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Monday, September 05, 2011

GOTTA BE TESLA. The tenth anniversary is a week away. Which means that this is the week when the conspiracy theorists will come to the fore with their latest and greatest theories about why everything we think happened didn't and they are uniquely endowed with the ability to see the truth.

Two people for whose intellect I have enormous respect have already made known to me that I am stupidly credulous, perhaps uniquely in their experience with me, for believing that Islamic terrorists brought down the WTC Towers and Building 7.

One tells me that Building 7 was brought down by built-in explosives that are now routinely put into government buildings which might contain national security information.

The other tells me that the Twin Towers were brought down by a Nikola Tesla particle beam which may not have been a Bush administration conspiracy but somebody else's (The S.P.E.C.T.R.E of Ernst Stavro Blofeld?) Think I'm kidding? Go here and read the reviews. The Truth at Last!

I'd like to get this kind of stuff out of the way before we reach the actual anniversary date. So here goes. Feel free to chime in, any and all of you.

Both men who think I'm being particularly dumb or obtuse about 9/11 are, I will repeat, brilliant. But there are at least two categories of what we call brains. The more common type is the silo brain. It has one or more areas of undoubted expertise that rise vertically into the stratosphere of intellect. They make most of the breakthroughs in specific scientific fields and disciplines. Their contributions are manifest, legion, and world-changing.

But there's another kind of brain, too. A kind I call relational, which can make sense of messy events and see patterns and meanings that seem irrelevant to the silo types. Obviously, I assign myself to this latter type, and The Boomer Bible is a uniquely quantitative example of the not completely touchy-feely nature of this kind of intelligence. I see wholes where the silo people see parts that mesmerize them into cultural and historical insanity.

I frequently defer to the silo types in my communications. I respect them enormously. And it facilitates my desire to learn from their greater expertise in this and that. But not this time.

This time, they're the dunces.

Let's rewind the tape. Two commercial airliners flew into the two tallest buildings in Manhattan, causing enormous loss of life. Then the buildings fell, collapsing into their own sub-basements, which extended for multiple floors underground. These unprecedented skyscrapers and their unprecedented collapse in close quarters with other major buildings, created unprecedented effects, including the delayed demolition of other buildings. How do the silo types choose to react? Not by learning from the unprecedented circumstance of such an urban catastrophe but by declaring that there's something fishy about it, something that doesn't compute with their superior understanding of physics. But wasn't it silo types who signed off on the design of the first Tacoma Narrows Bridge?


They preach logic at us. They insist, demand, they know better than us poor slobs who saw and felt and lived what happened. They disdain the relevancy of Occam's Razor when it doesn't suit their own more exotic interpretations. It wasn't an enemy attack. It was a deeply mysterious technological anomaly, at least in certain of its particulars which we are ill equipped to understand, because look at them and look at you and who's smarter? (Probably the way Roman scientists explained that Hannibal could never get elephants through the Alps.) They completely ignore the historical and cultural context surrounding the event -- that there was a confessed perpetrator with motive, means, and opportunity, and then they go on to inform us that whatever their expertise doesn't explain about what happened afterwards isn't a hole in their knowledge but a hole in our education, perception, and intelligence.

What does a lesser intelligence like mine make of the same events? I draw an elementary inference. All their theories depend upon on the occurrence of at least two extraordinary events, not one. Two commercial jets are hijacked and crashed into the Twin Towers AND mysterious nefarious powers-that-be compounded the already nation-stunning impact (why?) by vaporizing the towers with a particle-beam weapon that was never more than a rumor (unless you revert to the outraged Truther counter-theory of a deliberate, simultaneous building implosion that would have taken weeks and hundreds of conspirators to pull off) OR the U.S. Government chose this singularly catastrophic moment in U.S. history to cover its tracks (about what????) by bringing down at potentially even greater loss of life yet another building it had been prepared to demolish since the early 1970s if, uh, what???!!!

We've been here before. I'm older than most folks. I lived through long long years of Kennedy conspiracy theories. How many books by how many 'brilliant' investigators, including genius lawyers and scientists? A pissed-off jerk-off killed the president of the United States. Senseless, yes. Impossible to process rationally, yes. But it was Oswald's rifle, which was fired from the place where he worked, that killed the president, as all recent forensic recreations have proved was both possible and irrefutable. The Magic Bullet wasn't magic, the assassin's movements could be traced almost minute by minute, and he proved his complicity if not guilt by killing a cop while trying to escape after the fact. The alternative theories required two Oswalds (two kill shots of the towers), and all the usual suspects from the vice-president to the CIA to the mafia and a series of impossible third and fourth shots from grassy knoll to grate to Secret Service mole in the presidential limo.

In both instances, the conspiracy theories are fueled by the fact that the perpetrators died before they could confess or be tried.

But here's what none of the conspiracy theorists can do: provide a comprehensible timeline that makes coherent sense of what happened that day. Unless all you're claiming is that Building 7 was a lone instance of fascist government cover-up for crimes and info not known.

I'm out of patience. The illogic of the NEW Occam's Razor, that the second (or third or fourth or fifth) least complicated explanation is too persuasive to ignore unless you're an idiot liberal arts major is grotesque. It argues for an agenda that isn't related to facts or data but a desire to know better than the commoners and a political axe that can never be ground down to an edge of common sense.

I'll close with two videos that won't do anything but piss off my interlocutors.



Which is fine. Because I'm pissed with them too.

Now. If you want to fight, fight here. I absolutely refuse to let it stand in the way of the tenth anniversary thoughts and discussions I expect our commenters to stand up to.

Do NOT bring up any of this crap on 9/11.

Just so you know.

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