Conspiracy theories are BS, we all know that.

^{tinfoil hat with style}

Only gullible fools and emotionally unhinged attention-seekers could believe that

public opinion on the internet would be astroturfed, that civil rights movements would be infiltrated or that main stream media would be influenced by government propaganda agencies,
the government would use false pretenses and outright lies to justify invastions and wars against other countries or perpetrate false flag terrorist attacks,
someone would intentionally release chemical particles, bacteria or even bugs into the atmosphere, or attempt to influence weather patterns, even meddle with the ionosphere using high-energy microwave radiation,
government intelligence agencies would be among the greatest players in the international drug trade,
government agencies would support and assist totalitarian regime's murder, abduction, rape and torture of political opposition,
a "shadow government" has been ruling the U.S. for the last ~15 years,
a vast surveillance system eavesdrops on all private communications worldwide,
in a free and democratic country, secret courts would exist,
the financial elite are working towards a "New World Order" of centralization and external control (and even complain publicly when opposed by popular opinion),
in a free and open market, manufacturers would collude to artifically shorten the lifespan of their products to maximize their profits,
government agencies would conduct experiments with mind control via torture, electro shocks, sensory and sleep deprivation and drugs such as LSD for interrogations and even investigated the weaponization potential of occult dark magic,
government agencies would use unsuspecting citizens as guinea pigs in their experiments,
or that the label "conspiracy theorist" itself was coined to silence doubters and critics of official narratives.

^{If you found any sarcasm in the above paragraph, you may keep it, of course (there is a long and growing list of confirmed ("Wikipedia-true", as I like to call them) "conspiracy theories" in the /r/conspiracy wiki). Far from alleging that all conspiracy theories are true, and more than proving a broken clock is right twice a day, it demonstrates that alternative explanations of history should not be dismissed based solely on their public perception as "conspiracy theories".}

^{Hive account@corbettreport}

Let us talk about 9/11.

Why #investigate911? Because it has never been investigated properly.

"But the 9/11 Commission Report", you say, but consider:

Six out of the 9/11 commissioners are on record distancing themselves from the report and its veracity or strongly criticizing the proceedings and conflicts of interest, repeatedly and independently, going so far as calling it a "cover-up" and "set up to fail" -, among them both authors of the 9/11 Commission Report: Thomas Kean, Lee Hamilton, Timothy Roemer, Max Cleland, John Lehman and Bob Kerrey:

Lee and I write in our book that we think the commission in many ways was set up to fail, because we had not enough money, we didn't have enough time, we've been appointed by the most partisan people in Washington. :: Thomas Kean, 9/11 Commission co-chair, Commission "set up to fail"

So there are all kinds of reasons we thought we were set up to fail: we got started late, we had a very short timeframe - indeed we had to get it extended - we did not have enough money, they were afraid we're gonna hang somebody, that we would point the finger :: Lee Hamilton, 9/11 Commission co-chair Commission "set up to fail"

"We were extremely frustrated with the false statements we were getting. We were not sure of the intent, whether it was to deceive the commission or merely part of the fumbling bureaucracy." :: 9/11 commissioner Timothy Roemer, 9/11 panel distrusted Pentagon testimony: Commissioners considered criminal probe of false statements, cnn.com, August 2, 2006

We purposely put together a staff that had – in a way - conflicts of interest. [...] All of the staff had, to a certain extent, some conflict of interest. :: John Lehman, 9/11 Commissioner: 'We had to go through Karl Rove', Nick Langewis, David Edwards, rawstory.com, February 3, 2008; see also: Lehman: Commission Purposely Set Up So that 9/11 Staff Had Conflict of Interest

The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reached an agreement with the White House yesterday to gain restricted access to years of classified presidential briefings, which had been the focus of subpoena threats from the panel's chairman. [...] Cleland called the agreement "unconscionable" and said it "was deliberately compromised by the president of the United States" in order to limit the panel's work. "If this decision stands, I as a member of the commission cannot look any American in the eye, especially family members of victims, and say the commission had full access," he said. "This investigation is now compromised . . . This is `The Gong Show'; this isn't protection of national security." :: 9/11 panel to get access to withheld data, Laurence Arnold, Associated Press, The Boston Globe, November 13, 2003

President Bush personally has nixed the effort of the 9-11 Commission to get all the documents in the White House, especially the Presidential daily briefs, which basically tell the Commission and the American people what the President knew and when he knew it in regards to the potential attack on 9-11 and the attack itself and the follow-up. He has personally nixed that information coming to 9-11. That means to me that all of the members of that commission will never get to see the real documents that I think are sensitive. The President, as I think John Kerry mentioned, had time to go to rodeo, but didn’t have time to appear fully before the 9-11 commission. Truth of the matter is, the White House has played cover-up and a slow walk to this game from the beginning. Now after sewing to the wind, they’re reaping the whirl wind. Now what they’ve done is forced the Congress to extend the 9-11 Commission two more months, which kicks the final report in July right before the Democratic National Convention. That’s not the Democrats’ fault. That’s not the 9-11 Commission’s fault. That is the fault of the White House, to slow up this thing and it never even held any public hearing for six months. [...] One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9-11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up. :: "The White House Has Played Cover-Up" - Former 9/11 Commission Member Max Cleland Blasts Bush, Interview with Amy Goodman, Democray Now!, March 23, 2004

At some level of the government, at some point in time … there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened. :: The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America’s Defense on 9/11, John Farmer, 2009

"I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described," John Farmer, a former New Jersey attorney general who led the staff inquiry into events on Sept. 11, said in a recent interview. "The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years. . . . This is not spin. This is not true." :: 9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon, Dan Eggen, Washington Post, August 2, 2006

Why do you think officials tried to obscure some of the faulty decision making and communication on 9/11? It's almost a culture of concealment, for lack of a better word. You have someone like Sandy Berger, who by all accounts is a decent guy, taking rather extreme measures to remove documents from the National Archives and hide them at a construction site where he could retrieve them later and destroy them. There were interviews made at the FAA's New York center the night of 9/11 and those tapes were destroyed. The CIA tapes of the interrogations were destroyed. The story of 9/11 itself, to put it mildly, was distorted and was completely different from the way things happened. :: John Farmer in Q&A: A New Look at the 9/11 Commission, Dan Fletcher, time.com, September 11, 2009

Lehman: Commission Purposely Set Up So that 9/11 Staff Had Conflict of Interest

911 Commissioner Bob Kerrey claims 911 was a 30 year conspiracy (alt)

This doesn't prove, or intend to prove, that "9/11 was an inside job", or that "Bush did 9/11". It demonstrates however that it would be a grave mistake to think that the 9/11 Commission Report answered all questions, left no stone unturned, or was the least bit "independent" and thorough. When President Bush agreed (despite initially great resistance) to come before the commission, it was only together with Dick Cheney, not under oath, and behind closed doors, afterwards, he called it a "good conversation". Last month's long-awaited, but ultimately ignored release of the "28 pages" originally redacted from the report only served to confirm the suspicion that anything resembling "truth" is not to be expected from the government.

why care if 9/11 was a conspiracy

In this YT clip gone viral, "Tye the Blacksmith" says: "If it was conspiracy, I do not care." This stance has become quite common, with many who weren't even alive in 2001 now joining the debate. This was 15 years ago, let it rest, there are other things of greater importance, they say, and forget that 9/11, after 40+ years of cold wars, iron curtains and red phones, triggered the first and only casus foederis according to Article 5 of the NATO Charta, and that 9/11 served and continues to serve as justification for:

the war in Afghanistan.
the invasion of Iraq - widely regarded as illegal.
military doctrines of the "shock and awe" (terrorist) type.
the eradication of human rights and civil liberties and an overall regression to the Dark Ages, including, but not limited to, making torture, warrantless mass surveillance, unlimited detention and remote controlled execution without trial acceptable to the public.
the ongoing "War against terror" causing chaos, suffering and death in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, the Philippines, Yemen, Libya, Mali and other countries all over the world.

^{An Iraqi in Abu Ghuraib rejoices at all the freedoms}

Just a few weeks ago, government speaker to the FRG Christiane Wirtz justified the deployment of German military to Syria with the "War on Terror".

Although 9/11 happened almost 15 years ago - and probably for most of us, in a faraway country - it still of great importance, as its fallout concerns all of our everyday's lives.

Inarguably, 9/11 simply fell into the laps of well-prepared profiteers and racketeers; a compelling case is made by Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine and those who favor the LIHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose) reading.

Let it not be suggested that the answer to Cui bono? (not Osama bin Laden, not the people of Afghanistan and not the people of the Western World!) is already irrefutable proof of conspiracy.

Instead, on to the loose nuts suggesting the rabbit hole goes even deeper.

illuminati lizard alien outer space beam nanotermite mikronuke MIHOP

Upon completion, the World Trade Center buildings 1 and 2, called "North Tower" and "South Tower", were the tallest buildings in the world for a while, standing over 400 meters tall, built from finest structural steel, and were considered miracles of modern engineering. Their style often considered "gothic", architect Minoru Yamasaki had slightly different ideas for the design.

^{The kerosene deflagration upon impact}

When the towers fell, it was a matter of seconds - almost free fall, some initially said, more conservative numbers go from 12 to 16 and even up to 30 seconds, counting the swaying portion of the core (the "spire") that stood out for two additional blinks of an eye. In a physical phenomenon never seen before nor after, these two giant, slender steel structures, minutes apart, disintegrated progressively from top to bottom in a huge, explosive, mushroom-shaped fountain of dust and debris, down through themselves and in all directions of the heavens, leaving the whole city in a thick blanket of ultrafine powder - paper, microscopic steel spheres, concrete, wallboard, glass, human remains - and the footprints themselves stinking holes filled with molten metal and concrete with fires that would burn into december, a "chemical factory" surrounded by a fence from the lowermost perimeter columns and a level field consisting of the wafer-like perimeter column assemblies strewn around the plaza.

^{Elevation map generated by NOAAs LIDAR}

Now there are two irreconcilable views on why and how that could happen.

View Number One

is summarized minutes after the second tower's "collapse" by "Mark 'Harley Guy' Walsh", FOX freelancer:

Mostly due to structural failure, because the fire was just too intense.

And sure enough, hours later and in the following days, weeks, months and years, this theory found widespread support from experts and laypeople alike: quite obviously, although the towers merely swayed from the horizontal impact of the planes, and although most of the kerosene burnt off within seconds in dramatic deflagration fireballs and the rest within the building could accelerate the office fires for a few minutes at most, the plane must have cut through the core columns and stripped off the fireproofing, facilitating the softening of the structural steel, allowing it to suddenly give in at all columns of one floor simultaneously, starting a complex succession of serial failures initiating a pancake collapse, similar to a domino chain reaction, simply following gravity with the added dynamic force of each impact between the floors due to its sheer size.

In other words:

the jet fuel melted the steel beams.

^{Sources: New Scientist, Sept. 12th, Richard Ebeltoft, Chris Wise, Eduardo Kausel, Dr. Abdolhassan Astaneh-Asl, Matthys Levi, Hyman Brown, Lee Hamilton, Guy F. Tozzoli}

Over the years, this view has evolved into various splinter groups, both among experts and laypeople.

View Number Two

surmises that Newton/Euler's Laws of Motion and the principles of classical mechanics are applicable to big steel towers as well and thus, if a tower is supposed to stand up at least somewhat safely against frequent subtropical hurricanes and less frequent earthquakes, it must at least have the strength to keep its own weight up and hence, a progression of collapse should stop on grounds of the universal principles of conservation of momentum and energy alone. It is held by a group calling itself "Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth" and a few handful of other independent researchers and experimenters who conclude that some form additional energy which classically does not belong into a healthy office building must have been present when the Twin Towers disassembled themselves.

How is a lay person supposed to form an educated opinion if even experts can't agree on a model for the most fundamental concept of classical mechanics - a thing with given mass m that falls through given height h in given time t on a planet with a given gravitational surface acceleration g?

Richard Feynman to the rescue!

If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is… If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.

To this day, there is not a single experiment supporting "View Number One" by demonstrating the alleged principle behind a complete, vertical, progressive top-down collapse. If it were as evident as claimed, it should be easy to replicate, yet it is not. Its supporters stubbornly hide behind complicated papers, which, when deciphered, only reveal that there simply was, on average, not enough strength in the building to resist its own weight and hence, the towers were "doomed" [sic!], and global progressive collapse "inevitable" [sic!!!].

^{If F[c]>mg, the collapse decelerates, otherwise, it is unstoppable. How to build a tower with mg>F[c]?}

View Number Two, on the other hand, has repeatedly been confirmed by "experiments" with objects of all sizes, has quite simple analytical approaches to the problem and, most of all, observation on its side.

In other words: build a tower, drop the top 1/4 on the rest, observe, report, repeat - welcome to

#towerchallenge!

But where is the evidence then?

So glad you ask! Instead of salvaging all the debris for study and reverse engineering the failure modes as it is usual after traffic accidents and plane crashes to learn what is possible to prevent future disasters - even more indicated by the unprecedented nature of the phenomenon - officials lost no time to ship the evidence directly from the crime scene to its destruction in the smelting furnaces of India and China (2, 3, 4).

Even NIST had less than 0.5% of the steel at its disposal, but curiously failed to act on the recommendations of FEMAs appendix C to have a closer look at the "deepest mystery" - steel beams with signs of heavy corrosion, thinned to razor sharpness, with holes like Swiss cheese and signs of eutectic melting - although NISTs chief investigator John Gross clearly had his fun posing next to similar pieces only to later claim adamantly he has no knowledge of signs or reports of molten steel.

Engineering is complicated!

But does it really take a PhD in Einsteinian relativity to tell a natural collapse from an expert, perfect building implosion?

Later in the afternoon, a third building collapsed straight down into its footprint, the WTC 7 or Salomon Building just across the street from the rest of the WTC complex - essentially at free fall rate, as high school physics teacher David Chandler pointed out to NIST, who simply declared this the first case of a steel building collapse primarily due to office fire and presented short animations of jellifying towers, but refused to provide the input data for the underlying physics model.

if you see someone pissing into your beer, do you study urology or do you become a brewing master before you consider not gulping it down?

Nitpicking

Even if not the dissociation of the commissioners from their own report, the destruction of evidence at v[max], the lack of a reliable explanation for an unprecedented mechanical phenomenon, the signs of extremely hot and extremely long-burning fires in the rubble and the evasions of officials tasked with finding out the causes for the collapse and means to prevent similar disasters are not sufficiently overwhelming evidence that something is rotten in the state of Denmark, how then can the announcement by EPAs Christie Todd-Whitman that the air is safe to breathe be reconciled with the observation that the dust cloud even killed unborn life and is still killing first responders into an apology for the role the governments played in this whole theater?

Then even more explaining needs to be done for how the mightiest military in the world was unable to defend itself against an attack it was already training for at the very instant, how those responsible for the failure were promoted, how Dr. Rice could claim such an event could not be foreseen, how the whistleblowers were silenced, how the media could predict the collapse of WTC 7, why the FBI never suspected OBL, why the clear evidence of insider trading and foreknowledge has been ignored,

...and then there would still be irregularities like the phone calls of Todd Beamer and Barbara Olson, the POTUS' lingering in a classroom while his country was under the worst attack since Pearl Harbor, the black boxes...

...and still no mention of or link to anything related to the pentagram gone.

However you turn and twist it:

the "official conspiracy theory" is blatant nonsense.

^{Hive account@corbettreport explains the official conspiracy theory in under five minutes [sourced transcript]}

i speak freely before you other conspiracy theorists

who are skeptical of the "conventional wisdom" and "expert consensus", the complex and esoteric knowledge about the dark arts of economy, of compound interest and usury, of corrupt central banking systems and destructive markets, of power-grabbing government officials and paralysing bureaucracy, of the praise of eternal growth - those of you who value sustainability, liberty and freedom!

With those seeking refuge from the censorship of the old internet, inevitably will come those looking for a place on the blockchain to carve their research, opinion and arguments about these and similar "conspiracy theories" into.

And if the old internet is any indication, then some of them will from time to time come crawling out of their little #investigate911 and #vaxxed and #geoengineering categories and, against all your protest and objection, get washed onto the trending pages.

It would be too much to ask to agree whole-heartedly and non-questioningly with all and everything that is being presented as proof and evidence, and typical FUD posts never make it far by their nature anyway, so that's not what this is about. But if the words

Steem is committed to enabling free speech and building a free society

are to hold true, it is not advisable to use the downflag button to signal disagreement, to dismiss them as "twoofers" solely for not singing with the choir. Even if the downvote is well-intentioned, to protect gullible minds from the contagious disease of paranoia, mistrust, tinfoil-hattery, depressive suicide, to protect children dying from not getting healthy vaccinations and explorers from dying in Antarctica in the attempt to prove the world is a globe after all, it just might be the very post that needed to get the word out about a just grievance. If in doubt, imagine the White Rose would have peddled their conspiracy theories on Steemit!

Don't be Jakob Schmied.

I would like to live in a world where the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

Beautiful words, eh?

Galileo Galilei.

There can only be one way to combat misinformation:

better information.

a lesson

was learned from "Dr. Strangelove": how important it is that, in the case of an emergency, protocols be in place to pass vital information from any place in the world to whom it concerns.

The subscribers of /r/911truth would be disoriented on Steemit (as it allows no numbers as first character of a category name), so let it be known that #investigate911 shall be where we can meet again when TSHTF on reddit, because that's what we are good at: investigating.

Maybe it is here that a more international audience can give insights into how the day was perceived in their parts of the world; it would be nice to see some "Western" filter bubbles bursting. Not just a crackpot like Ahmadinejad argues from his authority as engineer, it is also heard from Saudia Arabia that:

all the wise people in the world who are experts on American policy and who analyze the images and the videos agree unanimously that what happened in the Towers was a purely American action, planned and carried out within the U.S.

...what say you, Russia, South America, Africa, Asia?

sources

The 9/11 Timeline, historycommons.org

Consensus panel

James Corbett's Hive account@corbettreport introduction post on Steemit

^{And just so you don't think I'm really a flat-earther,

I'll make an argument for concave earth in my next post.}

The Case For an Independent and International Investigation Into The Terrorist Attacks of September 11th, 2001 [introducing #investigate911]