It just ticks me off when some of them want special rights, not equal rights. And in this day and age, too many seem willing to give it to them. All for the sake of political correctness. After all, the only group that can be racist is Caucasians, apparently.

Not saying they're all like that, but whew, Cincinnati is chock full.

That's funny I don't think you have Georgian ancestry.

I hate when they play their drum music during my afternoon tea.

This will sound cold at first, but bear with me. I've decided that it's a bad idea to try to cultivate emotional connections to strangers in a disaster that you weren't a part of. Those connections have their place at the scene of the disaster itself, and similar emotions come into play when the disaster involves an acquaintance, but it's not appropriate to do that with people you have no connection to at all. It's not bad to feel sad or angry in a less personal sense, but those intense human connection tend to distort a person's view of reality when cultivated indiscriminately.

The fact that terrorists attacked us and killed many of our citizens is very concerning in it's own way, but the cost in personal suffering is no less than the cost of the three thousand people who die in motor vehicle accidents every month. When's the last time we thought about those people? When I hear on the news that someone has died in a car wreck, I feel sorry for them, but I don't try to fully empathize with their family. The intense personal connections between humans during crisis is a very important part of our emotional make-up, but when evaluating world events we need to be able to perform a more objective analysis of events.

Obi, I think what you're arguing is exactly what we do if on a subconcious level. If all Americans had cultivated an emotional attachment to those that died, we'd have accomplished nothing, and our country would now be in huge turmoil (ok fine it is in turmoil, but not for that reason). We're not saying every American should have gone into mourning, wearing black clothes and sitting around crying and doing nothing. But a moment to pray collectively for the souls involved (or whatever your religious equivilent may be) and recognize the horror of the situation is quite appropriate.

Somewhat along those lines, how does everyone feel about 9/11 being made a national holiday? I am personally against the idea. On the surface, I agree with having a day we can use to officially remember and recognize, even mourn the tragedy. However, I am also quite confident that if such a day were to exist, it would be used as no more than an excuse to get out of work and get drunk for the majority of Americans (ie Veterns Day, Memorial Day, etc), and such a cheapening of the event would really tick me off.

I think that there is also a distinction between thousands of individual, tragic, events and a heinous attack that at not just thousands of individuals but a country and a society. That doesn't diminish the individual, tragic deaths from things such as accidents but it does exist in a different frame of reference from acts resulting in the mass murder of thousands.

...You've never noticed this at all in the past?

I just thought he did it on purpose to get a rise out of people.

is such a crock unless you go to certain 3rd world countries.

there fixed!

That was my first thought when I read this thread. It was surreal to see a plane landed atop the Twin Towers, but it didn't really make me sad.

Eventually every day will be a holiday and no work will ever be done because we'll be so busy remembering every event that happened in the past. Because, you know, we need holidays to remember otherwise no one would even remember that a fellow named Martin Luther King, Jr. existed. Or that we have veterans. That fought in wars.

Not really.

Hey, if I had my way, ever day would be a Friday, and you could even speed on the highway... etc.

The fact that Freelancer believes in the WTC being orchestrated by the government, despite the fact that all theories can be debunked with simple logic or simple junior school science, makes believe that his intellect is of the lowest in this community, quite possibly, in his own community, and family, and hopefully, country.

He better be rock bottom, because anything lower, and we'd have to kill it.

**** off, *****.

You'd have to be pretty ****ing dim to buy the official story.

*******. I hope you DIAF you little ****. You better be careful or I'll cut off your balls with a rusty butter knife.

eh look normally i am all for being argumentative with freelancer. but, he already got banned so this is really uncalled for, and bordering on simply using this topic for blatant trolling.

or not...

Haha, really?

**** that. Then I'd be working everyday (although I have been doing that since last October anyway). I say Saturday would be better.

Go Asterix!

hey man, I didn't write the stupid rap. But anyway, Saturday doesn't rhyme with highway.

Back on topic, the only part about 9/11 that I have a hard time believing is the 3rd plane that was supposedly overcome by passengers and crashed in the desert. The whole thing seems fishy to me, and I find it much easier to believe that we (US Military) shot it down. By that point, I wouldn't have blamed them if they did, but I'm sure they would have wanted to avoid the certain public backlash that would have followed for firing on and *technically* killing innocent American civilians.

I had no idea that was rap.

I would agree that it is believable that the plane was shot down and that was my initial suspicion however there's just too much actual evidence to showing what really happened to still believe the plane was shot down. I don't think any reasonable person would have a problem with that course of action anyway.

The cell phone conversations [that the government faked] from family members on the flight who said they were going to take the hijackers on was what changed my mind about the 3rd plane being brought down. It's consistent with what my father would do, so I'm not that surprised to hear a whole group of passengers did it. Especially since some of them seemed to have figured out what had happened to at least one other plane.

Yeah, that is the thing about the 9/11 attacks. Hijackings had not resulted in that level of catastrophe in the past. Now that passengers would assume that is a probability it would be extremely difficult to control a plane full of desperate travelers.

Haha.

I could argue that nobody in Al Qaeda predicted the attacks would have that level of success, either. The fact that steel is more malleable at higher temperatures seems almost forgotten by our civilization.

Did Freelancer just get told off by El Maco?

D:

Who knows but they had not been successfully used as weapons before and that was my main point.

Yeah, old school. :p I Wish by Skee-Lo.

And since when are the american people reasonable?
:p

Anyway, what about the fact that the cell phones shouldn't have been able to work at the altitude the plane was traveling and yet somehow they did? Cellphones do not have a very high vertical range simply because it would require significantly more juice from the towers to transmit vertically, and there's no real benefit.

I don't know. You would probably have to ask the people that received the calls or confirm the actual altitude somehow since I don't know what levels they were flying at or how many people and how often they might have gotten signals. Then there's the in cabin recordings to debunk. Just seems like a whole lot of conspiracy to cover up an acceptable course of action.

The cruising altitude of a passenger jet is well within the range of a regular GSM tower.

It's amazing how many of these conspiracy theorists come from armchair scientists with no expertise.

No it's not.

Additionally, there's the problem of the speed of travel on an airline, which forces the cell to be switching towers constantly. If a call did happen to go through, it would almost certainly be dropped in a matter of seconds.

Haven't you SEEN people make cell phone calls on airplanes when they didn't think anyone was looking? Unless they were talking to themselves, I'm pretty sure all of those people had normal carriers.

Thanks Sarn, I didn't know they made directional antennas and your argument-free link to wikipedia has made me totally change my belief in how radio works.



so you mean you might get problems like the ones that happened, right?

The cruising altitude of the flight in question was about 10km. GSM specifies a 35 km effective range at ground level but with leakage you could be able to get intermittent service within a 40 km sphere.

That's assuming it's not a long range GSM tower.

Not to mention, you're going to have a plane full of passengers, almost all of whom will be trying to get a signal. Even if your chances are low, someone is bound to get a signal eventually.

Like abiogenesis, it only had to work once.

I have no problem believing that the passengers tried to fight their hijackers, but the sentiment that they deliberately crashed it in glorious self-sacrifice to prevent the hijackers from using it as a weapon is a little curious. It seems much more likely that they stormed the hijackers and in the struggle they lost control of the plane and it crashed. Was the black box recovered?

Anyway, certainly not what I'd do. When I'm going, I'm taking all you mother****ers with me.