Both Sides Now

Colorado Public TV is broadcasting Loose Change AAC on December 4th. They note that their prior broadcasts of Press for Troof and Blueprint for Troof caused some controversy:

Some of the feedback included complaints about the program breaks and our in-studio guests – that the station was only presenting a one-sided view that supported the alternative theories of the “Truth Movement” or “Truthers.”

So they're going to provide arguments from both sides this time around. I guess:

These program breaks will include multiple viewpoints – both for and against the film's content. Guests will include Kevin Ryan, a 911 Whistleblower, plus a representative for the official story of 9/11. Additionally, we will air a range of comments from people in the community, comments from filmmakers Dylan Avery and Korey Rowe, and others.

Errr, a representative for the official story? Who might that be? The post does include a link to Debunking 9-11, so it may be that Kate is going to be there, in which case I'm satisfied. But is it too much to expect that this representative be named beforehand?

Taxpayer Funded Truthers?

OK, well I am not a Canadian citizen, but I don't think they are anymore happy about subsidizing Truther "research" than I would be. From Jonathan Kay:

As I can report from my personal encounters with Hall at 9/11 Truth events in Montreal and Walkerton, Ont., the man is very passionate about his Trutherdom. But as long as he keeps it out of the classroom, he’s free to believe in whatever conspiracy theories he likes.

Unfortunately, Hall seems to be using his post at Lethbridge as a training ground for 9/11 Trutherdom. His star pupil in this regard is British graduate student Joshua Blakeney, who can be seen in this 2009 video harassing a female CBC reporter with his dark theories about the CBC’s failure to investigate the 9/11 “cover-up.” Blakeney also wrote this charming article expressing delight that author Christopher Hitchens had been sickened with cancer.

On Wednesday afternoon, Hall proudly announced that the University of Lethbridge has awarded Blakeney a $7,714 Queen Elizabeth II Graduate Scholarship to pursue his research. (The scholarship is listed as being funded through the “ongoing financial commitment of the Province of Alberta.”) Blakeney’s first $3,857 cheque will be available for pick-up on Dec. 1.

Olbermann is Right

Three words you will probably not hear me say again. But Andrew Napolitano (and Geraldo Rivera, for that matter) have become embarrassments to Fox News and should be kicked to the curb.

For some real hilarity, check out the comments at 9-11 Flogger. As usual, the kooks are deluding themselves into thinking that Keith said this with a wink and a nod:

Olbermann knows the truth
I wonder why he had the little notation "not really" with the photo. He's no dummy. He knows the truth. He's owned. Thank God for those like Olbermann for speaking out on other issues, but it''s so heartbreaking to have to tolerate his compliance with the network. He has been walking on thin ice lately, almost getting fired.

Olbernann said:

"OK. Napolitano is a truther. I don't have to agree with him. You don't have to disagree with him. But according to his employer's code of smear, they've got to fire him."

If said a certain way, one could assume "I don't have to agree with him" is equivalent to "I don't agree with him". But since Roger Ailes was the worst person target and not Napolitano, I would take Oblermann's words as carefully chosen and politically safe but not actually anti-truther. Nevertheless, I bet many will get the impression they are anti-truther.

This should not be misconstrued as Olbermann saying he thinks Napolitano should be fired. In effect, and to our great benefit, he is instigating a controversy at FOX, whether intentionally or not, that could lead to an explosion of discussion about 9/11 and Building 7.

I do think that Olbermann is more using the Truthers as a convenient club against his old nemesis, Fox News. But that doesn't mean that he's pro-Truther; I suspect he finds them just as wacky as we do.

Another Blogger for Reason

Welcome, Mr Rational! Solid writing style, sensible conclusions, worth a regular visit.

So how can this notion be applied to the 9/11 truth movement? The following is a common example of special pleading (e.g., How can the govt. continue to conceal the conspiracy if literally thousands of people were involved? Special plead: you don’t understand the concept of compartmentalization within the government).

This argument is special pleading because it avoids having to answer the real problem, namely that even with compartmentalization there still remain thousands of people who have to remain silent. Lets take the people who set up the demolition charges for instance. If they were only given instructions to set charges and nothing else, then I find it a little odd that not a single one of them has come forward with this information. The notion of compartmentalization fails when we realize that if one link in the chain fails, then the entire conspiracy fails.

Indeed. No matter how compartmentalized the work was, there would be a hell of a lot of people who would say, "You know, I wonder if those weird ceiling tiles I installed at the WTC had anything to do with the collapse."

Judge Napolitano Joins the Circus

I've had the feeling that this guy was a clown ever since he introduced "the great Alex Jones" on a Fox program; this just confirms it.

Geraldo Impressed by 1300 Architects and Engineers

And I can kind of see it from his standpoint. I mean, we've been around since the early days when Gage was claiming that insurance companies raised their premiums 2100 percent and thinking that the box demonstration was impressive, so we know it's just 1300 clowns in the circus, whereas Geraldo has none of that experience. He doesn't know about the swimming pool engineer or the HVAC engineer or the dental engineer who thinks it was done with beam weapons from space.

Waterboy Turns Detective

Kevin Ryan takes a fruitcake look at the insider trading issue. This part appears reasonable:

This is an example of the circular logic often used by those who created the official explanations for 9/11. The reasoning goes like this: if we assume that we know who the perpetrators were (i.e. the popular version of “al Qaeda”) and those who were involved in the trades did not appear to be connected to those assumed perpetrators, then insider trading did not occur.

Of course, the nutbars have quite a different vision of who was responsible for the 9-11 attacks and thus the world of those connected to the assumed perpetrators is much wider, and US-based.

As is typical with the Troofers, Ryan provides a great deal of dots, and invites the kooks to connect them:

The people ultimately found included an unnamed customer of Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown (DBAB). This involved a trade on United Airlines (UAL) stock consisting of a 2,500-contract order that was, for some reason, split into chunks of 500 contracts each and then directed to multiple exchanges around the country simultaneously.[12] When the 9/11 Commission report pointed to a “single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda,” it was referring to either DBAB or its customer in that questionable trade.

Michael Ruppert has since written about DBAB, noting that the company had previously been a financier of The Carlyle Group and also of Brown Brothers Harriman, both of which are companies closely related to the Bush family. Ruppert also noted that Alex. Brown, the company purchased by Deutsche Bank to become DBAB, was managed by A.B. (Buzzy) Krongard, who left the firm in 1998 to join the CIA as counsel to director George Tenet.[13] Krongard had been a consultant to CIA director James Woolsey in the mid 1990s and, on September 11th, he was the Executive Director of the CIA, the third highest position in the agency.

You know how it is, those dots could be connected in different ways than Ryan intends. Michael Ruppert has written about DBAB which was run by Buzzy Krongard who later worked at the CIA. Therefore Michael Ruppert is a CIA agent! Oh, wait, that's not the way the dots are supposed to be connected?

In 2002, investigator Kyle Hence wrote about the stocks involved in the SEC’s target list. Those that had the highest examples of trade volume over the average were UAL [285 times over average], Marsh & McLennan (Marsh) [93 times over average], American Airlines (AMR) [60 times over average], and Citigroup [45 times over average].[14] Other stocks flagged included financial firms, defense-related companies, and the reinsurance firms Munich Re, Swiss Re and the AXA Group. Put options for these reinsurance firms, or bets that the stock would drop, were placed at double the normal levels in the few days before the attacks. Regulators were concerned about “large block trades” on these stocks because the three firms were liable for billions in insurance payouts due to the damage inflicted on 9/11.[15]

You know what the problem is with all this analysis? We don't know what happened to the unflagged stocks. We don't know if there were lots of flagged stocks that didn't have unusual trading volume. I'd suspect that if you picked at random 100 stocks, 10 of them would have "unusual trading volume" today, just by chance.

Remember the bit about how the Commission assumed that al Qaeda was behind 9-11 and so they were only interested in people linked to al Qaeda? Well, look at the connection that Ryan makes:

However, Wirt Walker was connected to people who had connections to al Qaeda. For example, Stratesec director James Abrahamson was the business partner of Mansoor Ijaz, who claimed on several occasions to be able to contact Osama bin Laden.[24]

Interestingly, Ryan does not repeat the oft-made claim that Wirt Walker was a cousin of Bush. But:

Walker ran a number of suspicious companies that went bankrupt, including Stratesec, some of which were underwritten by a company run by a first cousin of former CIA director (and President) George H.W. Bush.

You know how it is, in Ryan's world, if you ran a number of companies that went bankrupt, you must have made lots and lots of money. He must think that Bill Gates has the wrong idea.

As usual, the real hilarity comes out in the comments section:

And let’s not forget the 240 billion dollars worth of bonds (converted to 10 year treasuries) that were coming due on September 12, 2001.
Coincidently, those securities were in the basement of the towers, and although the majority of the international bankers gold was removed before hand (whew, that was close!), the paperwork for those Black Eagle Trust bonds, which funded W’s fathers regime change acts 10 years before, unfortunately were lost.

The Black Eagle Trust is one of those WWII myths about what happened to the Nazi Gold; it just goes to show that old conspiracy theories never die, they just get subsumed into the new conspiracy theory.

Shermer and the Dolts

Note how excitable the "Truthers" get, particularly Anthony J. Hall (loved him in 16 Candles).

Who Wouldn't Enjoy This?

Matt Naus reports on the fun one has being a Troofer:

I've been doing these 9/11 Truth Street Actions for close to 5 years now but this one will remain in my memory for quite a while. Having a 9/11 Truth street action at a college university can lead to some crazy interactions. This was a rough one, and not because we had the usual swear words at times. It was because we also got some spit thrown at us and some guy wanted to kick down our sign. Another guy gave me the finger and it seemed he wanted to put it right up my nose he got so close. Some college girl even got nasty with us. We were stationed on the corner of 16th & Wisconsin Ave. (busy corner) near downtown Milwaukee. There is a high- rise college dorm building on this corner. From about the 6th floor of this dorm building we were getting harrassed by young college kids for about an hour screaming out the window of a dorm room calling it propaganda and singing God Bless America.. One college student, who took our information, was getting harrassed by these guys and he gave his fellow students the finger. Then these window yellers decided to come down to the street level and counter our sign with a sign of their own that said "Over 3000 families demand that we support our troops". These college kids also dressed up in red, white and blue with one of them wearing an Uncle Sam outfit and another wrapping himself in a flag. I guess they wanted to celebrate Veterans Day getting cars to beep at them with there sign. Near the end of our 8 hour day of street action you will see a short Asian student and another student in the Youtube that I interviewed. They started acting stupid during the interview so I cut it kind of short. Anyways, this Asian student flew past me and grabbed one of our signs that I just put against a garbage can and he took off. The sign had a picture of the war criminals in the Bush administration. I gave chase for about a block but this 60 year old guy couldn't catch him so I had to stop before I had a heart attack. I called the police and gave a report telling them I had the thief on youtube and waited for about an hour but no police came.

Sounds like fun!

Turns Out Al Capone's Vault Was A High Point

In Geraldo Rivera's career. Here's the nadir:


Note the bit where he talks to McIlvaine and he says "I don't want to get into the details of how you think he died." Could that possibly be because he doesn't want McIlvaine spoiling his "the family members are not like the nutjobs," conclusion? Let's remember that McIlvaine thinks his son died before either of the planes hit the buildings.

Ed Asner on the Troof

Ed Asner gives a rather amusing troofer interview. I believe he is founder of "Senile Old Men for 9/11 Truth".

D'oh!

Who knew that Homer was behind it all! And apparently they intend to do it again. That fat man must be stopped!

Yes, it's true. (Or might be.) For years, fringe types have pointed to amazingly sketchy but entertaining evidence that the attacks of 9/11 were actually foretold by the beloved Fox cartoon. Nearly four years before 9/11, in an episode of the show entitled "The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson," there's a curious little scene that some conspiracy lovers and "Simpsons" aficionados have long thought might be a warning....

Box Boy Rakes in $75,000

Our buddy Joseph Nobles (aka Boloboffin) reports:

$75,450

Richard Gage’s salary in 2009 from Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. That’s according to the 2009 Form 990-EZ available right now at Guidestar.org, an online organization that helps track non-profits.

That's about $75,450 more than James and I made on SLC last year. I confirmed the information myself at Guidestar. Gage claims to spend 80 hours per week on the Troof; that's about 11.5 hours per day, every day. It sure does not show in his presentations.

Apparently the CFO of AE911Troof is J. Marx Ayres; he's about to celebrate his 88th birthday.

Chomsky Nibbles At the Apple

Grifter's Latest

I had heard the title, Cognitive Infiltration, and assumed it was going to be about Cass Sunstein's memo. But it turns out that he's just recycling the same old trash:

cell phone fakery is CENTRAL to the thesis in his current book which claims evidence that there were no hijackings - no muslims on board - the hijackers are still alive - and the calls were faked.

No need to invent new snake oil if the rubes keep buying the old stuff, I suppose.

A Big Honking Plate of Stupid

It's hard to say what part of this interview between Roseanne Barr and Jon Gold (with Coleen Rowley) is my favorite. Is it when Roseanne says, "Thank God for Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone?", apparently unaware of what Matt wrote about the 9-11 Truthers? Is it when Roseanne's buddy calls in to suggest that the Truth Movement is a CIA plot? Is it when he goes on to suggest that the Truthers should drop their focus on 9-11 and instead concentrate on campaign finance reform and Jon Gold agrees? Or is it when Gold himself suggests that the vote be banned for whites and males for a couple centuries? Correction: Idiot Jon Gold stops by in the comments and says it was not he who suggested banning the vote for whites and males, and listening to it again I can hear it was Roseanne's buddy. My apologies to idiot Jon.

No, for me the best part is that Coleen Rowley sits there contributing to the conversation, and doesn't once seem to realize that she's talking with a bunch of insane people. I've known since her participation in the Treason in American Conference that she was a few slices short of a loaf, but still it's a bit jarring to realize that Time Magazine's co-person of the year for 2002 is so clueless.