By request, I watched the last half of Spare Change last night. It was impressive and interesting as I watched but there were a lot of little problems, as I realized afterwards: -- Seismographs -- The voiceover says the collapses measured as Richter 2.x quakes on a university seismograph and that could not have happened due solely to the collapse, because the energy of the collapse went into pulverizing the builings. But of course the buildings should have registered; the issue is conservation of momentum. Again, the voicover said the energy went into pulverizing the buildings, which is correct, but irrelevant. (In a deadhead hammer the energy -- nearly all of it -- is absorbed within the hammer head, but there's still a major "whomp" transfered to the object struck.) A collapsing building is like hitting the earth with a hammer, it will most likely show as vertically polarized transverse waves. What's the announcer trying to imply by saying the earlier explosion (during the unsuccessful attempt to bring them down a year or so before) didn't register because it "wasn't coupled to the ground"? There was little or no momentum transfer to the ground in that case, that's for sure, and no surprise that it didn't show. The energy release of the explosives in a controlled demo is dwarfed by the energy released by the falling building anyway -- this is just simple physics. It's surely the falling buildings which registered, _not_ the impact of the planes, _not_ the explosion of the fuel, and _not_ any hypothetical blast from explosives cutting the beams. None of those explosions should show, certainly not as a Richter 2 quake -- but the collapsing buildings should! -- Cell phones -- pfui. The announcer explains that, according to one test, there's 1 chance in 100 of a call getting through at cruising altitude, which is 7 miles up. So what? The planes were NOT at cruising altitude, they were about a fifth of a mile up (that includes flight 93), and at least the ones hitting New York were over a major metro area where cell phone towers abound. OTHER tests of cell phones in planes have indicated that they often work just fine; it's hit or miss depending on a number of factors. So, in this case they apparently worked just fine; what's the big surpise? The announcer says airlines have put cell phone repeaters in planes, and claims this PROVES the cell phones couldn't have worked. Is he ignorant, or is he just trying to fool the listeners? This proves *nothing* -- the airlines want to make money from phone calls, that is not new, and they forbid ordinary cell phone use as part of this scheme (use the air-phones, please); that is not new, either. They also want to provide reliable cell phone service, and again, ordinary cell phones, at cruising altitude (7 miles up), work badly or not at all in many parts of the country. But that proves nothing about the phone calls during 9/11. -- Crater and debris from flight 93: Just what WOULD we expect from a plane impacting at 550 MPH? Typical crashes are on landing or takeoff; take off speed of a jet is ~ 135 MPH or about 1/4 the likely speed of impact of a jet which _cruises_ into the ground. There was 16 times as much energy available when 93 hit the ground as when a jet crashes right after takeoff; so, it was 16 times as well pulverized, roughly speaking. In the video, they show another crash in which the plane "vanished" (but shortly after takeoff, which was a lower energy event), somewhere in Nigeria I think, but just show the clip and then act like it proved 93 could not have crashed. No comment on it explaining how it proves anything. To me, it didn't prove anything. In fact, much of the tape seemed to be done this way: Innuendo without hard facts. -- Explosions in the building -- why uncoordinated explosions before the collapse? In an intentional takedown they blow everything at once, and the building falls; they don't have things going off here and there throughout the building like random firecrackers before 4th of July. -- The analysis of the collapse -- if there's a grand conspiracy to cover it up and that's how FEMA and NIST came out with their "bogus" reports, why do they disagree with each other? Why not pick a story and stick to it? Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction must make sense; in this case it doesn't make sense, unless the two committees were acting in reasonably good faith. -- Molten metal in the basement five weeks after the blast -- I have a hard time with this one no matter how the buildings fell. How could it still be melted a month later? I just can't believe that. There /must/ have been an energy source which produced the molten steel weeks after the fall. Nothing else makes sense. Perhaps I should float this on Vortex. -- Flaming elevators -- so if they're cutting the main beams with thermite, why should that make the elevator shaft spout fire? It's "hermetically sealed" says the announcer, which is patently silly, but even if it were true why would anybody pack the elevators with thermite, which is the implication of the conspiracy theory? -- Firemen -- so they found some firemen who think it was a conspiracy and the building was demolished. There were hundreds or thousands of firemen who survived and some multiple tens of percent of the population think it was an inside job; so, there were dozens or hundreds of firemen who think that, too. That by itself proves nothing. "Let's see what the firefighters think" says the voiceover, and we get to hear what 4 or so firefighters think. No poll, no statistics, to support the _insinuation_ that all or most of them think it was an inside job. All we learned is that _some_ of them think it was an inside job with explosives, and that is no surprise. -- Fireman on floor 78 -- I need to check this. -- Bin Laden -- This deserves looking into. -- Squibs during collapse -- pfui. Same old same old. Nobody knows what a building this size coming down _should_ look like, so claims this doesn't look right are vacuous. -- Cell phone calls -- The flght attendant didn't sound hysterical, so she must not be for real; she sounded cold, flat, emotionless. Oh, please, like nobody ever talks that way in the middle of an emergency. The teenager, on the other hand, wasn't making much sense and sounded, if anything, kind of hysterical, so he must have been faked. Oh, please. There were no screams audible in the background of the cell phone calls, so they must have been faked. Oh, please. -- Black boxes -- The narrator says they lost the black boxes, and goes on to say that if they were recovered, we could tell _for_ _sure_ if these were the right planes. Then he says they DID recover the black boxes, after all, talks about transcripts, and a 3 minute missing bit of data from one of them. So, they have the black boxes; were they the right planes, or not? No comment. Presumably, this implies they _were_ the right planes, or that's how I would read the narrator's silence on the subject anyway. Or if the folks who recovered them were part of the grand conspiracy, why didn't they just lie about it and say they didn't get them back? Above all, if it's a conspiracy, why don't the conspirators have their story straight? Some say the boxes were lost, while others are publishing transcripts of parts of the content of the black boxes -- some conspiracy! -- Cleveland airport goings on -- frankly, who cares? If the passengers were spirited away they could just as well have taken them to Guantanamo, or Puerto Rico, or dropped in the ocean; there's no need to "account" for them. And whatever was going on at Cleveland could have any number of other explanations which would make more sense than the claim that, somehow, people from several planes were put together onto one plane (200 passengers disembarking from 93 in Cleveland = total of the people on the 4 planes which crashed, says the voiceover) and then flown from wherever they did the switch to Cleveland for who knows what reason. -- Conspiracy size -- Apparently the 200 passengers weren't just dropped in the ocean, so they are part of it. Airport personnel, New York security people, the Mayor's office, parts of the military ... the list goes on. Cleveland airport was locked down, massive security, so the personnel there were in on it, too. Controlled Demolition was allowed on-site early, says the voiceover. The implication is Controlled Demo is in on the conspiracy, too -- it just gets bigger and bigger. But once again this isn't followed up with a clear picture; it's left as innuendo. -- Witnesses -- we have dozens, maybe hundreds of people saying (essentially) "I saw stuff I didn't understand so it must have been a demo job". But there is NOBODY who says "I was involved, it stinks, it was a demo job". There were tons of explosives involved and some fancy work to put them in place. Several dozen people say something odd seemed to be going on; NOBODY has said there were explosives brought to the building, NOBODY has said "I delivered something weird to the building and I feel funny about it", NOBODY has broken the secret in any way shape or form. This is a very well kept secret. -- Inside trades, Bin Laden trades -- so, maybe somebody had inside knowledge. Big surprise. But that doesn't imply in any way that there were explosives involved. -- Unclaimed money -- There were massive Bin Laden trades, and there remains some large $$$ in "unclaimed money" from those trades, says the voiceover. Say what??? THAT makes no sense -- you take the money and run after a trade like that, you don't leave it lying around -- UNLESS the trade was legit, done for some other reason, in which case who knows what might happen after the massive disruption to the trading system which took place that day. -- Of course much is made of the insurance claims on the buildings (which were largely denied -- hmmm). Circumstantial evidence at best, of course; somebody found a way to profit. Gosh the elephant dung beetles really lucked out with that ball of poop, which happened to fall right in front of them -- that proves the beetles arranged for the dung to drop there! ... I don't think so. I realized why I'm so down on the conspiracy theory. The heart of it is "I don't understand how the official explanation can account for everything, I don't understand how the building could have collapsed like that, so it must be a lie". This is _exactly_ like the people who say "I don't understand how relativity can explain anything, I don't understand how it can even work at all, so it must be a lie".