I'd Like To Think They're Kidding

But I know they're not. In the midst of a discussion of the famed "beam weapons" imagined by Judy Wood and how ridiculous that speculation is, the supposedly responsible wing of the Troofers goes off the rails:

It could be that a lot of people come to DEW because they're already free energy believers. If you accept the latter then the former is obvious.

Another factor is probably that the pulverization of the concrete is poorly explained by conventional theories.

And while there seems to be general agreement that pushing the Death Star notion is not good politics, it cannot be ruled out.

Did it ever occur to you that it might be Judy Wood's job to incompetently advocate the advanced weaponry thesis so that the whole notion is discredited and never gets any serious research?

I am not satisfied by any of the explanations for the pulverized concrete. The notion that explosive nano-thermite could have done it has not to my knowledge been advanced in any rigorous way.

If the DEW people could provide adequate evidence, that's a different story entirely.

Agree. No one denies that Directed Energy Weapons are a lively, developing and horrific new field in unconventional warfare, nor that the Pentagon may well be 10-plus years ahead in terms of what is known to the public, nor indeed that DEW's may well be coming to a riot near you as a means of crowd control or as a new weapon to be used overseas (some reports indicate that DEW's are already being used in locales such as Iraq, but I have no hard evidence to indicate such), but there is ZERO evidence that they were employed on 911.

I do however find it interesting that both video morphology and directed energy weapons -- arguably two of the most significant (developing) means of unconventional warfare -- are being employed as disinformation tactics against the 911 truth movement.

There will come a time when both weapons will be used with some frequency, I suspect. Both audio and video morphing may have already been used in the various "Bin Laden" tapes.

One of the guys who refuses to rule out the beam weapons idea completely also decries using arguments from incredulity. But of course the whole "pulverized concrete" discussion is an argument from incredulity. "I don't believe it would look like that," is a classic argument from incredulity. Box Boy Richard Gage uses this in his presentations. He points out the pulverized concrete and claims that if explosives were not used, we would expect to see 110 floors of the World Trade Center stacked atop each other at the bottom of the pile. Since we don't see that, it must have been controlled demolition.

What a moron! Look, this is really simple. Even if the NWO had done controlled demolition with supernanothermitate, there would be no value to pulverizing the concrete. So we are left with two options: a) the concrete was (mostly) pulverized due to falling (on average) 55 stories, or b) the concrete was not mostly pulverized and claims that it was are largely a myth.

The website 9-11 Myths has a pretty good article on the pulverized concrete. Note in particular that Steven Jones himself has emphasized that describing the concrete as pulverized to a fine powder is an exaggeration:

As we examined the WTC-debris sample, we found large chunks of concrete (irregular in shape and size, one was approximately 5cm X 3 cm X 3cm) as well as medium-sized pieces of wall-board (with the binding paper still attached). Thus, the pulverization was in fact NOT to fine dust, and it is a false premise to start with near-complete pulverization to fine powder (as might be expected from a mini-nuke or a “star-wars” beam destroying the Towers). Indeed, much of the mass of the MacKinlay sample was clearly in substantial pieces of concrete and wall-board rather than in fine-dust form...

It seems that the 9/11 truth community likewise “has been slow to understand” that the WTC dust particles in greatest abundance are the “supercoarse” variety rather than “fine” particles, and that significant chunks of concrete were also found in the WTC rubble.

My take? I suspect a fair amount of the WTC concrete was pulverized from the collapse, but not all of it. I am thoroughly unsurprised by the notion that four-inch thick concrete floors falling from a great height were turned into dust by the collapse.

The Credulity of Some Reporters Beggars Belief

Check out this amazing article on a 9-11 fruitcake. Not so much for the idiocy he espouses, but for the credulity of the reporter, Dave Rasdal:

To be sure, this is a complicated matter that can’t be fully explained in a column like this or in a two-hour presentation/question/answer session I had with Russ. But, as you listen to Russ and see supporting data, you can’t help but shake your head. A lot of “facts” don’t add up, primary among them:

The speed of collapse. One video shows a building collapse in 8 seconds, which defies the laws of physics. Gravitational pull would require 9.2 seconds. The resistance of concrete and steel would at least double that.

The volume of debris. Sure, dust floated everywhere, indicating the buildings were pulverized. But that doesn’t explain how most of the concrete and steel from a 110-story building could become two or three inches of dust on the ground.

Yes, you can't help but shake your head at a reporter who somehow times "a building collapse" (which building is not specified) at 8 seconds. Of course, as I am getting doggone tired of pointing out, neither tower collapsed in 8 seconds (more like 15-18 seconds), and they did not come down faster than they would have due to gravity, as can be seen by the fact that the debris around them was falling faster than the buildings themselves. Indeed, aside from, say, rocket engines pushing the buildings down, how could they fall faster than gravity, even if we were to accept the Troofer nuts claims of controlled demoltion?

And the volume of debris question is Judy Wood "dustification" zaniness, although she at least has the sense to claim it was the most of the concrete turned to dust, not most of the steel. And indeed Judy comes up:

Wood, a former mechanical engineering professor at Clemson University, examined thousands of photographs and videos of the tragedy from every possible angle. She applied her knowledge to the physical evidence, letting that determine her findings, Russ says.

More moronic musings:

As Russ talks, you wonder along with him. If an airplane crashed into the tower with enough force to bring it down, why didn’t the plane come out the other side? How could the towers collapse so cleanly, spreading only minimal debris over nearby undamaged buildings? If underground fire contributed to the destruction, how could people like Gov. George Pataki walk on the debris without getting burned? Why did Hurricane Erin mysteriously turn away just before the collapse?

I cover these nutters every day, and that is the first I've heard Hurricane Erin brought up as part of the evidence. Why didn't the plane come out the other side? Small bits of it did, but it was largely broken up into small pieces by the impact with the building. How could Pataki walk on the debris without getting burned? Because the fires were underground, duh; there are literally dozens of reports of workers' boots melting from the heat. The towers did not collapse "so cleanly"; indeed many buildings in the area were either completely destroyed by the collapse or suffered major damage, including WTCs 3-7, World Financial Center 2&3, the Winter Garden, Deutsche Bank Building, St. Nicholas' Greek Orthodox Church, etc.

I guess the moral of the story is that the Troofers have gotten good enough at their nonsense that they can fool some particular gullible reporters. One would think he'd at least do some checking around.

Hat Tip: Rich in Iowa, in the comments. Great find!

Update: Check out this timeline by Gerst, if you have any doubts that this reporter should have been hearing "Cuckoo! Cuckoo!" every time Gerst opened his mouth.

She's Baaa--aack!

Judy Wood checks in with a page on ties between a hurricane and 9-11.

The development of “supercell” storms is examined and a comparison of their structure to that of a Tesla Coil is considered. It is therefore suggested that the electrical properties of large storm systems may have some similarities to Tesla coils and there is a possibility that technology exists to utilise or manipulate the energy in these storm systems for “secondary” purposes.

Countdown to "Truthers" saying we should concentrate solely on the sane members of their little club....

Kevin Barrett, Judy Wood, and Friends

I am not sure how much more of this I can do. First I watched Alex Jones' Endgame last week, now I listened to this interview of Judy Wood and Attorney Jerry Leaphart on Kevin Barrett's radio show. My brain hasn't taken that kind of abuse since that week of partying after finals that one year in college...

Idiocy is abundant in this interview. If anyone else is actually stupid enough to listen to the entire two hours (minus commercials) you can hear all sorts of inanities, like Judy Wood saying we need to look at all the "datas" (I am not kidding, I listened to it 4 times to make sure I was hearing it right). At the very end, a caller phones in to say that we need to look at "pro bono", who benefited from the 9/11 attacks....

But in my normal tradition I have to cite at least one quote from this idiocy-fest, at least to provide the potential for a nominee for a Stundie on JREF (I know, I will never beat clunkity-clunk). This week's idiot is Jerry Leaphart, who unbelievably makes Judy Wood look like the intelligent one, while discussing why the rubble pile at ground zero was not high enough.

And then the conventional wisdom also seeks to implant the idea that the sub-basement was so damaged and so filled with debris, and since the sub-basement was 6 levels that lo and behold, and voila, you have your 12 story rubble pile. But you know, even in making the assumptions in the light that is most favorable to the conventional wisdom in my view it still fails. Because the underlying assumption that the piles should be 12 stories tall only applies in the instance where you assume there was one tower. Hello, there were two 110 story towers there! Therefore, you should have two separate 12 story, or 6 story piles, but more likely, since the buildings were so close one to the other, you should really have a 20 story high rubble pile.

Fetzer Gets In Some Decent Points

James pointed the other day to this hilarious argument between Mark Dice and Jim Fetzer. As others have mentioned, the part where Jim discusses Dice's nutty "Resistance for Christ" group and their belief in "Luciferians" is quite amusing. But the part that I found interesting was the bit where Uncle Fetzer claimed that Jim Hoffman and Webster Tarpley had brought up "Directed Energy Weapons". Sure enough, I was able to pull it up from Synthetic Terror (Page 225 of the PDF):



And a paragraph later



This certainly shows how annoying it is to read Tarpley; he tells us not once, but twice on the same page that the power cord would be rather large. And Tarpley gets into real science fiction territory here (Page 245):



So Fetzer has a valid point; why is Webster Tarpley considered credible in the 9-11 Denial Movement and Judy Wood a kook? Of course, Fetzer's arguing they're both credible, while I would maintain they're both nutbars....

Wood Takes On NIST

Well I am back in the good old USA, albeit rather jet-lagged. Many thanks to Pat for keeping up on all the news while I was gone. Things went well, although we are still trying to decide whether to disperse our mind control drugs through the usual chemtrail method, or through Starbucks Coffee...

For those of you unfamiliar with this site, that is a joke, I don't want Starbucks lawyers calling me.

On to 9/11 denier news nuttery, well you know how the truthers are always demanding answers. Now former engineering prof Judy Wood is demanding that NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which has produced a series of reports on the collapse of the World Trade Centers, officially respond to her Star Wars Beam Weapon theory:

DATA QUALITY ACT (DQA) CHALLENGES HAVE BEEN FILED WITH NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY (NIST)

EVIDENCE FOR DIRECTED ENERGY WEAPONS PUT FORWARD IN A DQA REQUEST FOR CORRECTION

PERSONS WITH SUPPORTING INFORMATION ARE ASKED TO COME FORWARD AND BE HEARD

The DQA challenges are called "Requests for Correction" (RFC). Each one asserts that NIST's reporting on the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11/01 is lacking in quality, integrity. Some challenge NIST's conclusions and evasions as being fraudulent, misleading and deceptive.

These three RFCs are the first known to have been filed with NIST that challenge the validity of the official explanations of what caused the near instanteous destruction of the World Trade Center complex on September 11, 2001.

Oh yeah, this is going to help them find legitimacy in the scientific community.