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‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

politico.com

131–140 of 211 posts

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#131
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On July 7th 2005 I was on a bbc engineering course in a non-disclosable secret nuclear bunker in the Cotswolds, when my phone started ringing (on vibrate). Multiple times. Eventually got a text message saying the London underground was under attack and was I ok. It was only then I asked for the tv to be put on. The 00s were an eventful time. There’s now more time passed since the London attacks and the ita bombing ca…

> On July 7th 2005 I was on a bbc engineering course in a non-disclosable secret nuclear bunker in the Cotswolds, This one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_Norton,_Worcestershire#Th...

shhhh! It's secret!

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#132
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell me more? Any guesses to how it furthered agendas? It certainly changed stuff like airport security. I could see it being allowed to happen to make people take the war on terror more seriously. It would depend on how much of the current state of things could be predicted to determine reasoning. I'm sure even in the internet age there is plenty of forbidden knowledge.

The "war on terror" has served as justification for: - permanent mass surveillance of global communications - total governmental control and visibility into fiat money financial transactions - endless U.S. participation in or support for military campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Syria, and the concomitant trillions spent on military hardware and services - increasingly lawless privacy intrus…

You make it sound like all this stuff started with "war on terror". The US has been at war (and overthrowing governments) ever since WW2. And I'd be seriously surprised if the government did not have "total visibility" into non-cash financial transactions, phone calls, and internet traffic well before 2001.

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#133
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stupidity does not adequately explain the Holocaust...

And neither does it explain 9/11.

You're missing the point of Hanlon's razor. It does allow for malice, but only in cases where incompetence is not an adequate explanation. So there's no contradiction.

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a technical explanation for how call misrouting can happen except to observe that the endpoints are entirely reliant on the network to get this right, they don't even tell each other "Hi I'm X trying to call Y" and "Hi I'm Y answering a call from X". On Strowger electro-mechanical exchanges one of the nice features is that a random piece of the exchange handles each dialed call. This means the human intu…

I have a friend who, for a few months, had a really strange thing going on with his phone. Any time his phone was off, calls to him would be redirected to someone else. It was another person from the same city, but using a different carrier. Me, my friend and other friends of his called both companies to report the error multiple times. All we received was scorn and disbelief. We were told, repeatedly, that it simply…

Did he check if call forwarding was activated?

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#135
post #4

Nearly every American above a certain age remembers precisely where they were on September 11, 2001 False: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/911-memory-accura...

I was knocking a hole in a wall to install some windows that day.

I was told "some boys flew a plane into the twin towers"

I imagined American teens in a 2 seater Cessna. The truth was unimaginable.

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#136

This is a phenomenal oral history of the events, learning of, and response to the events of 9/11. If an emergency is a circumstance in which ongoing realities are emergent and aren't predictable based on previous experience or world-models, this is a phenomenal example of those dynamics. Commander Anthony Barnes: That first hour was mass confusion because there was so much erroneous information. It was hard to tell w…

World models are called 'schemas' in psychology. There is lots of evidence that people process information by fitting it into schemas.

There is an interesting tension between 'assimilating' information (taking in information that easily fits into your schema) and the need for 'accommodation' (acquiring new information that requires completely re-arranging your schema).

There is a high cost to assimilation, which explains why people will often dig in when faced with facts that require accommodation.

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#137
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm comfortable there is certainty. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/unanswered...

If the plane had been blown up by a bomb or shot down, it would have broken up into chunks which would have landed largely intact, because fuselage sections are quite light compared to their volume. You can see this in pictures of other downed or bombed planes, such as the one shot down over Ukraine. Most of the bodies would have fallen out of the plane or come down in the fuselage sections and been mostly intact. Bo…

> You can see this in pictures of other downed or bombed planes, such as the one shot down over Ukraine.

There is a solid chance the person you reply to is also an MH17 truther. It's a package deal.

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#138
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's also chilling, when you think about it a little more, is that a group of civilian passengers made more or less the same decision, and that's the reason these fighter pilots survived the day .

There's no evidence the passengers suicided. They were attempting to save themselves. There was a struggle in the cockpit, and the aircraft crashed. It may even have been that the terrorists crashed the plane when they realized they weren't going to make it to their target. This meme is unhealthy, and disrepectful to the fallen.

[deleted]

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#139
post #54

I was headed downtown to my startup's office when I heard a radio newscast. I don't even know why I had my radio on as it was a pretty short drive. I immediately went in and started checking the web. It gave me a little more information. Fifteen minutes later when my developer showed up you couldn't bring up any news site on the web. Guy from across the hall had a TV and he invited all of us in the building to watch.…

A lot of the Web wasn't geared for high load. Information was developing so rapidly that online was really the only effective place to go for information (such as it was -- there was rampant speculation). Many sites rapidly slimmed down their services and offered lightweight versions. A few lighter-weight sites remained up, notably, at the time, Slashdot. NPR refers to 9/11 as the event which made clear that the netw…

Google.com was pretty central as well.

http://web.mit.edu/6.033/2002/wwwdocs/papers/9-11.html

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#140
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I thought nothing would ever be the same. And nothing ever was. Plenty of stupid political decisions today , and untold billions of wasted money some of which is spent today are a direct consequence of 9/11.

By every measure, the terrorists accomplished their goals and won.

My impression was that the goal was to get the US presence out of the middle east. That goal failed pretty spectacularly.
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