Debunking Daniel Sheehan

I watched a large part of this 3-hour 2024 interview with Daniel Sheehan.  Sheehan makes a blizzard of claims of varying degrees of plausibility. I didn't bother fact-checking many, because he asserted them all with absurdly high self-assurance, even though some of them stood out as obviously implausible.  The ones I checked were:

1. JFK was shot from the grassy knoll. This of course was so thoroughly refuted by the Zapruder film and JFK autopsy that for many decades the less-silly conspiracy theorists have felt compelled to claim that both the film and body had been tampered with. (They don't bother to explain why the best shooter would be so badly mis-positioned that the body would need later tampering.) But there is a third debunk for this claim: Zapruder would have seen any shooter behind the fence on the grassy knoll. See for yourself with these images https://t.co/fIkurHrWUS. Anybody who confidently posits a grassy knoll shooter just isn't serious about the case.

2. Betty Hill's star map authenticates her alien abduction story. No, that star map was already dubious by 1980 (see Carl Sagan on Cosmos) and thoroughly debunked by the 2000s. See the summary at https://armaghplanet.com/betty-hills-ufo-star-map-the-truth.html.

3. Yamashita's gold. Sheehan claims that 33B ounces ($1.2T/$32/oz) of Yamashita's gold were spirited from the Philippines to Switzerland to finance nefarious "robber baron" schemes. But the known world supply of all above-the-ground gold is only 6B ounces. It's profoundly unserious to claim that somebody has an extra 33B ounces.

4. The "1934" FDR court-packing scheme was about corporate right of contract. Aside from the date being 3yrs off, this is still just demonstrably wrong. Just read e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochner_era#Ending. Or just ask your favorite AI:

Was the Lochner Court's resistance to New Deal legislation based on the commerce clause and how much contract rights (regardless of corporate involvement) were protected from government police powers by the 14th amendment? Or was it more based on corporate personhood?

Sheehan's fourth claim here is not as kooky as the three above, but if Sheehan fancies himself a constitutional scholar then he should know better. (As a Libertarian I will half-agree with Sheehan by saying the problem with corporate law is not personhood but rather limited liability. However, any rights-respecting scheme to park unlimited liability on some officers or shareholders would ultimately not make much difference, because of contractual arbitrage.)

2025-02-22 Update:

Sheehan's CV says: "Served as Co-Counsel before Supreme Court with James Goodall (New York Times), Alexander Bickel (Yale Law School), and Floyd Abrams (Cahill, Gordon, et al.)."  This claim is at best a deliberate exaggeration.

• Sheehan misspells the name of  NY Times general counsel James Goodale.
• The district court opinion United States v. New York Times Company, 328 F. Supp. 324 (S.D.N.Y. 1971) lists as the NY Times' counsel only Alexander Bickel, Floyd Abrams, and William  Heggarty.
• The Supreme Court opinion 403 U.S. 317 lists as the NY Times' counsel only Alexander Bickel.
• The NY Times search portal for the case finds several mentions each for Bickel, Abrams, and Goodale, but none for Daniel Sheehan.
• A Google search for "new york times" "goodale" "abrams" "bickel" finds almost 200 hits. If you add "Daniel Sheehan" to that search, it finds only Sheehan's own CV and a couple of Reddit posts debunking it.  (You can't just add "Sheehan" to the search, because Neil Sheehan was the NY Times reporter who broke the case.)
• Floyd Abrams reportedly confirmed in 2024 that "Dan was a young associate that did work on the Pentagon Papers case". Even if that's true, Sheehan clearly is exaggerating and misleading when he claims he was "Co-Counsel before Supreme Court with" the case's lead attorneys.

If Sheehan were actually a noble truth-seeker, he wouldn't deliberately inflate his credentials.

Mother Mother Was Not Marceline

On the Death Tape recording of the 1978 mass murder-suicide in Jonestown, Jim Jones repeatedly implores the parents to poison their children without hysterics. At 36m45s he nearly shouts:

Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, please. Mother, please, please, please. Don’t– don’t do this. Don’t do this. Lay down your life with your child. But don’t do this.

Notable survivors of Peoples Temple speculate that he was rebuking his wife, Marceline Jones. Their only biological child, Stephan Carter, was not in Jonestown that day, but is convinced it must have been his mother. Tim Carter was in Jonestown for the beginning of the poisonings, and saw his wife and infant son die. He points out that in Peoples Temple only Jim Jones could be called "Father", and that only Marceline was called "Mother". In at least one recent interview (2018 Terror In The Jungle), Carter says that Marceline was screaming "stop this!" However, the documentary does not give any details about when or how Carter heard this. There is no corroboration for these assertions in either the Death Tape or in the published eyewitness accounts. Instead, we know this:

• Moments before the revolutionary suicide meeting, as the assembled crowd awaited their fate in the pavilion, Marceline was conferring mere steps away with the JT leadership: JJ, Beam, McElvane, Katsaris, Johnny Jones, Harriet Tropp. Tim Carter noticed Dick Tropp arguing alone against suicide, with no support from Marceline. Instead, Harriet chides her brother as "just afraid to die".
• During the meeting, mere minutes before the poisoning begins, Marceline calmly helps shame and bully Christine Miller for arguing against mass suicide. Marceline does this after hearing Jones announce that the departing Ryan delegation has been targeted for murder: "some have stolen children from others, and they are in pursuit right now to kill them". She knows that this White Night is not a drill.
• Children were already being poisoned when Tim Carter sees his son and wife get poisoned. This is at least 20 minutes before Carter on his way out of Jonestown distantly hears Jones say "mother, mother, mother" over the PA. Carter thinks this was Marceline opposing the poisoning of children. But Carter was on the pavilion stage with 10 to 15 children's bodies already on the ground, and in no interview has he reported any opposition by Marceline specifically at this time -- the only time he was present at the poisonings.
• While Maria Katsaris is on the PA trying to speed up the poisoning of the children, JJ calmly says "Marceline, they've got forty minutes". There's no sound on the tape here indicating opposition from Marceline.
• Survivor Odell Rhodes was probably still at the pavilion during "mother, mother", and survivor Stanley Clayton definitely was, because he stayed until only 100-200 were left alive. They both reported people resisting poisoning e.g. spitting it out. They surely would have noticed and later reported it if Marceline was dissenting strongly enough for Father to passionately rebuke her over the P.A.
• During the "mother, mother" rebuke, a woman is screaming -- most likely the very woman Jones is rebuking. Jones tells the mother: "Lay down your life with your child."  Marceline's children in Jonestown were all adults. Son Lew died with the elite leaders in Jones' cabin. Security leader Johnny Brown wouldn't have taken poison early, with the children. And daughter Agnes was 35. There was no "child" of Marceline's present to lay down her life with. Her body was not next to any of her children.
• The recording pauses after the "mother, mother" rebuke, and the very next thing on the tape is Marceline calmly saying "--want the children out of S.C.U. [Special Care Unit]". She apparently was helping make sure that no children survived.
• Jones was continually pausing and resuming the tape, trying to control what got recorded for posterity. On multiple occasions toward the end, he briefly turned on the recording to sternly shame and rebuke the parents of screaming children. But if a PT leader as prominent as Marceline were suddenly opposing the suicides, he surely wouldn't have recorded that embarrassing dissent.
• In "Awake in a Nightmare" (Feinsod, 1981), Marceline consoles Odell Rhodes at a point after the "mother, mother" scolding, as the two of them comfort dying chidlren. In this detailed recounting of Rhodes' story, there is no hint that Marceline had just been scolded -- nor that she spoke up for the children.

Marceline Jones is widely treated as a sympathetic figure among survivors and researchers of Peoples Temple. She indeed worked frantically a year earlier in Sept. 1977 to avert a mass-suicide ultimatum that Jim Jones had issued. She surely would have preferred that Jonestown not die. But when the oft-rehearsed mass suicide finally became reality, we have no evidence that she spoke up against it. Instead, we hear her shame the one woman who did.

2020 Election Stolen Fair and Square

The 2020 election was "stolen" fair and square: via Russia collusion hype, Ukraine impeachment charade, Reade/Hunter non-coverage, pandemic politicization, pandemic election regulations, de-platforming, vaccine announcement delay, etc.

Isaac Saul at Skeptic.com ably debunks Democrat claims that 2016 was stolen, and Trumper claims that 2020 was stolen (with a detailed focus on Georgia).

Republicans Ted Olson, Mitch McConnell et al. analyze the 64 cases Trumpers filed against the results -- losing all cases but one. Both authors have long been demonized by Democrats -- Olson for his involvement in Bush v. Gore, and McConnell for packing the Supreme Court with conservatives.

Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist complains that Olson's team are anti-Trump, and that their analysis doesn't explore the losing cases in detail. But Hemingway doesn't even try to defend Trumper claims of hacked voting machines and fraudulent ballots, dismissing those long-debunked claims as "red herrings". Hemingway instead focuses on pandemic-related procedural changes and technicalities like having changed counties in the month before the election. Hemingway's article doesn't dare charge that any of these issues resulted in a single faked vote for Biden. Turns out she's as embarrassed by Trump's fraud claims as are the Never Trumpers she vilifies.

The Democrats didn't need to secretly fake ballots or hack voting counts in order to steal the 2020 election. They media "stole" it for them in broad daylight, and then bragged about it.

My 2021 Predictions

I had a good year for predictions. The only thing I got arguably wrong was to predict the jury would convict Rittenhouse on the weapons charge, but technically the prediction wasn't tested as the judge dismissed that charge before the jury could consider it. (I still would bet that the jury would say they would have convicted on that charge if it reached them.)

In March and April I was thinking there was a reasonable chance that SARS-CoV-2 was a lab leak. But after tuning into the debate on Twitter, by August my estimate was 20% and was still dropping in November. In December I said "Expect the CCP to successfully promote indefinite uncertainty".

In May I promoted an article by The Drive about adversary drone tech, and I said "I bet China, not aliens" are behind any serious phenomena that the Navy is seeing.  Now, per Mick West, I would rate mistaken identity even more likely than adversary tech for even the most interesting incidents.

In May there was a flurry of enthusiasm over a claim of fungal spheres growing on Mars. I unsuccessfully offered Robin Hanson 10:1 odds that this claim would fizzle quickly. Nobody seems to be talking about it any more.

In June I created a question on Metaculus about whether it will be widely accepted by 2030 that alien technology has visited our solar system. The community of 59 forecasters agrees with my prediction of 1% chance. If Metaculus allowed lower bets, I would say 1/1000.

In the run-up to the Pentagon's disappointing late-June release of UFO info, I successfully predicted in May that there would by Jan 1 (today) be no public

• CONTINUOUS multi-sensor track of hypersonic or hyper-G behavior
• sensor data contradicting Mick West's explanations of the 3 Navy videos
• imagery any harder to explain than the 3 Navy videos

Alas, I could not get any UFO enthusiasts to take bets on this.

In June I noted a shocking "big news" claim by anti-vaxxer Steve Kirsch about recent mortality data as the vaccines rolled out. An obscure Twitter user pointed out that the alleged anomaly was normal, and I successfully predicted his explanation would hold up.  Kirsch later deleted his "big news" tweet.

In November I successfully predicted the outcome of the Rittenhouse case and ensuing lack of riots. After the verdict I predicted that "2A advocates unfamiliar with Rittenhouse's internet footprint will be disappointed in him as a 2A poster child". The jury is still out on that one.

In November I endorsed the pre-omicron view that the ZeroCovid policies of China/Australia/NZ had clearly stopped making any sense. Omicron reinforces this view. It's going to be interesting if Omicron variolation combines with vaccination to finally turn Covid into "no worse than the flu".  Expect to hear "I told you so" from both China/NZ lockdown extremists as well as from anti-vax/anti-mandate extremists. I predict that everyone will end up believing they were right all along about this pandemic, which means that our species will be no better prepared for the next one.

After the SCOTUS abortion oral argument, I predicted on Dec 1 a 75% chance that the court will overturn Casey's viability line, and this will badly hurt the GOP.

In December I debunked a pro-vax claim about a 4-yr-old dying of Covid, but said that the rest of the list of 253 ["covidiot deaths"] at http://sorryantivaxxer.com are unlikely to be debunked.

In December I published my earlier conclusions on the identities of Q. I say there is only a 10% chance that any substantial fraction of Q's output was done independently of the team I identified. All five of my specific predictions about Trump/Q in that post will continue to hold up.

Q Unmasked

[These notes were drafted April 2021 but not cleaned up and posted because my interest in Q waned as QAnons largely stopped claiming Trump is still really president. Publishing now in Dec 2021 to summarize the available Q evidence. Nothing here is original/novel, but I haven't before seen this info collected in one place.][Dec 2022 update: excellent Q overview here.]

Summary

The original anonymous 4chan Q LARP was hijacked by Coleman Rogers and Paul Furber, who were joined by -- and later expelled by -- Ron Watkins and his father Jim (pictured above).

• 2017-10 Q begins as one of many anonymous 4chan LARPs (FBIAnon, HLIAnon, CIAAnon, CIA Intern, WH Insider Anon), probably as confessed by users Microchip and Dreamcatcher.
• 2017-11 Q identity is assumed by Coleman Rogers (PamphletAnon), working with Paul Furber (BaruchtheScribe), Rogers' wife Christina Urso (Radix) and perhaps Tracy Diaz (TracyBeanz) and Jerome Corsi. Ron Watkins (CodeMonkeyZ) soon joins the team.
• 2018-01 Q moves from 4chan to 8chan, controlled by Ron Watkins and his father Jim. Furber is expelled from Q, and claims Q is now an imposter.
• 2018-08 Rogers is expelled from Q, leaving the Watkins in control.

Timeline

• 2017-10-05 Trump: "Maybe it's the calm before the storm."
• 2017-10-28 #1 "HRC extradition already in motion"
• 2017-11 Rogers+Furber+Diaz create /r/CBTS_Stream
• 2017-11-09 #128 Q begins using Matlock tripcode
• 2017-11-25 Rogers+Furber+Diaz "gain control" of Q
• 2017-12-01c Q 1st post on 8chan CBTS
• 2017-12 Q changes tripcode to M@tlock!
• 2017-12 Jerome Corsi, Infowars
• 2018-01 Q moves from 4chan to 8chan with same tripcode
• 2018-01-05 Furber says original Q tripcode is compromised [e1 49m], Rogers disagrees
• 2018-01 Mon Furber removes both of Q's tripcodes
• 2018-01-09 Q joins Rogers' 8chan /thestorm #515 e153m
• 2018-03 /r/CBTS_Stream removed from reddit
• 2018-04 Corsi says imposter takes over Q
• 2018-04-08 #1082 JFKjr
• 2018-04 Rogers creates Patriots' Soapbox
• 2018-05-19 Q accidentally leaks too-long tripcode NowC@mesTHEP@in--23!!!
• 2018-06-15 Rogers "finds" anonymous Q post unsigned by tripcode
• 2018-07 /r/greatawakening removed from reddit
• 2018-09-18 #2224 /CM pls confirm #2226 Q knows # of IPs!
• 2018-12-12 Q says JFKjr not alive
• 2019-08 8chan goes offline
• 2019-11 8kun replaces 8chan
• 2020-02 Jim Watkins registers "Disarm the Deep State" PAC
• 2020-02-17 #3872 "Game Over" the day Fred Brennan flees Watkins-triggered prosecution in Philippines
• 2020-06-06 #4437 Q posts Python code
• 2020-07 Twitter bans 7K QAnon accounts
• 2020-12-08 last Q drop

Q Fails

• 2017-10-31 #15 The wizards and warlocks (inside term) will not allow another SATANic Evil POS control our country.
• 2020-06-04 #4414 Central communications blackout [never happened]
• 2020-06-11 #4455 What happens when Ds can no longer CHEAT ELECTRONICALLY? Push vote-by-mail? [Oops, Q ignorant of Dominion.]
• 2020-06-24 #4755 The 'Election Infection' cannot stop what is coming.
• 2020-09-16 #4722 They will: not concede on Election Night, contest this legally in battleground states, project doubt in the election results, organize massive riots. Playbook known. [Trump, not Dems, did all 4 of these things.]

Q Uninformed

• Q never mentioned Covid/pandemic until 2020-03-23. Q spent Jan-Feb of 2020 mostly talking about impeachment, and was unusually quiet in March. The "Plandemic" obviously surprised Q, who later said it was planned in advance to disrupt Trump re-election.
• Q never mentioned Hunter Biden until 2020-02-06.
• Q has never mentioned Dominion or Smartmatic.
• Q has never mentioned the 2019 Ukraine impeachment whistleblower Eric Ciaramella.
• Q has never mentioned Miles Taylor, the the HSA chief of staff who secretly wrote in 2018 in the NY Times "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration".

Q Was Not An Intelligence Insider

• Q chose to first go public on 4chan, a site full of racism and porn.
• Q's first 127 drops did not have any authentication (i.e. tripcode)
• Q's first tripcode ("Matlock") was chosen very poorly.
• Q did not understand that only the first 8 characters of a tripcode count, and instead chose longer passwords that gave no additional security.
• Q's passwords were known by random Qtuber Coleman Rogers.
• Q relied on easily-cracked site-specific tripcodes, instead of using off-the-shelf signing tech (e.g. PGP) that works securely and anonymously and portably.

Watkins == Q

• Q was suddenly so concerned about 4chan being "compromised", but had no such concern about Watkins' 8chan/8kun.
• After his problems with 4chan, Q had zero concern for establishing a method of identity verification independent of the Watkins.
• Coleman Rogers on a livestream was able to find and recognize a Q drop that someone had to point out to him was not signed? ("Oh, Q must have forgot to sign it.")
• Q did not post for the 3 months that 8chan was down? ("Nothing can stop what is coming" -- except the Watkins' inability to operate their site.)
• Q was able to post on the new Watkins 8kun site when most users couldn't.

Notes

• Watkins profits from QAnon
• 8chan/8kun advertising
• qmap.pub
• Goldwater news service
• "Disarm the Deep State" PAC
• Q never mentioned aliens, and said [#376] UFOs are a distraction

My Predictions

• Trump will never endorse Q and will disavow if asked directly, but will troll on this topic with weak interviewers/audiences.
• Trump will continue to claim credit for the Warp Speed vaccines, which will continue to be seen as wildly successful.
• Q will never resume classic Q posts claiming "the plan" is still in motion. That became untenable when it was apparent in early November that Trump would be leaving office Jan 20. Aside from a couple last "Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming" drops on Nov 12, the Q operation effectively shut down on election day 2020. And after Jan. 6 and the Dominion lawsuits, the Watkins know they cannot take the legal risk of resuming the old operation.
• Q will probably never post again on 8kun or any Watkins-controlled forum, as the Watkins do want to invite subpoenas for their hosting operations. And Q never took the obvious step of establishing an authentication identity independent of the Watkins, so Q is done.
• Q never had any access to insider government intel, and so will never be able to use such access to re-establish his identity on some post-Watkins channel. Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming -- except Q's amateurish inability to post independently of a pig-farming porn entrepreneur like Watkins.

Q Tripcodes

Matlock  > ITPb.qbhqo

M@tlock! > UW.yye1fxo

Freed@m- > xowAT4Z3VQ

F!ghtF!g > 2jsTvXXmXs

NowC@mes > 4pRcUA0lBE

StoRMkiL > CbboFOtcZs 

WeAReQ@Q > A6yxsPKia.

References

• 2021-01 Gospel According To Q - academic paper analyzing Q canon and stylometry. Includes charts of Q drops by tripcode, and Q aggregation sites.
• Qult_Headquarters - QAnon debunking subreddit
• 2020-12 QAnon Must Be Eliminated - screed purporting to trace the origins of Q
• 2020-04 questions about Q OpSec and adjacency to Watkins and porn
• 2019-06 list of failed Q predictions
• 2019-05 Paul Furber interview - alleges Q was hijacked 2018-01-05
• 2018-09-04 OAN Jack Posobiac interviews alleged original Q Microchip
• 2018-08 ground-breaking NBC analysis of Q origins: Rogers, Furber, Diaz
• 2018-08 list of failed Q predictions
• 2018-08 anonymous patriot's critique of Q OpSec e.g. tripcodes
• 2018-05 Tracy Diaz essay - denies Q complicity

Taiwan Independence Is Not Worth A Cupertino

During the Cold War, it was fine for Taiwan to free-ride on America's anti-communist containment strategy, and to shelter under America's dominant nuclear umbrella. But the situation changed around the time the Cold War ended in 1989.

While communism as an ideology lost the Cold War, the Chinese Communist Party studiously avoided the Soviets' fate. The CCP adopted just enough market freedoms to generate the easy catch-up prosperity needed to bribe its recently-starving citizenry into continued servility. But the CCP's legitimacy also leans heavily on the idea that the evil capitalists and oppressors who took refuge in Taiwan must never gain independence. The CCP's propaganda has convinced its 1.4 billion citizens that Taiwan independence is an intolerable affront to Chinese national identity. Of course, the real problem is that Taiwan is more than 3 times more prosperous than China, and enjoys vastly more political freedom. Together, these two undeniable facts are an existential threat to the ideological legitimacy of the CCP.  For at least thirty years, the CCP leadership has known that they are only one Beijing Spring away from spending the rest of their lives in jail (or worse).

So the CCP leadership is playing for keeps in aspiring to finally complete the conquest of Taiwan. The American guarantee of Taiwan's defense was arguably a good idea back when it had almost no marginal cost. But now, a credible defense of Taiwan would cost America more than Americans (or the people of Taiwan!) are willing to pay. Even worse, it runs a constant and growing background risk of a catastrophic war that would stretch from the Taiwan Strait to at least Guam, inland China, Japan, Wall Street, near-Earth orbit, and cyberspace.

And it could easily lead to nuclear war. If China set up a sea and air blockade of Taiwan, the U.S. would have to either back down, or challenge this act of war by eventually shooting its way through the blockade. Win or lose, the resulting conventional war would be a catastrophe for America's economy. But worse, the war would be an existential threat to the CCP leadership. Military defeat would not be acceptable when they have a nuclear arsenal just sitting there. So they likely would nuke some mainland American target, or at least threaten to.

Which one? It would be a target with high strategic or economic value relative to civilian casualties. So forget Washington D.C. or Manhattan or any major metropolitan downtown. A lower-yield nuke into Pearl Harbor would mostly spare Honolulu, but the Pacific Fleet's carriers would once again not be present, and the historical precedent is not a good one. Hollywood would be an interesting economic/cultural target, but the population density is high, and the headline would be "L.A. Nuked". A better target would be anywhere along the 13-mile line from Sand Hill Road to Santa Clara Stadium. That line is the backbone of Silicon Valley: venture capital, Stanford University, the Page Mill Rd. Stanford business park, the Google campus, and the remainders of the Valley's aerospace and semiconductor industry. That's where South Korea might aim a trans-Pacific nuke if it could. But China would instead be tempted to aim five miles south, and take out the Apple campus in Cupertino -- especially if they thought it would help them dominate the smartphone industry.

Whatever target they chose, America would be much more averse to this escalation than would the CCP. And so America should game this out, and cut its losses. There is no strategic hope for the 24M people of Taiwan to remain independent from those whose control of 1.4B Chinese depends on a commitment to ending that independence.

Taiwan has been a losing hand since the Berlin Wall fell and China's market economy rose. It's just an accident of geography that the CCP victory in 1949 was not total. When the freedom of Taiwan was relatively cheap to guarantee, it was worth guaranteeing. But it's not worth sacrificing a Cupertino.

This is not yet understood -- neither in official Washington nor in Taiwan itself. More than half of the people of Taiwan expect America to fight for their independence, but the people of Taiwan are unwilling to mount a credible deterrent.  So some U.S. president should say publicly what Trump said privately: "Taiwan is like two feet from China. We are 8,000 miles away. If they invade, there isn’t a f***ing thing we can do about it."

Little Risk Of Authoritarian Socialism in U.S.

Some freedom-lovers fear that America is on a path toward a socialist police state -- a path already followed by the most murderous regimes in human history:

• French Reign Of Terror
• Soviet Russia
• Fascist Italy
• Nazi Germany
• Communist China
• Cuba
• Nicaragua
• Venezuela

In all these cases, an authoritarian socialist police state arose without foreign conquest. However, there were many risk factors in play:

• Strong tradition of aristocracy
• Historic ethnic hierarchy/grievance
• Weak tradition of democracy
• Weak tradition of free speech
• Weak tradition of gun rights
• Severe land/resource inequality
• Agrarian economy
• Poorer than developed nations
• Recent war and/or depression
• Foreign military support for revolution

If you score these cases by the risk factors, you get:

• 7 French Reign Of Terror
• 9 Soviet Russia
• 8 Fascist Italy
• 6 Nazi Germany
• 9 Communist China
• 8 Cuba
• 8 Nicaragua
• 7 Venezuela

By contrast, the U.S. has only one risk factor: our distant history of slavery and our recent history of generous immigration has afflicted us with ethnic grievance. The U.S. is largely exempt from the other 9 risk factors. This suggests that alarmism about a U.S. police state is misguided, whether the alarmists are from the Left or from the Right. There was never any risk of Trump making America fascist.

Do the Internet and social media constitute a risk factor, or a mitigator? They allow activists and extremists to organize and to be amplified and to be canceled and to be de-platformed. But current concerns over cancellation and de-platforming need some historical perspective. The authoritative history Radicals For Freedom tells us that up until the late 1960s, the freedom movement was a remnant, a tiny flickering candle.  Even in the early 1970s, the freedom movement ran on shared postal mailing lists of at best a few tens of thousands of people. Now, the freedom movement is many millions of people, entrenched in every corner of the Internet. Some people may be canceled from enjoying the widest audiences, but what freedom-lover can honestly say that he cannot find enough pro-freedom content to read? What semi-diligent freedom-lover can say that he's successfully being kept ignorant about current events?

The sky is not falling. Our main risk is our continued slide toward some flavor of Western European nanny-state socialism. Preventing that slide is less sexy than LARPing about a revolution, but it is the hard work that freedom-lovers should not shirk.

Man Oppresses Man

Note: I created this meme on May 19 2013, in response to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy. Two weeks later, the world heard from a guy named Edward Snowden.

9/11 Memes

9/11 Conspiracy Confirmation Futures Contract

Consider the many conspiracies in history that have enjoyed sudden revelation/confirmation, such as

• 1920: player confessions reveal the 1919 World Series was fixed
• 1957: Apalachin Raid confirms the existence of the mafia
• 1967: Ramparts Magazine exposes Operation Mockingbird
• 1971: burglarized FBI files expose COINTELPRO
• 1974: White House tapes confirm Watergate cover-up
• 1975: Church Committee exposes MK-ULTRA and CIA assassination plots
• 1986: Congress exposes Iran-Contra
• 1997: National Archives reveals Operation Northwoods

The 9/11 conspiracy and cover-up would have required hundreds of operatives to execute, and thousands of co-conspirators to cover up -- far more than any of the conspiracies above that eventually broke open.  How long before somebody inside the conspiracy flips or slips?

There are allegedly almost 1700 architects and engineers who support the controlled-demolition findings of Architects And Engineers For 9/11 Truth.  AE911T claims that "most of those who take the time to examine this evidence acknowledge that the official story can’t be true".  If AE911T is right about how compelling their evidence and arguments are, then the truth of controlled demolition will spread inexorably in the technical community, and will eventually reach a tipping point and become the consensus view.

Here is an opportunity to profit handsomely from your personal insight and conviction that truth of 9/11 controlled demolition is obvious and compelling and must eventually triumph in the marketplace of ideas.

The Decade Ends Tonight

The Gregorian Calendar has a bug, in that it maps years to integers but fails to map any year to the integer zero.  There's no reason for this bug to prevent native speakers from defining "the seventies" as 1970-1979, or defining "the twentieth century" as 1900-1999.  No dead Pope gets to overrule what we native speakers currently mean by the words and phrases in our language.

If the Gregorian Calendar started from the year 2, who would say that the present decade will continue for another two years?

NORAD and 9/11

NORAD was never advertised as being able to prevent hijackings.

Throughout most of my life, there have been thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at the U.S. Some of those nuclear weapons were targeted straight at the SAC bases on which I and my family lived during both the 1962 DEFCON 2 and the 1973 DEFCON 3. When I was a kid and the network signal went out on the TV, I quickly switched channels to another network, to test whether New York had been vaporized and I thus had only a couple minutes to live. And yet, none of those nuclear weapons ever hit the U.S., or were ever used to coerce us.

So yeah, I’d say NORAD lived up to its advertising.

As for the gap in our defenses revealed by Mohamed Atta on the morning of 9/11: that problem was fixed within an hour by a small group of heroes in the skies above Pennsylvania.  Their number included Tom Burnett, Mark Bingham, Jeremy Glick, Todd Beamer, and Sandra Bradshaw.

Ballistic Missile Defense

There are distinct kinds of nuclear threats, such as:

1. Attempts by nuclear superpowers to win a nuclear war in a first strike
2. Attempts by nuclear superpowers to immunize themselves from U.S. nuclear coercion by establishing a secure second-strike capability
3. Attempts by nuclear non-superpowers to immunize themselves from U.S. conventional military coercion by establishing a credible limited first-strike capability
   
4. Acts of desperation by actors with either no return address or with good bunkers and no regard for their own citizens

In other words, we have to distinguish between ABM as used in nuclear war-fighting, and ABM as an attempt to undo nuclear arms proliferation. I see the latter as futile. Regarding the former, I'm OK with a porous low-cost ABM effort that offers an alternative to launch-on-warning as a way to restore mutual assured destruction between two adversaries armed to the teeth with heavily-MIRVed ICBMs (10x like the old MX and SS-18). But it is futile to use ABM to 1) prevent China from acquiring effective MAD parity, or 2) neutralize the ability of a North Korea or Iran to threaten anybody with nuclear ballistic missiles. We have to accept that China can incinerate an unacceptable fraction of our West Coast, and that a country like North Korea can (via speedboat if necessary) get a nuke into some city that we don't want to lose.

To get decent coverage for a boost-phase defense would seem to require either a big investment in orbiting assets or almost a cordon around the adversary, who can cheaply increase defense porosity by e.g. spinning his boosters or deploying warheads and penetration aids earlier, perhaps even while the upper atmosphere still degrades directed-energy weapons. Once you get past boost phase, I suspect that the physics and economics are overwhelmingly on the side of offense.

Twenty-First Century Political Economy

The only way to remove the corruption from politics is to decrease the amount of the economy that is owned and operated by the government -- agriculture, education, retirement savings, health care, mortgage lending, etc. When any such industrial sector is socialized, the smartest investment in that industry will usually be to invest in lobbying for a (bigger) piece of the government-controlled pie. Campaign finance reform proposals simply dull some the knives for cutting the pie (thus in effect sharpening others, like those wielded by celebrities and the media). As long as the pie is there, people will be doing whatever they can to gouge out big(ger) pieces of it for themselves and those they favor.

It's only lately seeping into the political world, but there actually has been unprecedented theoretical/scientific progress in the discipline of political economy in the latter decades of the 20th century. Thinkers have blathered about politics since before Aristotle without making any fundamental progress, but starting in the late 1950s academic economists have finally laid a sound theoretical foundation for analyzing the proper scope of government. Nobel Prizes have even been awarded for it. The theory is about how the analysis of market failure leads to a taxonomy of four kinds of goods: private, public, common, and club.

There is a joke that some people would do anything for the environment except take a science course. I add: some people would do anything for social progress except take an economics course. The standard liberal prescription is to create a centralized, non-scalable, byzantine mountain of regulations that tries to orchestrate hundreds of millions of people making tens of billions of decisions, and to constantly try to hand-tune the mountain to react to unintended consequences and to decide what groups/technologies/industries/etc. will be winners or losers. This will always be inferior to a decentralized, dynamic, scalable market-based approach that uses the pricing system to aggregate information and communicate incentives. The role of the government should just be to deter and punish force and fraud, and to correct market failure.

It's an open question whether democracy can work after majorities discover they can vote themselves money taken from other people. The theory of government failure is called Public Choice Theory, and while it too was only created in the last half-century, it has not yet given us any firm guidance on how to design institutions to prevent government failure. The findings so far from Public Choice Theory are very depressing. They demonstrate that voters have systematic incentives to deceive/delude themselves and to let politicians assist in the process. The best answer we have so far is to diffuse and decentralize government power as much as practical, so that jurisdictions compete with each other and people can vote with their feet if necessary.

A Bailout Hair Of The Moral Hazard Dog That Bit You

[This is the director's cut of today's joint press release from 18 California Libertarian candidates for Congress.]

The current mortgage crisis is the direct and predictable result of the government protecting borrowers and lenders from their own unwise choices. Only one party in America — the Libertarian Party — is willing to say who caused this crisis and to consistently follow the principle of holding such people responsible for their own choices.

This all happened before in the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s, when the government increased the level of deposits it insures from $40K to $100K, and the "Keating 5" senators (including John McCain) were interfering in the fraud investigation of an insolvent S&L whose chairman later ended up in jail for five years. When the resulting real estate bubble burst, the government used $160B of taxpayer money to bail out the borrowers and lenders who had made bad decisions.

When government socializes losses, the resulting incentive for excess risk-taking is called "moral hazard". After the precedent of the 1989 bailout of the S&L industry, the government fed a new real estate bubble with several more kinds of moral hazard. There had always been an implicit government guarantee behind the alleged "independence" of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, allowing them to sell mortgage-backed securities at prices beyond their underlying risk. In 1992, Congress passed a law requiring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to devote part of their lending to support affordable housing. In 1994, Congress gave advocacy groups the power to interfere with mergers among lenders who the groups think aren't lending enough to low-income borrowers. In 1995, the Clinton Administration created rules under the Community Reinvestment Act to further encourage such lending, including letting advocacy groups market such loans and then bill lenders for any marketing costs. In 1999, Fannie Mae created yet another program to encourage banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit was generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. The New York Times quoted an economist's reaction: "This is another thrift industry growing up around us. If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry." The tech bubble burst in 2001 and the Federal Reserve responded with even easier credit than it had been providing before. Artificially low interest rates fed the bubble in real estate prices, and encouraged the perception that the Fed would protect such asset prices with its interest rate policies. However, the Fed could only delay the day of reckoning, and in so doing made it worse.

Now the Republicans and Democrats have intervened again in the credit markets, by using $700B of taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street firms holding non-performing mortgages. This is a recipe for continuing the cycle of bailouts. If the S&L bailout cost $160B 20 years ago, and the current bailout costs $700B, then what will the next bailout cost?

The Libertarian Party says it's time to stop the insanity. Economic expansion is currently sluggish, but America is nowhere near the 45% contraction and 24% unemployment of the Great Depression. Talk of a general economic "crisis" is fear-mongering designed to justify more looting from current and future American taxpayers. If, as bailout advocates claim, there is potential for the government to profit from buying non-performing mortgages, then let private investors (including bailout advocates!) pursue these opportunities with their own money instead of with your tax dollars.

We already have a mechanism to sort out the assets and liabilities of a troubled company — it's called bankruptcy. Bankruptcy doesn't mean that assets get torched or employees get blacklisted from all future employment. Bankruptcy just means that assets and employees are taken away from those who failed to manage them wisely, and made available for more productive employment.

We already have a mechanism to punish those who deceived borrowers or lenders — it's called prosecution for fraud. The Libertarian Party's presidential nominee Bob Barr, a former federal prosecutor, has called for vigorous prosecution of anybody who practiced deceptive lending or who deliberately overvalued mortgage-backed securities. He says we need to clean up the marketplace, not cover up financial crimes with a deluge of taxpayer money.

Most importantly, we already have a mechanism to punish the politicians who worked so hard to help create this mess — it’s called an election. This November, don’t bail out the incumbents who are using your tax dollars to bail out their irresponsible friends on Wall Street. Instead, vote for the only party in America that believes people should be free to make their own choices in their personal and economic lives — and should bear the responsibility for those choices. Vote Libertarian, and send the message that Washington should be in nobody’s pocket.

The Heroes Who Stopped COINTELPRO

I hope someday these heroes are identified.

Published on Wednesday, March 8, 2006 by the Los Angeles Times

A Break-In to End All Break-Ins

In 1971, stolen FBI files exposed the government's domestic spying program.
by Allan M. Jalon

Thirty-five years ago today, a group of anonymous activists broke into the small, two-man office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Media, Pa., and stole more than 1,000 FBI documents that revealed years of systematic wiretapping, infiltration and media manipulation designed to suppress dissent.

The Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, as the group called itself, forced its way in at night with a crowbar while much of the country was watching the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight. When agents arrived for work the next morning, they found the file cabinets virtually emptied.

Within a few weeks, the documents began to show up — mailed anonymously in manila envelopes with no return address — in the newsrooms of major American newspapers. When the Washington Post received copies, Atty. Gen. John N. Mitchell asked Executive Editor Ben Bradlee not to publish them because disclosure, he said, could "endanger the lives" of people involved in investigations on behalf of the United States.

Nevertheless, the Post broke the first story on March 24, 1971, after receiving an envelope with 14 FBI documents detailing how the bureau had enlisted a local police chief, letter carriers and a switchboard operator at Swarthmore College to spy on campus and black activist groups in the Philadelphia area.

More documents went to other reporters — Tom Wicker received copies at his New York Times office; so did reporters at the Los Angeles Times — and to politicians including Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota and Rep. Parren J. Mitchell of Maryland.

To this day, no individual has claimed responsibility for the break-in. The FBI, after building up a six-year, 33,000-page file on the case, couldn't solve it. But it remains one of the most lastingly consequential (although underemphasized) watersheds of political awareness in recent American history, one that poses tough questions even today for our national leaders who argue that fighting foreign enemies requires the government to spy on its citizens. The break-in is far less well known than Daniel Ellsberg's leak of the Pentagon Papers three months later, but in my opinion it deserves equal stature.

Found among the Media documents was a new word, "COINTELPRO," short for the FBI's "secret counterintelligence program," created to investigate and disrupt dissident political groups in the U.S. Under these programs, beginning in 1956, the bureau worked to "enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles," as one COINTELPRO memo put it, "to get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox."

The Media documents — along with further revelations about COINTELPRO in the months and years that followed — made it clear that the bureau had gone beyond mere intelligence-gathering to discredit, destabilize and demoralize groups — many of them peaceful, legal civil rights organizations and antiwar groups — that the FBI and Director J. Edgar Hoover found offensive or threatening.

For instance, agents sought to persuade Martin Luther King Jr. to kill himself just before he received the Nobel Prize. They sent him a composite tape made from bugs planted illegally in his hotel rooms when he was entertaining women other than his wife — and threatened to make it public. "King, there is one thing left for you to do. You know what it is," FBI operatives wrote in their anonymous letter.

[...]

Liberty Dollars and Inflation Sense

If the Federal currency police were looking to give the Ron Paul campaign a boost, their abhorrent raid on the offices of the Liberty Dollar was pretty much the wisest move they could make. Most Americans don't remember that from 1933 through 1974 it was illegal in this country to own gold bullion without a license. The end of gold ownership regulations, along with the ends of the draft (1973), wage and price controls (1974), and the U.S. war in Vietnam (1975), must have contributed to the optimism of the early days of the Libertarian Party. Unfortunately, those four decades of gold regulation contributed to a paranoia about currency that still lingers in libertarians like Ron Paul. They claim that the government statistics showing low inflation since 1982 are a lie, and aren't persuadable by technical information about the CPI or systematic rebuttals to their fevered and ever-shifting arguments.

Two delicious ironies arise here. The first is that, if the gold bugs are right, then they should at some point be getting rich from their contrarian insights. That point always seems to be slipping into the foggy future. The second is that, if gold bugs had sufficient faith in -- or at least understanding of -- how markets work, they would realize that the modest 2%-4% inflation they decry is a scourge that any semi-intelligent person can hedge against using the right market instruments. What's economically most poisonous about inflation is that it historically has come in spiky and hard-to-anticipate amounts. A steady pace of low single-digit inflation is really only a problem for people who stuff currency into mattresses. (Indeed, if inflation gets to close too zero, it might draw the economy into a liquidity trap -- for details, see this Bernanke speech, and Tyler Cowan's dissenting view). A year ago, I had the pleasure of watching Prof. David Friedman sit in a living room and systematically dismantle an overmatched gold bug's arguments against fractional reserve banking. The closest approximation I can easily find on the web is this wonderful little paper he wrote in 1982 for the Cato Institute: Gold, Paper, or...: Is There A Better Money?

A somewhat dated overview of the the details of how the Fed influences inflation is this 1990 entry in the indispensable Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, part of the invaluable Library of Economics and Liberty. Some newer information is in this 2002 blog posting by Brad DeLong, and this 2004 paper about a "new monetary consensus". When liberal economists like DeLong can agree with libertarian economists like Tyler Cowan on the uninterestingness of the gold standard as a policy position, it's clear to me that gold buggery and Federal Reserve conspiracy theories are just a movement burden that we sane libertarians will have to grin and bear. The only interesting question I see on the inflation front is that regarding asset inflation: equities and real estate, and the extent to which their premiums are being driven (respectively) by the post-1995 productivity resurgence and by allegedly loose monetary policy. The conventional wisdom seems to say yes, but at least one mainstream economist says no (to the second thesis). The wild card for me here is the geolibertarian analysis of real estate valuation. I need to search the writings of Prof. Fred Foldvary and find out what geolibertarians think about inflation and asset prices.

DownsizeDC helping the enemies of freedom

To comments@DownsizeDC.org:

I am a member of the California Libertarian Party Executive Committee and the 2006 LP Platform Committee. Since my Green opponent in my 2006 congressional race is a national leader of the 9/11 conspiracy movement, I had the misfortune of acquiring more expertise on 9/11 conspiracies than probably any other leader in the LP or the broader freedom movement.

I write to tell you that you're being duped by leftist enemies of freedom.

Yes, I know you say:

DDC) most of the conspiracy theories that have emerged are speculation, or worse, lunacy. [...] The American public has been turned off by these theories. [...] We believe Al Qaeda supplied the manpower and flew planes into buildings. We believe foreign policy blowback was the primary motive. We believe that it's about the questions: The Jersey Girls deserve an answer. (DDC

Nearly all the victims' families have already gotten an unprecedented per-victim average payoff of $2.3M of taxpayer money, in exchange for which they agreed not to pursue legal action. The 9/11 conspiracy movement will never be satisfied with the independence of any investigation official enough to have subpoena power. If you want well-indexed answers to the conspiracists' questions, see http://911myths.com/, http://debunking911.com/, and http://www.jod911.com/. That your "background" page gives no hint of such resources suggests that you're more interested in cynically pandering to anti-government paranoia than in answering questions about 9/11.

During my campaign I prepared my own set of Questions For The 9/11 "Truth" Movement. If you're serious in saying that "it's about the questions", then you'll ask ask such questions of the conspiracists, and link to such resources on your background page. If you're serious about the questions you ask, then you'll post links to the answers that are already available from public resources. If you don't know how to find them yourself, I'll do it for you. You ask:

DDC) Why had the US military defenses, particularly NORAD, failed to stop any of the four hijacked planes, particularly when the plane crashes were separated by nearly two hours? (DDC

http://911myths.com/html/stand_down.html

DDC) What about the lack of response, both by the President, who sat in a public school in Florida after the second plane had struck, and his Secret Service detail, whose standard procedure is to grab the President and move him to safety, the morning of 9-11? (DDC

http://www.911myths.com/html/bush_on_9_11.html

DDC) Why have the 9-11 emergency recordings and tapes, plus 500 interviews done of the Fire Department, right after 9-11, been withheld from the public? (DDC

They haven't. http://wcbstv.com/national/topstories_story_228010652.html

DDC) How is that when we have the largest structural collapse in US history and the largest loss of life since the Civil War, not one Congressional official wants to know how this happened? (DDC

NIST conducted an exhaustive investigation of the collapse, and their massive report explains how it happened in excruciating technical and scientific detail.

DDC) Why was a potential suicide-pilot/conspirator who turned himself in nearly a year before 9-11, plus intelligence about hijacking American planes from fourteen nations, plus the Bush-requested Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6, ignored? (DDC

The conspirator was not a pilot. The FBI interrogated him for three weeks in 2000. The FBI criticized British authorities for not making him available for the 9/11 investigation. http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38448

Intelligence about hijacking threats wasn't simply "ignored", but intelligence failures surrounding 9/11 have already been exhaustively documented. See pp. 344-348 of the 9/11 Commission Report, and more details at http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq36.html.

http://www.911myths.com/html/august_6_memo.html

DDC) Why did the Justice Department, based on a FBI threat assessment, begin flying the Attorney General and other department officials by private charter jets, as reported by Dan Rather, CBS News, on July 26, 2001? (DDC

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/15662785.htm

http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?entry=4701

DDC) Why was Osama bin Laden, Al Quaeda, and their Taliban supporters, allowed to escape first to Jalalabad, then to Tora Bora, and ultimately into Pakistan? (DDC

There were disputes over how many troops to use in the battle of Tora Bora, but it's ludicrous to suggest there was a deliberate decision to allow OBL and al Qaeda to escape. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tora_Bora

DDC) Why did the administration first block, then stall, then hamstring, and only then, stubbornly cooperate (if you can call it that) with an investigation? (DDC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_your_ass. Do you really think subpoenas are going to turn up any answer other than this?

DDC) Why did only about 30% of the questions provided by the Family Steering Committee get asked and answered by the 9-11 Commission? (DDC

Of the 51 original FSC questions, the overwhelming majority have answers that even casual web-searching can find, just as I did for your questions above. Pick any five, and I'll answer those as well. Better, yet submit them all to the tireless webmasters of the anti-conspiracy sites I listed above, and see how fast they all get answered.

Questions For The 9/11 "Truth" Movement

Now that my race for Congress includes a Green who claims the Bush administration staged 9/11, I've surveyed the landscape of the 9/11 conspiracy funhouse. As someone who spent years debunking JFK conspiracy theories in the pre-Web era of the Internet, I've had no trouble zeroing in on the multiple weak spots of the 9/11 "Truth" movement. For those new to the funhouse, the 9/11 "Truth" movement believes that the Bush administration staged the 9/11 attacks by

• controlling the two 767's that crashed into the World Trade Center;
• using pre-planted explosive charges to demolish the twin towers and the 47-story tower 7;
• making Flight 77 and its passengers and crew disappear, so that the least-important wing of Pentagon could be hit with a missile alleged to be Flight 77;
• shooting down Flight 93 over Pennsylvania and faking all the evidence of a passenger revolt;
  
• arranging that America's air defenses failed to intercept the allegedly-hijacked jets; and
• arranging that al Qaeda fails to deny responsibility and indeed appears to claim responsibility.

9/11 Truthers say that the linchpin of their case is the "obvious" and "incontrovertible" visual evidence that the WTC buildings collapsed as a result of controlled demolition. Even though demolitions experts are nearly unanimous in disagreeing with such claims, the Truthers assert that a proper understanding of physics and materials science proves their case. So they focus on the technical details of the building collapses, and ignore questions showing that the conspiracy can be seen to be utterly implausible without any technical expertise whatsoever.

Thus to my opponent Carol Brouillet and all other Truthers I ask the following.

1. al Qaeda. The JFK conspirators couldn't get their lone gunman to claim responsibility, but the omni-competent 9/11 conspirators have such influence over al Qaeda as to make it consistently take credit -- and never again deny responsibility -- for 9/11. Why has al Qaeda taken credit for 9/11 in multiple communiques, and not attempted to deny responsibility since losing Taliban protection in 2001? Bonus questions: If the conspirators are making al Qaeda (appear to) claim credit, why didn't they do so earlier? If you can prove the conspirators control al Qaeda, then why bother arguing the rest of the conspiracy theory -- missiles, controlled demolition, faked hijackings, etc -- to people who believe al Qaeda did it? Why does Zacarias Moussaoui not deny that his al Qaeda comrades perpetrated 9/11?

2. Flight 93. If the government conspiracy could control commercial 767's and fly them into the WTC, why would it shoot down a 757 over Pennsylvania instead of fly it into the ground as suggested by all the carefully-prearranged onboard transmissions and recordings suggesting a passenger revolt that you say never happened?

3. Pentagon. If the government conspiracy could control commercial 767's and fly them into the WTC, why use a missile instead of another jetliner to hit the Pentagon in broad daylight and clear skies over a crowded metropolitan area bristling with civilian witnesses and camcorders and camera phones? Bonus questions: And if a missile was used, why make a 330-degree turn in the final approach, creating more exposure to cameras and witnesses? And if the radar recordings are fabricated, why include a turn that you say is suspicious?

4. Wristwatches. If the government conspiracy could crash two commercial 767's in a window of 17 minutes, why would it risk ordering a suspicious and traceable stand-down of air defenses so it could hit the Pentagon with a missile 80 minutes later? Flight 77 would not have struck D.C. until about 95 minutes after the first WTC crash. Instead of the government conspiracy spreading its four meticulously planned attacks across an hour and a half, why not instead just pretend the hijackers had wristwatches and then competently synchronize the four strikes? Did the Pentagon missile/drone team oversleep the morning of 9/11? And why were the cockpit takeovers spread over 90 minutes, allowing Flight 175 to even be warned of cockpit intrusion before it happened?

5. We Have Some Planes. Truthers claim that the government conspiracy was so worried about the alleged ability of America's air defenses to intercept hijacked airliners that the conspiracy took the risk of arranging stand-down orders. Whey did the conspiracy then use a suicide flight crew so incompetent that two of them repeatedly used the air-traffic radio to broadcast warnings they were trying to give to their passengers over the cabin intercom, thus giving the earliest possible notice that hijackings were under way? Why did they broadcast "planes" plural? Why did they only turn off the transponders on Flights 77 and 93 only after deviating from their course? Why did they never turn off the transponder on Flight 175 at all? Just how stupid were these evil government geniuses who took over these planes?

6. Demolitions. Nobody trapped above the impact floors in the WTC was going to be saved from the fire, and 200 of them had already jumped to their deaths. The collapse of WTC 1 and 2 only contributed 400-600 of the 3000 fatalities on 9/11, and the collapse of WTC 7 contributed zero. Why would the conspiracy risk setting up and then performing in broad daylight a controlled demolition of buildings that it knew would be under massive videographic surveillance, just to kill 400 rescue workers? Bonus questions: What if one of those swarming radio-equipped rescue workers had found an explosive charge while breaking through walls to seek trapped victims or clear exits? And with the towers twice as tall as anything around them, why not quintuple the death toll by hitting the 110-story towers just above the 57-story highest neighbor, instead of at the 96th and 81st floors? And why wait an agonizing 102 minutes to push the detonator for the first tower struck, since it is allegedly known that jet fuel cannot bring down a steel skyscraper now matter how big a fire it ignites and no matter how long it burns? Also, consider that at least 25% of the jets controlled by the conspiracy failed to hit their target. What was the government conspiracy's contingency plan if one of the WTC jets missed its assigned tower, and the building was then found to be wired from top to bottom with demolition charges?

7. Execution. The story told by 9/11 Truthers would have taken hundreds of conspirators to plan and execute:

• demolition experts to plant the explosives days in advance;
  
• insiders to allow planting of the explosives in the WTC -- whose chief of security John O'Neill was killed on 9/11 and as FBI Special Agent in Charge for National Security in the New York Field Office from 1997 to 2001 had led the bin Laden investigation;
  
• a team (presumably near the WTC) to stick around all day and trigger 3 controlled demolitions over a 7-hour span;
  
• people in the air defense chain of command to issue traceable and documented orders for exercises and a stand-down on 9/11;
  
• an Air Force pilot to fire a missile at Flight 93;
• military personnel to execute the missile/drone strike on the Pentagon;
• Pentagon insiders to allegedly suppress its air defenses;
  
• operatives to fabricate and plant fake Pentagon surveillance camera images;
• American Airlines and United Airlines insiders to allow access to the WTC jets;
  
• either suicidal pilots, or a team of aeronautical/avionics/jamming experts to secretly modify and remotely control the WTC jets and prevent the actual crew from using any radio or cell phone to call out;
  
• operatives to divert Flight 77 and make it and its passengers and crew vanish without any trace or making any onboard calls;
  
• operatives to plant physical evidence at each crash scene right in front of first responders;
  
• radio technicians remotely engineering the transmissions from the planes (or a far larger team to alter and fake the transmission records after the fact; see below);
  
• actors pretending to be doomed passengers talking on cell phones to loved ones and operators;
  
• agents to create false identities and histories and financial records for the hijackers;
  
• actors to pose as the hijackers on airport and ATM surveillance cameras;
  
• etc.
  

How is it plausible that the bumbling administration of George W. Bush could plan and execute such an intricate operation, without anyone among these hundreds of people blowing the whistle when first approached, or anonymously/accidentally leaking the truth anytime since?

8. Cover-Up. Attempting a cover-up the 9/11 conspiracy miracle would require thousands of more conspirators:

• operatives with sufficient influence over al Qaeda to prevent any of its leaders from disavowing al Qaeda's multiple admissions of 9/11 responsibility over the last four years;
  
• the nearby pilots who say they heard the cockpit transmissions from the hijacked jets,
  
• experts to fake the recordings of the 9/11 transmissions, cockpit recordings, black box data, and radar tracking data;
  
• the bipartisan 9/11 Commission and its staff of 100;
• FBI, including the teams who searched for traces of explosives at the crash sites;
  
• bitter Bush critic Richard Clarke, the NSC counterterrorism aide who managed the Situation Room video conference on 9/11;
• Secret Service;
• Justice Department;
  
• CIA;
• NSA;
  
• FAA, including air traffic control centers in Cleveland, Indianapolis, Boston, and New York;
  
• DOT;
  
• NORAD in Colorado,
  
• NEADS in New York;
• CONR in Florida;
• NMCC in the Pentagon;
• Andrews AFB in Maryland;
  
• Langley AFB in Virginia;
• Otis AFB in Massachusetts;
• Air National Guard;
  
• INS;
• Customs Service;
  
• State Department;
• NTSB;
• NIST;
• FEMA;
  
• NYPD;
• FDNY;
• NY City Office of Emergency Management;
• Port Authority Police Department;
  
• four flight training schools in Florida and Oklahoma;
• the government of Pakistan;
• the government of Italy;
• the government of Britain;
  
• the government of France;
• the government of Spain;
• operatives working against or among the 185 photographers to suppress or plant evidence in the nearly 7000 photographs taken at the WTC on 9/11;
  

How is it plausible that the bumbling administration of George W. Bush could orchestrate such a massive cover-up, without anyone among these thousands of people blowing the whistle or anonymously leaking the truth anytime since?

9. Scientific Apologists. If the scientific and technical evidence for the impossibility of the mainstream explanation is so overwhelming, then when will that evidence be believed by a fraction of the scientific community that is larger than the fraction who believe in creationism? The mainstream explanation is based on or corroborated by expert investigations by:

• Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers;
  
• Society of Fire Protection Engineers;
  
• National Fire Protection Association;
  
• American Institute of Steel Construction;
• American Iron and Steel Institute;
  
• Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat;
  
• Structural Engineers Association of New York;
• Underwriters Laboratories;
• NY City Dept. of Design and Construction;
  
• American Society of Civil Engineers;
• Controlled Demolition, Inc.; and
  
• researchers from Purdue, Northwestern, Columbia, Carnegie Mellon and UCSD.

10. Radical Non-Believers. Why is sole al Qaeda responsibility for 9/11 not denied by radical critics of the U.S. government? Such critics include:

• Ralph Nader, who said about reinforcing cockpit doors: "this single safety step could have thwarted the events of September 11";
  
• Jesse Jackson, who wrote in 2006 that "bin Laden has not stopped targeting us", and called the 9/11 Commission's recommendations "common sense steps";
• Noam Chomsky, who says corporate control of media and government in America leads to "manufactured consent" , but calls a 9/11 government conspiracy "extremely unlikely";
• Michael Moore, who in Fahrenheit 9/11 alleged nefarious Bush collusion with Big Oil and the House of Saud;
• JFK director Oliver Stone, who thinks the CIA assassinated Kennedy;
• BBC muckraking journalist Greg Palast, who thinks Bush stole the 2000 and 2004 elections;
• antiwar.com, which thinks the Bush Administration lied about Iraqi WMDs and terrorist connections in order to use an Iraq war as an excuse to consolidate political power and attack civil liberties;
• the Green Party, which admits Mohammed Atta led the al Qaeda 9/11 attacks; and
• the Communist Party USA, whose official newspaper lauded the 9/11 Commission's finding that al Qaeda's responsibility for 9/11 was not shared by Iraq.

I criticize the conspiracists for indulging in selective explanation -- for focusing on an accumulation coincidences and minor mysteries instead of advancing a comprehensive hypothesis that is consistent with the most evidence and leaves no glaring anomalies or contradictions. So what is my hypothesis for the existence of the 9/11 "Truth" movement? Read it in an upcoming posting on my blog.

Holtz vs. Brouillet & Co. on 9/11 "Truth"

On Thursday Aug 17 my Green opponent Carol Brouillet invited me to be a "skeptic" on a Palo Alto community access TV show about the 9/11 "Truth Movement". I agreed, even though I had been stunned by the size of the 9/11 conspiracy industry that was evident in the 200-page color biannual 9/11 "truth" magazine she gave me when I bought her lunch that Monday. I had in the 1980's and 1990's been immersed (as a skeptic) in the deep and fascinating world of JFK assassination conspiracies, but my only inkling of 9/11 conspiracies had been the occasional reference by Libertarian kooks to controlled demolition of the World Trade Center and a missile hitting the Pentagon. I knew that as a stay-at-home mom of teenagers, Brouillet had been a full-time student of 9/11 for five years, and I had just one weekend to get ready to take on her and two other conspiracists.

So it seemed like roughly even odds.

I started devouring the leading pro- and anti-conspiracy web sites, trying to anticipate what my opponents would say and what the best available rebuttals are. I got a huge break Friday when one of Brouillet's fellow conspiracist panelists sent a longish email explaining that a 9/11 government conspiracy is as "obvious" as was the JFK conspiracy, of which he (Robert Forte) had made "a very thorough study".

Big. Mistake.

In my response to him I slapped down his hopelessly uninformed assertion about the JFK Zapruder film, with a frame-by-frame analysis of the crucial head-shot sequence and a link to a web-based frame Z frame comparator.

Forte's co-panelist Dennis (galen) Mitrzyk was much more cautious about risking his credibility by directly engaging in the discussion, and so he instead forwarded a 9/11 conspiracist essay that nonetheless violated my advice that the conspiracists not invoke JFK. In this case, it was Paul Crag Roberts invoking Oswald's marksmanship as the key to realizing a conspiracy. I informed Mitrzyk et al. that Roberts' understanding of the JFK case was at least twenty years obsolete, as new studies in the 1970's and 1980's overwhelmingly substantiated the single/magic bullet theory that completely undercuts the marksmanship objection.

Forte still didn't quite take my advice, and weakly stood behind his Zapruder assertion with a defensive and vague one-sentence argument, giving me a chance to expand my earlier five-point rebuttal into a nine-point one. He then committed a series of major gaffes:

• To divert attention from my Zapruder argument, he made a blatantly uninformed claim that Clay Shaw (the peripheral JFK assassination figure played by Tommy Lee Jones in the Oliver Stone movie JFK) had been a CIA "agent". Bzzzt.
• He claimed the collapse of WTC 7 was "totally ignored in the official report", when in fact it's been discussed in two official reports totaling 86 pages.
• He claimed "the CIA was holding exercises" on 9/11, when in fact it was a simple office evacuation exercise at NRO building 4 miles from Dulles airport. NRO manages spy satellites, and has nothing to do with air defenses.
• He claimed that "the FBI admitted they have no evidence that bin laden had anything to do with 9/11", and I showed that this is blatant disinformation.

I couldn't resist closing my email by telegraphing the question that I think is most devastating to the conspiracist position: why does al Qaeda take credit for 9/11 instead of denying responsibility for it? As it turned out, my opponents did not take advantage of this by preparing very well for this question when I asked it on the show.

Next installment: highlights of the debate, and online video.