Pangloss

"I am a fundamentalista about fundamentalistas!" -- Pangloss

So you can't cite a source, and even if you could, it would just be the next-day claim by the grief-stricken father, who may or may not have learned he was wrong five minutes after the reporter hung up. Okies, I guess we move on. Well okay, but I can't imagine why you wouldn't just flip to the back of this important, scholarly work and type in whatever source Professor Ruppert lists there. Thanks for following-up on that -- clearly my memory was flawed. So we modify your claim above from "PDB not released" to "where are the missing pages?" Understood. But as I indicated at the beginning of the debate, circumstantial evidence is not acceptable. Hints and allegations are out of bounds. What I would need in this case, for example, would be something like a document showing that the missing pages listed the ways in which the US government was complicit in the terror attacks. You know, actual evidence of complicity, as opposed to missing evidence that could mean anything. By the way, the fact that there's a PDB on Osama is actually counter-indicative of collusion. If they were in cohoots with the guy then they probably wouldn't need a scanty, confused, horribly dated intelligence briefing -- something even Richard Clarke thought was pathetic. This would be the sort of thing you'd want to have cast a jaundiced eye towards when you were doing your critical thinking on this subject. You know, before you reached a conclusion sufficient to "reach a guilty verdict". ;-)

I have decided to coin a new word: Fundamentalistas! Definition: Anybody who adopts a theologically-derived political ideology that flies in the face of logic and reason. Not limited to American fundamentalist christian conservatives. Usage: "There were fundamentalistas all over my lawn, drinking Jesus juice from Diet Coke cans and singing hymns." "I wanted to have an abortion, but the fundamentalistas were in front of the clinic on the only day I could get off from work."

One of those rare people I always felt I could completely disagree with, but still respect not only the person, but his opinion and how he came by having it.

I would suggest that you simply post any evidence of any kind. Something. Anything will do. It doesn't matter what.

I'm not interested in hearsay. I'm interested in Ruppert's source. Presumably he has an bibliography and/or citations page of some kind in the back of the book, does he not? I don't care if it's written-only; I'm perfectly capable of using a library. What I want to know is whether he got this information from a reliable, independent, objective source, or if he made it up out of thin air (or something in-between). I looked at the first page of the links you provided from your Google search. The only one I saw from a reliable news source was a BBC story about mistaken identity, which I vaguely recalled hearing about. If Ruppert thinks these guys had plastic surgery then this doesn't even pass the stink test -- if you're going to go to that kind of length, you'd at least change the guy's name! You made it sound like this was fully documented and known to the public, but that does not appear to be the case. Common sense suggests that if they were alive we'd know it by now, because it would be the biggest news story of the century, so you need to overcome common sense with documentation and evidence. So let's see Ruppert's source, please. In addition, please remember that I've also asked you to cite his source for the allegation that the White House edited Richard Clarke's book. I would like to know more about this, as I don't recall hearing about it before. That's almost right. The issue is not whether the source has a funny name, but whether the source is credible. I can list several thousand web sites from people who swear that they've seen UFOs, but that doesn't mean they exist. It's not a matter of judgement, by the way. It's a matter of the tail wagging the dog. If you're going to sacrifice objectivity for information, you might as well salute and bend over, for all the freedom you will have. (It really doesn't matter WHO takes your freedom away, does it? So can we please not be so care-free about tossing it away? ) So yeah, if you cite a media source, it must be a mainstream news organization. CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, AP, Reuters, UPI, New York Times, Washington Post, or the BBC will do for starters. Holler if you need more. If you're not sure, post away, and we'll figure it out. I've seen it on TV, haven't you? I'm confused by this argument. It's obviously out there, since we're talking about it. It's discussed extensively in the 9/11 Commission Report. I don't understand the problem.

Ok, I'll take that to mean that you don't feel the "evidence" TT presented above is very compelling on the issue of complicity. Either that or you just jumped in without reading, and I can't imagine you ever doing something like that.

Sure. I'm not defending the administration -- I believe they dropped the ball (as did the previous one). But in terms of determining whether they were collusive with the terrorists none of Ruppert's "evidence" has "veritable value" either. Do you feel otherwise, or do you agree with me on the subject we're actually discussing here? Please don't duck out of the conversation now that you've injected your subject-changing point about the ball being dropped. You now owe me an explanation of your position on the subject of collusion -- you can't ignore it just because you don't like the fact that it makes YOU look like you're defending Bush, and/or because it serves your anti-Bush agenda to let TT/Ruppert/et al run on like this. Pay up.

The question we're discussing at the moment is not whether the administration screwed up, but whether they were in collusion with the terrorists. I'm not defending the administration, I'm simply pointing out what they might say. I'd appreciate it if we could stick with that subject for the moment. I'm having a hard enough time getting TT to defend his assertions without folks accidentally muddying the waters. Thanks.

First of all, most of these points are examples of argumentum ad ignorantiam, a common logical fallacy in which it is assumed that since something has not been proven false, it is therefore true. Lack of evidence to the contrary is not proof. You've already agreed with this when you say that it doesn't constitute proof, but you forget it again when you say that it constitutes evidence admissible in court. What you're perhaps not realizing is that courts use the same test of evidence. No court would allow this case to proceed based *solely* on this kind of evidence, because none of it directly addresses the issue of complicity. Put another way, none of the circumstantial allegations, even were they proven to not be circumstantial, prove complicity. This is demonstrated by the simple fact that each bit of "evidence" has an alternate explanation, which is equally viable in the legal sense. Note that I'm not saying that the alternate explanation is true, I'm saying that it's equally demonstrable. Which reduces your argument to a matter of "where there's smoke, there's fire". Sure, you can read it out in a courtroom, and people can take it into consideration, but if that was all you had you'd never get to trial in the first place. For that matter, it violates basic principles of critical thinking. Let's see what we have here.... Alternate explanations range from partisan politics (fighting the dems) to embarassment (or fear of charges of criminal negligence) about not doing what he could to protect the country. In fact they did. They testified on the record, which for the President and Vice-President is effectively the same thing, since they're already under oath not to lie. (And if you don't think that's strong enough, I have nine words for you: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman.") Alternate explanations range from partisan politics to national security issues to embarassment about not doing what he could to protect the country. Irrelevent. The document was released by the National Security Advisor in sworn testimony before the 9/11 Commission (on live television, as I recall). Incorrect. See the 9/11 Commission report, pages 86, 117, 141, 274-5, and the entire section entitled "The System was Blinking Red" (especially the subsection titled "The Drumbeat Begins", on pages 255-6. Interesting. What is Ruppert's cited source for this information? I've read that they had a copy for months, but I've never heard that one. What evidence would that be? Cite Ruppert's sources please. On the whole, an entertaining discussion, but we're still way out in la-la land.

Pets can't express to friends and loved ones that they would rather die than be kept alive in a vegetative state, unable to even swallow food or recognize them. Terri Schiavo did exactly that, as two trials and countless appeals upheld.

Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe". I was just talking about this in another thread, I didn't know this stuff myself, I've just been reading it over the last week or so. Great book. (Wait... I just made it up out of thin air! Really! I'm a genius! No? What do you mean you don't believe me?!)

Which (as Einstein discovered) is identical in nature to any other kind of acceleration.

According to Einstein, none of us are stationary at all. We're all moving at the speed of light, it's just that most our momentum is being translated along the Time axis. Two people sitting side-by-side aren't actually sitting still -- they're moving through space-time at the same rate and along the same vector. If one of them moves off in another direction, then some of his momentum has been taken away from T in order to be translated along X, Y and/or Z. Thus he appears to have not moved as far along in time as the first person. (Photons, on the other hand, move entirely along the X/Y/Z axes, and never along T, which is why they always seem to be moving at the same, unchangable speed.) If you look at it that way, rather than try to memorize various paradoxes and their resolutions, not only will relativity make a lot more sense, but much of quantum mechanics and particle physics will drop neatly into place as well.

Again, that's not what we're debating. What we're debating is whether or not that was deliberate, as part of an effort to (specifically) collude or cooperate with the 9/11 terror attack. You're attempting to prove collusion, not confusion. I'll simply grant (for the sake of discussion) the latter -- that the tests or practice or whatever it was that was being run that day caused confusion and/or hindered efforts. I'm not sure why it matters -- it's not like we had missiles or airplanes ready to go up there and shoot down terrorist-controlled passenger planes. But it's stipulated for the sake of discussion.

Well there's no particular rush, but this isn't what I had in mind at all. Please review our discussion and, if you're still so inclined, respond in the agreed-upon manner, when you have time. Thanks, and good luck with the lawn.

It's a file on your hard drive that starts the boot-up process for Windows NT-based operating systems (XP, 2000, etc, as opposed to 95, 98, etc). That error message can mean a number of things, such as a bad hard drive or a damaged partition. If you made an emergency boot disk then you can boot off that and repair the partition. Otherwise you can make an emergency boot disk on another computer and boot off that. Another option is to boot off the Windows XP disk and go through some of the repair options in there (there's an emergency repair option that comes up automatically, as I dimly recall).

I'll take a shot at this, having been reading Brian Green's "The Elegent Universe" this week. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. First of all, the answer has no solution because you can't travel at the speed of light. Hypotheticals have no frame of reference. However, we can try to envision what might happen if a photon were to, say, split into two photons, and one of them bounces off a mirror and returns to the starting point, where the first photon is waiting and observing. (Two photons walk into a bar. One of them looks into the mirror and says to his mate, "Hey, where'd you get that shiner!") (drum riff please) I'll answer "Yes". And when the light bounces off something and returns, it will appear to be travelling at the speed of light. The problem is actually an illusion rather than a paradox, and it's caused by a failure on the part of humans to visually comprehend the true (i.e. four-dimensional) nature of space. If you realize, as Einstein himself pointed out, that we're all travelling at the speed of light, expending most of our momentum along the "T" axis, and that photons expend none of their momentum along the T axis (i.e. they're "frozen" in time, expending all of their momentum along X/Y/Z), it makes a lot more sense. Put another way, we know that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. So if you visualize every object in the universe moving at the speed of light along the T axis, then in a sense these paradoxes are just due to the subtractive rather than the additive nature of relative observations of time. In other words, it SEEMS like when one object passes another that there's a relative difference in time measurement. But in fact one of them is actually "falling back" a little along the T axis in order to translate some of its momentum along the X, Y, and/or Z axis. In the case of our two photonic buddies, this is irrelevent, since they have no T axis of travel. From their perspective, photons fly about them at the same speed, time never changes, and nothing else (aside from other photons) appears to be moving at all (along X/Y/Z).

Wikimedia bought out by Encyclopedia Britanica: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Britannica_takeover_of_Wikimedia The specific changes are funnier when read in Wiki format:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050401.html APOD obviously having a little fun with the date.

Funny this comes up again, as I just saw a PBS Nova on HDTV about this last night. (Boy, PBS' HDTV quality is really low compared with Mark Cuban's HDNet -- which ironically also ran a news report last night about Phuket that was just shot a couple of weeks ago, basically focusing on how they need tourists to return to the island and spend money so they can recover). Anyway, they did a number of interviews with NOAA employees, looking at the timeline and what they did and when. Obviously not an objective investigation, but it did sound like they tried their best.

That's fine, I probably won't be on again tonight. It doesn't matter to me.

Online discussion has changed my political and moral viewpoint vastly over the years. I've been involved in online discussion since the early days of CompuServe and The Well. I've gone from a conservative (libertarian and conservative radio shows were the first entities that made me actually think about politics) to a liberal and back to the middle again.

Have fun with what? That? That's just wild conjecture, exactly the sort of thing I'm not interested in debating. I hope TT understands that.