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.

Alex Jones’ hysterical lunacy

Forget world-class liar. Alex Jones is just an idiot

I started watching a tragicomically predictable new Alex Jones video heralding bin Laden’s death as “Another Gov’t Lie” expecting some good meat for a post. Turns out I didn’t even make it that far. The video begins with what skeptics call a “Gish Gallop:” a debate tactic that involves making a series of statements so inane and obviously false that your opponent simply saps his/her allotted time in refuting them. I’m not accusing Jones of that level of cleverness; rather, I think he is both so stupid and so visibly intoxicated on the Kool-Aid that he just can’t help himself. As always Jones would rather float stupid statements rather than make evidence-based claims, and here they come:

-Initial media reports about Jessica were the doing of “the government.”

Except that it was The Pentagon that first spoke out against the initial, farcical Washington Post story that began the firestorm. And whose investigation was finally reported by WaPo in their self-praise-showered retraction. So this is just Jones being stupid about the who’s who: he’s confused “the government” with “the media,” one journalist from some sort of black ops media whiteout operation, and one shitty newspaper with a fictional government fraud campaign.

-…And those reports were scripted by Jerry Bruckheimer.

Okay, this one is clearly a lie on Jones’ part, so I guess there’s room for that, too. He outright says that Bruckheimer was “called in to script the story” about Lynch’s rescue. The admittedly hype-happy Guardian clarifies:

Back in 2001, the man behind Black Hawk Down, Jerry Bruckheimer, had visited the Pentagon to pitch an idea. Bruckheimer and fellow producer Bertram van Munster, who masterminded the reality show Cops, suggested Profiles from the Front Line, a primetime television series following US forces in Afghanistan. They were after human stories told through the eyes of the soldiers. Van Munster's aim was to get close and personal. He said: "You can only get accepted by these people through chemistry. You have to have a bond with somebody. Only then will they let you in. What these guys are doing out there, these men and women, is just extraordinary. If you're a cheerleader of our point of view - that we deserve peace and that we deal with human dignity - then these guys are really going out on a limb and risking their own lives."

It was perfect reality TV, made with the active cooperation of Donald Rumsfeld and aired just before the Iraqi war. The Pentagon liked what it saw. "What Profiles does is given another in depth look at what forces are doing from the ground," says Whitman. "It provides a very human look at challenges that are presented when you are dealing in these very difficult situations." That approached was taken on and developed on the field of battle in Iraq.

The Pentagon has none of the British misgivings about its media operation. It is convinced that what worked with Jessica Lynch and with other episodes of this war will work even better in the future.

So Jones’ timeline is backwards, his claim seems to be lifted from a metaphor being made in a Guardian piece and – oh, forget it. He wasn’t stupid here; he was dishonest.

-…And members of her unit who “blabbed” were killed by the government

Oh, did I mention that it was an active-duty deputy commander at CentCom who first called out the media on their story? Jones seems to be basing this point on the notion that members of Lynch’s unit began “dying in car crashes” and “getting shot in the head.” You know, classic government black ops. This seems to be Jones simply being stupid about statistics, as he fails to realize that returning veterans tend to have a higher young-life death rate than the general population. It may also be him being stupid about history, as many of those “outspoken” members of her unit were showered in awards and accolades by the military, even as they were speaking out about the media treatment of Lynch. This could also involve Jones being stupid about simple logic: Not only did members of her unit seem to pass away with no correlation to their speaking to the media, but they seemed to do so well after “the damage” was already done (again, “damage” direct at the media, not the military).

-…And “the government” told Lynch to lie about her story.

And it obviously didn’t work, due to, you know, that time she called out both the media for their horrific reporting and the military for later promoting the rescue operation, not the reports about Lynch herself. Oh, also that memoir she wrote.

-…Just like Pat Tillman, who “they” killed because he “was about to go home and speak out against the war.”

And without even giving Jones time to further raise my blood pressure on this one, let’s just make sure to point out that Tillman was an active and vocal critic of Iraq before he died. Hell, Jones had to have known that one – he had to lift Tillman’s own anti-Iraq invasion quotes from somewhere. And hell, afterwards, “the government” was pretty terrible at taking out the members of Tillman’s unit, the friends of Tillman, and Tillman’s family members who actively spoke out about what really happened to him. To say nothing about how bad “the government” is at covering up cases for which it dutifully hands out self-damning evidence. Okay, there’s little room for Jones’s defense there. I guess he’s a liar, too.

Jones is not known for subtlety; neither are his fellow stupid people. I think if he were pressed to discuss the obvious fraud he spews on a daily basis he would admit that he has no interest in reality, for he has already spun his own. It is one in which everyone who doesn't follow him religiously is his enemy, everyone who disagrees with his politics is a Satanic monster and there is no room for facts in a war of volume. This is a small blog representing a small community of dedicated skeptics; Alex Jones is a loud, aggressive blowhard with a horde of gullible followers at his back. It's time to stop pretending that all nonsense is equally worth serious inquiry. Jones's viewers are stupid enough to believe him, and that's their own fault. Until they start making an actual case that goes somewhere, they have given the rest of us nothing to address.

Ahem...

One: We're not going to say anything about the death of bin Laden. You have news sources that say much more than we could. You can already draw the necessary inferences about how the mere circumstances of the chase for bin Laden itself prove his role in global terrorism. To go on about bin Laden's death would be to reach for the low-hanging fruit of skeptical inquiry.

Two: Speaking of low-hanging fruit...

The author of the blog Killtown has announced "a challenge" to 911myths.com concerning some of his claims about Shanksville. He doesn't specify which - his link to his "challenge" is simply a link to his "Shanksville"-tagged posts - and says he'll settle for "anyone" addressing "any" of this claims.

This is odd, because we not only demonstrated the fallacious thinking in the very first post that comes up in his "Shanksville" list, but we commented to that effect on the post itself - it has since been deleted.

Killtown, that challenge was accepted weeks ago. Why are you destroying the evidence?

NIST Tested Bomb, Demolition Hypotheses!

The torrent comes in at a massive forty GB, but if you're interested, 9/11 deniers have epically shot themselves in the foot by obtaining the NIST burn video database, much of which includes video of the various computerized tests NIST ran while trying to assess how the buildings collapsed on 9/11. In theory, this dataset includes virtually every test NIST engineers ran in devising their explanation for what happened.

Kind of makes you wonder why this wasn't bigger news in the conspiracy theory echo chamber.

These videos are just nails in the coffin of an already-defunct movement. Rather than vindicating the faith, this archive proves that not only were the NIST and 9/11 Commission reports based on rigorous testing, but that engineers, academics and scientists working for the government explicitly tested conspiratorial claims. We have gigs and gigs of video proof that NIST and its affiliates considered every possible angle of the event, and were able to rule out the kinds of hypotheses that today guide what remains of the faith's holy writ.

The 9/11 Datasets Project is run by The "International Center for 9/11 Studies" and apparently all of its content was freely obtained by FOIA suit. Has anything ever so beautifully refuted anti-government paranoia? Maybe its the afternoon coffee kicking in, but I'm positively giddy that this has happened. IC911 has destroyed the 9/11 truth movement.

In fact, searching for "International Center for 9/11 Studies" on PrisonPlanet returns the incredibly flaccid response deniers had to actually surveying the footage: All that they cared to report about were things like 'CBS reporters heard explosions on ground floor before collapse' and 'CNN reported third explosion on 9/11' and 'firefighters heard explosions!' All that they really seemed able to deal with was the same old laughably tired fact that mainstream journalists suck at their jobs, and turns out 9/11 was a confusing day. They apparently have no interest in the substantive evidence. There's really no question as to why.

At the very least, we now have definitive proof that NIST didn't "whitewash" jack when it came to their investigation. There is terabytes of data here to deal with. These guys worked damn hard. As 9/11 deniers have themselves demonstrated, anyone who calls the 9/11 investigation a bogus effort is either lying or stupid. We now have a few weeks of video with which to address that claim.

I downloaded one of the archives, "42A0016," which is about 300mb of video and photographic depictions of NIST laboratory activity and photographs of the buildings. One video shows the hours of construction that went into recreating just one of the sections of the tower for a NIST in-lab test, and another shows a theoretical bomb blast on another such in-lab rendering. The files are too big to upload to Blogger and, for some reason, aren't in the uploads the deniers have been making to YouTube...








There really are too many photos, bits of video, and other such stuff to deal with, but make sure to check out the data yourself. Nothing I've seen to date stands as a better refutation of 9/11 denial than the evidence they themselves are presenting here.