our rational mind again should tell us (something that perhaps the mind of the ancients, for whom ghosts were as real as other objects, did not) that there is no pattern up there among the stars. Sagittarius, the heavenly Archer, must have been – was – a product of an ancient imagination familiar with archers and archery.  They projected onto the meaningless, random scatter of the stars patterns with which they were familiar, so that they could recognize them.  Similarly, but being mostly unfamiliar with Greek mythology, the first American astronauts imposed their own everyday images on the night sky, the better to make it recognizable.  Thus, for example, one constellation became known to astronauts of the Sixties as the Vacuum Cleaner. An ancient could not have been brought to see this image at all, because it had no correspondence in his mind. For him the vacuum cleaner image did not exist. Try as he might an astronaut would be totally incapable of conjuring in the mind of an ancient a vacuum cleaner image in the night sky, because it had not entered the latter’s experience. To exist at all phenomena must become incorporated in our experience. Facts are recurrent experiences. 

(For the conclusion of this post, click here.)

Ghosts - 1

Truth! Now there’s an interesting word!  We're told it's from Proto-Indo-European dru through Sanskrit dhruv, meaning firm, fixed, and Latin durus, meaning hard, hardy (hence durable) – through Old English trum, meaning strong, firm, and into modern English usage as true. What is true, our ancestors tell us, is that which stands the test of time. 

A fact, I think we would say, is a species of truth, for we also think of facts as durable; they too are that which has stood the test of time. But facts are slippery things; more and more so, as the pace of life accelerates. In our attempt to keep facts fixed, to nail ‘em down – to keep them, as it were, beyond the reach of tricky fingers and wayward minds – society has throughout our history adopted various defensive strategies. Chief among these has been the appeal to authority. There are fashions in authority, as there are also fashions in facts. Tradition is the word we normally associate with the guardianship of facts in the pre-scientific age. The word has almost a negative connotation today, doesn’t it?  Religion is part-and-parcel of tradition, and religious authority, too, is on the wane in the West, but in its heyday religion had mastery of most of the important facts that ruled men’s lives. Today religious authority has been largely supplanted by the authority of science, whose province, you could say, facts are. You want to know a fact? The indisputable truth about something? Science will tell you.

That, at least, is the populist view. Scientists themselves are not so adamant. In science, on the contrary, nothing can be proved true. It can only be proved not to be false – yet. But it is the populist view that claims our attention, and science provides the authority today for much that we believe in, i.e. that which we hold to be true. So it’s really this populist view – that facts are hard and fast and immutably “out there” – rather than the scientific view, which I want to examine, because it is this (pardon the heresy) erroneous faith in the permanence of facts which is opening us to abuse by the very authorities in which we have put our trust. 

What, then, are facts?

My New Oxford English Dictionary pithily defines a fact as “a thing that is indisputably the case”.  Who would quarrel with that? And yet this definition contains within it the Achilles Heel of all facts, the one fatal flaw which ruins them all, namely that they are disputable! What human beings find to argue and kill each other over more than anything else are, precisely, those things that they had always taken to be facts - until someone came along and questioned them. It is their very assumed indisputability that is itself the cause of the greatest acrimony. One could – almost – turn the definition on its head without loss of meaning: “Facts are assumptions, and the more dogmatic the assumption the greater the disputes that will be generated as, sooner or later, it is called into question.”  Not as pithy as my Oxford English, perhaps, but you get my drift.

And now, by way of contrast, let’s look at what popular belief says about ghosts. Ghosts are almost universally accepted as real throughout the so-called developing world, but as almost completely rejected by the West as non-factual, at least among followers of science. The West doesn’t believe in ghosts because we have a label for everything we’ve invented, and we’ve invented an awful lot. There’s very little out there that escapes the mesh of our preconceptions. What little there is (UFOs, psychokinesis, spoon bending, precognition, ESP…) is quickly explained away by the ever-watchful censor in our brain, which slaps a label on these things (“weather balloon”, “gravity”, ”sleight of hand”, “amnesia”, “coincidence” …) before they can do any damage to our cultural immune system. Our resulting world view is crowded with theories we call “facts”: mostly things which have duration, velocity, mass, and so on, which can convincingly be said to exist apart from ourselves. This, we say confidently, is the objective world, of which ghosts do not form a part.

To one not brought up in the scientific tradition, however, a lot happens that is as yet unlabelled. While in the so-called developing world the subjective is thoroughly understood, the objectivity so familiar to the West is considerably less real. In such a mental environment there’s lots of uncharted territory the void of which our imagination is free to fill. There is, in a word, plenty of room for ghosts. 

The movement from a world dominated by the subject to one dominated by the object appears to be an evolutionary one. The latter world view simply explains things better. The benefits of science in every walk of life – in food production, disease control, transport and communications – are too staggeringly beneficial to humanity for us to doubt this. But at the same time you’d have to be blind not to notice that things are going horribly wrong in this objective world of ours. It’s becoming a cliché that our wisdom doesn’t match our power. Destruction of our habitat is occurring at a speed and to levels unprecedented in human history, driven not just by population pressure caused by scientific advances in medicine and food production, but equally by the rapaciousness which it is technology’s gift to gratify. Meanwhile, the scale and manner of killing that our armies now engage in – dispassionately of course, but overwhelmingly of innocent civilians – would not be possible without laser guided bombs, missiles, depleted uranium, and a utilitarian mindset, and although scientists are not to blame for the nuclear disaster resulting from the Japanese tsunami of March 2011, the overconfidence that placed six nuclear power plants in its path was that of scientists as much as politicians.

So the movement away from subjective interpretations of the world towards the objectivity of science, though an evolutionary advance, still leaves our world view manifestly skewed. While traditional religions may be fighting a losing battle against the seduction of technology, the hubris which haunts science will not allow it to admit its own limitations, which are in the long run more dangerous to the planet, involving as they do the misuse of more and more material power.  

And what are these limitations? There is really only one: as the subjective realm claimed universal dominion in the past (“Thou shalt have no other God but me”), so science - having relegated humanity to a small planet in an insignificant orbit round an insignificant star in an insignificant region of an insignificant galaxy, in a universe which, scientists now tell us, may be but one of many - claims that crown today (“Science answers all questions worth asking”). The doctrine of objectivity lays claim to everything, but (and here’s the limitation) unalloyed objectivity is amoral – it cannot tell good from bad. It cannot, for example, even make the claim, which I have just made on its behalf, that it is an evolutionary improvement on institutional religion, because “improvement” is a value term, like “better” and “worse”, and there is no value in objects qua objects.

But scientists make value judgments all the time. They just don’t see that in so doing they are routinely flouting their own rules. The trouble starts when they examine these value judgments in the same way that they do science – as objects. As objects values disappear in a puff of logical smoke, and the scientist, thereby confirmed in his belief in the lack of objectivity of values, continues building hydrogen bombs and depleted uranium weapons, splicing goat genes into corn, testing drugs on indigent Africans, and anything else his financial masters tell him to do, with a conscience that is not so much clear as non-existent.

Where subjectivity alone is blindly passionate, a world of utter objectivity is one bereft of meaning. Rigorous objectivity purges value from everything, leaving a “flatland”, as Ken Wilber calls it. 

What the world seems to need, therefore, is some kind of synthesis of subject and object, with neither claiming supremacy. But how are we to achieve this, when each, to be true to itself, must claim the whole of reality?

There is a way. Radical empiricism, though a bit of a mouthful, is a Western remedy for a predominantly Western mental disease. It cuts the Gordian knot by declaring that both subjects and objects are mental constructs, mere inferences derived from the primary reality that is experience itself.  In the words of Robert M. Pirsig,

everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided.

That is a deceptively simple statement. Please read it again. It is analysis – thinking - that divides the world into subjects and objects. To make ourselves whole again we have to unlearn the prejudice created by our addiction to facts (i.e. our belief that the world we experience is different from what we are), which causes us to feel separate from the world.  And if we lack the meditative ability (as I confess I do) then we can at least use the intellect itself, which created this illusion in the first place, to see through this crazy, destructive, false distinction between ourselves and what we deem to be our separate surroundings.  

(For the continuation of this post , click here.)

WHAT INDEPENDENT EXPERTS SAY

The linked video is over two hours long. It concerns the foundational importance of physical evidence, and an egregious example of its criminal concealment by powerful vested interests.

I have been arguing throughout this blog that - contrary to conventional wisdom - we see what we believe. Almost everyone I know takes the opposite view, yet at the same time they continue to behave in exactly the manner I am suggesting. Thus there are some people to whom I simply cannot send the link to this video, even though it speaks to the very thing they claim to hold in the highest esteem. I cannot send it because, scientific though it is and they claim to be, its conclusions pose too great a threat to their belief system.They will simply and reflexively dismiss it - and me - out of hand.

Is it too much to ask that you attempt to watch it? Perhaps. A lot of it is essentially the same expert observations and resulting opinions repeated by many different specialists. Yet if - as most now claim - the physical world is the foundation of everything else, then surely the unprejudiced opinion of independent scientists (rather than that of paid government minions and their apologists) is what we should be asking for to solve a crime whose repercussions are with us still, ten years after its unpunished execution.

(If you already know this stuff and want to cut to the chase, then beginning at around the 1-hour 30-minute mark will give you the most 'explosive' findings and conclusions - and some interesting comments by psychologists who ironically turn the spotlight on those who question the mental health of anyone who challenges mainstream beliefs!)

https://cryandhowl.wordpress.com/2011/09/19/911-explosive-evidence-experts-speak-out/

CD 201 - THE TWIN TOWERS

My last post was about the controlled demolition of WTC7. Where do we go from here? Depending on "where you are" you may be interested to look further, or you may be saying “Ok, so WTC7 was brought down by CD – so what?” or you may conceivably be unconvinced by the evidence.

The interpretation of physical evidence, after all, is dictated by our beliefs, and not the other way around. Presented with the - to me - all but irrefutable evidence that WTC7 was felled by a sophisticated controlled demolition process many of us will still ask “But what could have been the motive?” Not that failure to answer according the questioner’s standards for committing mass murder will result in a repeal of the laws of physics, but simply that the laws of physics are in most cases eclipsed by far more emotionally powerful social and political allegiances.

We see what we believe. For those of us who suffered physics through high school our beliefs supposedly rest on the firm foundation supplied by physical evidence. But this view is, paradoxically, mere idealism. Belief does not come from the physical world at all. It emanates from us. When we say “I believe that the earth revolves around the sun” we give no thought to the generations upon generations of people who thought otherwise, despite the same primary evidence (No, don’t tell me we have more evidence now! Aside from personal observation – essentially the same as in Galileo’s time - we mostly only have other people’s word for it). At the time when Galileo’s theory was first being propagated it met with incredulity and outrage, because it violated previously held beliefs concerning man’s place in the universe. Belief shaped how the evidence of the senses was interpreted.

Our position today is no different with respect to 9/11. The most elegant physical explanation presented so far for those three collapses is controlled demolition. It fits all the observed phenomena and has a solid a priori base in CD theory and practice. All other theories require considerably greater explanatory effort, fall far short of explaining all the relevant phenomena, and can cite no precedent to give authority to their conclusions. This is unscientific in the extreme. The only reason we do not see it for the prejudice that it is is that we are as immersed in the cultural matrix that defends this view as Galileo’s detractors were in theirs.

Admittedly, to see the destruction of the Twin Towers (WTC 1 & 2) for the controlled demolition that it most assuredly appears to have been requires rather greater effort than that needed for WTC7. This is because, aside from the enormity of the betrayal that it implies (WTC7 was at least empty) the destruction of WTC 1 and 2 was not a textbook CD. Their disintegration as seen on video, though in important respects similar, is unlike what we see in other controlled demolition videos.

The Twins could not be brought down in an entirely conventional fashion, because to do so would have immediately given the game away. Conventional CD starts the collapse at the base, usually with powerful charges (The demolition of WTC7 almost certainly used thermite to soften the steel, thus requiring considerably less explosive) so that the weight of the upper floors assists in the collapse.

Here’s a conventional CD –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79sJ1bMR6VQ

The Twin Towers, however, were both hit by planes well above the mid-point, so could not very well be seen to collapse from the bottom up! Nor could the explosions necessary to bring them down be too obvious. The demolitions had to be initiated at the point of impact (there is visual evidence that they were guided, not piloted, into the buildings), and continued in a downward (as well as an upward) direction. Had they been demolished conventionally, starting at ground level, the massive weight of these two structures would have successively collapsed each floor as the weight of the entire building above it (suitably softened by explosives) came into contact with the unyielding resistance of the ground. Instead, all the floors below the impact points had to be physically weakened (probably with thermite – viz the molten steel seen flowing down WTC2 in some videos) and then synchronously shaken loose with many small charges. The result was still an audible barrage of explosions, some from far below the fires, and symmetrical, near-free-fall collapse - the signature of CD. For heaven’s sake, why bother with CD if random kerosene fires will do the job just as well?

Erik Lawyer, FDNY fireman, calls attention to the National Institute of Standards failure to follow standards (!) for the investigation of glaring 9/11 anomalies -

http://911blogger.com/news/2011-05-25/firefighters-911-truth-erik-lawyer

Video and transcripts of FDNY firemen testified to “explosions” –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2A8VMg_B64

http://911review.com/coverup/oralhistories.html

Those who defend the government position ignore or ridicule all this expert witness testimony. They claim that the weight of the upper floors was enough to do the entire job. Once initiated, they say, “global collapse was inevitable”. Such papers as have been written to support this theory depend for their plausibility on the assumption that the upper floors crushed, or “pancaked”, the lower floors. Common sense, as well as the evidence of our eyes, however, refutes this. In the first place the upper floors were not some invincible pile driver, but were made of the same material as the lower, so would disintegrate at least as rapidly as anything with which they came in contact. In the second place, the lower structure was necessarily much more massive than the upper, and would have offered far greater resistance than could be overcome by the lighter structure above. Most significantly, perhaps, not only were no pancaked floors visible in the wreckage as evidence of collapse, but in all the videos the vast majority of the structure can be seen flying out for up to 150 meters in all directions as the destruction progresses from floor to floor down the building. While the collapse theories require that almost all the mass of the building was required to crush them, in observable fact little material fell within the Towers' perimeter, so by what could their supposed collapse be sustained? In the case of the North Tower (which fell last) the upper part – theoretically the pile driver of the lower – itself is seen to disintegrate early in the destruction process, with beams flying miraculously upwards before arcing towards the ground. In the case of the South Tower the considerable upper portion begins to fall (as would be expected) towards the most damaged corner, yet the rest of the building below it somehow still manages to collapse symmetrically and completely, in wayward defiance of the laws of physics.

Now let’s look at the fall of the Twin Towers. (It’s a long and harrowing video. Stop when you’ve had enough!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4rjOhpCmCk&feature=related

How are we to interpret all this unfamiliar data? A simple comparison may help. Imagine a pool ball dropped onto a pillow. What do you think will be the result? Will the ball rebound, or will it come to rest? What will happen to the pillow?

Now imagine the same ball dropped onto a slab of granite. What will happen?

Our experience tells us that in the first case the pillow will be dented by the ball, which will come to rest in the dent it has created. It will not rebound because the gravitational energy accumulated by its free fall has been almost completely absorbed by the displacement of the pillow. The dent in the pillow is proof that it has absorbed the gravitational energy of the ball.

In the second case the rebound, ricochet, or even fracture of the ball is all caused by the resistance of the rock. Because the granite will not give, the ball must rebound – the energy of the fall has nowhere else to go. The rebounding of the ball is proof of the resistance of the rock.

Beams, concrete, and dust can be seen flying in all directions as the Towers fall. If the collapse theory is to be believed this can only mean that these flying fragments encountered resistance; that they are flying off in all directions because, like the pool ball on a chunk of granite, their downward trajectory has been thwarted and their energy must be somehow dissipated elsewhere.

What the defenders of the government conspiracy theory are allowing is that the pool ball both bounces off the pillow, and dents it. But you can’t have it both ways! Either the upper floors crushed the lower – in which case we would find the remains of the upper part of the building stacked on top of the lower, as the ball stays in the pillow – or they were resisted by the lower, in which case they flew out in all directions, leaving the lower structure standing, like the ball deflected by the rock. The upper part of the building could not at one and the same time both cause the collapse of the lower and yet fly off as beams, fragments, and powder in all directions. The horizontal and even upward ejection of the smashed building is proof – absent a repeal of the laws of physics – of its meeting resistance. Ergo the building did not collapse as the government and its defenders claim.

The cause of the horizontal and vertical ejection of all that steel, concrete, glass and dust was not collapse at all, but the successive detonation of tons of thermite (which melts steel) and pre-rigged explosives. Dramatic, even absurd though this sounds, there appears to be no other way (other than space beams, or other exotic energy devices) to create these observed effects. This contention is, moreover, supported by expert witness testimony (systematically ignored by the 9/11 Commission Report). Our inability to as yet find sufficient motive should not in any way (if we believe in science, as we claim to do) diminish the force of these facts. The government version is only easier to accept because it puts the blame on a class of remote strangers we find it easy to hate and fear – fanatical, Muslim, cave-dwelling Arabs skilled at flying commercial jets at high speed into small targets without navigational assistance.

Niels Harrit describes the discovery of nano thermite in the remains of the Towers -

http://socioecohistory.wordpress.com/2009/04/15/danish-scientist-niels-harrit-nano-thermite-explosives-in-the-wtc-dust/

This discovery, like every other piece of evidence which contradicts the official explanation, has of course been cavalierly brushed aside by 9/11 gatekeepers, their usual derogatory epithets (without which no denial of “truthers” would be complete) all too effectively blinding us to the weakness of their arguments.

CD 101. TRUSTING THE EVIDENCE OF YOUR EYES.

The tenth anniversary of the greatest civilian loss of life on American soil is just around the corner. The case is supposedly closed, but the manner of collapse of World Trade Center building 7 offers strong proof that it should be reopened. Not unexpectedly, the high ideal to “follow the evidence wherever it may lead” encounters considerable resistance at the mention of this building.

Controlled demolition (CD) enables condemned tall buildings to be brought down quickly in a manner that will not cause damage to surrounding structures. The procedure requires a high level of knowledge and skill in the correct distribution of the right amount of explosive charge, and split-second timing of its ignition. Executed properly the building drops like a horse shot in the head – straight down, at almost free-fall speed, under a combination of its own weight and the sudden destruction of resistance in all its support columns at once.

Thanks to our acquaintance with the effects of gravity, a short introduction to how gravity works on falling buildings should be sufficient for our purpose. Before proceeding further, then, let’s take a quick look at some controlled demolitions. They’re quite fun to watch. Here’s a good representative sampling (please click on the link before continuing) -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK50So-yYRU&feature=related

But what happens if the charges don’t go off at exactly the right time? Well, then you end up with a real mess! (Please click on this link too) -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wwDF58Hw9M&feature=related

This illustrates the huge wayward forces that demolition engineers must tame in order to bring a multi-storey building down safely. Explosives set off correctly throughout are essential to the even descent of the building. Any asymmetry results in disaster.

With this pictorial introduction we now have something with which to compare the collapse of WTC7 – the third building to fall in the 9/11 attacks. Here’s that collapse at actual speed

http://www.911research.com/wtc/evidence/videos/docs/wtc7_collapse2.mpg 

And now in slow motion...
http://www.911research.com/wtc/evidence/videos/docs/wtc7.gif

This looks to be, judged by all that has gone before, a classic example of a controlled demolition, does it not? Note the great accuracy with which this 47-storey, steel frame building – a sturdy giant, occupying an entire city block – was brought neatly down in textbook fashion almost exactly into its own footprint at very nearly free fall speed; a tidier job, despite its size, than most of the preceding examples. Note, moreover, how all the windows remain in place (removal of all windows prior to CD is the norm, to prevent flying glass), suggesting, aside from a manifest lack of damage on that side, sophisticated use of thermite (an incendiary) to weaken the 410 steel support columns ahead of demolition, thus allowing for less explosive force. Very elegant!

Now read what Wikipedia, one of the world’s most-used knowledge resources, has to say about this event –

On September 11, 2001, 7 WTC was damaged by debris when the nearby North Tower of the WTC collapsed. The debris also ignited fires, which continued to burn throughout the afternoon on lower floors of the building. The building's internal fire suppression system lacked water pressure to fight the fires, and the building collapsed completely at 5:21:10 pm^[1] The collapse began when a critical column on the 13th floor buckled and triggered structural failure throughout, which was first visible from the exterior with the crumbling of the east mechanical penthouse at 5:20:33 pm.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_World_Trade_Center)

So, in defiance of the visual evidence (where are the raging flames, the heat-smashed windows, the buckling walls, the tell-tale tipping of a tall building falling out of control?), Wikipedia declares flatly that this was not a CD at all, but a random collapse. Not a word is said about the theoretical nature of the alleged simultaneous buckling of 410 support columns – an impossibly unlikely event, in the absence of CD, and to explain which NIST had to concoct a sophisticated computer simulation three years in the making, whose parameters the public has not been allowed to examine. Perhaps anticipating these objections, the Wikipedia editors offer this -

World Trade Center controlled demolition conspiracy theories say the buildings that collapsed on September 11, including building seven, were felled by controlled demolition.^{[53][54][55][56]} The NIST report rejects this hypothesis, as the window breakages and blast sound that would have occurred if explosives were used were not observed.^[8] The suggestion that an incendiary such as thermite was used instead of explosives is discarded by NIST because of observations of the fire and the building's structural response to the fire, and because it is unlikely the necessary quantity [of] material could have been planted without discovery.^[35]

The article does not mention that the “conspiracy theorists” include 1500 architects and engineers who have risked their careers and reputations to dismiss the NIST analysis as hogwash. And it only mentions in passing that

the collapse of the old 7 World Trade Center is remarkable because it was the first known instance of a tall building collapsing primarily as a result of uncontrolled fires.^[35]

Remarkable, indeed! Here’s what several experts have to say about it (again, please click on the link) –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=yIOC1J44RYw

Also unmentioned in the Wikipedia article is what appears to be the frank admission of none other than the building owner himself, Larry Silverstein, that controlled demolition was indeed employed to bring WTC7 down –

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7750532340306101329&q=pull+it+wtc

An often overlooked feature of Wikipedia is the Discussions forum of its volunteer editors. In the WTC7 Discussions forum this rather incriminating video is summarily rejected –

In short, the reason why this video isn't mentioned in the article is that it's a fantasy, one of many that are used to manipulate people into believing a particular set of beliefs. -Jordgette (talk) 17:52, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

A heated discussion of Silverstein’s use of the term “pull it” ensues, in which the majority as usual prevails and all mention of the video is omitted.

It turns out the Wikipedia article on WTC7 is both a particular source of pride to the Wikipedia editors, and one of the online encyclopedia’s hotspots, attracting a lot of comment, not to say criticism, of which the lack of mention of the Silverstein “confession” video is but one. Further on in the Discussions forum we read this response by Tom Harrison and Jordgette to a suggestion by Smitty that the WTC7 article should include NIST's mention that there was some pre-collapse vibration, and a period of free fall acceleration (I have slightly edited and reformatted the text, for clarity). Tom Harrison launches the counter-attack against Smitty -

You think collapse times should be emphasized, and the article should include "free fall acceleration?" Astonishing. I oppose including your paragraphs. That kind of skewed selection of factoids gives undue weight to the elements of fringe theories. We should rely on the summary of the report to determine what's important. Tom Harrison ^Talk 00:06, 3 August 2011 (UTC)           

In support of which Jordgette chimes in -

I agree; the less cherry picking we do of these hundreds of pages of documents, the better. That's why I support drawing from the executive summary only. There is little value in these minutiae. The detection of six seconds of vibrations, and what parts of the building were determined to experience free fall acceleration and for how long, are not necessary in a general encyclopedia article on... 7 World Trade Center. The five-page NCSTAR1A executive summary does not mention these details, so the brief collapse section in this article shouldn't, either. If someone is looking for the precise timing sequence of the collapse, they can find it in the source. -Jordgette (talk) 00:20, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Cherry picking? Surely the pot is calling the kettle black! Smitty replies –

Since when is a resource subject to only allowing inclusion of information in the summary? Can someone please post a link to a WP best practices that recommends this? Tom, your... insinuation that I am pushing "fringe theories" is absurd. Are you saying NIST is on the "fringe"? My entire post was pulled from NCSTAR 1-A and NCSTAR 1-9. The six seconds of vibration is pertinent and interesting, and it is one of the pieces of real world data that NIST used to verify its computer data. You can read a more brief summary in NCSTAR 1-A on pg. 42. If you want to leave this detail out, that's fine. However, I state strongly that the three stages of collapse are important enough to include because this is the part of collapse that is actually visible to people. You can't possibly justify ignoring the actual visible collapse. In fact, it is important enough for NIST to include in their FAQ page... Additionally, the wiki article currently contains original research when it comes to the collapse timings. You cannot defend what is there. It must be updated to reflect the current source. Smitty121981 (talk) 00:46, 3 August 2011 (UTC)smitty121981

But Tom/Jordgette will have none of this -

Yes, you've stated your position strongly indeed. However, others seem to disagree, don't they? That's why we have a talk page. If we're going to list what was actually visible to people, then we should include when specific windows broke and what direction and color the smoke/dust was going. But we aren't, because they're unnecessary details. (If you want to distance yourself from conspiracy theorists, perhaps you shouldn't keep insisting on including the extremely minor bit about free fall acceleration of the north face. You may not know this, but "NIST admits freefall!" is a common rallying cry used by "Truthers.")
The above links lead to other mainstream statements about the WTC "collapses" which completely discount any suggestion of foul play from within the U.S. government. Everything is accepted to be exactly as stated by the organs of government authority.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:7_World_Trade_Center)

And there you have it, in that last sentence, in a nutshell. Naked bias, dressed up as objectivity, protecting a black lie whose exposure threatens America’s controllers; and it’s in Wikipedia, the on-line encyclopedia trusted by billions. It’s not that Smitty’s points are invalid, but simply that to publish them will lend support to the nutcases who believe the evidence of their own eyes. Case (and minds) closed.

DO THEY OR DON'T THEY?

That Alan Dershowitz can dismiss in two pages such a weighty question as “Do the Jews control the media?” says more about the knee-jerk agreement he expects to enjoy than it does about the accusation he claims to refute. So, here are a few pages in response.

Dershowitz’ argument in essence turns on a single question: does it, or does it not matter to be Jewish in the American media? He asserts that in the most important cases it does not, despite acknowledging that there are “many individual Jews in positions of influence in Hollywood, in network television, in sports and entertainment and in many other areas of American public life”. Many of these individuals, he explains, “are Jewish only in the sense that their parents or grandparents happen to be Jews. They do not live Jewish lives or support Jewish causes”, and “indeed, many individual Jews who are in positions of authority are anti-Israel and critical of Jewish values. Others simply don’t care about these issues.”

So, he denies that the majority of Jews in media share Jewish values. They are, he is effectively saying, de facto - if not de jure - not Jewish. 

That point apparently settled to his satisfaction, Dershowitz then takes aim at Christopher Hitchens for insinuating that Jewish control of the media nevertheless exists.

What is he suggesting? That Jews actually get together to decide who gets fired and hired? Or maybe they don’t even have to get together, because they all think alike.

But this kind of rhetoric merely hides the truth in plain sight: like-mindedness is precisely what identifies people as a group. In the Jewish case, these shared values - which he flatly denies exist among most media moguls - derive from a particularly powerful array of commonalities. In disarming his enemies he himself mentions (as he must) the Big Three – anti-Semitism, Hitler, and the Holocaust. Together they scream “Hands off the Jews!” and represent possibly Jewry's most socially cohesive force, namely, their collective victimhood. Kevin MacDonald adds to the list -

“There is a great deal of consensus on broad Jewish issues, particularly in the areas of Israel and the welfare of other foreign Jewries, immigration and refugee policy, church-state separation, abortion rights, and civil liberties” (Jewish Power, p. 5). Indeed, the consensus on these issues among Jewish activist organizations and the Jewish intellectual movements… despite a great deal of disagreement on other issues, is striking. These attitudes typify the entire Jewish political spectrum, from the mainstream Jewish left to the neoconservative Jewish right, and in general, the Jewish profile on these issues is quite different from other Americans. Massive changes in public policy on these issues coincide with the period of increasing Jewish power and influence in the United States. (http://theoccidentalobserver.net/tooblog/?p=3547 . Italics mine - PH)

Dershowitz particularly singles out the New York Times as an example of unbiased news coverage. Let me therefore repeat the famous words of former NYT executive editor, Max Frankel, which Mr. D certainly has not forgotten* –

I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert … Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognized, I wrote them from a pro-Israel perspective. (http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2006/03/explosive_charge_against_harva.html - see footnote*)

And let’s not also forget the grim study conducted from September 29 2000 to December 31 2004 by the watchdog group If Americans Knew. The study charted the relative reporting of the deaths of Israeli vs Palestinian children by – guess who? That’s right, the New York Times. Here are some of the results –

For the first year of the current uprising, there were 197 reports in New York Times headlines or first paragraphs of Israeli deaths. During this time, there had actually been 165 Israelis killed (the discrepancy is due to the fact that a number of Israeli deaths were reported multiple times).

During the same year-long period, 233 Palestinian deaths were reported in headlines or first paragraphs. During this time, 549 Palestinians had actually been killed.³In other words, 119% of Israeli deaths and only 42% of Palestinian deaths were reported in New York Times headlines or first paragraphs.

Finally, we compared the running totals of actual and reported deaths for Palestinians and Israelis. This finding underscores The Times’ tendency to report a fictional situation in which Israeli and Palestinian deaths occur at more or less the same rate, and illustrates the dramatic gap between the reality of Palestinian fatalities and the coverage of them.It is significant to note that The Times reported Palestinian deaths along a curve that largely replicated the Israeli death count, despite the fact that the curve for actual Palestinian deaths was both considerably different and far higher than the Israeli curve. At the same time, part way through the year the running total of Israeli deaths reported by The Times rose above the actual number of deaths. Such reporting gives readers a substantially incorrect impression of the conflict.

In its conclusion If America Knew noted –

In particular, our study showed immense distortion in the coverage of children’s deaths. By covering similar numbers of Israeli and Palestinian children’s deaths in headlines or first paragraphs, The Times suggested an equivalency in death rates for the two groups, when in actuality over eight and a half times more Palestinian children had been killed during these two study periods. (In fact, in 2004, 22 times more Palestinian children were killed than Israeli children.) Additionally, Times’ coverage obfuscated the fact that at least 82 Palestinian children were killed before the first Israeli child’s death. [For the complete study, go to http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/nyt-report.html#kids]

And on the moral perspective of Jewish American media control, here’s American Jewish journalist Philip Weiss -

Americans are not getting the full story re Israel/Palestine. Slater says this dramatically in his paper--that the Times has deprived American leadership of reporting on the moral/political crisis that Israel is undergoing, one that [the Israeli newspaper] Haaretz has covered unstintingly. At Columbia the other night, Jew, Arab and gentile on a panel about the human-rights crisis in Gaza all said that Americans are not getting the full story. Ilan Pappe has marveled in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, that the Nakba is all but unmentioned in the U.S.--while Haaretz has sought at times to document it… [Do Jews Dominate in American Media – And So What if we Do? at http://wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/5815 ]

And finally, let’s take a look at one current example of American mainstream media reporting, and compare it with the reporting of the same event by non-American media organs.

On July 22, 2011 Anders Behring Breivik murdered a very large number of people in Norway in cold blood. Within a few hours, and without confirming the authenticity of its source, the New York Times published a report linking the attacks (there were two, one a distraction to clear the way for the other) to Muslims and asserting that Ansar al-Jihad al-Islami (supporters of Global Jihad) had claimed responsibility. When this was revealed as a falsehood, the paper quietly removed the story from its online edition, without noting the retraction or issuing an apology. With the crimes – and the distraught public – still begging for an explanation, the NYT thereafter published numerous articles blaming Breivik’s Islamophobia and distrust of multiculturalism, while in a further article his lawyer was quoted as baldly declaring his client insane.

Hidden quite early on in all this was a single, unexplained statement in an article of 25 July, Norway – Breivik Attacks, July 2011. It said that the victims were “political campers”. (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/norway/index.html).

Political campers? Why might Mr. Breivik have singled out political campers? What was their brand of politics? Were they staging a pro-Muslim demonstration, perhaps? Or extolling the virtues of multiculturalism? The statement held the promise of a specific motive, yet the article declined to elaborate, as if to suggest that the political nature of the get-together was of no importance.

Meanwhile, repeating the false Al Qaeda lead of the NYT, in the Weekly Standard, July 22, 2011, Thomas Joscelyn wrote –

We don’t know if al Qaeda was directly responsible for today’s events, but in all likelihood the attack was launched by part of the jihadist hydra. Prominent jihadists have already claimed online that the attack is payback for Norway’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan. (http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/terror-strikes-norway_577274.html)

And in the Washington Post of 25 July we read this from Jennifer Rubin -

This is a sobering reminder for those who think it's too expensive to wage a war against jihadists. I spoke to Gary Schmitt of the American Enterprise Institute, who has been critical of proposed cuts in defense and of President Obama's Afghanistan withdrawal plan. "There has been a lot of talk over the past few months on how we've got al-Qaeda on the run and, compared with what it once was, it's become a rump organization. But as the attack in Oslo reminds us, there are plenty of al-Qaeda allies still operating. No doubt cutting the head off a snake is important; the problem is, we're dealing with [a] global nest of snakes. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/norway-bombing/2011/03/29/gIQAB4D3TI_blog.html)

Yes, even as late as 25 July, Ms Rubin was still, in defiance of the evidence, blaming Al Qaeda!

With Al Qaeda at last reluctantly dropped from the list of suspects, on July 26 the Washington Post offered this tempting motive –

Self-confessed Norwegian mass-murder suspect Anders Behring Breivik calls himself a “cultural Christian,” writes Mathew N. Schmalz in the Washington Post‘s “On Faith” section.(http://blog.beliefnet.com/news/2011/07/washington-post-norway-killer-not-a-religious-christian.php#ixzz1TguF8cLy)

And so it went. To unearth something nearer what appears to be the truth we have to go overseas, to the Jerusalem Post, where Larry Derfner speaks of Breivik’s endorsement of Israel in his 1500pp manifesto. Derfner asks (31 July, 2011) –

“What does this mean for Israel, that this neo-Nazi monster repeatedly expressed his affinity for ‘Israeli nationalism’ together with his loathing for ‘the so-called Jewish liberals,’ whom he called ‘multi-culturalists?’

He quickly answers his own question –

“It doesn’t mean that the Israeli right-wing majority… share Breivik’s ideology, which is genocidal, anti-Muslim, anti-liberal, national supremacism.

“It does not mean the Israeli Right bears any responsibility, even indirectly, for inciting Breivik to kill.

“It does not mean that the Israeli Right sympathizes with the atrocity. The overwhelming majority of Israeli right-wingers were repelled by those murders.

“So despite Breivik’s expressions of solidarity with the Israeli Right, the two are much, much more different than they are alike.”

Methinks he doth, like Dershowitz, protest too much. But the American mainstream papers have not mentioned this angle at all. Only if it becomes public knowledge will they be forced to do so. And they have thus entirely omitted to mention this –

The above image was taken on Utoya Island the day before the massacre there. It appears in the Israeli on-line journal Rotter (http://rotter.net/forum/scoops1/25606.shtml) together with the following headline –

AUF Leader Eskil Pedersen believes it is time for stronger measures against Israel.

The “political campers” casually mentioned by the NYT, it turns out, were the Labor Party’s youth movement. Two days before the Utoya Island massacre their leader, Eskil Pedersen, gave an interview to Norway’s second largest tabloid newspaper, the Dagbladet. In it he stated that he “believes the time has come for more drastic measures against Israel, and [wants] the Foreign Minister to impose an economic boycott against the country,” adding -

The peace process goes nowhere, and though the whole world expect Israel to comply, they do not. We in Labour Youth will have a unilateral economic embargo of Israel from the Norwegian side.

The AUF Labour Party Youth Movement have been devoted promoters of the Israel Boycott campaign, said The Dagbladet newspaper, reporting that “The AUF has long been a supporter of an international boycott of Israel, but the decision at the last congress demands that Norway imposes a unilateral economic embargo on the country and it must be stricter than before.”

“I acknowledge that this is a drastic measure”, stated Pedersen, “but I think it gives a clear indication that we are tired of Israel's behaviour, quite simply”. (http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/gilad-atzmon-was-the-massacre-in-norway-a-reaction-to-bds.html )

Breivik believed himself to be acting, above all, in support of right-wing Israeli objectives. This primary motive for an attack of unprecedented violence on Norwegian soil received no mention whatever in the Jewish controlled mainstream American media.

While I do not accept Dershowitz’ thesis that the Jews do not control the American media, I do believe that much of their bias is entirely unconscious – including perhaps the bias Dershowitz himself displays. As I’ve written elsewhere, whoever and wherever we are, our view of the world can be summed up as “My position is objective. To the extent that others disagree with it, theirs is not.”

Although perhaps exhausting, this post is by no means exhaustive. Still, as someone recently said, I rest my case.

Pablo
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If you have not yet done so you are also enjoined to read the widely acclaimed – and excoriated – The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/john-mearsheimer/the-israel-lobby

* Alan Dershowitz claims this widely-quoted ‘confession’ appears on numerous ‘hate sites’, and that this somehow renders it invalid. He does not, however, claim that it is taken out of context, or that it does not represent Frankel’s views.