Dick Dastardly is a scapegoat

I thought of something random at work today.

If anyone has ever seen the cartoon Wacky Races then they would know that Dick Dastardly is always being called a cheater.

My though was that they always called him a cheater, but the others would cheat as well. I suspect that it's because he stops to cheat.

Think about it, all the other cars had devices that essentially allow them to cheat. Take a look at the Gruesome Twosome for example. They have a ghost that they use to scare the other racers, now how the hell is that not cheating? Or Professor Pat Pending, his "car" can turn into anything. "Oh dear the road has just suddenly turned into a lake. I'll just turn my car into a jetpack." Because we all know that it's still a car race when you're using a jetpack.

Essentially the entire race was a bunch of cheaters cheating their way to victory. (A notable exception would have to be Peter Perfect, whose car was just that, a car. And it usually fell to bits because of it.)

But Dick was always the "cheater". But maybe there was another, more sinister reason for it.

In order to cheat as much as he does he would need money. Since he never wins any races he would probably run out very quickly.

I think therefore that he would have been paid by the Wacky Races people (if such an organisation existed) to cheat to make the races more interesting. There is no other reason for it. If he is able to get a massive lead every race (and several times too) to set his traps then it stands to reason that he could, you know, just race normally and win.

By scapegoating him it also allows the people to claim that the others don't cheat, because you have to stop and do something in order to cheat "properly".

So that's pretty much it, Dick Dastardly is a scapegoat, but he's also part of a massive conspiracy that involves him being a scapegoat.

A Response Of Some Kind

About 322 days, 5 hours and 53 minutes ago on a cold July afternoon I wrote "Debunking911.com Is A PNAC Front.

View wise it's the most successful thing I've ever written because of the nice referrals I get from the site in question.

Anyway, enough background.

I've received a comment from a chap calling himself "Chuck Boldwyn" challenging a debunking of something that he managed to calculate that shows that what he has done proves that the September 11 attacks could not have happened the way they actually did.

Unfortunately, comment wise, I can't really say anything. I've only had some instruction in classical mechanics and I'm also not an engineer. I've never even pretended to be one on TV (incidentally I'm not on TV...).

I can, and will, only comment on things that I have noticed.

As far as I can tell from the post in question though, it seems to be using the assumption that the tower was essentially acting as one big block of steel. That seems to ignore structural elements like joints etc. I would have thought that the force acting downwards upon the building would affect the load bearing columns and the joints and so on.

There is a bunch of maths which to me seem to work. By the way, if a proper engineer happens to read this could you please tell us whether the equations are being used correctly together?

But then we get to an interesting bit:

This means the the lower 94 block of steel could support 100 blocks of 94 floors before possible total collapse could occur.

This also means that the lower 94 block of steel could support 588 blocks of 16 floors before possible total collapse could occur, since one 94 block is equal to 5.88 16 floor blocks.

588 Vector Force units of upward support (stressed Normal Force)against 1 Vector force unit of downward gravity weight force, all by its lonesome.

Now apply Vector math Addition to opposing Forces to find that the top block could never in one's wildest dreams totally collapse the lower 94 floor block of powerfully strong and very thick,
4 inches, steel.

588 Force units of upward support
minus
1 force unit of downward weight Force
gives 587 force units of non-collapsing support.

1 Force Unit(FU) = 1 DL(16)

(588 FU up) - (1 FU down) = 587 FU up.

This is something I don't understand. What the hell is a "vector force unit". I'm well aware that force is already a vector, so "a vector force" is rather redundant statement. Where does this "1 force unit" come from?

I do question why such "hard hitting" research is being posted here and not being sent to an engineering journal to undergo peer-review. Hell, even a letter to one would be better then posting it here. But I'm not expecting him to sent his work in to a credible journal because of this statement here:

That is the Final & Ultimate answer as to why the twin towers could never, ever collapse under the conditions offered by NIST, the Government, the Mass Media, and the big name University and corporate PHDs.

Since the confirmed discovery of the red and gray nano Thermite active and explosive particles in the WTC dust samples, there is no leg to stand on by the NIST, government and all the "quack" PHDs hired by the Government to do their lying diry work with the Mass Media.

(emphasis mine)

Basically to him there are no "peers". There are only "shills".

"Confirmed discovery of red and gray nano Thermite" [sic]? Yes, by a man whose entire argument was "I've found things that would be in thermite therefore there was thermite", without determining whether the elements and molecules analysed would appear in any regular office.

There are also two other posts that don't really have any substance. One links to a youtube video, and they both go on mentioning "patriotism" and "traitors".

For those that haven't read anything else on this blog, I'll mention this here. I am not an American. I don't hold US citizenship, I also don't live in the US. I am an Australian. Accusing me of being a traitor to the US is like claiming that Saddam Hussein was a traitor to the Sudan. It doesn't work.

I'm going to post his last comment in it's entirety:

This "Anti Truth Movement" site has been completely and 100% debunked with no mercy. You are all fools, dupes, idiots, numbskulls, morons, and retards if you still, yet, support the government's and the Mass Media's Theis Conspiracy. You will now be a supporter of mass murderers. Be careful of what you support.

Next time, use your brain, if you have one...

Two small things:

1. Re: support of mass murderers. I can claim the exact same thing to you. By not supporting my side (which, by the way is the one supported by far more evidence then yours) you support Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda are mass murderers. Therefore you support mass murder.
   
   So next time you argue this, don't try to label people. (Yes, I am aware of the fallacy above.)


2. I have used my brain. When will you start using yours properly?
   

An Open Message To 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists

Dear "Truthers",

As you know today is September 11, or as you guys would know it 9/11. Today is the day when we remember 2998 people who died as a direct result of the attacks, 6000+ people who were injured, and the first responders who are currently ill, or dying, from lung diseases due to the poor air quality after the towers fell.

Nationals from over 90 countries totalling 327 people died on that day as well.

Project 2996 has made a list of all the people who died including where they are from.

All this because a fundamentalist Islamic organisation called Al Qaeda decided that the best way for people to follow what they believe is the "right" religion, and that their variant of that religion is the "correct" one.

Unfortunately for the last seven years there have been a bunch of people who call themselves the "9/11 Truth Movement" who have spent their time going about claiming that "9/11 was an inside job".

You go about claiming "thermite" or "thermate" or "silent explosives".
You go about claiming "space beams", "C4 coated rebar" or "holographic planes"
You go about claiming "missiles hit everything", "north of CITGO" and other ridiculous things.

There are even members of your group who claim that the people on the planes are still alive.

You willingly spout lies about the US Government, and you don't seem to care.

When you spout these "theories" you aren't a "patriot". You aren't a "hero". You are pathetic. All the evidence is there that shows who did it. There is even the admission by the leader of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, that it was his organisation that pulled off the attacks.

But instead of that you just sit in your towers built of ignorance and lies, going "there's no way that Arabs in caves with boxcutters could have done it".

You go on and on about "the laws of physics being violated" while showing an utter ignorance of what the laws of physics are.

Do you honestly think that going about shouting "9/11 was an inside job" is going to make masses of people rally to your "cause"?

Do you honestly think that buying 10 copies of "Loose Change" or any of that crap they sell on "Prisonplanet" is going to help?

The obvious answer is no. You have had seven years to prove your case, and each time you have failed utterly.

You now go around spending your time pissing on the graves of the passengers of the planes, the members of the NYPD, and the Port Authority Police, the members of the FDNY, and children. And for what, because you don't seem to like your government.
You have had seven years to make your case and yet you have no evidence of it at all.

So I leave you with this:

Just shut the fuck up. Seriously. Just shut the fuck up.

Sincerely,

Wildy

Plausible Deniability?

This is running more from the comment from my page about Debunking9/11.com being a PNAC front.

I asked why, if the US government was all powerful, would they bother paying people to argue with CTists.

The somewhat surprising result was that I actually got a response (as you can see, writing stuff that people comment to isn't really my forte).

Basically the argument runs that if a CTist site was taken down it means that something they said was something that the US government didn't want people to know.

When I said what I did I was thinking more in the early stages, when a site like Infowars or PrisonPlanet could be removed with little or no problem.

Now that some of these seem to be somewhat big it does pose a problem now wouldn't it?

Funnily enough I don't think so.

My evidence comes from a somewhat unlikely source.

The PNAC website.

The direct link takes you (as of 8/7/08) to a page saying:

"This Account Has Been Suspended Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible."

What I want to know is wouldn't this still be a possibility for a site like Infowars? Making it look like they didn't pay their server fees?

Even the Wayback Machine and other such sites could be affected. Look at Operation Clambake on the Wayback Machine.

Not there.

Scientology got their lawyers to remove it (also see here).

I would assume that it would also be easy to just remove the offending page(s) from the archive instead, I mean you can still find PNAC on there, you could still do something similar for Infowars.

Christophera - Visual Analysis

This is the second part of the x many long part series about Christophera, the first part of this may be found here.

This part deals with a cut & paste post dealing with his claim of either:

1. Visual Analysis is only needed
2. It looked like an explosion
   

This claim is a simple one, he posts pictures which will be reproduced below, and claims that they "prove" an inside job.

The following pictures are the ones that he posts, in reality they are in varying states of appearance (for some reason he thinks that the Myspace forum is pure BB code, even though it supports HTML):

As you can see from these pictures he is claiming "the collapse of the WTC looks like an explosion, look at this picture along with these explosions and you will see that the collapse of the towers were, in fact, an explosion."

Unfortunately when you look at reality this does not seem to be the case.

Do you remember this picture from the last post on this subject?

This picture was created because of this very series of claims.

Also take a look at this after reading this post.

What we are seeing here is a problem in the thinking of Christophera. Photos can be a reliable way of ensuring that an event can be remembered very clearly.

However they do have limitations. The photo captures an event at a specific period of time, in the case of 9/11 the collapse of the towers.

Because of this you will get pictures that when static look like something that they aren't. The reality of the incident may be completely different to the photo in question, or may be a part of a bigger picture.

Unlike, a posed photo, photos of 9/11 are more like taking photos of a birthday party. Each photo tells a small part of a bigger story.

Amanzafar has an excellent set of photos from 9/11. (Although it is somewhat sad to note that there are CTists out there who use them as "evidence" for their claims.)

The collapse of the towers is one of those events where it looked like an explosion but it wasn't.

Take a look at these pyroclastic flows:

These photos are of various eruptions. The USGS one is from Mt. St. Helens (US), the one below it is from St. Augustine (Alaska, US), the one to the top right is from somewhere while the bottom right is from Mayon Volcano in the Philippines.

Compare these pictures to the quarry blasts, or the picture of the tower. They do look kind of similar don't they?

Logically we can say that based on the picture the tower looked like an explosion, in the same way we can say that these pictures of pyroclastic flows look like explosions if we didn't know what a pyroclastic flow is.

It is grossly incorrect to claim that "only visual analysis is needed" or draw the conclusion that "the towers looked like an explosion therefore they were blown up".

The "Mt. St. Helens was an inside job" photo uses the same logic as Christophera used, since the pyroclastic flow looked like an explosion it must mean that explosives were used and only the government could have done it.

It is quite clear that the Mt. St. Helens picture makes an absurd claim, but it is no more absurd then the one Christophera makes.

Debunking 9/11.com Is A PNAC Front.

Ok, so it isn't.

But if you like to believe this guy then apparently it is.

This is Debunking 9/11.

I guess since PNAC's website is (as of 1/7/08) suspended it must be proof.

At least in conspiracy theory land.

Take this interesting snippet for example:

"debunking9/11.com is a very sophisticated, extensive and professionally put together website that clearly has had a lot of expensive expertise poured into it. It goes to extraordinary lengths to attempt to debunk the evidence that has presented itself on the internet over the last seven years as an alternative to the US government’s version of the events of 9/11, but – and this is where the site gives itself away – it doesn’t attempt to debunk just some aspects of the new evidence that has been presented, but it tries to debunk every bit of it. It is that characteristic that defines it as a propaganda site rather than a site that is scientifically objective with its arguments."

So according to this Mr. Lataan, (the name given on the profile) the evidence that makes Debunking 9/11 a shill propaganda site is:

1. Looks professionally done
2. Debunks all of the "evidence" given by "truthers".
   

That seems to be it.

It really seems that the NWO and PNAC have gone downhill, what with PNAC not having the money to keep their website going, and making a propaganda website that seems to have been made from a template.

Funnily enough Debunking 9/11 doesn't debunk everything. It only debunks the more common claims. It doesn't cover Judy Wood's space beams, or really anything from Christophera.

But I guess, if I start up a website (hypothetically) somewhere near the start of all this rubbish, I would have been able to write quite a bit since the "truth" movement is a very static one with little new information entering into it.

Or this bit:

"But what really gives it away is the rhetoric and tone of the narrative, which is presented in a pseudo-technical pseudo-academic way, but which is transparently intermingled with outright neoconservative propaganda which has nothing to do with the events of 9/11."

Which he decides to give an example:

"Take, for example, this on the ‘Osama bin Laden’ page of their website:
“Conspiracy theorists like to say ‘Some Arabs with box cutters couldn't have pulled this off.’ Let's forget for a minute how racist that statement is”.

Firstly, of course, one needs to ask; what conspiracy theorists like to say ‘Some Arabs with box cutters couldn't have pulled this off’? Trying to cast those that doubt the US government’s official version of the events of 9/11 as ‘racists’ is a classic neoconservative tactic used because of the connotations of the word ‘racist’ has with ‘anti-Semitism’."

Oh dear.

I wonder how logically sound it is to argue "he's making strawmen" by using an argument from ignorance.

Once again we go to the Debunking 9/11 FAQ:

"Q: Most of your arguments seem to be strawmen. Why do you attack arguments I'm not making?

A: There are arguments some web sites make which others do not. Just because you haven't seen the argument on your favorite conspiracy site doesn't mean there aren't those who make it. (Read: logical fallacy) If the topic doesn't apply to you, then just skip it and go on to the next. "

But to answer my fellow croweaters question, why not take a look,Comment 8 here, here, or here.

As you can see, quite a few conspiracy theorists like to say that. Just because you don't or your specific group don't does not, as the FAQ extract pointed out, does not mean that nobody else does.

To be honest, the rest of the post in question is nothing more then complaining, wild accusations (how is he attacking Jones or Griffin?) and the standard "the webmaster is being paid to do this".

Honestly, if there is such an all powerful government, then why haven't they taken out all of the "truthers" in the US? Why would they have to pay people to make sites like this when they could just as easily and cheaply take down the sites?

This is another thing that I don't expect any "truther" to answer.

Update: Welcome people from Debunking911.com. If you have read this far then please take the time to look at some of my other 9/11 related posts through the tag, or take a look at some of the other stuff on here.

Update 2: There is a response to some of the comments posted below. The post may be found here.

Christophera and His "Phenomena"

If you ever happen to chance upon Chris Brown, a conspiracy theories, online who goes by the name Chris on Myspace, but has also been known as Christopera on the JREF forum and a variety of other names online, you would have seen this before.

This post has been created for two purposes, firstly, to put together links and other sources that show, or contradict what he says, and so, if you ever encounter him online, you can just link directly to this when he starts resetting the argument.

One final note before I begin. Christophera and his "concrete core" "theory" is a fringe "theory" of a fringe group, you don't hear too much of this in mainstream 9/11 CTs, but even the Loose Change Forum has banned him at one time for spouting his theory, but online he is still as verbose as other "truthers".

INTRODUCTION

His opening changes depending on who/what he is responding to, when in agreement he will mention "5 phenomena", when posting in response to a debunker, he will probably insult the person first, his content starts with the follwing five links (spelling/grammar/punctuation has not been changed). Beyond this point is where the standardised post begins:

free fall
total pulverization.
superfine, heated particulate
smooth, square cut column ends x the 1,000's
heavy steel assemblies heaved hundreds of feet

(Link to NIST FAQ, Link to plaguepuppy video, dead link, the last two are links to pictures on his site).

(Note, at this time I cannot find a working link to the video, it's a clip with Joe Casaliggi talking about the towers collapsing to dust, Myspace has a stupid linking thing, kind of like a really long tinyurl.)

The only comment I can make of these links is that the presence of a dead link shows how it is used to make cut and past arguments.

The next section before the "evidence" is as follows:

"With the FEMA, steel core column lie, nothing can be explained. It is all impossible and that is what the counter truth movement wants.

Support for the steel core columns is support for the impossible to obscure the possible.

All five of the above phenomena, that NONE of those who believe in the FEMA lie can even approach, can be explained with the use of the true structure, the steel reinforced cast concrete tubular core in the center of each tower.."

Ok, got that? The claim is that everything, including NIST, which is his very first link, is wrong. We also see here a rather typical argument from all kinds of people on the CT side of the fence, that there is some sort of organisation out there designed to censor the "truth".

We are also introduced to his most important point. That the Twin Towers did not have a steel core, and in fact has a concrete one.

Now, I will provide some links, but the best place to see a debunking of a "concrete" core is on this thread from Above Top Secret.

Other places that say that it was a steel core include:

• The University of Sydney
• Skyscraper.org
• NYC-Architecture.com

Some of the commonly posted pictures that prove him wrong include:


















PARAGRAPH 1

His next section is the "evidence". This will be broken down into the paragraphs he posts.

"free fall
Concrete can be fractured instantly to fall freely by a small amount of properly placed explosives. With C4 coated rebar and C4 poured into the floor corrugations that also acted as cutting charges for the interior box columns, the only full height columns that existed, free fall was assured. The security phone lines were used to distribute an audio tone to digital counters on every floor and every 40 foot of core. Floors were timed with 75 millisecond delays and core sections of 40 foot at 300 milliseconds."

(NIST again).

This paragraph introduces the second idea that makes up this argument, C4 coated rebar.

But first, let us see what NIST says about free fall:

"NIST estimated the elapsed times for the first exterior panels to strike the ground after the collapse initiated in each of the towers to be approximately 11 seconds for WTC 1 and approximately 9 seconds for WTC 2. These elapsed times were based on: (1) precise timing of the initiation of collapse from video evidence, and (2) ground motion (seismic) signals recorded at Palisades, N.Y., that also were precisely time-calibrated for wave transmission times from lower Manhattan (see NCSTAR 1-5A). "

What they say here is that they don't actually know the exact time but they make a good estimate based on the evidence they have, and there was quite a bit.

However, if you look at pictures, like the one shown here, you can see that there are sections of the building that fell faster then the building itself. Debunking911 has a section talking about free fall that also shows how Christophera (and any other CTist that claims free fall) is wrong.

Next, we come to the C4 coated rebar. The explosive used in C4 is Royal Demolition Explosive or RDX. It is something of an unusual choice to use C4 since the "official" line of thinking is that it was therm*te.

According to Chrisophera this was coated on the rebar, and was used to blow up the towers.

There is a problem with this line of thinking to begin with. According to a supplier, C4 lasts about 10 years under good conditions, not the 30 needed for this "theory" to work. The common counter that I have seen involves him either changing the definition of the word "about" to "up to and including 30" or claim that concrete is a better container then say mylar in a well ventilated area.

We see two problems here. Firstly, if there are any bacteria that were on the rebar before the concrete core was poured, and they happen to be mentioned here, and survive, then they would start to consume the RDX. The counter was that the conditions were too alkaline. Unfortunately there are plenty of scientific articles out there that show that RDX can degrade in an alkaline environment, such as the following:

• Potential for Biodegradation of the Alkaline Hydrolysis End Products of TNT and RDX
• Alkaline hydrolysis of the cyclic nitramine explosives RDX, HMX, and CL-20: New insights into degradation pathways obtained by the observation of novel intermediates
• Contribution of Hydrolysis in the Abiotic Attenuation of RDX and HMX in Costal Waters
• Determination of Key Metabolites during Biodegradation of Hexahydro-1,3,5-Trinitro-1,3,5-Triazine with Rhodococcus sp. Strain DN22 (another bacterial related one)
• Kinetics of RDX degradation by zero-valent iron
  

As you can see, there aren't any that are related to the topic at hand, but the evidence is quite clear that it will degrade either bacterially in anaerobic conditions, or will degrade through chemical processes at high pH.

Funnily enough, once you take care of these two points, there is very little left to argue. Even if his first premise, that the WTC towers had a concrete core, his second premise, that it was C4 coated rebar, doesn't stand up to the evidence at all.

PARAGRAPH 2

"total pulverization
The above free fall explanation takes care of the building but it needs to be said that when the floors blow and the 300 milliseconds delay of the core blast occurs, the contents of the building are subjected to an outward blast of hard stone aggregates that shred everything and blow it out the windows explaining the 3-5cm bone fragments on roofs 400 feet away."

(The link is the one that I don't have the proper url to).

This section follows on from the first paragraph. When you take away the possibility of it being explosives, you are left with a re-worded version of the "squibs" argument.

Debunking 9/11 has a section on this.

The simplest explanation for what Christophera is claiming was caused by the same process that created the "squibs". The compressing floors during collapse forced air outwards, smashing the windows creating the "squib" effects.

The compression of the floors forced the air out at a speed fast enough to fling bone fragments great distances.

PARAGRAPH 3

"superfine, heated particulate
With an engineered explosive container made from concrete having the explosive coating on the centralized rebar, the pressures from optimum containment are absolutely maximized. Optimized pressures create a maximum shock wave lending to the total pulverization described in the above paragraph but also creating the 10-100 micron sized particles that are super heated to rise and form the distinctive pyroclastic flow. This also causes some of the iron of the rebar to be bonded to molecules of silica and calcium as seen in the dust analysis."

(The dead link)

Another rewording of an old CT argument, "superfine, heated particulate" is a more elaborate way of saying "pyroclastic flow", which is what he says anyway.

The problem is that trying to claim that there was a pyroclastic flow means very little unless you are arguing that volcanoes took down the towers. Just remember if the towers collapsing looked like a quarry explosion which is also a pyroclastic flow, it leads to only one conclusion, the Mount St. Helens eruption was an inside job.

(By the way, if you were the guy on Myspace who created this picture which I nicked, say something, I would like to give you credit for this picture.)

PARAGRAPH 4

"smooth, square cut column ends x the 1,000's
The C4 filled corrugations died out into special corner plates that were described in the 1990 documentary as stiffeners for the floor to column joint. There were 6 plates per column, installed in 2 layers all the way around the tower every 3rd floor made from tempered steel, 3/8 thick I think. If these were high pressure gas guides a collapsing plane of high pressure gas would surround the column and slice through it performing as an optimized cutting charges. Good evidence is shown with a ruptured Column. This also provides a very good explanation for the large quantity of iron microspheres as dark columns of iron particulate seen in images are blown out the tops of the severed but still standing interior box columns inside the clouds of debris in the surrounding demolition."

("optimized cutting charges" is a dead link, "ruptured Column links to his own site", the long link is to a picture of one of the towers collapsing.)

All I can say here, not working in the construction industry, but from what I have heard from people who know what they are talking about, all that is here is absolute rubbish.

The 1990 documentary that he mentions either never existed, or does not support what he claims. Likewise, he has claimed before that the C4 coated rebar thing came from an article he read in the 70's, another source that cannot be verified.

On the JREF forum, a poster called Chainsaw has a far more logical explanation of any microsphere. Unfortunately this is another area where I am lacking in knowledge.

PARAGRAPH 5

"heavy steel assemblies heaved hundreds of feet
Some of the cutting charges failed due to exposure to bad weather during construction. When this happened, large assemblies were intact and the webs of floor "I" beams against the core; still connected to floor beams going out to the perimeter columns, still connected by spandrel plates in the 3 story panels delivered for assembly; were subjected to the expanding debris wave of the concrete core detonating which cause a billowing of the web of an "I" beam showing huge pressure applied horizontally"

(Both links go to his own site) This is the last paragraph of the "evidence". The problem we have here is that it ignores other possibilities like the "I" beam billowing due to pressure from the collapse, instead being put down to "cutting charges failing due to bad weather".

By this time there is very little left to counter, since the argument collapsed four paragraphs ago.

CONCLUSION

His conclusion is as follows:

"Every phenomena explained in detail. All it depends upon is the infiltration of the US government before 1966 by a faction capable and secrecy adequate to design and construct such buildings for the purpose of eventual demolition."

Clearly, all the "phenomena" were not explained in detail, at least not in a fashion that is acceptable by any scientific standard. There is plenty of evidence out there that at this time I have not found, or encountered from other people arguing with him (or hasn't been purged by the new N&P mod on Myspace).

In a way his "all it depends" claim could be considered true, unfortunately, there is no way to prove it, and also ignores the fact that you have to believe that he is right, and everyone else who thinks otherwise (including the people who built the towers) is wrong, some very unsatisfactory excuses about the lack of evidence, and the suspension of belief about the shelf life and ideal storage of RDX.

Which version of events looks better? His or what actually happened?

An Alleged Theory

It started out as a silly response, but I want to post it here. It's my new theory on what happened on 9/11.

It is as follows:

The alleged towers were allegedly hit by two alleged planes, which allegedly caused an alleged fire which allegedly caused the buildings to allegedly fall down allegedly damaging apparently one building although allegedly it damaged/destroyed alleged neighbouring buildings.

Allegedly another alleged plane hit the Pentagon, and a fourth plane allegedly crashed in the alleged town Shanksville.

On top of this it is alleged that the alleged black boxes from the aforementioned alleged planes allegedly were destroyed, even though they were allegedly made of materials that allegedly allow them to survive.

Allegedly an alleged woman managed to survive and allegedly was able to look out of the alleged buildings. Which allegedly managed to collapse even though steel buildings have not allegedly fallen from alleged fire before.

Finally alleged symmetry of an alleged implosion is not allegedly impossible.

German Talis, The Face Of 9/11 CTs

It's all over the blogosphere.

Well maybe it isn't.

It sort of is.

Anyway. Some guy from We Are Change called German Talis, (why?) is now sort of the new face of the 9/11 "truth" movement.

He decided to beat a girl, Maureen Lovetro who has cerebral palsy who was in a wheelchair.

And if you don't like the New York Post, then why not take a look at this smaller article from (sigh) Fox.

By the sounds of it the reason the girl was beaten up was because Talis was told to shut up by the parents, and probably also because the girl was a fan of the First Lady.

I'm going to be blunt here. This guy is a prick.

Honestly.

I mean he was already a git to begin with because he is stupid enough to believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy but beating up a girl? And in a wheelchair of all things?

The "truthers" have decided to stand behind this cowardly person. Especially since Talis doesn't seem to have the balls to pick on someone that could actually beat him, like say, the father of the girl.

Even Alex Jones is asking for lawyers to help this guy.

So this is what the "truth" movement has come to now? Attacking helpless girls and heckling people? But I thank you "truth" movement. Now there is even more evidence why people shouldn't join you. You guys are idiots and protect people who bash helpless girls.

Congratulations.

As long as this doesn't happen. I'm sure everything will be fine.

Microblog

If there are twoofers, does that mean they use pwoof?

Debating Truthers

This is something of a response to a comment from my last post. It's also because after all the time I have spent blogging here I've finally got a comment (so now I expect a second comment around July) and this way I get an excuse to make a new post (read: wouldn't fit on reply comment).

The comment was:

"Any suggestions how to effectively argue with Truthers to get through their stubborn skulls?-Steve"

It is rather hard to get things through their stubborn skulls unless you hypnotise them, or wipe their memories somehow or drill a hole in their skulls and connect their brains to some sort of rational thinking machine. But fear not and read on.

From my own experience and also drawing on the experiences of others the simplest answer is that there really isn't anything you can say that can change their minds.

The current opinion of the JREF Forum (where I go to talk about things like this) seems to be that the "Truth" movement is dying. Recent things that were touted as life-changing or something like that, like the release of Loose Change: Final Cut were complete flops and NIST's WTC 7 report will be a complete failure to them when it is released, currently they are saying it will be the key, they will probably claim government tampering or something when it doesn't support their ideas. The next section will be much better, I promise (the most important thing is in the bold print).

There would still be people floating around that you can convince, and there would still be plenty of fence sitters who have just managed to catch on. These are people that can be convinced but it may take some time.

For many debunkers it is the fence sitter, not the CT, that engages them into these debates, but you can convince a CT at times.

Information will be the key to convincing someone, and a lot of patience and tolerance (I have snapped before but that was more because the CT had turned to lacing responses with ad hominems). If you go here, you can find pretty much all the information you need on their points.

One of the strange things about the 9/11 CT is that it is something of a hybrid. It's what you get if you have someone who is paranoid about the government, crossed with pseudoscientist, crossed with creationist.

I have come across some good sites reading in my free time about various things that have helped.

Phil Plait's On Debating Pseudoscientists is invaluable. Especially this line:

"What I have found is that there is usually a core set of claims, the "big ones" upon which the rest of the other thousands of claims rest."

You will find that with these CTs as well. For example Chris Brown of "C-4 coated rebar" fame basically rests on two main premises. The first is that there was a concrete core, and the second is that C-4 will last for 30 years in a high alkaline environment. If you can disprove either point you can convince anybody. Anybody that is except Chris Brown. These claims will exist in all the theories and aren't hard to work out. These claims are protected by the simplest of logic.

If you have had any experience with creationists then you already know some of the techniques being used. If not this article will be very useful (when you get to "The scientist / informed lay person debates within constraints that Creationists do not bother themselves with, i.e. sticking to the facts." just replace on the list "Creationist" with "Truther" the rest is an interesting read, but not as relevant unless you happen to be arguing in real life), as is anything from talkorigins.

Finally, and I probably should have put this first, is Debating with a Conspiracy Theorist

I found this in my earlier days of arguing. It contains pretty much everything that you need to watch out for.

To summarise, arguing with a "Truther" is basically arguing with a fundamentalist Christian you will most likely never convince them, but it is possible.

Tired of 9/11 Truthers?

It gets annoying arguing with "Truthers". You spend all this time trying to show them where they are wrong and all they do is ignore you, or insult you, or create threads that attack you, or just argue in circles.

Half the time they just get pissed off at you if you look at the evidence, or have looked at the evidence, and haven't come up with their conclusion and the rest of the time they just ignore what you have to say.

All that I can see of the truth movement is that it is just a small bunch of fundamentalists who are either in too deep, can't see where they are wrong, refuse to admit that they are wrong, or are just really really stupid.

Us debunkers spend so much time arguing with these people, mainly because at this point in time we don't want fence-sitters to join the ranks of the stupid. That is all that these "Truthers" are, stupid.

Now I am pretty sure that when I post this thread, I will get a whole lot of posts attacking me and simultaneously presenting these people as the "innocent victim being oppressed by the evil debunker", even though they have their own thread that I am basing this on attacking us.

They live in a world of lies, hypocrisy, and giving their money to people (who in their right mind needs to buy a pack of 10 LCFC DVDs? You only need one and it's just under 1/10^th the price of the 10 pack) who are clearly exploiting the stupidity of these people.

Even in that thread linked to above, the debunkers have to defend themselves from a torrent of ad hominem attacks their favourite tactic after their strawmen fail, which they always do.

Truthers are liars, fools, equivocators, clearly paranoid, and prefer stupidity to actually thinking. You can't claim to be "protecting democracy" when you willingly state that if you take over you will kill us for speaking out against you. Nor can you say that if you say that you will subject Bush and Cheney to a rigged trial so you can kill them. That is equivocation, it's the same thing as claiming that there are FEMA death camps but when you take over you will fill death camps with debunkers.

You can't claim that we are suppressing free speech just because we oppose what you say.

That is what free speech is. If I take a position contrary to your own it's because I don't think your position is a viable one. It doesn't mean that I am a government shill, or paid by the US government, or paid by Myspace or News Corporation (who own Myspace). Do you think that these people give a shit about what you think on this issue?

Besides, regardless of what you think most people don't believe what you say. Sure you can point to prisonplanet articles which manage to misinterpret poll results in such a blindingly obvious way that you can tell that the person who wrote the "article" must have an IQ of a plant of some sort (sorry to plants there).

On top of that there is this whole thing on ignoring evidence. Congratulations have to go out to the truth movement here. They have managed to become the Creationists of Conspiracy Theories. "Truthers" have shown themselves to be intellectually dishonest again and again, I can't think of any other CT that uses as much quote mining as the 9/11 CTs. I can't think of any other CT that willingly distorts what witnesses have said or given undue weight on the people who support whatever idea it is that the particular "truther" is trying to argue.

Why don't they go and learn about science and the scientific method. As we know in this thing called "science" we have a bunch of rules and stuff that we follow quite rigidly. One of them is finding conclusions based on the evidence. We don't come up with a conclusion and then cherry pick evidence to support our idea.

Cherry picking, which a certain poster does here willingly and has admitted it is wrong. It doesn't matter what your intent is, however "noble", it is still wrong. But then again truthers seem to enjoy this double standard of complaining loudly if they even suspect us of cherry picking but see no problem in doing it themselves.

The entire "Truth" movement is based on lies and doublethink. The doublethink has been shown above. The lies are pretty much anything that they say apart from the following words: "an", "the", "a", "and", "lies". Most conjunctions lead to lies. Adjectives lead to lies, nouns lead to lies, verbs lead to lies.

At this point the only thing that I can think of coming from a "truther" regarding the truth is that the Myspace editor thing isn't the best. That's it. It's not even part of the bloody argument.

I, like most debunkers, have accepted the fact that these people are too dimwitted to understand what actually happened. I am pretty sure that we would gladly leave these armchair geniuses alone if they would stay on their specifically designed "Truther" only CT site and not venture beyond there, arguing among themselves until they can come up with some coherent theory that they all believe in (specifically the MIHOPpers) before venturing out into the world.

Now to await the barrage of insults from the "truthers"...

What you see above is an OP I created for a Myspace thread. It becomes rather obvious in this rant where I stop addressing the debunkers and start addressing the "truthers". If you want to see what the truthers say to me, click here.

Confused

I am really confused.

I have been arguing over at Freedom Crows Nest for a short time and I am now on someone's ignore list.

The thing is that the guy is a CT.

Now if I was someone who is continuously added to ignore lists then I would say that I have just made a new record. As far as I know I have only crossed posts once with this guy (he ignored me after replying to me).

For the purposes of posterity I will post his reply to me here. Basically his post was saying 'debunkers don't "study" and should'. I asked whether that meant just going to CT sources because I wanted to know what he meant by "study". He replied:

'Buy study I mean listening to members of the US military FBI NSA and others you retarded fuck

Print Audio and Video

go find it brainiac if you are so clever and intelligent

but you are not ..see that is the problem .. You are not capable .

I'm not getting sucked into these time wasting exercises any more

added to Ignore .

.'

So apart from not allowing me a right of reply when I do get one (he attacked me personally this time, and by doing this has removed that which annoys me) he has caused me to be confused.

Should I be sad or happy that I have been added to his ignore list?

Censorship and Conspiracy Theorists

It's rather funny when you think about it. You hear about censorship in countries like China or in crazy closed cults or in the past when Fascism and Communism were more prevalent.

You don't have to travel to these places or back in time to see this in action however all you have to do is go onto a conspiracy board, or even just a website.

They rely on censorship and the hope that you are too lazy to bother double checking their quotes, facts, claims, random crazy stuff.

Now if you go to a forum with debunkers on it and watch the endless battle that we fight with these people you will see that there are many, many insults thrown at the debunkers. We are treated like Goldstein's agents.

The require censorship to thrive, because the less of the facts their audience knows the more likely they are to believe what is in front of them.

This is one thing that makes groups like the 9/11 CTs far more hypocritical then normal. They claim "the government controls and censors the media" while censoring their own work. I fail to see how they can claim to be "patriots" while they so willingly do what they claim the government is doing.

It makes them look like two sides of the same coin.



Except that they aren't really.

Why I Argue

I spend some of my time on the net arguing with CT's and Creationists. I do like a good argument though, but I think that I have come across the same revelation that pretty much all skeptics come across (actually I figured this out a while ago, but I want to write about it now).

We argue and debunk not to convert the person making the claim, but to prevent other people from falling into stupid beliefs.

We are the ones who present the counter arguments to stupid claims.

We are the ones who are labelled by those that we oppose.

• We are government shills to CTs that involve any government
• We are soulless Atheists to the creationists
• We have "closed minds" for alternative theories and medicine.
• We are generally attacked when we present the "other" view, or disprove theirs.
  

And yet we persevere and continue to argue. We wade through the never-ending layer of shit that people consider to be rational and we don't know how well our efforts are doing. All we know is that we are helping to keep these people in check, and to lessen the damage that they cause.

I think that deep down we all know that for many of these people we can never defeat them in an argument, but we certainly can show others that they are the thieves, liars and charlatans that they truly are.

September 11

Well today is September 11, the 6^th anniversary of the attacks on the towers.

I hope that this day does not affect the families of those affected. Especially those who happen to be at the site of the towers.

The so-called "Truthers" will be there spewing their filth.

And that is all it is filth no matter what they say.

For example I go onto the Myspace political forum and it is full of 9/11 related crap, like it was faked, while I write this I look and see 9 threads with the numbers 9 and 1 and 1 in that order.

It is just sick. I personally am getting sick of it.

However some of those threads titled '9/11' were made by debunkers poking fun at the idiots.

I did find one important little gem.

A proper scientist has decided to tackle the 'demolition' idea. Dr Keith Seffen is a Cambridge University scientist and has published this paper in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics. We all know it is complete shit but it is rather important because, unlike the conspiracy theorists, proper scientists put there ideas up to the all important peer review.

The conspiracy theorists seem to think that they don't have to stand up to the same scrutiny as real scientists and no conspiracy theorist has tried to publish a paper that would even disprove the Bazant-Zhou paper (see the link above entitled "peer review"), they can try on the internet, and a few sites seem to try but they are not doing it on the field of science.

They are pretend pretend scientists who should be ashamed of themselves for trying to pass off this shit as real science. That link can take you to many papers that disprove the conspiracy theorists however you will never see a conspiracy theorist publish their work in a scientific journal or try to disprove those peer-reviewed hypotheses in a scientific journal.

They may make up some stupid argument as a reason why they shouldn't but all it shows is that they have no argument that can stand up to science.

I will leave you with a 9/11 related psychology thing. Look at the following two pictures that I nicked from here:

















(I don't know if the pictures are working though. Stupid Australian internet).