Eric Lawyer Debunked

Over at JREF, by triforcharity.

At: 39 seconds in, he asked for an investigation that follows the standards and has contempt and subpoena powers. The "Standards" he is referring to, is NFPA's guidelines. Well, as we have already established, NFPA is not a law enforcement agency, and makes no laws. See above.

At about: 40 seconds in, he says that “This should have been the most protected, preserved, over tested and thorough investigation in world history."

Well, you see it was. Fresh Kills rings a bell. The FDNY and NYPD could not logically say that nobody was to try to rescue anyone, or move anything, until this scene was completely documented. To ask that is asinine at best.

Yep. This is one of the more idiotic things that Troofers say. Remember, they claim to represent the first responders and the victims. But they would have called off all search and rescue operations and put up crime scene tape all over the site, rather than save the 17 or so people who were actually pulled out of the pile and survived.

Note as well, this post there (#3) by tfk, quoting one of the men involved in training of the canines involved in the search and rescue operation:

No explosives or incendiary devices were planted anywhere in that complex. None. Our dogs and the other EDD K9's would have alerted after the fact as well. It's what they are trained for. We staged for the two weeks we were there at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. This is where much of the structural steel was brought. Despite rumors to the contrary, chain of custody was maintained and virtually all of the steel was cataloged and vital pieces were inspected. Not a single dog ever alerted to the presence of either explosives or incendiary residue.
Not one.

Yet Another Radical Leftist Magazine Denounces the Kooks

I actually had a subscription to Mother Jones way back in the 1970s.

Assessing our vulnerability to terrorist attack remains difficult in part because the events surrounding the attacks of September 11, 2001, have not been thoroughly explained. In its investigation into them, the 9/11 Commission slid past many important questions, leaving them unanswered, and did not adequately challenge the Bush administration when it refused to cooperate or obfuscated its own actions. This has naturally spurred the various conspiracy theories that have set out to unravel what happened. Some address legitimate issues, such as the as-yet-unexplained fact that American intelligence had been tracking lead hijacker Mohammad Atta since the late 1990s but did nothing to stop him. But most theories run the gamut from the preposterous (the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon were drones) to the improbable (the WTC buildings collapsed due to a demolition charge).

The supposed tracking of Mohamed Atta is the Able Danger nonsense. Some good debunking in this article, although he's a little too quick to accept the supposed "warnings" of 9-11, and how they should have been passed on to the American people.

The Gravy Line

A new contribution to analysis of 9-11 conspiracy claims by JREF Forum member RMackey.

In evaluating alternate theories, and conspiracy theories in particular, one often desires to distinguish whether a theory is plausible, if unlikely, or whether a theory is absurd. This distinction is important to a skeptic, because a skeptic should always respond logically and rationally to a plausible theory, even if it contradicts previous theories and especially if it contradicts poorly supported belief and conjecture. An absurd theory, on the other hand, may and in many cases should be simply dismissed. No amount of logical analysis can salvage an inherently illogical proposition.

Unfortunately, the question of how to identify an absurd theory remains open. The problem of evaluation is in many respects parallel to determining the burden of proof, in the sense that the more plausible theories have a lower burden of proof, or conversely that an argument partially or wholly satisfying its burden of proof is inherently more plausible. This consideration, however, does not give us any actionable formula, since burden of proof is also subjective. While some attempts to quantify burden of proof exist, primarily in the field of trial law, this standard is not directly applicable to philosophy or science.

I think all debunkers have an internal "Gravy Line" sensor built in. For example, Killtown often pleads with debunkers to take on his claim that Val McClatchey's photo was faked. But I think we can all see using RMackey's technique that this claim, even if true, amounts to:

3. Anomaly or Artifact (Score = 0.25): An argument that criticizes an existing theory while proposing no competing hypothesis of its own, such that if the argument is accepted, uncertainty actually increases.

Negative Adjustments? Clearly there are several negatives to Killtown's theory. First, you have to explain how she managed to fake this within a very short period of time while huge attention was being focused on the Shanksville site. That's a major negative. Also, you have to acknowledge that if Killtown's measurements are off by a small amount, the entire conclusion may be invalid. Major negative adjustment. Killtown has never explained a reason for Val McClatchey to fake the photograph; profit is assumed to be a motive, but there was no immediate reason to assume that there would be significant demand for the photograph. Major negative.

We could go further, but there is no real need. Multiplying the factors together: .25 X .5 X .5 X .5 = .03125, below the Gravy Line. Obviously there is some subjectivity to this analysis in determining what values to place on the adjustments, and the .05 Gravy Line may be too high or too low. But this certainly represents an interesting attempt to quantify why some theories just aren't worth debunking.

A Defense of Rosie

Nope, I didn't write, it, but Debunking 911 did.

As I mentioned over at JREF, I'm glad somebody wrote this piece even though I disagree with it at least in part. A lot depends on what Rosie does over the next few months.