Monday, December 31, 2007

This Must Make Their Board Meetings Rather Boring

We have often pointed out how Bob Bowman, despite his military resume, is one of the odder members of the 9/11 denial movement (which is quite an achievement in itself). Bowman has also been accused of inflating his resume on occasion, a charge which I have not seen proven 100%, but it quite likely considering how odd it is for a 70+ year old retired lieutenant colonel to list medals he got in ROTC in his biography.

So with this in mind I was not too surprised to see some research, done by troofers ironically, pointing out the the Board of Advisors and Fellows that he lists for his organization, "The Patriots", are in fact mostly dead, some of them for over a decade.

Bowman replies at the forum where this was brought up with:

This is Bob Bowman. Thanks for the excellent research. All these people have been on my advisory board since 1982-1985. I've been battling government lies for a quarter of a century. Do you think I should put an asterisk beside the names of those who have deceased? Sounds like a good idea to me. I've been pretty busy since 9/11/2001 and haven't bothered recruiting a new generation of advisors. Maybe I should do so. Of course, most of my original advisory board are still very much alive.

Yeah, I guess he was still trying to figure out why they stopped sending him Christmas cards. H/T Conspiracy Smasher.

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Scottish Hero on the Troofers

John Smeaton, one of the men who helped foil the terror attack at Glasgow Airport, on his experience with the blackshirts:

He has spent months pointing out that he was not the only hero on the day; that he actually didn't do very much. That was the gist of his acceptance speech for a CNN Heroes award on December 6 in America, and everyone lapped it up. He expressed similar sentiments at the 9/11 memorial service in New York in September, which he describes as "the most poignant and humbling moment of my life". His past belief in the conspiracy theories surrounding the Twin Towers attacks were swept away.

"The most disrespectful thing I've ever seen was these people walking about with T-shirts blaming the American government for the attack," he says. "Take that and shove it as far up your arse as you can get it."

The Religion of 9/11 Truth

We have discussed this before, but an author on OpEdNews (which normally is rather truther friendly) writes an excellent essay on the nature of the 9/11 denier religion.

The 911Truther Movement is similar to a religion because its followers believe in or partake of the following:

(1) Revelation – 911Truthers KNOW that what they've been given by the 9/11 Commission and NIST is anything but the "truth". This knowledge is revealed by the planning and execution of a false flag operation by others (most probably the Administration). While the planning and execution were managed very successfully, neither were quite good enough for the cleverness of Truthers discoveries of multiple layers of incompetence – despite the fact that no one has yet confessed to participation in or knowledge of the actual conspiracy.


Read the rest here...

Sunday, December 30, 2007

Yet More Brave Souls Stand Against Creeping Nazism

I ask you, what would we do without courageous souls like Ray McGovern, standing firm against Bushitler?

In late fall 2005 when Times correspondent James Risen's book, "State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," revealing the warrantless eavesdropping was being printed, Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., recognized that he could procrastinate no longer. It would simply be too embarrassing to have Risen's book on the street, with Sulzberger and his associates pretending that this explosive eavesdropping story did not fit Adolph Ochs' trademark criterion: All The News That's Fit To Print. (The Times' own ombudsman, Public Editor Byron Calame, branded the newspaper's explanation for the long delay in publishing this story "woefully inadequate.")

When Sulzberger told his friends in the White House that he could no longer hold off on publishing in the newspaper, he was summoned to the Oval Office for a counseling session with the president on Dec. 5, 2005. Bush tried in vain to talk him out of putting the story in the Times. The truth would out; part of it, at least.


Now of course the notion that Sulzberger has a lot of friends in the White House is rather amusing. And had a newspaper editor dared to defy Hitler, he would have been headed to Treblinka instead of Times Square, but otherwise the analogy is perfect.

Ray McGovern, of course, is one of those seven idiotic "CIA professionals" that the kooks love to point to as supporting their 9-11 crackpottery (and in this particular instance they are right). Of course, it does not surprise me that the CIA, which failed to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet Union or the attacks of 9-11, was the former home of a moonbat like McGovern, who confuses a fading Republican administration with the Nazis.

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Saturday, December 29, 2007

More Nuttiness at 9-11 Blogger

Two particular posts drew laughs from me. First up is this fatheaded call for a global ban on false-flag attacks.

Why not work for a global ban of false flag operations? We can parlay the assassination of Bhutto into a wake up call for the world. A false flag operation is the ultimate was crime against the wrongfully accused state.


I've got a better idea. Why not call for a global ban on terrorist attacks? Or a global ban on assassinations?

And another poster suggests that a whole bunch of people run for Congress on a 9-11 kook ticket:

What if 9/11 truthers ran for Congress- not just Bob Bowman and Carol B., but 435 truthers in every state and district. Nobody would have to quit their day jobs as this could be an internet/ volunteer movement a la 9/11 truth and Ron Paul's campaign. We could generate internet noise until the MSM was forced to cover us.

Friday, December 28, 2007

Disable Danger

Our buddies at Conspiracies R Not Us are doing some impressive work. John Ray put together an excellent discussion of Able Danger, the Pentagon's data mining program that some claim identified Mohamed Atta prior to his arrival in the United States.

Unfortunately for the conspiracy theorists, another key element of any data mining operation is having a large population to choose from. In the business world where data mining is a practical tool, often an entire “set of all consumers of X” are analyzed – potentially, millions of people.(5) Unfortunately for the Able Danger crew, their target population (extremists who rely on the Internet for dissemination of propaganda and for organizational coordination) had only had access to the Internet for about two and a half years, since 1996 when the Internet first exploded on the global stage.


Excellent analysis of a complicated issue!

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The Benazir Bhutto Assassination

While the rest of the world, and particularly Pakistan, recoils in horror to this awful event, the truthers, who believe there is no such thing as a simple act of violence for the obvious reason, but that everything must be cloaked in some complex web of conspiracy, start their little minds wandering in speculation.

911 Blogger starts us off with the creative title, "I Call B*llshit on the Bhutto Assassination":

However, currently the big story on the Indian news wires is the eyewitness reports of Bhutto actually being assassinated by two separate snipers firing from a nearby building. As two snipers would tend to indicate some level of coordination and planning, as well as training for how to shoot someone with a sniper rifle from long range, it suggests military involvement, possibly even the involvement of the Pakistani clandestine operations agency, the ISI, which has long and demonstrable ties to both the CIA and the 9/11 attacks (for a quick refresher Mahmoud Ahmed, the head of the ISI, wired $100,000 dollars to Mohammed Atta, the supposed lead hijacker on 9/11, shortly before the attacks.) The sniper reports are spreading throughout the media now:

Gee, the only people who know how to use a sniper rifle are the military? Not like Osama bin Laden set up a series of camps and trained thousands of people in the use of weapons or anything, or thousands of Pakistanis engaged in the wars of Afghanistan on their own. I am also amazed that he would find it unusual that in an attack involving both gunfire and bombs, not to mention the murder of 20 people, that there would be some confusion in the reporting. Gee, you think?

Jon Gold gives us this brilliant insight:

Today, sadly, former Prime Minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. The list of suspects is a long one, but for the purposes of this article, I'm going to focus on one. The Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency or, more commonly known within the 9/11 Truth Movement as, the ISI.

Hello, it is more commonly known outside of the "9/11 Truth Movement" as the ISI too. Could you guys be more egocentric?

And of course the Loose Change Forum can always be counted on for idiocies. They manage to make it a whole 4 posts before they get the Jews involved. And they wonder why they get accused of anti-Semitism

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Thursday, December 27, 2007

Who is Richard Gage?

Ref, from the JREF Forum has a good page up on his site regarding everyone's favorite designer of IHOPs, Richard Gage. Definitely worth a look.

What he does:
presents the slide presentation made by others

makes radio appearances stating the claims made by others

asks for huge amounts of money

makes uninformed phone calls and letters to NIST

has an online petition demanding an independent investigation

exaggerates his popularity

Sounds more like your average rank-and-file activist than an expert, don’t you agree?

If you still want to become an AE911Truth hero and donate $911/month to Gage, feel free to do so. If you want to take a medium sized A/E firm and Gage to lunch for $500, feel free to do so.

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See If This Sounds Familiar

Here's a quote from a very interesting article:

Contrary to appearances, however, this was no normal scientific conference. Cold Fusion is a pariah field, cast out by the scientific establishment. Between Cold Fusion and respectable science there is virtually no communication at all. Cold fusion papers are almost never published in refereed scientific journals, with the result that those works don't receive the normal critical scrutiny that science requires. On the other hand, because the Cold-Fusioners see themselves as a community under siege, there is little internal criticism. Experiments and theories tend to be accepted at face value, for fear of providing even more fuel for external critics, if anyone outside the group was bothering to listen. In these circumstances, crackpots flourish, making matters worse for those who believe that there is serious science going on here.


Yep, that's the field Steven Jones was in before he went on to an even more pariah field!

Hat Tip: Bored with all Twoofers (in the comments).

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And Now It's 100 Papers Published

James pointed a few months ago to the fact that Professor Jones was trumpeting 70 papers published in his vanity publication; now the century mark has been reached. Of course, we all know that the actual number of papers published is 43 (it even says that at the top of their webpage), and the only way they get to 100 is by including letters.

And even the 43 number is pretty dubious before we get into the quality of those papers. The first issue included the notorious "Elephant Plane" paper, which turned out to be a thorough fiasco, debunked within JONES itself by a letter. Several papers have been dedicated to debunking the "No Planes" theories, and the laser beam from space crowd. Another took the unremarkable stance that the fires weren't hot enough to melt steel, something even Rosie O'Donnell knows.

The paper that put them over the 100 mark is particularly minimalist. Although Dr. Jones describes it as "concise and packs a punch in just three pages", in fact it's about a page and a half, contains no calculations, and basically concludes that as the steel sagged, it should have gotten stronger.

Heckuva a job you're doing there, Jonesy!

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Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Jersey Girls Continue to Agitate

I am beginning to think that Ann Coulter and Ted Rall were right.

Our government’s official story regarding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, tells us that 19 Arab hijackers successfully defeated the United States military by hijacking four commercial airliners within two hours on a budget of approximately $400,000. These men, armed only with small knives, box cutters and Mace, were able to knock down the World Trade Center towers in New York City and strike the Pentagon.


No, that's not "our government's official story". It's what happened. They did not hijack the planes "within two hours"; it was about an hour and fifteen minutes. They did not "knock down the World Trade Center towers" with "small knives, box cutters and mace". They used something much larger, rhymes with "trains". For women supposedly so consumed with the events of that day, they don't seem to know the slightest thing about 9-11.

Get off the stage, ladies. The CIA tapes (which is the hook they peg their letter on) did not indicate that the 9-11 nutbars, which sadly you've joined forces with, were right.

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New Debunking Blog

Say hello to Conspiracies R Not Us, a new blog devoted to debunking the nutbars. Looks like some solid work going on over there, particularly this post which explains all the people who would have to be in on the conspiracy in order for the CT kooks to be right.

Considering that “Loose Change” either directly or indirectly implicates the upper echelons of the FBI, CIA, SEC, USAF, the Bush administration, the Department of Defense, the Pakistani ISI, the US Senate, the 9/11 Commission; much of the Army and Navy (namely, anyone who works at Pensacola Naval Station, Maxwell Air Force Base, San Antonio, the Monterey Defense Language Institute and failed to come forward about teaching or training the terrorists themselves; or any of the thousands of people who took part in routine exercises like Vigilant Guardian and Northern Vigilance and failed to report that they were too paralyzed to help save the day on 9/11, which no one has ever come forward to say honestly), one is left to wonder:

Well, who wasn’t involved?


Highly recommended!

Monday, December 24, 2007

Christmas Truce

The BB guns are going silent around here until the day after Christmas. Happy Holidays, everybody!

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Brother-In-Law of Hijacker Held

What the troofers never seem to grasp is that the 9/11 hijackers were real people, with real ties to others. Even Kevin Barrett could investigate this stuff properly if he put his mind to it. In this case it was announced recently that the brother-in-law of a 9/11 hijacker is now being charge at Guantanamo, for his own terrorist plots.

From 2001 through 2002, authorities believe al Darbi moved money from al Qaeda into banks to finance a plot to attack the vessel, the statement said.

Al Darbi allegedly prepared for an al Qaeda attack by traveling to several countries to buy a GPS device, a boat and other equipment in late 2000 or early 2002, the office said.

He registered the boat as the "al Rahal" under his own name under the Sao Tome flag, and bought a second boat to teach Yemenis how to swim and how to operate it, authorities said.

In the spring of 2002, al Darbi left the United Arab Emirates on the boat headed for Yemen, but diverted to Somalia because of concerns with his passport -- discussing those plans by satellite phone, the office said.

Al Darbi is the brother-in-law of Khalid al-Mihdhar, a hijacker aboard American Airlines Flight 77 on September 11, 2001, the military said.

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At Least They Aren't Calling It Peer-Reviewed

Richard Gage's Architects and Engineers organization is now coming out with their own newsletter, the Blueprint. In case it isn't already apparent enough how much of an ego trip this is for our not-so-humble designer of IHOPs, they put his smiling picture right there at the top of it.








Further on down they have a photo of Charles Pegelow, who is, as far as I can tell the only active structural engineer in the 9/11 denial movement. Apparently he has been so busy though, he hasn't had time to have a photo taken since the early 60's.






Then of course, one of the first things they do is hit people up for money. At least it is not to buy Gage's friends lunch now.


We now have five staff who volunteer most of their time to AE911Truth. To be truly effective, we must remunerate these dedicated staff members. This is how all nonprofit organizations thrive and grow. Our responsibilities, time commitment and expenses are growing dramatically with our increasing success. We also must purchase computers, printers, software, and handle traveling and legal expenses. Our efforts and growth cannot be sustained without your help. Help us to avoid placing advertising on our website!

Having looked at their website I am still trying to figure out what 5 mostly full-time people could possibly be doing. Not like they have actually conducted any original research or anything. I am not sure why an organization with hundreds of "engineers" would need to beg for money to buy computers, these tech people should have plenty already.
Further on, I was rather amused by their call for people to link to their website with the title, "9-11 Commission Report Implicitly Discredited by More Than 200 Architects and Engineers". Well, since "explicitly" descrediting it would require an actual scientific argument, they will just have to imply one.

They continue by describing Gage's recent rant to NIST.

Richard Gage delivered a stunning, 5-minute reminder of the overwhelming vidence of controlled demolition and molten metal to approximately 10 NIST members, including Shyam Sunder, Charles Thornton, Therese McAllister, John Gross, and the representative of the AIA, Dave Collins.

I am sure they were stunned, just not for the reasons you think.
And then they end with yet another tribute to the great Richard Gage.
Very positive reviews of our response to NIST have been written, including this one on 9/11 Blogger: "Richard Gage, AIA has shown himself to be a true hero of the truth movement by putting this evidence into the record, and confronting NIST live on the internet for the world to hear. I think he did the best one could with 5 minutes. The investigation continues. and the points he brings up can no longer be ignored as it is part of the record now."
Wow, like the standard for getting someone to say nice things about your truth movement work on 911 Blogger is so high. How long before he gets an endorsement from the ASCE?

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Saturday, December 22, 2007

Are You Sure They're Not Poker Chips?



I like that he mentions he's know about this since July but this is the first he's talked about them publicly.

I'm certainly not qualified to discuss the chemical signature, but there's an interesting discussion going on at the JREF forums. I'll defer to Dr Greening (Apollo 20) and Crazy Chainsaw, who know quite a bit more than I about this information.

1.When is Prof. Jones going to publish his X-ray spectra so we can all take a closer look at them? Just flashing them up on a slide at a talk is of no real use!

2. So these chips contain Fe, Al, K, Si, and O..... What happened to the S that was so important last time around? And since when is Si an ingredient of thermite/thermate?


And:

You need to take a look at Volume III of the famous "Particle Atlas" by Walter McCrone. This provides scanning electron micrographs and EDX spectra for thousands of common materials. The section from pages 760 - 780 is most interesting since it shows flyash microspheres from large domestic waste incinerators burning paper, wood and plastics as well as flyash from coal-fired furnaces. The EDX spectra show major peaks from Al, Si, K, Ca, and Fe together with smaller peaks from Ti, S and Cl.

Jones' spectra are a perfect match for FLY ASH!

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Friday, December 21, 2007

Probable Collapse



New film by Mark Roberts, superbly done. If I were a truther, I'd be sending up the white flag by now.

Shorter David Sirota

But who can blame the conspiracy theorists for postulating that 9-11 was an inside job, when the FCC leaks "secret" information to lobbyists.

No kidding:

But while many of these conspiracy theories are offensive and factually unsupported, the underlying paranoia and loathing are not surprising, and the feelings are not motivated merely by a fear of the next bogeyman around the corner. The sentiments are symptoms of a deep crisis of confidence in our public institutions -- a crisis that is a predictable reaction to a government that now all but admits it breaks laws, hides information and disregards the public.


And:

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) provides perhaps the most pristine example of all. In October, the General Accounting Office (GAO) reported that this faceless alphabet-soup agency tasked with regulating the media business now regularly leaks secret information to lobbyists before that information is released to the public. The behavior undoubtedly feeds into the world of "political intelligence" -- a burgeoning cottage industry in Washington whereby well-heeled lobbyists gather inside government information for their corporate clients.


And to close:

In Scripps Howard's report on its poll findings, some experts expressed astonishment at the anger being expressed by the country. But really, we should be baffled if public opinion were any different. Considering what's going on, is anyone actually stunned that America is enraged? Is anyone really confused about why so many believe the government conspires against the public?


Nope. They're

Reflecting Pool Trailer



This was suggested by commenter Craig. I had looked at an earlier trailer for this film, but according to IMDB the film has actually been completed. The plot synopsis screams "disinformation":

An investigation of the 9/11 events by a Russian-American journalist and a father of a 9/11 victim implicates the US government in the attacks. ALEX PROKOP (JK Baltazar), a successful journalist, receives a rare 9/11 video tape revealing missile-like bursts of light on the hijacked planes as they hit the Twin Towers.


Heh, sort of reveals the risk involved in doing a 9-11 Troof film as fiction. The lead time on a feature film is so long that something that was hot once (the missile-like bursts of light actually opened Loose Change I) can be considered ridiculous even by the ardent fans of the CT awhile later.

To his astonishment, he discovers that the firm providing WTC security was run by immediate family members of the President. We follow Alex and Cooper as they investigate the inexplicable collapse of the 47-story WTC Building Seven, disprove the implausible airliner "attack" on the Pentagon, and uncover the illegal destruction of physical evidence from Ground Zero.


Oh, swell, the usual crap about Marvin Bush, practically the easiest claim to debunk.

The trailer shows people playing with models of the WTC and Pentagon, which reminds me of a manic Richard Dreyfuss constructing that butte in his living room in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And the 911 Truth Org guy in South Park had a scale model of the towers on his coffee table as well.

It will be interesting to see if this film actually makes it to the theatres; the production values and the acting look to be the "straight to DVD" quality. Oooh, the evil FBI is threatening the publisher! Never mind that Nancy Jo Sales was able to sell her article to Vanity Fair on the Loosers, never mind that Hustler has published a couple of glowing tributes to 9-11 Troof, never mind that C-Span broadcast the idiotic "Scholars" panel from LA last year; somehow this Russian journalist is getting too close to the Truth?

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Kos Does It Again

Another Truther Diary, no "Troll Diary" tags yet.

Make no mistake, the 9/11 truth movement holds the future of the United States. We are not subversive "conspiracy theorists" or enablers of foreign terrorism. We are patriotic warriors working to nullify group delusion produced by government propaganda. Dozens of books and websites reveal countless technical contradictions and inconsistencies with the official government 9/11 story and the laws of physics. The weight of the evidence supports one painful verdict: Our federal government played a role, probably through a large "black op." The "why" is obvious: To justify an unjust war to serve corporate interests and greed.


The commenters all seem to sense this is coming, but so far it has not happened. There are many statements that Hirschhorn has been banned, but I see no sign of that; his diary page still exists. Get on the stick, folks!

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Thursday, December 20, 2007

Major Bloggers Fall for Fruitcake Site

This is pretty funny. Andrew Sullivan, certainly one of the A-list bloggers, and Matt Yglesias, both link to a tale of woe from a "young blonde Icelandic" woman who experienced a nightmare at the hands of US immigration authorities when she tried to go shopping in New York with some friends.

Matt and Andrew's take is basically, jeez look at these immigration Nazis under the Bush Administration. Tom Maguire notes that there were plenty of such horror stories even prior to the Bushitler regime.

But one of the commenters at Tom's site noted that the page was "Truther" which caught my attention. And then I realized it was Laura Knight-Jadczyck's site. Oh, man of all the fruitcake sites in the world, two top anti-Bush bloggers had managed to link to possibly the craziest.

Who is Laura Knight-Jadczyk? Here's a long, perhaps overly credulous article on her from a St. Petersburg, Florida paper.

She was studying astrology and making charts for herself and others. She was reading the literature on astral projection and psychic auras and ESP, delving into crystals and meditation and out-of-body experiences. She was also continuing with her experiments with the Ouija board. Often, she conducted these experiments with her friend Freddie.

Freddie was 34, tall and thin, with a quiet rumble of a voice. His official job was working as an office manager for a local company that produced infomercials. But Laura, who had met him a few years before, believed Freddie to be a talented medium in his own right. At first, when the two of them had gotten out the Ouija board, they'd been searching for lottery numbers, hoping to strike it rich. Now they were trying to speak to the dead and to spirits from what Laura and Freddie called "other realities."


That article appears to be circa 2000, lots of things have happened since. Laura went on to form a doomsday cult based on her Ouija board readings, discussed in rather exhaustive detail here.

I became involved with Laura Knight Jadczyk and the Cassiopaeans because of my co-author and friend Vincent Bridges. He kept telling me about this weird scene that sounded like outtakes from Tod Brownings’ Freaks. There was a fat lady, her gnomic Polish husband, and this question mark of a guy named Freddie, and they were channeling alien beings from “Sixth Density” that were communicating through the constellation of Cassiopia by means of a Ouija Board!


And that's just the beginning. She apparently swindled a bunch of money by "raffling" off her home, but never announced a winner. She moved her cult to France.

Of course, I don't expect Andrew Sullivan or Matt Yglesias to know that they hit the fruitcake jackpot. But here's another tale of woe from the same site at the hands of El Al security that might set off some alarms:

That's when they grabbed my luggage, whisked me to the basement, stripped off my clothes and probed every orifice of my body for explosives.


One blogger appears to have noticed that this site is nutty:

However, neither Matt nor Andrew linked to that site. They linked to a word-for-word lift of the original on this site, which uses it as the liner for a litter box full of vile 9/11-truther and Israel-conspiracy nonsense. Thousands of readers following their links went there, instead of the original site.

National Treasure

Jon Voight is most definitely not a "Truther":

Of course, the film's potential scenario provides a feast for conspiracy theorists. But while some of the unsolved mysteries in the history of our country can't be denied, don't expect Voight to buy into any arguments about who may have killed John F. Kennedy other than Lee Harvey Oswald.

As for any conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11, don't get him started.

"The conspiracy theories about 9/11 are not only coming from addle-minded people, they are coming from sick-minded people who are anti-American," Voight said. "Who knows why? Most of the people who are party to that stuff are people who have been abused somewhere in their lives and are striking out at their parent figures -- the government being the great parent, in a sense."


Two thumbs up!

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Quick Hits

Christmas truce accepted by me. James can make his own decision on this, but I'll be happy to play video games with my nephews for a couple days.

Here's a Christmas card from Caustic Logic to Craig Ranke:

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Idiotic Loose Change Forum Post of the Day

This one reveals the problems that younger people have with understanding Baby Boomer cultural references, and just about had me rolling on the floor.

Huckabee Says, "PAUL IS DEAD"--JUST RELEASED ON CNN WHEN PLAYING HIS CHRISTMAS ADD-- sick bastard !


I viewed the ad brifely, did he actually say: Ron Paul is dead, meaning he's going to be assassinated, like rumors I've been hearing, or was it indirect, or just a figure of speech.

Would like to find out exactly what he meant.


Okay, kiddies, here's the answer. Huckabee was responding to criticism of his "Christmas" ad, in which many people claim that a bookshelf in the background was actually a sneaky, subliminal cross. In a joke that everybody who lived through the 1960s would get, Huckabee said, "If you play the ad backwards, it says "Paul is dead, Paul is dead."

He is not referring to Ron Paul, he's referring to the late 1960s' rumor that Paul McCartney was dead. This was a red-hot item back then, sparked by some over-medicated people listening a tad too closely to the music. The idea was that John Lennon had placed clues to McCartney's death in some Beatles' songs; one song, when played backwards, supposedly said "Paul is dead, miss him, miss him."

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Rochester Report

Our commenter Patrick was present for a screening of Loose Change Final Cut and for the apres-film beverages, and gives us the following report in the comments on the last post, which is good enough to pull out to the front page:

My God, what a fun night with the Troofers in Rochester. Dylan and Korey showed up; I stuck with (or, near) them and their local crew the whole night, including the bar afterwards.

Believe me, these freaks are worse than you could ever imagine. (And actually, not to say that about Dylan and Korey; I have to admit they seemed like affable fellows).

I'll post more later, but just some random thoughts ...

After the movie, outside, I passed out a rather innocuous leaflet, just suggesting that people read this blog and 911myths.com and debunking911.com. At the top of the leaflet, I typed the link to Mark Robert's PDF of Loose Change Creators Speak.

I was actually in a rush to do this. I printed it out on my computer; made it half a page to save on waste. I went to Kinko's, copied it, made some really bad cuts with their splicer or whatever the hell that is; in the end, it looked like a completely unprofessional job.

For this, throughout the whole night, I was branded a Secret Service spy.

I haven't been photographed like that since high school athletics and my sister's wedding. At the bar, some ass was waiting in his car, engine running, for my trip outside for my occasional cigarette break. He was photographing me from his car. What a waste of both fossil fuels and human DNA.

Back in the bar, I was getting more than the occasional stare and more than the occasional cell phone grab.

Wait not to mention - I intended to leave after one beer. One of the douchebags seriously stalked me. I double-backed twice, finally confronting him (although I had no intention of doing so). He accused me of having a gun and asked me if I had all the proper licenses and registrations for that gun. He had his hands in his pockets, and I was (hate to admit it) seriously scared of what that nutjob might do, so I ran back into the bar.

At the bar, I met Squeaky Fromme incarnate - apparently the person who organized the Loose Change showing (her name, I was told by the bouncer, is Wendy). During the time prior to her creating physical space discomfort (I'm sure that she, like Squeaky, knows how to do this), I thought, "No, she's not getting into a staring contest with me, that can't be true, I'm making that up," but, no, she wanted a staring contest, had the bartender take some pics of me with her camera and later confronted me with "So what are you doing here".

Now, normally, if a woman said "So what are you doing here" at a bar, I would be flattered, perhaps intrigued. But her words were vapid, empty, disturbing. And hurtful, at least as to how Human Being 1 should be treating Human Being 2. And she kept going, disturbing me with her emptiness and loneliness.

Anyway, after some more fun events, I took a cab home, having become officially cab-drunk and going-back-to-my-car-paranoid.

But ... to leave you with two other highlights.

At the Q&A session after the showing, a gentlemen said something like, "Could you recommend resources that link the Israelis and the Mossad with 911?" I instantly heard the paraphrase - "Could you tell me how to blame 911 on the Jews?" I screamed "HEINRICH HIMMLER". Very funny moment, for me and about 15-20% of the crowd.

And I was struck by the fact that Korey promised that after lawyer fees (I'm a lawyer, I understand), ALL of the money that they were making would go to the 911 truth movement (whatever that means) and first responders (we can verify what that means). Prior to that - during the movie - I saw a big jar with a sticker that said all proceeds go to first responders (and some cash in that jar). Also, this was billed by the theater as a "benefit." So ... was this a charity event? Are all of their events charity events? I knew that, during the Q&A, I would get one question. So I asked if they were properly registered as charity solicitors with the State of New York. He tried to say that they were an LLC (so what) and then that they were a 501(c)(3) (which would be a lie), but then had to admit that they weren't registered as parties allowed to solicit contributions for a charity.

Like, I said, I'm an attorney. But then, very minor. Sounds like a job for the Attorney General!


Sounds very much like they are doing everything by the seat of their pants.

Great job, Patrick!

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Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Just How Out Of It Is Ron Paul?

The "Only Man Who Can Save America" as I believe it is termed, is on Glenn Beck's show being asked about his nutjob followers. Glenn Beck of course is right at the top of the troofer hit list for his previous program with Michael Shermer and James Meigs. The troofers are not going to be happy with this clip though, although not so much for Beck, as for Ron Paul, as he unequivocally states that he does not believe in the tenents of the 9/11 conspiracy theories such as no plane hitting the Pentagon or remote control planes. I can't really endorse his response though, because bizarrely, he claims that he was not even aware of being supported by wacko conspiracy theorists. When asked about the Pentagon being hit by a missile or remote controlled planes, he claimed that he had "never even heard of these challenges before".

WHAT? Hello, how many times have you been on Alex Jones' radio program? Have you even paid attention to who Alex Jones is? Not to mention that these are hardly the only fringe elements that he hangs out with. As I pointed out previously he has been the main speaker at event like those run by the Freedom Law School, which is on the watchlist for extremist organizations by the ADL, and is frequented by all sorts of fringe types such as tax resisters, anti-Semites, and conspiracy theorists.

So the man is either lying, or he is completely clueless about a social movement that is fairly widely known in the country as a whole, and that is rampant among his followers. Do you want this man running the country?

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Alex Jones Proves Ron Paul Is a CIA Stooge!

You know, conspiracy theory logic may be frustrating for the sane, but sometimes it is fun to use it. It is in this spirit that I discovered this morning that Troofer presidential favorite Ron Paul is a CIA stooge, well that is if you believe what you read on Alex Jones' websites.

How can I prove this? Well let's look at this article from just a few months back on Infowars.com.

Former Intelligence Agent Says Google In Bed With CIA

Steele also sounds off on 9/11 doubts
Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com October 27 2006
A former clandestine services officer for the CIA who also maintains close relationships with top Google representatives says that the company is "in bed with" the intelligence agency and the U.S. government. He has also gone public on his deep suspicions about the official explanation behind 9/11.


So it was with this in mind that I was stunned to see this headline on Prison Planet just this morning.

Google Tops Among Ron Paul Donors

Is he really so foolish to think that we cannot connect the dots? Hah! I am going to go make a You Tube video now and come up with some snazzy slogans to scream through a megaphone.

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Monday, December 17, 2007

A Little Behind, Are We Jon?

Jon Gold comments over on 911 Blogger regarding the infamous missing $2.3 trillion:

Is The Missing $2.3 Trillion Really Missing?

Today, Jerry Mazza's story entitled, "Following Zakheim and Pentagon Trillions to Israel and 9-11" was re-posted on indybay.org.

In that article, Jerry states, "At that time he was unable to explain the disappearance of $1 trillion dollars. Actually, nearly three years earlier, Donald Rumsfeld announced on September 10, 2001 that an audit discovered $2.3 trillion was also missing from the Pentagon books."

On February 20th, 2002, Gerry J. Gilmore of the American Forces Press Service reported that, "DoD financial experts, Zakheim said, are making good progress reconciling the department's "lost" expenditures, trimming them from a prior estimated total of $2.3 trillion to $700 billion. And, he added, the amount continues to drop."


He is a bit behind on this though. I read this story over the weekend, but rampant anti-Semitism aside, it is hardly worth debunking. This $2.3 trillion story has been debunked so many times, it is not really worth our time. For God's sake, it has been in all 4 versions of Loose Change, including the supposedly undebunkable Loose Change: Final Cut, "fact checked" by David Ray Griffin, and it has been shown to be bogus for well over a year now. In fact the very article by Gerry Gilmore he mentions has been found on 911 Myths for quite some time now.

While I suppose I could give Jon some credit for pointing out truther mistakes, something which the average truther would rather die than do, he still fails to correct the impression that this had anything to do with Rumsfeld or Zakheim, a fact which has been proven on both 911 Myths and this blog for quite some time. This "missing money" was not "announced" by Rumsfeld, nor the result of the actions of anyone in the Bush Administration, it was in fact a problem that they inheirited from previous administrations, and were trying to address:

By JOHN M. DONNELLY

The Associated Press 03/03/00 5:44 PM Eastern


WASHINGTON (AP) -- The military's money managers last year made almost $7 trillion in adjustments to their financial ledgers in an attempt to make them add up, the Pentagon's inspector general said in a report released Friday. The Pentagon could not show receipts for $2.3 trillion of those changes, and half a trillion dollars of it was just corrections of mistakes made in earlier adjustments.


Gold does end with one bit of inadvertent honesty though:

I'm not defending Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon's inability to track billions of dollars, nor am I a "Zionist Mole for Larry Silverstein", however, if a "debunker" wanted to use this against us, it wouldn't be hard for them to do so, and make us look like fools.

Yes, I agree, it isn't hard to make you look like fools.

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The "Crime Scene" Nonsense

I mostly ignore this argument because it seems so patently absurd, but a lawyer resuscitates it in this article, so I thought it might be worth spending a couple minutes on.

All United States law students are required to complete a criminal law course. The examination to obtain their license to practice law has criminal law as one of the subjects covered. All lawyers are trained that the normal procedure is to yellow tape the crime scenes. No crime scene evidence is to be disturbed. You’ve seen this action numerous times on the CSI television shows. In the case of 9/11, no yellow tape of the scene was made to preserve the evidence. To the contrary, the scene was taped off to prevent investigation. Persons who identified themselves as Federal Bureau of Investigation agents collected the film from all known surveillance cameras around the 9/11 crime scenes. The evidence was immediately loaded on trucks, carried away and destroyed.


This almost seems like a parody of the Troofer's position, it's so ridiculously extreme. First, note the obvious contradiction: "No yellow tape of the scene was made to preserve the evidence...the scene was taped off...." I mean, what is is complaint here? Did they use the wrong color tape?




"The evidence was immediately loaded on trucks, carried away and destroyed."



Well, loaded on trucks, yes.

You know what really bugs me about this crap? Had the Bush Administration done as the "Truthers" now demand, they'd be howling for his head for having obstructed emergency personnel's access to the WTC site to search for survivors. I mean, can you see the cops and FBI putting up crime scene tape around the entire lower Manhattan, and saying to the firemen and other rescue workers, "Sorry, but we cannot allow you inside this line, because this is a crime scene. No, you can't move any of those steel beams to save lives, because we have to investigate each and every piece of steel for evidence of controlled demolition."

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Yet Another Cautionary Tale

Vanity Fair covers the dual suicide of a couple that at least has some peripheral connection to the 9-11 conspiracy theories.

Maybe it was Morales’s refreshing lack of knowledge of anything connected with Hollywood that made the couple gravitate so heavily now toward the hip pastor. Or maybe it was his knowledge of subjects which had come to interest them, which other friends of theirs considered a bit nutty. “The U.S. government invaded Iraq on the basis of lies and still some people want to deny the existence of conspiracies,” said Morales.

In May, Duncan published on her blog a long conversation with Morales on topics such as MK-Ultra and Operation Chaos—actual C.I.A. mind-control and surveillance programs between the 50s and the 70s. She announced on the blog (two days before she died) that she was writing a piece called “The Devil and Dick Cheney”—“a metaphysical investigation,” Morales explained, into whether the vice president “could actually be Satan.”


He offered to contact his friend Alex Jones about doing a Scientology show on his nationally syndicated radio program (The Alex Jones Show), which specializes in government secrets and conspiracies. Blake liked the idea. In January, he had sent someone an e-mail promoting Jones as a “colorful Texas populist who has hipster credibility.” It was through Jones’s show that he had become familiar with the “9/11 truth movement” and its questioning of the U.S. government’s so-called “official story.” He had e-mailed friends about this too. He now became a semi-regular attendee at the Sunday-night 9/11-truth meetings at St. Mark’s Church, which Morales oversees. Morales said, “He was talking about doing art around 9/11 truth.”


The piece is written by Nancy Jo Sales, who also wrote the piece on Dylan and the Loosers last year, and who, by no small coincidence is also the former wife of Frank Morales. Weird story.

Sunday, December 16, 2007

History On Trial

Last month I made a post on the connection between the approach of Holocaust Deniers and 9/11 Deniers, based off of reading Deborah Lipstadt's book, Denying the Holocaust. It must have struck a nerve because it immediately drew the wrath of some of the extremists who post here, and currently has nearly 200 comments. Among the comments, Professor Lipstadt was kind enough to post here and recommended that I read her next book, History on Trial: My Day in Court With David Irving.

So with my interest in this subject, and history in general (I was a Russian Studies major in college after all) I set off to do just that. In many ways, by being more focused, I found this book a more interesting refutation of the denier theories than the previous one, and found it as a whole fascinating. History on Trial, in short, covers the episode where British historian David Irving, using the rather ridiculous British standards for libel, sues Professor Lipstadt for libel, for documenting in her previous book that he was a Holocaust denier who employed dubious historical standards. Of course Irving is hampered in his court case by the that fact that he is.

This subject bears more than just a passing connection to the 9/11 deniers. After all, it was David Irving who Kevin Barrett was referring to when he said:

As a rational person who is not a specialist in the subject of WWII, but who has studied the history of Zionist Big Lies vis-a-vis Palestine, I cannot possibly dismiss the arguments of people like Green, Irving, and even Zundel.


And when Christopher Bollyn wrote an e-mail to Steven Jones defending himself against accusations of anti-Semitism, his claims of hundreds of thousands of deaths were most likely based on Irving's book, "The Destruction of Dresden", where Irving first greatly exaggerated the casualty toll in an attempt at moral equivalence with the Holocaust. It should be noted though, that Bollyn exaggerates even beyond Irving's lie. It should be no suprise though, that these people continue to cite the arguments of Irving, even years after they have been proven false.

But the ties are not merely ideological, among a few fringe members, but lead into the tactical. By suing Lipstadt, Irving was trying to get her to withdraw her book from the market, and to silence further criticism of his work. Ironically, he then tried to claim that in fact he was the victim of a campaign to silence him and suppress his freedom of speech, much like the 911 conspiracy movement is constantly claiming that they are being censored, merely because others disagree with their work. This has moved beyond theoretical, because the 911 conspiracy movement is also using the courtroom against their ideological opponents, most famously with Kevin Ryan's failed lawsuit against Underwriters Laboratory, but also with attempts by Morgan Reynolds and others to get NIST to alter their findings. This issue is more than just theoretical for me, because even I have been threatened with a libel suit in the British courts, merely for blogging about the Leo Wanta nuttiness. How long before one of the 9/11 Deniers also resorts to this tactic to silence their opponents?

As I pointed out in my previous post, the tactics employed by the Holocaust Deniers and 9/11 deniers mirror each other, and this book makes it even clearer. The author's lawyers, clearly lay out the pattern of abuse of history that Irving is guilty of, including quote mining (calling Dylan Avery), mistranslating documents, and outright lying. Irving continuously defends himself claiming that he like anyone else makes mistake, in which case the defense points out quite rightly, that random mistakes should even out in the end, coming down 50% in favor of, and 50% against one's argument, but Irving's "mistakes" were exclusively to the benefit of making Hitler and the Nazis look better. One can find the same "mistakes" in just about every 9/11 denier webpage, book, or movie (calling Dylan Avery) ever made.

Professor Lipstadt also makes some interesting comments regarding the nature of historiography in general. Irving tries to prove his case by arguing minutiae, be it the nature of the elevator doors at Auschwitz, a single instance of coats being distributed at a concentration camp, or, more grotesquely, the amount of coal needed to incinerate a corpse, all while ignoring the big picture, which overwhelmingly indicated the nature of the Holocaust. As Lipstadt points out, history is not done this way, through taking minor points and reaching big conclusions, it is done through the preponderance of evidence. Keep this in mind the next time you are arguing about the exact altitude cell phones work at.

Most disturbingly, I was struck by the fact that many defended Irving on the grounds of free speech, just as people defend 9/11 deniers saying that they have the right to their version of history. This is especially absurd, because Irving was the one trying to silence the opposition. Yes, historical revisionist have the right to spout their lies, but they also have the right for others to correct them, and to call them what they are.

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Saturday, December 15, 2007

Flight 93 Memorials

Johnathan V. Last discusses the efforts to build a couple of memorials to some of the heroes of 9-11..

He closed on the property a few days later and set to work restoring it by himself. There was only one electrical outlet, which had to provide power for both lighting and tools. The walls and ceiling needed to be torn out and rebuilt. There wasn't much money. Father Al was buying supplies $50 at a time at the local lumber yard, whenever he could spare the cash. One day the manager noticed the priest who kept coming back and buying bits of this and that. He asked what sort of project he was working on. Father Al told him about his plans for the chapel. The manager called Maggie Hardy Magerko, who owns the 84 Lumber Company, and relayed the story.

Hardy Magerko immediately gave Father Al a $23,000 grant toward materials for the restoration. That August, she came by the church to visit and saw how truly desperate the condition of the place was. She sent out a call to carpenters and craftsmen and put a small army of professional builders at Father Al's disposal. They worked around the clock for ten days, using the sketches he had drawn on Christmas as their blueprints. As Father Al tells it, at 4:00 P.M. on September 10, 2002, "the artist applying gold leaf paint to the trim in the sanctuary put his brush down and the work was complete." The Flight 93 Memorial Chapel was finished.

The Union City memorial and Flight 93 chapel have more in common than their private origins. There are people who view the passengers and crew of Flight 93 as victims to be mourned. And then there are people like Michael Emerson and Father Al who insist that these are heroes to be celebrated.


Amen!

Umberto Eco on the Truthers

Sounds like he's not impressed by the "what are the odds" arguments:

Since I believe that our world came into existence by chance, I have no trouble arguing that chance — or a concurrence of various idiocies — lies behind most events. My innate scepticism and caution prompt me to doubt the existence of any alleged plot because I believe that my fellow man is too stupid to conceive a perfect one. And I say this even though I’m inclined to believe that Bush and his administration are capable of anything.

I refer to what I would define as the “proof of silence”. For example, there are those who insinuate that the American moon landing was a televised fake. But there were people checking up on this — in this case, the Soviet Union — who had an interest in speaking out if the American spaceship had not landed on the moon. The Soviets kept quiet, so there’s your proof that the Americans really did go to the moon. And that’s that.


Hat tip: JREF forum member Alferd Packer.

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Can He Win the Million Dollars For This?

Alex Jones has long promoted his predictive powers based off of a claim that he predicted 9/11. Of course he only did this by making hundreds of vague and paranoid claims in the first place, and then waiting until one of them came true, sort of. None of the hundreds of predictions he has made since then have come true, but he doesn't talk about those.

Now the nutjobs are going one step further over Prison Planet, with one of the paranoid wing's so-called journalists saying that troofer presidential candidate Ron Paul may be assassinated, or maybe not:

Best-selling author and Bilderberg sleuth Daniel Estulin says he has received information from sources inside the U.S. intelligence community which suggests that people from the highest levels of the U.S. government are considering an assassination attempt against Congressman Ron Paul because they are threatened by his burgeoning popularity.

Estulin, whose information has unfortunately proven very accurate in the past, went public with the bombshell news during an appearance on The Alex Jones Show today.


What is hilarious though, is what they point out as information that has "proven very accurate in the past".

Estulin pointed out that his past predictions about global events were very accurate because of the solid information provided to him from within Bilderberg and the elite. Over 18 months ago Estulin correctly made the call that the Iran war had been delayed and was probably off the table, which is looking to be exactly the case after the release of the recent National Intelligence Estimate. Estulin in featured at length in Alex Jones' film Endgame, in which he is also filmed making the prediction based on his sources.

OK, exactly how hard is it to predict that we wouldn't invade Iran? How hard is it to predict that something won't happen, period? I hereby predict that we will not invade Iran, that Steven Jones will not win the Nobel Prize for Physics, and that the Miami Dolphins will not win the Super Bowl.

Do I get my million dollars now?

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White Men Can't Dance



Apparently this is Dylan Avery, demonstrating for us.

Hat Tip: Undesired Walrus at JREF.

Friday, December 14, 2007

A New NIST FAQ

Most likely in response to being asked the same inane questions repeatedly by truthers, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has posted a supplental FAQ on their website. Not that this will change the fact that they will still be repeatedly asked the same inane questions.

Since the release of the Final Report on the Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers in October 2005, NIST has received many questions from interested readers curious about NIST’s findings and the technical basis for them. The complexity of the investigation and the length of the final report (including all of the supporting volumes) have made understanding of the investigation a challenge for many interested readers. In response, NIST has prepared simplified answers to the most frequently asked questions.

1. Was there enough gravitational energy present in the World Trade Center Towers to cause the collapse of the intact floors below the impact floors? Why was the collapse of WTC 1 and 2 not arrested by the intact structure below the floors where columns first began to buckle?

Yes, there was more than enough gravitational load to cause the collapse of the floors below the level of collapse initiation in both WTC Towers. The vertical capacity of the connections supporting an intact floor below the level of collapse was adequate to carry the load of 11 additional floors if the load was applied gradually and 6 additional floors if the load was applied suddenly (as was the case). Since the number of floors above the approximate floor of collapse initiation exceeded six in each WTC Tower (12 and 29 floors, respectively), the floors below the level of collapse initiation were unable to resist the suddenly applied gravitational load from the upper floors of the buildings. Details of this finding are provided below:

Click on the above link for more...

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Yet Another Troof Movement



And if you think the concept of multiple Troof Movements is absurd, check this out:

Truth movements that arise after pivotal events like electoral fraud, 9/11, key assassinations and false flag ops can/should become more than forensic inquiries into a single heinous crime. They can also expose wider patterns of illicit control, deception and propaganda, and use their revelations to rouse entire societies to reject a malignant status quo.


Hat Tip on Cartoon to Markyx at JREF.

The Hardy Boys & the San Francisco Stalker



Dylan travels to The City by the Bay, encounters a mysterious stalker, engages in a little hecklivism of Warren Buffet, and maligns the CEO of Fiduciary Trust. Once again, despite the constant claims that not many people were in on the plot, the conspiracy nutbars are happy to expand the scope at the drop of a hat.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Richard Gage Redux

So to continue with my last post, pointing out the idiocies of Richard Gage's interview with Kevin "Hang 'em High" Barrett. Now he starts misrepresenting the FEMA report on World Trade Center 7:

Gage: FEMA, who came up with this conclusion, pulls the rug out from under themselves by saying that the best hypothesis, which is fire plus the random damage from the debris from the World Trade Center, remember this building was not hit by an airplane, uhh their best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence. They are saying we have no faith in our own best hypothesis. So they give it to NIST, NIST does nothing with it, NIST punts.

If Gage had actually read the FEMA report though, he would know that the "best hypothesis" does not refer to the general theory that the building collapsed from fire and debris damage, but it is referring to a specific hypothesis regarding a specific collapse mechanism, and FEMA's desire that the matter should be studied further.

The loss of the east penthouse on the videotape suggests that the collapse event was initiated by the loss of structural integrity in one of the transfer systems. Loss of structural integrity was likely a result of weakening caused by fires on the 5th to 7th floors. The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this time. Although the total diesel fuel on the premises contained massive potential energy, the best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence. Further research, investigation, and analyses are needed to resolve this issue.

Gage doesn't seem to realize that real science takes time, and requires more than a gut feeling that the buildings should topple over like a beer bottle.

Now Gage shows why he is not an engineer, in fact he is barely able to put an intelligible sentence together, from 14 minutes in:

Gage: NIST, of course, is at fault, chiefly for stopping their entire $20 million 3 year investigation at the instant of aircraft impact into the building, uhh, before the structural behavior of the building, uhh, showed uhh, it's uhh collapse. Well why would they spend $20 million examining every turbine of the uhh airplane, and also the uhh the fires, uhh, the incredible of uhh analysis and stop the investigation right when the the collapse begins. It... it, they only have one half of a page in this 10,000 page report that merely speculate that uhh well it was obvious from they say that uhh the massive weight above the impact, uhh, could not be uhh, absorbed by deformation by the steel below. Uhh, and therefore we have a freefall collapse. (laughter) And it is absolutely ludicrous that the 80,000 tons of steel below the jet plane impact had no capability whatsoever to even slow down this weight.

Uhh, it is not, uhh, speculation, it is called math. Real scientists do actual calculations, they don't rely on arguments from incredulity.

Later Gage discusses the "demolition" of the towers, which apparently is so obvious I can't believe that I did not recognize it before.

Gage: You have the blast waves removing these columns symmetrically all the way around the building. The firemen describe these explosions wrapping around the building like a belt. And sure enough the videos show these explosions occurring all the way around each side of the building symmetrically, and progressing actually, I am told and we're doing this analysis now, faster than free fall. Now that is impossible by physics! Something can only fall as fast as... as... as... free fall speed. Uhh, so what is happening is the concrete is being completely pulverized to fine dust and to gravel.

What videos has he been watching? And what has he been smoking? I thought even the slow truthers had given up on this faster than free fall thing. I guess nothing ever dies in trutherville.

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Kevin Barrett and Richard Gage

I have always considered Richard Gage to be one of the more bland members of the 9/11 denial movement, if only because he presents this incredibly boring, long-winded, and unoriginal representation of truther views. After listening to him talk with Kevin Barrett though, it is clear he is as fruit loopy as Kevin Barrett, if not as bizarrely entertaining.

I really don't know where to start, this whole interview is so full of mind-numbingly bad science and logic, it is hard to point out anything particular. It is apparent that Gage is one of the world's lamest arguments to authority, as he presents little more than "This couldn't have happened, because I am an architect and I don't think it could have". For some reason I get the impression that this whole thing is an ego trip for his otherwise uneventful life drawing up plans for high school gyms.

In any case, I finally came up with a few gems, from 7 minutes in:

Barrett: That leads to a question that I want to ask a credentialed person, and you’re the nearest credentialed person right not (laughter). When to the so called debunkers try to tell us, well building 7 had been damaged and so on. They expected it to collapse because it had been so damaged. But yet they didn’t clear the whole area. Wouldn’t if they were expecting some kind of accidental collapse, which of course had never happened in history (laughter), but assuming that they were, wouldn’t they assume it would topple sideways and wouldn’t they clear out a very large area?

Gage: Well I am not sure how big the area was, I think it was fairly large. I don’t think it was 47 stories large, that is a great point!



Actually there are numerous accounts of first responders being pulled back. What do you think this whole Larry Silverstein pull it comment is? Mark Roberts has categorized numerous accounts here.

Q: You were still there?

A: Yes, so basically they measured out how far the building was going to come, so we knew exactly where we could stand.

Q: So they just put you in a safe area, safe enough for when that building came down?

A: 5 blocks. 5 blocks away. We still could see. Exactly right on point, the cloud just stopped right there. Then when that building was coming down, that same rumbling.

And yes, 5 blocks is more than 47 stories.

More later...

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Troy Does Alex Jones



Oh, my, I have to admit I had no idea Troy was this talented at parody. Funniest thing I've seen all week, by far! Two thumbs up, way up!

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Wednesday, December 12, 2007

An Oldie But a Goodie

Earlier I once said that to my knowledge David Ray Griffin had never participated in a debate or an interview in which he was challenged. I am still not aware of any examples of the former, but I found an older example of the latter, in an interview with the CBC.

As expected, the guy is evasive as OJ Simpson under cross examination.

Solomon: I'm quoting Lee Hamilton, he says that 'the only thing I ask in the future is that the conspiracy theory people do not apply a double standard, that is to say, they want us to provide an airtight case for any assertion that we make, whereas when they make an assertion, they often do it on very flimsy evidence. And he says, his quote is, 'I ask them to show me any hard evidence.' If you could show him hard evidence, what would you show him?

Griffin: If Lee Hamilton would be willing to meet with me and discuss with me in a public forum, that would be wonderful, and I will show him all the evidence. But he will refuse this, as will all other members of the 9/11 Commission. They make these brave statements in front of the camera, but when you ask them 'let's enter into a debate about this', they always refuse, saying 'well, we don't want to lend the conspiracy theorists credibility.

Now, he used this term "conspiracy theorist" to apply to me and other members of the movement, but of course a conspiracy is simply when two or three people enter into an agreement in secret to do something illegal. The 9/11.. the official story about 9/11 is a gigantic conspiracy theory - that 19 Arab Muslims, under the guidance of Osama bin Laden, defeated the world's most sophisticated military defense system, and also in bringing down the World Trade Center, defeated many of the basic laws of physics. So that is the basic conspiracy theory, and what we in the movement are doing is challenging that conspiracy theory.


Uhh, you ever want to get around to answering his question?

Griffin later explains gravity:

Griffin: Sure, people grasp at straws, and it's not surprising that they would do this. But these squibs - in my book, I call them horizontal ejections, and they're really quite impressive, and to believe that the force of gravity, which is a vertical force, could have caused these is scientifically very dubious - particularly when you see that it is not only smoke that is ejected horizontally, but you have pieces of steel and aluminum that are thrown out horizontally, some of them even vertically, for part of the way, several hundred feet. There is no way that can be explained as the downward result of the compression.

Later he repeats the myth that 9/11 was not investigated.

Griffin: Let me add here, what we need is a genuine investigation. We have more of a criminal investigation if the local 7-11 is robbed - you actual put people under oath, you give them lie detector tests, you threaten them with prison if they lie under oath - none of that was done with 9/11, which was the biggest crime in American history, and it was not investigated as a crime. For example..

The FBI would disagree:

Our ensuing investigation of the attacks of 9/11/01—code-named “PENTTBOM”—was our largest investigation ever. At the peak of the case, more than half our agents worked to identify the hijackers and their sponsors and, with other agencies, to head off any possible future attacks. We followed more than half-a-million investigative leads, including several hundred thousand tips from the public. The attack and crash sites also represented the largest crime scenes in FBI history.

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Does Bob Bowman Still Wear Bell Bottoms?

We haven't heard much from Colonel Bob lately, but apparently he is going retro, because I thought all of these "The oil company is hiding the carburetor that gets 150 MPH gallon" urban legends went out of style in the late 70s. Here he is on Kevin Barrett's radio show last night about 42 minutes in.

There are a lot of folks who believe that we got energy secrets from the UFOs that have been kept under wraps by the Pentagon. I am completely agnostic on all that. But I do know that there are certainly better batteries and there are ways to have better electric and super hybrid vehicles that would enormously slash the amount of gasoline that would be required.


Yeah, tell that to Toyota. I found it amusing that he is agnostic on the whole alien technology thing. Guess what else he claimed to be agnostic on, on national TV no less? Yeah, on what happened on 9/11. So you heard it here first, one of the leading figures of the 9/11 denial movement rates their theories as convincing as those regarding secret alien powerplants.

Richard Gage is actually the guest for the second hour, when I get a chance I will have to see if he has come up with anything to say that he hasn't just read on the Internet.

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Late To the Party

Jenny seems to think--strike that. Jenny seems to feel that we have insufficiently covered the Truth Action Forum's attempts to clean house. We covered extensively their efforts in the Kennebunkport Warning fiasco, coming down squarely on their side and opposing Webster Tarpley.

Now they have moved on to Kevin Barrett. It is certainly enjoyable to see the Truth Jihadi getting hauled on the carpet, but jeez, if they'd been reading our site they'd have known about his negative qualities long ago. I apologize if this is ancient history to a lot of you.

They discuss:

Kevin's Holocaust Denial. Jeez, we caught onto that in February.

Captain Eric May is a numerologist and anti-Semite.

Barbara Honegger is a Munchkin.

Of course, this being the Troofers, they bring up some of the "good" things Kevin Barrett has done, like expose the Franklin Coverup.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Shiny, Happy People Holding Hands!





Who wouldn't want to be a "Truther"?

So Much For Sulfur

All we have been hearing for some time now from Steven Jones is how the only explanation for traces of sulfur at Ground Zero is the use of thermate, despite the fact that thermate has never been used in building demolitions, while ignoring all other possible sources of sulfur. It is in this context that I noticed this article this morning on the environmental hazards of hydrogen sulfide in the Wall Street Journal, so I e-mailed Herr Jones a copy, on the likely assumption that he is not a subscriber.

So as not to run afoul of the Journal’s copyright, I will only excerpt the pertinent parts here.


Hydrogen sulfide is produced when organic material containing sulfur decomposes, such as in sewage. It can also be produced from chemical reactions. The gas is readily found in the Earth's crust and in extremely low levels in the atmosphere. In dumps specializing in construction and demolition debris it can be produced when gypsum, the main ingredient in wallboard, decomposes.

After several hurricanes devastated the Gulf Coast in the 2004 and 2005 seasons, millions of tons of wet construction debris were hastily dumped in pits, quarries and landfills in Florida, Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana, says Lynn Wilder, an environmental health scientist with the agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. Because many homes were damaged, a higher-than-normal percentage of the demolition debris contains gypsum. Already, complaints have cropped up around some of these facilities and U.S. and state investigators are monitoring several sites.

So, instead of the presence of sulfur in building materials being anomalous, as Jones seems to think, it is present in such large quantities as to be a serious health hazard.

I am not expecting a response to my e-mail any time soon.

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Dylan's Changing Positions



In this clip, which I believe comes from the presentation Dylan made at the Chicago "Scholars" convention, Dylan states that he doesn't believe that the 19 hijackers existed. As I pointed out the other day, this marks him as a "No-Planer", at least as of the time this was filmed. He's also changed his mind on the hijackers; I recall in a recent interview that he now believes they existed.

Hat Tip: Emailer Genghis

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Which of These Three Will Be a Troofer Longer?




My guess is that the kids will grow out of it, and that the old man may live long enough to see that. But it's going to be close!

Monday, December 10, 2007

Yet Another 9/11 Confession

These happen so often that they don't even bother to post anymore on 911 Blogger about how he was tortured to say this.


GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba — A Yemeni admitted he was a driver for Usama bin Laden and knew of the Al Qaeda leader's role in the Sept. 11 attack, an FBI agent testified Thursday, countering defense assertions that the detainee was a minor employee with no role in terrorism.

Salim Ahmed Hamdan told FBI agents that he had chauffeured bin Laden around Afghanistan in an Al Qaeda convoy after Sept. 11 and overheard the leader say he had expected only up to 1,500 people to be killed in the attack, Special Agent George Crouch said.

"When Usama bin Laden learned it was much larger than that he was very pleased," Crouch recalled Hamdan telling him and two other FBI agents during one of a dozen interrogation sessions at Guantanamo in the summer of 2002.

Naomi Wolf, Nutbar



She sounds like somebody who just saw Loose Change last night. "Two days after 9-11 I was reading they're shipping the molten metal out to China?"

Slam-Dunking Justin Martell

Justin posts over at the Looser Forum that somebody should take Mark Roberts down a peg or two for certain comments he made over at JREF:

Here's a claim made by the man that his fellow "debunkers" call the "scourge" of the "Debunking Movement." Roberts posted the statement below on 11/5/07, in response to a fellow JREF poster mentioning the fact that New Yorkers and 9/11 Rescue Workers were told by the EPA that the air in lower Manhattan was safe to breath:

"Well it's also completely false. No one lied about the air quality at Ground Zero" - Mark Roberts, in post 11,088 as Gravy on the JREF Forum, 11/05/07. (I'm having trouble locating the original thread. It may have been deleted. However, I took a screenshot of the post, if you'd like it you can email me)


It took me a bit of poking about on JREF to find the cited post; possibly because Martell has a unique idea of what quotes around words mean. However, I'm pretty sure this is the post to which Justin refers:

Well, it's also completely false. No one said the air at Ground Zero was safe to breathe. Looks like Avery's desire to make this version "100% airtight" went by the wayside.


We criticize Dylan for quote-mining but at least in his case the words quoted do appear in that order. Martell turns "No one said the air at Ground Zero was safe to breathe," into "No one lied about the air quality at Ground Zero." As you can see, the statements are not quite identical. There is no indication that Gravy's post has been edited; JREF forum posts that are edited more than about 15 seconds after submission all show a little notation that the posts have been edited, and after about two hours they cannot be edited at all. So, Mr Martell, feel free to email me the screenshot.

Having established his strawman, Martell proceeds to demonstrate that it is arguable that the EPA downplayed air quality concerns. But of course, he is unable to come up with anything that remotely disproves that "No one said the air at Ground Zero was safe to breathe." Indeed, the EPA releases that he cites are largely not concerning Ground Zero itself, but the surrounding areas, as this indicates:

"The EPA wasted little time in assuring New York residents and rescue workers that the area surrounding ground zero was safe. On September 13, 2001, just two days after the attacks, the agency issued a press release in which it explained "sampling of bulk materials and dust found generally low levels of asbestos. The levels of lead, asbestos and volatile organic compounds in air samples taken Tuesday in Brooklyn, downwind from the World Trade Center site, were not detectable or not of concern."


Brooklyn, of course, is not Ground Zero.

Update: Martell has corrected his post at the Looser Forum; however, not surprisingly he does not make any acknowledgment that there was a mistake in the original. Justin, take a tip from us and when you fix things up, be transparent. When we make mistakes around here, and we do, we don't bury them, we acknowledge them in the post in question.

Update II: Justin has revised his post to note that he originally misquoted Gravy. We appreciate the transparency.

And Dylan, we were not referring to any quote-mining you did in this particular instance, we were talking about the long-ago mining of Wally Miller. As I said, at least you didn't change his words, even if you did pick the sentences you quoted highly selectively.

Hoping the Wiesenthal Center Does Not Back Down

Richard Gage's collection of fruitcakes has responded to the Simon Wiestenthal Center regarding the Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Denial being included in their grouping of sites that promote terrorism and anti-semitism. As we have seen with all open letters from the crackpot brigade, this one is not aimed at the nominal recipient but at the rest of the "movement".

The clear implication is that our website promotes "conspiracies", "disinformation", and – since you sandwiched it between violent Jihad militant training type websites – "terrorism" too. A brief review of our website shows that it simply contains science-based facts and questions regarding the destruction of the WTC Twin Towers and Building 7 – as well as a petition listing over 800 signatories, including more than 230 well-respected architects and engineers who are demanding a real investigation of these building "collapses" based upon the clear evidence presented in our website.


No, Richard, it contains nutty conspiracy theories and disinformation.

Regarding the anti-Semitism noted in your email form letter: We, too, abhor bigotry in all its forms, and have distanced ourselves from those few who engage in it.


Not distanced quite enough.

911 was an inside job. Our government was not simply aware, but deeply involved with all phases as was Israel. We either wake up and move on this, or prepare for 1984...Orwell wasn't off by that much...


And here:

i firmly believe these buildings were imploded. it was a masterful operation "I think" by the Israeli intelligence and the alleged hi jackers. i firmly believe the Israeli intelligence knew of the plot to hit the twin towers and used this information to coincide with the planned destruction of the buildings.

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Troofers Harass Ex Canadian PM

Last week the troofers were all estatic with headlines like "Ex-Canadian PM Next 9/11 Truther?" on Prison Planet, simply because one of their followers handed him a Loose Change DVD and an investigate 9/11 t-shirt and he didn't immediately toss them in the trash.

How soon they turn on you though, now Prisonplanet is reporting:

9/11 truthers in Ottawa and Toronto continued to speak truth to power this weekend when they asked former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien if he had watched a Loose Change Final Cut DVD that was handed to him earlier in the week in Vancouver, and also if he supported the North American Union. Chretien ran out of polite nondescript answers and eventually resorted to physically pushing away a truther in Toronto.



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