Wag the Dog

Did you ever see the movie? It was a great movie that actually made a point...politicians are not above starting a war to divert people's attention from more pressing issues. The movie was made right after our beloved former president Clinton ordered air strikes on Iraq. As I am sure you recall, this was about the time the Monica Lewinski scandal was getting a great deal of press.

Today, however, I want to suggest that we have been had by another dog wagging president.

Last night, Tucker Carlson interviewed physics professor Steve Jones of Brigham Young University. Dr. Jones has recently released a paper in which he hypothesizes that the twin tower collapse and the subsequent collapse of Tower 7 was caused by explosives that were placed in advance of the airliner crashes.

In reading the paper, Jones makes some excellent points which I would like to share with you today. (You can read the entire paper here.) First, he points out that building 7 was supported by 24 huge steel support columns and 57 perimeter columns. If you watch the video of the collapse, you will note that the building collapsed straight down into its own footprint. Now the official word on the collapse of this building is that there were several fires burning in building 7 and the heat of the fires caused the collapse. Dr. Jones argues that if the fires had been hot enough to cause the structural failure, it would have been an asymmetrical collapse. In other words, it would have toppled over. In fact the only way building 7 could have fallen in the manner it did, is if most or all of the support columns had been pulled at the same time. Remember, a plane did not hit this building and it fell several hours after the others.

His second point is the finding of molten metal in the basements of the buildings. Research has shown that jet fuel does not burn hot enough to melt metal, but thermite, an explosive, produces molten metal as a by-product of the explosion.

Dr. Jones stated on television last night that the jets may have been just a diversion for the explosions that were needed to bring the buildings down.

Pretty stunning stuff, eh?

Couple this information with Dr. Gary North's research into the passenger manifests on the jet planes that crashed into the buildings on 9/11 and a frightening picture begins to emerge. For those of you who have not read Gary North's article, I will post it tomorrow, as his email autoresponder does not seem to be working.

Now, what does this have to do with economics? Well, think back to the state of the economy prior to 9/11. After a huge bull market, the stock market had begun to sell off that summer. Whether you knew or not, the stock market bubble had popped and you better believe they knew it. Remember after the twin towers collapse the markets were closed and before they reopened everybody in the securities industry came out asking Americans to invest and be patriotic. It worked temporarily, but in the end the markets do what they will and down was the market direction of choice.

The tools that I use to measure market risk indicated a high risk environment for the market in October of that year, even after the markets reopened and rebounded slightly before continuing their fall. Ever since the Hoover era, this county's economists have believed that war spending will help pull a country out of an economic slump. So I leave all of this to you dear reader to draw your own conclusions.

Most people will not even read this. They will stop halfway down and believe what they have been told because the alternative is too scary to believe. Most people are so busy living life and paying bills that they have no time to consider the implications of something like this.