I have subsribed for the year even though I can't listen. Your commentary is to articulate and important to be missed. Thanks for your efforts for peace
If only we could clone Dennis Kucinich! Nearly every sentence of his essay should be on billboards across he country. Mainstream media drown us in reports of the damage and deaths wrought by Russian weapons, all the while reporting on the exportation of American weapons as if they're magically benign.
I'm guilty - rather than face any inconvenience, I'll pay my taxes even though I know they'll be used for devastating weapons to supposedly protect me and my fellow citizens from manufactured foreign enemies. Dennis makes it clear that America's enemies are within.
"It is time to demand that those who had have led us in this direction be voted out or removed from public office."
Indeed, it is time, past time - and the only way to remove them from office is to vote them out - to do that we need candidates of honesty and integrity - who are not owned by corporate interests - and that leaves out D/Rs - anyone who runs as a D, e.g. may start out with good intentions, but as we have seen, they are soon read the riot act and either conform or get booted - you are the poster child for that ...
So, Dennis, because we need independent folks of honesty and integrity to hold office in this country - will you run again? I would support you, as I did the other 2 times you ran ...
Run again, Dennis - and I hope anyone who reads this post will encourage and support you in that endeavor - we need folks like you and time is running out ...
Dennis, my wife [Jackie Captain says, Hi] and I picked you up at the airport in Madison, Wisconsin sometime around the time neocons — with Hillery Clinton, Biden and the whole bunch of neolibs in tow — decided what a wonderful idea it was to invade Iraq, all in self-defense of course.
You called for peace, civil liberties, human rights and an end to lies at BobFest. Predictably, you became the enemy of the Democrat Party over the last 20 years. Peace, civil liberties, human rights and candor? What the hell country you think we live in?
Nice to read your analyses at Substack.
I think the Democrat Party is irretrievably corrupt, and is the most dangerous enemy facing progressives today.
We keep fighting, but I urge folks to adjust fire dead-center towards the Democrats.
Excellent.. Prodigiously compelling....utterly tragic.. However I fear it's too late for the United States to change its stripes. With the assassination of the President whose platform was peace, the die was cast.. and the Kent State generation that protested in symbol and song on college campuses in the 60s fell silent. But God almighty is listening to the blood crying everywhere from the ground, and the Good Book (Jeremiah 50 and 51) has already described in minute detail the recompense for the United States. Pray to God that you are not here for it.
Well written but dangerously naive. Ukraine was an independent state with a democratically elected government. It was/is being brutally invaded by a dictator with a long agenda to destroy democracy. Read “Road to unfreedom” by Tim Snyder and dozens of other books and lectures. What are we supposed to do, Denis, sit back and watch democracy destroyed? This is not to excuse our tragic and evil behavior toward Iraq which you cover beautifully in your essay. It would have been a good thing if we could have been stopped before we started. Same goes for Russia now.
Wonderful description of the criminal policies, practices and political model of the US. The only addition to this is that, extrapolating the formula detailed here, is the same picture that we saw with the promotion of a fearmongering campaign to sell the country on Covid as an invisible enemy with lack of transparency, use of the media to sell this 'war,' destroying all critical voices, never holding the so-called leaders accountable to provide real data on an illness most likely contrived in a lab and let loose, etc, etc. The American people not only need the gruesome details of how the Iraq war was sold and how that political model sold the American contrived Ukraine fiasco with its economic raping of the public's livelihood and food, but is the same process and practice on every other big issue most especially the fear of Covid an illness that actually causes less deaths than the annual flu. And the selling of drugs that are barely tested, have caused most of the deaths, and instead of military equipment there are not drugs that make billions in profit for a very few select people while the public is losing their civil liberties out of fear.
Dear Dennis, I used to work for you, back in 03/04 and would like to speak with you regarding solutions for the sake of all nations of the world 🕊️❤️🙏☘️
Brilliant piece of writing there Mr Kucinich. The only thing I’d like to add is that there also needs to be a reopening of the 9/11 investigation into what really happened that day and who was truly behind those horrific crimes. There is just way too much evidence that’s been suppressed that’s led to many unanswered questions for Americans and citizens of the world to accept the third rate unbelievable claims of the 9/11 Commission, a group that was only appointed because of the insistence of victims’ families.
When you take a deep dive into all of the anomalies that remain unanswered, you cannot help but consider that these deadly attacks were planned and executed not necessarily by Islamic fanatics but by people connected in some way to our own government. Sadly upon such a revelation, the criminal, almost demonic attack on Iraq makes even more sense.
Let's face it. Dennis Kucinich, Dr. Ron Paul, Seymour Hersch, John Mearsheimer, Col MacGregor and others, are voices crying in the wilderness of foolish Americans who think there's any such thing as a conspiracy theory. The term would never hold up in court of law. Something is either true or it isn't. All of the labeling will fall away with a whimper and be forgotten, in the day when the Lord's recompenses for the USA come to pass.
Awesome to have Dennis Kucinich back working to bequeath our children a world at peace, and a nation where democracy and liberty and the rule of law are really respected.
I appreciated this piece. It contains the heart and feeling of the man I remember from the early 2000’s.
And yet, the basic premise at the start of the piece retells a version history which is more akin to myth than a critical parsing of what actually transpired. I offer this to you, Dennis, with great respect, for your consideration. There’s much more beyond the myths we tell.
-
The very first tell was visible exactly as the first tower began to fall. I watched it happen on TV, about 45 minutes after the planes hit the buildings. Strangely, the second tower struck collapsed before the first. Weird.
The collapse that unfolded went against every structural engineering principle known and employed to construct buildings of this size. I saw the buildings fall straight down at astonishing speed. Basic physics seemed suspended. I was shocked.
The WTC towers are a Type I structure, which require 3 hours of fire protection. This is because Type I structures don’t have a height limitation. Very tall structures require time to evacuate and deploy firefighters. So while a two story apartment building might only have a 1 hour rating, tall buildings are held to a stricter standard. This is primarily driven by insurance, as most building codes have been since their inception. This doesn’t mean 3 hours to collapse, but 3 hours until a certain level of deformation takes place. The building is still expected to stand, not collapse. In real life, no fire-protected Type I building has ever suffered catastrophic collapse before or since the WTC. This is very important.
We have to remember that these were, at one time, the tallest towers on the planet. They weren’t built to simply *meet* the building codes of the time, but to vastly *exceed* them. These towers were designed with a highly redundant structural system that paired vertical load bearing and shear resistance in its interior and a web-like network of structural steel at its perimeter that lent the towers remarkable stiffness and resiliency (an essential characteristic for tall buildings subjected to hurricane force winds which can come from any direction). In addition to the robust redundancy of the structural design, all of the steel was either encased or covered with fire-protective material, be it concrete, gypsum, or asbestos-containing coatings available at the time.
I have personally worked intimately on the design and construction of these kinds of tall buildings, and when I saw these buildings collapse on that fateful day, I knew immediately it was an Op. And a very large and elaborate one.
On that day, the TV told me to ignore training, education, and experience, and just be afraid. It told us that somehow jetliners crashing into the buildings made them fall, like Luke Skywalker—a single X-Wing taking down the Death Star. That’s fine for a movie plot line, with accompanying special effects; but from a structural engineering perspective, it’s utter fantasy. It would take much more than a single plane, and the collapse wouldn’t have looked like that. What it looked like was controlled demolition. Full stop.
Every structural engineer and architect worth their salt should have jumped out of their seats and exclaimed, “WTF?” Instead, most sat and waited, silent. My team members and peers were curiously silent, hesitant to ask questions. Most said nothing and changed the topic when probed. They were uncertain. Afraid to speak out. Like an unmasked person in a crowd of masked faces, they feared being isolated. Perhaps there was something they didn’t know?
There were so many angles to pick this apart based on basic principles, but almost no one noticed and fewer said anything. No one seemed to see the rate of fall, the way the collapse self-corrected early on at the top third. No one seemed to question how it is that relatively minor damage to one side of a redundant structure played out as a very uniform and organized collapse.
Almost that very day, a blanket of silence spread out over the topic. It was as if a mass suggestion spell had been cast and nearly everyone had bought the ruse. It was as if the TV and headlines had been scripted beforehand, structured to obscure and direct inquiry away from the forensic evidence. Is it any wonder that the overwhelming majority of the steel remains were quickly freighted off to asia for smelting? Forensic examination wasn’t a goal, it was to be avoided.
Many point to the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania crash as big tells, but for me, it was the WTC collapses that spoke volumes. Basic physics, Newtonian Mechanics, high rise design principles, all had been violated; and we’re not talking about particle physics here, but basic principles that have been used to design buildings for centuries. How could this possibly be?
Immediately, within the space of weeks, the industry rags devoted special issues reporting theories of collapse. The theories were all ridiculous, but like the NEJM or the Lancet, does anyone question Architecture or Structure? Never mind that all of a sudden, the normal advertisements changed on a dime to market security bollards, fire-rated glass, and terrorist-resistant building security systems. The people who read these initial theories fell into three camps: skeptics, acceptors, and those who stayed silent. I would estimate around 75% were acceptors, 5% were skeptical, and 20% were afraid to give voice to their questions.
Much like the doctors during the pandemic outbreak, only a few professionals in connected fields spoke out, many were cowed into silence, and a great many went along in blind acceptance. Honest truth: a huge number of architects suck at structural engineering, even on an intuitive level, and outsource even fundamental design to engineers—they like to spend an inordinate amount of effort on prettifying the packaging. People who raised questions were drowned out by official pronouncements via NIST and the media.
What followed reads like a template for now. Computer models were created to cartoon animate a brand-new phenomena: Progressive Collapse. Mathematics professors were called upon to write papers demonstrating the mathematics, proving the theory. Most people couldn’t understand the language or read the papers being written. But those who could, knew the computer model was bullshit and the mathematics made no sense. I waded through the poorly written paper and confirmed it was another part of the Op.
The most oft-cited paper at the time basically tried to argue that through a combination of potential energy and momentum of collapsing floors one could numerically demonstrate that there was adequate energy in the system to demonstrate the feasibility of the collapse. What laypeople didn’t know, and what the reporting in this failed to grok, is that the equations in that paper were based on a fantasy. The analysis failed to account for the total amount of energy required to demonstrate not just the collapse, but the observable evidence: cutting of massive steel beams and columns, the pulverizing of enormous amounts of concrete into dust, along with corrugated steel, truss joists, even connecting bolts, so much reduced to dust and slag. The paper was an exercise in obfuscation—using math to bolster the psyop, invisible to all but the most intrepid.
There is nothing that will cause a steel frame structure to pancake collapse at close to free fall speed without removing vertical support below the falling mass first. This is fundamental. All of the structural connections and supports below the falling mass have to fail at each floor in order without affecting the speed of collapse. If the mechanism cited by the paper had been true, you would have observed slowing collapse, not a uniform one. Further, the pile of rubble at ground level would more likely have been a broken stack of floor plates, and not the overwhelmingly atomized debris sprayed out over many city blocks in all directions.
Eventually this deeply deceptive model was refined and tweaked, with various propositions suggesting failure of poorly-applied fire-proofing and faulty truss joist connections as the culprits behind the failure. Much of this made its way into the 9/11 Commission report even though it is all an elaborate lie. But telling a lie repeatedly to people that don’t understand the basis for the lie has been shown to be a very effective strategy. Eventually, fortified by ‘official’ decree, even the basic laws of physics must bow.
Very few considered that the towers had undergone retrofitting in the years leading up to the collapse, much of the work happening at night to avoid disruptions to public business operations. Funny that.
In the end, not very different from a virus (relatively small fire with poor fuel stock) somehow ripping through the population (the first ever/since examples of catastrophic failure in buildings of this type due to fire), mass dissemination of prepared mathematical manipulation, mixed with copious amounts of fear messaged through the media (Bin Laden, Bin Laden, Bin Laden), followed by governmental mandates (Patriot Act) and actions (War), benefitting the super-rich (war profiteers and the security state).
There’s that old adage about repeating history when we fail to understand it…
I am 80, retired on fixed budget so can't upgrade to paid but resonate strongly with your piece, recalling your heroic stands in congress, against war especially. The war beat goes on hyped by acolyte media as fatigued citizen zombies consider it the only possible Normal. Now it's the US vs Russia on steroids (thinly veiled as a Ukraine battle with exit strategy totally decided by Zelensky). Thanks for spelling this out once again.
I have subsribed for the year even though I can't listen. Your commentary is to articulate and important to be missed. Thanks for your efforts for peace
If only we could clone Dennis Kucinich! Nearly every sentence of his essay should be on billboards across he country. Mainstream media drown us in reports of the damage and deaths wrought by Russian weapons, all the while reporting on the exportation of American weapons as if they're magically benign.
I'm guilty - rather than face any inconvenience, I'll pay my taxes even though I know they'll be used for devastating weapons to supposedly protect me and my fellow citizens from manufactured foreign enemies. Dennis makes it clear that America's enemies are within.
"It is time to demand that those who had have led us in this direction be voted out or removed from public office."
Indeed, it is time, past time - and the only way to remove them from office is to vote them out - to do that we need candidates of honesty and integrity - who are not owned by corporate interests - and that leaves out D/Rs - anyone who runs as a D, e.g. may start out with good intentions, but as we have seen, they are soon read the riot act and either conform or get booted - you are the poster child for that ...
So, Dennis, because we need independent folks of honesty and integrity to hold office in this country - will you run again? I would support you, as I did the other 2 times you ran ...
Run again, Dennis - and I hope anyone who reads this post will encourage and support you in that endeavor - we need folks like you and time is running out ...
Dennis, my wife [Jackie Captain says, Hi] and I picked you up at the airport in Madison, Wisconsin sometime around the time neocons — with Hillery Clinton, Biden and the whole bunch of neolibs in tow — decided what a wonderful idea it was to invade Iraq, all in self-defense of course.
You called for peace, civil liberties, human rights and an end to lies at BobFest. Predictably, you became the enemy of the Democrat Party over the last 20 years. Peace, civil liberties, human rights and candor? What the hell country you think we live in?
Nice to read your analyses at Substack.
I think the Democrat Party is irretrievably corrupt, and is the most dangerous enemy facing progressives today.
We keep fighting, but I urge folks to adjust fire dead-center towards the Democrats.
Excellent.. Prodigiously compelling....utterly tragic.. However I fear it's too late for the United States to change its stripes. With the assassination of the President whose platform was peace, the die was cast.. and the Kent State generation that protested in symbol and song on college campuses in the 60s fell silent. But God almighty is listening to the blood crying everywhere from the ground, and the Good Book (Jeremiah 50 and 51) has already described in minute detail the recompense for the United States. Pray to God that you are not here for it.
Well written but dangerously naive. Ukraine was an independent state with a democratically elected government. It was/is being brutally invaded by a dictator with a long agenda to destroy democracy. Read “Road to unfreedom” by Tim Snyder and dozens of other books and lectures. What are we supposed to do, Denis, sit back and watch democracy destroyed? This is not to excuse our tragic and evil behavior toward Iraq which you cover beautifully in your essay. It would have been a good thing if we could have been stopped before we started. Same goes for Russia now.
Wonderful description of the criminal policies, practices and political model of the US. The only addition to this is that, extrapolating the formula detailed here, is the same picture that we saw with the promotion of a fearmongering campaign to sell the country on Covid as an invisible enemy with lack of transparency, use of the media to sell this 'war,' destroying all critical voices, never holding the so-called leaders accountable to provide real data on an illness most likely contrived in a lab and let loose, etc, etc. The American people not only need the gruesome details of how the Iraq war was sold and how that political model sold the American contrived Ukraine fiasco with its economic raping of the public's livelihood and food, but is the same process and practice on every other big issue most especially the fear of Covid an illness that actually causes less deaths than the annual flu. And the selling of drugs that are barely tested, have caused most of the deaths, and instead of military equipment there are not drugs that make billions in profit for a very few select people while the public is losing their civil liberties out of fear.
Dear Dennis, I used to work for you, back in 03/04 and would like to speak with you regarding solutions for the sake of all nations of the world 🕊️❤️🙏☘️
Brilliant piece of writing there Mr Kucinich. The only thing I’d like to add is that there also needs to be a reopening of the 9/11 investigation into what really happened that day and who was truly behind those horrific crimes. There is just way too much evidence that’s been suppressed that’s led to many unanswered questions for Americans and citizens of the world to accept the third rate unbelievable claims of the 9/11 Commission, a group that was only appointed because of the insistence of victims’ families.
When you take a deep dive into all of the anomalies that remain unanswered, you cannot help but consider that these deadly attacks were planned and executed not necessarily by Islamic fanatics but by people connected in some way to our own government. Sadly upon such a revelation, the criminal, almost demonic attack on Iraq makes even more sense.
Let's face it. Dennis Kucinich, Dr. Ron Paul, Seymour Hersch, John Mearsheimer, Col MacGregor and others, are voices crying in the wilderness of foolish Americans who think there's any such thing as a conspiracy theory. The term would never hold up in court of law. Something is either true or it isn't. All of the labeling will fall away with a whimper and be forgotten, in the day when the Lord's recompenses for the USA come to pass.
Awesome to have Dennis Kucinich back working to bequeath our children a world at peace, and a nation where democracy and liberty and the rule of law are really respected.
I've been sharing Loose Change #2 DVD since 911. Officials in Busch Admin need to be held accountable. Or, like Dennis says, thus just gets worse...
Dennis Kucinich for President, Kshama Sawant for Vice President, and Medea Benjamin for Secretary of State!
I appreciated this piece. It contains the heart and feeling of the man I remember from the early 2000’s.
And yet, the basic premise at the start of the piece retells a version history which is more akin to myth than a critical parsing of what actually transpired. I offer this to you, Dennis, with great respect, for your consideration. There’s much more beyond the myths we tell.
-
The very first tell was visible exactly as the first tower began to fall. I watched it happen on TV, about 45 minutes after the planes hit the buildings. Strangely, the second tower struck collapsed before the first. Weird.
The collapse that unfolded went against every structural engineering principle known and employed to construct buildings of this size. I saw the buildings fall straight down at astonishing speed. Basic physics seemed suspended. I was shocked.
The WTC towers are a Type I structure, which require 3 hours of fire protection. This is because Type I structures don’t have a height limitation. Very tall structures require time to evacuate and deploy firefighters. So while a two story apartment building might only have a 1 hour rating, tall buildings are held to a stricter standard. This is primarily driven by insurance, as most building codes have been since their inception. This doesn’t mean 3 hours to collapse, but 3 hours until a certain level of deformation takes place. The building is still expected to stand, not collapse. In real life, no fire-protected Type I building has ever suffered catastrophic collapse before or since the WTC. This is very important.
We have to remember that these were, at one time, the tallest towers on the planet. They weren’t built to simply *meet* the building codes of the time, but to vastly *exceed* them. These towers were designed with a highly redundant structural system that paired vertical load bearing and shear resistance in its interior and a web-like network of structural steel at its perimeter that lent the towers remarkable stiffness and resiliency (an essential characteristic for tall buildings subjected to hurricane force winds which can come from any direction). In addition to the robust redundancy of the structural design, all of the steel was either encased or covered with fire-protective material, be it concrete, gypsum, or asbestos-containing coatings available at the time.
I have personally worked intimately on the design and construction of these kinds of tall buildings, and when I saw these buildings collapse on that fateful day, I knew immediately it was an Op. And a very large and elaborate one.
On that day, the TV told me to ignore training, education, and experience, and just be afraid. It told us that somehow jetliners crashing into the buildings made them fall, like Luke Skywalker—a single X-Wing taking down the Death Star. That’s fine for a movie plot line, with accompanying special effects; but from a structural engineering perspective, it’s utter fantasy. It would take much more than a single plane, and the collapse wouldn’t have looked like that. What it looked like was controlled demolition. Full stop.
Every structural engineer and architect worth their salt should have jumped out of their seats and exclaimed, “WTF?” Instead, most sat and waited, silent. My team members and peers were curiously silent, hesitant to ask questions. Most said nothing and changed the topic when probed. They were uncertain. Afraid to speak out. Like an unmasked person in a crowd of masked faces, they feared being isolated. Perhaps there was something they didn’t know?
There were so many angles to pick this apart based on basic principles, but almost no one noticed and fewer said anything. No one seemed to see the rate of fall, the way the collapse self-corrected early on at the top third. No one seemed to question how it is that relatively minor damage to one side of a redundant structure played out as a very uniform and organized collapse.
Almost that very day, a blanket of silence spread out over the topic. It was as if a mass suggestion spell had been cast and nearly everyone had bought the ruse. It was as if the TV and headlines had been scripted beforehand, structured to obscure and direct inquiry away from the forensic evidence. Is it any wonder that the overwhelming majority of the steel remains were quickly freighted off to asia for smelting? Forensic examination wasn’t a goal, it was to be avoided.
Many point to the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania crash as big tells, but for me, it was the WTC collapses that spoke volumes. Basic physics, Newtonian Mechanics, high rise design principles, all had been violated; and we’re not talking about particle physics here, but basic principles that have been used to design buildings for centuries. How could this possibly be?
Immediately, within the space of weeks, the industry rags devoted special issues reporting theories of collapse. The theories were all ridiculous, but like the NEJM or the Lancet, does anyone question Architecture or Structure? Never mind that all of a sudden, the normal advertisements changed on a dime to market security bollards, fire-rated glass, and terrorist-resistant building security systems. The people who read these initial theories fell into three camps: skeptics, acceptors, and those who stayed silent. I would estimate around 75% were acceptors, 5% were skeptical, and 20% were afraid to give voice to their questions.
Much like the doctors during the pandemic outbreak, only a few professionals in connected fields spoke out, many were cowed into silence, and a great many went along in blind acceptance. Honest truth: a huge number of architects suck at structural engineering, even on an intuitive level, and outsource even fundamental design to engineers—they like to spend an inordinate amount of effort on prettifying the packaging. People who raised questions were drowned out by official pronouncements via NIST and the media.
What followed reads like a template for now. Computer models were created to cartoon animate a brand-new phenomena: Progressive Collapse. Mathematics professors were called upon to write papers demonstrating the mathematics, proving the theory. Most people couldn’t understand the language or read the papers being written. But those who could, knew the computer model was bullshit and the mathematics made no sense. I waded through the poorly written paper and confirmed it was another part of the Op.
The most oft-cited paper at the time basically tried to argue that through a combination of potential energy and momentum of collapsing floors one could numerically demonstrate that there was adequate energy in the system to demonstrate the feasibility of the collapse. What laypeople didn’t know, and what the reporting in this failed to grok, is that the equations in that paper were based on a fantasy. The analysis failed to account for the total amount of energy required to demonstrate not just the collapse, but the observable evidence: cutting of massive steel beams and columns, the pulverizing of enormous amounts of concrete into dust, along with corrugated steel, truss joists, even connecting bolts, so much reduced to dust and slag. The paper was an exercise in obfuscation—using math to bolster the psyop, invisible to all but the most intrepid.
There is nothing that will cause a steel frame structure to pancake collapse at close to free fall speed without removing vertical support below the falling mass first. This is fundamental. All of the structural connections and supports below the falling mass have to fail at each floor in order without affecting the speed of collapse. If the mechanism cited by the paper had been true, you would have observed slowing collapse, not a uniform one. Further, the pile of rubble at ground level would more likely have been a broken stack of floor plates, and not the overwhelmingly atomized debris sprayed out over many city blocks in all directions.
Eventually this deeply deceptive model was refined and tweaked, with various propositions suggesting failure of poorly-applied fire-proofing and faulty truss joist connections as the culprits behind the failure. Much of this made its way into the 9/11 Commission report even though it is all an elaborate lie. But telling a lie repeatedly to people that don’t understand the basis for the lie has been shown to be a very effective strategy. Eventually, fortified by ‘official’ decree, even the basic laws of physics must bow.
Very few considered that the towers had undergone retrofitting in the years leading up to the collapse, much of the work happening at night to avoid disruptions to public business operations. Funny that.
In the end, not very different from a virus (relatively small fire with poor fuel stock) somehow ripping through the population (the first ever/since examples of catastrophic failure in buildings of this type due to fire), mass dissemination of prepared mathematical manipulation, mixed with copious amounts of fear messaged through the media (Bin Laden, Bin Laden, Bin Laden), followed by governmental mandates (Patriot Act) and actions (War), benefitting the super-rich (war profiteers and the security state).
There’s that old adage about repeating history when we fail to understand it…
Fantastic article.
Now do the Covid-1984 Genetic Bioweapon Injections.
I am 80, retired on fixed budget so can't upgrade to paid but resonate strongly with your piece, recalling your heroic stands in congress, against war especially. The war beat goes on hyped by acolyte media as fatigued citizen zombies consider it the only possible Normal. Now it's the US vs Russia on steroids (thinly veiled as a Ukraine battle with exit strategy totally decided by Zelensky). Thanks for spelling this out once again.