OK then. Just the facts. 9-11

[William Seger]

67. Nonsense will never change my mind, but actual evidence certainly would.

By idiomatic definition, "conspiracy theorist" has come to mean someone who believes highly implausible theories without good reason. They have complete trust in their paranoid intuitions, so they allow paranoid speculations to grow, unrestrained by any requirement for evidence-based substantiation, into paranoid delusions of "truth." Since they start by assuming a conspiracy, they seek only to confirm that belief, not to challenge it. If that weren't bad enough, conspiracism has a special built-in excuse for eschewing evidence-based reasoning: Any evidence that proves their speculations to be false is dismissed as being fake, and the lack of evidence to prove them right is assumed to be because of a massive cover-up.

That approach sets no limits on what kind of nonsense you will believe. That is simply not how rational people attempt to understand the world, and I'm quite sure I haven't given you any reason to accuse me of thinking the same way from the other side of the fence. I believe in objective reality, and if buildings were brought down by controlled demolition, then it should be possible to prove it with actual evidence. If you could actually do that, it wouldn't matter what William Seger thinks, anyway, but instead of sound evidence-based argument, we get "stuff" like this:

> Pancake theory leaves 50 stories of debris with the columns in the middle of the debris standing there.

In fact, in both tower collapses, there was a "spire" of core columns that remained standing for a short while after the main collapses, but then they fell too because they were not designed to be free-standing. They buckled because they needed the floors for lateral stability. Trust me on this: You'll do far better to assert that demolition charges started the collapses rather than the causes hypothesized by NIST, but then gravity did the rest. You will get exactly nowhere by continuing to assert that demolition charges were necessary for the collapses to continue, because that simply isn't true. Trying to make that case leads to silly stuff like this:

> 10 stories a second at free fall speed with huge beams being thrown about says to me it's more than a "melt down".

But people who actually understand structural mechanics (and who have used actual science-based quantitative analysis instead of naked assertions and hand-waving) disagree with you. Since I think I understand the collapses fairly well, your inability to understand them is not particularly interesting, much less a rational reason for believing the ridiculously implausible controlled demolition theory. To change my mind, you need to explain to me what's wrong with my understanding, and the above quote falls far short. NIST has proposed plausible explanations for what initiated the collapses, and once they started, they could not be stopped because the dynamic forces were simply too large to be absorbed by those structures.

> And WTC 7 had small fires on a few floors.

False, according to the people who were actually there, and not particularly meaningful. anyway, since the NIST simulation shows that there was enough fire to cause the postulated collapse.

> If you've ever watched the collapse, you can see the Penthouse on the roof collapse first.

Which is completely explained by the progressive collapse starting under the penthouse in NIST's theory, and not really explained at all in controlled demolition theories (i.e. why wait for 6 seconds to blow up the rest of the building).

> And there were explosions heard too.

Apparently, you've never heard a real controlled demolition, so I suggest some YouTube research. High-explosive cutter charges have a very sharp, distinctive sound that would have easily been picked up in all the videos. A controlled demolition of a building the size of WTC7 would easily have been heard in New Jersey. But there was absolutely no sound in any of the videos (or any seismic activity recorded, either) that remotely resembles high-explosive cutter charges. That's precisely why the ridiculous, unfounded, and unnecessary thermite theory was invented.

> And the Commission never explained how or why WTC 7 fell.

The 9/11 Commission was not tasked with explaining why WTC 7 or any of the other WTC buildings fell. And obviously it would have made no difference whatsoever to paranoid conspiracy theorists if they had: The NIST reports DO explain them but "truthers" respond with predictable knee-jerk rejection.

I see you've bombarded the board with this kind of nonsense. I'm not much inclined at the moment to respond to all of them, since it's the same recycled nonsense that we've been wading through for years around here.