A Sad Blog, For a Sad Day...

Now, I realize it may be in poor taste to some to discuss my opinions on the 9/11 conspiracy theorists on 9/11; no doubt even after 8 years the sting is still there. So if you would like to bypass today's blog please do.

I recently saw the movie "Loose Change" (the 9/11 conspiracy not the Ja Rule video) I am totally behind the times on this one even more than the "I Pledge" video. But I will say this, it raises questions and is very entertaining, it's 1 hour and 20 minutes so if you are in for it go and watch it. I won't link it under threats of "murder" from a few of my friends, but you can Google it or whatever, just like I said, if you watch the Ja Rule one you may kind of be on the wrong page for this blog. Now, I will just start off by saying that these are some very passionate, very plucky youths that really did their homework. If, say, they drove around in a van solving pirate ghost mysteries, I would totally watch it. And watching it, this video, I was like, "Damn, that is weird." Will I sign up for their newsletter? I wouldn't go that far. But do I think that these guys have some sinister motive for making this? No, I think they just stumbled on to a bunch of other people's websites and got swept up in a kind of pull. I'll admit after seeing a Myth Busters intro in which they were going to debunk the moon landing hoax myths, I thought, "those are some really good points about the moon landing." But all of them were debunked, at least to my satisfaction.

I've been watching a lot of documentaries lately, as well as in the past. I'm noticing a very disturbing trend with modern documentaries (late 90's on) and it's where they have an outcome or agenda that they are pushing on us. For instance, I saw Fahrenheit 911 (a family friend offered to pay for me if I would see it with her) and it really got me fired up after seeing it. But I realized I am simply being swayed. The best documentaries I've seen, really let the story tell itself. They interview the people close to the story, experts, etc. and it's more organic that way. And also there are no people telling you the conclusions to be drawn, in fact in most of the good, educational documentaries, you don't even get to see the people making it. Now, remembering back to the days of my Lincoln-Douglass debates, I remember that you would get the side of a debate and pick ideas to support it. That being said, there are many, many facts, experts, and eye witnesses that can support any idea. In many different interviews of the two they said how the firemen they quoted on the movie, would not give their testimonies on the Loose Change video. Is it coercion? Is it that they were lying? I doubt it, but when there are so many things going on, it's hard to trust your own memory.

Okay so I know I'm all apologies today but I was told this is kind of a disturbing story but it is one from my experience where things were so out of control that I lost track of what was going on. If you want to skip through it, I'll put it in Astrix's.

**
Now, after a long day at work I decided to call it an early night at about 7:00, it was hard to get to sleep because my upstairs neighbor was running some sort of water. After about an hour water started to seep through the corners of my ceiling. It's not unlikely that maybe she left the bathtub running and dozed off. I went up to her apartment and knocked her door, but it sounded like maybe the TV was on or she was talking on the telephone. After banging on the door with no response, I called the emergency maintenance number but the guy said he was eating dinner and would be there in a while. It was probably an hour and a half before he actually got there, and when he did he said, "Oh shit, I'm not going into that apartment, that bitch is crazy, she pulled a gun on me one time." I knew where he was coming from, the lady was crazy and in her 40's and dating a much younger gangster looking guy who was in and out of prison. I had called the police on them at least twice after hearing screaming and what sounded to me like physical scuffles. Neighbors would corroborate this story, telling me stories about her stopping by at all hours of the night asking to use the phone injured and in tears, or sometimes bragging that her boyfriend got her some crack cocaine to try. While I don't know very much about her, sometimes she would go months without a peep other times they would be screaming and fighting so loud my friends that visited me would have to raise their voices to drown it out.

Well back to the story, my apartment is slowly filling with water and the maintenance guy doesn't want to go into the lady upstairs's apartment and turn it off. So we call the police, and they were able to respond in under a half hour, but they said since the door was locked and they didn't have a warrant it was actually the fire department's jurisdiction as she was maybe in danger. It took them nearly an hour to arrive and set up so they could go in through a window. By this time my apartment was filled with water in the bedroom and standing water even in the living room. But I could cross my legs and be out of the water while in the living room. This left me few options but to just look at the clock. A female firefighter came down to my apartment and said the water was turned off but it will still drip until the water drained and to start cleaning up my things. Well I thought maybe her water heater just broke or something and I didn't see any harm in gathering my things. Soaked in this water a detective starts asking me questions about the incident, it was then I figured out I'm soaked in this "dead body" water. Well that certainly isn't the point, so here is what it was. The boyfriend had just recently gotten out of jail, the woman was unstable, and the cause of death was told to me as being, "massive head injury from hitting the toilet" (and the impact was enough to break the toilet to cause the flooding).

You could interpret it many different ways, her boyfriend killed her, she committed suicide, or she just fell. The detective told me that he's ruling it an accident and that one of the details in my story didn't add up, that being that the TV wasn't on and she had to have died from the impact onto the toilet. If a reporter came to me and asked my story I would have told her about the noises I heard when I knocked on her door; and certainly the way I remember it even today, I did hear talking. Another thing was the latch or chain that could only be locked from the inside, is what prevented the police from going in, in the first place. One of the neighbors said that she knows that she was murdered because she weighed 90 pounds and even falling like a sack of potatoes couldn't have broken the toilet. She went on to say that, the man was so much of a thug that he knew how to lock the latch and jump of the balcony (only about 15 feet, I wouldn't jump it to catch the bus, but I would survive falling off it probably). That was interesting food for thought, those toilets were built like a rock and her frail figure would have to have quite a bit of momentum behind it to break it. But can I honestly say that the detective suppressed valid parts of my testimony or covered it up? No way, he deals with this all the time, I most certainly don't. If he says, "accident" I'm inclined to think it's an accident, but nobody really knows and there are lingering questions.
**


Now, I'm no fancy big-city scientist; and I probably know less about physics than these guys (and some things they say are thoroughly debunked anyway). But let's concentrate on the motive. The flimsiest part of this whole thing is the very reason for the conspiracy, he said the twin towers were attacked because of people trying to cover up insider training? Are you fucking kidding me? So I'm some Wall Street bigshot and I'm about to get nailed for insider trading and my only idea is to create a nation-wide conspiracy and sacrifice thousands of innocent lives? Insider trading is a couple years in a minimum security prison, if you were to get caught planning something like this that would be a few years in, what Office Space calls, "Federal Pound-Me-In-The-Ass Prison," and if you got caught doing this, that's a revolving-door jury to put you in the gas chamber. And as far as coercion? Even if you had the clout to shut up all the people involved with this, your life is a house of cards, any one of these people has a crisis of conscience and your plan is totally undone. Worse than that, maybe someone decides that maybe a few documents might be worth something and you could get blackmailed for life.

And that other stuff he talked about, the dump truck full of gold under building 7? That would be believable if real life was Die Hard 3. Anyone who has seen a James Bond knows that gold heists are good because they can be melted down and sold anywhere, but let's not get carried away; there are some huge problems with gold. Primarily it's very heavy, while a dump truck full is very valuable, what can you do with it? Who could you even trust to get a dump truck full of gold where you need it to go? Where would you take it? Are you going to fill up packages at Cash4Gold.com? The time it would take to fence and smelt a dump truck full of gold would be a magnet for problems. If anyone found out about it you could have an army after it, so after hush money, laundering, trustworthy muscle, a fence that can even offload that amount of gold within the conspirator's lifetime; it's safe to assume it's not worth as much as it is in world trade... so if you want to make money, you would be better off swindling it, then you ever would hauling it away. And let's say there was gold there, why would they do something to the Pentagon and flight 93? Unless there is some kind of National Treasure director's cut, there shouldn't be any gold in the Pentagon. If any one of the bizarre other attacks had failed (and anyone got apprehended) then the whole project fails. I can't imagine that there would be a person out there that would say that the twin towers going down weren't a big enough smoke screen to get away with a couple hundred million dollars.

Let's also consider the ethical implications of this, that people within the government are keeping quiet because they want to keep their jobs. Those are some pretty stirring images on the TV, on websites, people sending prayers through the email; you want me to believe that there isn't one person out there that would have a crisis of conscience after seeing all these things? And coercion by the FBI, oh brother, you think they can keep tabs on the hundreds of thousands of people that could have stumbled on to a conspiracy this big? You can't tell me even the "Patriot Act" can do that. They also talked about one of the pilots doing drills to crash into the Pentagon. It's one thing to profiteer off of the deaths of 10's of thousands of civilians; but you want to say that there is a pilot out there that was willing to kill himself so that somebody else could get a couple hundred million dollars? I may be wrong about this, but... isn't the point of a high level multi-million dollar conspiracy, that you live to spend the money?