Jesse The BSer Ventura: I Called It!

Remember back in December when the Governator had his Conspiracy Theory Show on the 9-11 Fruitcakes? There was a segment where Van Romero painted superthermite on a steel beam and lit it on fire (starts about 40 seconds into this clip):



Note that Romero asks the question, "Does it burn long enough and hot enough so that we have structural failure?" at about 1:50 into the video. Hilariously, Ventura cuts off Romero at that point. As I said at the time:

"And we see that while the unpainted beam did not catch fire, the painted beam did seem to light up. But will it fail structurally?"

Well, no kidding they skip right over that part. Apparently the idea that the steel caught on fire, however briefly, is enough to convince Jesse that this was how they did it. And nobody stops to mention that the claim is that they destroyed columns (vertical) not beams (horizontal), and that we haven't seen the beam actually destroyed in the video by any means. It's another TrutherBurn fiasco!

Well, Dave Thomas, who debated Richard Gage in November obtained the original video of Van Romero, including his conclusion:

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.

The "Strawman" Strawman

It is quite common for truthers to use, or rather misuse, the strawman fallacy whenever anyone criticizes them, on the basis that there is no such thing as a universally held belief in the conspiracy community. Normally though, they at least manage to limit themselves to beliefs which are not at the core of their own theories.

In this light, check out Steven Jones complaining about yesterday's National Geographic show:

Robert,
Bags of commercial thermite set against a steel column -- what a pathetic "experiment." Not anywhere close to representing my views, as you must know, from our discussion about the red/gray chips and the crucial distinction between ordinary thermite and super-thermite! What a terrible and unfair straw-man joke you are evidently trying to pull.

Why can't you get a sample of super-thermite? I think you can, if you will actually try. Or are you like NIST which refuses to look?

Hello? Calling Dr. Jones! You spoke for years about thermite and/or thermate as the core of your theories. Remember all the talk about tons of molten steel pouring out of the towers, the photographs supposedly showing the glowing red hot beams, the pools of molten iron flowing like lava. All of this you claimed was caused by incendiaries, not explosives. You even wrote a 47 page paper about this, which is still available on your website. Are you now claiming that this entire paper is invalid and is a "strawman" argument? Although actually, if so, that would be one of the few things I could agree with him on....

A Response to Harrit, Jones, et.al. From Dr Greening

Copied from here, reproduced without permission in the interests of science:

I just sent this e-mail to the authors of the "Active Thermite" paper:

The "Active Thermite" debate, (if there ever was one!), has now sadly reached a state of stasis and stalemate. It basically boils down to this: do you believe Harrit and Jones or not. Or stated another way: Are the red/gray chips definitive evidence that "energetic" nanothermitic agents were pre-planted in the WTC or are these chips explainable in some other, less conspiratorial, way?

To begin to answer this question we need to consider just how unusual, (or not!) these red/gray chips really are. Harrit et al. believe that the red/gray chips are indeed very remarkable - so much so that these authors insist that these chips simply could not be found in dust produced by a "natural" collapse of the Twin Towers. Harrit et al. make this claim mainly because of two characteristics of the chips:

(i) Their alleged engineered "nano-scale" structure

(ii) Their alleged "highly energetic" pyrotechnic properties

With regard to the first of these points it is quite evident that Harrit et al. have based their characterization of the WTC red/gray chips almost entirely by copying the work of scientists at Texas Tech University and the Lawrence Livermore National Labs who have made and patented nano-structured energy-dense materials for use as detonators and pyrotechnic agents. (See the papers and reports of authors such as M. L. Pantoya, T. M. Tillotson, R. L. Simpson, B. J. Clapsaddle and A. E. Gash, as well as Chapter 7 of the book "Energetic Materials" by U. Teipel) It is therefore very significant that these nano-technology materials scientists consistently and repeatedly make use of scanning electron microscopy, X-ray analysis, and DSC to characterize their samples - precisely the techniques used by Harrit et al to characterize their red/gray chips. But in spite of this obvious attempt to convince the scientific community that the WTC red/gray chips are indeed the high-tech creations of dedicated "nano-engineers" toiling away in some clandestine weapons laboratory, these chips are in reality quite low-tech and decidedly micro, as opposed to nano, in scale and structure.

With regard to point (ii) above, Harrit asserts that the chips are fragments of an "energetic material". This claim is mostly based on DSC measurements, but we need to consider: is it supported by experimental evidence? The Harrit paper reports the energy content of the red chips to be in the range 1.5 - 7.5 kJ/g. This is in fact not very "energetic" at all when you consider that common organic materials such as simple hydrocarbons or oxygenated hydrocarbons contain far more energy per gram than the red chips. Thus gasoline releases about 48 kJ/g, and stearic acid, found in plant and animal fats, releases about 40 kJ/g upon combustion. Since carbon, in some as yet unknown chemical state, is also found in the red chips, it is certain that some of the energy content of the red chips is accounted for by this non-thermitic ingredient. In fact, if the chips contained a mere 10 % of graphitic carbon it would account for more than half of their energy content!

Nevertheless, on page 28 of their paper, Harrit et al. offer another reason to believe that the red chips are a highly energetic thermitic material:

". the DSC tests demonstrate the release of high enthalpy, actually exceeding that of pure thermite. Furthermore, the energy is released over a short period of time, shown by the narrowness of the peak in Figure 29."

This statement, also repeated in the Abstract to the paper, is simply not correct and shows a complete lack of understanding of DSC by the authors of the paper. Why do I say this? Well, Figure 29 is the DSC trace of a red chip heated from 20 deg C to 700 deg C at 10 deg C/ min and shows an exothermic peak extending from approximately 420 - 470 deg C. Now, as someone who has run many DSC analyses on a wide variety of materials, I know that the height and width of a DSC peak depends on many factors such as the sample-holder, the furnace atmosphere, the sample packing density, etc, but most of all, DSC peak widths depend on the heating rate. Given that the DSC trace of Harrit et al. was acquired at 10 deg C/min and has a FWHM ~ 25 deg C, one can be certain that a different peak width would have been obtained if a different heating rate had been used. Thus DSC peak widths are not indicative of reaction rates. This is amply illustrated by many of the DSC traces and the discussion given in Chapter 5 of the well-known chemistry textbook "Thermal Analysis" by W. Wendlandt.

Finally, I should add that DSC is most effectively used to study reaction rates if it is carried out in isothermal mode using the Avrami-Erofeev equations to analyse the data. This experimental approach allows a rate constant and an activation energy to be calculated for the reaction responsible for an exothermic peak. I am surprised that a Chemistry Professor at a well-respected University appears to be unaware of this simple fact ....

Yes indeed Prof. Harrit, you had the temerity to tell me to take my time and not waste yours, when perhaps I should be telling you to take your time, but not waste mine!

The thread over there is pretty interesting to read. You can see quite clearly that only Greening (Dr G) speaks with confidence and authority; the Truther posters are mostly "Well, what about this, and what about that?" I don't want to knock them, because I get the sense that Metamars, in particular, is making an honest attempt to discuss the issues but clearly doesn't know the science (and let me add that I don't know it either; I can only judge by the way the discussion flows).

I am a bit surprised to learn that Steven Jones swears in his emails; it just seems out of character for someone who is generally soft-spoken and genial.

Note also this key point:

I've already done a calculation, (see my post from a few days ago), of how much heat energy a layer of nano-thermite (such as the one allegedly found by Jones et al) could generate. And, by the way, you have not commented on this calculation as you said you would. Nevertheless, my conclusion was that Jones' chips would do no more than slightly warm a WTC column!

Faced with this, what did Jones claim?

So when I bounced my calculations and conclusions off Jones et al, all he could come up with was the suggestion that there were probably other explosives used in the WTC and the nanothermite chips were maybe just fuses!

Thus, after all the fuss about high-tech nano-thermites, we are back to good-old "bombs in the buildings" as the answer to how the buildings were destroyed.

No kidding; after all that fuss, Jones is claiming that sooper-nano-thermite was just a fuse!

Jim Hoffman Theorizes...

And shows why theorizing is so discredited in the 9-11 Troof Movement:



Yep, explosive ceiling tiles. Now in fairness, he does note that these are not exactly something you can pick up at Home Depot:

All of the equipment is available off-the-shelf from commercial vendors or special operations supply depots except for the wireless explosive ceiling tiles, which have to be specially manufactured.

And Hoffman has figured out the time problem as well:

With workers swapping in new tiles at an average rate of two tiles per minute per worker, it takes a team of fourty workers 187 hours to retrofit an entire Tower. The work is performed in three weeks and weekends of night shifts, emptying one truckload per night, with the truck parking inconspicuously in the WTC subterranean parking garage.

Sounds completely credible to me. Then again, I am still waiting for that inheritance from my uncle who died in the plane crash that the nice bank manager told me about.

Get the Evidence to Fit the Conclusion

I noticed this earlier while reading Henry62s article in the previous post. In Jones' et al supermagiconanothermite paper, they discover the presence of sulfur, which apparently isn't in their current brand of supermagiconanothermite, so they dismiss it as contamination from the gypsum wallboard:

Prior to soaking the chip in MEK an XEDS spectrum was acquired from an area of the red-layer surface. The resulting spectrum, shown in Fig. (14), produced the expected peaks for Fe, Si, Al, O, and C. Other peaks included calcium, sulfur, zinc, chromium and potassium. The occurrence of these elements could be attributed to surface contamination due to the fact that the analysis was performed on the as-collected surface of the red layer. The large Ca and S peaks may be due to contamination with gypsum from the pulverized wallboard material in the buildings.

This reminded me of the fact that earlier they had been arguing that the presence of sulfur was proof of thermate. And sure enough, if you go back to Jones' original paper, the presence of sulfur is the smoking gun, and he dismisses the wallboard as the source.

Finally, sulfidation was observed in structural steel samples found from both WTC7 and one of the WTC Towers, as reported in Appendix C in the FEMA report. It is quite possible that more than one type of cutter-charge was involved on 9/11, e.g., HMX, RDX and thermite analogs in some combination. While gypsum in the buildings is a source of sulfur, it is highly unlikely that this sulfur could find its way into the structural steel in such a way as to form a eutectic or to cause sulfidation; experiments are always encouraged to test such ideas. The evidence for the use of some variant of thermite such as sulfur-containing thermate in the destruction of the WTC Towers and building 7 is sufficiently compelling to warrant serious investigation.

Alex, Alex, Alex...

He should have stuck to suggesting five minute strikes. Alex Floum is back at 9-11 Blogger with a spot of debunking of Judy Wood's laser beam. Unfortunately, he makes a thorough hash of it right from the start:

The main argument of folks pushing the theory that the Twin Towers were brought down with directed energy weapons is that conventional explosives (like thermite) could not have pulverized the concrete into dust as observed in videos of the event.

Conventional explosives like thermite? But thermite is not an explosive, it's an incendiary. After a video clip of the south tower collapse, he shows us explosives blowing up what appears to a be a large earthen berm, which is a pretty cool video actually except that he gives us no context and (of course) cannot claim it was blown up by thermite. Then we get several more videos of explosions of dirt piles. Look, explosives can turn dirt into dust! Who would have guessed?

He closes with this:

The above videos show conventional explosives (they are examples of a method called "cast blasting", which is very low-tech. Cast blasting just means that holes are pre-drilled and explosives placed in the holes).

So that's how they did it! They just drilled holes in 110 concrete floors and placed explosives in them. Brilliant! And nobody noticed this?

The comments are, if anything, even worse. John A Mitchell from France contributes this bon mot:

Useful video but I am not completely convinced. Sure, on the outside that is what we saw. But in the interior, the back bone supporting columns, the elevators, filing cabinets, computers etc were reduced to dust. Can you imagine the energy to do that ! The amount of energy can be calculated by the science. A small atomic bomb could have done the job with less preparation and giving the sufficient energy ?

Hoverer the small parts of bones found on surrounding roof buildings would be explained by explosions that you have shown.

Well, Professor Jones shows up and admirably has none of this latter nonsense:

John states: "But in the interior, the back bone supporting columns, the elevators, filing cabinets, computers etc were reduced to dust. "

I challenge that statement, and ask for references to back it up. Really -- the statement requires evidentiary support, not unsubstantiated repetition.

Au contraire, mon ami, I have photos of an intact brief case, calculator, wallet, the antenna which was on the North Tower, and steel columns (in pieces, yes -- explosive do that).

But no mention that thermite has been wrongly described as a conventional explosive.

You know the funniest part about this? I agree that Judy Woods' laser beam is an absolutely loony idea, so I should by rights be on Floum's side in this matter. But he's not trying to debunk it and accept the quite rational idea that any pulverization of the concrete occurred because the building collapsing (or more precisely, because of it hitting the ground) instead he's got his own theory which is only marginally less insane than Judy's.

I feel like I'm listening to a bunch of knuckleheads arguing over whether Randy Moss or Marvin Harrison is the better passer.