The driving of reasonable people away from a discussion by the influence of the fringe elements. Even this brief exchange with London Lad has reminded me of why most biologists ignore creationists rather than engaging with them, why people in physics departments don't respond to all the "challenges" to Einstein's relativity that appear in their mailboxes, why many thoughtful people don't even want to touch on Israel, why there is the concept of Godwin's Law. Too many people wearing their ignorance on their sleeves, too many people posing as "experts" what haven't a clue, too many people with agendas.

I think the word "Hippie" was mentioned. That word in itself was an attempt to relegate the 60's anti-war movement to the fringes where it doesn't need to be considered (the Yippies were a colorful anti-war group known for antic protests... "hippy" was a word created by the MSM of the time to try to associate all anti-war protesters as drugged out, lazy, dirty, children only interested in partying and sex) (an aside.... everybody go out and get "The Glass Teat" by Harlan Ellison... the more things change, the more they stay the same... also, the H. Allen Smith humor books filled with actual stories of the experiences of a journalist in the early 20th century are good for that too...).

The absurdity of people looking at videos and pictures of the outside of the WTC buildings to "prove" or "disprove" anything is, for anybody who has ever seriously considered the stresses on a complex system undergoing catastrophic collapse.... or even the stresses on a stable structure of that size, is ludicrous. the bizarre seemingly unexplainable phenomena that happen during hurricanes, earthquakes, etc. should be a clue that expecting things to be amenable to the mathematics used to understand the carefully chosen, simplified situations you encounter in high school physics is really almost unbelievable. THink of the pressures in the pipes of the buildings that are required to get hot water to the tops of the buildings, that suddenly gets released, the random displacements of air whose detailed pressure field depends on the exact layout of the interior, the internal windows, doors, walls, support structures, etc. There is a reason we still put airplanes in wind tunnels to study airflow.. computer modeling is simply not up to the task of dealing with highly chaotic systems. The underground forces need to be considered as well... i.e, what does the sudden displacement of earth due to the collapse of a giant building do to the below ground structures underpinning a nearby building?

Unfortunately, as soon as a horde of people start shouting and screaming all sorts of crazy things about how they can easily "prove" that the necessarily very rough approximations that a careful model by several respectable scientists does not account for all the diverse phenonomology observed in such an event, the actual 'experts' quickly lose interest in spending all of their limited time on arguing with the London Lad's of the world whose every statement shows how glaringly ignorant and confused they are of even the most basic principles involved.

Which is, of course, another way of creating a sphere of deviance. Cuba, abortion, gay marriage, Israel, evolution, and now 9/11 are all things that have developed such an insane group of rabid irrationalists around them that reasonable discussion on these topics becomes nearly impossible, although all of them are topics that desperately need more rational discussion.

At some point, most people tend to develop the attitude of Ford Prefect "We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win."

There was no controlled demolition... the physics of how you can have a collapse at near free-fall is quite straightforward and detailed here:

http://www.counterpunch.org/physic11282006.html

the summary:

1. The dynamic force created out of the gravitational potential energy within the space of just one level spacing was far in excess of the static force the framing was designed to support, and

2. Elastic waves launched from the collapse front quickly filled the building --both lower structure and upper block --with large dynamic stresses, which weakened and ruptured joints well in advance of that material entering the collapse front.

on that latter point... mechanical energy is transported at the speed of sound, which is much, much faster than the free-fall velocity, which is why you can undermine the structural stability of the entire building almost instantaneously by a good whack at the top.

The silly conspiratist's fallacious use of Newton's third law is the same logical fallacy you would commit if you tried to claim that a carpenter is too weak to put a nail in a board with a hammer because he could stand on a nail and it still wouldn't go in. He could even jump up and down on it (wearing shoes) and it wouldn't go in. But any decent carpenter can put a rather large nail almost instantaneously into a board by using a tool (i.e. a hammer made of a hard, unyielding substance) to transform a relatively small momentum into a huge impulsive force (the definition of force is the change in momentum/change in time... make the change in time short enough, and the force can be as large as you want) where the slowing of the velocity of the hammer is barely noticable. The fall of the top section of the building the length of one floor acted like a giant hammer, immediately undermining the structural stability of the entire building, no explosives needed.

The guys promoting this particular "9/11 Truth" are every bit as bad the Creationists who misuse the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics to "prove" life requires a power not governed by the laws of nature. And also provides an easy way to label as whacko anybody who still has questions about political motivations and obscuration, creating so much noise that any real investigation into who knew what and when about the attacks can be dismissed as "just another crazy 9/11 conspiracy theory".