"...




The lunacy of 9/11 Truth goes far beyond this sort of mere ignorance though, and includes many claims that border on or plunge right into the absurd. We have all seen the planes hit the Twin Towers, right? Granted that we can be deceived, for example on the YouTube website you will find many videos of both professional and amateur magicians performing amazing tricks. Ever seen Criss Angel walk on a swimming pool or levitate, or a junior school kid apport and then vanish a handkerchief into thin air? Even if you don't see the nearly invisible glass he is walking on, or the fake leg, or the false thumb, you know this is sleight of hand rather than actual magic. The planes really did hit the Twin Towers though, right? I mean, this can't have been staged, can it?
Would you believe there are some Truthers who think that is indeed the case? Then there is Judy Wood. Dr Wood earned a BSc in Civil Engineering, then an MSc in Engineering Mechanics, followed in 1992 by a PhD in Materials Engineering Science. That is impressive. How would you like to argue with a woman of that supreme erudition in her own field? You might feel slightly more confident if I told you that she believes the Twin Towers were brought down not by the planes but by some sort of secret death ray that "dustified" the buildings. The truly frightening thing about her is that she sounds so plausible and argues so forcefully, far more so than the extremely erudite Vladimir Terziski whom I saw in January 1993 explaining, inter alia, how the Nazis reached the Moon in 1938 and how in 1945, a team of Nazis and Japanese had crash-landed a flying saucer on the planet Mars. No, I'm not making this up, and it gets even sillier.
Most Truthers don't go this far, and are content simply to chant their mantra "9/11 was an inside job" over and over again, blissfully unaware that the same lunatic claim was made about the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
The overwhelming majority of the Truthers' claims have been demonstrated clearly to be false, but that doesn't stop them parroting these claims over and over again, like the one that there was no plane wreckage at the Pentagon, and the one that a plane didn't crash at Shanksville, and so on.
There is a plethora of organisations supposedly dedicated to investigating 9/11 from many different perspectives; the organisation Pilots For 9/11 Truth sounds impressive, but check out their documentary 9/11 Intercepted; the introduction in particular is full of stupid innuendo about planes being allegedly hijacked, and a message being allegedly received from Mohamed Atta to the effect that "We have some planes".
Later it gets even sillier with an allusion to Operation Northwoods and the usual conspiratorial garbage about false flags. Best not to mention what this film claims about the attack on the Pentagon. Pilots for 9/11 Truth? Pilots of what, flying saucers? These people are not so much conspiracy theorists as space cadets.
The mainstay appears now to be the non-controversy over the fall of Building 7 and the presence of thermate/thermite in the wreckage. These arguments are superficially persuasive, especially to the non-chemist, which is most of us, but one might just as well argue that the flooding that occurred when the mains was ruptured is evidence of explosives, after all, water contains a volatile and highly explosive gas: hydrogen. Here is an intelligent explanation of the thermate/thermite claims. Of late, these have been replaced by the claim that nanothermite was responsible, but the evidence for this too appears to have been overstated, to put it mildly.
Even if such material were found among the debris, to bring down buildings of this size, there would remain the little matter of how it could have been detonated without the ear-shattering noises that are characteristic of controlled explosions. While it is true explosions were heard coming from both the Twin Towers and Building 7, these were nothing out of the usual. Indeed, small explosions can often be heard on a fair sized bonfire that does not contain light bulbs, strip lighting, refrigerators, computers, and doubtless many other artefacts found in buildings of that size and nature which could and undoubtedly did explode prior to collapse. Without explosions of a recognisable controlled detonation magnitude and other evidence of same - such as recognisable fragments of timers, etc - none of the claimed thermitic residuum amounts to the requisite black swan.
In his rebuttal of Richard Gage, Chris Mohr covers Building 7 probably better than NIST, a body that has come in for a great deal of unwarranted criticism from the 9/11 loonies. In an earlier segment of this video, Mohr also goes into some depth about who would have had to be in on the conspiracy if these were controlled demolitions. This is something I have long wondered.
Just imagine the complexity of the operation - recruiting 19 hijackers prepared to die for the New World Order, the timing of the attacks, how would they know Building 7 would be damaged? And so on. That is without the teams needed to plant the detonators, and all the other nonsense. The logistics of such an operation beggars belief, but still we hear the mantra and the same endlessly repeated facile arguments implying that if you can't account for every single anomaly of that terrible day, the Truthers must be right, and the government did it. I have addressed some of these anomalies elsewhere; most of them turn out not to be anomalies but either ignorance or outright lies. The claims about the BBC having foreknowledge of the collapse of Building 7 and Larry Silverstein confessing on TV are ludicrous. The misrepresentations of the collapse of this same building are a marvel to behold. There is plenty of archive footage on YouTube and elsewhere that shows the authorities, in particular the heroic firefighters, were fully aware of the damage done to it, and the near certainty of its collapsing.
The very latest nonsense is a film that has been broadcast on public television in the run up to the 11th anniversary of the atrocities, the grandly titled 9/11: Explosive Evidence - Experts Speak Out. The kindest thing that can be said about this film is that it confuses cause and effect, which is hardly surprising when one considers that the man behind it is none other than Richard Gage.
I won't review it here because it contains nothing new, though it has been reviewed elsewhere on this site by someone who is both a little more intelligent than me, and a great deal more gullible. One of the things die hard truthers advise us to do is follow the money. Okay, let's start by asking how much Mr Gage makes from his "not-for-profit".
Some information about this can be found here and here. Try not to laugh.
Unless I'm missing something, according to this film, the Twin Towers collapsed from the top down by controlled explosion, both of them, while Building 7 (which no one has heard about), collapsed from the bottom.
What was that I said about logistics? This means that Mohamed Atta and his fellow mass murderer Marwan al-Shehhi had to crash these planes precisely where they did, between floors 93 and 99, and between floors 77 and 85 respectively, because by an amazing coincidence, the controlled explosions began at those floors. Don't let's even think about Building 7.
At the moment, I am being chased across the web by Dan Noel, a highly qualified well-meaning fruitcake, an engineer with a fixation about Building 7, and who has apparently developed "a new, exciting system that allows virtually every human being, starting at a very young age, to learn to use telepathy to automatically realign any target with the Divine purpose".
Somebody should introduce him to Judy Wood; they'd make a lovely couple.
One other point that needs to be mentioned is that not all the people peddling alternative versions of what happened on 9/11 are either well-meaning or cranks; there is a considerable amount of blatantly spurious analysis out there including doctored videos. One of the most sophisticated such hoaxes is what has been called "The Ball Theory". Don't be deceived by such nonsense, and always bear in mind that the governments of the world are not the only liars out there, and much of the time they are not even the biggest liars. I will go further than that and say that as far as the logistics of 9/11 go, we can believe probably 99.9% of the official version up to the events of that day. The American Government and the British Government lied about the so-called weapons of mass destruction - the very same weapons they have - and they lied about, or rather attempted to cover up, the professed motives for the attacks - but the investigations carried out by the FBI and other agencies were thorough, reliable, honest and probably as accurate as we can expect.
The 9/11 attacks have affected all of us profoundly, unless you are living on a desert island, a monastery, or somewhere like that. For me, the gullibility is far more worrying than the plain evil, because the sort of ignorance engendered by the 9/11 Truth Movement is inherently dangerous. The recent case of Brandon Raub is testimony to that.
Ignorance has an unpleasant way of turning into hysteria. We are fortunate that those in power - on both sides of the House - don't give any credence at all to these ravings. Under other circumstances, we could have seen things turn very nasty as happens when the extraordinary popular delusion becomes entwined with the madness of the crowd.
Probably the main reason it hasn't is because 9/11 Truth is not made up of the usual suspects, but is a curious mixture of extremely erudite men and women with no brains, leftists, America Firsters, people from all walks of life, anti-Zionists, anti-war activists, mystics, a few die-hard anti-Semites, and virtually no Moslems at all. Then there is that great intellectual and champion of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Ed Asner, as well as all manner of kooks, people who have no idea how to think critically.
Overall, the movement appears to have no uniform agenda, although there are unquestionably some people making a lot of money out of it, and other things like unwarranted prestige.
In closing, I should say a few words about NIST. This body has been the target of much unwarranted criticism for failing to mount a proper investigation. Some people seem to think it mounted or should have mounted a criminal investigation. They should at least take the time to read the terms of reference of its actual investigation. NIST was asked to investigate the collapse of the buildings and to make recommendations for improved safety, including construction. This was a scientific and technical investigation, not a criminal one. That side was done by the FBI and other legal authorities. If a small building or a plane had been bombed, it would have been feasible for NIST to replicate the outrage and repeat the damage. Clearly this was not feasible with two 110 storey buildings, so for the Twin Towers and Building 7 a computer simulation was the best option. This appears to have been only partially successful, but as I have said before [quoting Lord Justice Beldam in Regina v Ram, (1995)]: "In our opinion the effect of this evidence was to demonstrate what every experienced counsel knows, that in reconstructing events from postmortem appearances there are considerable limitations to the opinion of an expert, however distinguished."
NIST appears to have fudged its data in places, but it remains to be seen if this was anything more sinister than drawing the best line through the dots, as scientists tend to do. NIST didn't do all this work in-house but contracted out to many individuals and companies. Literally hundreds of people worked on it, and clearly they were not all part of the same delusional Grand Conspiracy, the one that can orchestrate the mass murder of thousands of individuals in coordinated attacks yet can't rid the world of one pesky cleric.
My kitchen window faces east; when I looked out of it this morning at close to 8.40, the light cumulus clouds were breaking up in the sun, and the day looked very much like it must have looked precisely 11 years earlier in New York - bar the time difference - a few minutes before Mohamed Atta crashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower. Yet the world is a very different place from the one New Yorkers woke up to. It is a colder, harder place, and there is no going back. It seems as though not only can we not halt the spread of hate, or state repression, but we can't halt the spread of ignorance either, else the 9/11 Truth Movement would long since have died the death along with alchemy.
The above is my last humble contribution to attempting to halt it, it is also my final word on both 9/11 and 9/11 "Truth", and I will publish no more articles about either, at least not on this site."

http://digitaljournal.com/article/331530

The article says it all.

But it doesn't tell what the aliens' REAL agenda is!!!

only the Reptilians know.

Nice piece of tail!!

Head scratching moments in twoofer (ahem) logic.

"Some people would believe fire could melt steel, if a lot people told them that fire could melt steel."

"The government never tells us the truth about anything. So why do we believe them after the impossible has happened?"

"through the path of greatest resistance"

"the speed of gravity"

"Mobile phones don't work on aircraft."

"Hanjour was such a bad pilot that he couldn't land a plane."

"Steel turned to dust"

"Secret military weapons no one knows about"

"The Pentagon is the best defended building in the world"

"It was a CD, but it was made to not look like a CD."

My personal favourite:

"It looked exactly like a controlled demolition in every respect, so it can only possibly have been a controlled demolition, and the fact that it didn't actually look very much like a controlled demolition at all just showed that it was an unconventional controlled demolition, because the conspirators wouldn't have been stupid enough to make it look exactly like a controlled demolition in every respect."

"Can you think of anything else that may have happened that day, that never happened before? Maybe there's a connection."

"Black smoke means oxygen-starved fire".


Ah, great moments in stupidity.

good Article sure sums it up!

However, there is something else working. Once a concept such as "fire can't melt steel" has been debunked by showing the exact effect heat has on structural steel and the percentage of weakening that occurs at the temperatures expected to be found in a plane crash, the same presenter of the invalid claim will come right back with the same argument as if it never happened, over and over.

Is this a learning disability or an agenda (such as blame Bush) that is the real goal and the facts don't matter at all.

It's psychological, so perhaps it is a learning disability...

Yea people have no concept of yield strength lol. And on hotrods post, I also think it's funny they think straight down is the most resistance lol. They know nothing about inertia, impact force, or even Newton's laws.

Newton was wrong in that one instance!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtwNYN_HDkw

Sound familiar?


Mark Hoofnagle has described denialism as "the employment of rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of argument or legitimate debate, when in actuality there is none." It is a process that operates by employing one or more of the following five tactics in order to maintain the appearance of legitimate controversy:
1.Conspiracy theories — Dismissing the data or observation by suggesting opponents are involved in "a conspiracy to suppress the truth".
2.Cherry picking — Selecting an anomalous critical paper supporting their idea, or using outdated, flawed, and discredited papers in order to make their opponents look as though they base their ideas on weak research.
3.False experts — Paying an expert in the field, or another field, to lend supporting evidence or credibility.
4.Moving the goalpost — Dismissing evidence presented in response to a specific claim by continually demanding some other (often unfulfillable) piece of evidence.
5.Other logical fallacies — Usually one or more of false analogy, appeal to consequences, straw man, or red herring.

Tara Smith of the University of Iowa also stated that moving goalposts, conspiracy theories and cherry-picking evidence are general characteristics of denialist arguments, but went on to note that these groups spend the "majority of their efforts critiquing the mainstream theory" in an apparent belief that if they manage to discredit the mainstream view, their own "unproven ideas will fill the void".[/i[

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denialism

If you research the problem it seems to be more of a "blame Bush" connection. However, if you look at the Mingle troofers, they don't seem to be that political.

This whole unprovable argument for or against one theory or another, name calling and opinion bashing....

It's like 2 monkeys arguing over a banana under a tree full of them!

POINTLESS!

If you dropped a brick on your toe and I explained to you the laws of gravity, the physics of falling objects, and the calculated force of a five pound brick moving at ten feet per second on your foot and someone else told you an alien force beam pushed the brick at your foot, would you give each explanation equal merit?

That is what you are doing now.

Do you believe in miracles or do things just happen for the better at times?

Can you prove a miracle? Can you prove it isn't?

I question 9/11 because it doesn't add up for me, others might think I'm crazy for having a belief or understanding different from theirs, but without facts (all veiled under gov't security shams) 9/11 can never be argued rationally by either set of beliefs... therefore, any belief is equally valid, or equally invalid, and to argue a point without fact..... is indeed pointless!

Name calling and opinion bashing from either side is senseless, devisive and futile...except to grow ones own ego.... and homey don't play that!