re: What really matters

One of the central themes of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code is that Jesus had it going on with Mary Magdalene and had a child and that the church has been covering it up for centuries. Well, I've seen alot of statements and debate about whether or not Christ was married, and I have to say ... SO WHAT?!

First off, need I remind everyone here at the Da Vinci code is found in the Fiction section?

And more importantly, whether or not Jesus was married takes absolutely nothing away from the real reason He was here. To suffer and die on a cross.

And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death — even death on a cross! Philippians 2:8 (New International Version)

Jesus gave everything - his life, his humanity, and if you believe Dan Brown, his love and family as payment for the sins of mankind.

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
John 3:16 (New International Version)

So, in the final analysis, I have to ask. Whether or not Jesus was married to Mary, who watched him die - BTW, does it really matter?

Not to me.

re: trying to become Mini Moore's

Gentlemen. I watched your film and want to congratulate you on your achievement. Not the producing of a hard hitting documentary on 9-11, mind you, but by doing such a good job screwing up the details which you present! By creating so many errors in your work, you have truly achieved a level only suprised by your mentor Michael Moore.

Let's take a look at some of your best "Whoppers:"

Claim - "A3's only in storage at Raytheon"

Fact: "In the agreement Hughes had with the Navy, the Navy had agreed to retain at least one aircraft in inviolate storage at Davis-Monthan for long term parts support for major structural parts. Westinghouse also operated an A-3 in a similar arrangement."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-3_Skywarrior

"A US Miltary Helicopter circle the Pentagon? Wow, that never happens."

Jim Mars book "Inside Job." Jim Mars also wrote books on the JFK assasination. He makes his living selling conspiracies.

Navy C130s flying over Pentagon. Considering that the Navy operates C130s as part of it's Naval Reserve's Fleet Logistic Support Wing as part of it's VR-53 squadron based out of Andrews AFB, that's a fairly normal thing.
http://www.dcmilitary.com/baseguides/navy/ndw/ndw_installations.html

"Low, muffled thud, explosions." Gas tanks cause that. I've seen it.

The FBI would confiscate tapes and they would warn people not to discuss it. By default, it's a criminal investigation. They don't want anything to compromise that. It's called STANDARD PROCEDURE.

Rumsfeld safely in his office on the other side of the Pentagon. If a conspiracy, why was Rumsfeld there at all?

100 eyewitness accounts say AA Jet. 2 say small plane. http://911research.wtc7.net/pentagon/evidence/witnesses/jetliner.html#large

"B52 Bomber crashes into the Empire State Building in 1945."

Well, considering the B52 hadn't been operational or even tested until the B-52A first flew in 1954, 9 years later, and considering it's an eight engine jet bomber and the plane that crashed in the Empire State Building was a two engine PROPELLER bomber called a B25 Mitchell ...

The B52 weighs 185,000 pounds empty/nearly 500,000 pounds maximum at takeoff.
The B25 weighs 20,000 pounds.

The B52 measures Length: 159 feet, 4 inches (48.5 meters) Height: 40 feet, 8 inches (12.4 meters)
Wingspan: 185 feet (56.4 meters), has a top speed of 650 miles per hour (Mach 0.86), Ceiling: 50,000 feet (15,151.5 meters

The B25 measures Span was 67 feet 7 inches; length was 51 feet, height 15 feet 9 inches. The top speed of 275 mph at a gross weight of 33,500 pounds, with a cruising speed of 230 mph.Its service ceiling was 23,800 feet.

I can see why the producers got them confused.

http://www.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?fsID=83
http://history1900s.about.com/od/1940s/a/empirecrash.htm
http://www2.hurlburt.af.mil/library/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=3424

Building 7 according to PM and NIST:

"The most important thing we found was that there was, in fact, physical damage to the south face of building 7," NIST's Sunder tells PM. "On about a third of the face to the center and to the bottom--approximately 10 stories--about 25 percent of the depth of the building was scooped out." NIST also discovered previously undocumented damage to WTC 7's upper stories and its southwest corner"

Sprinklers in the WTC. Shredded and useless under impact.

The examples the film cites have no instance of impact damage from a 757. NONE. THeir comparison is virtually useless as the impact damage of the WTC, coupled with the fire caused the Collapse. Talking about regular floor fires does not take this into account nor the presense of jet fuel to burn, explode and further weaken the structural integrity of the buildings.

"In stage 1 (Fig. 1), the conflagration caused by the aircraft fuel spilled into the structure causes the steel of the columns to be exposed to sustained temperatures apparently exceeding 800°C. The heating is probably accelerated by a loss of the protective thermal insulation of steel during the initial blast. At such temperatures, structural steel suffers a decrease of yield strength and exhibits significant viscoplastic deformation (i.e., creep—an increase of deformation under sustained load). This leads to creep buckling of columns (e.g., Bazant and Cedolin 1991, Sec. 9), which consequently lose their load carrying capacity (stage 2). Once more than about a half of the columns in the critical floor that is heated most suffer buckling (stage 3), the weight of the upper part of the structure above this floor can no longer be supported, and so the upper part starts falling down onto the lower part below the critical floor, gathering speed until it impacts the lower part."

http://www.tam.uiuc.edu/news/200109wtc/

"The majority of the jet fuel exploding in a massive fireball." HOW DOES THE NARRATOR KNOW THIS?!

From PM: "But jet fuel wasn't the only thing burning, notes Forman Williams, a professor of engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and one of seven structural engineers and fire experts that PM consulted. He says that while the jet fuel was the catalyst for the WTC fires, the resulting inferno was intensified by the combustible material inside the buildings, including rugs, curtains, furniture and paper. NIST reports that pockets of fire hit 1832°F.

"The jet fuel was the ignition source," Williams tells PM. "It burned for maybe 10 minutes, and [the towers] were still standing in 10 minutes. It was the rest of the stuff burning afterward that was responsible for the heat transfer that eventually brought them down."

"The Hole" - PM: When American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon's exterior wall, Ring E, it created a hole approximately 75 ft. wide, according to the ASCE Pentagon Building Performance Report. The exterior facade collapsed about 20 minutes after impact, but ASCE based its measurements of the original hole on the number of first-floor support columns that were destroyed or damaged. Computer simulations confirmed the findings.

The tidy hole in Ring C was 12 ft. wide--not 16 ft. ASCE concludes it was made by the jet's landing gear, not by the fuselage."

The Windows at the Pentagon:

"They were not designed to receive wracking seismic force," Hays notes. "They were designed to take in inward pressure from a blast event, which apparently they did: [Before the collapse] the blinds were still stacked neatly behind the window glass."

No plane wreckage:

Blast expert Allyn E. Kilsheimer was the first structural engineer to arrive at the Pentagon after the crash and helped coordinate the emergency response. "It was absolutely a plane, and I'll tell you why," says Kilsheimer, CEO of KCE Structural Engineers PC, Washington, D.C. "I saw the marks of the plane wing on the face of the building. I picked up parts of the plane with the airline markings on them. I held in my hand the tail section of the plane, and I found the black box." Kilsheimer's eyewitness account is backed up by photos of plane wreckage inside and outside the building.

Cellphones flying in altitude. Question - WHERE WAS HE FLYING? Was there a concentrated cell towers along his route? 1/100 chance? Frankly, that's pretty good for Cingluar customers. Razz

Galileo's law of falling bodies - which he used wooden ramps and round balls running down them to prove:

The Law of falling bodies

Galileo was the first to demonstrate and then formulate the equation for the distance d traveled by a falling object under the influence of gravity for a time t:

\ d=\frac{1}{2}gt^2

He (Salviati speaks here) used a wood molding, "12 cubits long, half a cubit wide and three finger-breadths thick" as a ramp with a straight, smooth, polished groove to study rolling balls ("a hard, smooth and very round bronze ball"). He lined the groove with "parchment, also smooth and polished as possible". He inclined the ramp at various angles, effectively slowing down the acceleration enough so that he could measure the elapsed time. He would let the ball roll a known distance down the ramp, and used a water clock to measure the time taken to move the known distance; this clock was

"a large vessel of water placed in an elevated position; to the bottom of this vessel was soldered a pipe of small diameter giving a thin jet of water, which we collected in a small glass during the time of each descent, whether for the whole length of the channel or for a part of its length; the water thus collected was weighed, after each descent, on a very accurate balance; the differences and ratios of these weights gave us the differences and ratios of the times, and this with such accuracy that although the operation was repeated many, many times, there was no appreciable discrepancy in the results.".1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_New_Sciences

Compares nicely with the WTC, NOT.

Van Romero quote as addressed by PM:

"Demolition expert Romero regrets that his comments to the Albuquerque Journal became fodder for conspiracy theorists. "I was misquoted in saying that I thought it was explosives that brought down the building," he tells PM. "I only said that that's what it looked like."

Romero, who agrees with the scientific conclusion that fire triggered the collapses, demanded a retraction from the Journal. It was printed Sept. 22, 2001. "I felt like my scientific reputation was on the line."

The Steel of the WTC - didn't have to melt, just had to have it's structural integrity compromised to the point of collapse. PM. The best they can use is Kevin Ryan writing a letter to cover his professional ass.

The producers support this with the "trained civil engineering opinion" of news anchors and "vague possibilities," and radio reports in the heat of the moment.

Also, consistently with controlled demolitions, is the fact that buildings need to be deliberately weakened up AND down the structure and that evidence of this is obvious as it takes weeks, even months to prepare. No one in the building could've missed it. How can you do that to two buildings with no one noticing?

Siezmic recordings:

""There is no scientific basis for the conclusion that explosions brought down the towers," Lerner-Lam tells PM. "That representation of our work is categorically incorrect and not in context."

The report issued by Lamont-Doherty includes various graphs showing the seismic readings produced by the planes crashing into the two towers as well as the later collapse of both buildings"

Also, any footage of controlled demolition that I have seen shows a consistent footprint. Half the building falling first, followed by the second half along a verticle line. And yet, we didn't see that in the WTC.

Pancaking, not explosions:

Once each tower began to collapse, the weight of all the floors above the collapsed zone bore down with pulverizing force on the highest intact floor. Unable to absorb the massive energy, that floor would fail, transmitting the forces to the floor below, allowing the collapse to progress downward through the building in a chain reaction. Engineers call the process "pancaking," and it does not require an explosion to begin, according to David Biggs, a structural engineer at Ryan-Biggs Associates and a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) team that worked on the FEMA report.

Like all office buildings, the WTC towers contained a huge volume of air. As they pancaked, all that air--along with the concrete and other debris pulverized by the force of the collapse--was ejected with enormous energy. "When you have a significant portion of a floor collapsing, it's going to shoot air and concrete dust out the window," NIST lead investigator Shyam Sunder tells PM. Those clouds of dust may create the impression of a controlled demolition, Sunder adds, "but it is the floor pancaking that leads to that perception."

They provide a statement of Osama Bin Ladin as proof of a conspiracy?! Someone denying they committed a crime?

Comparing valid tale markings of two different companies?

4 minutes out of 24 minutes. How much of that is no talking, just waiting? Voice activated recorders, perhaps?

Flight attendant who is TRAINED to handle potential highjackings and inflight emergencies? What do you want her to do, scream and carry on helplessly? She's doing her job here.

Personal calls. I'm sorry, but I talk to my wife every day. EVERY DAY. I would know if someone wasn't my wife. Mark Bingham's mom would know if that was her son.

As for the voice morphing technology ... I noticed there was no corroborating evidence offered other than strangers who may or may not have met Colin Powell ...

Finally, Judicial Watch is reporting that the DoD is releasing video of Flight 77 striking the Pentagon today. So my question is, will you apologize for the pain you've caused the victims of this terrorist tragedy?

I suspect not.

re: Damning DaVinci

Brothers and Sisters. I have but one message for you. STOP. Don't you realize that once again Hollywood is using you as its best marketing tool? They make a controversial movie about Jesus, the church, our faith just hoping, HOPING that you'll rise up in arms and protest it's release.

And why? Because psychologically, the target audience that they want to reach - I'll give you a hint, it ain't us - will become so curious over the hulabaloo that they'll pluck down a Hamilton for a ticket. Cha ching, cha ching.

Witness the proof. Last Temptation of Christ. Total dog of a film. The church had a fit over it. As such, it ended up almost making back it's money, instead of causing Universal to lose it's shirt. Thanks, Jesus freaks for the protesting!

How about Dogma? Kevin Smith's satirical, yet blasphemous look at the Catholic Church? $8 million opening weekend (the budget was $10 mill). Finished in the green with $30 Mill. I'm sure that one bought Kevin a new BMR. Why? Protests, of course.

Here were two terrible movies which, had they been ignored, would've died a quick and painful death at the box office. But now, The Davinci Code gets to cash in. And when this pleagurized FICTIONAL book, turned MOVIE rakes in the cash, it'll be because of stories like this or organized efforts like this which flock people to see it out of nothing but sheer curiosity.

Some argue this is a chance to witness to the world. To tell them the straight scoop. Well let me ask you this, do you think that someone who looks for God in a popcorn line is going to seriously come to know him before the end of reel 1?

Hollywood relies on our passion. It takes them straight to the bank. So, if you want to be a marketing tool, be my guest. As for me, I'll wait for Netflix.

For as Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, head of the Roman Catholic church in England and Wales, told the Jonathan Dimbleby programme on ITV1 on Sunday:

"I think it's a harmless thriller. If people want to read it they can and people who read it should realise it is fiction."

re: Fishy answers



Dear Mr. President,

Today, I had a true head scratching moment as I read your response to the question "what was your greatest moment as president."

You had your choice of liberating 25 million people in Afghanistan, ending the reign of Saddaam Hussein, 2 tax cuts, getting reelected by more votes than your predescessor ... and you choose catching 7.5lb large-mouth bass?

Seriously, Mr. President. I have participated in an online forum defending the war, defending your policies, defending your Presidency. I, and other rank and file faithful like me, have taken a lot of heat from your enemies when we debate them.

That's not the kind of response the boots on the ground in Fallujah and Baghdad want to hear, Mr. President. They're laying their lives on the line and you think of bass?

You may have thought it sounded like a funny response, a joke. But when you respond like that, you make those of us who fight to defend your presidency feel pretty darn stupid that we do.