Merged ReThink911 - a Richard Gage ad campaign

[Redwood]

Originally Posted by ozeco41
Do that around my town and the graffiti folks would modify it to:

"Jesus Saves - in the National Bank" - or something similar.

Around here is was
Jesus saves, but (insert name of hockey player) scores on the rebound.

Generation test for those in the U.S.: Do you remember when your schoolmates had "Jesus Saves (Green Stamps)" written on their notebooks?

 

[thedopefishlives]

Around here is was
Jesus saves, but (insert name of hockey player) scores on the rebound.

Jesus saves. Everyone else rolls 1d20.

 

[jhunter1163]

Jesus saves. God invests.

 

[Orphia Nay]

At one point during the disastrous fundraising on Fundly last month, AE911Truth was so happy about $900 they received from the members of "Team San Diego" that they proudly announced it on their Facebook page. Yesterday, out of the blue, the donation counters on ReThink911.org had the enormous amount of $12,454 added, which was by far the highest daily amount of the revamped campaign, probably even the entire fundraising campaign alltogether. This was about as much as was added to the counter in the entire previous week, which included another sudden spike of $5,762 on July 25.

The amount for today dropped to a still impressive but comparatively low $3,970. This means that ReThink911, according to its own numbers, made more money in the last 5 days than it made in the two weeks before. As far as I can see, except the project nearing its fundraising deadline, nothing happened in the preceeding days that would explain this increase. Actually, numbers appeared to have reached a low point just before this started.

The following graph shows how exorbitant the boost was. The red line represents how much was added every day since the campaign got reorganised in late June, the blue line is based on the same numbers but flattened a bit by calculating an average for every day that didn't see an addition to the counters on the website, based on the next numbers that were added (for example, three days counting 0 / 0 / 3,000 would show as 1,000 / 1,000 / 1,000).

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/thum_4547051f6a39202531.jpg[/qimg]

Very interesting, thanks!

Not that the spike makes sense if you look at the number of shares and likes on their Facebook page.

 

[Richard the G]

Ozeco,

Generally I know where the burden of proof belongs. As I say in my YouTube videos, I chose to debate Gage the hard way, by answering all his challenges directly. Literally hundreds of "what about" 's! Even with this choice, I haven't found a claim that stands up to scrutiny. In other words, it is indeed possible to meet the reverse burden of proof in most instances. (Admittedly no one can prove a negative, but it is possible to at least develop a reasonable hypothesis for every anomaly they dig up).

So Tony gave me two what-abouts (above). The "freefall of Building 7 for eight stories" is well explained in my video #18: First, the measurements are of one point along the perimeter. More importantly, Gage et al assume only two forces at play in the collapse: gravity vs resistance, therefore resistance must equal zero for freefall acceleration to occur. But torquing and leveraging were also taking place, giving us measurements that are close to net zero resistance. This could explain why one point on the roofline could be measured at approximately freefall. As for the "lack of deceleration" of the North Tower, first of all femr has shown the deceleration, and secondly, in general the building came down at around 70% of freefall, showing resistance was occurring during the collapse.

You're right Ozeco that I'm leaving myself wide open by accepting their standards of proof etc, but even that vulnerable position has not inspiredthe 9/11 Truth side to produce any data that can be explained only by CD.

I'm not sure what you mean about my agreement with Gage. A few weeks ago, I told him to his face that I disagree with every technical conclusion he has ever made about the cause of the WTC collapses! We certainly have strong points of agreement around both politics and our spiritual persectives, but on 9/11 CD we are in 100% disagreement and we both know it and assert it to one another.

I understand how you have always tried to connect with Gage in an open and non-judgemental way. However now that you have debated many points with him and his team, I would be very interested in your opinion about the honesty or dishonesty that ae911truth use to portray their arguments.

Take for instance the pyroclastic-like clouds. Currently #7 on their list of reasons to believe in CD. And when you go to the evidence they claim "Such behavior clearly indicates the input of huge quantities of heat far in excess of what the friction of a gravity-driven collapse could produce." There is no indication or evidence of this yet they continue to peddle the nonsense.

Do you believe that Mr Gage is really misguided in these statements rather than being deliberately dishonest? Its been suggested that Gage honestly and truly believes it was CD, and I think he does. And that anything that is said in support of the ae911truth is ok as long as it gains more support for an honest cause.

And since you have said you will not call Gage a liar, will you call ae911truth unethical for posting things that you know are false?

 

[Orphia Nay]

The campaign still has to make $25,000 by August 1.

 

[Venom]

What happened???

 

[Orphia Nay]

http://rethink911.org/ is still saying they need $25,000.

Good goalposts are expensive these days.

 

[cjnewson88]

Goalposts shifted;

The deadline to reach our goal is August 11, 2013.

 

[carlitos]

http://rethink911.org/ is still saying they need $25,000.

Good goalposts are expensive these days.

ReThink911 will be seen in 11 major cities this September, coupled with grassroots actions all around the world. Select your preferred city below and donate to make the planned advertising for that city a reality. The deadline to reach our goal is August 11, 2013. After August 11, ReThink911's focus will shift to educating the public and this website will be modified to serve that purpose.

Their bolding. Recently added. I don't believe those donation meters are accurate, not for a minute. What a scam.

 

[Muc]

I totally missed last Sunday's newsletter with a message from Ed Asner which, once again, vastly exaggerated the effect of the Times Square billboard (and is probably supposed to be responsible for the ridiculous donation spike on monday).

The billboards of Time Square are seen by nearly a million people a day. That's nearly 30,000,000 people who are expected to learn about Building 7 by October 1st and these are the projected figures for just one city!

Awful projection. Again, the outdoor ad company specifically says that this particular billboard generates an estimated 667,323 impressions a week, adding up to a bit less than 3,000,000 impressions during the whole of September, a tenth of what Asner claims, and AE911Truth should know that. That of course does not mean unique impressions, so the number of people who see the ad is even lower than that. Also, according to Remember Building 7's own survey a few years ago, only a minority of these people will actually "learn about Building 7", as Asner puts it, since the majority of New Yorkers is well aware that "a 3rd tower fell on 9/11". It happened in their city, after all.

What's left is probably somewhere in the low hundred thousands, and those people still have to care enough to a) visit the website, b) believe what is written there, c) keep believing it and, most importantly, d) do anything about it. If it was that easy to transport an effective advertisement message on a tight budget with some amateur volunteers, companies wouldn't spend dozens of millions on theirs instead of simply relying on faith. From the perspective of a cult leader that needs donations it is understandable that Gage and his aides are trying to convince the gullible that this "historical" campaign will really, quote, "change the world" this time, but if he is not completely delusional, most he can hope for is that it will change the financial fortunes of his organisation - hopefully enough for another significant and well deserved pay raise for the shining hero of 9/11 Truth.

 

[jaydeehess]

Generation test for those in the U.S.: Do you remember when your schoolmates had "Jesus Saves (Green Stamps)" written on their notebooks?

Early 70's

 

[ozeco41]

Early 70's

I had no school mates in the 70's. ozeco41, ozrco43 were way past school and ozmco70, ozlco71 and ozpco75 were too young.

 

[Muc]

Here is the latest graph. This time I took the last 9 days of the Fundly based version of the fundraiser into account, a period in which the entire campaign (meaning the 55 cities plus the then so-called "matching funds" pool) received contributions worth less than $800 in total.

As last time, the red line is the daily additions to the counter and the blue line is a normalized value taking into account the days that saw no new numbers. There was no update yesterday because they finally sent out their Daniel Sunjata signed cyber-begging email in which he said that $210,000 were in already and only $15,000 missing, which was the standing of two days ago - and they wouldn't want their counter to show anything else. Expectedly, today saw a considerable spike of over $8,000, which is not included in the graph yet.

What a truly amazing development.

Here are the daily numbers for each city so far. If there are dates missing that means that the donation counter was not updated that day. As with above graph, today's numbers are not included yet.

City|June 26|June 28|June 29|July 2|July 4|July 7|July 8|July 9|July 10|July 11|July 13|July 15|July 16|July 17
New York|6174|482|2011|896|1460|635|37|634|1760|196|249|1245|220|45
San Francisco|190|150|178|275|185|415|25|270|0|75|130|225|0|0
Dallas|275|0|600|775|55|62|1050|50|60|10|0|35|100|337
Washington|230|0|50|210|45|1690|70|25|0|100|100|35|0|0
Toronto|205|20|100|1326|826|8|1150|646|0|2160|180|892|575|0
Vancouver|105|0|0|542|606|20|1000|25|10|60|0|365|0|1070
Boston|10|20|50|291|100|10|650|50|40|130|175|0|0|0
Chicago|175|100|25|450|70|60|550|35|60|25|26|150|100|0
San Diego|25|100|600|85|5|100|0|500|0|0|0|0|0|0
London|360|50|450|0|15|0|430|0|190|0|515|70|100|0
Sydney|265|0|200|40|50|160|500|20|10|0|60|100|0|20
Total|8014|922|4264|4890|3417|3160|5462|2255|2130|2756|1435|3117|1095|1472

City|July 19|July 20|July 21|July 22|July 24|July 25|July 26|July 27|July 28|July 29|July 30|July 31|August 1|August 2|August 3
New York|1435|213|459|191|245|1706|186|42|2101|691|793|366|37|545|1153
San Francisco|540|114|37|248|124|37|37|0|1387|266|169|444|183|664|183
Dallas|15|0|99|16|37|213|74|74|1137|569|15|445|97|146|242
Washington|175|192|0|87|15|0|151|0|149|124|291|0|87|142|540
Toronto|750|651|904|151|421|1318|0|77|403|1722|10|111|1024|990|532
Vancouver|60|136|10|107|25|861|271|121|2268|37|303|37|898|849|522
Boston|630|50|25|174|87|55|0|37|556|35|0|0|99|67|37
Chicago|323|10|124|324|149|694|0|30|188|97|0|58|74|0|67
San Diego|0|57|0|10|0|37|10|62|550|148|15|87|0|0|87
London|30|37|10|0|30|344|243|0|2000|204|74|74|94|0|139
Sydney|0|87|117|0|47|497|74|74|1715|77|10|52|187|124|74
Total|3958|1547|1785|1308|1180|5762|1046|517|12454|3970|1680|1674|2780|3527|3576

Looks quite fishy to me. Generally it's obvious that the distribution is very uneven. Cities get nearly nothing for days, then enormous amounts for a short time, then near nothing again. This includes New York, which on a bad day gets two-digit numbers and on a good day four-digits. What's also obvious is that the numbers of the two Canadian cities are all over the place. To visualize this, here's the rollercoasting graph for Toronto:

When looking at those stats one should keep in mind that campaign co-organizer Mike Figa repeatedly claimed that almost all donations were small contributions under $100.

Two more details:

Until July 19 most daily numbers for the cities were rather even and could be divided through 5 or 10. From July 20 on this suddenly changed and the final digits started looking more random. I would love to hear an explanation for this.

On July 7, there was a mini ad-campaign in San Diego in which they did a one-day test of the rolling billboard they want to deploy in September. In the following three weeks, the lousy amount of $676 ($500 of it in one single day) was added to the San Diego counter, and 13 days didn't see any addition at all. According to AE911's own numbers, the result of that short test campaign was nothing but a desaster. No city has performed nearly as bad over such a long time since June 25 (of course New York did even worse on the more transparent Fundly counter with just $95 in one month). Looks like they didn't really think this through when they randomly assigned the amounts to the cities.


For posterity, here is the only image I have of the since purged ReThink911 main Fundly page with its donation counter showing $314,441, taken on June 16.

There is also a copy taken on May 27 available at the Wayback machine showing $300,651, suggesting that overall donations in the entire month before the reorganisation of the campaign and its sudden surge in donations were roughly $15,000, with the bulk of it being contributed end of May/early June and the campaign being basically dead by mid-June.

To put those Fundly amounts in context, here is an incomplete timeline of other ReThink911/Operation Tip the Planet claims regarding their funds (some of which have been already posted in this thread).

Here you can hear ReThink911's Laura Katleman claiming the campaign raised an amount of $90,000 in the "first three days" of the OTP/RT911 fundraising during a podcast as early as March 28 (37:35 mark). This amount would obviously be almost entirely covered by the "liabilities" they already held and therefore not be anything they actually needed to "raise". She suggested later in the interview that this money was intended to match every dollar that would be donated for the city teams.

In April and early May AE911Truth claimed to have collected $100,000 in "matching funds" for "Operation Tip the Planet".

On May 14, they posted this message on causes.com, claiming $118,000 already raised "with another $250,000 pending" and, somewhat contradictory, "close to $350,000 in matching funds" available. The owner of the account the message was created with is Laura Katleman, who appears to have also been administrator of the RT911 Fundly page. Haven't read anything RT911 related of her since the latter has been scrapped.

End of May they introduced the RT911 Fundly page on which it was claimed that around $300,000 were already available and a fundraising goal of $600,000 was stated.

On June 18 Richard Gage posted under his name that donations had reached $100,000 at a time the Fundly counter showed around $315,000 (and it continued to do so for another week).

Below is a screenshot of the revamped RT911 page on June 25 showing overall donations of roughly $118,000, one week after Gage's $100,000 announcement. As stated above, actual donations in that period were in the three-digits. Coincidentally, the $118,000 are the same amount claimed to be available more than five weeks earlier by Katleman.

As we know, on June 25 AE911 also posted a brief comment stating that some of the "matching funds", which were never to be mentioned again from then on, had "not arrived as expected". This is the only explanation they ever issued why the campaign funds shrank to a third of the amount claimed a few days before and to one they already claimed to posses almost one and half months of fundraising earlier (not even counting funds that were merely "pledged" at that point according to them).

Here is what is now left of the ReThink911 user account on Fundly, showing most of the associated city teams. As you can see their name was removed and it is "Anonymous User" instead of "ReThink911" now. Logo is still attached, though.

Alltogether, this is pretty much the opposite of the transparent and well-organized campaign you would expect from an IRS registered non-profit. Looks like AE911Truth changes the numbers whenever it suits them. The way they manipulated potential donors by promising an enormous amount of "matching funds" that never existed is unacceptable alone. Good for them that their followers have an awful memory and hardly ever ask questions (at least not the questions they should ask before parting with their money).

 

[Orphia Nay]

Great post, Muc! I fully agree with your final paragraph.

It appears there's been at least one new splitter in the ranks. When will one of them spill the beans?

 

[carlitos]

Good for them that their followers have an awful memory and hardly ever ask questions (at least not the questions they should ask before parting with their money).

From neuropsychological tests, Pope found that chronic cannabis users showed difficulties, with verbal memory in particular, for "at least a week or two" after they stopped smoking.

...

Experiments on animal and human tissue have demonstrated a disruption of short-term memory formation,[15] which is consistent with the abundance of CB1 receptors on the hippocampus, the region of the brain most closely associated with memory.

That mobile billboard in San Diego isn't at all what I thought it would be. (as an aside, a 3 minute video montage of a one-day thing where they are handing out pamphlets? freaking drama queens). I imagined that they were wrapping a trolley.

http://www.michaelallenassociates.com/pdf/San_Diego_Trolley_Presentation_2008.pdf

 

[carlitos]

http://rethink911.org/ says that they are at $222,862 / $225,000, with 4 days to go until the 11th. They have arbitrarily shown the shortfall across several cities, but several are also shown as fully funded. Including NYC. I look forward to seeing this ad campaign in the marketplace. I'm sure it will happen the day after Dylan Avery gets the Avery Foundation up and running.

ETA - yikes.

 

[dudalb]

Poor Ed Asner. Old Age Can Do Terrible Things To A Person.

 

[LSSBB]

Poor Ed Asner. Old Age Can Do Terrible Things To A Person.

I chalk it up more to poor critical thinking skills.

 

[JSanderO]

I chalk it up more to poor critical thinking skills.

Intelligent people are rather easily misled by what appears to be well reasoned arguments by what appear to be qualified people making them who are assumed to have thoroughly investigated what they are speaking about. The default position is to trust not to distrust (except authority which always is engaged in self serving deception.) And this is how intelligent people fall prey to fakes who do so with intent or simply self deluded people passing themselves off as competent experts. The technical issues are well above the pay grade of 99.99999% of the people anyway so they are left to choose who to believe based on whatever criteria works for them.