Historians have been grappling with the issues raised in this excerpt for decades involving how we interpret documents and construct narratives about the past. Differences in interpretation persist no matter how many new documents are produced or how close to the present they were created. Historians disagree as much about the 1990s as the 1790s.

Only the most naive would think that photographs can make something definitively true; photos and video are merely new kinds of documents that people will disagree on. There is nothing particularly special about the biases and interpretation of visual media that we haven't already been dealing with for generations.

Hurricane,et al., WTC 7 was severely damaged by falling debris and burned for close to eight hours before it collapsed. Not a single reputable structural engineer has come out in the last 6.5 years to question the collapse of WTC 7. What, are they all part of the conspiracy, too? Did Cheney go to all their houses and threaten to shotgun them if they spoke up?

The 9/11 "Truth" conspiracies all fail this simple test of logic: for it to have been a government plot, the number of people involved in the cover-up would have to be astronomical. This administration couldn't cover up the outing of a single obscure former CIA spook, and yet they are capable of pulling off the greatest feat of misdirection and planning in history? Please...

I am a die-hard liberal, Obama booster and Bush loather. I certainly think the administration used 9/11 to further their despicable agenda. But I can not for a single second entertain the idea that they could have set up 9/11. The idea is utterly and totally preposterous.

The Truthers would rather believe that the Government is an all-powerful Super Society that controls everything down to the last detail than admit the real truth: There is no single Government watching out for us, for good or evil. There is, rather, a loosely affiliated set of interconnected agencies, many with different agendas, all at each others throats for a bigger piece of the pie. And that's all.

The 9/11 attackers saw a loophole in our security mindset, they exploited it, and that's it. Nothing more sinister.

Isn't that scary enough?

Unless you wanted a discussion about 9/11 :)

Pictures are a terrible way to convey information. People have a tendency to think they are infallible, when nothing could be further from the truth. We've known for a long, long time that by altering or removing the context of a picture we can make something appear to be what we want, because our brains are hard wired to identify everything we see as fast as possible. You don't have to have a picture of a thing, you just have to have a picture of something that most people will identify as that thing.

People don't see what they want to see, they see what they expect to see because that's the fastest possible connection they can make. It's a survival trait. Comes in pretty handy when that large shape flying out of the underbrush is a saber toothed tiger, but it can be problematic when looking at 3/4 of a second of a jetliner in flight. Works with auditory stimulus as well.

So sadly, even leaving out the issues around digital enhancement and modification of pictures and sound, words really are the best way to convey information, because we have to think about them. Doesn't stop people from trying to make them say what they wanted them to say, but at least they have to work at it a little.

Gestalt Psychology, developed in the first half of the 20th century, was devoted to this concept- "The whole precedes the parts." We want to believe that we can contruct a picture of the world, but neurologically, this is not how our brains are wired. We are wired to see patterns and then fits the pieces we observe later into the patterns we carry with us all the time. Thus, the whole precedes the parts, we see what we have always seen. Real change, therefore, comes not from seeing some new fact. It comes from accepting a new whole, a new pattern. No one ever convinces someone else of something with one new fact. But we can learn, we can accept new things. It is just very hard.