I'm almost positive Goliath smooshed David. Just saying.

Anyway, a doggedly persistent Malcolm Trosclair will be discussing the fall of the Twin Towers in the comments here, and I give him full permission to reproduce anything that I do here in this post or in the comments in full on his site. Go ahead and replace the profanity with, I don't know, rainbows or kittens or whatever makes you happy. But if anything goes up, everything goes up.

I cautioned Malcolm against taking my tone or timbre as an example of anyone else's thought. I tremble at the thought of being an example or representative of anyone other than myself. My thoughts are mine, which is why I wear this tinfoil hat, so nobody can steal them or pass them off as their own. Once I wore it shiny side in, and it was a whole big bad deal.

We got the God issue out of the way in the comments of the short bus post, and now we can talk about the physical evidence regarding 9/11.

I will start out by saying that I am willing to be convinced. Malcolm doesn't think that I am capable of changing my mind, but people who have been here have seen me do so, but only when the evidence is good. He really has a chance of changing my mind here.

So, I have opened an appropriately-named bottle of Irony and am ready to go.


The first salvo Malcolm fired included a number of videos that I presume he agrees with. The first came to me in this form:

A danish scientist Niels Harrit, on nano-thermite in the WTC dust ( english subtitles )
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_tf25lx_3o

OK. I watched the whole thing. Beginning to end, and I immensely enjoyed the amusing novelty language, Danish.

Important points here. At no point does he sit down and explain what he found, how it works, or even make a case that, even if he had found something, how it supports a conspiracy theory. He is pointing to red particles and going "eh? eh?" He doesn't produce an image, confirmation from another lab, anything. Heck, he doesn't even tell me what journal he published in! Then he says a couple of things that strike me as extremely naive. First:

This is just daft. First, because he suggests that there is a type of science that could be fudged and still be considered science. Presumably that is the type of science he believes that other side practices. He seems damned sure that he is right for someone who admits at the time that his article has been out for less than a week. The statement, "we cannot be wrong" is not in the toolbox of a real scientist. Adam Savage said it best: "Failure is always an option." Now, I don't know if he means "fake data" or "make mistakes," but that really doesn't matter. You are naive if you think neither can be done. For example, say that you find that something falls to earth at 9.8 m/s/s. It stops being useful science when you say that angels are pushing down on falling objects at a steady rate so that the objects accelerate. Science can be botched at every level of interpretation. This is why peer-review is merciless--editors are trying to eliminate as much potential error as possible, and their reputation is on the line if they miss something glaring.

In the next breath, he says:

I don't know the provenance of his samples (and archeologist or geologist, for instance, would demand to know when and where something came from). I don't see any evidence in this interview one way or the other that he has ever had a sample under his microscope. And neither do you, I would point out. He is only making claims here. Don't give credence to someone because someone is on TV. Lots of idiots make it onto TV. Look at Oprah's show!

The "47-storey" building, of course, is WTC7. The image below is the best angle that I have seen of the shot, and even though retarded guinea pigs from Pluto can see that frames have been cut out to make it look (badly) like it fell faster, I could give a dingo's kidneys about the image. More interesting to me is what the people filming say.



"I told you that sucker was going to go." "You see, that's why they didn't try to put that fire out." The building was clearly in visibly bad shape, and the fire was burning for a long time. Some truther, of course, futzed with the footage, and, man, it looks bad for a fake. I would like you to admit, Malcolm, that that footage was badly faked between time marks 5 & 6 seconds. The zoom-in shot he's pulling back from shows the fire, and let's face it, the cloud of smoke changes completely between 4-6 seconds. This is altered video that precludes us from timing the collapse. Malcolm, please send me a link to footage that shows the entire collapse of #7 from top to bottom. Surely this is out there somewhere and we can time it. (Like I said, you have to show me the evidence. I'm not the one making the huge claim. It falls on the shoulders of the claimant to demonstrate their case.)

He does say a few things that show a breathtaking ignorance of what has happened since 9/11.

Nobody charged? What about the Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker? Not wanted? I have an APB out on a guy in a bathrobe and a beard named Osama "Peter" bin Laden. This guy's on the fracking moon, Malcolm, and demonstrably so. I just demonstrated it.

So who is this bozo I never heard of until tonight? Well, you can go to the list of his peer-reviewed publications that his university maintains and see how many have to do with nano-thermite. Eye-opening, wasn't it, Malcolm? You saw exactly zero peer-reviewed publications about nanothermite and 9/11. This paper was not peer-reviewed. It appeared in Bentham Science publications, and I am so sorry but they seem to have HUUUUGE credibility problems. They are clearly a pay-to-play fly by night outfit. Check out the hoax that a Cornell Graduate student pulled on them. He submitted a grammatically correct, literally meaningless paper to them, and they published it. Nobody has bothered to look at this guy's work because it was published at a vanity press, Malcolm. The Chronicle of Higher Education, which all academics should read, covered this hoax. Massively discredited. Suddenly it makes sense why nobody mentions where this article came from. I like the opening line of the Chronicle's article:

Bentham Science Publishers, as it watches editors quit in protest of lax peer-review standards, is contending that it agreed to publish a specious research report by a Cornell University graduate student because it was trying to trap the perpetrator.

What about New Scientist? What do they have to say about these publishers? They...joyless scientists...actually call it "crap." They call it CRAP because the purported submitting lab of the hoax was "Center for Research in Applied Phrenology" (phrenology is studying the bumps on your head). It could not be a less credible publication. This paper fails peer-review muster. I would appreciate a couple of sciencey types who read to discuss the importance of peer-review. One of the tools in my bullcrap detection kit is if "new and earth-shattering science" is promoted primarily in the popular media and not in the journals. This reeks of such a rotten publication.

"Fudging science?" You bet you can, Neils. And now, you too know you can, Malcolm. Get it published in a real press and have it reviewed first by real chemists, then I'll listen. I am setting a very, very low bar here, one that you should adopt too.

Now there was this, which Malcolm put up:

Controlled Demolition of Building 7 Admitted On PBS (10 min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9b4D-aO3zY

"Pull it?" He's talking to the fire department at that point. There has been terrible loss of life, he said. He was saying pull the firefighters out of there. And when you let a building burn, it falls. This was an insult to my intelligence, Malcolm. Are you saying the fire department, which lost an assload of people that day, now moonlights as a professional demolition service, one that uses nano-thermite, which has never been shown to have been used in a single demolition in the history of ever? Really? Is that what you are contending? This is feeble. You have some bozo jumping around saying, "Silverstein says they blew it up!" And your evidence is the word "pull"? Feeble, Malcolm. Really, really weak. And how is a real estate developer going to use the word "pull" when talking about a fire crews? "Pull them out." Sure, he could be speaking in "demolition vernacular," but it seems unlikely since he is not a demolitions expert. In fact, even if you were right, the not-NYFD crew responsible for demolishing the last building uses the term in a very specific way, 'pulling' is clearly guiding the direction of the fall, not just "destroying" it.

And the Dan Rather bit. You know what, I remember that day very very well, Malcolm, and nobody knew what the hell was going in. Rather says it reminded him of a controlled demolition. So what? What else does he have to compare it to? To the inexpert eye, which I venture you have two of, it might look like a controlled demolition, but you don't even know what you would be looking for as evidence of a controlled demolition. In fact, if you look at Loose Change and similar self-published Truther silliness, they too rely heavily on evidence from people (on-site reporters) who do not have any authority or knowledge, and who can't possibly have the foggiest clue about what's happening. You are citing confused people and think it helps your case!

I've address that a lot of energy went into the building of the towers, all of them, including building 7 and it was transferred from potential into kinetic, chemical and thermal energy as it all burned and collapsed. We should not be surprised to see buried debris glowing red hot even weeks after the collapse. It is up to you to show me otherwise.

Now I appreciate that you have seen the light on Stubblebine. And you are right. Just because he has said other stupid things doesn't mean that this is stupid. That would be the opposite of the appeal to authority ("If X says something, then Y is true because X said it.") Only the pope can make that claim. (Haha.) But don't turn around and then say: "Look at all of these architects and engineers who don't believe that the WTC brought these buildings down." This is going to hurt quite a bit, Malcolm. But remember, I'm really, really enjoying it.

You say that 969 architects and engineers have signed the petition. Do you want to know how fringe, how far outside expert opinion belief you are? Screw the architects. They don't put the things up. That's what engineers do. Architects have the vision, engineers make it happen. But hell, let's make them all engineers. From my point of view, this makes your case as strong as it can be, since I consider architects the ones who design the fiddly bits around the doors.

Let's say that 969 engineers signed. Now, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 1.5 million engineers in the US. That is, and I have already been generous in giving you 969 engineers, you will acknowledge, .0646% of all engineers are in your camp. Now, you can scream, "But you are appealing to the authority of the majority!" Ah, but you are appealing to the authority of a marginalized minority of loony-toon crackpots who are WAY outside the mainstream of professional thought. And I looked through that list. This is not scientific, but eyeballing it, it seems that you have a high percentage of petroleum/environmental/chemical/electrical engineers on your list, whose opinions on matters of structural integrity are about as useless as an OB/GYN's opinion about experimental brain surgery.

The Creationists do this list thing too, not realizing that they are actually putting their necks into a noose. (See Project Steve.)

I too have studied the 9/11 question and have spent aproximately $10,000 of my own money to host a conference here in Pensacola.

Who did you have as your speakers?

Dave vonKleist: Wrote, and presumably misspelled, "9/11 in Plane Site."
David Gunderson: who is known for "his belief in, and investigation of, criminal conspiracies involving cults run by government officials."
Jim Marrs: Oh, I know him. He's a professional conspiracist. He's big-time. Yeah, he's well known.

Not exactly a diverse group. This is what we call the echo chamber effect. I encourage you to, the next time you drop $10,000 into a conference, that you try to get a diverse set of opinions instead of beating a single drum. And you don't get to call me closed-minded anymore.

You understand that I teach classes about conspiracy theories at the college level, right? That this is what I do professionally? That this is not my first time peeking my head into this particular girls' locker room?

I look forward to your reply and I will give it an entire post. If you post this at your site, I must insist that you post it in its entirety and have a link.

UPDATE: I wanted to add another classic Onion interview about 9/11 conspiracies. It seemed appropriate and is at the same time quite funny.


9/11 Conspiracy Theories 'Ridiculous,' Al Qaeda Says

HJ/Goliath (almost out of Irony--I love it. A bottle of vino and a conspiracy theory. I'm in heaven! Figuratively, Malcolm.)