that, echoed once by the gal who used to cut my hair. How to explain the destructive power of F=ma and what a quickly accelerating mass of increasing aggregate weight heading straight down in one direction can do – how to explain that to someone who had already jumped on the conspiracy wagon. We had always been friendly towards each other, so, after a while, rather than flip out (inside I was seething), I asked her for the talcum powder. I shook a large amount of the powder onto my upturned left hand and held my downturned right hand a few inches above it. “See the space between my hands? Let’s say that’s the 60th floor of one of the world trade center buildings. This is what happened when everything above the 60th floor came straight down on top of it.” Then I (angrily, I admit) brought my right hand down hard and fast. Loud noise and a big cloud of powder. I went on to explain that what she saw in the collapse of WTC1 and 2 were clouds of instantly pulverized building materials, furniture, rugs and glass, being ejected from each floor as the structures collapsed and not explosions. I let her imagination run on the part about pulverization.
still shocking after all these years. We were still believing that our friends and colleagues would get out until the South Tower came down. Then it really started to sink in that there was no hope.
A few months back I did see a bit of an uptick in what’s sort of the opposite side of 9/11 conspiracies, in the form of younger people discovering that Bin Laden’s motives were revenge for US actions in the Middle East, specifically their support for the Israeli government. As far as I can tell those motives were never widely published in the US media, so I think they came as a bit of a shock to 20-somethings.
I remember a brief window following Sept 11 2001 - a few weeks, tops - where people who didn’t usually ask those sorts of questions were seeking the answers. Journalists like Robert Fisk were getting a lot more attention than usual.
Followed by “they hate us for our freedom” catching on, and curiosity dropping.
The beginning audio is 4 people (I think: two men, two women) talking in Japanese about what they are seeing happening. At first they’re talking about the huge amount of smoke, and a discussion on how much it’s possibly still on fire inside the buildings. They ask him to zoom in to try and see how big the flames are on inside the structure.
When the first tower collapses, the conversation quickly becomes one of shock and dismay. “Oh no!”, “I’m scared!” “This can’t be happening!”, etc.
Then of course they quickly realize the cost in human lives is going to be huge. “They’re all gone”, “Everyone at ground level is in danger too.” “Even the people on the ground nearby are probably dead.” “The surrounding buildings have probably collapsed as well.” “Any news crews nearby have probably perished.”
They also start speculating as to the cause of the collapse. At 1:40 the woman says, “That can’t just be from the fire, can it? There must have been some other explosion or something? I mean, it collapsed from the bottom, didn’t it?”
The conversation changes to English after 2:00, so there’s no need to translate after that.
Seeing how even at the very beginning they were thinking it had to have been an explosion or something, it really does show how lack of understanding of physics and corresponding lack of trust in the intelligentsia in general contributed to the conspiracy theories that surrounded the collapse of the towers, even from day one.
Good demonstration. I’ve had conversations like this (but no talcum powder).
I think at one point there was a “truther” group of architects and engineers which was just weird? irritating? Not sure what is the right word here. Anyway, people who really should have known better because of their professional expertise.
I used to work for a company that recorded TV news broadcasts for analysis and reporting (like a kind of “clippings service” for broadcast media). There was a rack of baker’s shelving in an annex near my desk that had cardboard boxes full of videocassettes labeled “9/11”, “9/12” and “9/13”. Instead of wiping and re-using the tapes, as we usually did, someone had set three days of recordings aside, creating an archive of the national reporting on September 11th. It might well have been the only such archive that existed.
The company went out of business a few years ago. I have no idea what happened to the tapes, but I imagine they were probably tossed in a dumpster somewhere. As far as I know, they were never digitized.
Now I’m deeply wondering what they had to say about the third building that went down.
< ducks and runs >
One thing made very clear from this footage, especially with the collapse of the second tower, is just how much material and mass falls outwards away from the vertical axis, landing on the surrounding area. The sides peel away like banana skins, totally at odds with any sort of “controlled demolition” claptrap often spouted by the conspiracy crazies.
Too right. I had neighbors who were all-in on this and more.
One held a PhD; both (they were a couple) were college-educated.
I eventually gave up trying understand their point of view. I later learned they also believed that Michelle Obama was a man, and so much more [that I will elide here].
FR. I had to turn it off.
I would question the veracity of the credentials of such groups along with their politics.
… whatever happened to it, we all know it was Osama bin Laden’s fault 
I went down that rabbit hole once out of morbid curiosity. More of the same nonsense, really.
Yeah, I was joking of course. I knew some people then who kept asking, very insistently, why that building “never gets mentioned.”
Why???
We lost our 7th/8th grade parochial school English/History teacher in the attack. He became an FDNY battalion commander some years after leaving the teaching profession (horrible pay for teachers – and he wanted to raise a family… and did), and when hearing of the attack, drove into the city from Staten Island in his small fire truck. He was an FDNY expert in emergency response, something he taught in the department. His widow told me he also took part in the response to the 1993 WTC bombing. One of those guys who everyone spoke of – even before the attack – as having a big impact on everyone who knew him. Yet another opportunity to thank one of your life-mentors… lost.
This footage brings back perhaps the most dreadful day I remember in my personal history. I was at work in central London. We heard the news and switched on the TV. It was a videogames company so we had plenty of TVs. We watched the disaster unfold. I felt the tectonic plates of history moving. An awful lot of things began to go wrong on that day.
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