Tuesday, January 26, 2010

A thought experiment for truthers

Question: How do you know this isn't the cover-up of a crashed, hijacked plane?

"Course all the neighbors ran out into the street. We didn't know what was going on," said Paul Williams, who heard the explosion.

Some people said they thought it was a plane crash, others, a house explosion.

It has everything 9/11 deniers need. Bystanders hearing the sounds of explosions. A quick attempt at a cover-up. Media shills - both with 'Eastern European'-sounding last names.

Truthers, spell out your line of reasoning about this and see if you get the joke.

Monday, January 25, 2010

XKCD: rarely funny, sometimes hilarious



Remarkably close to the beliefs of actual 9/11 deniers, many of whom admit that the United States really does have enemies abroad, but still insist that George Bush had to concoct the most elaborate hoax in history in order to invade a couple of third-world countries, such as the United States invades every couple of years or so.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

"The Weird Factor," or, spot the logical fallacy

Answers after the block. Hint: The "better name" rhymes with "shmallacy from schmincredulity." From antiwar.com, posted over at 911truth.org.

What I call the Weird Factor, for lack of a better name, seems to have become a permanent feature of our post-9/11 world, a dark and sinister leitmotif that plays in the background. On 9/11, of course, the Factor was on full display as a whole string of unusual events and unexplained phenomena were visited on us. The 9/11 Commission did little to clear these matters up, for the most part because they didn't address them. Just a few for the record: Bush reading My Pet Goat to schoolchildren after being told of the attacks, the sudden appearance of the "Israeli art students" – and their buddies, the "laughing Israelis" – in the months and weeks leading up to the attacks, and the apparent passivity of US air defenses on that fateful day.

I mean, how is it possible that the terrorists actually hit the Pentagon, the symbolic fortress of America's alleged military supremacy? After spending untold trillions on "defense" over the years, a sum that never declines in real terms, and driving ourselves into near-bankruptcy on account of it, how in the name of all that's holy did nineteen men armed with box-cutters manage to drive Don Rumsfeld stumbling into the street, literally running for his life?


The most glaring logical error the author of 911truth.org's blog post committed here is called the fallacy from incredulity. This fallacy is committed when one argues that because one is surprised by an event, that event could not have happened.

1. 9/11 was surprising to me.
: The government did it.

Could this "logic" replicate in any way, to any other situation? Of course not. The fact that something surprised you has nothing to do with whether or not that something did in fact happen. 911truth and antiwar.com require you to believe that if you think something is unlikely, it is therefore obvious that "the government" (whoever that is) was responsible. Here are a few examples of this fallacy being committed by the author of that post in just the first couple of paragraphs.

Fallacy from incredulity: People from Israel were in New York City in September of 2001. Shocking. Some of them came to the United States to go to college, and some even came as (gasp) tourists! Because the "five dancing Israelis" were such good secret agents, here they are on national television talking (and laughing) about the conspiracy theories that have been born to justify their existence in the minds of 9/11 deniers. Hey, wouldn't people cheering the deaths of Americans be people 9/11 deniers could naturally associate with? The founders of the religion of 9/11 denial did find 9/11 rather humorous, after all.

Fallacy from incredulity: "A plane hit one of the biggest buildings on the Potomac? Impossible! 2003 called, they want their arguments back."

Fallacy from incredulity:. "Having an international military presence means the Pentagon should've been armed with missile banks eager to be fired onto hijacked civilian jetliners. Because in the few minutes between the hijacking of Flight 77 and its impact into the Pentagon defense officials weren't miraculously granted the authority to rewrite American national defense rules to allow the shooting down of American civilian jetliners, the hijacking of which in every case prior to 2001 was for ransom purposes rather than suicide attack purposes, the government did 9/11."

As you can tell from my sarcastic interpretation of this author's claims, I think his assessments of the relative probabilities of certain things happening is patently false. But even if they weren't, the mere logic of the author's statements gets him laughed out the door. His only argument is that he personally thought the United States was invulnerable to terrorism, and that any deviation from his fantasy world is therefore a stochastic impossibility short of necessitating what would be by far the most elaborate hoax in history.

A conspiracy-minded blogger thinks something unlikely happened, therefore everyone who works for the US government is a terrorist. Does that statement not ring true to you? No? Congratulations, you know more about writing, rhetoric and argumentation than the editorial staff of antiwar.com.

Next up: The rest of his post!

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Well, its official

Cindy Sheehan, the activist who once thought she could beat Nancy Pelosi in a primary election, is on the speaker list for a "Treason in America: the Wars & Our Broken Constitution" Conference."

Because all 9/11 deniers must be anti-war, and must believe that everyone who isn't a 9/11 denier must be a gullible, warmongering hawk. That's how cults work, don'tcha know.

Monday, January 18, 2010

Heads it was the US, tails it wasn't the Taliban (cont.)

An elaborate plan by Taliban soldiers was carried out in Kabul today, with multiple timed suicide strikes on the capital's downtown, coupled with urban squad tactics on the part of the Taliban. MSNBC has more.

When the Flight 253 hijacking was foiled by a Dutch film-maker - who 9/11 deniers think was a trained CIA spook along with would-be terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, now facing two consecutive life sentences barely into his twenties - deniers argued that the plan was so shoddily-crafted that it proves African and Middle Eastern people are too stupid to have carried out the 9/11 attacks. 9/11 deniers are convinced that non-Westerners are simply stupider than the rest of us, and to them the failure of the Flight 253 hijacking, though a black op of course, is final proof of their beliefs.

Here we have a coordinated tactical strike with military and symbolic significance. Twenty militants devastated a country's (ostensible) capital city. The Taliban, which 9/11 deniers also believe is run by the U.S. government, attempted to destroy the U.S.-backed center-left government and nearly succeeded.

Listening to the twits over at 911blogger and 911truth, one comes to realize that 9/11 deniers legitimately don't think terrorism exists. Right now they're trying to cook something up over at 811truth connecting Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to - you guessed it - Mossad. Sometimes, the jokes write themselves.

9/11 deniers have some answering to do. Does your bigotry against non-Westerners hold up in the face of the obvious? Does terrorism not exist? Does the U.S. have no real enemies, only its own creations come home to roost? Is there no such thing as an organic foreign opposition to U.S. interests abroad... or has your worldview failed?

Sunday, January 17, 2010

This guy loves himself. Also labels. But not his friends.

Killtown's mad about being banned on TruTV's forums. I don't know the guy or why he was, but I find his post-ban griping quite amusing.

One, his post drips with ego, as his posts do generally. This is pretty much in line with the vast cranial expansion of most 9/11 deniers, who regard themselves as "the truth seekers" who are "going deeper" to ask questions that us "sheeple" wouldn't dare ponder. Of course, that they uncritically glean answers to said questions from shoddily-made YouTube videos full of Garage Band house beats and grainy Bitmaps posted by people lacking basic grammar and critical thinking skills is beside the point. The point is, we're sheep because we get our information from people who have fancy college degrees and stable sources of income, and they're privy to mystical sources of knowledge such as only CrystalSeeker99 can provide. Apparently he was banned from TruTV because he was spamming. The response he gives himself on his personal blog is that, well, his spamming was popular and it ain't spam if a lot of people click on it. Trolling is allowed when someone as smart as me is doing it. Right.

Two, he doesn't seem to get the joke when he refers to people who dare challenge his faith as "skeptics" in a derogatory fashion. Consider his passive-aggressive anger at us blasphemous interlopers in his post:

And what's really funny is right before they banned me, I just reported two posts from skeptic trolls for -- guess? -- that's right, them starting trouble (as to be expected from your average JREF skeptic troll).

Getting banned there is harsh. They delete all of your posts. Just ask skeptic troll "Deelite." =)

Three sentences. Three usages of the phrase "skeptic troll." Cute. So do 9/11 deniers just not bother calling themselves "skeptics" or "alternative theorists" anymore, at this point? Have they just admitted that they're a religion?

It pleases me to no end to see that "skepticism" has become a sin in the denier world. There is no better way to further reduce your cult to a broken record player repeating an un-funny joke than to take a synonym for "person who thinks a lot" and use it as an insult. Right on, Killtown. You tell your frontal lobe who's boss. "Starting trouble" will sow dissent amongst the proletariat.

Third, the denier infighting is about to reach ridiculous levels. Remember when they decided that Amy Goodman was a government spook? Remember when they decided that Dylan Avery was a government spook? If you decide to take a peek over at any of these hysterical dens of woo-woo known as a 9/11 forum, you'll see what I mean. Everyone is an enemy, and everyone is scared of everyone else. Its almost not funny. Almost.

Killtown: You go, girl. Fight the man/each other/your impulse to think critically.

Friday, January 15, 2010

"The government wants to make us THINK!"

As someone who works in behavioral econ and mathematical psychology I was pumped to see one of my intellectual heroes Cass Sunstein appointed to a post in the Obama Administration. His bibliography spans politics, economics, and psychology, and his work in the academic literature is required reading in most courses in behavioral studies. A true polymath of the social sciences, and a pretty nice guy to boot.

And 9/11 deniers have just started comparing him to Hitler.

Got Fascism? : Obama Advisor Promotes 'Cognitive Infiltration'
Cass Sunstein is President Obama's Harvard Law School friend, and recently appointed Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

In a recent scholarly article, he and coauthor Adrian Vermeule take up the question of "Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures." (J. Political Philosophy, 7 (2009), 202-227). This is a man with the president's ear. This is a man who would process information and regulate things. What does he here propose?

[W]e suggest a distinctive tactic for breaking up the hard core of extremists who supply conspiracy theories: cognitive infiltration of extremist groups, whereby government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of believers by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups, thereby introducing beneficial cognitive diversity. (Page 219.)

Read this paragraph again. Unpack it. Work your way through the language and the intent. Imagine the application. What do we learn?


Rarely does the failure to get the joke resound so epically.

People who oppose the government have legitimate concerns. During the Bush Administration, police and military organizations engaged in illegal or at least immoral infiltration of peaceful protest organizations. And it was wrong.

Cass Sunstein is advocating showing up to a group of people and asking them to explain why they believe what they believe. This is what every group should voluntarily be seeking, anyway. To their cries of "got fascism?" I ask, "got group-think?" If your beliefs are true, Sunstein's argument that the government should seek open debate with you should be a blessing. You should be looking forward to having hordes of converts.

Instead, what do they fear?

Put into English, what Sunstein is proposing is government infiltration of groups opposing prevailing policy. Palestinian Liberation? 9/11 Truth? Anti-nuclear power? Stop the wars? End the Fed? Support Nader? Eat the Rich?

It's easy to destroy groups with "cognitive diversity." You just take up meeting time with arguments to the point where people don't come back. You make protest signs which alienate 90% of colleagues. You demand revolutionary violence from pacifist groups.

Only one of those things Sunstein lists is a conspiracy theory, making this blogger's paranoia look more than a little silly - and to that second paragraph, its not like 9/11 deniers, you know, already do all of that themselves.

Never has a group ever so resolutely opposed such a banal policy that would be beneficial in the long run to any group that wasn't fundamentally afraid of having its beliefs challenged.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Abdulmutallab probably would've failed anyway

Beware journalists trying to play engineer, but this piece at msnbc.com is quite interesting.

In theory at least, seat 19A would seem ideal. It is positioned exactly over the center of the wings, and under it is a tank capable of holding 41,559 liters of fuel. Video demonstrations of a similar amount of the same explosive being detonated in the open show a powerful blast, and that power would be magnified in a restricted space like an airplane cabin.
...
But it’s not so simple. That center fuel tank is part of what is called the wing box, a structure that anchors the wings to the fuselage and absorbs the greatest stresses of flight. For this reason, it is one of the strongest parts of the airplane. Also, Northwest Flight 253 was in the last phase of a long trans-oceanic flight and the main fuel tank would have been by then very light in fuel. It’s true that even a small amount of fuel would still have been enough to ensure the success of the bomber’s mission, but only if that tough wing box had been penetrated.

And where was this guy who supposedly helped him get through security? Is Jasper Schuringa, a Dutch filmmaker who is certainly no Amereican sympathizer, also now supposed to be a CIA agent? Abdulmutallab is facing life plus ninety years, and can't point the finger anywhere else to lessen his sentence? Considering it was going to fail anyway, what about this exactly reeks of "false flag?"

The 9/11 denier noise machine has some approaching tanks in the background to deal with.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Other 9/11 deniers trying to jump in on flight 253 conspiracy theories

911blogger imported its post from dissidentvoice.org attempted to join the "GOV DID 253" bandwagon and, I have to say, it is quite a lark. They have absolutely nothing that wasn't reported in that "mainstream media" they love to hate... they just use it to come to the conclusion that there's no such thing as terrorism and Britain (or possibly America or Yemen) did the flight 253 hijacking.

Let’s take a look at those informational “snippets” and summarize what is quickly emerging as growing evidence of U.S. foreknowledge of an imminent attack on an American passenger plane:

* May: the British government withdrew its student visa for Abdulmutallab, a graduate of the prestigious University College London and placed him on a watchlist, barring his entry into the UK. MI5, and presumably their MI6 military intelligence colleagues in Yemen, compiled a dossier on the would-be bomber, citing his “political involvement” with “extremist networks” that have enjoyed on-again, off-again ties with NATO military intelligence organizations across the decades. This information, as Brown government spokesperson Simon Lewis, who let the cat out of the proverbial bag, was shared with their American counterparts.

* August: U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA and NSA, intercepted cell- and satellite phone traffic which revealed that a Yemeni affiliate of the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets, also known as al-Qaeda, were finalizing preparations for an operation that would utilize a “Nigerian.”

* October: Newsweek revealed in their January 11 issue, that the dodgy cleric, the American-born Anwar al-Awlaki, who communicated extensively with the disturbed Ft. Hood shooter, Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan, posted “a provocative message on his English-language Web site: ‘COULD YEMEN BE THE NEXT SURPRISE OF THE SEASON?’” According to Newsweek, “Al-Awlaki seemed to hint at an upcoming attack that would make Yemen ‘the single most important front of jihad in the world’.” The Washington Post reported in 2008 that al-Awlaki had extensive contacts with 9/11 hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi, Khalid Almihdhar, and Hani Hanjour and was suspected of having assisted the 9/11 plot. According to the Post, “three of the hijackers had spent time at his mosques in California and Falls Church.” Despite, or possibly because, of these dubious connections “he was allowed to leave the country in 2002.” According to the History Commons, it is only in 2008 that the U.S. government concludes that the shady imam “is linked to al-Qaeda attacks.” However, Al-Awlaki’s provenance as a new “terrorist mastermind” should be viewed with suspicion, given well-documented links known to have existed amongst the 9/11 hijackers and American, Saudi and Pakistani secret state agencies.

* October: the same month Al-Awlaki was hinting at a “surprise,” Newsweek revealed that John O. Brennan “received an alarming briefing at the White House from Muhammad bin Nayef, Brennan’s Saudi counterpart. Nayef had just survived an assassination attempt by a Qaeda operative using a novel method: the operative had flown in from the Saudi-Yemeni border region with a bomb hidden in his underwear. The Saudi was concerned because he ‘didn’t think [U.S. officials] were paying enough attention’ to the growing threat.” A familiar trope we’ve heard in the aftermath of other terrorist strikes.

* Early November: Newsweek published an exclusive report January 4, that two U.S. “intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security circulated a paper within the government last fall that examined in some detail the threats that bombs secreted in clothing–or inside someone’s body cavities–might pose to aviation security.” According to information leaked to the newsmagazine by anonymous “national-security officials,” the report “was prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center in conjunction with Homeland Security and the CIA,” and that “one principal point of discussion in the document was whether the detonation of a bomb hidden in clothing on an airliner would have a different explosive effect than the detonation of a bomb secreted in a body cavity under similar circumstances.” (emphasis added) This chilling report, prepared in the wake of intelligence information provided U.S. security agencies by Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism czar, should raise provocative questions. No other media outlet however, has followed the trail.

* November 19: Abdulmutallab’s father, a prominent Nigerian banker and former high state official, visits the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, telling State Department and CIA officials he believes his son is a threat. A cousin tells The New York Times that the father told U.S. officials, “Look at the texts he’s sending. He’s a security threat.” Although Embassy personnel promise “to look into it,” the cousin told the Times that “they didn’t take him seriously.”

* November 20: the CIA prepares and files a report on Abdulmutallab that is sent to agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia “but not disseminated to other intelligence agencies,” unnamed “officials” tell the Times. Embassy staff also wrote and sent a cable known as a “Visa Viper,” to the State Department and National Counterterrorism Center and a security file is opened on the suspect.

* December 9-24: Abdulmutallab travels to Ghana from Ethiopia and pays cash, $2,831 to be precise, for a ticket on a Northwest Airlines flight from Lagos through Amsterdam to Detroit, landing on Christmas Day. “It is now known” The Independent on Sunday reported January 10, “that the Ghanaian hotel he listed on his immigration form was not the one where he was actually staying.” According to IoS, although the FBI “has officers on the ground in Ghana and believe it is likely the terrorist may well have had his final al-Qa’ida briefing, and supplied with equipment and explosives, there,” no steps are taken to apprehend the suspect. “All this” IoS comments, “was more than a month after his father, a wealthy Nigerian banker, had met officials at the US embassy in Abuja to share concerns about his son.”

* December 22: during a White House Situation Room briefing Newsweek reports that “a document presented to the president titled ‘Key Homeland Threats’ did not mention Yemen, according to a senior administration official.”

* December 25: Abdulmutallab boards Flight 253 in Amsterdam with only a carry-on bag for his international flight; the would-be lap bomber holds a 2-year entry visa into the United States. As is standard procedure, the Department of Homeland Security is notified an hour prior to departure that he is a passenger on the plane.

* December 25: the Los Angeles Times disclosed January 7 that “U.S. border security officials learned of the alleged extremist links of the suspect in the Christmas Day jetliner bombing attempt as he was airborne from Amsterdam to Detroit and had decided to question him when he landed.” Homeland Security officials “declined to discuss what information reached the U.S. border officials in Amsterdam on Christmas Day.” Despite suspicions by Customs and Border Protection agents, who had accessed NCTC’s TIDE database, the flight crew is not notified of Abdulmutallab’s presence aboard the airliner and additional security precautions therefore, are not made.

Once you lop off the daffy leap of faith required to next assert that "therefore, Barack Obama wanted Flight 253 to be hijacked," nothing more elegantly makes my point that the United States has many enemies, tracking all of them is hard, coordination amongst interdepartmental and international intelligence agencies is hard too, and many but not all terrorist plots are foiled.

That's some fine work, boys. Even disregarding that almost their entire case is built on political hearsay, if you haven't drunken the Truther Kool-Aid you actually have quite elegant proof of the fact that the government did not hijack this flight right here.

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Heads it was the government, Tails it wasn't the terrorists

Still more from 911truth.org's version of a 12/25 conspiracy theory:

What are we to make of the failed Underwear Bomber plot, the Toothpaste, Shampoo, and Bottled Water Bomber plot, and the Shoe Bomber plot? These blundering and implausible plots to bring down an airliner seem far removed from al-Qaida's expertise in pulling off 9/11.

If we are to believe the U.S. government, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged al-Qaida "mastermind" behind 9/11, outwitted the CIA, the NSA, indeed all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies...

And so on.

Consider the logic of this line of argument. If a terrorist plot is successful, it couldn't have been terrorists, because terrorism against the United States is hard to pull off. It is difficult, therefore impossible. Apparently, 9/11 deniers are convinced that Middle Eastern Muslims can not possibly be as clever as white Westerners.

If a terrorist plot fails, 9/11 deniers say, it is because terrorists are incompetent dolts, uneducated foreigners who could not possibly possess the capacity for tactical action required to pull off this sort of thing. I mean, just look at how many ridiculous plots have been foiled!

It never seems to occur to 9/11 deniers that recent events prove that there are many, many attempts made on the lives of Americans at home and abroad on a constant basis, and that the probability of a terrorist attack succeeding is positively correlated with the amount of planning that went into it. With many attempts tiny probabilities stack, and those who plan win. Those would be those snippets of obvious statistical reality that are just too inconvenient for deniers to pay attention to.

Friday, January 8, 2010

Well, it took about two weeks, but...

9/11 deniers have finally started slapping together an excuse for themselves about the would-be flight 253 hijacker. From today's 911truth.org post, unironically called "Is Anyone Telling Us the Truth?"

Could the Underwear Bomber have been one of the Israeli terrorist recruits? Certainly Israel has an interest in keeping the US fully engaged militarily against all potential foes of Israel's territorial expansion.

The thought brought back memory of my Russian studies at Oxford University where I learned that the Tsar's secret police set off bombs so that they could blame those whom they wanted to arrest.

Of course. Hundreds of years ago the Russian monarchy engaged in subterfuge, therefore The Jews Did 12/25.

Who benefits? Clearly, attacking Iran is on the Israeli-U.S. agenda, and someone is creating the "evidence" to support the case, just as the leaked secret "Downing Street Memo" to the British cabinet informed Prime Minister Tony Blair's government that President Bush had already made the decision to invade Iraq and "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Of course, the classic cui bono fallacy. It'd been days since a 9/11 denier used that one. The military-industrial complex might in some long term, crassly utilitarian sort of way benefit from a failed terrorist plot, therefore the military-industrial complex engineered a hijacking. Just like how I personally benefited from the invention of wireless Internet, therefore I helped invent it. Have you met my buddy, Al?

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had been posting his views online since at least 2005, and had been a practicing proselytizer for Islam since high school. He never went to the U.S. until 2004, meaning he'd have to become a CIA agent really quickly. While being trained as a CIA spook he had time to attend college in London and noisily announce his worldview via Internet on multiple occasions.

This insinuation is no more pathetic than any other set of 9/11 denier beliefs, but it really makes one want to get inside the head of the person who wrote this. Being a 9/11 denier forces an incredible amount of cognitive dissonance on someone - they have to turn people like this into patriotic American CIA agents who are willing to give their lives to temporarily alarm the civilian population. This kid's going to rot for "life in jail plus ninety years," and the author of this pitiful article has to convince himself that he's doing it at the behest of the Zionist conspiracy.

Kind of saddening, actually.

Monday, January 4, 2010

NYCCAN's Pathetic Claims

"NYCCAN" is the 9/11 denier front that has so far failed a number of times to convince members of one of America's most politically diverse cities (including its margins...) to support their vague, ill-defined notion of a "new 9/11 Commission." Considering that 911truth.org only raised about 20% of the $50,000 it needs last year and has failed to even reset its counter for 2010, NYCCAAN's claim that it can "self-fund" its fictive investigation is a laughable, transparent farce, considering their bleating that the last one was "underfunded," clocking in at $15 million. As last year saw another failure on their part to actually do what they said they would do, their latest message to the troops reads like a Lehman Brothers sales pitch, only with slightly more lies by omission.

December 31, 2009

Dear Friends and Fellow Advocates for Answers and Accountability,

As we look ahead to 2010, we at NYC CAN would like to offer our deepest thanks to everyone who contributed to a remarkable and historic [failed]campaign, and we would like to take a moment to celebrate the achievements that give us much to build upon in 2010.

2009 was a year of tremendous progress for our cause. Among a long list of successes, a peer-reviewed paper was published in a mainstream scientific journal documenting the discovery of active thermitic material in the World Trade Center dust [that forced that journal's editor to resign in shame when it was discovered that the paper wasn't reviewed and was a shoddy joke unfit for a Blog post]; the petition of architects and engineers calling for a new investigation into the WTC destruction has leaped to nearly 1,000 signatories [most of whom aren't actually architects or engineers]while founding member Richard Gage, AIA travels the world delivering his analysis of the buildings' demise to thousands of concerned citizens and leaders [at a massive financial net loss]. The increasing strength and credibility of our message is evidenced by the ever greater frequency of media breakthroughs casting a positive light on the questions we pose.

And it ends with the most pitiful attempt at a claim of "forward progression" I've ever heard:

Because only 25 signatures are required for the insertion of an article on New Hampshire town ballots, Vote For Answers New Hampshire has set an ambitious goal of placing its article on 40 town ballots across the state at local elections this spring. The article reads:

Shall New Hampshire's Congressional Delegation be instructed to pursue a new and independent investigation to address thoroughly all of the evidence and unanswered questions related to the events of September 11, 2001? (The record of the vote on this article shall be transmitted by the Town of ________ to New Hampshire's Congressional Delegation.)

Already, petitioning efforts are underway in 21 towns, and several Town Halls have confirmed the wording is appropriate to be placed on their ballot.

So they claim they were able to get 52,000 signatures in New York (almost certainly a lie), and now want to move forward by aiming for 1,000 signatures in one of America's most libertarian states? They've lied about their capacity to accomplish tasks thousands of unpopular causes have in the past, so lets see if they can summon the almighty pillar of science and engineering expertise in the New Hampshire State Legislator on their daffy beliefs.

Sunday, January 3, 2010