Richard Gage and Troofer Logic

The main reason I am interested in conspiracy theorists, is not for the subjects they discuss, personally I could go for the rest of my life without having to hear about Marvin Bush being the head of WTC security, but that I was interested in how they come up with their conclusions. Yes, some are just insane, people who look in the clouds and see secret messages, but others just follow certain irrational ways of looking at things. They take certain facts which are at least partially based in reality, mutate them a bit, tie them together with some stretched logic, and proudly proclaim a completely false conclusion.

The latest example of this is Richard Gage on Kevin Barrett's radio show Tuesday night. Barrett actually asked me to be on over the weekend, but I refused and was replaced by someone much more entertaining, if not exactly equal in logical thought.

Anyway, about half way through the first hour Gage argues:

But back to this molten metal found, not only at the base of building 7, but the twin towers, tons of it, seen by the first responders and the demolition workers, flowing like lava, they say.

There is only one person who made the lava comparison, but they did not say "tons of it" Gage, added that part.

And afterwards, months afterwards, it took months to cool, they would bring up these multi-ton chunks of this previously molten substance which turned out to be iron, its not even structural steel, because it doesn't have chromium in it and it has manganese, it has fluorine.

Here is he merging two claims. First, the "chunks" which are on display in an aircraft hanger along with other debris recovered from ground zero. It is not a "previously molten substance" though but compressed concrete and other debris. The testing for chromium is probably referring to a separate claim that Steven Jones made about the dust he collected from New York. Jones certainly did not test this chunk of concrete, in fact he commented to me in an e-mail that he still needed to in order to figure out what it was.














Gage continues after a break for commercials:

Barrett: Now you said it was molten iron, not molten steel. What explains that?

Gage: Exactly there is no explanation for molten iron in any of the official accounts of the story.

I'll skip ahead for a minute, past where he quotes from that mighty
scientific source, Wikipedia...

So what produced all this molten metal and this incredible heat that sent pyroclastic dust clouds down the street at 35 MPH in every direction, away from building 7.

It was a volcano!

Gage: Well, it turns out, in the previously molten metal chunks, Dr. Steven Jones, this physicist, formerly from Brigham Young University, finds the chemical evidence... including iron mostly, and aluminum, manganese, flourine, potassium, and sulfur. These form the chemical ingredients of the classic signature of thermite. A high tech incendiary used to cut through steel like a hot knife through butter. This is the smoking gun of building 7, which is the smoking gun of 9/11.

Except Jones did not test these concrete chunks. He claims he tested other debris, and Gage is just running the two claims together. This could not be the "smoking gun of building 7" even if it were true, because the chunks were from the towers, not building 7.