Creative Speculation

... so what you take as obfuscation may well be your own confusion.

> You claimed that the fact that NIST's models did not show the curtain wall was significant. It wasn't significant. The model showed the perimeter columns folding up like a wet paper bag. That's what's significant. It bore no resemblance to reality.

But I have a lot of patience, so I'll keep saying the same thing until you show some sign of comprehending it: The curtain wall was not included in the simulation because it was not a gravity-load-bearing structural element. The "perimeter columns folding up like a wet paper bag" does not have a "resemblance to reality" that we see in the videos because of that omission from the model, but that is completely irrelevant to what the simulation was designed to study, which was the collapse initiation and propagation through the load-bearing structure.

According to the NIST hypothesis, the curtain wall did not contribute to the initiation of the collapse, nor could it possibly have prevented the collapse propagation through the interior structure. If you want to challenge the NIST hypothesis about that initiation and propagation, have at it, but yammering over and over about a "wet paper bag" of the exterior columns minus the curtain wall doesn't do the trick, because the building is already going down by that time. You can (and probably will) in post after post after post ignore that logic, but to do so is simply a waste of bandwidth and the time it takes to read your posts.

> Thermite demolitions have been done. In 1935 a 600-foot steel tower was taken down with thermite in Chicago.

Hmm, that's an interesting story, but looking into the details makes it easy to see why it wasn't tried again for even a simple tower, much less an office building: "Huge “overshoes” in the form of cupolas made of steel and lined with firebrick were constructed around two legs of the tower and filled with 1,500 pounds of thermite."

> Explosives planted inside the hollow columns and sized to bulge, but not break, incendiary-heated column walls would buckle the columns and the sound would not escape to the outside.

As I already said (and you apparently didn't check), the absurdity of that hypothesis is moot since structural drawings for WTC 7 show I-beam columns, not hollow columns, throughout the building.

> It's a sign of superior intelligence to avoid jumping to conclusions, and your apparent belief that one must choose between thermite and explosives is simple minded. There is no reason that scientifically-applied thermite could not achieve sudden onset.

Superior intelligence is no defense against self-delusion, nor does it guarantee that ad hoc "just so stories" have a shred of plausibility. Your claim that thermite could achieve sudden onset is completely unsubstantiated by any rational proposal for how to do that, but sorry, there's a bigger issue: There certainly are reasons to have extreme doubts about the alleged conspirators concocting such an unnecessarily complicated and cockamamie demolition method and expect to pull it off without a hitch, particularly since there is no rational reason why they would need to produce a sudden onset! In fact, arranging for the collapse to occur slowly would make it look much less like a controlled demolition. How is it that your superior intelligence missed that consideration when it started dreaming up ways to get a sudden onset with thermite? Somehow, the superior intelligence of conspiracy theorists seems to consistently fail to explain why conspirators are manifestly incapable of designing simple and safe schemes but instead seem to actually prefer the most complicated and risky hoax they can come up with.