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.

Jones' Overunity Device

It seems extremely unlikely that something so simple could possibly be creating power, and there's no real way the purported extra power could be coming from the Earth's magnetic field, as Jones was talking about at 9-11 Flogger.

It's been a long time since I did the Physics of Electricity and Magnetism; could it simply be that Jones has charged up the capacitor (which acts as a storage battery), and then when he reduces the power from the AA battery the power in the capacitor is released, and hence he gets the Pout>Pin that he's claiming?

Steven Jones' Latest Latest Research

Apparently his discussion of earthquake machines is off for now, being not quite half-baked. Instead, he's focusing his efforts on "free energy"; the crackpottery formerly known as perpetual motion. Get his breathless regurgitation of a fruitcake claiming to have stopped his studies of a new device after being visited by the men in black:

This last week was a nightmare for me, you have no idea under what pressure I have been and how many people contacted me, warnings that I should keep quiet... and in the end, yesterday, I had a personal visit after leaving my day to day job.

I had the impression that I live in a free country but it was demonstrated that anything is possible, we will never move forward.

Of course that is a very vague discussion that could mean anything. But another Truther has more on the miracle machine:

Romero had seemed very sincere and open about his device. It was also a hard slap in the face to everyone who had been preparing to replicate the setup. Forum members had invested their time getting ready to replicate, sacrificed materials in order to fabricate rotors/stators, and even spent their hard earned money purchasing components. As Romero stated in one of his posts, the device was not cheap to build. He expected the cost of a slightly larger scale version of the device to cost around one thousand dollars.

Yes, you heard that right, ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS!

The same guy posts a link to this very entertaining film:


I love the guy who created the monster wheel. Like a ten-foot wheel wouldn't have been enough to demonstrate the concept. If you look carefully, you'll see it's just an extension of this:

The idea is based on a child's see-saw or teeter-totter. I'm sure most of us remember that if two children of the same weight got on one of those, but one moved closer to the middle while the other sat out at the end, that the former would be lifted in the air. So it makes sense that if you have extended weights on one side of a wheel, and the weights move in after they reach the bottom, that the wheel would turn. But the diagram above also shows the design problem; as you can see there are only four weights doing the work on the right side, while there are 8 weights being pulled upwards on the left.

Note as well that although the story ends with the wheel still spinning, there is no mention of it doing any practical work, like generating electricity.

In fairness to Jones, the one he's pushing seems more like the guy who charges batteries and then uses them to run the motor which charges more batteries....

But of course I don't want to spend the whole post on perpetual motion, as fruity as it is. No, we're still on 9-11 Truther idiocy around here, so check out the post on Jones at Troof Action. Our own Brian Good starts out well:

With four months to go before the anniversary, does he really think this is the best strategy for bringing good publicity to nanothermite?

I wouldn't be surprised if there are hairy hominids running around in British Columbia, but I don't think they're the best use of my time right now.

Note as usual the focus on PR, not the actual topic at hand. It's not whether perpetual motion or earthquake machines are nutty, it's whether they will make the Truthers look nutty.

But being Brian Good, it's only a few pages more before he indulges his inner lunatic:

Dr. Jones is certainly entitled to look at anything he wants to on his own time.

Frankly I wish he would look at the possibility that high-tech secret weapons were used on the twin towers, because I've never been able to see how gravity, conventional explosives, thermite, or nano-thermite could have pulverized the concrete floors of the twin towers in mid-air. I can't help wondering if Dr. Wood's incompetent assertions about exotic weapons was intended to make the whole field unpopular.

Yep, as we have noted in the past, Richard Gage is every bit as crazy as Judy when it comes to the "missing floors" and "pulverized concrete", and PetGoat Good isn't about to abandon Box Boy.

And Victronix isn't about to abandon Jones:

Even if Steve were investigating the idea that politicians might be reptiles from another planet, he is ultimately a scientist -- has been for his entire career -- and he would conduct an experiment and discover that the hypothesis had no basis, and move on. He doesn't just make fantastic assumptions and then publish them on a blog and say "it must be that way!" (ala David Griscom). Steve conducts research.

But isn't that the problem with reptilian theories--that there's really no way to test it?

Steven Jones Once Again Behind the Curve

Disgraced Professor Steven Jones hilariously makes a post on 911 Blogger supporting the lawsuit of April Gallop (assuming it is still up by the time you read this) calling for people to help influence her case in the appeals court, quoting from another article:

You will need to act fast, because the case has already been in the Circuit Court, in Connecticut, for three weeks today, and a ruling can come down soon. If you value your life, you will try to stop that ruling from being an affirmation of the dismissal. Once the dismissal happens, Gallop’s case, with its amazing insights into 9/11, will be legally barred from being adjudicated. It will be like Jim Garrison’s JFK case. “So near and yet so far.…”

I am not sure exactly what either of the authors thought they can do to "stop that ruling". Are they planning on kidnapping the families of the judges or something? Regardless, as Pat pointed out yesterday, the decision has already been made. Her case was not only thrown out but Gallop and her lawyers are being threatened with legal sanctions for bringing such a frivolous suit before the court.

Wow, with cutting edge research like this, I don't know why they haven't blown the lid off of 9/11 already.

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.

Bravely Slaying the Strawmen of His Imagination

Steven Jones tackles two objections to his "research" that I have never heard before:

1. That somebody contaminated the samples with nanothermite. Huh? No, Steven, we don't think there's really nanosupercallifragilisticexpiallythermite in the samples at all.

2. Perhaps the falling buildings just generated the nanothermite. Err, see my response above.

I love that he tested samples of dust from a couple controlled demolitions and found no red-gray chips. One would think this would tell him that the WTC buildings were not brought down by controlled demolition, but Truther logic doesn't work that way.

I do find it interesting that Jones mentions what caused him to go Truther: Some woman was giving a talk on something else and casually mentioned that the Towers were not brought down by the planes, to apparently thunderous applause. And it's interesting to hear that the Waterboy is trying to make nanothermite himself. Perhaps he could get together with Jim Hoffman and manufacture ceiling tiles of the stuff.

Maybe He Will Stay There

Steven Jones is interested in the possibility of a 9/11 truther conference in Tehran next year.

Conference in Iran in 2011?
He referred to a conference next year in Iran, evidently to include a discussion 9/11. Does anyone know any more about this conference?

Of course one of the troofers immediately calls for him to attend:

I don't know... We'll have to try to find out more..
But we need to get you, Richard Gage and others over there to present the best and strongest evidence and not let it get diverted into false debates over whether some people let it or made it happen etc. Hopefully you guys would be willing and able to go if the opportunity presented itself. Thanks.

I am all for it. I will even help pay for a ticket. One way, of course.

CIT for the Prosecution

Arcterus, one of the more intelligent Truthers, writes about the problems CIT would experience if they were running the case for the prosecution.

Let's start with their own witnesses being cross-examined with each other. CIT's own witnesses state that the plane impacted the building. Their case for claiming the physical evidence was faked revolves around the testimony that the flight path as on the north side of CITGO. They would HAVE to find some way to convince the jury that part of the testimony was right and another part was wrong without directly saying so. Now even if they made this possible, invalidating a witness discredits their ENTIRE testimony. Even if you're only arguing against part of it, it only makes the entire testimony look bad. It's so unlikely it might as well be said to be impossible that an entire jury would accept a testimony to be PARTIALLY accurate. They would almost definitely disregard it. Even if, by some miracle, each and every one of them thought in this way, that would go out the window upon cross-examination. Take, for example, Sergeant Lagasse. CIT says that Sergeant Lagasse giving irrefutably wrong locations of the taxi cab and light poles actually supports their theory. Well, that's all fine and dandy, but back in the realm of reality, all it means is that he's WRONG. And if he's wrong, it means the entire testimony could be wrong. That and, of course, they wouldn't be allowed to say why they think it supports their conclusion. They can not speculate.

I particularly like this part:

In short, this means "Every contact leaves a trace." Are the implications of this clear? Physical evidence is always correct, because it can not be wrong. IF the physical evidence was faked, then there'd be some sign, some EVIDENCE that it was faked. Does everyone understand? You can only trump physical evidence with PHYSICAL EVIDENCE.

Were the light poles blown away by explosives? Then there should be some explosive residue. Was that segment of the Pentagon blown up? Then like all bombs, there must have been some shrapnel. Were the plane parts planted? Then it should be clear to forensic examiners that the locations of the plane parts are all wrong, that they flew in the wrong trajectory, that they weren't traveling at the right velocity, anything to suggest that they didn't originate from a high-speed plane crash. Did the examiners miss all of this? If so, it doesn't matter. It means CIT has no case here. If the evidence was missed by those examining the scene, there's nothing that can be done about that. It still means there's no documented, verifiable physical evidence with which to suggest that the whole scene was set up.

Indeed. Of course, if we try to suppose that Professor Jones is in the witness chair, and Arcterus the prosecutor, I'd love to hear this part:

Arcterus: Did you obtain confirmation that the red-gray chips were thermite?

Jones: Well, we sent them to a guy in France, who confirmed the existence of the chips, although not in the quantity we found them, and he discovered they had been deactivated...

Arcterus: Do you have any evidence that they had been deactivated?

Jones: Errr, well, that is to say....

That's Hype-o-thesis

I'm sorry to say, Steven, that you are indeed a nutty heretic.

Confirmation? We Don't Need No Stinking Confirmation!

Waterboy Kevin Ryan posts the good news that somebody else wants to test the dust samples to confirm or refute the possibility that they contain traces of thermite. The bad news? The Troofers don't want to cooperate.

I wrote back to the sampler and suggested to him that Corley could probably obtain his own WTC dust samples. After all, Corley had supposedly waded through WTC dust for months. Why was he asking for our samples?

The rest of the article is revealing for its paranoia. I laughed a couple of months ago when I noted that the French scientist who supposedly confirmed the thermite results turned out to: a) not have confirmed the results and b) opined that perhaps his samples were "deactivated". Turns out Ryan is just as suspicious:

Immediately after the article was published, it appeared that a response might be forthcoming due to inexplicable damage to several packages sent, via the US Postal Service, between some of the investigators who were involved. When my colleague Steven Jones sent a sample of the red-gray chips to my post office box in late April 2009, the samples had been removed from the double envelope package through a series of slits just barely big enough to slide the small vial out. The postal inspector never responded to my complaint. But when I later mailed something to my colleague James Gourley, the envelope arrived with a corner ripped out, in a gross kind of damage that neither of us had ever seen.

Professor Jones chimes in in the comments:

Excellent sleuthing work, Kevin --

as usual. I deeply appreciate your insights through the years.

You have identified one of the main insiders, IMO.

So in other words, they are not going to allow independent confirmation of their results. This is not the scientific method as I understand it.

We'll see if this flies with the "responsible wing" of the Truth Movement.

Steven Jones "Would Be Very Sad" to See Holocaust Denier Leave Troof Movement

Adam Syed, whose Holocaust Denial I discussed here, posted an April Fools' Day Prank on 9-11 Blogger this week, in which he "announced" that he was now an ex-Troofer. Professor Jones commented:

I figured it must be an April Fools joke as I read your name, Adam.

You know about explosive nanothermite -- something the debunkers shy away from.

I would have been very sad to see you go and leave the fray...

Agreeing with Our Rebunkers

Over at the inaptly named 9-11 Debunkers blog, we get slapped down a bit for laughing at Steven Jones' speculation that the Haiti quake was created by the New World Order.

Haiti? A false flag? What kind of crazy person would think that?! A drill goes live and a bunch of mass murdering war criminals and celebrity whores beg the public to donate money to support the militarization of an oil rich island. Nothing suspicious there! I haven't seen such a sickening display of vampiric exploitation since Michael Jackson's funeral. And if they could blow up skyscrapers with nanotechnology back in 2001, the idea of them being able to create earthquakes in 2010 isn't much of a stretch. Hell, there's a publicly available US Air Force document that seriously discusses the prospect of teleportation! This is what's out in the open. Imagine the black projects going on in the ultra secret underground laboratories!

Now that's a bunch of crazy talk of course. I assume that the teleportation document is thoroughly speculative, and "Beam me up, Scotty," will not be practical at any point in the near future. Note as well that the "false flag" bit is rather amusing; the false flag for the Haiti earthquake is, well, Mother Nature.

But I do have to agree with them on this point:

...if they could blow up skyscrapers with nanotechnology back in 2001, the idea of them being able to create earthquakes in 2010 isn't much of a stretch.

Yep, both of those seem equally practical. BTW, note that like most "Truth" sites, they don't care for free speech:

I spend far too much time spelling out for people what I have already spelled out hundreds of times. Comments are now closed.

Steven Jones on the "Fake" Haitian Crisis

I mentioned this before, and I believe there is more, but I can't find a recording of it, but here is the clip of him bringing up Haiti from the recent AE911 pressless press conference:

A & E for 9/11 Truth Press Conference End from MysterE Productions on Vimeo.

Another one that you might never have thought of, that I will be addressing this next little while is Haiti. Now Haiti you wouldn't think of as a generated crisis. But did you know that tremendous oil reserves have been found in the bay, in that area right around Port-au-Prince. Tremendous oil reserves reported in 2008 to be larger than the oil reserves of Venezuela, which is one of the largest oil producers in the world. So again is this a "natural" or "real" crisis or is it one of Biden's generated crises? That's what I will be talking about the next hour. I don't have an answer for sure on that yet.

If there were still any doubts that the so-called leading scientist of the 9/11 truth movement was a complete crackpot, this pretty much erases it.

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.

You Have Got To Be Kidding Me!

The Troofers are having a big confab in Sydney, Australia this weekend, with Richard Gage and Steven Jones as the draws. The conference is dubbed "The Hard Evidence" tour (there are a couple more stops down under before it ends), and from the title, you might expect that Jones would be focusing on supernanothermatite, the material he claims to have found in the WTC dust, with perhaps a short digression into iron microspheres.

You would be wrong. In fact, according to one attendee:

Steven Jones is speaking right now. (He's going into great detail about the put options, btw)

Seriously. What's next, Jonesy? Eight of the hijackers are still alive according to the BBC?

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.

You Can't Go Back, Jon

There's a long and interesting argument over at Truth Action about whether Controlled Demolition arguments are hurting or helping the 9-11 "Truth" Movement. In general the Truth Action folks try to avoid "evidence-based" arguments in favor of "warnings" and "the families' questions" and "air quality" arguments. However, no less an eminence than David Ray Griffin has recently pronounced LIHOP dead and only MIHOP as acceptable, now that the presence of nanothermite in the WTC dust has been "proven".

Jon Gold writes:

It's not a prerequisite. It would be nice if the movement came to terms with the fact that focusing solely on Controlled Demolition, when the masses have been saturated with hit pieces, documentaries, and media pundits saying how crazy the idea is, is not the best course of action in my opinion. It is STILL the #1 roadblock I come across with people. "You're one of those nuts who think there were explosives in the buildings." Just happened to me yesterday.

I have some sympathy for Jon on this point, but you can't put the genie back in the bottle. The fact is that almost all "Truthers" push controlled demolition as a major part of their argument. Steven Jones and Richard Gage have no other focus. If you read that post, you'll see that even the people who are defending Jon on this point almost all agree with the CD hypothesis.

Victronix:

To me, the movement seems to be growing right now because of the scientists, engineers, etc who are behind demolition and have risked or lost their careers to do so.

Arcterus:

I endorse controlled demolition but I do find it best to, at the least, refrain from mentioning it until I've hit the more solid and documented evidence.

Zombie Bill Hicks:

Ok, be careful there, because I've never spoken out against CD or said that I don't believe in it. Ever.

I'm particularly amused by the CD true believers, like Pavlovian Dogcatcher, who thinks it's truth inviolate:

You don't need anything but a high school level understanding of Newtonian physics to accept the fact that the official story in regard to the buildings coming down contradicts long understood and consistently demonstrable laws of physics. You really don't even need any formal understanding of the physics, particularly in the case of WTC7, just a reasonable grasp on reality.

So denying that "Truth" is synonymous with Controlled Demolition is a lost cause. It's nutty, but then everything the "Truthers" believe is nutty.