« The Muslim Mosque New York City And Freedom of Religion in America | Brazil and Venezuela: Two Turning Point Elections this Fall » |
[Author’s Note: I am working on a Psychohistory analysis of one of the most popular websites on the Internet, DailyKos (Alexa Traffic Rank 4,025)]
Mentioning DailyKos to outsiders will provoke a rant about a leftwing gatekeeper website populated by left wing ignorant kooks kept in line by a sexist man working for the CIA.
Daily Kos is blog where pinko retard basement dwellers highlight the moar deluded of the leftard section of the tinfoil hat crowd's conspiracy theories about George W. Bush, conservatives, and the state of the nation. Articles on this shrill blog repeat how Bush stole the election ad infinitum, that Dick Cheney is a robot when he is actually just an eminence gris, and fantasize about Ann Coulter being a man. This last claim is particularly cruel in view of the Daily Kos viewpoint that shemales should always be identified as women.
The site is controlled by the CIA but not for the purpose of disinformation or gate keeping. The CIA run the site to manage the emotional band of the community just above apathy but below effective activism. A psychohistory case study explaining why it is important to keep the members of the Dailykos community engaged in the Democratic process is coming soon.
DailyKos is owned and operated by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and in one of those coincidences that don’t happen very often, was born September 11, 1971.
And speaking of 9/11 and 'Conspiracy Theories' in general, they are forbidden at DailyKos.
The FAQ (rules and guidelines for posting diaries)
DailyKos accepts that the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by agents of Al-Qaeda. It is forbidden to write diaries that:
“911 Truthers are Dummies” published at Dailykos on August 4 (below) and was my successful attempt at getting around the rules and guidelines.
My position on September 11:
I’ll get right to the point, I have read the books and watched the documentaries on September 11 for three years and the 9/11 official story:
Nineteen fanatical Arab hijackers, masterminded by an evil genius named Osama bin Laden, crash airplanes into steel skyscrapers because they “hate our freedom to consume” and inexplicably on 9/11 jet fuel, which is basically kerosene that burns at about 400c, took on the qualities of an explosive demolition agent, vaporizing 70 tons of aircraft into a puff of smoke and causing 110-story buildings to collapse into a pile of rubble. [1]
Is so stupid Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld didn’t expect you to believe it.
I will donate $10.00 for each comment (up to 150.00) to our favorite website, The Peoples Voice, for feedback from this community. My email address is mandrell2010@gmail.com.
911 Truthers are Dummies (hyperlink provided in case you want to read the comments at DailyKos. The Kogs missed the subtle message. My guess is that you guys will figure it out.)
By Katherine Smith, PhD
[DailyKos Disclaimer about why conspiracy theorists are consistently wrong. All conspiracy theories (C/T) can be reduced to a supposed discrepancy or anomaly in one official record or another. To the conspiracy theorists the holes in an “official story” are some kind of truth that conspirators are trying to cover up. However, because theorists rarely if ever have any coherent beginning-to-end narrative of what they think happened, the perceived discrepancies constitute the entire basis of their arguments.
What the conspiracy theorists consistently ignore (and rarely does anyone point out) is how simple it would be for the criminals to change or falsify the alleged discrepancy or anomaly. The act of doing so would be trivial compared to the magnitude of other acts the theorists claim the conspirators committed.]
September 11, 2001
It’s getting harder these days to avoid gullible progressive Democrats telling ludicrous fairy tales about 9/11.
MoveOn, WeAreChange, WorldCan’tWait and the 9/11 Truth movements have constructed an elaborately woven web of delusions and unsubstantiated hearsay about the events of 9/11 to the extent that a number of otherwise rational Democrats have actually fallen under their spell.
These theories come in every variety, but all reach essentially the same conclusion: that the U.S. government, or some shadowy group that controls it, organized the attacks as part of a master plan for global domination.
“Blaming some conspiracy within our government for the horrific attacks of September 11 mars the memories of all those lost on that day. There were errors and missteps in our government's response, to be sure, but the performance of our public servants was, on the whole heroic, not destructive.
Any explanation for the tragedy of September 11 must start and end with the facts. Those of us who live in the real world use the methods of science, the protocols of investigation, and the dictates of logic [to reject any government New World Order conspiracy].” Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report James Meigs, Popular Mechanics
According to most paranoid theorists, the smoking gun of 9/11 can be found on the Project for a New America (PNAC) website:
A plan written in 2000, entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century,” The treatise clearly showed that members of the Bush administration had planned to take military control of the Gulf region one way or another, long before the attacks of 9/11.
The PNAC website openly calls for a “transformation” of the U.S. military into an imperialistic force of global domination but goes on to note there was a problem: The American people would have to go along with the idea and so the “The process of transformation,” the plan said, “is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”
The Truthers have adopted that phrase as their mantra: like a new Pearl Harbor…like a new Pearl Harbor….like 9/11.
To them, there is no question that 9/11 constituted a catastrophic and catalyzing event. Their leading spokesman David Ray Griffin with connections to the New World Order wrote a best selling book, The New Pearl Harbor.
It never occurred to them that the U.S. Government would NEVER publish their plans for worldwide military hegemony on the PNAC website.
What are these people smoking?
George W. Bush played the part of being stupid really well for eight years but no one in their right mind would actually believe Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle would announce their secret plans for 9/11 on a website with an Alexa traffic rank of 942,906 and 1631 sites linking in.
But wait, Bush and Cheney were not behind 9/11 after all: it was a Zionist Israeli plot.
Thanks to the unmitigated stupidity of the five Israelis caught on tape dancing on 9/11 and Chris Bollyn’s recent discovery of “Israel’s Super-Termite” (nanothermite), we now know the September 11 attacks were to change the military equation in the Middle East.
And Chris Bollyn has the answer as to “how the Israeli government could possibly think they would get away with such an audacious and heinous crime of false-flag terrorism:”
“What they didn’t expect is that a few Americans would dig into the evidence and uncover every stone to find the real culprits. They certainly didn’t expect that a careful and independent scientific analysis of the dust would reveal that a nano-composite form of super-thermite was used to pulverize the World Trade Center.”
“What they didn’t expect is that a few Americans would dig…” I can hardly stop laughing!
But when I did stop laughing, I contacted Andrew Johnson at Check The Evidence and asked him the following questions:
Q) What is thermite anyway? Answer: Aluminum Powder and Iron Oxide (rust).
Fact: The exterior of WTC towers contained aluminum and there were some rusty beams inside the buildings. Therefore, we can dismiss any smoking gun theory of super-thermite because you would expect to find aluminum powder and iron oxide in the remains of the World Trade Center.
Q) What does thermite do to metal? Answer: It melts through it.
Q) What happened to the towers? Answer: They turned largely to dust.
Thermite cannot have been responsible for turning towers to dust. Let's see this nanothermite in action please!
The Unsupported And Frankly Embarrassing Conspiracy Theory of WTC 7
No essay on 9/11 would be complete without the dishonorable mention of the huge case of insurance fraud on the part of Larry Silverstein.
Was he planning to use the leftover money from the dumbest insurance scam in history to finance the New World Order?
Larry, as just about any of these lunatics with a tinfoil hat will tell you, is guilty because he admitted that he and the FDNY decided, jointly to demolish WTC 7 late in the afternoon of 9/11.
“I remember getting a call from the, er, fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, ‘We’ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.’ And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse.”
This statement is taken as an admission by just about every conspiracy theorist that Silverstein wanted to demolish the building so he could make a profit when he collected the insurance money.
Huh? Did I miss something?
This story has so many holes it is hard to know where to start.
First of all, conspiracy theorists should get a dictionary before they put their foot in their mouth claiming he was using a demolition term when he said, “pull” the firemen from the building.
The only people who would believe his statement proves anything are those who would be stupid enough to go on national television during a 2002 PBS documentary and admit to demolishing their 47-story skyscraper. That wouldn’t be Larry Silverstein, click here to read his biography.
Other problems with a Controlled Demolition theory of WTC 7:
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released its report on the collapse of World Trade 7 in 2005. Investigators looked specifically at the possibility of explosives and wrote:
"Hypothetical blast events did not play a role in the collapse of WTC 7 and investigators "found no evidence whose explanation required invocation of a blast event. Moreover, the smallest charge capable of initiating column failure would have resulted in a sound level of 130 dB [decibels] to 140 dB at a distance of at least half a mile. Witnesses did not report hearing such a loud noise, nor is one audible on recordings of the collapse.”
Are we to assume Industrial Risk Insurers (IRI) forked over $861 million because their claims adjustors, investigators, personnel and board of directors all missed hearing Silverstein admit he “pulled it” on national television? Maybe no one at IRI ever read or listened to endless replays and reprints of Larry’s admission of guilt.
The implosion (not explosion) of WTC 7 was different from the twin towers.
WTC 7 had a small debris field as.
WTC 1 and WTC 2 showered debris in a wide radius as their frames essentially "peeled" outward. FEMA: WTC Study, Ch. 5 (05/02)
Were there two different types of thermite used on 9/11, one that showers inward and the other outward?
Controlled demolition (explosion) could never explain the implosion of any of the towers that collapsed on 9/11.
The Single Stupidest Insurance Fraud In History
Silverstein's best-case scenario was an insurance payout of $6.8 billion for the twin towers. Putting aside that the insurance companies refused to pay and settled for $4.55 billion and that he had a mortgage on the twin towers, the $10-12 billion to rebuild the towers would leave him with at least $4 billion deficit. And contrary to what you heard, the twin towers were quite profitable and had fairly high occupancy rates.
To recap, Larry Silverstein wanted the moneymaking towers destroyed so he could collect a net loss from insurance funds, not to mention the loss of rental income during the 10+ years it will take to re-build the Freedom Tower.
The Top 40 Reasons to Doubt “911 Truth”
The mother of 9/11 conspiracy sites, http://911truth.org/ allegedly started by Janice Mathews lists the Top 40 Reasons to Doubt the Official Story of September 11th, 2001 and makes you believe it was an Inside Job.
Below is an analysis and commentary of 23 of the “Top 40 Reasons.”
(7, 24, 25) Controlled Demolition Theory Debunked
The "Melted" Steel Claim
FACT: Jet fuel burns at 800° to 1500°F, that is not hot enough to melt steel (2750°F). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn't need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength—and that required exposure to much less heat.
The Puffs Of Dust Claim
FACT: Once each tower began to collapse, the weight of all the floors above the collapsed zone bore down with pulverizing force on the highest intact floor.
Like all office buildings, the WTC towers contained a huge volume of air. As they pancaked, all that air—along with the concrete and other debris pulverized by the force of the collapse—was ejected with enormous energy.
Demolition expert Van Romero regrets that his comments to the Albuquerque Journal became fodder for conspiracy theorists. "I was misquoted in saying that I thought it was explosives that brought down the building," he tells PM. "I only said that that's what it looked like."
Romero demanded a retraction from the Journal. It was printed on Sept. 22, 2001. "I felt like my scientific reputation was on the line." But emperors-clothes.com saw something else: "The paymaster of Romero's research institute is the Pentagon. "Conspiracy theorists came out saying that the government got to me. That is the farthest thing from the truth. This has been an albatross around my neck for three years."
The Seismic Spikes Claim
Seismographs at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., 21 miles north of the WTC, recorded the events of 9/11. "The strongest jolts were all registered at the beginning of the collapses, well before falling debris struck the earth," reports the web site WhatReallyHappened.com.
A columnist on Prisonplanet.com, a website run by radio talk show host Alex Jones and known disinformation agent, claims the seismic spikes (boxed area on Graph 1) are "indisputable proof that bombs brought down" the towers. The website reports that two seismologists at the observatory, Won-Young Kim and Arthur Lerner-Lam, support its findings when they said “each sharp spike of short duration consistent with a demolition-style implosion."
FACT: "There is no scientific basis for the conclusion that explosions brought down the towers," Lerner-Lam tells Popular Mechanics. "That representation of our work is categorically incorrect and not in context."
The report issued by Lamont-Doherty includes various graphs showing the seismic readings produced by the planes crashing into the two towers as well as the later collapse of both buildings.
WhatReallyHappened.com chooses to display only one graph (Graph 1), which shows the readings over a 30-minute time span.
On that graph, the 8 and 10-second collapses appear—misleadingly—as a pair of sudden spikes. Lamont-Doherty's 40-second plot of the same data (Graph 2) gives a much more detailed picture: the seismic waves—blue for the South Tower, red for the North Tower—start small and then escalate as the buildings rumble to the ground. Translation: no bombs. Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report James Meigs, Popular Mechanics
(3) Pentagon Strike
The Pentagon was hit 1 hour and 20 minutes after the terrorist attacks. Andrews Air Force Base was not involved in a response. What more proof do you need that 9/11 was an Inside Job.
Pilots for truth knew immediately 9/11 was an Inside Job because a pilot who could barely fly a Cessna would never be able to execute the difficult aerobatic maneuver in a Jumbo Jet required to strike the Pentagon on the just-renovated side opposite Rumsfeld’s offices. Why else was Hani Honjour chosen to hijack Flight 77?
(6) The Day And Possible Smoking Guns
Since everyone knows cell phones didn’t work at high altitudes in 2001, the faked calls made at 30,000 feet were intended to convince you it was an Inside Job. And when was the last time you called your mother during the stress of a hijacking and gave your first and last name?
Obstruction of high profile FBI Investigations appeared to the conspiracy theorist that high-level corruption and protection of criminal networks was going on in the FBI That is: Sibel Edmonds, Robert Wright, Coleen Rowley and Harry Samit, the "Phoenix Memo," David Schippers, the Bin Laden family, the "Bojinka" plot, and John O'Neil.
However, when considered in sum these “cover ups” don’t prove anything except they were an ingenious way to convince 9/11 Truthers it was an Inside Job.
(11) Insider Trading
Of all the stupid moves these dunderheads made on 9/11, the unknown speculators using foreknowledge of the events to profit on financial markets takes the cake.
"Put options" placed to short-sell the two airlines, WTC tenants, and WTC re-insurance companies in Chicago and London all dutifully leaked in the media are a hoot.
(17) Anthrax
Mailings of weapons-grade anthrax - which caused a practical suspension of the 9/11 investigations - were traced back to US military stock.
Now that was pretty stupid. You would think they could find some anthrax somewhere other than at a U.S. military facility.
And those dummies at the FBI, what were they thinking when they dumped the evidence instead of substituting some anthrax from Iraq? Then they could really link Saddam to 9/11.
And speaking of mailings, a fourth grader would have sent the letters out randomly, not just to media figures raising objections to the USA Patriot Act.
(29, 30) The Bush Connections
You can hardly swing a cat without hitting a bush connection:
That’s a total of 5 Bush connections on 9/11. There are 4 letters in the name Bush, 5+4 = 9. There are 7 letters in the name George W., 7+4 =11. Proves 9/11…was an Inside Job.
(13) Who Is Osama Bin Laden and Why Can’t all of the Doubles get their Story Straight?
He did it, he didn’t do it. Bush wants him dead or alive but later doesn’t think much about him. The FBI says they don’t have any hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11, what is that about?
There is so much misinformation surrounding this poor dupe it’s hard to know where to start.
Let’s just say that if you were planning 9/11 and wanted to blame it on a dialysis patient you might want to tell Dan Rather to keep it quiet that Osama had been admitted to a Pakistani military hospital on September 10, 2001. (CBS)
There are more commentaries in Appendix A.
The “Top 40” should be renamed the Top 40 Reasons to Doubt the 9/11 Truth Story.
Katherine Smith, PhD mandrell2010@gmail.com
Footnotes:
[1] Professor Steven Jones
Given Professor Jones’ enormous popularity in the 9/11 arena, we must undertake the unpleasant task of social analysis. Jones "evokes" the persona of a choirboy and he plays to the gallery. Here is evidence: over half of his slides have no connection with physical science, and instead are political. In effect, they proclaim, "Elect Steve, I wanna be your physicist, I’m a NICE guy." The clutter in Jones’ presentation ranges all over the map: Jones proudly points to "growing investigative support at BYU" [pdf (7/19/06) p. 44], a sympathy-soliciting but phony-sounding email threatening negative consequences and promising bribes (I’m a victim, I’m courageous), crowd—pleasing calls for investigation/impeachment, paeans to phony peak oil crises and fragile infrastructure, denunciation of corporate profits (he is a conservative [pdf (7/19/06)] and corporate profits are bad? Corporate losses are good?), solar cookers, shared values, the Prophet Nephi and other irrelevancies.
Does anyone really care what a physicist says about Nephi, the U.S. Constitution, pre-9/11 intelligence warnings, Able Danger, or an alleged insider sell-off of Raytheon pre-9/11? He even gets his economics wrong here because a pre-9/11 "buy-off" of Raytheon would profit insiders as defense contractors’ share prices would soar with the forthcoming "war on terror." Excusable error for a physicist perhaps but bad physics and use of his authority to pronounce in fields where he has no expertise are not excusable. All would be forgiven if he offered insights or revealed hidden truths, but he does not. As 911eyewitness creator Rick Siegel said in mocking Jones and his thermite diversion to explain missing towers, "Of course it was WMD, why else [call in] an educated nuclear physicist promoting solar cookers?"
Steven E. Jones, BYU physicist, rocketed to the top of the 9/11 research ladder based on position and credentials. But nearly a year later, his contributions range from irrelevant to redundant to misleading to wrong. He has not turned up a single item of value. The majority of what Jones says is political and his physics is egregiously wrong (SJ: aluminum "cannot" glow yellow in daylight), deceptive (SJ: WTC demolitions can be treated alike), nonexistent (SJ: jet liners crashed into WTC, a jet liner might have crashed into the Pentagon) and shallow (SJ: thermite is key to WTC demolitions).
Appendix A
(7) The Demolition Hypothesis
Hypothesis according to The American Heritage Dictionary:
1. A tentative explanation for an observation, phenomenon, or scientific problem that can be tested by further investigation.
2. Something taken to be true for the purpose of argument or investigation; an assumption.
3. The antecedent of a conditional statement.
“The collapse of both World Trade Center towers—and the smaller WTC 7 a few hours later—initially surprised even some experts. But subsequent studies have shown that the WTC's structural integrity was destroyed by intense fire as well as the severe damage inflicted by the planes. That explanation hasn't swayed conspiracy theorists, who contend that all three buildings were wired with explosives in advance and razed in a series of controlled demolitions.” Popular Mechanics
By far and without a doubt the most compelling reason to reject the tentative explanation for the collapse of the twin towers is because everyone, and I mean everyone, but a tiny majority of people in the world is convinced the twin towers collapsed from controlled demolition.
Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth accept the conspiracy theory of controlled demolition because of two men: Steven Jones and David Ray Griffin.
Steven Jones, a professor in physics with no expertise whatsoever in material science was asked to leave the university when he embarrassed the physics department at Brigham Young University by going public with his “best hypothesis” about the collapse of the twin towers. [1]
Jones’ research, never peer reviewed, does not prove the building collapsed from controlled demolition. A peer-review of Steven E. Jones' 9/11 Research (The Trouble with Jones)
David Ray Griffin, retired professor at the Claremont School of Theology and spokesman for the 9/11 Truth Movement, has written numerous books questioning the 9/11 “Official Story” based on the research paper from Steven Jones.
His books, that some would call treason, are readily available at mainstream booksellers like Barnes and Noble.
He lectures frequently at universities and public places explaining in nauseating, repetitive detail that September 11 was not the result of 19 Arab terrorist and insists, without any proof other than Steven Jones’ inconclusive un-reviewed paper, that controlled demolition can explain the collapse of World Trade center towers.
Ponder this: If the twin towers were demolished by the Bush Administration to bring on the New World Order (which never happened), then the 19 Arab terrorists are innocent of murdering, in cold blood, 3,000 American citizens.
If that, dummies for 9/11Truth, isn’t giving aid and comfort to the enemy Al Qaeda terrorists, I will eat my Patriot Act Hat. [9]
Steven and David should be thanking Dubya for not torturing them in Guantanamo.
(1) AWOL Chain of Command
The US air defense system failed to follow standard procedures for responding to diverted passenger flights on 9/11 and the various responsible agencies - NORAD, FAA, Pentagon, USAF all gave radically different explanations for the air defense stand down.
I don’t know what this proves except that the agencies involved did not anticipate and were unable to handle the extraordinary events of 9/11.
(4) War Games
The multiple military war games (Vigilant Guardian) held on the morning of September 11th including scenarios of a domestic air crisis, a plane crashing into a government building, and a large-scale emergency in New York is an impossible series of coincidences that no one would believe were a chance occurrence.
Therefore the war games were staged to convince the Truthers that the air defense sabotage was an Inside Job.
(8) Foreknowledge & The Alleged Hijackers
What did officials know? How did they know it?
Would anyone really believe that multiple allied foreign agencies would come forward after the attacks and embarrass the US government with the details of the attack?
Answer: No. This must be part of the Inside Job plan to make you believe the Bush administration was in on it.
(9) Able Danger Plus Surveillance of Alleged Hijackers
The US military's "Able Danger" program was keeping the 9/11 ringleaders under surveillance.
Huh? What else could you conclude except that it was an Inside Job?
(12) Who were the perpetrators?
Much of the evidence establishing who did the crime is dubious and miraculous: bags full of incriminating material that happened to miss the flight or were left in a van; the "magic passport" of an alleged hijacker, found at Ground Zero; documents found at motels where the alleged perpetrators had stayed days and weeks before 9/11.
This is so ridiculous it needs no commentary.
(14) Cover UP?
Yep a-d, they are all true, all the signs of a systematic 9/11 cover-up executed to convince you it was an Inside Job.
(16) Disposing of the Crime Scene
The rapid and illegal scrapping of the WTC ruins at Ground Zero where they disposed of almost all of the structural steel indispensable to any investigation of the collapse mechanics made it look like to even Joe Six pack they had something to hide. Therefore Joe would come to the inescapable conclusion it was … you guessed it, an Inside Job.
(19) A Record of Official Lies
These two are so obvious I will not waste my time with a commentary.
(21) Unanswered Questions and the "Final Fraud" of the 9/11 Commission:
I can’t add much to this one. What else could it be except an Inside Job.
(34) Plundered Trillions?
On September 10, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld announced a "war on waste" after an internal audit found that the Pentagon was "missing" 2.3 trillion dollars. On September 11th, this was as good as forgotten.
I love to watch the look of amazement on a Truthers face when you point out that no one would have known the money was missing unless Rumsfeld let the 2.3 trillion out of the bag… right before the attacks.
(37) The "Little Game"
Why was the WTC privatized just before its destruction?
Answer: Because it was. Insurance companies are not stupid and they don’t hand over billions of dollars to policy holders without an investigation. Twelve insurance companies and NIST concluded the buildings did not collapse from controlled demolition.
(32) Attacking the Constitution
But did they round up dissidents, 9/11 Truthers or suppress any anti war or 9/11 Truth demonstrations?
No, on 9/12 we went back to shopping.