I'm not going to downvote you, you raise a point.

However, I do feel the need to ask a few things.
What possible reason other then either being a bible thumper or homophobe is there for objecting gay marriage?

I'm asking legitimately. Two people love each other, they want the same treatment as everybody else. Unless it's wrong in the eyes of the lord, or you don't like seeing a man holding another mans hand, I see no actual valid reason for it. They still pay to be wed, if they want children, they have to adopt..which means a child gets much better care then it ever would if it doesn't get adopted, and that way everybody's happy.

Now, Beck says he opposes Illegal immigration, big difference to just immigration. I can understand not wanting illegal immigrants, even though they too are just a group of people looking for a better life, but the ones who come over legally, apply for a visa or citizenship.. if they take a job away from an American, then they deserve the spot more then the American, they were more qualified.

I don't see the point of denying the holocost, when there are still survivors OF the holocost, and documents, eyewitness accounts, films, and still photographs proving that millions of Jewish people were encamped, and killed, during WWII. True, you can argue that you don't care about the jews, you just don't believe it happened.. but I don't understand the reasoning for it. Any hard look at the facts would prove that it happened, and unless you really did have some ulterior motive you'd change your views.

Of course you can oppose policies without being a racist, anybody claiming you ARE one is a loon. Obama is NOT the first ever president of the u.s.a. and as far as I know, for each and every president before him, there was at least one group of people that thought "Hey..we don't like you, or your policies, BOO!"

You can oppose the war on terror without hating the troops makes no sense to me. Most people who are against the war seem to be against it because they feel that American blood shouldn't be shed in a senseless war, and want to bring them HOME. I don't understand your point there at all.

Abortion, I agree with you on. My mother is adopted, and while I'm still pro-choice, she is against abortions. If whoever gave birth to her decided on having an abortion instead, she would never have been here.

Look, I'll stop picking apart your post now, because I know the point was actually to promote having an open mind, but your examples given are slightly..flawed. By all means, if you have means to correct me, do so, I will gladly look at all the evidence given to me. But honestly..
some things, some pre-concieved notions, they're honestly true.

>> ^xxovercastxx:
I hate to say it but, despite the hypocrisy, Beck has a point.
I know I'll be downvoted into oblivion for saying this, because I've been through it before, but maybe one or two of you will hear the message and understand it.
You can oppose immigration without being a racist.
You can oppose Obama or his policies without being a racist.
You can deny the Holocaust without being an anti-semite.
You can oppose gay marriage without being a homophobe.
You can oppose the US Government without being a terrorist.
You can oppose the War on Terror without hating our troops.
You can oppose hydrogen powered vehicles without supporting big oil.
You can oppose abortion without being a Bible-thumping misogynist.
You can oppose war without being an appeaser.
Do many people oppose gay marriage because of their hatred of gays? Certainly. Do many people oppose Obama because of racism? Clearly. Are some who deny the Holocaust anti-semites? Probably.
But some people are just mislead and some people are just nuts. Some even ( gasp ) have different and legitimate opinions. We've gotten to this place where any level of disagreement warrants the most extreme vocabulary that can be conjured and the liberals are just as guilty as the conservatives.
You want to know why there's no progress in government? It's because of radical preconceived notions. Anything the left proposes is Nazism, Fascism, Marxism or Socialism. They hate good Christian people and the country. Anything the right proposes is Nazism, Fascism or Discrimination. Nobody even hears the other side because they've decided ahead of time what those people will say.
And the vast majority of you here on the sift are the same way. Open your eyes and ears. There are a lot of people with differing and/or opposing viewpoints to yours and not all of them are nutcases who want to destroy the country. You serve nobody's interests by shooting them down with extremist labels before they've even had the chance to make their case.

"2) Quit mentioning that no building has collapsed due to fire before. It's irrelevant."




I would argue its not irilivent

Granted other buildings didn't have plans fly into them and they were also different buildings. However it would be foolish to ignore the fact that no other steel building has fallen down from fire as there are still aspects of the buildings that are similar evan more so with bulding 7. ( I would be prepared to ignore them if infarct it was the case that other buildings r infact not analogous to building 7 I don't know enough to make an informed desisoin on the issue)

So yes I would not make a big point of no other steal buildings falling down as its only partiality relivent and could not be used as an argument in itself , it dose however help with determining a lose grounding and basses for what sort of temperatures and fire damage general steal structures can withstand.
(and as i said the other buildings might in reality be compleatly different structures so it could be 100% irelivent as you say )


and yeah crotch flame your totally right about the eyewitness accounts , this is the thing that annoys me the most you simply cannot trust what people say from an event , even more so when its something like this where they will be in shock and the fact that so much of what eye witness have said has been taken out of context. having said that I don't think you should ignore eye witnesses outright and many of the comments talking about audible explosions should still be considered however as I say be treated as a very low form of evidence and likely to be wrong.


IT is important to maintain proper application of scientific method and as you say I don't think this is that well written but then again these people are structural enganears not scientists and they do make manny valid points/ points of interest . At a minimum this is far more "scientific" than 99% of the other talks and videos on 9.11 but it could defiantly be allot better.

I keep waiting to see what's so convincing for the people here and I can't find it. But rather than counter-arguing I'll give my advice as a scientist to the people who present these things.

1) Quit talking about the "myth" and "official story." You should be proposing this as a hypothesis as an alternative to the standard hypothesis. Presenting the scientific method as a way to tell the truth from lies is a perfect example of this where they should have simply described it as a method for determining the truth. You're giving away an emotional conviction toward the conclusion of the study.

2) Quit mentioning that no building has collapsed due to fire before. It's irrelevant.

3) Almost all of the eyewitness accounts should be ignored - especially given the chaotic nature of the events that day and especially people claiming to have heard explosions.

4) The fact that the towers fell mostly on their own footprint is exactly what you'd expect from a building collapsing under the weight of the topmost floors. There's simply no source of momentum to force the tower to fall sideways. Building 7 is more interesting though and the video spent more time on this.

6) Too much of the analysis is based on small samples and having been done by this Dr. Jones alone. It seems as though there could be several other explanations for the thermite evidence Jones found that isn't presented. I'm not even saying they're better explanations, but I feel pretty certain someone has presented other explanations and this guy doesn't present them.

...Anyway, I'm getting bored. Basically, by the way this is presented I can't believe this guy, or any others I've seen, are being objective and so I can't shake the feeling that there's lots of data that isn't being presented here. I spend a lot of time listening to technical talks and you can quickly tell the difference between someone presenting scientific results and someone trying to sell you something.

No, there is no proof there, it's just more theory. Do you even understand the word 'proof'? Do you understand what it implies? What I've seen in that video is hypothesis and conjecture based on eyewitness accounts, previously debunked faulty and/or false information, and some science mixed in to make it all seem plausible. I'll admit the guy is doing better than most to make it seem like he's presenting you with "proof", but it's still totally manufactured.

I can't believe anyone who has compared an actual building demolition and the WTC destruction can say that they are identical, aside from the fact that they both fall downwards. The WTC buildings first fail right where the planes struck and where the fires were. The remaining bottom portions of the buildings remain fully intact until the point at which they are compressed and collapsed by the weight of the top portion of the building coming down on them. In the case where a building that has been rigged to collapse, all the floors are blown nearly simultaneously and the building falls straight down because it can no longer support itself. This is not happening when you watch any of the videos of the WTC collapse.

Since the official version of events has already been released, I would say it is up to the conspiracy theorists to provide their evidence that contradicts the official version. And by evidence I mean physical proof of bombs inside the towers, physical proof of a missile hitting the Pentagon, physical proof of anything that happened that directly contradicts the official version.

The evidence I've seen presented so far by conspiracy theorists, in this videos and others, seems to be mainly made up of eyewitness accounts on the day itself, a day that was so chaotic and confusing that there was loads of incorrect information being broadcast on all channels. Does anyone remember one of the original stories of the explosion at the Pentagon, before it was shown to be a plane? For a while it was being reported that a helicopter had crashed on the pad, or that a bomb had gone off on the helicopter pad. There was also story that there was a fire at or near the White House. Both of these events, along with many others that day, were proven to not have happened at all or had been confused with other events as the story was passed along. I'm not discounting eyewitness accounts altogether, but it cannot be your only evidence that something different than the official version happened.

Chapter 1 courtesy of the http://richarddawkins.net/article,4217,Extract-from-Chapter-One-of-The-Greatest-Show-on-Earth,Richard-Dawkins---Times-Online

Imagine that you are a teacher of Roman history and the Latin language, anxious to impart your enthusiasm for the ancient world — for the elegiacs of Ovid and the odes of Horace, the sinewy economy of Latin grammar as exhibited in the oratory of Cicero, the strategic niceties of the Punic Wars, the generalship of Julius Caesar and the voluptuous excesses of the later emperors. That’s a big undertaking and it takes time, concentration, dedication. Yet you find your precious time continually preyed upon, and your class’s attention distracted, by a baying pack of ignoramuses (as a Latin scholar you would know better than to say ignorami) who, with strong political and especially financial support, scurry about tirelessly attempting to persuade your unfortunate pupils that the Romans never existed. There never was a Roman Empire. The entire world came into existence only just beyond living memory. Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, Romansh: all these languages and their constituent dialects sprang spontaneously and separately into being, and owe nothing to any predecessor such as Latin.

Instead of devoting your full attention to the noble vocation of classical scholar and teacher, you are forced to divert your time and energy to a rearguard defence of the proposition that the Romans existed at all: a defence against an exhibition of ignorant prejudice that would make you weep if you weren’t too busy fighting it.

If my fantasy of the Latin teacher seems too wayward, here’s a more realistic example. Imagine you are a teacher of more recent history, and your lessons on 20th-century Europe are boycotted, heckled or otherwise disrupted by well-organised, well-financed and politically muscular groups of Holocaust-deniers. Unlike my hypothetical Rome-deniers, Holocaustdeniers really exist. They are vocal, superficially plausible and adept at seeming learned. They are supported by the president of at least one currently powerful state, and they include at least one bishop of the Roman Catholic Church. Imagine that, as a teacher of European history, you are continually faced with belligerent demands to “teach the controversy”, and to give “equal time” to the “alternative theory” that the Holocaust never happened but was invented by a bunch of Zionist fabricators.

Fashionably relativist intellectuals chime in to insist that there is no absolute truth: whether the Holocaust happened is a matter of personal belief; all points of view are equally valid and should be equally “respected”.

The plight of many science teachers today is not less dire. When they attempt to expound the central and guiding principle of biology; when they honestly place the living world in its historical context — which means evolution; when they explore and explain the very nature of life itself, they are harried and stymied, hassled and bullied, even threatened with loss of their jobs. At the very least their time is wasted at every turn. They are likely to receive menacing letters from parents and have to endure the sarcastic smirks and close-folded arms of brainwashed children. They are supplied with state-approved textbooks that have had the word “evolution” systematically expunged, or bowdlerized into “change over time”. Once, we were tempted to laugh this kind of thing off as a peculiarly American phenomenon. Teachers in Britain and Europe now face the same problems, partly because of American influence, but more significantly because of the growing Islamic presence in the classroom — abetted by the official commitment to “multiculturalism” and the terror of being thought racist.

It is frequently, and rightly, said that senior clergy and theologians have no problem with evolution and, in many cases, actively support scientists in this respect. This is often true, as I know from the agreeable experience of collaborating with the Bishop of Oxford, now Lord Harries, on two separate occasions. In 2004 we wrote a joint article in The Sunday Times whose concluding words were: “Nowadays there is nothing to debate. Evolution is a fact and, from a Christian perspective, one of the greatest of God’s works.” The last sentence was written by Richard Harries, but we agreed about all the rest of our article. Two years previously, Bishop Harries and I had organised a joint letter to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

[In the letter, eminent scientists and churchmen, including seven bishops, expressed concern over the teaching of evolution and their alarm at it being posed as a “faith position”at the Emmanuel City Technology College in Gateshead.] Bishop Harries and I organised this letter in a hurry. As far as I remember, the signatories to the letter constituted 100 per cent of those we approached. There was no disagreement either from scientists or from bishops.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has no problem with evolution, nor does the Pope (give or take the odd wobble over the precise palaeontological juncture when the human soul was injected), nor do educated priests and professors of theology. The Greatest Show on Earth is a book about the positive evidence that evolution is a fact. It is not intended as an antireligious book. I’ve done that, it’s another T-shirt, this is not the place to wear it again. Bishops and theologians who have attended to the evidence for evolution have given up the struggle against it. Some may do so reluctantly, some, like Richard Harries, enthusiastically, but all except the woefully uninformed are forced to accept the fact of evolution.

They may think God had a hand in starting the process off, and perhaps didn’t stay his hand in guiding its future progress. They probably think God cranked the Universe up in the first place, and solemnised its birth with a harmonious set of laws and physical constants calculated to fulfil some inscrutable purpose in which we were eventually to play a role.

But, grudgingly in some cases, happily in others, thoughtful and rational churchmen and women accept the evidence for evolution.

What we must not do is complacently assume that, because bishops and educated clergy accept evolution, so do their congregations. Alas there is ample evidence to the contrary from opinion polls. More than 40 per cent of Americans deny that humans evolved from other animals, and think that we — and by implication all of life — were created by God within the last 10,000 years. The figure is not quite so high in Britain, but it is still worryingly large. And it should be as worrying to the churches as it is to scientists. This book is necessary. I shall be using the name “historydeniers” for those people who deny evolution: who believe the world’s age is measured in thousands of years rather than thousands of millions of years, and who believe humans walked with dinosaurs.

To repeat, they constitute more than 40 per cent of the American population. The equivalent figure is higher in some countries, lower in others, but 40 per cent is a good average and I shall from time to time refer to the history-deniers as the “40percenters”.

To return to the enlightened bishops and theologians, it would be nice if they’d put a bit more effort into combating the anti-scientific nonsense that they deplore. All too many preachers, while agreeing that evolution is true and Adam and Eve never existed, will then blithely go into the pulpit and make some moral or theological point about Adam and Eve in their sermons without once mentioning that, of course, Adam and Eve never actually existed! If challenged, they will protest that they intended a purely “symbolic” meaning, perhaps something to do with “original sin”, or the virtues of innocence. They may add witheringly that, obviously, nobody would be so foolish as to take their words literally. But do their congregations know that? How is the person in the pew, or on the prayer-mat, supposed to know which bits of scripture to take literally, which symbolically? Is it really so easy for an uneducated churchgoer to guess? In all too many cases the answer is clearly no, and anybody could be forgiven for feeling confused.

Think about it, Bishop. Be careful, Vicar. You are playing with dynamite, fooling around with a misunderstanding that’s waiting to happen — one might even say almost bound to happen if not forestalled. Shouldn’t you take greater care, when speaking in public, to let your yea be yea and your nay be nay? Lest ye fall into condemnation, shouldn’t you be going out of your way to counter that already extremely widespread popular misunderstanding and lend active and enthusiastic support to scientists and science teachers? The history-deniers themselves are among those who I am trying to reach. But, perhaps more importantly, I aspire to arm those who are not history-deniers but know some — perhaps members of their own family or church — and find themselves inadequately prepared to argue the case.

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips . . . continue the list as long as desired. That didn’t have to be true. It is not self-evidently, tautologically, obviously true, and there was a time when most people, even educated people, thought it wasn’t. It didn’t have to be true, but it is. We know this because a rising flood of evidence supports it. Evolution is a fact, and [my] book will demonstrate it. No reputable scientist disputes it, and no unbiased reader will close the book doubting it.

Why, then, do we speak of “Darwin’s theory of evolution”, thereby, it seems, giving spurious comfort to those of a creationist persuasion — the history-deniers, the 40-percenters — who think the word “theory” is a concession, handing them some kind of gift or victory? Evolution is a theory in the same sense as the heliocentric theory. In neither case should the word “only” be used, as in “only a theory”. As for the claim that evolution has never been “proved”, proof is a notion that scientists have been intimidated into mistrusting.

Influential philosophers tell us we can’t prove anything in science.

Mathematicians can prove things — according to one strict view, they are the only people who can — but the best that scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried. Even the undisputed theory that the Moon is smaller than the Sun cannot, to the satisfaction of a certain kind of philosopher, be proved in the way that, for example, the Pythagorean Theorem can be proved. But massive accretions of evidence support it so strongly that to deny it the status of “fact” seems ridiculous to all but pedants. The same is true of evolution. Evolution is a fact in the same sense as it is a fact that Paris is in the northern hemisphere. Though logic-choppers rule the town,* some theories are beyond sensible doubt, and we call them facts. The more energetically and thoroughly you try to disprove a theory, if it survives the assault, the more closely it approaches what common sense happily calls a fact.

We are like detectives who come on the scene after a crime has been committed. The murderer’s actions have vanished into the past.

The detective has no hope of witnessing the actual crime with his own eyes. What the detective does have is traces that remain, and there is a great deal to trust there. There are footprints, fingerprints (and nowadays DNA fingerprints too), bloodstains, letters, diaries. The world is the way the world should be if this and this history, but not that and that history, led up to the present.

Evolution is an inescapable fact, and we should celebrate its astonishing power, simplicity and beauty. Evolution is within us, around us, between us, and its workings are embedded in the rocks of aeons past. Given that, in most cases, we don’t live long enough to watch evolution happening before our eyes, we shall revisit the metaphor of the detective coming upon the scene of a crime after the event and making inferences. The aids to inference that lead scientists to the fact of evolution are far more numerous, more convincing, more incontrovertible, than any eyewitness reports that have ever been used, in any court of law, in any century, to establish guilt in any crime. Proof beyond reasonable doubt? Reasonable doubt? That is the understatement of all time.

*Not my favourite Yeats line, but apt in this case.

© Richard Dawkins 2009

Your video, Eyewitness Testimony FAILURE, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Successfully processed your "amazon" invocation - view all Amazonized posts here

reliability...
fingerprints? nope.
bite marks? nope.
bullet analysis? nope.
eyewitness testimony? nope.
lineups? nope.
police interview? nope.
interrogation? nope.

DNA? yep, with caveats.

i'm taking a paper titled "psyc, crime and law", (lectured partially by people in the innocence project, who are heroes) and it's thoroughly depressing learning about all the horrific wrongdoings. i now have no faith in the criminal justice system (particularly the united states', glad i don't live there).

Ok, for the sake of argument, let's take it as a given that he overstates the case claiming that American sponsored torture alone motivated the vast majority of militants entering Iraq (the exact motivations, numbers, percentages, etc are probably not knowable) - the overstatement itself doesn't entirely undermine the essential claim.

It's the difference between an eyewitness reporting that a guy was stabbed over 100 times and died - then the forensic pathologist comes in and says, well, he was actually stabbed only 25 times. Clearly the witness "overstated" his case, but the substantive conclusion is still relevant and correct - the guy was stabbed to death.

It's just not that hard to believe that images and reports of humiliation/abuse/torture of muslim prisoners could and would inspire would-be militants to throw in with the cause and travel to Iraq in greater numbers than they otherwise would have. Looking at the other side, I truly believe that the videos of beheadings by muslims were in fact effective recruiting tools for our own military.

What I do find hard to believe is the claim that mistreatment of prisoners played little or no role at all in enemy recruitment (and I note that you are not making that claim) and was this godsend providing the military and defense dept windfalls of life-saving information (none of which has ever been substantiated, nor will it ever in my opinion) as people like Cheney would have the American public believe.

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

But Ms Werbeloff has been forced to admit her "eyewitness" account was bogus.

As she prepared to tell all on Nine's A Current Affair, detectives told The Sun-Herald last night Ms Werbeloff's account of the shooting of Justin Kallu, 27, the so-called "skinny wog", was made up.

"We have interviewed her and she has not witnessed the shooting," said acting Kings Cross Police crime manager, Detective Inspector Matt McQueen. "She has admitted to making it all up and has not witnessed the shooting."

^drattus,

I don't know what century you were born in, but we have this new fangled thing called "science" which states that you should have evidence for your assertions. If you are going to call a man insane, and label what he says * Lies than you better back it up with more than conjecture. Until the last paragraph I haven't made a SINGLE assertion in this entire thread. Note that the only claim I made, I provided evidence for. All I did was, when confronted with dubious assertions, ask for evidence.

To address xxovercastxx's claim that this isn't science, science is a list of best known methods. Nothing more, nothing less. In physics that means controls, laser measurement, etc. In medicine that means placebos, double blind experiments, etc. In history that means eyewitness testimony, physical evidence, etc.

Barack Obama's birth location is indeed a question of science. Whether he is a socialist or not is a question of science. Whether the US has a very large national debt is a question of science. Whether he said certain things, or passed certain proposals with certain implications is a question of science. These are not matters of faith. If you think otherwise, why did you come here to debate it? Just sit in your room and pray for answers.

^is your birth location a political question? Its okay you believe what you do, but as far as you've shown, its a faith-based conclusion. Believing the birth certificate while not believing the eyewitness testimony isn't science, its faith.

As I stated, I have no political stake in where Obama was born. My only interest is in the truth, and with the current evidence, I cannot come to a conclusion either way.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Rodney Stanger, Molly Bish, suspect, news' to 'Rodney Stanger, Molly Bish, suspect, news, Eyewitness' - edited by Fusionaut

>> ^Constitutional_Patriot:
All the first hand accounts from people like Mr. Rodriguez, the firefighter testimony and the journalists seem to quantify the existence of explosives being set off.
Are you truth debunkers saying that these people don't know what they saw, felt and heard even though they were giving eyewitness accounts at ground zero? If we can't believe those who were able to escape being victims of this heinous act then we should just take a quasi-government controlled agency at it's word? I think not.


Your argument only makes sense if witness accounts are reliable in telling the difference between concrete supports being crushed beneath 50 stories of skyscraper and explosives being set off at the exact same time. If you go watch other footage and witness accounts you won't hear a consistent story of all the witnesses talking about secondary explosives going off. The consistent story is panic and confusion, basing the entire argument on selected witness statements is weak in the extreme.

Ever been in a fender bender? Try and get the same story from the witnesses even for something that straightforward and relatively non-traumatic, you'll find it's the exception. For 9/11 any sane person should expect the witness accounts to vary infinitely more.

For 9/11 we have a huge stock of footage showing the collapse, and not a ONE shows any explosions on the floors beneath until after the top floors have started crashing down. The shear weight of those floors SHOULD cause the floors beneath them to blow out explosively.