FFS, the human population has increased nearly 700% in 200 years, leading to an equally proportionate increase in twisted fundamentalists. In that time, there has also been a tremendous increase in availability of materials to blow shit up with. Combine that with an increase in global communication and an expanded media that thrives off bad news, and you have a looking glass in which the world appears to have gone to hell. Not just to hell, but the bowels of hell, and then crapped back out and set on fire. And not just fire, but evil corporate George W Hitler fire.

It won’t stop any time soon either, people are going to do crazy stuff until we crack the genetic code and embue future generations with a douchebaggery inhibitor. Best we can do is keep our fingers crossed and hope never to become collateral damage of someone else’s stupid ass agenda.

Going back to Shermer’s point – it is all about beliefs. For the left-wing it is a belief in serving a collective good and dehumanizing the individual. When you serve a collective good it becomes easy to rationalize individuals as selfish and evil creatures who need to be subdued in order to advance the cause.

There were many aspects to the NIST report. In fact, the report reaches up to 10,000 pages. However, the conclusions were written by only a dozen or so people. Many of the people who worked on a specific aspect of the report might not even know what the conclusions were in another area. As well, the NIST report does not go beyond collapse initiation. Bazant picks up where NIST leaves off. So I would need to know those who support NIST’s pre-collapse analysis and Bazant’s post analysis.

-Structural Responses of World Trade Center under Aircraft Attacks

The goal of this paper was to show, “why both buildings did not collapse immediately after impact, and WTC2 collapsed sooner than WTC1.”

I don’t see where it states that they agree with Baznat’s crush-down crush-up hypothesis.

-Could the World Trade Center have been Modified to Prevent its Collapse?

This paper does reference Bazant. But it is Bazant’s 2002 paper.

“The paper by Bazant and Zhou (2002) shows why, when the columns of a single floor of each tower of the WTC lost their load-carrying capacity due to prolonged heating, the whole tower was doomed.”

The current official explanation for “collapse initiation” is the inward bowing of the perimeter columns due to catenary action of the sagging floor trusses, not high column temperatures. Bazant and NIST no longer support the high-column temperature explanation.

-ANATOMY OF A DISASTER: A STRUCTURAL INVESTIGATION OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER COLLAPSES

This paper seems to support the pancake collapse hypothesis, “leading to a pancaking progressive collapse of the entire WTC 1 tower.” This is not the current theory offered by Bazant and NIST.

However, I will agree Bazant supports Bazant theory and he also agrees with NIST. Some of the other authors of his paper, like David Benson, do as well.

Bazant’s paper, ‘Mechanics of Progressive
Collapse: Learning from World Trade
Center and Building Demolitions did appear in a peer review journal, the Journal of Engineering Mechanics. However, Bazant’s conclusions were challenged by James Gourley and Gregory Szuladzinski. These criticisms also passed peer review and appeared in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics. So the paper does not stand unchallenged. More recently other critics have joined the fray.

The long march towards the truth continues.

Okay, but what percentage of the engineering community has gone on record stating that they agree with NIST and Bazant?

Please explain why you believe that the national Libertarian Party has dropped this requirement. Since this is quite clearly not the case, it makes your post sound like an underhanded swipe at the LP.

Not sure if I agree with your reasoning, but you might find this article that details a series of experiments with structural steel and heat interesting:

Behavior of Steel Columns at Elevated Temperatures
K. W. Poh and I. D. Bennetts, J. Struct. Engrg. 121, 676 (1995), DOI:10.1061/(ASCE)0733-9445(1995)121:4(676)

Probably, you should check all the citing articles to get a feel for what has been done since, and cited articles to get an idea of what was known in 1995. I mean, if your actually interested in knowing what engineers know about heat, steel, and structural strength.

For example, that article is cited by this one:

Dominant Factor in the Collapse of WTC-1
Konstantinos Miamis, Ayhan Irfanoglu, and Mete A. Sozen, J. Perf. Constr. Fac. 23, 203 (2009), DOI:10.1061/(ASCE)CF.1943-5509.0000014

Which, if I’m not mistaken, adds three more authors to my abbreviated list of engineers and experts with publications in the peer reviewed literature that discount the controlled demolition hypothesis.

The peer reviewed literature really represents the position not just of the authors of the papers themselves, but of a field as a whole. And if you find one expert who claims to find some fatal flaws in a paper, you should bear in mind that his results have not been verified by another expert, and the paper has been approved by at least three.

In any case, I do want to thank you for prompting me to do a more thorough investigation of what the field of structural engineering has to say about 911. Paper searches in fields I’m not familiar with is one of my favorite means of procrastination.

These authors have a slightly different viewpoint on exactly why the world trade center towers were not brought down by controlled demolition. SO I think that’s 32 published, peer reviewed authors.

How many published, peer reviewed papers in the engineering and construction journals support demolition?