First Time Poster, Short Time Lurker: An Introduction Options

[TomPaine]

It was November '08, a few weeks after the fabled presidential election that carried so much promise. I had worked campaigns in Virginia, New Hampshire and Colorado to elect our current president, and was buzzing with joy at what I thought was a genuine changing of the guard. Something about it seemed so substantial. Farewell to the most dissembling, mendacious and deceitful administration in this country's history. Farewell to two wars, reprehensible cronyism, Wall Street handouts and the gradual death of the middle class. Farewell to criminal negligence, lies, more lies, fraudulent WMD claims and more lies. America was back, this I was certain.

Temporarily unemployed, I had more time on my hands than I knew what to do with. I spent most days catching up on sleep and most nights researching U.S. history. An avid JFK assassination researcher, I'd known for some time that Oswald hadn't, in fact, shot Kennedy alone - and probably hadn't pulled a trigger at all. Mystified by the media's deafening silence on the matter, and suspicious about other plausibly Deep Events (RFK, MLK), I forayed onto youtube to absorb as many pseudo documentaries about those events that the site offered.

While watching something related to JFK, I noticed a thumbnail with the burning World Trade Center towers. I can't remember the movie's title, but it included explosions, and perhaps out of morbid curiosity I clicked on it.

I was well aware of 9/11 conspiracy theories, but as sure as I'm sitting before this computer I did not believe one word of them. I'd even watched Loose Change one night in college, but the movie did nothing to sway my militant belief that 9/11 was nothing more than a random attack carefully planned and insidiously perpetrated by 19 terrorists with box cutters. The simplest diagnosis was that I wasn't ready to disbelieve, I had refused to yank the curtain. Months would pass before, out of boredom and curiosity, I gave it another look.

That video I mentioned told a different story about 9/11 than the one neatly trotted out by the government and mainstream media. Explosions - bombs - in the towers. Tiny holes in the Pentagon. Pristine passports on the streets. A third building collapsing straight to the ground even though it wasn't touched by a plane. I had remembered watching Building 7's collapse live on 9/11/01, but seven years and many beers had temporarily erased that image from my memory.

I watched a replay of the first tower collapsing time and again. Play, rewind, play. After a handful of rounds I cogitatively sketched a picture of the tower's interior to imagine the enormity of its structure - the core columns, exterior columns, connectors, welding, bolts, thousands of tons of concrete and hundreds of thousands of tons of reinforced steel. Using fourth grade math I determined that this enormous structure had collapsed at a rate of 10 floors per second without resistance, pulverizing nearly all structural materials and ravaging 110 floors' worth of office supplies into fragments no larger than a human hand.

Through this mental imagery, one question persisted: how one earth could 10 floors have collapsed in one second? I had read that one floor of the WTC towers was akin to one acre of land, with unprecedented redundancy and almost unimaginable intricacies. All this information was coalescing at the precise moment I replayed (for probably the dozenth time) video of the collapsing tower.

"My god," I said, "they blew the building."

I'm profoundly fascinated by hearing similar stories of how people finally awakened from their slumber, the moment the curtain was pulled to reveal the true perpetrators of the Big Lie. In his eloquent introduction located a few threads below mine, fellow member JimMac called this revelation a "journey of self-discovery." Coming to grips with the Big Lie isn't transitive, he posited, but rather it's something that must come from within. Sadly, this truth is largely responsible for the uphill battle we face. The media blackout complicates matters immensely, but the human mind's infinite capacity to reject factual information through the invocation of bias and emotion presents our most challenging hurdle.

Speaking about the impracticality of social security, Ron Paul stated that true courage comes from the commitment to see things as they are and not as we want them to be. I couldn't help but relate this to 9/11 and a recent experience of mine.

I've been a member of a sports message board for the past eight years, and recently a fellow member posted a video of Geraldo Rivera talking about the mysterious collapse of Building 7. Rivera was joined by Bob Mcilvaine, who lost his son on 9/11, and a structural engineer who thinks pre-placed explosives dropped the building. Following the usual pile-on and ad hominem attacks, I came to the poster's defense by posting a serious of videos and academic papers questioning and indeed disproving the official story. Evidence included testimony from a plethora of eyewitnesses who testified to explosions going off in the towers before and after the planes hit; the impossibility of free-fall acceleration during gravity-driven collapse; the violation of fundamental laws of physics, including the law of conservation of momentum; the discovery of molten steel beneath all three towers and the scientific impossibility of carbon-based fires melting certified steel; the bizarre story of five dancing Mossad Israelis stationed in nearby New Jersey to document the event; the implausibility concerning the fact that the FBI had successfully rounded up the names and backgrounds of all 19 high jackers before NORAD was informed that flight 93 had been commandeered by terrorists.

Unsurprisingly, my posts were met with derision (stupid conspiracy theorist and his tin-foil hat), personal attacks (you're a mentally disturbed troofer), abject insults (f*cking retard) and unwavering disbelief. Aside from my frustration over failed efforts to foster reasonable discussion, it was amazing to watch the pack mentality at play. System justification theory reasons that people inherently fight to promote, protect and bolster the status quo because of their pathological desire to view the world around them as righteous, desirable and good. It's partly why the german people were among the first holocaust deniers. They didn't want to believe that their leaders could carry out such atrocities, that people representing their country could be so evil. That 15 page thread was the internet embodiment of SJT, a back-and-forth with a group that can't see the forest for the trees.

The posters who actually bothered to respond to my posts presented deeply ignorant and nonsensical counter arguments. The explosions in the towers were falling computers, and all eyewitness were mistaken because of the "confusion of that day." Trained firefighters and the president of Controlled Demolition Inc aren't qualified to discern the difference between molten steel and molten aluminum. Many didn't understand the implication of free-fall acceleration. Only one understood that carbon-based fires cannot melt steel.

Interestingly, one poster did come to my defense and posted a startling story about an encounter he had in Munich in March '00. Before I leave you with his story, I'd like to thank Rob for allowing me to join this wonderful site. You're all very much patriots, and it's truly a privilege to be included among you.

-- John

Now for the story:

Let me preface this by saying that I am not a conspiracy theorist.

In March of 2000 I was in Munich, Germany staying at a hostel with a beer vending machine in the common area. So my friends and I were sitting around drinking beer, pregaming for the mandatory trip to the Haufbrau House.

A fellow american heard us talking and sat down with us. God help me if I remember how the conversation got from point A to point B, but this guy is suddenly pulling notebooks, newspaper clippings, and diagrams from his backpack and explaining how muslim terrorists are going to use airplanes as missiles. He specifically said that they were going to crash them into buildings in New York and D.C. and that the U.S. government was in on it.

I kid you not. He said that the government was allowing it to happen in order to unite the rest of the world in a war against the mid-east. My friends and I were getting uncomfortable talking to this whackjob so we cut out of there and never thought about it again. Until after September 11th, of course, when we had a conversation about whether we were remembering the incident correctly.

After a few conversations with me, this poster began researching 9/11 for the first time and now openly questions the official story. But even after experiencing this inexplicable encounter, for eight years the guy never thought twice about questioning 9/11, the most cataclysmic day in U.S. history.

[rob balsamo]

Welcome to the forum Tom. Thank you for your support!

I look forward to more of your posts.