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"experts" are self-righteous blowhards, and no mention is made of the dozens of AE911truth.org "signatories" who have rescinded their signatures or claimed they never signed in the first place.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.
This is the official blog for the growing Facebook group, "9/11 conspiracy theories are BS."
Showing posts with label thermite. Show all posts
Showing posts with label thermite. Show all posts
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
The "#1 Pick" at AboveTopSecret
Call me a masochist, but every so often I like to breeze on over to the AboveTopSecret forums to see what's out there. AboveTopSecret is essentially the hivemind of the conspiracy world - every daffy idea has its own dedicate pages, threads, and fervent readers. Today's front page advertised the thread for those who believe "The Gog/Magog War Prophesied In Ezekiel 38-39 Is Beginning," but of course I was most interested in what was "new" in the 9/11 denier forums. As I've repeatedly written there is little new under the sun in the land of 9/11 denial - the faith has had only minor tweaks since 2003 in most cases, with primary tenets about thermite added later in a desperate bid to revive the movement - and this proved to be no exception.
Here were the two threads that made the front page of AboveTopSecret: The "Most Read" and the "User Favorite" are partially presented below. All you need are the first few sentences of each thread (though I'll link to them as well) to get the gist.
Number one:
And number two:
And, in case it wasn't obvious: One is either a deliberately lie or the obvious error of a dundering incompetent, and two is as well. But if you've been following us these past few years, you're so busy groaning and hitting your head against the desk with the obviousness of that fact that you probably already have those data sources memorized.
And just to be clear, my ordering was arbitrary: Either of these could've easily won the "number two" slot for content.
Here were the two threads that made the front page of AboveTopSecret: The "Most Read" and the "User Favorite" are partially presented below. All you need are the first few sentences of each thread (though I'll link to them as well) to get the gist.
Number one:
most focus about 911 is put on the towers, but the big proof of an inside job comes from the pentagon
911review.org...
the US refused to release anything about the pentagon and it was very hidden from the media
but any picture of the actual hole in the pentagon proves that it was not hit by a plane<
its simply not big enough, and does not resemble a collision at all but actually resembles explosive damage!
what more evidence do you need?
it would be impossible to fly a huge Boeing in at the angle it hit, especially with limited flight training
And number two:
I am calling all 9/11 official story believers:
This thread will either change your mentality and prove to you once and for all that 9/11 was an inside job, or you will remain in the dark believing in a flawed sequence of events. Hopefully an in depth investigation of most of the evidence which goes against the official story is enough to convince you.
The 'Loose Change Final Cut' which is available on YouTube completely debunks the official 9/11 story from top to bottom...
And, in case it wasn't obvious: One is either a deliberately lie or the obvious error of a dundering incompetent, and two is as well. But if you've been following us these past few years, you're so busy groaning and hitting your head against the desk with the obviousness of that fact that you probably already have those data sources memorized.
And just to be clear, my ordering was arbitrary: Either of these could've easily won the "number two" slot for content.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Starting to crack
Something happens to successful movements about the time people start calling them “successful.” In poli-sci speak they start to develop institutions and organizations. Institutions are rules, organizations are groups (mnemonic go: “The Constitution is an institution, while the nation is an organization”). 9/11 denial could only be college kids passing around Loose Change for so long. Alex Jones, Disinfo and others who profit from gullibility smelled cash in the water, and 9/11 denial had some organizations behind it. Along came Prisonplanet then the wave of “(appeal to authority X) for 9/11 Truth” sites, and we were off to the races.
This is a familiar story. The cottage publishing industry that rose up around President Kennedy’s assassination and the mini-movement of modern-day UFO hunters tell the same story: Once enough people with enough money are engaged in promoting an idea – any idea, a bad idea, a good idea – that idea is probably going to stick around. Today nobody really seems to give a shit if the Bavarian Illuminati secretly controls the world or if aliens crash-landed at Roswell, but we all immediately know what I’m talking about. Truthers have their own versions of dedicated sources of content and attention that keep their movement going.
But lately, those organizations have started to break down. Infowars and Prisonplanet can barely be troubled to cover 9/11 denial these days. Alex Jones has a lot more to be wrong about concerning fluoride and the President’s birthplace. Skeptics are literally running out of content about 9/11 denial because there is so little by way of new absurdity actually being produced. Indeed, we’re generating more books about them these days than they are. And 9/11 deniers are starting to turn on those who have wandered from the path. For example, 9/11 deniers now generally believe one of their own founding fathers is now clearly a "disinformation agent."
Yet its “institutions” – its norms and rules – remain. 9/11 deniers still must believe everything they’re told by the higher-ups. It is still unpatriotic to the 9/11 denial community to admit that the thermite theory chapter of conspiracy theories has failed and must be closed. The cargo-cult approach to science remains: veteran deniers are trapped at the table bobbing their heads at each other about laughable hypothesizing, embarrassing “data collection” techniques and non-analysis. Newcomers have nowhere to start: by starting to rely on nonsensical jargon, the cult has eliminated most of its ability to initiate new acolytes.
This is just the beginning of a larger theory about conspiracies I’m just starting to think about, but it seems that the institutions can greatly outlive the organizations. Organizations that thrive on conspiracy theory talk can easily hop from subject to subject, and so those theories are unstable: their primary clearing-houses can abandon them at any time. 9/11 denial is starting to look so sloppy and silly because it has no organizations to forward its institutions: it is rules without rulemakers and, like any unenforced legal system, has come to just look sad, silly and empty.
This is a familiar story. The cottage publishing industry that rose up around President Kennedy’s assassination and the mini-movement of modern-day UFO hunters tell the same story: Once enough people with enough money are engaged in promoting an idea – any idea, a bad idea, a good idea – that idea is probably going to stick around. Today nobody really seems to give a shit if the Bavarian Illuminati secretly controls the world or if aliens crash-landed at Roswell, but we all immediately know what I’m talking about. Truthers have their own versions of dedicated sources of content and attention that keep their movement going.
But lately, those organizations have started to break down. Infowars and Prisonplanet can barely be troubled to cover 9/11 denial these days. Alex Jones has a lot more to be wrong about concerning fluoride and the President’s birthplace. Skeptics are literally running out of content about 9/11 denial because there is so little by way of new absurdity actually being produced. Indeed, we’re generating more books about them these days than they are. And 9/11 deniers are starting to turn on those who have wandered from the path. For example, 9/11 deniers now generally believe one of their own founding fathers is now clearly a "disinformation agent."
Yet its “institutions” – its norms and rules – remain. 9/11 deniers still must believe everything they’re told by the higher-ups. It is still unpatriotic to the 9/11 denial community to admit that the thermite theory chapter of conspiracy theories has failed and must be closed. The cargo-cult approach to science remains: veteran deniers are trapped at the table bobbing their heads at each other about laughable hypothesizing, embarrassing “data collection” techniques and non-analysis. Newcomers have nowhere to start: by starting to rely on nonsensical jargon, the cult has eliminated most of its ability to initiate new acolytes.
This is just the beginning of a larger theory about conspiracies I’m just starting to think about, but it seems that the institutions can greatly outlive the organizations. Organizations that thrive on conspiracy theory talk can easily hop from subject to subject, and so those theories are unstable: their primary clearing-houses can abandon them at any time. 9/11 denial is starting to look so sloppy and silly because it has no organizations to forward its institutions: it is rules without rulemakers and, like any unenforced legal system, has come to just look sad, silly and empty.
Monday, May 23, 2011
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:
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.
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.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
"International Hearings on the Events of September 11, 2001"
For what may be the third or fourth consecutive year the denier movement won’t be able to get enough attention in America to host a full-scale event and so is hosting its big conference in Toronto. I cut my teeth in Toronto at a CFI event debating AE911truther Doug Plumb. Toronto is the hub of 9/11 denial, and it makes sense in a lot of ways. The movement is driven by a handful of obscure postmodern academics – the staple of Canadian academia’s history departments.
This one looks to be pretty dull. The usual round of faces will headline the event – David Chandler, Richard Gage, Steven Jones… No new “whistleblowers” or fresh faces, unless you count the shockingly lame 9/11 newcomer du jour Niels Harrit.
In case you couldn't tell, this event won't actually include "hearings," in the technical sense of the word (though technical accuracy was never the movement's strong suit). Judging by the lineup its going to be yet another PowerPoint parade that takes itself far too seriously and accomplishes far too little except in terms of repeating the same hashed-out arguments about shoddy thermite research and since-refuted attacks on NIST and "the American government" (whoever that is) in general.
I base my cynicism purely on the event’s thus-far announced objectives, which read like a how-to guide for creating an echo chamber:
Guesses: The event is going to be well-attended but not sold out. We will hear at least one presentation about “molten steel.” The movement will continue not to recognize its complete failure to gain a foothold in the mainstream. No one will present a case for bin Laden’s innocence. It will go largely unnoticed.
This one looks to be pretty dull. The usual round of faces will headline the event – David Chandler, Richard Gage, Steven Jones… No new “whistleblowers” or fresh faces, unless you count the shockingly lame 9/11 newcomer du jour Niels Harrit.
In case you couldn't tell, this event won't actually include "hearings," in the technical sense of the word (though technical accuracy was never the movement's strong suit). Judging by the lineup its going to be yet another PowerPoint parade that takes itself far too seriously and accomplishes far too little except in terms of repeating the same hashed-out arguments about shoddy thermite research and since-refuted attacks on NIST and "the American government" (whoever that is) in general.
I base my cynicism purely on the event’s thus-far announced objectives, which read like a how-to guide for creating an echo chamber:
(1) To present evidence that the U.S. government’s official investigation into the events of September 11, 2001, as pursued by various government and government-appointed agencies, is seriously flawed and has failed to describe and account for the 9/11 events.
(2) To single out the most weighty evidence of the inadequacy of the U.S. government’s investigation; to organize and classify that evidence; to preserve that evidence; to make that evidence widely known to the public and to governmental, non-governmental and inter-governmental organizations.
(3) To submit a record and a summary of the Hearings, together with signed Statutory Declarations by witnesses, to relevant governments, groups and international agencies with the request that a full and impartial investigation be launched into the events of September 11, 2001, which have been used to initiate military invasions and to restrict the rights of citizens.
(4) To engage the attention of the public and media through witness testimony as well as through public talks and media events during the four day event.
Guesses: The event is going to be well-attended but not sold out. We will hear at least one presentation about “molten steel.” The movement will continue not to recognize its complete failure to gain a foothold in the mainstream. No one will present a case for bin Laden’s innocence. It will go largely unnoticed.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Okay, “911debunkers,” Let’s Walk You Through It
Looks like we really managed to ruffle some feathers over at the debunker-wannabe blog, apparently un-ironically named “Debunking the Debunkers.” Get out your violins:
And thus follows the usual moaning of those unable to defend a position: They claim that we characterized their arguments in an unfair fashion, that we portrayed their worldview unfavorably, and didn’t define terms in a way that makes their position look good – essentially. For reference, here is the post that got them in such a fuss – and now here’s the next refutation.
D911D starts right off by attempting to backtrack and re-characterize their stance on the “maneuvers” Hani Hanjour “pulled off” on 9/11. The author initially simply gives us
While linking to one of his prior posts that includes, after an impromptu rant about some sort of unemployment difficulties he’s facing,
I think on some subconscious level I was being charitable by not trotting this out in the original post, because this generally speculative characterization of the plane’s maneuvers was pathetic. Hani Hanjour dipped the nose and the plane descended at a jaw-tearing 45 miles per hour (why, human beings themselves should fly apart at that speed!), then descended again at a face-melting 34 miles per hour and somehow managed to tip the plane back up to overcome the enormous pressure. Things are a lot less scary in perspective, I think. Hani Hanjour tipped the nose twice, and is thus a miracle pilot?
And, as usual, I think it goes without saying that the claim that Hanjour is naught but a flight-school dropout who was “incompetent in a single engine Cessna” is a lie by omission - he was, until he wasn’t.
(source, quoting page 225 of the 9/11 Commission Report)
His instructor described him as “a very average pilot,” and, from the source cited above,
And, from pentagonresearch, "Despite Hanjour's poor reviews, he did have some ability as a pilot, said Bernard of Freeway Airport. "There's no doubt in my mind that once that [hijacked jet] got going, he could have pointed that plane at a building and hit it," he said."
So this is just a battle of the scare quotes.
In 9/11 denier land, this argument breaks even: “They” have quotes saying the maneuvers were undoable for Hanjour, “we” have quotes saying they were doable for Hanjour. By the denier standard of evidence, this argument is a draw. We have to throw up our hands (ed. note: Wrote “throw up in our hands” the first time. Viva Freud!) and walk away from the table. Fortunately, as a skeptic, I can do better: this kind of crap don’t matter. Who cares what various semi-authorities think about the relative talents of the pilots? Are we meant to conclude that there should’ve been something “likely” about 9/11? Should 9/11 have been a day without the weird, without the inevitable deviations from the mean? This entire line of reasoning is hogwash. What we know is that the positive evidence helps us establish who the pilots were.
Here, in fact, let’s play a thought experiment and grant the 9/11 deniers a premise. Let us falsely render Hanjour a doddering incompetent who couldn’t have flown a paper airplane over his desk. This changes nothing about what we almost certainly already know about Hani Hanjour’s life. 100% of the remaining evidence singles him out as a hijacking pilot, even if we let the 9/11 deniers escape with the obvious lie that he couldn’t have tilted a plane slightly for a brief period. The positive evidence - the records of his training, of his travels, his presence on the plane, his consorting with the fellow hijackers, the many people who came forward to volunteer information about his life (and those who were captured and forced to…) all stand. We know 9/11 deniers are deluding themselves when they make this particularly absurd argument. But even if they weren’t, they’d still be in a very deep hole.
So yes, D911D, you’re wrong on this point. In our previous post, in fact, you were merely wrong; now you’re dishonest.
He next attempts to use the highest form of standard of evidence in 9/11 denier circles – shite YouTube videos – to address the fact that he doesn’t understand how probabilities work. This was in response to a little aside I made about his hypocrisy in saying that skeptics “don’t bother to run the numbers.” Here’s the video he used:
This video is hysterical, so I recommend you give it a view. The presenter begins, in what appears to be a fully honest deadpan, with the following:

“What is the probability of the BBC predicting an unknown event in advance? …100,000.” We can scrap this one because the BBC didn’t predict jack in advance. And yes, it goes without saying, this guy didn’t calculate jack, either. No numbers were “run” here – but by now, it should be obvious we aren’t dealing with the most intellectually rigorous of folks here.
Next up, he asks, “what are the chances of cell phones working at high altitude in 2001?” This entire claim is a non sequitur, as SLC has addressed here. In general, this guy dishonestly calls air phones “cell phones” for most of his claim. Yawn. 2003 called, they want their arguments back.
And in claim three he simply lies. The majority of 9/11 Commission Report members did not “go public saying the investigation was a fraud.” Many members of the Commission complained that the Bush Administration was unhelpful and intrusive, but this guy simply lies about the substance of those complaints. And then he simply decides, “the probability of this one is less than one in a thousand.” That of course is a non sequitur response to the stated question, “how many public enquiry’s have [sic] had a majority of its members go public about fraud?” That question doesn’t even demand a probabilistic answer.
Oh, and have we mentioned, two of the three claims made so far don’t even have anything to do with the actual mechanics of 9/11? The implied theory in number one – of foreign journalists being paid off to start telling “the official story” even before it happens, because apparently the world’s most clever conspirators don’t know what a time zone is – would be completely unrelated to actually pulling off 9/11, and number three is even more obviously so – even if it weren’t a lie.
D911D, you’ve been lied to by people who want you to believe them. Isn’t this the sort of thing you should be angry about? Going to move on now, let me know if you need hand-holding through the remaining five claims.
After all, we now have something more fun to address: D911D’s truly tragic attempt at defending the “thermite” hoax, perpetrated once again by demonstrable frauds whom this author should be dead-set on refuting. He’s a “debunker” after all, dontchaknow.
I’m confused as to why we got the first link he provides, which doesn’t have a lot to say about our case for why the big thermite article is a fraud. It provides one particularly egregious overstep early on: It quotes an article saying that “Nanosized thermitic materials are being researched by the U.S. military with the aim of developing new types of bombs that are several times more powerful than conventional explosives” to argue that nanothermite “IS an incendiary and an explosive,” even though it is literally chemically impossible for that to be true unless you add something else to the thermite (Debunking 911 maths it out here). I’m honestly unsure how to address this claim but with the self-evident fact of how thermite behaves when it “goes off” – a process you can watch here and here). Thus, clearly, its “use in incendiary devices” is the exact same as its use in fireworks – as a pyrotechnic initiator.
Starting off your blog post with an obvious lie is not a good way to get taken seriously, and then trying to quote your way around the serious issues preventing your point from being taken seriously is at least as bad. The entire crux of their argument rests on the appeal to mediocre authority contained in the author’s quote of Jim Hoffman’s article, which reads thus:
And when we go to the article itself, the evidence we find for Hoffman’s claim is… nonexistent. The author claims that the “particles” used to build the case were “very small” without saying how much larger or smaller they were than, say, the average particle found in the wreckage, or the size of other particles of similar chemical composition. You know, the only two things you would want to know to empirically verify that claim. He next says that “the particles are highly uniform in size and shape,” running into the exact same problem, plus another one: he doesn’t bother to provide any metric of uniformity! So no, they are not highly uniform in size and shape – there, an equally valid claim to Jim’s, per unit volume of empirical evidence. I think the closest Hoffman comes to trying to do original science in this regard is to try to come up with the chemical composition of his samples.
As such, it is scientific dishonesty to reject the fact that these are the normal components of the collapse site of a skyscraper. It is an impossible claim to make – and doesn’t even move an inch in the direction of our refutation.
They hint at what to me is the most important point – the ridiculous way in which the sample was gathered – in the second link, but only dig themselves deeper. To be clear, Jones did not gather any samples. People mailed him things, and he took them at their word. From the article itself:
And, even better, the original article gives us a map of where the samples were (supposedly) collected, showing that three of the four were uh, well, let’s just say they wouldn’t be the residue of a beam-melting job, that’s for sure:

At least this time they tried to be skeptics, unlike their other two claims. Okay, D911D, 2,300 words later, I have not reduced your fraudulent, dishonest, and/or downright absurd claims to “straw men.” Here they are, and there is why they are wrong. There is why your worldview is still, in fact, utterly false.
While repeatedly calling us '9/11 deniers', 'wannabes' and 'cargo-cult skeptics', and mocking me for quoting more of Shermer than I needed to, NR oversimplifies my arguments and engages in the usual fact-free straw man attacks.
And thus follows the usual moaning of those unable to defend a position: They claim that we characterized their arguments in an unfair fashion, that we portrayed their worldview unfavorably, and didn’t define terms in a way that makes their position look good – essentially. For reference, here is the post that got them in such a fuss – and now here’s the next refutation.
D911D starts right off by attempting to backtrack and re-characterize their stance on the “maneuvers” Hani Hanjour “pulled off” on 9/11. The author initially simply gives us
Hani Hanjour would need to have been superhuman to pull off the maneuvres he did. So number 2 definately [sic] applies to the hijackers.
While linking to one of his prior posts that includes, after an impromptu rant about some sort of unemployment difficulties he’s facing,
"Hani Hanjour, a man who was incompetant [sic] in a single engine Cessna, then executed a complex 330 degree downward turn, descending 6000 feet in two and a half minutes. He then entered a steep dive and descended a further 2000 feet in 40 seconds, pulled out of this steep dive at 500mph, overcame enormous G-Forces and knocked down five light poles in less than a second while maintaining the perfect trajectory required to hit the ground floor of a conveniently reinforced section of the Pentagon without touching the lawn. And he accomplished all this without being caught on any of the eighty plus cameras surrounding the Pentagon and without attracting the attention of the US air defence."
I think on some subconscious level I was being charitable by not trotting this out in the original post, because this generally speculative characterization of the plane’s maneuvers was pathetic. Hani Hanjour dipped the nose and the plane descended at a jaw-tearing 45 miles per hour (why, human beings themselves should fly apart at that speed!), then descended again at a face-melting 34 miles per hour and somehow managed to tip the plane back up to overcome the enormous pressure. Things are a lot less scary in perspective, I think. Hani Hanjour tipped the nose twice, and is thus a miracle pilot?
And, as usual, I think it goes without saying that the claim that Hanjour is naught but a flight-school dropout who was “incompetent in a single engine Cessna” is a lie by omission - he was, until he wasn’t.
In 1996, Hanjour returned to the United States to pursue flight training,after being rejected by a Saudi flight school. He checked out flight schools in Florida, California, and Arizona; and he briefly started at a couple of them before returning to Saudi Arabia. In 1997, he returned to Florida and then, along with two friends, went back to Arizona and began his flight training there in earnest. After about three months, Hanjour was able to obtain his private pilot's license. Several more months of training yielded him a commercial pilot certificate, issued by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in April 1999... Settling in Mesa, Hanjour began refresher training at his old school,Arizona Aviation. He wanted to train on multi-engine planes, but had difficulties because his English was not good enough.The instructor advised him to discontinue but Hanjour said he could not go home without completing the training. In early 2001, he started training on a Boeing 737 simulator at Pan Am International Flight Academy in Mesa.An instructor there found his work well below standard and discouraged him from continuing.Again, Hanjour persevered; he completed the initial training by the end of March 2001.
(source, quoting page 225 of the 9/11 Commission Report)
His instructor described him as “a very average pilot,” and, from the source cited above,
One 9/11 Commission footnote (to Chapter 7) is relatively positive. 170. FBI report, "Summary of Penttbom Investigation," Feb. 29, 2004, pp. 52¬57. Hanjour successfully conducted a challenging certification flight supervised by an instructor at Congressional Air Charters of Gaithersburg, Maryland, landing at a small airport with a difficult approach.The instructor thought Hanjour may have had training from a military pilot because he used a terrain recognition system for navigation. Eddie Shalev interview (Apr.9, 2004).
And, from pentagonresearch, "Despite Hanjour's poor reviews, he did have some ability as a pilot, said Bernard of Freeway Airport. "There's no doubt in my mind that once that [hijacked jet] got going, he could have pointed that plane at a building and hit it," he said."
So this is just a battle of the scare quotes.
In 9/11 denier land, this argument breaks even: “They” have quotes saying the maneuvers were undoable for Hanjour, “we” have quotes saying they were doable for Hanjour. By the denier standard of evidence, this argument is a draw. We have to throw up our hands (ed. note: Wrote “throw up in our hands” the first time. Viva Freud!) and walk away from the table. Fortunately, as a skeptic, I can do better: this kind of crap don’t matter. Who cares what various semi-authorities think about the relative talents of the pilots? Are we meant to conclude that there should’ve been something “likely” about 9/11? Should 9/11 have been a day without the weird, without the inevitable deviations from the mean? This entire line of reasoning is hogwash. What we know is that the positive evidence helps us establish who the pilots were.
Here, in fact, let’s play a thought experiment and grant the 9/11 deniers a premise. Let us falsely render Hanjour a doddering incompetent who couldn’t have flown a paper airplane over his desk. This changes nothing about what we almost certainly already know about Hani Hanjour’s life. 100% of the remaining evidence singles him out as a hijacking pilot, even if we let the 9/11 deniers escape with the obvious lie that he couldn’t have tilted a plane slightly for a brief period. The positive evidence - the records of his training, of his travels, his presence on the plane, his consorting with the fellow hijackers, the many people who came forward to volunteer information about his life (and those who were captured and forced to…) all stand. We know 9/11 deniers are deluding themselves when they make this particularly absurd argument. But even if they weren’t, they’d still be in a very deep hole.
So yes, D911D, you’re wrong on this point. In our previous post, in fact, you were merely wrong; now you’re dishonest.
He next attempts to use the highest form of standard of evidence in 9/11 denier circles – shite YouTube videos – to address the fact that he doesn’t understand how probabilities work. This was in response to a little aside I made about his hypocrisy in saying that skeptics “don’t bother to run the numbers.” Here’s the video he used:
This video is hysterical, so I recommend you give it a view. The presenter begins, in what appears to be a fully honest deadpan, with the following:

“What is the probability of the BBC predicting an unknown event in advance? …100,000.” We can scrap this one because the BBC didn’t predict jack in advance. And yes, it goes without saying, this guy didn’t calculate jack, either. No numbers were “run” here – but by now, it should be obvious we aren’t dealing with the most intellectually rigorous of folks here.
Next up, he asks, “what are the chances of cell phones working at high altitude in 2001?” This entire claim is a non sequitur, as SLC has addressed here. In general, this guy dishonestly calls air phones “cell phones” for most of his claim. Yawn. 2003 called, they want their arguments back.
And in claim three he simply lies. The majority of 9/11 Commission Report members did not “go public saying the investigation was a fraud.” Many members of the Commission complained that the Bush Administration was unhelpful and intrusive, but this guy simply lies about the substance of those complaints. And then he simply decides, “the probability of this one is less than one in a thousand.” That of course is a non sequitur response to the stated question, “how many public enquiry’s have [sic] had a majority of its members go public about fraud?” That question doesn’t even demand a probabilistic answer.
Oh, and have we mentioned, two of the three claims made so far don’t even have anything to do with the actual mechanics of 9/11? The implied theory in number one – of foreign journalists being paid off to start telling “the official story” even before it happens, because apparently the world’s most clever conspirators don’t know what a time zone is – would be completely unrelated to actually pulling off 9/11, and number three is even more obviously so – even if it weren’t a lie.
D911D, you’ve been lied to by people who want you to believe them. Isn’t this the sort of thing you should be angry about? Going to move on now, let me know if you need hand-holding through the remaining five claims.
After all, we now have something more fun to address: D911D’s truly tragic attempt at defending the “thermite” hoax, perpetrated once again by demonstrable frauds whom this author should be dead-set on refuting. He’s a “debunker” after all, dontchaknow.
I’m confused as to why we got the first link he provides, which doesn’t have a lot to say about our case for why the big thermite article is a fraud. It provides one particularly egregious overstep early on: It quotes an article saying that “Nanosized thermitic materials are being researched by the U.S. military with the aim of developing new types of bombs that are several times more powerful than conventional explosives” to argue that nanothermite “IS an incendiary and an explosive,” even though it is literally chemically impossible for that to be true unless you add something else to the thermite (Debunking 911 maths it out here). I’m honestly unsure how to address this claim but with the self-evident fact of how thermite behaves when it “goes off” – a process you can watch here and here). Thus, clearly, its “use in incendiary devices” is the exact same as its use in fireworks – as a pyrotechnic initiator.
Starting off your blog post with an obvious lie is not a good way to get taken seriously, and then trying to quote your way around the serious issues preventing your point from being taken seriously is at least as bad. The entire crux of their argument rests on the appeal to mediocre authority contained in the author’s quote of Jim Hoffman’s article, which reads thus:
These are all features of a nano-engineered material. It is not possible that such a material was formed as a by-product of the destruction of the Twin Towers...
Although these elements -- aluminum, iron, oxygen, and silicon -- were all abundant in building materials used in the Twin Towers, it is not possible that such materials milled themselves into fine powder and assembled themselves into a chemically optimized aluminothermic composite as a by-product of the destruction of the Twin Towers.
And when we go to the article itself, the evidence we find for Hoffman’s claim is… nonexistent. The author claims that the “particles” used to build the case were “very small” without saying how much larger or smaller they were than, say, the average particle found in the wreckage, or the size of other particles of similar chemical composition. You know, the only two things you would want to know to empirically verify that claim. He next says that “the particles are highly uniform in size and shape,” running into the exact same problem, plus another one: he doesn’t bother to provide any metric of uniformity! So no, they are not highly uniform in size and shape – there, an equally valid claim to Jim’s, per unit volume of empirical evidence. I think the closest Hoffman comes to trying to do original science in this regard is to try to come up with the chemical composition of his samples.
As such, it is scientific dishonesty to reject the fact that these are the normal components of the collapse site of a skyscraper. It is an impossible claim to make – and doesn’t even move an inch in the direction of our refutation.
They hint at what to me is the most important point – the ridiculous way in which the sample was gathered – in the second link, but only dig themselves deeper. To be clear, Jones did not gather any samples. People mailed him things, and he took them at their word. From the article itself:
It was learned that a number of people had saved samples of the copious, dense dust, which spread and settled across Manhattan. Several of these people sent portions of their samples to members of this research group. This paper discusses four separate dust samples collected on or shortly after 9/11/2001. Each sample was found to contain red/gray chips. All four samples were originally collected by private citizens who lived in New York City at the time of the tragedy.
And, even better, the original article gives us a map of where the samples were (supposedly) collected, showing that three of the four were uh, well, let’s just say they wouldn’t be the residue of a beam-melting job, that’s for sure:

At least this time they tried to be skeptics, unlike their other two claims. Okay, D911D, 2,300 words later, I have not reduced your fraudulent, dishonest, and/or downright absurd claims to “straw men.” Here they are, and there is why they are wrong. There is why your worldview is still, in fact, utterly false.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
"Debunking the Wannabes"
This is my new phrase for people who operate under the stated mission of "debunking the debunkers" - i.e., those who defend the faith against skeptical inquiry: Wannabes. Perhaps cargo-cult skeptics. At any rate, check out the incredibly tepid response of the 9/11 deniers to Michael Shermers' now-viral smackdown of Anthony Hall.
Why they choose to spell out all of Shermer's points and only address three of them is beyond me - especially when their three attempts only make themselves openly look worse. First of all, their point about Hani Hanjour's "maneuvering" is false. Even other 9/11 deniers concede that Hani Hanjour's "maneuvering" was nothing special. Their second attempt is a particularly glaring internal contradiction:
"Skeptics don't bother to run the numbers... I didn't bother to run the numbers, but they'd probably get some kinda CRAZY number!" They really give nothing meatier here than an underhand-pitch for an amusing aside. The mere phrase "calculate the improbability of all the coincidences" makes my statistics background start to ache. Did they mean "calculate the probability, given their priors?" Let's give them the benefit of the doubt on that one.
For their third and final attempt at substance, they trackback to one of their own previous posts where they attack Shermer for daring to refute their beliefs from the standpoint that they lack logical coherence and the mere presence of empirical data. In attempting to rebut him, the author(s) of 911debunkers.blogspot.com seem to have repeatedly fallen back on the perpetually resurfacing fraud of "thermate incendiary" [sic] being found at the WTC sites. For their own edification, in case they are as yet unaware (and they seem to be so, as they trotted out that pathetic claim as if it were still relevant to the debate), CrNU has refuted those claims here and here. Thermite was not found at the WTC site, guys - you've been duped.
Wannabes? Cargo-cult skeptics? Whichever they are, they managed to give it their full 30% at rebutting Shermer this time, and even came up 0 for 3 overall.
Michael Shermer has responded to Anthony Hall's confronting of him in his usual way.
After listing several NWO theories, Shermer writes...Nevertheless, we cannot just dismiss all such theories out of hand, because real conspiracies do sometimes happen. Instead we should look for signs that indicate a conspiracy theory is likely to be untrue. The more that it manifests the following characteristics, the less probable that the theory is grounded in reality:Same old incredulous nonsense. But I found 2, 8 and 10 interesting as they could equally apply to the official conspiracy theory and Shermer's own beliefs.
1. Proof of the conspiracy supposedly emerges from a pattern of “connecting the dots” between events that need not be causally connected. When no evidence supports these connections except the allegation of the conspiracy or when the evidence fits equally well to other causal connections—or to randomness—the conspiracy theory is likely to be false.
2. The agents behind the pattern of the conspiracy would need nearly superhuman power to pull it off. People are usually not nearly so powerful as we think they are.
3. The conspiracy is complex, and its successful completion demands a large number of elements.
4. Similarly, the conspiracy involves large numbers of people who would all need to keep silent about their secrets. The more people involved, the less realistic it becomes.
5. The conspiracy encompasses a grand ambition for control over a nation, economy or political system. If it suggests world domination, the theory is even less likely to be true.
6. The conspiracy theory ratchets up from small events that might be true to much larger, much less probable events.
7. The conspiracy theory assigns portentous, sinister meanings to what are most likely innocuous, insignificant events.
8. The theory tends to commingle facts and speculations without distinguishing between the two and without assigning degrees of probability or of factuality.
9. The theorist is indiscriminately suspicious of all government agencies or private groups, which suggests an inability to nuance differences between true and false conspiracies.
10. The conspiracy theorist refuses to consider alternative explanations, rejecting all disconfirming evidence and blatantly seeking only confirmatory evidence to support what he or she has a priori determined to be the truth.
Hani Hanjour would need to have been superhuman to pull off the maneuvres he did. So number 2 definately applies to the hijackers.
Defenders of the official story mix facts and speculation, and they don't ever calculate the improbability or assess the factuality. If they were to calculate the improbability of all the coincidences surrounding 9/11 being 'just coincidences', they'd probably get a value greater than the number of electrons in the universe. And with regards to the explanation for the towers destruction, the debunkers take computer models over hard evidence. So the official conspiracy theory also ticks number 8.
Finally, the debunkers, including Shermer himself, "[refuse] to consider alternative explanations, rejecting all disconfirming evidence and blatantly seeking only confirmatory evidence to support what he or she has a priori determined to be the truth". I couldn't have put it any better myself, Shermer!
Why they choose to spell out all of Shermer's points and only address three of them is beyond me - especially when their three attempts only make themselves openly look worse. First of all, their point about Hani Hanjour's "maneuvering" is false. Even other 9/11 deniers concede that Hani Hanjour's "maneuvering" was nothing special. Their second attempt is a particularly glaring internal contradiction:
Defenders of the official story mix facts and speculation, and they don't ever calculate the improbability or assess the factuality. If they were to calculate the improbability of all the coincidences surrounding 9/11 being 'just coincidences', they'd probably get a value greater than the number of electrons in the universe.
"Skeptics don't bother to run the numbers... I didn't bother to run the numbers, but they'd probably get some kinda CRAZY number!" They really give nothing meatier here than an underhand-pitch for an amusing aside. The mere phrase "calculate the improbability of all the coincidences" makes my statistics background start to ache. Did they mean "calculate the probability, given their priors?" Let's give them the benefit of the doubt on that one.
For their third and final attempt at substance, they trackback to one of their own previous posts where they attack Shermer for daring to refute their beliefs from the standpoint that they lack logical coherence and the mere presence of empirical data. In attempting to rebut him, the author(s) of 911debunkers.blogspot.com seem to have repeatedly fallen back on the perpetually resurfacing fraud of "thermate incendiary" [sic] being found at the WTC sites. For their own edification, in case they are as yet unaware (and they seem to be so, as they trotted out that pathetic claim as if it were still relevant to the debate), CrNU has refuted those claims here and here. Thermite was not found at the WTC site, guys - you've been duped.
Wannabes? Cargo-cult skeptics? Whichever they are, they managed to give it their full 30% at rebutting Shermer this time, and even came up 0 for 3 overall.
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