Skeptic Project

While looking around for new 9/11 conspiracies I found an interesting article that uses sarcasm to talk about conspiracy theorists: What I Learned

I think it's absolutely one of the best reviews of the 9/11 conspiracy theorist mindset I've ever seen. I want to share some of my favorite lines from it.

• The silence of the thousands of military & civilian authorities who must have been involved in order to pull off such a widespread conspiracy and the silence of the true witnesses and recovery/cleanup volunteers can be easily explained by the government buying their silence. Thousands. And it's worked perfectly, since nobody actually part of the conspiracy has stepped forward.


• Top Pentagon officials suspiciously and abruptly cancelled travel plans on Sept. 10 for the next morning, apparently due to security concerns, so they were obviously part of the plot. They cancelled their travel so they could stay where it was safe. In their office building. In the Pentagon.


• If the 9-11 Commission report is flawed or incomplete, it obviously means that the attacks were orchestrated by the United States, not that the report was simply...flawed. Or incomplete.


• The U.S. is actually quite popular worldwide; so much so, in fact, that its government must create artificial terrorist organizations to attack it. Left to their own devices, everybody else pretty much respects Americans and leaves them alone.


• It takes the complacency or cooperation of the world's largest superpower to hijack a defenseless civilian aircraft.


• The WTC towers fell in what was obviously a controlled demolition. The largest, messiest, deadliest, most witnessed, most mismanaged, most ill-timed, most poorly executed, and most uncontrolled controlled demolition in history.


• Those plane crashes were like so totally fake cuz they were so totally unlike all the real fiery passenger jet crashes into buildings I've seen in real life.


• When you refer to the planes, say "alleged aircraft." When referring to the terrorists, say "alleged terrorists." Because not only can we not be sure they even existed, but also, "alleged" has such a nice, objective ring to it.


• The same nefarious conspirators that pulled off the single largest concerted suicide attack in history forgot to make a hole in the Pentagon to help fakethe airliner impact site.


• Incompetence, being unprepared, not foreseeing events, rushed decisions, finger pointing, blame trading, and hysteria equal "conspiracy."


• More information only muddles "the truth:" The most accurate and complete reports of any disaster are from selections of the first hurried reports, not from more complete, thoughtful analysis and more thorough eyewitness reports that come later


• When we hear witnesses describing "something like a bomb going off" in the Pentagon, we should ignore subsequent (and concurrent) eyewitness reports of a rather large passenger jet flying into exactly the same spot, and ignored reports and photos of engines, landing gear, other aircraft parts, aircraft passengers, and other debris being found on and in the site, and absolutely no evidence of any explosive.


• No buildings in history ever fell because of fire until 9-11. And if the WTC towers were the first modern, steel structures to collapse by fire, it is not a testament to the intelligent engineering put into the design of skyscrapers in general, but only evidence that the WTC was brought down by other means. No, I don't mean by airplanes filled with thousands of pounds of fuel ramming into them, I mean by a bomb.


• Steel supports must liquify at their melting point of 3000°F in order to weaken and fail, and everything that metalurgists and engineers have told us about heat of only about 700°Fweakening steel is false, and for thousands of years, metal workers like blacksmiths and armorers have just had it all wrong, because they only needed large blast furnaces, spigots, and molds to form horseshoes, swords, and plowshares from liquid metal, and they didn't need a hammer and anvil, as you see in Hollywood movies' special effects.


• It doesn't make sense that remains of the hijackers and passengers, who hit the sides of mostly open-spaced office buildings at hundreds of miles an hour and ejected out the other side, were some of the first remains discovered, and not under thousands of tons of rubble straight down. The body parts must have been planted on streets, on the roofs of buildings, and through broken windows by burglars. Or something.


• If video is poor quality, or with low frame rates (like with a surveilance film), it must be fake.


• The WTC towers fell straight down (more or less), which proves that it was a controlled demolition. If it were a true building falling down, it would havefallen over like a popsicle stick.


• Although video clearly shows smoke and debris being blown out the pancaking WTC upper floors as the floors collapse against each other, but video of planned, controlled building demolitions clearly shows bright flashes of explosions before the building begins collapsing, the explosives planted in the towers must be some new super-secret kind because the explosive effect obviously goes back in time and starts the collapse of the building before the explosions throw stuff out the windows. So now there's the whole "Government Stuff Can Travel Through Time" consipiracy, and don't get me started.


• George W. Bush is at once America's most deviously intelligent autocrat and its most stupidest president ever.


• When an eyewitness describes a loud sound or strong, sudden vibration as "like a bomb," it means unequivocally that it was a bomb, because, you know, people have so much experience identifying bomb noises versus nearby passenger jet crashes


• 99.9% of the world's top engineers, architects, physicists, and chemists are all wrong, and I am right, because I read the Intarweb and I am so smart.

And the most telling:

• If I repeat the same absurd claims enough times, they will become truth: There are over 6.5 billion people in the world, and about 1.1 billion of those people use the Internet. Chances are, I could claim anything on the Web, and at a million-to-one odds, over a thousand people would believe me. In the age of the Internet, that makes me an expert.


• I can't be wrong because thousands of people believe my theories. But you can be wrong even though hundreds of millions believe you, because we all know there are millions of stupid people in the world.


• Any information that comes from the government is suspect, because everybody knows that "the government" is one vast conspiracy utterly controlled by a small number of evil-doers, not made up of millions of honest, hard-working people, at all levels of bureaucracy, of all ages, of all parties, of all walks of life, each fighting in their own way for truth, justice, and the American way.


• The government has a track record of blowing up its own buildings to push its own nefarious agenda, like they did in the Oklahoma City bombing and the 1993 WTC attack, because, you know, those attacks enabled the government to, you know,... do stuff, and stuff. So you can see this isn't a new idea for them.

Who am I kidding? The whole thing is great, check it out!

In other news, my review of the Zeitgeist Radio Address is going to wait, because Peter Joseph implied that there will be another show debunking the debunkers, but if the next show is a regular show then I'll just finish it up. I'm trying to better allocate my time here, especially with that new Alex Jones movie coming out in 2 days.

QOTD, From Prison Planet:

Charlie Sheen released a statement shortly after his imaginary interview with the president challenging anyone who disagrees with him to debate him on Larry King Live:

[ Reuters ] Appearing on The Alex Jones Show today to discuss his video address to Barack Obama, Charlie Sheen has challenged those who have publicly attacked him for speaking out on 9/11, particularly Meghan McCain, Rush Limbaugh Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, to debate him on CNN's Larry King Live.

Pat from the blog Screw Loose Change, one of the most popular 9/11 debunking sites, if not the most well known, stated:

[ Screw Loose Change ] I Accept Charlie Sheen's Challenge

Let's roll.

Chuck, I'm publicly attacking you for speaking out on 9-11. I promise not to bring up your hookers or your divorces or your drug use; I promise to keep the debate solely on the evidence presented in your video address to President Obama.

So what do you say? Have your people contact my people.

So, will Sheen accept? Probably not. I'd love to see it happen, but I don't think he would even dream of doing it. The only thing I can imagine is if Sheen is more crazy than he's letting on (likely), but we'll see.

QOTD, from Facebook:

Updates: See the end of this article on page 2 for updates.

The links to the articles for the big announcement are below:

http://www.prisonplanet.com/twenty-minutes-with-the-president.html

http://www.prisonplanet.com/charlie-sheen-requests-meeting-with-obama-over-911-cover-up.html

Basically the first article deals with an "interview" between Charlie Sheen and President Barack Obama about the events of 9/11. It all seems pretty interesting, but there's a reason you haven't heard about such an interview yet, it's because of this line, at the very bottom of the interview:

Author's Note:  What you have just read didn't actually happen... yet.

Yes, the interview hasn't happened yet, but if you read the comments, many people think it's real. In Alex Jones radio show I was listening to, he implies that the interview is real and is a big deal.

It's completely fake! It's Truther fan-fiction!

--

In the second article, it's discussed how Sheen will be on Alex Jones' radio show, and also how Sheen exclusively released the "interview" to Prison Planet members. On Alex Jones radio show, Jones stated that "[Sheen] could have released this to the mass media but he wanted to keep the context correct", that's paraphrasing, but it was more or less said that way.

A lot of the comments in the post were either of disappointment that the interview was fake; calls to get over it; or statements saying that the fake interview looks bad.

I think I agree that the fake interview looks bad, because if it does indeed go viral as some members of Prison Planet are predicting, and it comes out it was fake, it will make Sheen look like a complete jackass.

I hate to break it to Prison Planet members and the Truth Movement, but most people do trust the mass media, even though you tell them not to, the truth movement is not the majority. If MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, HLN, etc decides to say Charlie Sheen is an asshole, most of America will agree with them. If you don't like that view, well that's too bad, but it's seriously the way it is.

Here are some comments that I liked:

From first article:

A lot of people seem to be quite upset about Jones and Sheen's move today:


Nothing brings the hammer of the president faster than a fake interview:


As I said, Jones implies it's real on his show, it seems as though he's doing it on the site to a certin extent:


Regardless of all of the comments that do say it's fake, there are still ones that say it's real, and the linked articles on Digg and Reddit still imply it's real and many people still believe so. Here's a comment from about half-way into the comments of the first article, clearly showing they did not read any of the other comments, like I'm sure most people won't:


Comments go on to talk about how brave Sheen is, as if creating a fake interview takes big cojones. Though of course, you see people saying "he could ruin his career", but I think he wouldn't done that a long time ago when he came out as a truther. You know, when he was JAQing off.

(JAQ = Just Asking Questions)

In the "interview", Sheen says he voted for Obama, and now he wants his hope and change, but really when it comes to conspiracy theorists, the only thing they want is for their version of "truth" be real regardless of how many facts speak against it.

Several people claim that their posts saying it's fake are getting deleted, though it doesn't say on which site it is, or which article:





From second article:

My feelings exactly:


Again, more people claiming their comments being deleted:


A lot of posts talk about how the disclaimer was added some time after it was originally posted:


Again, similar story:


And a great question I want an answer to; why if Obama is a puppet (as said in the Obama Deception) would interviewing him mean anything at all?:


--

Based on everything said, it seems the original article went up on Prison Planet and Infowars with no disclaimer, then the disclaimer was added to the Prison Planet article sometime after 7:10 AM CST, however it wasn't added to the Infowars article until much later.

If you look at the Infowars interview, the comments say nothing about the disclaimer, and until around 9:19 AM (two hours after the change on Prison Planet) when the first comment mentions it, they still think it's real:

http://www.infowars.com/twenty-minutes-with-the-president/



It's clear Jones was being sneaky here. There are apologists though, who say it's OK to lie to all of his fans in order to get the interview circulating, but I think it really goes to show how below the belt the leaders of the Truth Movement will hit in order to get their way - something they constantly criticize others for doing.

See the next page for more featured comments.
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If you haven't read page one of this article, go back and read it. This page is featured comments that I enjoyed from Prison Planet relating to the two articles.

From the first article detailing the interview:

If Jones didn't see this coming, he really needs to take a step back and realize that his movement is entireally based on trust, and if his followers don't trust him, then he won't make any money anymore:


You are all too right:


As I've shown, originally the disclaimer wasn't included, and it wasn't included on Infowars until two hours after it was added on Prison Planet:


It's OK to lie, so long as Alex Jones is the one lying:


Some people were wise enough to realize it was fake:


Again, more people saying the disclaimer did not appear until later:


More people think it's OK to lie so long as Jones is the one lying:


From the second article detailing the fact Sheen is going to try to get an interview with the president, as well as when Sheen will be on Jones' radio show:

This may tear the community apart:


Similar story in the second article about the authenticity of the interview:


It's OK if Jones lies because it's all a big trick and he'll come to the rescue, just you wait and see!


A bit more of a harsh way to put it, but good none the less:


The disclaimer is at the very bottom of the Interview in subtext, and I'm not the only one who even sees this as sneaky:


Distrust might become more common place in future "announcements" from Jones:


In the end, hopes dashed against the rocks:


There were many other comments worth posting, but I didn't want to waste too much bandwidth. I wanted to save this incase it disappears in the future, because Jones has done that in the past with articles that made him look bad (like the DTV camera thing).

Spread the word and show how full of it Jones really is.

Updates:

Above Top Secret (a conspiracy site) has a backup of the original Infowars article before the disclaimer went up and they deleted comments that pointed out the interview was fake:

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/Twenty_Minutes_with_the_President.html

There are also reports of critical comments in the articles being deleted. I looked into this, and it's true, in fact some of the comments in this very blog post are no longer on the Prison Planet or Infowars articles.

Alex champions freedom but when it works against him he shuts it down!

P.S. I'll be updating this post as things progress, I won't be making a blog post tomorrow morning, check this post instead.

Updates 2:

Apparently in order to control more, you know, do what Jones claims he's fighting against, Prison Planet has disabled comments on a boatload of posts, here are just a few:

http://www.prisonplanet.com/alex-jones-on-charlie-sheens-letter-to-the-president.html
http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-awful-truth-the-media-hides-highly-credible-people-question-911.html

Also the same seems to be happening over at Infowars

http://www.infowars.com/charlie-sheen-now-is-the-time-to-demand-the-truth/
http://www.infowars.com/forbes-reports-the-dollar-has-collapsed/

Updates 3:

Apparently some Infowars members are blaming the initial lack of a disclaimer on WordPress:

<div class="article-quote">[Prison Planet Forums] "Way less than three hours actually... it was up on infowars within 45 minutes after the first posting... I explained this before, one of the problems with WordPress when you are posting an extremely long piece of text, it must go up in short snippets during high traffic times, or it jumbles/stumbles/crashes the system... this article is 16 pages long and had to be up on both websites by 9 AM Central Time."</div>

It's pretty interesting that one line didn't make it up, but everything else showed up just fine. This also doesn't explain why comments were getting deleted that said it was fake before the disclaimer was up on Infowars. It also doesn't explain why many comments are gone now, and why comments are disabled on many recent Infowars and Prison Planet articles.

They must be using a version of WordPress I'm not familiar with. I didn't realize MySQL queries that update a single field did it in snippets during "high traffic times".

Updates 4:

Apparently on his radio show, and I missed this, Jones claimed that the comments were being closed down because of the load on the servers. I guess I could believe that, but it still doesn't explain why comments critical of Alex have been deleted, I guess his definition of "closed down" must imply removing criticism as well.

As I said earlier on his show Jones always implied the interview was real, here's even another listeners commentary on that fact:

[ ATS Forums ] Since starting the show, I don't think he once said that the 20 minute interview was a complete fabrication and it never happened. People who want proof that Alex Jones is a complete fraud and sensationalist, they need to look no further than this pathetic excuse of journalism. Unless he comes up with something completely miraculous in the next week with this thing, I can honestly say, I will never listen to his show again, nor will I even read his website, because it's looking like he just debunked himself.

Interesting stuff indeed!

Updates 5:

As of 2 PM CST today comments are still turned off on both Prison Planet and Infowars, I imagine Alex Jones is waiting for things to die down a bit before turning them back on.

Some members on the Prison Planet forums seem to believe that if that making fan-fiction interviews with the President and Charlie Sheen makes the Main Stream Media look bad, not them. I'm not sure how that makes any sense.

LA Times covers the idiocy: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/09/obama-charlie-sheen-911.html

US News does the same: http://www.usnews.com/blogs/peter-roff/2009/09/09/charlie-sheen-joins-the-truther-911-conspiracy-theory-fringe.html

AP reports that some news outlets reported it as true initially, and to me that pretty much debunks their 7 WTC "reporting" evidence, considering if the news can't get something like this right, how would they be involved in a big conspiracy? Isn't it more logical one wrong report was issued and everyone ran with it? Yes: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2153837/charlie_sheen_requests_meeting_with.html

Addressing my earlier comment about how illogical it was to blame WordPress for a single line:

[ Prison Planet Forums ] Alex is now saying that this is all the fault of Wordpress. Come again?

1) They could post 16 pages of text but couldn't post a single line of disclaimer at the beginning of it?

2) Alex is constantly bragging about how he delivers terrabytes of data and how he has a CDN and yet he can't deliver comments and images on his site?!?

Does Alex think that we're that stupid? The guy's a liar and can't come clean.

On that same thread you can see a lot of posts with very big fans (1,000+ posts per person) talking about losing faith in Jones and the movement about of this.

Most interestingly, having to disable WordPress comments and delete critical ones, doesn't explain how WordPress would be too much of a strain, but the Forums on his site wouldn't be, and they're still not disabled, and use far more bandwidth and database queries than WordPress.

In any case the apologists are still well on hand:

[ Prison Planet Forums ] lol grow up kid, there is a difference between lies and irony/satire. Charlie Sheen did not tell lies, he used an ironic perspective to tell the truth. Read some political texts from famous writers of the last centuries (including the 20th), this is a writing technique used all over the place.

Ever notice people who call people "kid" are often kids themselves and know jack shit about what they're saying? I guess it's a way to make fun of someone without providing real information. I get called a kid a lot by high school students on forums who say they can debunk me, but haven't at all - ever.

In response to the above another user said:

[ Prison Planet Forums ] You should GROW UP!

The problem is NOT Charlie Sheen's article, the problem is that Alex Jones LEAD US ALL to believe that it was REAL!

1) Alex Jones hyped this for weeks!!!
2) NO DISCLAIMER FOR HOURS!
3) Spent 90 minutes of his show without telling his listeners that the "interview" never happened!

That, my friend, are lies and deceptions of the highest order!

Those are the two general views within the Alex Jones movement right now it seems. Maybe this will tear them all apart.

Recently conspiracy theorists have been going off the wall, basically implying my entire site is a lie because some page numbers are wrong in my sourcing on Zeitgeist Part II. Let me explain the situation:

Originally when discussing whether or not Seven World Trade was mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report, I pointed to the following pages: 301, 310, 319, and 322 (twice).

Sky Hook on our Facebook group had pointed out these numbers are offset by 17 for the most part, however are slightly wrong. After a bit of investigation, we figured out that I had noted the PDF page numbers, not the page numbers used in the book inside the PDF.

Conspiracy theorists jumped on this, claiming that my references were all wrong and that I "simply made up page numbers", while claiming they had read the book as well and it wasn't in there.

Well, I finally updated to the literal page numbers, but I've also kept the PDF page numbers, and a note, so either way conspiracy theorists can shut the hell up about it.

The new page numbers are: 284, 293, 302, and 305 (twice), and I changed the source from a page with various 9/11 Comission Report documents, to a PDF of the actual document.

See, originally the only person to point it out was Sky Hook, and I figured since he didn't go nuts about it, nobody else would and I had it on my list to fix some other time. However I found out that on various forums people are using this as a way to discredit me, as if they can't find other things.

Now that it's starting to bleed over into the Facebook group, I went ahead and took the 2 minutes to verify the new page numbers and upload the new version of the article.

Thanks a lot for your help Sky Hook.

Over the years I've heard a lot of people imply that somehow spin is something that exists only in America and sometimes in England. Of course, as one would easily guess, I almost always hear this from fellow Americans. It seems as though some people believe that foreign news doesn't play games, but it does.

On our Facebook group someone pointed out an article titled:

Does virus vaccine increase the risk of cancer?

Here's an exerpt:

Lung specialist Wolfgang Wodarg has said that there are many risks associated with the vaccine for the H1N1 virus.

He has grave reservations about the firm Novartis who are developing the vaccine and testing it in Germany. The vaccination is injected "with a very hot needle", Wodarg said.

The nutrient solution for the vaccine consists of cancerous cells from animals and "we do not know if there could be an allergic reaction".

But more importantly, some people fear that the risk of cancer could be increased by injecting the cells.

Did you catch that last part? "But more importantly, some people fear that the risk of cancer could be increased by injecting the cells."

If we go back and read it again, it's clear that Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg is concerned about allergic reactions, however the article then jumps to "some people fear [a] risk of cancer".

It brings you in with the belief that a doctor stated something, but nowhere in the article does Wodarg suggest the vaccines could increase cancer, that's something some people suggest. Who are these some people? People on Natural News? The article never says, but it wasn't the doctor. I find it fairly plausible that most of the people who read the article will believe a doctor said it could increase cancer, not just some people.

Naturally, I don't know if the article did this on purpose, but it sure sounds fantastic from the title. No doubt they roped people in with a great title, hell most people do that, it's creative writing 101, but it just seems a little irresponsible the way it's written.

See you on Monday!

Prison Planet QOTD: