David L. Griscom Wins A Debate--Against Himself!

Hosted by Holocaust Denier Kevin Barrett, and with a prize donated by... wait for that one.

Okay, so Barrett and Griscom, two of the slimiest toads in Trooferdom set up a debate challenge. 
Griscom, known mostly to us as the guy who posits that all or most of the passengers on the four doomed flights are living it up in Tahiti with handsome Swiss bank accounts, offered to debate anybody who had an a$$hole index of at least 50.

Since Griscom is the only person who has pinned the meter on that particular index, it turns out that nobody else qualified.

But it gets better, much better.  Griscom appeared on Barrett's radio program to accept his major award, during which he gave his physics evidence:



He's a typical drooling senile troofer; I particularly like that his strongest "evidence" wrt WTC-7 includes the fact that it came down into its own footprint (absurd I know) while his strongest evidence on the Twin Towers includes that "beams" (really columns) were ejected hundreds of feet outside their footprints.

Perhaps even better is that the debate offered a $1000 prize (to be donated to the charity of the winner's choice) .  Given that the judges were those buffoons who actually listen to Kevin Barrett's radio show, I have little hope that even if they had waived the a$$hole index requirement, that any debunker could win.

But better still is who put up the money.  It turns out to be ANETA, which stands for Association for 9-11 Truth Awareness, run by Rick Shaddock,  Looks like it's a serious lobbying firm, on K Street in DC no less, the address for major national lobbying firms.  But of course it's just some frigging drop box for letters.

Shaddock came to our attention about four years back; he was one of those experimenters who have provided us with much amusement.  His experiment was to drop a concrete block on another concrete block from five stories up to "prove" that the concrete could not have been pulverized on 9-11.

Shaddock appears to be a big-time phony himself, as pointed out by Muc at JREF. 

There is the Rick Shaddock we (barely) know who, according to his Linkedin profile, did a Master in Education at the "Maharishi University of Management" (with a thesis on "Critical Thinking, Open-Mindedness, and EEG Coherence in Meditating Students"), a BS in Computer Science at Colgate University and an "online course for developing and managing real estate" at Trump University.

Then there is (or better: was) a Dr. Rick Shaddock with a similar looking resume who, in 1984, also did a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the obscure "Central International University" in Los Angeles (dissertation: Relational database management training methodologies - not available anywhere). Actually the university is so obscure that you can only find it in a number of business listings, most of which point to a "Ste 530" (a PO Box, I guess) in an office building at Wilshire Blvd. It also has another address at 1000 University Manor, Fairfield, Iowa which - and now it's getting entertaining - is also the address of a PO Box of Rick Shaddock's CI Corp. What are the odds? I bet the telephone number of the university - if it still exists - leads to an answering service. At one point they even had a rather crappy and fake looking web site, which linked to an apparently never realized alumni site whose domain was coincidentally registered over Shaddock's "Cosmic Internet Registration".

Need a Ph.D.? Just make up your own university.

There's a third Dr. Shaddock who finished his Ph.D. in the same year as the above (1984) at the equally obscure California Technical University. Actually I can only find a high school by that name, and it appears to be defunct.

There also is another Shaddock who did his Ph.D. at "C.I.T.", which I guess is supposed to create the impression that the university was Caltech.

And there's the lab coat wearing computer scientist (Frede-)Rick Shaddock who did his Ph.D. at Westmar University in Iowa, also in 1984.

There's the 1997 version of Rick Shaddock who was a "PhD candidate in Computer Science" at an unnamed institution. The 1998 Shaddock who had finished his Ph.D. in Computer Science. The year 2001 Shaddock who was currently working on his "PhD dissertation in Computer Science" (title: Database management methodologies, and EEG brain wave correlates - not available anywhere). The 2002 Shaddock who finally had earned back his Ph.D. - institution still unknown. And the 2014 Shaddock who is currently working on a Ph.D ... again (see above quote).

A Preacher to a Dying Breed

Jonathan Kay, the Canadian journalist who penned Among the Truthers, shares his thoughts after visiting a Richard Gage lecture in Toronto, his third such visit (he is a braver man than I).

Ask Richard Gage how he came to become obsessed with what he calls the “truth” about 9/11, and you hear what sounds an awful lot like a story of religious conversion It was March 2006, and the mild-mannered California architect was driving down the Pacific Coast Highway on his way to a construction meeting. Bored, he flipped on KPFA 94.1 FM, a listener-supported “free-speech” station out of Berkeley — “to hear what the communists were talking about,” as he later told me in a 2009 interview. Up to that point in his life, Gage had been a staunch “Ronald Reagan Republican” (his words) and an Iraq War supporter. But what he heard on KPFA’s airwaves blew his mind. “[The speaker] was talking about the 118 [World Trade Center] first-responders — information that had just come out in 2005 — who said they’d heard explosions and flashes of light, beams dripping with molten metal, all amid the collapse of 80,000 tons of structural steel,” he told me. “It hit me like a two-by-four. How come I’d never heard of any of this? I was shocked. I had to pull my car to the side of the road to absorb it all. I knew I’d be late for the meeting. But I didn’t care.”

Osama bin Laden Brother in Law "Yeah, we did it"

No surprises at the trial of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith. Guess he is on it too, or maybe it is one of those Manchurian candidate brainwashing things.

The defendant's testimony in a stilled Manhattan courtroom Wednesday took a federal jury half a world and many years away, to a mountain cave in the desolation of Afghanistan, to the hours after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.

In that mountain cave, defendant Sulaiman Abu Ghaith testified, sat the man who had summoned him, his future father-in law: Osama bin Laden.

Bin Laden invited him to sit, Abu Ghaith said, and then asked if he'd heard what happened.

"We are the ones who did it," Abu Ghaith, speaking through an Arabic interpreter, quoted bin Laden as saying. Bin Laden then asked for his opinion of what to expect, Abu Ghaith said.

"America will not rest until it accomplishes two things," Abu Ghaith testified he told bin Laden. "To kill you, and to destroy the Taliban."

"You're being too pessimistic," bin Laden responded.

A Truther with a Moment of Integrity, Better Late than Never

I don't often say nice things about Truthers, but I have to give some credit to long time Truther, and Russia Today news host Abby Martin, for finally having some integrity and recognizing the fact that she works for a propaganda arm of the Russian government.




I was a bit amused by the headlines and discussion over at 911 Flogger that she had been "outed" as a Truther though.  I didn't realize that it was ever a secret.

Now if only she would apply this skepticism to her other nutty beliefs...

On a related note, another host at Russia Today actually went one step further and quit on the air. Waiting for Abby to follow.