Free Scootle!

I've been rather critical of the folks over at the rebunking 9-11 blog, but it appears that Scootle Royale is actually beginning to realize that perhaps some elements of 9-11 Trutherism are counterproductive.  He wrote a longish post over there warning his fellow Truthers that perhaps it was time to say ix-nay on the ermite-thay.

Unfortunately, if you surf over there, you won't find it.  Why?  Well, there are two possible explanations.  One is that he wasn't quite done with it (which appears true).  The other is that he's been gagged (which appears more likely).

On May 3 and May 15, Scootle published a post entitled "Red Chips or Blue Pills; A Warning to AE911 Truth."  In the post, he noted the results of the Millette report, which proved pretty conclusively that the red and grey chips claimed by the idiot Harritt and Jones to be nanothermite, were not.  Instead they are quite likely a form of primer paint, although Millette was unable to definitively establish that.

Each time, the post had only partially finished sections, and thus seemed like a draft, and each time, the post was fairly quickly "pulled".  I was advised of this post by several commenters and by an emailer who shall remain anonymous.  It was decided to allow Scootle some additional time to finish off the post.  But at this point it's been five weeks since the first version was posted over there, and three weeks since the second one, and it wasn't that incomplete.

What's more, since then 9-11 Rebunkers have prominently promoted Box Boy Gage's latest opus, 9-11 Explosive Evidence: Experts Speak Out, which relies heavily on the nanothermite claim, even though Scootle's May 15 version of his post concluded with this warning:

Red-gray chips could, if debunked, discredit Expert's [sic] Speak Out, and therefore AE911Truth and 9/11 Truth as a whole.

You can read Scootle's post as it appeared May 15 here (click on the image to enlarge it to viewable size).  When will his post return on 9-11 Rebunking?

Red-Gray Chips Tested and Determined Not to Be Thermite

I'm shocked, shocked I tell you.  Here's the report; there is active discussion going on at JREF. Main point:

The red/gray chips found in the WTC dust at four sites in New York City are consistent with a carbon steel coated with an epoxy resin that contains primarily iron oxide and kaolin clay pigments.

There is no evidence of individual elemental aluminum particles of any size in the red/gray chips, therefore the red layer of the red/gray chips is not thermite or nano-thermite.

 (Bolding added for emphasis).  Kudos to Chris Mohr for pursuing this matter and to all the folks who contributed funds to the effort.  So far no response from the supermagiconanothermite team of Jones, Ryan or Harritt.

Goodbye Bentham Open Chemical Physics Journal

Well, well, it looks like they do have some standards after all. Bentham Publishers has dropped the journal which published the Active Thermitic Materials paper by Harrit and Jones:

There is an Open Physical Chemistry Journal, but the Thermite paper is not located there. If you do a search for Harrit, the paper is shown on their site, but it's a ghost; clicking on the link gives you a 404 error.



But I'll let the Von Trapps have the final word:


Hat Tip: moorea34 at JREF.

Bentham Comedy Continues

It seems that the storied nanothermite paper is collapsing into to its footprint at freefall speed. A former professor at the University of Ottawa did a critique of the paper and sent it to the supposed current editor. Guess what? The supposed current editor resigned awhile ago. Why?

1) I was not editor of the journal at the time the manuscript you refer to was received and processed. I was not involved in its handling, and in no way do i agree with its conclusions. In fact i do not even know how the paper's peer reviewing was handled - or if it was reviewed at all. The journal never wanted to disclosed this matter to me

2) What may be even worse - noone seems to be at the helm of this Journal. Months ago -simply after becoming acquainted with the article you mention, its possible misshandling, etc- i submitted my immediate resignation as editor to the open chemical physics journal. As you can see from the email below, my letter of resignation was received and acknowledged. However, i still appear as the journal's editor - in fact i'm still receiving manuscripts to handle (which i naturally ignore).

(bolding added for emphasis).

Yep, he resigned over the Harrit/Jones paper. Note in particular that the professor who critiqued the nanothermite paper is sympathetic to the "Truth" Movement.

Hat Tip: grandmastershek at JREF.

Ready for a Laugh?

Guess who exposed himself as the peer-reviewer for Steven Jones' Active Thermitic Materials paper?

No, not Snoopy. That would be deserving of some respect. Instead it's that sack of fecal matter inhabiting the hockey jersey, David L. Griscom. Does that seem like a harsh assessment of such a kindly-looking old phart?

Well, Griscom has earned it and more. In a movement not exactly blessed with sensitivity, he came up with the single-most offensive theory put forth by the Truthers: All the passengers on the four doomed flights are alive and living it up in Tahiti.

I envision a similar 9/11 scheme, but one where the passengers boarded under their true names. Indeed, the seat occupancies on all four aircraft allegedly hijacked on 9/11 were very much lower that industry average (averaging 26% of capacity vis-à-vis 71% for all domestic flights in July 2001). So, here I extend my “all passengers survived” postulate to all four 9/11 “hijacked” flights on the notion that this small number of passengers might have been considered by conspirators as the minimum number for public credulity, while at the same time not exceeding the maximum number of “true believers in the cause” willing to accept long separations from their loved ones (sweetened by handsome Swiss bank accounts).

As I have pointed out in the past, the reason these retards believe that somebody could be persuaded to betray their friends, family and country, is because they themselves would jump at the opportunity, provided the Swiss bank account was handsome enough.

So yes, the guy who "peer-reviewed" Jones' paper is a Troofer moron himself. Professor Jones tries to put a smiley face on it:

The reviewer's name is Prof. David L. Griscom. Among his impressive credentials, Prof. Griscom is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Fellow of the AAAS.

Well, he's certainly an AAAS-hole, Steven. But even the Troofers have their limits, and in the comments, loosenuke points out:

Does his promotion of theories, for which there's no actual evidence, such as 'all passengers survived' and 'the Pentagon was hit by a fighter jet', affect your opinion of his credibility- why or why not?

And JO911S published a letter by Griscom Feb 07; why didn't you mention this?

I think you previously mentioned that Bentam was given suggestions for reviewers; was Griscom one of the people suggested?

Jones does a little shuffle:

I do not think that Prof. Griscom's studies on 9/11 "compromise" him as a reviewer -- he critiqued the paper critically as a scientist, giving (as he said) the authors twelve pages of comments and questions. This scientific thoroughness is unusual in a review (from my experience) -- very unusual.

I do not know how the editors selected the reviewers, and I do not know the name of the other reviewer.

Never mind that he's a nut; his nuttiness wasn't evident in his review of our paper. And the second part is a dodge; loosenuke didn't ask him how the reviewer was chosen, just whether Jones recommended him. Given that Jones used to point out Griscom as an example of another physics professional for 9-11 "Truth", it's not hard for me to guess the answer to that question.

But it gets even better. Jones says he doesn't know who the second peer-reviewer was. Not to worry, the next commenter says:

I do know the name of the second Peer Reviewer, who obviously wants to stay anonymous yet. All I can say is that his reputation is undoubtable, too.

Yeah, I'm sure that if Sitting Bull knows him, he must indubitably be another fruitcake.

Supermagico-Nano-Thermitate

Box Boy is Australia this weekend and still selling the same line of bull. But I had to laugh at his latest interview with Truth News Australia, because as usual, the Troofers want to have it both ways. Starting about 17:00 in, Gage gets off onto thermite/thermate, which he explains is a high-tech incendiary. Now we can quibble about how high-tech it is when you can buy it on ebay, but note that about 17:50 he specifies that thermite "doesn't have the large 'bang' of C4 or RDX, high energy explosives."

But at about 29:50, Gage is back onto the "explosions described by over 100 first responders." It's like the whole bit about how thermite doesn't have the large bang is completely forgotten. And it probably is, for about 90% of the kooks.

Bentham Journals Get Punk'd! Again.

LOL, remember all the pride that the kooks expressed when Jones and Harrit, et. al., got their paper published in the "peer-reviewed Bentham Open Journals?" Well, turns out that's not the only BS paper published at that venue:

Earlier this year, Davis started receiving unsolicited emails from Bentham Science Publishers, which publishes more than 200 "open-access" journals – which turn the conventional business model of academic publishing on its head by charging publication fees to the authors of research papers, and then making the content available for free.

As the emails stacked up, Davis was not only encouraged to submit papers, but was also invited to serve on the editorial board of some of Bentham's journals – for which he was told he would be allowed to publish one free article each year. "I received solicitations for journals for which I had no subject expertise at all," says Davis. "It really painted a picture of vanity publishing."

Oh, but it gets better, much better. After creating their paper with a computer program that generates nutty stuff:

Davis and Anderson, writing under the noms de plume David Phillips and Andrew Kent, also dropped a hefty hint of the hoax by giving their institutional affiliation as the Center for Research in Applied Phrenology, or CRAP.

Yet four months after the article was submitted, "David Phillips" received an email from Sana Mokarram, Bentham's assistant manager of publication:

This is to inform you that your submitted article has been accepted for publication after peer-reviewing process in TOISCIJ. I would be highly grateful to you if you please fill and sign the attached fee form and covering letter and send them back via email as soon as possible to avoid further delay in publication.

The publication fee was $800, to be sent to a PO Box in the United Arab Emirates.

Of course, those of us who've been paying attention know that the Bentham Journals got punk'd the first time when they published the ridiculous paper by Harrit, Jones, Ryan and Szamboti.

Hats off to Philip Meir Davis and Kent Anderson, who pulled off the hoax. Here's a sample of the computer-generated nonsense:

In this section, we discuss existing research into red-black trees, vacuum tubes, and courseware [10]. On a similar note, recent work by Takahashi suggests a methodology for providing robust modalities, but does not offer an implementation [9].

It makes more sense than what Jones and Harrit published.

Hat tip for this excellent find to alienentity at JREF, who points us to this post by Volatile, also at JREF.

Update: More discussion here. Turns out that the footnotes have some hilarity in them, including a 2005 article by Alan Turing and Timothy Leary (both dead by that point--Turing had been dead for 50 years), and Noam Chomsky's work on vacuum tubes and voice over IP protocols.

Davis posts here.

What is surprising is that the assistant manager claimed that the article went through peer-review although there is no evidence that it actually did. Anyone with English proficiency — with or without a degree in computer science — would recognize that this manuscript makes absolutely no sense.

Remember Jones claiming that this was the most rigorous peer review he'd ever undergone? I'm certainly hoping that's not true.

Update: Fallout from the incident:

Bambang Parmanto, a University of Pittsburgh information scientist, resigned from his editorship at The Open Information Science Journal (TOISCIJ) after reading a story on The Scientist's website yesterday (June 10) that described a hoax paper submission to the journal. Editors at journal claimed to have peer reviewed the article and slated it for publication pending the submission of $800 in "open access fees."

"I didn't like what happened," Parmanto told The Scientist. "If this is true, I don't have full control of the content that is accepted to this journal." Parmanto said that he had never seen the phony manuscript that was accepted by TOISCIJ. "I want to lessen my exposure to the risk of being taken advantage of."

You may recall that the editor of the Journal that published Harrit and Jones' paper also resigned immediately after that paper was accepted.

By the way, Parmanto may have to wait for awhile for his name to be removed from the masthead; check out the first comment here:

Well done! I have had my doubts about that journal for quite some time. Actually, I have long ago withdrawn from the so-called editorial board because I felt something was wrong. I am actually a bit shocked to find out that my name still figures on the list!!

Whoops There Goes Neils Harritt

Barrett and Harritt, together again for the first time. How does it happen that the newest superstar of 9-11 Troof, whose name sits atop the "peer-reviewed paper" that the goofs have been pushing, finds himself sharing a stage with Holocaust Denier and No-Plane sympathizer Kevin Barrett?

How does it happen? Because Harritt himself is a kook as you can see from the brief segment of him shown in the trailer. BTW, in the long JFK speech aired, Kennedy is referring to the communists, although the kooks always claim it's the NWO.

Seriously, at this point I'm starting to feel like we're bullies on the beach, knocking down the sand castles of a bunch of special ed kids.

Hat Tip: BG, our original "Truther" commenter.