Jim Fetzer & Conspiracies

[Jrrarglblarg]

Of course, we have all fallen into Prof. Jim's little trap. He loves to be the center of attention. He loves to debate people. And we have done that for him. I call it the Ward Churchill effect...as long as he is the center of attention, nothing else is important...IMHO

The bolded statement is not supported by evidence on this forum. The posts from him thus far suggest that what he loves is to have contrarian opinions, but isn't interested in spending much energy defending them. As soon as someone attempts to engage him in debate he has so far moved his Gish to a new Gallop.

 

[matt.tansy]

* Barium and Strontium: Neither of these elements should ever appear in building debris in these quantities.

Citation needed, of course.

The levels never fall below 400ppm for Barium and they never drop below 700ppm for Strontium...

Stop right there! Let's play with that! Let's assume the strontium is the least radioactive of the radioactive strontiums generated by a nuke, Sr-90, and let's see what dose someone would get walking through those dusty Sr-90-laden streets.

Assume 600,000 tonnes of dust evenly distributed over a 1 kilometer radius. Take the ppm, multiplied by the Specific Activity (5.09e12 Bq/g), multiplied by the gamma ray dose rate for surface deposition (1.12E-16 Gy per Bq per square meter per second) and we get a dose that will give a person a 100% lethal dose in 2 minutes and completely incapacitate the human central nervous system in 17 minutes.

Get that? Complete incapacitation in 17 minutes.

So it's a pretty silly idea the strontium came from a nuke. But that's at the low end of the silly scale. Here's what's at the upper end:

A megaton of fission generates 3.88 petabecquerels of Sr-90. To get 700 ppm of Sr-90 in 600,000 tonnes of dust would require a yield of 551,000 MEGATONS. That silly enough for you?

This is the great thing about debating conspiracy theorists who try to BS their way through a scientific topic. They are rarely aware that what they say has implications other than what they intended.

 

[Tomtomkent]

So exactly when was the EMP-less, Radioactive Fallout-less nuclear weapon developed and why has it not been used in the wars since 9/11 when it would, no doubt, have been incredibly useful?

 

[Redwood]

Originally Posted by Redwood
So the FBI knowingly placed the engine in an impossible location? Did they do this just to taunt the Truthers, or were they too stupid to realize it was impossible? Is the Conspiracy all-powerful but utterly stupid? Or could it be that you are wrong?

These guys are not rocket scientists. They were following the script. It would take someone very familiar with engines to detect the mistake, but they wanted it to use as proof for the gullible that a Boeing 767 had hit the South Tower. And I guess, to judge by this thread, they succeeded.

The Vast Conspiracy must be a collection of dunces and Einsteins such as never seen anywhere. They "write the script" of a 767 crashing, fake videos even down to this one of the engine hitting the ground, but forget to use the right engine, and place it in an impossible location!


And it's "perfectly framed" too!

 

[Jrrarglblarg]

I would point out that the remaining chunk of a still-spinning jet engine moving at 400mph is hardly likely to remain in the spot it hit the ground, but I doubt the point would have any value to the subject of the thread.

So I won't.

 

[Scott Sommers]

* Barium and Strontium: Neither of these elements should ever appear in building debris in these quantities. The levels never fall below 400ppm for Barium and they never drop below 700ppm for Strontium and reach over 3000ppm for both in the dust sample taken at Broadway and John Streets.

* Yttrium: The next decay element after Strontium, which further confirms the presence of Barium.

Explain to me why they shouldn't? Both Barium and Strontium were used in Cathode Ray Tubes (as was yttrium!) - which would be computer monitors of the time. Factor in that every desk in every office on every floor would have had at least one computer monitor and tell me again why I should be surprised?

Pretty much the same for the other minerals on your list. They had industrial and commercial uses. You seem unaware of this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_cathode

Today, hot cathodes are used as the source of electrons in fluorescent lamps, vacuum tubes, and electron guns in cathode ray tubes and laboratory equipment such as electron microscopes,

The most common type of indirectly-heated cathode is the oxide-coated cathode, in which the nickel cathode surface has a coating of alkaline earth metal oxide to increase emission. The earliest material used was barium oxide; it forms a monatomic layer of barium with an extremely low work function. More modern formulations utilize a mixture of barium oxide, strontium oxide and calcium oxide. Another standard formulation is barium oxide, calcium oxide, and aluminium oxide in a 5:3:2 ratio. Thorium oxide is used as well. Oxide-coated cathodes operate at about 800-1000 °C, orange-hot. They are used in most small glass vacuum tubes, but are rarely used in high-power tubes because the coating is degraded by positive ions that bombard the cathode, accelerated by the high voltage on the tube.[5]

Lanthanum hexaboride (LaB6) and cerium hexaboride (CeB6) are used as the coating of some high-current cathodes...Other hexaborides can be employed as well; examples are calcium hexaboride, strontium hexaboride, barium hexaboride, yttrium hexaboride, gadolinium hexaboride, samarium hexaboride, and thorium hexaboride.

 

[Justin39640]

When I was doing museum demonstrations we had a structures show where I would take a 'column' made of just light poster paper and then stack blocks of wood on top of it. 8 blocks in total were put on it. Then, for good measure (and a bit of theater) a brick.

We did the same experiment in a 7th grade shop class to demonstrate how tubes are stronger than solids. I find it amazing that a 12 year old me understood this concept better than Fetzer does today.

 

[rambaldi]

He is also currently advancing the prediction that there will be a "false flag" attack on the USS Vincennes, to be used as a pretext for US military action towards on Iran... even though that ship has now been decommissioned, was in mothballs for a number of years and has now been reduced to scrap!
?

Now that Fetzer has entered this forum, wouldn't it be nice to hear his explanation what became of this...

Have THEY abandoned the plan after it was exposed by him?

Have THEY realised that using a no longer existing ship made the plan quite silly?

Did the attack happen and was ignored by the world?

 

[JayUtah]

The full up engine is over 9,000 pounds...

The majority of which comes from the robust rotor shaft assembly that we see in the photo, minus the relatively light and flimsy stuff shorn away by its passage through the building.

A white van delivering the damaged engine would be overloaded - it would be funny.

I would point out that the remaining chunk of a still-spinning jet engine moving at 400mph is hardly likely to remain in the spot it hit the ground...

I was going to bring that up if no one else did.

These are just some of the ludicrous aspects of the Fetzer-White narrative for this evidence. Far from being the "only" rational answer, it isn't rational in the least. A bunch of guys won't be lifting these engines out of utility vans. The engines won't just embed themselves in the concrete where they happen to come to rest. Fetzer has to populate his conspiracy fair tale with inept operatives that would make the Keystone Cops look like a Harvard emeritus dinner, in order to patch all the glaring holes in it.

It boils down to simple "anomaly hunting" the likes of which we can get for free elsewhere from any of a number of basement-dwelling trolls. Observations are pitted against expectations that derive solely from inexperienced lay supposition. Except in this case readers are misled into thinking Fetzer is an actual scientist and so his expectations ought to be given some credence.

 

[kookbreaker]

I don't see the problem!

 

[I Ratant]

I'm now imagining a children's museum type rig that I could build in a day: a lightweight platform, 1/8" plex perhaps, a foot square. Four poles or bars at the corners rigged to allow the plat to slide up and down the bars without binding. This would give kids a system to try different ways to make 1 sheet of paper hold up the platform with increasing weights.

Man, I should just build one on spec and try peddling it to the various children's museums around here.

.
Do THAT!
Expand those young minds into thinking way outside any box!

 

[turingtest]

The majority of which comes from the robust rotor shaft assembly that we see in the photo, minus the relatively light and flimsy stuff shorn away by its passage through the building.





I was going to bring that up if no one else did.

These are just some of the ludicrous aspects of the Fetzer-White narrative for this evidence. Far from being the "only" rational answer, it isn't rational in the least. A bunch of guys won't be lifting these engines out of utility vans. The engines won't just embed themselves in the concrete where they happen to come to rest. Fetzer has to populate his conspiracy fair tale with inept operatives that would make the Keystone Cops look like a Harvard emeritus dinner, in order to patch all the glaring holes in it.

It boils down to simple "anomaly hunting" the likes of which we can get for free elsewhere from any of a number of basement-dwelling trolls. Observations are pitted against expectations that derive solely from inexperienced lay supposition. Except in this case readers are misled into thinking Fetzer is an actual scientist and so his expectations ought to be given some credence.

And it's such scatter-shot anomaly hunting- there's no coherent point to the ones Fetzer sees, no rational narrative that, as a whole, they serve. The engine thing, for instance; it was bad enough when Fetzer portrayed that as being where it couldn't have been, in a condition it shouldn't have been in; no, he had to get greedy with the anomalies and grab for just one more- that it was the wrong kind of engine! This doesn't even fit his own "theory" of some all-powerful conspiracy, until he can invoke what seems to me is a law for CTists (and creationists)- to simply assume for your conspiracy (or deity) whatever properties it needs to have at any given time for you to see it as such. If that means it's so omnipotent and omni-competent that it can (as AG points out) anticipate every single video viewpoint of the crash so it can fake them all consistently, then that's what you assume. If, however, your own anomaly hunting finds that the conspiracy foolishly planted the wrong engine type for the frame it's supposed to serve, then "they mucked up"- supreme incompetence is what you assume. Whatever makes the conspiracy angle work...

And his Magic Dolly Theory (h/t matt.tansy) is ludicrous, the most blatant example of circular reasoning I've seen in a while- the dolly is suspicious because the engine was obviously planted, and the engine was obviously planted because the dolly is suspicious. It couldn't possibly be that the dolly was there to carry what's actually seen sitting on it. That's outside the circle of assumption that makes for a conspiracy; and CTists will never attribute to mere contingency what can be seen as proof of imposition.

Fetzer's a good teacher of critical thinking, if he's trying to show by example what to avoid.

 

[Jrrarglblarg]

For critical thinking practice I generally prefer sparring in Club Moonhoax but we seem to have exhausted the available pool of sparring partners.

 

[I Ratant]

...
Fetzer's a good teacher of critical thinking, if he's trying to show by example what to avoid.

.
I was just thinking that for a criminal investigation, Fetzer and White would be handy guys to get involved.
They would come up with a list of gen-u-wine suspects, all of whom the authorities could now not bother looking at, as the real suspects would not be on the list!

 

[trustbutverify]

.
I was just thinking that for a criminal investigation, Fetzer and White would be handy guys to get involved.
They would come up with a list of gen-u-wine suspects, all of whom the authorities could now not bother looking at, as the real suspects would not be on the list!

Reminds me of George Costanza's do the opposite strategy for self improvement.

 

[turingtest]

I've always tried to at least empathize, if not sympathize, with folks whose viewpoints I disagree with; but that's assuming a certain shared basis of rationality, not having to breach an impenetrable fortress of circular reasoning. I just can not get into the head of someone who believes that everything is a conspiracy, and simply won't accept any evidence to the contrary. This includes not only Fetzer (let's see- Apollo, Newtown, Paul Wellstone, the Holocaust, JFK, 9/11, and only Fetzer knows what else), but also, from the Religion and Philosophy section, folks like Tom Skylark and Paul Bethke, to whom all of humanity's history and its future seems to be one big Conspiracy By God (either against or for them personally, I'm never sure which). As far as basic methodology goes, there's no essential difference between the "thinking" of a committed CTist and a religious fundamentalist.

 

[Wolrab]

This thread is not Coast to Coast AM, any number of truther forums, any number of internet radio shows, not Info wars/prison planet, not a truther seminar, not a truther "trial", not a truther "presentation", not youtube video, not a truther pay to publish journal, and definitely not one of Prof. Fetzer's books (on sale now!).

How can you guys just come in and spout facts, numbers, and generally not lap up what Prof. Fetzer spoon feeds us?

Don't you realize he is a PHD? How come you guys are allowed to doubt him? Isn't someone going to hang up on you? Have security escort you out of the building? Not allow you to post comments? Edit your responses? Not allow you in the seminar? Turn off your microphone?

How dare you guys. Buy his books and run up his internet hits already.

Sheez.

 

[I Ratant]

The most notable "feature" of the Fetzer/White team is they're proven wrong about -everything- all- the time, and yet never understand this!

 

[jaydeehess]

The full up engine is over 9,000 pounds
[qimg]http://i286.photobucket.com/albums/ll116/tjkb/efe25d72-b81c-443a-ba3a-1eeae8eb0db5.jpg[/qimg]
You might need to upgrade the wheels on the cart/dolly/etc
The fan section was damaged beyond repair in the WTC before ejected.

A white van delivering the damaged engine would be overloaded - it would be funny.

Someone is missing the engine has the damage expected for impact with the WTC and being ejected. Spreading lies about the engine is bad; I wonder if the engine hit anyone.

I was loading scrap into my brother's van to be recycled, he got upset, with over 5,000 pounds to recycle, I think less than a quarter would be too much for the van. We made over 4 trips.

It is amazing how much BS flows from 911 truth pushers of woo.

Reminds me of,,,,,,(anecdote time),,,,
When I was 19 I was on a forest fire fighting crew. Our bush camp site had a helipad and thus several barrels of fuel on site. However some dumb bunny had simply reused gasoline barrels, refilling them with jet A, or whatever the Bell Ranger is supposed to use. So, since fuel was scarce, and the helicopter busy, and these barrels needed to go back to the city logistics warehouse, someone had to take them back in a pickup truck. That someone was the then junior guy, me. I am not sure how much five 45 gallon drums of fuel weighs but I do know that my front wheels were barely touching the road. I would take my foot off the gas in turns in order to bring the front down a bit to get more friction and ensure that turning the steering wheel actually turned the truck. I drove fifty kilometers down the highway at fifty km/hr in ninety zone, all the while illuminating the interior by the white of my knuckles, I do not think I blinked the whole time. The logistics guy at my destination asked if I had enemies at the camp as it looked like someone had been trying to kill me. (He was joking,,, I hoped). He said he would send a one ton truck out with fuel barrels later in the day, as he cursed our camp officer over the radio.
Return trip was just foodstuffs. Much better both in weight and subsequent handling of the truck, as well as in not having to constantly put out of mind the imagery of what would happen if I , and my cargo, were in an accident.

 

[DGM]

Reminds me of,,,,,,(anecdote time),,,,
When I was 19 I was on a forest fire fighting crew. Our bush camp site had a helipad and thus several barrels of fuel on site. However some dumb bunny had simply reused gasoline barrels, refilling them with jet A, or whatever the Bell Ranger is supposed to use. So, since fuel was scarce, and the helicopter busy, and these barrels needed to go back to the city logistics warehouse, someone had to take them back in a pickup truck. That someone was the then junior guy, me. I am not sure how much five 45 gallon drums of fuel weighs but I do know that my front wheels were barely touching the road. I would take my foot off the gas in turns in order to bring the front down a bit to get more friction and ensure that turning the steering wheel actually turned the truck. I drove fifty kilometers down the highway at fifty km/hr in ninety zone, all the while illuminating the interior by the white of my knuckles, I do not think I blinked the whole time. The logistics guy at my destination asked if I had enemies at the camp as it looked like someone had been trying to kill me. (He was joking,,, I hoped). He said he would send a one ton truck out with fuel barrels later in the day, as he cursed our camp officer over the radio.
Return trip was just foodstuffs. Much better both in weight and subsequent handling of the truck, as well as in not having to constantly put out of mind the imagery of what would happen if I , and my cargo, were in an accident.

Jet A is just a shade under 6.8 pounds per gallon. (gasoline runs around 6/6.5 depending on grade)