Is Dylan Avery Luke Skywalker?

I'm mostly impressed that anybody bothered to watch Star Wars 2 and 3; after the travesty that was the Phantom Menace I gave up. As usual, Truthers think that because a major event was caused by a gigantic plot in a movie somewhere, that means that all major events are gigantic plots.

A Funny Video And....

A serious response.  First the video:

And the reponse? I found this over at Truth Action, where a poster named Snow Job had this to say:

The folks over at SLC are extremists who hate everybody not on board with Republicanism, and have in fact declared Republicanism to be identical to a litmus test of being American, just like... basically every Republican who ever lived.

I have, in fact, never issued such a declaration, and I would find such a declaration ignorant. I am a Republican, yes, but I do not think that the GOP has a monopoly on the best ideas. I wrote one time at JREF that I think of liberals as the gas pedal, and conservatives as the brakes. Without liberals we'd never move forward, and without conservatives we'd pretty quickly drive off a cliff. It is the dynamic tension between the two parties that results in us moving forward but at a sensible pace. More important, note that Snow Job does exactly what he accuses me of doing: writing off the other side entirely.

Hollywood Fantasists for 9/11 Truth

We have covered this attempt to create a 9/11 Truth movie, to go along with their assortment of DVDs and books, previously, but now it is getting increasingly fantastical.

“A Violation of Trust” (formerly titled “Confession of a 9/11 Conspirator”) is a feature film project that is willing to do what the world’s governments and legal bodies are unwilling to do – open a real investigation of 9/11 for the entire world to see. It dramatizes the first day of “The President’s New Investigation of 9/11”, with actors performing from a tightly-written, factually-accurate script that pits the 9/11 Commission Report and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Reports against the work of 9/11 researcher Dr. David Ray Griffin and the scientific research highlighted by leading 9/11 truth organizations, including Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.


The filming of “A Violation of Trust” will be performed on a single set, depicting the investigation’s public hearing room. The single-set approach provides the most intense platform for the actors and the script to involve the audience. The film’s compelling drama, forceful images and real-time video clips will be woven into its often contentious question-and-answer dialogue to create opportunities for conflicting views that will be argued both passionately and in a scientific and logical manner.

They claim to have assembled a pretty decent cast, although mostly from the list of leftist Hollywood has beens that are normally attracted like moths to a flame to any such endeavor, such as Ed Asner, Martin Sheen and Woody Harrelson.  Their shooting schedule is pretty ambitious though:

The production schedule for “A Violation of Trust” is as follows:

Pre-Production: NOW


Principal Photography: 10 days beginning March 22, 2012


Post-Production: 6 weeks


Cannes “Marche du Film” Premiere: May 16, 2012


Release Date: September 11, 2012

I am no expert in the film industry, but I think 10 days is pretty ambitious, even for a film which only has one set. This has all the potential of a really bad fact-impaired documentary. 

Typical Truther Scholarship

A Truther named Dr Paul Rea has written a book, apparently his second Troofer tome.  Dr Rea is uniquely qualified to write such a book, possessing degrees in structural engineering, fire safety, history and aviation.

Okay, just kidding.  Actually he was a professor in the humanities, which means his major qualification for writing this book is that his computer has a word-processing program.  The book sells for $32.95 but is discounted on his site to only $21.00 (softcover).  He's made a few chapters available online.

As usual, it's not hard to find errors.  For example, discussing the Mexican cession of territory following the Mexican-American War, he says:

The war was short, but the gains were huge. As a price for halting its drive southward, the United States forced Mexico to sign over a vast area, which included all of what is now New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, California, and part of Colorado (E. Foner Give Me Liberty! Vol. 1 pp. 402-405).

Well, I'm not a history major, either, and yet I knew instantly that was not true.  For starters, over half of New Mexico was originally part of the Republic of Texas, and came into the Union when the Lone Star State did.  In addition, a large segment of  New Mexico and Arizona (including the locations of the current cities of Tucson and Yuma) were added with the Gadsden Purchase.  He also attributes the US entry into World War I to the sinking of the Lusitania, which appears to be something that all Truthers get wrong.

The sloppy scholarship continues into the chapter on WTC 7:

For the first two or three hours, the blazes were scattered and not immediately visible. NIST also acknowledged that the first photographs or videos of WTC-7 fires were taken at about 12:10 a.m., and that two other photos were taken at 12:28.

Fires at WTC 7 on 9-11 at 12:10 a.m. would indeed be quite suspicious, as that was more than 10 hours before the falling debris from the North Tower hit the building.

We get the usual nonsense about Barry Jennings' recollections:

Despite the evacuation order and the police presence that must have accompanied it, the mayor’s staffers did enter the WTC-7 just after 9:00. Michael Hess, corporation counsel for the city and a close friend of Giuliani; and Barry Jennings, the Director of Emergency Services for the City Housing Authority, made it up to the OEM (Independent [UK] 9/13/01). Expecting to find Giuliani at the command center, they were amazed to find “everybody was gone.” Since evacuations take time, these reports imply an evacuation order was given before 9:03.

Puzzled, Jennings called other staffers, one of whom told him “to leave and leave right away.” A superior also commanded him to “get out of there now.” But the elevators didn’t work because the power had gone out (BBC 9/6/08).

Rea ignores the evidence supplied in that final sentence, "the power had gone out."  We know that the power went out when the South Tower collapsed, right around 10:00.  Which of course shows that Jennings was wrong with his estimation that he entered the building around 9:00.  Jenning's times are all off by about 30-40 minutes; once you adjust for that by comparing other things he said, his testimony fits perfectly with other accounts.  Truthers don't make adjustments because their whole case rests on BS, like "Oooh, look this guy says it was 9:00 but X didn't happen until 9:40, so therefor the time of X must be wrong."  Think Norm Mineta here; there is abundant evidence that Mineta's times are off by as much as an hour, and yet do any of them make the obvious conclusion that Mineta was wrong?

WTC-7’s relative obscurity is itself puzzling. This high-rise building wasn’t hit by an airliner, and at 47 stories it would have stood as the tallest skyscraper in 30 states. When New York Times reporter James Glanz characterized the fall of WTC-7 as “a mystery that under normal circumstances would probably have captured the attention of the city and the world” (NYT 11/29/01), he was factoring in media environment right after 9/11. But it wasn’t just a tsunami of shocking news that has caused WTC-7 to go underreported; it also posed big challenges to the Official Story.

The fall of WTC-7 should have been a bigger story because the circumstances of its demise were anything but “normal.” While the standard narrative says the skyscraper disintegrated because of fire damage, this seemingly simple hypothesis introduces more ambiguity than it dispels. Was fire really a sufficient cause, especially when one recalls that, before 9/11, no steel-framed high rise had ever come down because of fire?

The Troofers' continual amazement at the relative obscurity of WTC 7 is amusing.  Granted, on almost any other day it would have been headline news all across the country.  But on a day when two 110-story towers collapsed, killing over 2000 people, the collapse of a 47-story skyscraper that killed nobody is absolutely minor news that will be reported, if at all, in the 83rd paragraph of an 86-paragraph story.  I forget who it was, but some baseball player had the misfortune to pass away the same day Ty Cobb did; whose death do you think was headlined and whose got a brief mention at the end of the story?

Please Read This Peer-Reviewed Paper, Which Disproves the Argument that We Are Making

Things have been slow around here at the New World Order lunchroom, but the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, in their desperate attempt to turn out new fundraising material, can always be counted on to produce some new idiocy eventually.

Now they have decided to produce a serious of FAQs addressing questions people have regarding their crackpot theories, with the second asking:

FAQ # 2: What about the planes that slammed into the Twin Towers? Wouldn’t they have disturbed the demolition devices?

They then go on to argue that the collapse started in the location where the aircraft did not have its major impact, ignoring the whole point that the fires were the primary cause of the collapse, but that isn't the major idiocy of this article, which comes to the conclusion, once again on the magical properties of thermite:

Second, a demolition using advanced nanothermite material (which has been identified in the WTC dust) may help to explain why the fires started by the planes did not set off explosive devices. As noted by Dr. Steven Jones:

It is important to note that initiating the thermite reaction requires temperatures well above those achieved by burning jet fuel or office materials -- which is an advantage of using thermite charges over conventional monomolecular explosives such as TNT, RDX and PETN. Below is a photograph of an experiment performed by the author and colleagues at BYU in which a sample of thermite was heated to orange-hot temperature (about 1700 ºF). We demonstrated that the thermite reaction would not ignite at this high temperature. Later, the thermite reaction was triggered by burning a magnesium strip in contact with the thermite. An electrical superthermite "match" could have been used and remotely triggered via radio signal.

Now the truely ironic (and moronic) thing, is although they quote Steven Jones from a Journal of 9/11 Studies paper from 2006 regarding the ignition point of Thermite, they first link to the nanothermite paper (authored by Jones and others) where they tested their alleged nanothermite sample.  That paper had this to say about the ignition point of their "explosives":

3. Thermal Analysis using Differential Scanning  Calorimetry
 Red/gray chips were subjected to heating using a differential scanning calorimeter (DSC). The data shown in Fig. (19) demonstrate that the red/gray chips from different WTC samples all ignited in the range 415-435 ˚C

This of course is several hundred degrees below the ignition point of Thermite cited above (1700 F = 927C), and well within the temperatures produced within a normal office fire, so their own experiment either disproves the conclusions of the article itself, or their assertion that this was Thermite, or in fact... both assertions.

H/T to NoahFence on the JREF forum for pointing out this latest bit of idiocy.

Your Conspiracy Theory Is Nutty...

Ours is sane.  The Journal of 9-11 Studies publishes two more papers, which again demonstrate that the real name of the publication should be The Journal of Debunking Pentagon Missiles, Flyovers and Bombs.  As always, the Truthers do a spectacular job of demolishing those parts of the conspiracy theory with which they disagree, while remaining blind to the weaknesses of their pet hypotheses.

Navy SEAL Smacks Prominent Truther

No, not Richard Gage, but still...



Language warning, hey, they are interviewing a Navy SEAL after all.

Donations Requested for Thermite Testing

Here's an email from Chris Mohr, who so humiliated Box Boy Gage in a debate that the latter decided not to put the debate out on DVD as originally planned:

Request for contributions to WTC Dust Analysis

Here is my official request for funds to analyze the WTC dust. To summarize, after three months of investigating this, the best person I found for the job is James R. Millette, Ph.D. of MVA Scientific Consultants. He is an independent researcher with extensive experience in forensics and dust analysis. He promises an objective study: "At present, I have no opinion as to whether we will find any active thermitic material. All I can say is that to this point in time we have not found any during the general particle characterizations we have done. Because we have not focused on this particular question in the past analyses, we are proceeding with a careful, forensic scientific study focused on the red-gray chips in a number of WTC dust samples. When I present the data, it will be in front of critical members of the forensic science community... I am an independent researcher without an interest in how the research results come out. Our laboratory is certified under ISO 17025 which includes audits of our accuracy, reliability and integrity. I am a member of the American Academy of Forensic Scientists and have sworn to uphold the high ethical standards of the organization."

Dr. Millette continues to receive input from forensic experts as well as from me and my JREF companions. He has already found red-gray chips using stereomicroscopy and has created initial spectographic analyses of some of the red-gray chips in his lab's possession. He plans to do, at a minimum, a replication of many of the experiments already done in the original Harritt/Jones/Ryan et al Bentham study as well as additional testing by PLM, SEM, TEM and FTIR after sample treatment. I am thinking other tests may be added to the protocol. We will get a full report and he will also make it public.

Chemist and 9/11 Truth activist Kevin Ryan has refused to provide samples of red-gray chips he believes are thermitic, or even to sign off on the chips Dr. Millette would provide. He believes Dr. Millette's past work with the EPA and other dust studies were deceptive and that his results would not be objective. Dr. Millette has expressed confidence that he can find red-gray chips that are a scientifically valid match for the chips studied in the Bentham paper. I am confident of Dr. Millette's scientific integrity and knowledge. He has taken a strong interest in this subject and plans to do a very thorough job. He has never once hinted at any prejudice against the thermitic materials hypothesis and consistently says he has no opinion until he has thoroughly analyzed the data. 

Because of his strong interest in the subject, he is charging only $1000 for several thousand of dollars worth of tests. I am now asking all people of good will on "both sides of the aisle" to make the necessary contributions to have this work move forward.

Please write a check or money order payable to Classical Guide Inc. and mail to Chris Mohr, Foothills Chapel, 1950 Ford St Golden CO 80401. This is not tax-deductible. Leave me an email address and a snail-mail return address so I can acknowledge receipt of your contribution and mail you back your check if we can't raise the necessary funds (though I believe we can). Whatever you pitch in will be kept private unless you tell others on the JREF thread how much you pitched in. Once we get $1000 in checks, I'll deposit them all and give Jim Millette the "Go" sign. If you have any questions you can send me a private message right here on JREF.

Thanks all and Happy New Year!

Chris advises that he has already received $500 in pledges so far.  This is a great opportunity to put the nano/iso/super thermite/thermate theories to the real peer review, and as such the Truthers themselves should welcome the opportunity.  What a surprise that Waterboy Kevin Ryan isn't cooperating; guess we know who isn't interested in the Truth.