9/11: Explosive Evidence – Experts Speak Out: Appeal to Authority – The Movie

A new AE911truth video is coming out later this year and its trailer has been released. The trailer begins with the trail of burning paper that 9/11 deniers wrongly assumed was molten metal, and moves right along to footage of WTC 7 collapsing that begins after
the collapse of the rooftop penthouses - the collapses that refute virtually every conspiracy theory requiring WTC 7 to have been "pulled" from the inside.



The music is overwrought, the "experts" are self-righteous blowhards, and no mention is made of the dozens of AE911truth.org "signatories" who have rescinded their signatures or claimed they never signed in the first place. The original studies about "nanothermite" are still bunk. This is simply another attempt to reset the 9/11 denier movement: recut the exact same mediocre documentary with different people, and hope it lends your movement credibility it has never had.

AE911T Tries To Debunk Judy Woods

If anyone wants insight into cognitive dissonance, you're in for a treat. AE911 has tried to debunk Judy Woods' energy weapons conspiracy theory.
They have precisely one basis of criticism and that is that their insane conspiracy theory generates marginally fewer decibels of laughter from the rest of us than Woods.' Their version - where a fictional, Roland Emmerich movie-version of the low-explosive material thermite was invisibly installed on what would've had to be thousands of building columns by the metric ton, and then ignited out of order by nonexistent people, oh and also the whole "radical Islamist" thing is a hologram - apparently pales in comparison to Judy Woods' theory that lasers from space destroyed the World Trade Center. You know, one's crazy. The other. Um.

Check out how close AE911 gets to admitting that its own theory is utter absurdity. When comparing the ability of Judy Woods' theory and their own to explaining the "collapse profile" of the Towers, this nugget drops:

In order for the core column breaks to be so straight and horizontal, DEW technology would have to have the following features:

• Be capable of a sufficiently sharp focus for it to attack all or most of the columns at a given level at the same time, but only the ends of those columns;

• Be capable of having its target level move down the building without changing the angle at which it cuts the columns;

• Be capable of having its target level move down at two-thirds of freefall acceleration (as measured by David Chandler), and perhaps other acceleration rates;

• Be capable of having multiple target levels, so that it could destroy the falling upper section of each tower while also destroying the lower section, to create the illusion that the upper section is crushing the lower section, even though that upper section is in itself being destroyed; and

• Be capable of destroying only those connections between steel columns that still form part of the buildings’ structures, leaving untouched the hundreds or thousands of steel assemblies and steel pieces that can be seen flying out of each tower in huge clouds.

In addition to all these features, Wood's alleged secret DEW technology would have to be able to pulverize most of the concrete in both Towers and Building 7, and in the case of the Twin Towers, fling 90% of the buildings' mass outside their footprints. such technology would also have to be able to account for the evidence relating to molten iron, nano-engineered energetic material, and the sights and sounds of explosions described below. Why posit sophisticated secret technology to explain these observations, when some combination of thermitic incendiaries and explosives placed throughout the buildings can explain them much more simply, without making wild assumptions?

I couldn't not laugh at that last sentence. Yes, wild assumptions. Which procurement officer was in charge of shipping in that thermite for Bush, by the way?

This is insanity at its finest. It is either deeply cynical condescension to AE911's reader(s), or mere stupidity. I can't tell. I just can't tell.

Niels Harrit - Copypasta Chef du Jour

The 9/11 denial community has been passing around an interview with Dr. Niels Harrit. At the outset of the interview he says that he was convinced to become a 9/11 denier by three Steven Jones DVDs. Sounds like a hell of a rational thought process. Here’s that interview.

It actually takes Harrit about two solid minutes of talking to commit his first error. Around the four thirty mark (he begins talking only at the end of his interviewer’s own charming little monologue) he says that three building collapsed “as a result” of the plane impacts. He makes the point that “two planes” caused “three skyscrapers” to collapse, a reference to the collapse of World Trade Center 7, which was not hit by a plane. This claim is actually false: In total, almost a dozen buildings were heavily damaged by falling debris in the same way that WTC 7 was, and most of them were eventually razed due to that damage.



But from there, he really picks up the momentum. He says that WTC 7 “fell straight down” (false), and even incredibly says that there is “no believable reason” WTC 7 collapsed. Obviously, 200,000,000 pounds of debris is insufficient for Dr. Harrit.


Dr. Harrit: 200,000,000 pounds of debris is INSUFFICIENT.

And then, of course, not only does he state that “the official report says that [all three] of these buildings collapsed due to office fires” (false) and then that such a thing “has never happened before” (false – irrelevant, but still false, dammit).

Here comes a doozie. Here comes one that’s going to get us some criticism from the deniers, always eager for an excuse to hold onto their faith. Here comes the part where I tell you that this is where I turned off the video, and stopped caring about what this guy has to say. I get it. I’m open-minded, I’m open to new claims and evidence, but that is not what Dr. Harrit was offering. Harrit was brainlessly parroting the same errors and falsehoods perpetrated by this dying cult for the past eight years, breathlessly committing the same simple factual errors. If Dylan Avery had taken out a copyright on his laundry list of idiotic statements about 9/11, he’d be a wealthy man by now – thanks in part to Dr. Harrit.

Guys, you’ve been caught telling too many lies. Too many of your key articles of faith have been exposed as obvious errors. You’ve fallen too far, and faced too many long-ignored refutations to think that the bullshit parade can continue to march apace. If your new mouthpiece is exactly as credulous and fact-ambivalent as the rest, he’s already forfeited his right to be taken seriously. Dr. Harrit: I yawn at you. You have nothing for me. You’re exactly as intellectually lazy as your dubious forebears. Don’t expect to be treated differently.

A “Free Fall” Piece? Really, Guys?

This week saw the appearance of a WTC 7 free-fall post over at AE911. The post contains prime examples of everything that is wrong with your average Truther post.

I’m surprised that skeptics have made less light of the incredibly mediocre nature of the average 9/11 denier’s screed. Tell me if the apparent flow of each such “big-claim” type article, each “final proof” disseminated from bobbing head to bobbing head is a mutually assured annoyance, or if I’m just crazy:

1. The meandering, banal prologue.

The post I’m griping about begins with the groan-inducing phrase, “Galileo was the first to describe the amazing fact that…” Does anything make you reach for the scroller faster? Does anything prompt more urgent zoning out of the eyes in desperate search of valuable keywords like “gravity,” “data,” or “the goddamn point of all this?”

This introduction reminds me of an epically bad blog post from the cargo-cult version of an academic organization, the Journal of 911 Studies. The post was as useless as one must come to expect from frauds like Frank Legge, and it managed to open with a

It has been said that the world is one continuous Rorschach inkblot test: we see what we expect to see based on our fears and desires.

The hinge on my laptop lid just rusted a little. Can’t we just get to the point? Can’t your evidence and your reasoning speak for itself?

It has been said that the world is one continuous Rorschach inkblot test: we see what we expect to see based on our fears and desires. All sides of the World Trade Centre (WTC) collapse issue can see definitive corroboration in the same photos and videos, the same laboratory tests and the same reports. In this way both authors of this paper initially accepted the official explanation for the collapse of the buildings, as set out in the technical report of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST),[2] but they now undeniably approach the report from a skeptical perspective.

So we first get a post-modern statement that everything is a mere matter of interpretation, then a passive assertion that the authors have got it all figured out. That is, after all, one of the apparent points of the droning intro:

2. The in-your-face appeal to authority.

We all recognize this. Not a post goes by these guys where it isn’t asserted with resolute failure to get the joke that the “authors have studied this issue for year.” They have “thought hard about the evidence.” They have “carefully considered all sides of the issue.” When making his shocking and novel claims about free-fall collapse speeds, the author of this post asserts in describing his methodology,

I used a video analysis tool to carefully measure the velocity profile of the falling building using CBS video footage from a fixed camera aimed almost squarely at the north wall. A video detailing this measurement is available at YouTube/user/ae911truth. I calibrated my measurements with the heights of two points in the building provided in the NIST Building 7 report released in August 2008, so I know the picture scale is good.

The “video analysis tool” is unnamed, the video is unidentified and relies on you to use a broken hyperlink, and the provision of the calibration points is completely unexplained. Which part did he rely on? Why did he use the wrong version of the report (the NIST Building 7 report has been updated multiple times – heck, updates to the report were released the very next day)? What’s worse is that this is one of the more “subtle” appeals to authority 9/11 deniers make – especially when they clothe themselves in the rank condescension of wannabe academic seriousness.

Make your point and be done with it. I don’t care where you worked for twenty years. I don’t care where you got your BS, your MD, your PhD. You don’t impress me.

3. The seemingly overt disrespect for the viewership.

This is the point that inspired this post in the first place: 9/11 deniers condescend to their readers and insult their intelligence. (And yes, it goes without saying, they lie to them as well – that’s a separate point) Why does David Chalmers just expect his readers to take his calibration method on faith? Why does he expect they will just believe him because he told them to do so? I think its because he really doesn’t give a shit about his audience anymore. He doesn’t expect to “convert” anyone anymore. He may very well understand that his cult has failed. Sloppy science is allowed because, well… because who cares?

This blog operates under the possibly naive premise that such technicalities are actually at the core of why conspiracy movements succeed or fail. The Internet has allowed arguments to play out rapidly and thoroughly, with near-instantaneous back-and-forths of links, citations, and back-up claims. The side with the most hyperlinks wins, and the other side has stopped bothering altogether. I think it goes beyond the mere fact that the 9/11 denier blogosphere is an echo chamber for people who already agree with its creators – because that’s true of every blogosphere to some extent (including the skeptical one). I think it goes to the fact that the 9/11 deniers are uniquely unequipped to handle serious refutations of their work – they fundamentally don’t know the science, and unless they’re the OPs, they can’t check the post or the author’s previous works for backup. In a world where everyone who disagrees with you is a CIA spook, your theories get little wiggle-room – it seems hard for 9/11 deniers to recalibrate their refuted ideas without making their audience raise their pitchforks and cry “heretic!” After all, in a world where Dylan Avery, Amy Goodman, Judy Wood, and Sibel Edmonds have all been variously accused of being “plants,” it is unlikely that people are going to be willing to leave their camps. The movement, as Faulkner once wrote, is fucked.

Oh and, just to be clear, the free-fall theory is bullshit – not that Chandler gives us a specific claim of any kind to refute.

Analyzing a Typical 9/11 Conspiracy Film

The purpose of this article is to examine a typical 9/11 conspiracy film and to deconstruct its flaws. To support its assertions this film uses copious amounts of bad science. This film assets that WTC 7 fell at “free fall speeds” thus it must have been caused by a controlled demolition. Lets have a look:

1)

The first picture of interest is the reference screen that the author uses to determine scale for their calculations.


A few things of note: The Irvine Trust building that is used for scale is not particularly close to WTC7 and thus, using it as a source of scaling is flawed. This is especially true since the video is shot from and elevated location, this further skews our sense of scale. There is also nothing to indicate that its flooring system is similar to WTC7, this is another source or error. Also note that the video on the left, its indicator of the 21st floor does not correspond well with the scale on the right. The Irvine building is 23 floors tall and the scale on the left, if correct, would be lower than the 21st floor.

2)

Even if the distance covered is correct, we already have a discontinuity in the calculations used by the video’s author. From the picture below the author times the fall to be 4.15 seconds.

The author then says that WTC7 fell 100 meters in 4.5 seconds.

The author then uses a “Science website” to calculate what the free fall times for objects falling 100 meters. In essence this science website is just using a kinematics equation to calculate the fall time. The equation to calculate the time of a falling object in free fall, vacuum is simply:

t= [(D*2)/a]^0.5

Where: D is the distance, a is the acceleration due to gravity, and t is the time.

The author then shows that an object falling in free fall will cover 100 meters in 4.5 seconds.


This is indeed true but this is also where the work by the videos author starts to seriously fall apart. As we showed earlier the video the fall time was 4.15 seconds. If the WTC 7 really did fall 100 meters in 4.15 seconds this would correspond to an acceleration due to gravity of 11.6 m/s2 . Earths gravitational acceleration is 9.8 m/s2 this corresponds to an 18 percent increase. At this point the videos author has lost most if not all footing. Nothing can sustain an accelerated fall over 100 meters without an enormous amount of energy to force it down. Additionally, during a building demolition with explosives, the building falls close but not above the rate cause by gravity. There is no forcing down by the explosives. Controlled demolitions operate by destroying the supporting columns of the building, which then allows gravity to tear down the building. What this means is, the videos scaling calculations are incorrect and misleading. The authors assertions that a building would not collapse at exactly free fall speeds is correct, but this statement in itself causes the whole premise of his video to fail. From his own calculations and numbers the buildings did something that is physically impossible and it causes me to believe that his work is not only flawed, but purposely misleading and doctored.

3)


Perhaps the silliest and most obscene part of this video was when the author compares the free fall lab to the video, to show that the two fall at the same time. The first thing to note is that the author does not show how he scaled the video to match the program, this is a totally different frame from the first frame of the video showing the collapse. By not showing how he scaled the video, you can match the video to any speed of collapse. As we have shown previously the calculations and video scaling are already fatally flawed to begin with, this comparison is another case of serious misrepresentation and bad science.

4)



The final frame of the video acts as a summary. Again, this contains serious flaws that are based on false assertions and bad science. The observation that the WTC 7 fell faster than the speed of gravity is phased incorrectly. Objects in vacuums do fall at the speed of gravity; this shows that the author has deficiencies in his understanding of the basic physics behind the collapse of WTC 7. As we shown before, the author’s calculations and scalings are flawed and incorrect. Any numbers used by the author are not accurate and cannot be trusted. The conclusion that the building was “pulled” down by a vacuum caused by a controlled demolition is totally incorrect. During a controlled demolition there is no vacuum that causes the building to fall. The building falls due to the structural supports being broken and the building then falls under the force of gravity. Furthermore the author indicates that a “large explosion” is heard 9.5 seconds before the collapse. If an explosion was present almost 10 seconds before the collapse it cannot be the source of energy needed to cause the building to fall at the supposed accelerated rate. After almost 10 seconds any force from that explosion would have dissipated and in either case, if a large explosion was the cause of the collapse, if anything, it would have slowed the collapse because of the upward force of the explosion.

In summary, we have shown that this video contains serious flaws in its calculations of the fall timing, scaling of the video and contains numerous continuity errors that make any of its mathematical and physics assertions dubious at best. According to the authors own calculations WTC 7 did things that are not only impossible from an engineering standpoint but also from a basic physics standpoint as well. This shows that the author has serious deficiencies in his understanding of basic physics and analysis. We have also shown that the authors conclusions are inconsistent and lack basic physical sense.

It should be also noted that the NIST has recently released a new study on WTC 7 which has shed new light on the collapse and has conclusively answered many questions asked by conspiracy theorists. http://wtc.nist.gov/ The findings of this study is being used in new building codes concerning fires and impacts on structures. No where did any of the NIST’s reports does it show that WTC 7’s collapse was caused by a controlled demolition or that there was any strange phenomenon that cannot be explained through rational analysis.

In many ways this video is typical of the basic 9/11 conspiracy mindset. A slight inconsistency, based on a false observation is blown out of proportion. Bad science and engineering take over and soon enough a regular phenomenon has become a world class controversy that involves thousands of people in a multifaceted conspiracy. A conspiracy involving a controlled demolition of WTC 7 would have involved hundreds if not thousands of people, yet not one of these people, after 7 years has blown the lid on the biggest conspiracy of the century. By comparison, it is almost common knowledge that the Bush administration had spoken at length about invading Iraq during their fist national security meeting. This meeting would have involved less than several dozen people. In the case of science, the simplest explanation is usually the most correct one. In a simplistic way, a building burning uncontrollably for hours on end, damaged by enormous amounts of falling debris, falling under its own weight seems much more reasonable than, a multi million dollar, national conspiracy, involving thousands of people, through all levels of government, as proposed by shady internet videos.