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.

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:

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.

John Patrick Bedell: 9/11 denier, fanatic, suicide martyr

The next in the line of bearded anti-American engineering students who become suicide attackers was a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. Shocking. His entire belief set was 100% compatible with those of your average Tea Partier, and the ideological right has already leaped to their own defense. Just because he bought every right-wing belief about the monetary system, Barack Obama, gun rights, drugs, and the American legal system doesn't mean he... well, the excuse-making is up to them.

Predictably, Stormfront has eagerly endorsed the violence in the name of traditional conservative values, while others have demanded that Bedell shouldn't be labeled as right-wing because he smoked pot. For the record, only one presidential candidate vocally favored marijuana legalization in the last election.

The particular brand of nutjobbery fostered and nurtured by the cult of 9/11 denial has inevitable consequences. Like virtually every die-hard acolyte we meet, these people are disconnected from their families, mistrustful of everyone around them, and in favor of violent retaliation of everyone who disagrees with them. Whether it's a Facebook troll promoting eugenics on public websites, or someone actually going out and making good on your beliefs as Bedell did, 9/11 deniers fall on the same continuum. After all, if you truly, honestly believed that the world was run by a secret sect of greedy, murderous overlords, waiting in the wings to destroy everything you love... why wouldn't you lash out against innocent people like this?

A thought experiment for truthers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on the unbearable lightness of being a denier

This blog is simply a gold mine for news about terrorism in Africa, reporting today about a man who was caught in Mogadishu trying to board a plane with a syringe and various powdered and liquid chemicals.

"We don't know whether he's linked with al-Qaida or other foreign organizations, but his actions were the acts of a terrorist. We caught him red-handed," said Barise.

A Nairobi-based diplomat said the incident in Somalia is similar to the attempted attack on the Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day in that the Somali man had a syringe, a bag of powdered chemicals and liquid — tools similar to those used in the Detroit attack. The diplomat spoke on condition he not be identified because he isn't authorized to release the information.

Barigye Bahoku, the spokesman for the African Union military force in Mogadishu, said the chemicals from the Somali suspect could have caused an explosion that would have caused air decompression inside the plane.

This is nothing major, but its always worth pointing out the degree to which 9/11 deniers have to shut themselves out to reality. There is daily proof that there is organic, home-grown terrorist sentiment out there, people all over the world who are willing to do the open society harm.

Either you believe that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and every twit like him on earth is secretly a Zionist agent, or you've come to grips with reality.

Bomb in Pakistan kills 43

Rescue teams have established a death count of forty-three from a bomb that went off last night in Pakistan, according to a blog operating out of Pakistan.

Monday's bombing struck at the start of a procession of Shiites marking Ashoura, the most important day of a monthlong mourning period for the seventh-century death of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, Imam Hussein. Minority Shiites have suffered frequent attacks by Sunni extremist groups who regard them as heretical.

"I fell down when the bomb went off with a big bang," said Naseem Raza, a 26-year-old who was marching in the procession. "I saw walls stained with blood and splashed with human flesh."

Not relevant to 9/11 denial, you say? Think again. One of the main points I try to push in every debate I have against a denier is that they are not actually fighting just against the laws of physics, a damning body of forensic evidence against the hijackers, and overwhelming evidence against the current leadership of Al Qaeda. They are literally pretending that decades of history never happened. In their world, Ronald Reagan built Osama bin Laden out of old T-1000 parts, he fought the Communists until we were done with him, and then he lay dormant in a warehouse in Area 51 until we needed him again. Their view is false.

They have to pretend that there are no deep ideological rifts in the Muslim world. They have to pretend that there is no cultural backdrop to the terrorism we see in the world today. Their worldview forces them to believe that there are not millions of people around the world, with their own livelihood, personal beliefs, plans and connections willing to do harm in the name of their faith. For them, Muslim cultural evolution literally must stop in the 1880s.

9/11 deniers are often accused of living in a fantasy land, a world of black and white where there is essentially one homogenous group of bad people (mostly composed of the kinds of people we were really, really annoyed by in high school, I think!) and everyone else - everyone else - is just a puppet.

A big part of why the denier movement has completely fallen apart is because they're forced to find a conspiracy theory in basically every violent action that happens in the world. Though there is a damning silence on their part over the obviously organic 12/25 incident aboard Flight 253, their attempts to conjure a fantasy world around every act of obvious terrorism, which their faith requires them to make, are probably a big part of the reason why none of them really appear to believe themselves anymore.

Ring of Power - refuted

A brief introduction

“Ring of Power” is a six-hour perversion. Its claims are bizarre, farcical, ridiculous – and believed by thousands.

Its claims so rapidly spiral outside the realm of remote plausibility – all in the name of overwhelming hatred and appalling ignorance – that someone watching with an objective mind is simultaneously infuriated and confounded by its producers’ mindset. Much of this video’s content is overtly racist and all of it is permeated with paranoia. Even a piecemeal checking of the facts rips this work to shred on contact. And, thus, this series is to be undone.



Episode One
Part one of “Ring of Power” is a Gish gallop of false claims and outdated conspiracy theories (warning: “melted steel” ahead) that barely warrant addressing. Those who have actually been reading up on the literature may wish to skip over the refutation of episode one, simply because much of it is laughably outdated.

What is new, however, is its narrator’s new height of arrogance. Mispronouncing or awkwardly pronouncing every word with a thick Canadian accent, the narrator illustrates the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as if it were the preview for a summer blockbuster in such a cynical, sarcastic way that this tactic alone makes this movie worth slamming down. She reads that 9/11

“Looks so much like a formula, action-packed Hollywood movie that it had ‘made in the USA’ written all over it…”

Which is (a)a fallacy from incredulity, and (b)an incredibly stupid statement. This casual arrogance will define the narrator’s persona throughout the show.

The contradictions also get off to a good start as, in the course of dolling up one of the worst tragedies in U.S. history to create its pulpy narrative, “Ring of Power” claims that on 9/11

“Well-positioned cameras shot the action-packed drama from every conceivable angle…”

yet, mere minutes later, the narrator will be whining about a lack of corroborating evidence (video, perhaps?) behind claims that the hijackers were seen in bars in Florida on the night of September 10, 2001.

“The timing, the title, and the eerie advertisement for Harvey Weinstein’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ movie called ‘The Two Towers’ was a prophetic and disturbing coincidence…”

Hey, wait a minute…”The Two Towers” wasn’t “Harvey Weinstein’s” movie. It was directed by Peter Jackson and had nine primary producers, one of which was Mr. Weinstein. Why does the narrator go out of her way to find somebody with the last name “Weinstein” to mention in her pun on the 9/11 attacks?

During the first week, the 911 producers made a fantastic fortune just on the stock market alone. How? Just by knowing in advance that the stocks in airlines and insurance companies associated with the 911 crash[es] would fall in value. Using that inside information, they made negative bets on the stock market called ‘put options.’ ‘Put options’ are bets that a certain stock will fall in value…

First off, this is not what a put option is. A “put option” is a security you can place on a purchase of stock so that, within a certain time period, you can sell that stock at the price you bought it. This is a normal feature of stock trades and, as noted elsewhere, were bought and sold over 30,000 times in the sixth months prior to 9/11 on the airlines whose planes were hijacked, meaning over 30,000 investors (most of them chump change, apparently) would have to be “in on” the attacks.

Of course, it also means that your net gain is zero dollars. If you sell stock at a given price, and that price is the same amount at which you purchased it, your difference is zero. What an “insider investor” would actually do would be to (1)cash out stock without put options the day before 9/11 to maximize profit, then (2)buy up all the free-floating shares in the crash that ensued, once again maximizing profits (because such “insider traders” would presumably know that the government would bail out many of the bigger airlines, as they did ). So almost right off the bat the makers of “Ring of Power” have made an error that a first-year business major couldn’t make. They even call put optioning “high-risk gambling,” even though it’s clearly the exact opposite of high-risk gambling. So far, no 9/11 denier has ever been able to do better than the SEC – that is, to find that the number of put options bought and sold prior to 9/11 was no greater than you would expect to normally happen in the course of a year.



They then run through a list of usual complaints against the Bush family:

-Members of the bin Laden family were co-investors in Bush’s failed energy company.
-One of the bin Laden family was in the Ritz-Carlton hotel having “a business meeting” on 9/11
-The bin Laden construction company engaged in rebuilding after the U.S. embassy bombing.

Perhaps no 9/11 deniers have ever read a word on the actual history of the bin Laden family. Steven Coll, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, has written two fantastic books that deal with the subject, Ghost Wars and The bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century. Lawrence Wright also wrote extensively of Osama bin Laden’s relationship to his family in The Looming Tower. He writes:

…on March 5, 1994, [King] Fahd personally decided to revoke bin Laden’s Saudi citizenship.

Saudi Arabia is an intimate nation, with large families and tribes complexly knitted together. To be expelled from the country was to be banished from these intricate relationships that are so much a part of every Saudi’s identity. Citizenship is a closely guarded property, rarely awarded to foreigners, and the fact that the bin Laden family, of Yemeni origin, were full members of Saudi society indicated the honored – but vulnerable – place they held. Immediately after the king canceled bin Laden’s citizenship, Bakr bin Laden, the eldest brother, publicly condemned Osama, turning the family’s back to him. Many of bin Laden’s countrymen date the moment of his total radicalization to the announcement of the king’s decision. An emissary traveled to Sudan to formally deliver the news and demand bin Laden’s passport. Bin Laden threw it at the man. “Take it, if having it dictates anything on my behalf!” he declared.

Anyone who presumes that a connection with the bin Laden family (the patriarch of which, Mohammed bin Laden, is a hero in Saudi Arabia for building the highway that connected the two disparate halves of the country) means a connection to Osama bin Laden is not worth taking seriously.

FBi debputy director John O’Neill quit his job when his investigation of Osama bin Laden was blocked.

This is far from the truth. O’Neill resigned because he had hit the twenty year mark (known as “KMA,” the point where an FBI agent can take his pension and his experience and take on a cushy private-sector consulting or security job – to tell the bureau to “kiss my ass”), because the double life he was living was being investigated, and because he was, like many in the FBI, fed up with the difficulty in obtaining interdepartmental contact lines in the pre-USAPATRIOT ACT era. See Wright, pp. 389-400.

Top Pentagon officials canceled their travel plans for 911, citing security concerns.

No one has ever offered any actual, concrete evidence of this, but even if it were true…do any 9/11 deniers know career military personnel? They do more moving around, perhaps, than anyone on earth. If the net you’re casting is this video’s – that is, to look for any “political, military, and corporate VIPs” who were “kept out of harm’s way” – then to only be able to find a couple of generals who had travel plans moved to, from, or around on 9/11 is rather a sign of laziness on the part of conspiracy theorists than anything else. Yes, the people who fly most are likely to have had travel plans on a given day of the week. Yes, a certain percentage of those flights get canceled in advance.

As barely even an aside, the video then goes on to say that the flight school where two of the hijackers trained at Ruddi Dekkers-Hoffman Aviation,

is linked to CIA drug smuggling…through [two aviation companies (the narrator does not say their names clearly)] which shared the same small Venice airport with Dekkers.

Just to be clear, sharing an airport with a company does not make you an inbred interest of that company. Is there any actual “link?” Heck, is there any actual evidence that the CIA engages in “drug smuggling?” If there is, this video fails to mention it.

Then come the usual claims about the hijackers being whoremongers who visited “local strip clubs.” All of these claims are based solely on witness recollections from years ex post. None of them are reliable and almost all are directly refuted by the actual evidence – interviews with the hijackers roommates, interrogations of captured co-conspirators, etc. Ironically, the narrator asks,

Would devoted and highly secretive Muslim hijackers publicly risk their mission…and why were they in Florida instead of Boston the night before their suicide mission?

The first part is simply a contradiction – this movie will soon go on to talk about Larry Silverstein and “pull it” - wondering why those particular conspirators would be so secretive when it expects you to believe that this conspirator would blurt out his roll in the attacks on national television. It also claims that the hijackings “went off without a hitch,” even though 25% of the hijacked “missiles” missed.

It then falsely implicates guilt in “how long” it took response planes to launch and then erroneously (duh) states that responses “typically” take less time.



The “Bush sat there chatting about goats” thing.

Look deep down into your hearts, friends. Ask yourselves, “but no, really, what would we all be thinking of Bush today if he scampered out of that room with smoking heels as soon as he heard about the 9/11 attacks?” We’d all be thinking, as we watched that classroom full of stunned, helpless youngsters, that Bush made the wrong decision. Why, how could he possibly leave all those defenseless youngsters behind? Shouldn’t our President be able to keep his calm? Bush did what is standard and sensible for a politician to do when alerted of a crisis: act restrainedly. You’d think the makers of this video would applaud one of the few times in Bush’s presidency when he has act with due restraint.

Also, raise your hand if you know it’s false that there was no video footage of the first plane impact available on the first day. Perhaps because this is a Canadian video they had difficulty accessing news archives, but I think the rest of us know better.

The video, never one to dwell on a subject long enough for its viewers to realize how absurd its claims are, skips right along to mention the “impossibility” of the hijackers piloting the planes.

The equipment [the hijackers] encountered in the Boeing cockpits on September 11 was similar to the simulators they had trained on in the months before the attacks. So, it’s not surprising that they operated the planes with some degree of competence. “When they took over the plane, it was already in flight,” says Brian marsh, a flight instructor at Airline Transport Professionals Flight School…”All they had to do was pretty much point and go. It’s even easier than driving a car because there are no roads.”

As part of their basic flight training, the hijackers were schooled in the use of the flight management systems and autopilot features. …Harrah purchased a portable Global Position System (GPS)…[Hani Hanjour] steered the plane manually for only the final eight minutes of the flight

See Dunbar & Reagan, 2006, p.6. Another interesting contradiction here: immediately after noting how “suspicious” it was that the hijackers could fly the planes “precisely” [sic] into the towers, they note how “suspicious” it was that the hijackers also foolishly missed the “commanders’ offices” in the Pentagon. Why, the hijackers were simply too competent/incompetent in hitting/missing the right/wrong targets!



Flight 93’s debris was not found as far away as claimed in this video. Yes, this video commits the MapQuester’s Fallacy.

If government agents knew nothing, how could they identify nineteen Muslim hijackers from fake passports and no DNA evidence?

Probably from their not faked passports and all that DNA evidence.

How could Mohammed Atta’s passport survive the explosion that supposedly cremated him…?

When a plane crashes, lots of energy is released from the wreck in the form of heat. This means that the air heated in and around the plane is seeking to equalize with the rest of the air around it (i.e., all the rest of the air on earth), so you have an enormous whoosh of air in all directions, a sudden vacuum being filled as quickly as possible. This is why you expect small objects like passports and wallets to survive plane crashes.

Just to let you know, most Americans learn this in eighth grade science class.

Why weren’t the planes’ voice recorders found?

Oops…?

Why weren’t the hijackers under surveillance?

Once again, see the books listed above. This is a textbook case of attributing to malice what should be read as CIA, FBI, VISA, etc. incompetence and difficulty in sharing information pre-9/11.

Why was Mohammed Atta’s suitcase conveniently left behind? Why would a hijacker about to die on a suicide mission pack a suitcase?

Wait, which of these complaints are you going to go with? The suspiciousness of one would necessarily exclude that of the other.

Why didn’t the terrorists take a taxi to the airport?

Why would this be less suspicious than driving there? What’s suspicious about driving to an airport, anyway? What is this picture doing in this video?



Here’s to high production value.

You start to get an even better feel for how outdated this movie is when it brings up the anthrax attacks as if they hadn’t been solved months ago.

There are no airport security videos of any of the Muslim hijackers boarding any of the planes.

If you board a plane in Portland, Maine – as Mohammed Atta did – that’s where you’re on video passing through security. Do you pass through security in a connecting flight airport? No. Nobody who has ever used an airport could legitimately be confused about this. How could anyone even remotely intellectually honest even claim that this is anything but a pseudo-question, based on a false premise and with false implications?

Bin Laden repeatedly denied being involved in 9/11, and said that Israeli Zionists were responsible.

Bin Laden has, of course admitted many, many times to being behind 9/11 and al-Qaeda specifically admonished Iran for spreading “the lie” that Israel was behind 9/11. There is zero video footage of Osama bin Laden saying that the Israeli government conducted 9/11.

…Then “the Jewish Zionists” come up again. Hm. This is getting weird.

Seven of the nineteen Muslims whose mugshots were flashed around the world are alive.

As warned, this video does put you in a bit of a time warp.

She picked up an Airfone and reported that four Middle-Eastern looking men. The fact is that Israeli men are Middle Eastern men who just happen to be Middle Eastern looking. The voice of the hijacker heard from the hijacked planes voice recorder reveals that the accent of the hijacker matches an Israel Hebrew accent.

First of all, no it doesn’t. Second of all, what? Where’s the evidence? Where’s the counter to the DNA evidence proving that it was nineteen Arab hijackers? Didn’t this video just say that there was a suspicion absence of flight recorder evidence? Oh, golly, here comes a ”Five Dancing Israelis” claim… the creative new spin put here is that this version of the Five Dancing Israelis has them “filming 911 from multiple angles,” when the guys usually accused of being “the Five Dancing Israelis” only had one camera. And it brings up a fringe claim among fringe claims, that of the supposed “Israeli art student spies…”

Marvin Bush just happened to be the director of Securicom, which provided electronic security for the World Trade Center…

(He wasn’t, and they didn’t). But this movie doesn’t seem to have any problem defrauding anybody, even American firefighters, in the name of pushing its own agenda, because as soon as its done lying about Marvin Bush’s position it starts immediately lying about a gentleman named Louie Cacchioli…

On September twenty-fourth, firefighter Louie Cacchioli told People magazine “we think there were bombs set in the building…”

However,

As for those who believe bombs may have been planted in the buildings, one of the primary sources they cite is New York City firefighter Louie Cacchioli. Shortly after Cacchioli led 40 office workers out of the North Tower, the South Tower collapsed, enveloping him in a cloud of debris he thought would kill him. A People magazine reporter approached Cacchioli shortly after he was pulled out of the wreckage. “On the last trip, a bomb went off,” he said in the resulting article. “We think there was [sic] bombs set in the building.”

A 20-year department veteran whose photograph is on the cover of the Time-Life book, Faces of Ground Zero, Cacchioli is seemingly an unimpeachable source…According to Cacchioli, it is the conspiracy theorists who are twisting his words. “That was a misquote,” he tells Popular Mechanics, referring to the initial comment about believing there were bombs in the building. “It was in People magazine. They interviewed me when they finally got me out of the rubble. I said, ‘It sounded like a bomb.’ I tried to explain what I meant [after the fact] but it was already out there.”

Cacchioli, who retired from the fire department for health reasons originating on September 11, says he has been contacted repeatedly by people hoping he will say that there were bombs in the building, but he refuses to do so…he feels misrepresented by the media, and is distressed at the inaccurate use of his name in conjunction with conspiracy theories

(see Dunbar & Reagan, 35-36).

The steel-supported World Trade Centers were designed to withstand the impact of a jet-liner…

…According to one of the engineers of the buildings promoting them in the 1970s, when the heaviest jet liner was 200,000 pounds lighter than, and moved 100mph slower than, the commercial jets used on 9/11.

It’s impossible jet fuel, burning in combination with oxygen, to melt steel…

And there it is, folks. That’s the money quote. “Jet fuel can’t melt steel.” I’m flummoxed, too.

Why did Tower Two, that was hit second, fall first?

This one’s really just there for the laughs.

…And why did WTC 7 collapse?

Just to remind everyone of how outdated this one is.

Who controlled access to the buildings? The 30yr old WTC has always been publicly owned managed by the New York/New Jersey Port Authority; that is, until a Jewish businessman named Lewis Eisenberg became the chairman. Lewis Eisenberg is an active leader in Jewish Zionist organizations. He personally oversaw negotiations that put the publically owned World Trade Center into private hands. Those private hands belong to two Jewish pro-Zionist billionaires, named Larry Silverstein and Frank Lowy, even though their bid was lower than other bids. Lowy served as a commando in the Israeli army,and Silverstein just happens to be the former chairman of the United Jewish/Israel Appeal. With Eisenberg’s help, they landed the 99-year lease for half-price, 3.22 billion, even though its bid was lower than others.

The word “Jewish” appears four times in this claim. Evidence to back it up appears zero. Just something to think about. Also, Eisenberg did not “help” Silverstein acquire the property (and Lowy didn’t even acquire it at all…); his first choice was a firm called Vornado. Their bid was for $3.25 billion, compared to $3.22 billion from Silverstein Properties – but then Vornado said it wanted to change the contract ex post to be for only thirty-nine years and renewable up to ninety-nine after that point. In other words, they wanted to be able to sell it off. Business giants Charles Gargano and Tim Ryan were also informed that they could try to outbid Silverstein, but they didn’t attempt to do so.



Moving right along its new trend of trying to use the word “Jewish” as many times as possible in a sentence, it meanders over to Zim Israel Navigation Co., fraudulently claiming that that firm got out of the World Trade Center “just before the attacks,” another fringe claim among fringe claims. Suspicious because, of course, “it just happens to be owned by the government of Israel,” which is false.

And, of course, Silverstein has lost over a billion dollars in aggregate due to 9/11, so this particular “Jewish businessman,” who according to RoP demolished it to avoid “an 800 million dollar facelift” (there is no evidence that this was ever in the making). You couldn’t make a shoddier narrative out of Larry Silverstein than Ring of Power’s.

Before the first plane ever hit the first tower on 911, a massive military buildup was organized near Afghanistan, called operation “Swift Sword” and operation “Bright Star”…17,000 US and NATO troops gathered near the friendly country of Egypt.

So, it turns out Cairo and Kabul are 2,222 miles apart; meaning Egypt is closer to Paris, France; Chicago is closer to Houston, Texas; and Chicago is closer to Los Angeles. Yes, military forces are gathering in the Chicago suburbs for an imminent invasion of Texas. And by now it almost goes without saying but, of course, there’s no evidence for any such thing as “Operation Bright Star,” and “Operation Swift Sword” took place almost five years later. “Imminent,” indeed.



This frame appears right after the narrator asks, “so who exactly are the producers of the 911 reality disaster movie?” and right before the narrator tries to assure its audience that she’s not going to try to blame “practicing Jews.” No, seriously though.

So who exactly are the producers of the 911 reality disaster movie? …contrary to popular opinion…not practicing Jews [or] practicing Muslims. They are a secret network of international pirates who identify with no nation, no national flag, and no established religion. Their flag is the Skull and Crossbones and their God – GOD – spells “Gold, Oil, and Drugs.”

It is important to understand the difference between the term “Jews,” “Hebrews” and “Zionists.” The majority of the world’ Jewish population are honest, caring, honorable people who practice Judaism, follow religious tradition, and embrace good moral values. The term “Hebrew” refers to the Hebrew language. It also refers to the Hebrew people who are the ethnic descendants of the original Twelve Tribes of Israel. The term Zionist refers to political extremists. Zionists believe that Hebrews are God’s chosen people and that Hebrews have a right to the Muslim lands of the Palestinians. Why? Because according to the Bible, God says so. These Zionist extremists represent only a small minority of Jews and Hebrews. Christians who support Zionist theft of Palestinian lands are called “Zionist extremists.” Their goal is to help fulfill the prophecies of the Bible story.”

This closing quote of the episode is submitted for your consideration, and to warn you where this movie is heading.

“Did the world’s wars, revolutions, and big events of human history evolve naturally? Or were they calculated and pre-planned? If they were planned then who planned them, and what do they plan for the future of humanity?”



Thus “Ring of Power” dives head-first down the rabbit hole into of a peculiar brand of conspiracy theories that I refer to in an upcoming Skeptical Inquirer article as Esoterics, after “Esoteric Agenda,” another popular documentary. “Esoterics” is a far-reaching term that refers to many conspiracy theories about ancient history; for example, if the Christian figure Jesus Christ was actually an Egyptian Pharaoh; if all royalty and all wealthy people are the results of incestuous inbreeding over 4,000 years; etc. In short: get ready for a wild ride.

The story begins by outlining the premise that the world is controlled from three cities:

“Washington, DC,which is not part of the city of Washington or the United States…The inner city of London, which is not part of London or England…and Vatican City, which is not part of Rome or Italy…”

Actually, until 1871 there was in fact a “City of Washington” that was a separate municipality from the District of Columbia, so this claim actually was once true… a hundred and thirty-seven years ago.

The London bit is the interesting one. London itself has a mayor and a Greater London Assembly (a city council), both of which are elected, and ground-level administrative duties are carried about by thirty-three smaller legislative authorities. One of these is called the City of London Corporation.

It is only a “corporation” insofar as it is something that was incorporated. In times and places like Medieval England, where land was divided up entirely among estate-holders into things like vassal provinces or duchies, everything can be considered “incorporated” in that it is or was territory granted to an estate-holder by whoever was higher up than him in the royal hierarchy. Because of the fact that the City of London is almost entirely businesses (there are only about 9,000 people actually living in the City of London), the people who vote in its elections include not just its residents, but prominent figures in the firms that operate in the City. For one of the supposed seats of a secret world government (spoiler alert), it’s a pretty open system.

Like much of British government, this arrangement is widely considered to be very silly. It is regarded as the embodiment of elitism, an “old-boys’ club” of sorts that only appears to maintain its peculiar delegation system for the sake of tradition. As this movie will do repeatedly down the line with clubs like Skull and Bones, it will confuse harmless, aging-frat-boy mentality with cold and calculated malice. The City of London is a “corporation” with its “own flag,” yes, but it is in fact governed by and part of the United Kingdom.

And yes, Vatican City is its own country, with its own government, postal service, etc. Why does the narrator save the least anomalous-seeming of the three cities for last, the exact opposite of what commonsense narrative rules would dictate?

So that it can begin a long, heated tirade against Catholicism and Christianity in general. Yes, for in Vatican City, “gracing the walls of St Peters Basilica is the Vatican-Approved Image of God, an angry bearded man in the sky... Cruel and violent images of God’s torturing son suffering, bleeding and dying… are on display throughout the Vatican. These images serve as reminders that God allowed his son to be tortured and killed… these explanations and scary images are especially difficult for children to understand.”

…And cut to a South Park scene about the Catholic Church. For about two straight minutes. It’s probably the most enjoyable two minutes of the movie, so enjoy it while it lasts.

The Vatican rules over approximately two billion of the world’s six point one billion people [Protestants are Catholics now? And since when does the Pope ‘control’ anybody?] … the colossal wealth of the Vatican includes investments with the Rothschilds in France, Britain and the USA, and with giant oil and weapons corporations like Shell and General Electric…gold [which is] stored by the Rothschild-controlled Bank of England and the Federal Reserve Bank...the Vatican is the greatest wealth accumulator…in existence.

Then after meandering on about the ancient Indulgences (“tickets out of Hell”) practices for a few moments, the Gish Gallop continues along its merry way, hitting pretty much every point someone would refer to if they wanted to build a comprehensive list of complaints against the Catholic Church, from “they kept the masses ignorant and in the dark by denying them a basic education” (how the Church deliberately denied anyone something that didn’t really exist yet is a question for saner people to ponder, evidently) on down.

Between 1095 and 1291 AD the Pope launched seven bloodbaths called the Christian Crusades, torturing, burning, beheading, and mass-murdering hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Jews in the name of God. The Pope’s brutal soldiers were called the Knights Templar, or Knights of the Temple of Solomon, and evolved into today’s secretive brotherhood called the Freemasons. Between 1450 and 1700AD, the Catholic Church followed up their Holy Terror with the Inquisition. Based on rumors… the Catholic Church… burned alive millions of innocent women at the stake.

Weasal words put in bold by the author. The narrator appears to be unaware of the atrocities that Muslims committed in their occupation of the Holy Land – the selling of boys and girls into slavery, the emptying towns of Jews, the imposing of the arrogant jizya on anyone and everyone in sight, and, of course – the classic sword-point conversion, or the act of what I call legislating the opposition out of existence – the act of enacting so many religiously-bigoted taxes, property and fashions laws (Jews were required to wear distinguishing robes in most of the Muslim Empire at that time) against non-Muslims that it becomes socially and economically infeasible to expect anyone to be able to follow their desired beliefs – all of which were the bread and butter of life in the Muslim Empire.

And it almost goes without saying that the narrator’s pulling her claims about the Knights Templar purely from thin air (or perhaps a Dan Brown novel). Not only were the Knights Templar not “The Pope’s brutal soldiers” (they were brutal soldiers, but independent ones at least) and not only did they do much more than fight – charity work and so on – but they were actually disbanded so that the kings of Europe wouldn’t have to pay them their war debts. At the end of the Crusades, Christendom basically sued itself for peace.

There is also absolutely zero evidence that anything of the Knights’ Templar survived the end of the organization. This makes intuitive sense – if all of a bank’s assets are taken, if most of its members move on to other things, and if new organizations fill in the vacuum, its chief executives don’t simply “go underground” to “carry on the tradition” with nothing in their pockets – they’ve got better things to do (like get jobs in the new niche firms, for example!). The Knights Templar was just one of countless charitable, mercenary, and/or financial organizations that rose in response t o the complex needs of managing an army of Crusaders.

This is a point that I think is lost on most conspiracy theorists, out of dishonesty or unfamiliarity with Medieval history. A bank in a time where most people didn’t use money and there was no internationally-recognized system of interest or currency (never mind that the idea of the “nation-state” itself didn’t really exist yet, either) could only really survive if it was financed by royalty, or by a massive war effort like the Crusades. Indeed, the Templars, who were only peripherally even involved in banking, were certainly not the most successful bank in the Crusader era (for example, the Leccocorvo bank and the banks of various Italian city-states almost certainly fared better) and in fact some historians don’t even bother mentioning them.

And in every case, as soon as a King takes your property, you’re done, for good – not to be magically resurrected in more powerful form some centuries later, as this movie will soon contend. The Knights Templar ‘banking system’ (what scant and cursory evidence of it exists) was a two-bit, one-time operation, nothing more. Outside of the fact that they used some pretty cool imagery, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a good reason to pick the Knights Templar as your first generation global dominators.

In fact, in the whole muckraking act against the Catholic Church, this movie conspicuously fails to expose perhaps its cardinal sin: its condemnation of usury. As will be seen, this movie basically becomes a tirade against interest rates so this deliberate misleading via obfuscation is understandable. The Catholic Church had loose, fractally-applied laws against charging interest on loans. As any economist worth her salt knows, a ban on interest is a one-way ticket to a zero-growth economy, with no consistent incentives for investment, and basically no profit to be made in long term projects of any kind. Obviously, this movie fails to mention its similar intent as the Medieval Catholic Church’s prehistoric conception of economics: to attack what it farcically refers to as “Fractional Reserve Banking,” that is, the system of interest and loans.

The phrase “fractional reserve banking” is a meme that does not appear in conventional financial literature except as a minute aside. All the phrase means is that banks use the money they receive in the form of accounts to invest elsewhere, rather than keep all of it on hand. Because what would happen if banks could not move any money around? They would be zero-growth firms. No business on earth operates in this fashion. No economy in history has operated in this fashion. The idea that an individual or firm can put money or assets somewhere with the expectation of return on investment is the principal motivator for perhaps every economic decision ever made. I cannot state with sufficient strength the fact that “fractional reserve banking” is the practice of banks making investments, period.

But of course, you could be so busy trying to compare the checklists of dirty deeds by two of the world’s main religions that you’d forget that nothing’s going on in this movie.

During world war two, the Vatican was criticized for supporting Hitler and his Nazi regime. To this day, the Vatican is still under investigation for plundering Nazi gold from Swiss bank accounts of Jewish Holocaust victims. Over the past five decades over 1,500 priests and bishops have been accounted in the assault of tens of thousands of boys and girls in their churches and orphanages…why has the Churhc fought and resisted the compensation claims of their sexually, emotionally, and spiritually traumatized victims?

After t he first sentence, that any of this would have to do with the point of the movie will surely soon be made evident…Oh, wait, it’s going back to the “Corporation of London” thing, never mind. It is now described as a “city state” that’s not “part of greater London or the United Kingdom…and does not pay its own taxes.” That doesn’t help explain why you have to fill out all these taxes every year, though. Once again, the movie is simply wrong. But this is intuitively obvious to the economics-savvy in the room: if the middle of London were a tax haven, it would be rather hard to keep quiet about, and would be much, much more densely-populated than it is currently.

The video then goes on to commit the same blatant error of thinking with the incorporated entity known as “The Crown” that it did with the “City of London Corporation:” looking at the word “corporation” and immediately going, “owned by the Jews – er, the ‘Zionists’ – in a dark shadow cabal scary evil…”

“The Crown” can have two meanings here: one, basically a euphemism for the modern British legal system. When you go to trial, you are tried by “The Crown,” which is a metonym for the judge presiding, the laws she’s trying you for violating, and the authority by which she does so. So when this movie says that

Contrary to popular belief, The Crown is not the royal family or the British monarch. The Crown is the private corporate city-state of London.

It is completely wrong, in the way that you would be completely wrong if you saw the headline of a case called, say, The State of Massachusetts v. Jones taking place in Westborough, Massachusetts and concluded that Westborough was actually the state of Massachusetts, and that the place usually known as Massachusetts was actually just “private property” of Westborough. So, the false claims all pour out of this fundamental error. There are so many errors that in this case I have simply hyperlinked from the claim to a refutation of it after it is made:

[The London Corporation] is also the headquarters of royal Freemasonry [not correct] and the organization known as The Crown [absurd]. The Crown [sic] has a council of twelve councilors who rule the corporation [not really] under a mayor, called the Lord Mayor. The Lord Mayor and his twelve-member councilors who sit in for thirteen of the world’s thirteen most powerful banking family [what?. This ring of thirteen families includes the Rothschild family, the Warburg family, the Oppenheimer family, and the Schiff family [no firms there are “owned” by any of these people, and nine of them are either political bureaucrats or representatives of publicly-held firms]. [They] hold land in ‘worldwide crown colonies like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand [this is specifically refuted in the basic principles of ’Crown ‘ law].

It’s difficult to offer a more in-depth refutation of something that has absolutely no basis in reality whatsoever. The very next sentence in the narration describes Parliament as a “public front” for the City of London, which is so wrong from so many angles the English language lacks the phrases to describe its magnitude.

Like the city-state of London and the Vatican, a third city-state was created was created in 1982. That city-state is known as the District of Columbia and is located on 10 square miles in the heart of Washington...

...If you’re scratching your head and trying not to laugh at anyone who believes that the District of Columbia didn’t exist until 1982, join the club.

The creation of the District of Columbia is part of the U.S. Constitution:

[Article 1, Section 8]. The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; To borrow money on the credit of the United States; To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes; To establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States; To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures; To provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States; To establish post offices and post roads; To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries; To constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court; To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations; To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water; To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years; To provide and maintain a navy; To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces; To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions; To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

To exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States, and to exercise like authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state in which the same shall be…

This claim, which is merely farcical, is just the first in a row of bizarreness that characterize this section (even among the previous sections). The narrator next claims that the laws of the District of Columbia (part of a “separate Constitution,” she claims, much in the same way that any other set of town codes would be characterized as ‘a separate Constitution’ – incorrectly) are “operating under a tyrannical Roman law known as Lex Fori [which wasn’t actually a Roman law],” for which she provides absolutely no evidence (and which are completely refuted by taking even a cursory look at Washington, DC’s laws. Then come the atomic bombs:

A sobering study of the signed treaties and charters between Britain and the united state exposes a shocking truth: the United States has always been and still is a British crown colony. King James I was famous for not just changing the bible into the King James Version but for singing the first charter of Virginia in 1606. That charter granted America’s British forefathers a license to settle and colonize America. The charter also guaranteed that future kings and queens of England would have sovereign authority over all the citizens and colonized land in America stolen from the Indians.

And don’t worry, before you can even remind yourself that the Continental Congress was established for a reason, and that whole five-year war of independence thing ending with British surrender actually happened for a reason the narrator has a truly daffy line of reasoning to counter historical fact with:

After America declared its independence from England the Treaty of 1783 was signed. That treaty specifically identifies the King of England as the “Prince of the United States and specifically contradicts the belief that America won the War of Independence... if America had really won the War of Independence it would never have agreed to pay debts and reparations to the King of England.

Here is the beginning of the Treaty of Paris (the so-called ‘Treat of 1783’), where Prince George the Third is identified – and yes, this is all one sentence:

It having pleased the Divine Providence to dispose the hearts of the most serene and most potent Prince George the Third, by the grace of God, king of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, defender of the faith, duke of Brunswick and Lunebourg, arch- treasurer and prince elector of the Holy Roman Empire etc., and of the United States of America, to forget all past misunderstandings and differences that have unhappily interrupted the good correspondence and friendship which they mutually wish to restore, and to establish such a beneficial and satisfactory intercourse , between the two countries upon the ground of reciprocal advantages and mutual convenience as may promote and secure to both perpetual peace and harmony…

Let’s parse this carefully because it never refers to George III as “Prince of the United States.” George III is named “king of Great Britain, France, and Ireland,” “defender of the faith, duke of Brunswick and Lunebourg,” “arch-treasurer and prince elector” of the Holy Roman Empire “etc.” “and of the United States of America.” Why is there is parsing between the Holy Roman Empire and the United States of America? Why is “etc.” in there?

Because a “prince elector” is not a prince. A prince elector is a rank that only existed in the Holy Roman Empire at the time. There was no such thing as a “prince elector” in the thirteen colonies. That’s why George III is simply described as someone who is “of the United States of America,” that is, someone who has a relationship of some kind with those states, not a “prince” or “sovereign” over it – of course, the very first article of the treaty reads

Article 1:

His Brittanic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz., New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be free sovereign and independent states, that he treats with them as such, and for himself, his heirs, and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety, and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof.

This is the very first article of the treaty. No one even remotely intellectually honest could have made this error. The narrator of this movie is deliberately and openly lying to her audience. Doubly so when she ponders that “if America had won the war of independence, it would never have agreed to pay George III reparations” afterwards, as if the concept of suing for peace did not exist, whereby somebody doesn’t lose his personal assets over his engagement in activities to which he was legally bound. Never mind that this compromise was probably necessary to ensure that the war did not continue for another decade until every Royalist on the continent was dead, but absconding with George III’s private assets (his business investments) in retribution for him holding up the duties to which he was legally bound (advancing the agenda of his empire) would be not only nonsensical but probably legally impossible given the lack of legal infrastructure in the young United States – recall the Articles of Confederation disaster. Not that suing for peace was basically the only way that wars ended in the imperial age anyway, or anything.

And so, when the narrator ponders that the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was designed to “make the president subservient to the King of England,” it should go without saying that this is complete fraud. The Thirteenth Amendment is the Amendment that outlaws slavery and reads thus:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The end.

In her rush to expound upon as many ludicrous conspiracy theories as she can in as little time as possible, the narrator forgot to mention that any reference to this “Titles of Nobility Amendment” is historically unsound and spits in the face of the fact that this version of an Amendment was shot down when it was proposed. Once again, this is a claim that someone who had actually done their research could not have honestly made, as is the subsequent claim that the costs of the American Revolution made Americans themselves “debt-slaves to the King of England,” as Continental Congress is the body that actually agreed to pay the soldiers who sacrificed for the birth of the United States.



And, of course, it wouldn’t be a conspiracy movie without reference to the Federal Reserve Bank. The narrator begins by referring to the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank the “biggest theft in American history” that handed “total control of the economy to the Rothschild banksters [sic].” From here on until the end of the series, the narrator will use the word “bankster” for pretty much any person of Jewish descent or person who works in any part of the private sector. And as with most conspiracy theory movies this one seems to have no idea that there is not one “Federal Reserve Bank,” but that it’s a system of quasi-publicly-owned banks throughout the United States.

The makers of this video also seem to have no idea what the functions of the Fed are or why it was created in the first place. The idea of a nationally-chartered bank has been in and out of practice throughout U.S. history. The first Federal Bank existed from 1791-1811 to help stabilize currency values post-War of Independence, then lost public support and niche value after currency became stable; it was called back into existence during the Civil War to help manage Union war effort funding efficiently, then disappeared again as its usefulness was lost (reminiscent of why the Templar banks died out); then finally returned as a permanent fixture after two key events: the panic of 1893 and the panic of 1907.

In the first case, investors from Europe and North America under J.P. Morgan’s aegis came together to invest $65 million in the government entirely through private-sector means, to stabilize the dollar. In the second, United Copper had outlined an ambitious project to monopolize the copper industry that attracted large investments by many of the biggest banks; as the bid for monopoly fell, so fell the banks. After a night of last-minute negotiations, J.P. Morgan, George F. Baker, James Stillman, George Cortelyou, John D. Rockefeller, and many other prominent banking industry leaders agreed to invest enough in Federal and state banks to “keep American credit solvent.”

What’s important to note is that the average American did not want J.P. Morgan’s help. Though he and other titans of industry had essentially saved the country’s economy, they failed to convince anyone that they had done so for any reason other than personal long-term gain. Just like in today’s credit crisis, where the Fed is being perceived suspiciously for proposing to drop $700 billion into America’s bank and mortgage industry, people did not want the undue influence of the wealthy into their economy, for better or for worse.

That is why the fundamental result of the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank has a more than slightly ironic true meaning when compared with the wild hysteria of conspiracy theorists: its creation fundamentally weakened the positions of the same billionaires who had previously been relied on in times of panic. Every Federal Reserve Bank’s board is created through the elections of various regional banks, and has been since 1913. And, of course, as another federal agency, federal banks can be and often are regulated into a corner by Congress. For the “greatest theft in the history of the world,” this act did perhaps more than any prior in America’s history to make sure wealth stayed in the hands of the average American.

This is yet another point that I think is lost on conspiracy theorists. The creation of the Federal Reserve Bank was actually a mitigation of out-of-control risk-taking, and is still today the greatest guarantor of a functioning economy the American government can provide. It simply provides the oversight that the previously shrouded-in-darkness investment system had relied on to create the shaky and shady deals that led to the numerous panics that necessitated the Fed’s creation. The exact same problems exist today due to three decades of anti-regulatory spirit. However, considering many conspiracy theorists are libertarians, their own point is farcically contradictory: they oppose free market investment structures (as Ring of Power’s repeated hollow ad hominem attacks against the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Morgans, etc. will demonstrate), and oppose the standard, democratically-created and democratically-run Federal Banking System (which, by the way, is not privately owned). Some people simply cannot be pleased.

Ring of Power also states that the Fed is “never audited and never pays taxes,” which is also complete fraud, as “all Federal Reserve Banks and branches are audited and examined regularly,” and the Fed

The Board of Governors, the Federal Reserve Banks, and the Federal Reserve System as a whole are all subject to several levels of audit and review. Under the Federal Banking Agency Audit Act (enacted in 1978 as Public Law 95-320), which authorizes the Comptroller General of the United States to audit the Federal Reserve System, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has conducted numerous reviews of Federal Reserve activities. In addition, the Board's Office of Inspector General (OIG) audits and investigates Board programs and operations as well as those Board functions delegated to the Reserve Banks. Completed and active GAO reviews and completed OIG audits, reviews, and assessments are listed in the Board’s Annual Report (before 2002, the reviews were listed in the Board's Annual Report: Budget Review).

The Board's financial statements, and its compliance with laws and regulations affecting those statements, are audited annually by an outside auditor retained by the OIG. The financial statements of the Reserve Banks are also audited annually by an independent outside auditor. In addition, the Reserve Banks are subject to annual examination by the Board. The Board's financial statements and the combined financial statements for the Reserve Banks are published in the Board's Annual Report.

Not to mention the fact that whether or not “The Fed” paid taxes would be a moot point, as it would be absurd for the federal government to tax one particular federal asset. Federal agencies are funded by the federal budget, so to tax itself for the budget that was allocated to it would simply be a waste of time – Congress can and does accomplish a functionally identical but faster end to this question by simply limiting Fed funding. Its feasible to say that the person or people who made this movie don’t know how taxes work or how agency funding works, so this rather silly paragraph was necessary.

The narrator also speculates that the Fed is a “money cartel” designed to deliberately enrich the “banksters,” so it’s also time for a brief economics lesson.



Presenting the fundamental welfare theorem of economics. Suppliers have higher incentive to sell as their potential gains get higher, and demanders (consumers) have a higher incentive to buy as prices get lower towards their value preferences. At some point for every market, assuming rational actors and homogenous goods, there is an equilibrium point (Q*, P*). At that point, demanders have a maximum amount of utility gain as they would’ve been willing to pay any price between P* and the upper half of the demand curve – and vice versa for suppliers. Shifting the price up or down would result in some inefficiency, either for buyers, or for sellers.

But now let’s say that the supplying firms organize into a cartel, which is basically just a monopoly made up of lots of firms. If that happens, and the market is truly monopolized, the suppliers can set prices – and they’ll set them at the point where average variable costs intersect with the supply graph (which is where, purely from a suppliers’ perspective, every dollar being spent on variable costs is generating some level of profit):



As you can see, the consumer loses out but has no other options in this market because the market is monopolized. The suppliers are now making every possible dime that they can and getting the most possible bang for their buck, but the consumer has had her gains encroached upon and there’s now a deadweight loss area, which is an area where net gains are not realized. A monopoly works basically the same way.

But the economists in the room have already noticed that something’s up: the firm that breaks from the cartel stands to make enormous gains. If one firm breaks out of the cartel and moves forward even a tiny bit, to say, (Qm-1, Pm+1), it will be charging lower prices than any other firm on the market. And, assuming goods are more or less homogenous, that means that the cartel-breaker will corner the market. Then, in order to compete, the cartel firms will move down, to (Qm-2, Pm+2), (Qm-3, Pm+3)…(Q*, P*). If there were a “bankster cartel,” as this movie imagines, rather than a regulated market (to mitigate the various inefficiencies of information asymmetry, supplier power, etc.) as reality presents us with, every one of these “banksters” could maximize their wealth by simply wandering away from the fold.

To counter this argument, “Ring of Power” will have to move into absolute absurdity and bigotry, as will be shown shortly.

Meandering along, the narrator makes sure to mention that the Washington Monument was “designed by a Freemason” even though there’s no evidence that he was and this claim is circumspect in its implications because the Washington Monument was built as a winner of a contest, not by commission. Furthermore,

The construction of a monument to honor George Washington was first considered by the Continental Congress in 1783. At the time of his death, and during the next three decades, Congress neglected to take definite action on many additional proposals for the erection of a suitable memorial. In 1833, the Washington National Monument Society was organized by influential citizens of the National Capital who undertook the building of a "great National Monument to the memory of Washington at the seat of the Federal Government."

The progress of the society was slow at first. By 1847, however, $87,000 (including interest) had been collected by popular subscription. A design submitted by Robert Mills, a well-known architect, was selected. It provided for a decorated obelisk 600 feet high which was to rise from a circular colonnaded building 100 feet high and 250 feet in diameter. This temple was to be an American pantheon, a repository for statues of Presidents and national heroes, containing a colossal statue of George Washington.

The original design, however, was greatly altered in the course of construction and the present monument - a hollow shaft without decoration or embellishment - has little in common with Mills' elaborate plan. The proportions of Mills' shaft, which were at variance with traditional dimensions of obelisks, were altered to conform to the classical conception, thus producing an obelisk that for grace and delicacy of outline is unexcelled by any in Egypt.

On July 4, 1848, the cornerstone was laid with elaborate Masonic ceremonies. The trowel used by Washington at the laying of the cornerstone of the Capitol in 1793 was used on this occasion.

So in order for the monuments of Washington, DC to be part of a “grand conspiracy,” we need:
(1)Over a century of concerted effort by a Freemasonic elite specifically to build a pointy tower in Washington, DC.
(1a)A reason to potentially expose their, er, millennia-long occupation of the global seats of power (see below) in the name of a tourist attraction.
(1b)The ability to rule the world but the inability to keep TourOfDC.Org from announcing that your plans were touched off by “elaborate Masonic rituals.
(2)The deliberate twisting of the designs of a guy who was probably not a Freemason over the course of a century to make it, er, more Ancient-Egypt-ey (sort of, see below).

We also need to basically forget why obelisks and pyramids are popular designs in early architecture.

It is a popular meme that “nobody knows” how the oldest obelisk structures were built, but this is plainly untrue, as many accounts of their construction remain. As one would intuitively guess, the easiest way to hoist up an obelisk is with opposing teams of rope-bearers on either side slowly lifting it up. While the term “obelisk” is generally used to describe the religious icons spread throughout the Egyptian empire from modern Ethiopia to Israel, the Mayans, Rome (almost certainly independently of stealing them from Egypt), Byzantium, and virtually any other place with the materials to build them. The same with pyramid-shaped structures, which are found the world over. Why?

The answer is, as usual, the one that makes the most intuitive sense, best fits the evidence, and is most loathed by conspiracy theorists: it’s the easiest. A pyramid shape, whereby each successive floor weighs less and is smaller than the previous one, was pretty much the only shape that primitive, not-very-good building materials could accommodate (and even then, many obelisks crumbled when their builders tried to raise them up). This would also happen to explain why pyramids went out of fashion as soon as new ways of building large buildings were found.

So, unfortunately for the makers of this video, arguing that every obelisk on earth is somehow interconnected by a parent civilization is like arguing that every pointed weapon or fishing rod originated within one mind rather than independently in many places, as the evidence dictates. This metaphor is also overly generous because most cultures pyramids were shaped differently from each other, from elaborate stone-carved step pyramids in Chichan Itza to big freakin’ piles of hay in Nordic lands.

And it doesn’t help just how deep they carry this error, either.

"What exactly is an obelisk? Obelisks are phallic-shaped monuments honoring the pagan god of ancient Egyptian called Amun-Ra. The spirit of this pagan god is said to reside in this obelisk."

This is all part of what I call cargo cult history but most will better recognize as Da Vinci Code History or ‘pseudohistory.’ It’s a bit of a parse game to discern history from fake history, but basically, pseudohistory is an unfounded even if plausible narrative of history that, as a general rule, causally links people and events in ways that mainstream, academic historical study would consider extreme. It’s one of these things you know when you see, and you will see it here like you’ve never seen it anywhere.

It’s demonstrably false from the sources above that obelisks were designed to honor the Egyptian “deity” Amun-Ra as most were built either in honor of Pharaohs themselves, to other deities, or not by Egyptians. In fact, it isn’t even really correct to refer to “Amun-Ra” as “Amun-Ra” because first and foremost Amun was originally an anthropomorphic concept, vaguely akin to Tien in Chinese theosophical history. By the time Amun was merged with the sun “deity” (similar story there), Ra, obelisks had already been built to other deities. It goes without saying that no record survives of Amun’s soul supposing to be trapped in about thirty places.

Then, as with the transition from the previous episode, this one decides to end on a swing for the bleachers of woo-woo. It jumps quite suddenly to a farcical take on Hebrew etymology and claims:

Vowels were interchangeable in the Biblical Hebrew language…[so] Amum can be spelled Amen, Amon, Amun, Omon, or Amun… Today, "Amen" is one of the most popularly used words in the world…Without realizing it, people all over the world are praising Amun.

The mind is indeed boggled. In Ancient Hebrew vowels were not interchangeable, in fact, the demonstrable differences between them were integral to much of the language, Never mind that, of course, you would not spell Amen “A-M-E-N” in Ancient Hebrew (as those letters don’t even exist outside of the Roman alphabet).

Because I’ve heard this claim about vowels before I looked into it, and it seems that this argument is generally only made by conspiracy theorists and people trying to confirm the historicity of the Bible prior to the advent of modern historical study. One website makes the perhaps hyperbolic claim that it is “one of the biggest scams of all time is that ancient Hebrew had no vowel-letters.”

Oh, plus this claim is absolutely silly. The entire etymology of much of Western religious language is a deliberate lie to fool people into praising an Egyptian spirit? “Ring of Power” anticipates the laughter of its saner viewers and counters that in Kings 1:36 in the Bible (some translation not based on King James’s, of course), the line

Benaiah the son of Jehoiada answered the king and said, "Amen! Thus may the LORD, the God of my lord the king, say.

demonstrates that the word “Amen” means “the Lord of my lord,” using the lower-case “the lord” here to mean, you know, the upper-case one (ironically, in the video they do indeed use the King James Version). Putting the phrase into even an ounce of Biblical context:

28 Then King David said, "Call in Bathsheba." So she came into the king's presence and stood before him.

29 The king then took an oath: "As surely as the LORD lives, who has delivered me out of every trouble, 30 I will surely carry out today what I swore to you by the LORD, the God of Israel: Solomon your son shall be king after me, and he will sit on my throne in my place."

31 Then Bathsheba bowed low with her face to the ground and, kneeling before the king, said, "May my lord King David live forever!"

32 King David said, "Call in Zadok the priest, Nathan the prophet and Benaiah son of Jehoiada." When they came before the king, 33 he said to them: "Take your lord's servants with you and set Solomon my son on my own mule and take him down to Gihon. 34 There have Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anoint him king over Israel. Blow the trumpet and shout, 'Long live King Solomon!' 35 Then you are to go up with him, and he is to come and sit on my throne and reign in my place. I have appointed him ruler over Israel and Judah."

36 Benaiah son of Jehoiada answered the king, "Amen! May the LORD, the God of my lord the king, so declare it. 37 As the LORD was with my lord the king, so may he be with Solomon to make his throne even greater than the throne of my lord King David!"

laughs this claim out of the room. (Disclaimer: this Blog does not endorse any particular religion, or even religion in general)

But the narrator of this video can’t seem to avoid throwing out every absurd pun in the name of her junk hypothesis as possible, and so this is where we end up:



…No foolin.’ Given what you’re already seen here, and given the previous references to The Da Vinci Code, guess who they’re going to talk about next?



Episode three in the video series opens with a pointless montage playing angry music and showing pictures possibly pertaining to the various wars between Israel and the Arab world and flashing the words “7,000 SETTLERS” several times. This once again is presumably building towards some point, but none is explicitly given. Until, of course, it decides that

Israel has written human history, and it is also writing the future of humanity.

It wouldn’t be a conspiracy theory video without not-so-veiled threats against the freest nation in the Middle East. But as shown this one takes pseudohistory to new depths, so the narrator moves along, deciding that there was a band of roving warriors that entered Egypt known as the “Habarus” – how the maker of this video singlehandedly reached consensus on an old archeological argument that does not in fact align with most of the evidence is not given, and ”most scholars do not now support this view.“

Oh, and the Habarus were also the Hyksos (or not, or even the exact opposite), and they conquered Canaan (which may or may not have even existed at the time), and then “changed its name to Israel,” while they were also the Pharaohs of Hyksos-dominated Egypt. (…You don’t say.)

In 135AD the name was once again changed to Palestine after the Romans conquered the land. As recently as 1948 the name was officially changed back to Israel again by the Hebrew Zionists who slaughtered and drove the Palestinian people from their homes, land and villages after WW2.

You are left to decide for yourself why this factually-inaccurate break in narrative flow is here.

The best way to understand what’s really going on in the world today is to journey back in time and dig up the ancient secrets of the past. Those ancient secrets have been hidden by the ruling class beneath the shifting sands of Egypt for more than 4,000 years.

Historian travel guides like Josephus [edited posthumously by 1st-century Christians, but saying absolutely nothing about ancient Egypt aside from some specious commentary on the Habarus], Herodotus [oops, wrong half of the Middle East]…as well as writers like [incomprehensible], Ralph Ellis [who wrote, King Jesus: from Kam to Camelot: King Jesus of Judaea was King Arthur of England…no, seriously] and Neils Peter Lemke [who actually appears to have some quite interesting things to say but few that would pertain to (spoiler alert) Jesus Christ being a Pharaoh (I warned you)] provide flashlights into the past.

Then, after going on about how the “Hebrews” were supposedly “in charge” of a series of shifting, bloodily-replaced Pharaohs throughout all of history, the narrator states

Archeology experts have found absolutely no evidence whatsoever of Hebrew Jews ever living in slavery in Egypt or their exodus… There is not one shred of archeological evidence for Moses or any of the Bible's cast of Hebrew characters. There is however plenty of evidence for the existence of Pharaohs whom these Biblical characters are based on.

First off, as shall be shown, whichever direction you try to go with this conclusion you will be wrong. It’s also a complete contradiction of what the entire episode until now has been about. Did the Hebrews exist, or didn’t they?

Later on, the video is going to claim that these insidious Jews have been controlling all of history from “behind the scenes” because their religion leads them to believe that they must bring on the “war of Revelations” (…from that book of the Bible not ascribed to Jewish beliefs) and that this will bring them, er, a One-World Communist Government, but also the Apocalypse…you’ll see. So which came first, their religious beliefs, or their retrofitted religious beliefs designed to mask the fact that they were once Pharaohs? Without their religious identity, what drove them to see world conquest in the first place?

Please note that the implications of the preceding paragraph refute this entire series.

"The Hebrews were not a race of people as once thought,” the movie continues, without irony. “They were a Semitic and Asiatic class of foreign workers who migrated into Egyptian lands as craftsmen and builders.” A Semitic “class?” This claims is as usual completely false because it is well established genetically, historically, and ethnographically that not only is there a basic “Semitic” group, but that this group has splintered off into distinct groups of people that include Jews and Arabs. Furthermore, it is well established that “Semitic” is a family of language that lexically parses Akkadian, Aramaic, Ugaritic, and Phoenician. This parsing includes some interesting distinctions between the Jews and the “Canaanites:”

Hebrew is the surviving member of North Central Semitic languages, the language “of Israel today, Aramaic, Ugaritic, and Phoenician, where the two latter no longer exists.” But the real beef of the refutation of this movie comes when we look into how the Phoenician Canaanites (who this movie calls just the Canaanites…who are really the Hyksos…who are really the Habarus…who are really the Jews…who are really the Canaanites…):

The people of Phoenicia, are now referred to as Phoenicians, even if before 1200 BCE we see that there are no distinctions in descriptions or names between them and the Canaanites. We do no[t] know if they represented one ethnic unity, or several. But from all sources, we see that they used one language, belonging to the Semitic family, now referred to as Phoenician.
According to one theory the Phoenicians were immigrants coming to the region around 3000 BCE. If this theory is true, it is furthermore possible that their origin was in the Persian Gulf, as this is stated in older traditions. But there are no forms of historical or archaeological evidence for this.

More likely however, is that the ancestors of the Phoenicians were the original population of the area. Yet it is room for the theory of immigration, as this could have involved a limited immigration, with the change of language and some traditions as a result.
If the first theory is correct, upon their arrival in Lebanon, it is quite likely that they mixed with an indigenous people. And it is quite likely that the original Phoenicians mixed with neighbour people, as well as other trading peoples. In general, one could say that today's Lebanese are direct descendants of the Phoenicians, but migrations and mixing of ethnic groups have been a part history ever since the decline of the Phoenicia.


…

In every Phoenician city, the wealthy merchant aristocrats had certain rights protecting them from the full strength of the law. Under the aristocracy, were the lesser businessmen, craftsmen, dealers, shopkeepers and entrepreneurs. Below this group in social standing were the normal working man, and at the bottom, slaves. Still, slaves were protected to some extent by the law, and could earn money and even buy their own freedom.

Two very important inventions are ascribed to the Phoenicians, glass and the alphabet. However, both were techniques imported from others — glass from the Egyptians and the alphabet from the more southern Canaanites. But it was the Phoenicians who invented the glass blowing technique, and who stated mass production and exports of glass.

So when the video goes on to claim that the Canaanites/Hyksos/Habarus/Jews were all “migrant workers” who infested and "grew to positions of power and wealth in Egypt," it’s got history absolutely, 100% wrong. Most likely, Phoenician was absorbed into mainline Hebrew as indigenous Hebrew Palestinian culture grew its own merchant class, and trade with Egypt was the norm. To go back to the old “Who built the Pyramids” thing, most archeologists say it was indigenous Egyptian seasonal workers. So that throws out another key piece of this series: There is no plausible mechanism by which the Hebrews could have ‘taken over’ Egypt. Furthermore, it spits in the face of basic history to argue that this version of events could be even slightly reconciled with what we actually know about where the Hyksos, Hebrews, Phoenicians, and Egyptians came from and went to.

This video then begins to essentially refute itself by going along with an Old Testament historiography and arguing that "Abraham, who was born in the town of Ur in 2055BC" was originally named “Abram.” The movie contradicts itself here yet again because this is four hundred years before the supposed Hyksos invasion (which probably never even happened, confirming what we speculated on above). Anyway, “Abram…married his beautiful sister Sarai,” then changed their names to "Egyptian names," Abraham and Sarah (which are not Ancient Egyptian names). Then, "once they migrated to Egypt Abraham turned over his wife to the Pharaoh as a sex slave and was rewarded with gold and silver." This is a warping of Biblical narrative with, well, goofy speculation. For someone who goes at great lengths to essentially defraud the last two centuries of archeological study, this narrator appears to have no problem accepting the same myths that, uh, she once called completely false at face value.

Thus follows a rant against circumcision that insults the narrator’s sensibilities because its practice "implied that God made a mistake in design" and has "more to do with mark of Hebrew ownership than hygiene," which (yawn) isn’t really how cultural transmission works, and is simply junk theology. It’s also disingenuous, because of course the narrator spends ten minutes of the movie ranting against the moral hypocrisy of the Western version of a deity.

"Who was the Pharaoh that the Bible neglected to identify when Abraham and Sarah reached Egypt? His name was Amenemhet I and he ruled Egypt from 1991BC-1962BC" (around a century before the narrator says when she believe Abraham lived), she concludes, getting her dates wrong simultaneously. "Is there any other evidence connecting Amenemhet I to Abraham? According to Egyptian history Amenemhet is not of royal blood and his family origin is unknown," she states, then tries to back up her claims by offering “Egyptology experts believe he seized the throne after murdering Mentuhotep.”

All of this is simply untrue.

King of Ancient Egypt, founder of the 12th Dynasty, ruling 1985-1956, 31 years.
Amenemhet was vizier under King Mentuhotep 4, allowing him to build a strong position in the administration of Thebes. Upon Mentuhotep's death, there was no strong contender to the throne, and Amenemhet took power and had his opponents defeated.

During his reign the capital of Egypt was moved from Thebes to a new capital south of Memphis, which he named Itj-Tawny. Amenemhet brought prosperity back to a troubled Egypt, he limited the power of the nobility, and he had the government reorganized.

He was also active in neighbouring countries, like Libya, Sinai and Nubia. He secured the borders toward Asia by having built the Walls of the Prince. Many fortresses were built in Nubia, increasing his control over this region of rebellious tribes.

A number of monuments were erected in his name. A text possibly containing instructions he gave to his son Sesostris 1, has been found.

In the 20th year of his reign he made Sesostris co-regent, putting him in control of the army and foreign policy. The co-regency lasted 10 years. Sesostris could peacefully ascend the throne upon his father's death.

And then the video seals its own coffin. Sarcophagus?

In 1818 Antonio Lebolo made a revolutionary discovery that identified Abraham as an Eypgtian Pharaoh.

He exhumed eleven Egyptian mummies along with rolls of papyri inscrolled with hieroglyphic writings and drawings... One of those drawings was interpreted by Mormon Joseph Smith and his Egyptologists as Abraham sitting on the Pharaoh's throne. Abraham's name was also deciphered on a roll of papyrus. Joseph Smith published his controversial findings in the Book of Abraham in 1842 and was murdered two years later. Today the only Egyptian pyramid tomb forbidden to the public is the tomb of Pharaoh Amenemhet I who many Biblical experts now say is the Biblical Abraham."

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"Their common remains are concealed inside the famous Ark of the Covenant."

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The evidence shows that the ancestral patriarch is Amenemhet I and that his biblical name is Abraham.

Without meaning to offend our proud Mormon-believing constituency…this is absolutely false, ridiculous, wrong, and a sham.

"“It is difficult to deal seriously with Joseph Smith’s impudent fraud."
-Archibald Sayce, professor of Egyptology at Oxford.

As The Other SkepTwin writes:

At some point in the mid-1830s, about five years after "translating" the bogus "Book of Mormon" hoax, Joseph Smith finds himself in possession of what is basically a traveling sideshow of treasures from farthest Egypt. He finds some scrolls written in a version of low-to-high ancient Egyptian and sits down to translate them. It is to his benefit that the scrolls were not rediscovered by some curious curators of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, with the final piece not being available to the hands of professionals until it was discovered hidden away in an LDS archive in the 1960s.

Smith's "translation" tells a story about the patriarch of a long-extinct Mesopotamian theocracy, who went by the clever moniker "The Father we lift up" (Abraham). This is the part of Mormon canon that talks about this Abraham traveling to Egypt and learning all about that ridiculous Kolob gobbledygook you often hear brought up in many a mirthfully heartless critique of Mormon theology (even Jack Chick has picked up on that this is retarded; http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0061/0061_01.asp). It opens with a neat little story about the barbaric Egyptian gentiles trying to ritually murder Abraham until an angel intervenes to save him (an unabashed, uncreative reprint of the Isaac story), and then the next three chapters are spent talking about how there are many gods, and that our God lives near a star called Kolob.

It is almost impossible to enumerate precisely what Smith's translation got wrong since there is literally nothing in his fanciful fairytale that is at all germane to the content of the so-called Joseph Smith Papyri. Taking the first facsimile, which depicts the scene from which Smith translated the pagans attacking Abraham:

-Smith has labeled Osiris's icon as the Holy Spirit, Osiris's physical body as Abraham's, and Anubis as some, previously unknown gentile priest. It may seem odd that someone with the traditional depiction of Anubis's body would have a human head (since Anubis had the head of a jackal), but it just magically happens to be the case that this off detail of the papyrus is one of the exact lacunae that Smith himself "restored" while making his translation. That means that he mistook Anubis's body for a human body and literally just drew in a human head where there should be a Jackal's.

-He has labeled the jars under Osiris's funerary bed (which Smith refers to as a sacrificial altar, even though in this picture Osiris is already dead) as "idolatrous gods," even though these jars contain GOOD things in the language of real Egyptologists: they are jars protecting the removed organs of the deceased so that he can still use them in the afterlife. Note that the "gentile priest" is holding a surgical instrument, though this is in a malformed lacuna of the image that Smith himself may have restored, so it is impossible to what was actually in this section of the picture.

-He has taken a perfectly lovely artistic device, which is purely for decoration, at the bottom of the image and mislabeled it as an Egyptian representation of the "pillars of heaven."

-Smith describes another ornamental device as the "Shauman," or, the Egyptian version of the One True God's heaven. "Shauman" is not a word known to exist in any Egyptian language, ancient or modern.

Then there is the second facsimile. It is a circular image that depicts a complicated set of instructions to be buried with the dead so that they would know what to say to this or that god when it came time to journey to the afterlife. Smith has completely invented a cosmology being dictated to Abraham by an angel. Again, saying what exactly he got wrong is difficult because literally no part of his "translation" matches anything in a real translation of the second Smith Papyrus made by someone who can actually speak Egyptian. Among the more glaring errors are:

-The entire plot.

-The sermon from the angel talks about a One True God and such, but the papyrus plainly depicts numerous Egyptian gods. The creator-god Chhm-Re is actually present in the picture, but Smith's translation knows nothing about this (or the names of any of the other gods in the picture).

-He misrepresents a depiction of Horus's four sons as "the four corners of the Earth."

-A supplication to the Egyptian creator-god is translated into some gobbledygook about whether or not humans will ever be able to figure out the scope of the numbers being used in the astronomical calculations used in locating Kolob.

-Much of the rest of the papyrus has been deliberately altered by Mormon meddlers. The only other legible section actually talks about the city Heliopolis, but Smith has translated it into some kind of utterly bogus Lord's Prayer.

The third facsimile supposedly depicts Abraham lecturing on the finer points of geometry and astronomy to the Egyptian high court. It talks about slaves and princes and so on, but there is nothing even plausibly mistakable for such figures in the actual third facsimile. Everyone in the picture is in fact an Egyptian god, and Smith has gotten quite literally the entire thing wrong.

Mormon apologists are often so embarrassed by this that they in some cases question its authenticity. The FLDS position seems to be that anything Smith translated without the assistance of Moroni's magic rocks is completely illegitimate and that only the Book of Mormon is the liturgically correct forgery for them. Other Mormon "scholars" waffle back and forth between attacking the "official version" of the Papyri, drawing such uselessly broad "parallels" between the real translation and Smith's that it is transparently obvious that they have no real comeback (one scholar goes so far as to say that the Book of Abraham can be trusted because it talks about One True God in facsimile 2, and the real translation also talks about a highest Creator-God, ignoring the fact that the real translation also mentions dozens of other Egyptian gods and a plot that is completely different).

(End transmission. Q’APLA.)

Surprisingly enough, this in fact refutes the entire series outright.

The overarching premise of this series is that a tiny group of Jewish “banksters” has for thousands of years controlled the world’s wealth from gaining mastery over Egypt, once the financial capital of the world, then up through Rome, then through the Knights Templar, and so on down to our old friends J.P. Morgan and Larry Silverstein. This is all predicated on the belief that such mastery actually exists – and we have refuted that. It’s also predicated on the belief that global domination is any sort of imperative in Jewish theosophy – which is absurd. It also requires us to believe that Abraham and Amenemhet I were the same people, which we now know to be false. It requires you to take the words of a religious con artist at face value. It requires you to not know a thing about basic economics. It rests on fundamentally distorting history, and deliberately lying about what happened on 9/11.


But it’s all supposed to begin here, “beneath the shifting sands of Egypt.” This is the point in “Ring of Power” where it’s supposed to begin – and it doesn’t. Given all of this production’s ridiculous and fraudulent statements, when you put all of its mishmashed pieces together, nothing happens. Its subsequent claims – about Jesus being an emperor, about Hitler being willing to commit the Holocaust “because his grandmother was a native Jew” – become stillborn. If it can’t defend its claims about the economic tactics of Jewish people, about where this grand conspiracy came from, and about its activities over the past 4,000 years, the rest of it simply slides into a pool of incoherence.

Point by point, “Ring of Power” is dead in the water. Nothing that it said about the past 4,000 years, the histories of the United States, Egypt, London, Israel, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, the Crusades, the Knights Templar, the Federal Reserve System, archeology, history, science, anything is true or correct.

“Ring of Power” is the product of insanity. Anyone who even momentarily fell for its bizarre claims about the American Revolution or 9/11 set foot on a dangerous path, to a world where evidence does not matter, truth does not matter, and profound, all-consuming paranoia governs every second of every day. The only reason anyone could even countenance this piece is because it is clear that its creator or creators have a tenuous at best grasp of reality. To them, I can only say that I’m sorry. I’m sorry that no wakeup call has come. I’m sorry that this is where you are. I hope that this document might be a step forward.

To their viewers I cannot state with sufficient strength that you have been deluded and lied to. In no unequivocal terms, let us finally be certain: there is nothing in “Ring of Power,” and so it is no more.