9/11 Conspiracy and the War on Christmas

Some people don’t like Christmas. Twice. Or Chanukah.

But some people, who are (if you can believe it) even more shameless, have decided to capitalize on Christmas by opening the old wounds of terrorism. Here is the proof. Can you believe it? As if insulting science wasn’t enough, these people now want to insult Christmas! Well, some of us wish to keep our real science, and our real holidays.

       

The scientific pitfalls of this 9/11 conspiracy stuff are too numerous to count. There are more holes in 9/11 conspiracies than there are in the fossil record! Many people have pointed them out, including the international press. Like Dark Matter, 9/11 conspiracy theories get much of their impetus from works of fiction. It should be no wonder, then, that the vast overwhelming majority of academics in the movement are poets and Mormons. Imagine that! Scholars with the gall to tell us that Reformed Egyptian is a language have now decided that gravity proves conspiracies! Sure, and Jesus was a Native American. Anyway, let’s quickly go through some of the main claims of the 9/11 Truth Movement.

1) Buildings don’t obey gravity when they are hit by airplanes

This claim should make you queasy right off the bat. To base a broad overarching theory on something as shaky as gravity, which no one understands, is ludicrous. And in any case, consider the false dichotomy presented by “Jonathan” and the other conspiracy theorists: it was either airplanes, or it was the government. But surely any five year old can think of other alternatives, e.g., the buildings happened to fall down that day. Stranger things have happened. Why rule out this coincidence? Furthermore, perhaps Al Quaeda itself did a controlled demolition. That none of the conspiracy theorists have thought of this is incredible! Good one guys.

2) Science proves that 9/11 was a conspiracy

None of the theorists have the authority to say this. For one thing, the movement consists mainly of middle schoolers who don’t know how to express themselves. Honestly, is Dylan Avery still in diapers?

3) Dick Cheney planned 9/11 from a bunker. We know this from documents.

Nope. Go ahead, check for yourself.
So those are three of the major claims. They are incredibly easy to refute, as you can see, since I just refuted them. This won’t even be my longest blog post. Besides, several other commentators, including psychopaths, have refuted 9/11 conspiracy. That’s embarrassing for the movement.

And natural scientist Noam Chomsky has very, very succinctly refuted the basic premises of the movement. He has done this multiple times.

Anyhow, this Christmas, don’t get distracted by the war profiteers pushing 9/11 conspiracy. Dylan Avery, Jonathan Leland, Korey Rowe, the Mormon Church, and Jason Bermes, think they can make money of the birth of Jesus. I think that there’s enough profiteering during the holiday season. We don’t need it tarnished even more by the crazies.

Dark matter? (part two)

Many of you read my first post on Dark Matter. Some people, particularly Mr. Sophismata, didn’t quite get it. Therefore in this post I’m going to expand greatly on my thoughts. It will include some overlap, but not very much. It is important that I, for example, am more explicit about precisely how the analogy between a frightened child and a contemporary physicist works. I begin with a little history.

A Brief History of Dark Matter

In the 1970’s it was reported that as much as 90% of the Universe doesn’t exist. Physicists had discovered that their theories, hiding behind very confusing mathematical equations, were simply wrong. Contrary to what you or I would do, the scientific response to this startling revelation was not to abandon the defunct theories. Exercising incredible hubris, scientists decided that their theories couldn’t possibly be wrong. But they needed a large amount of non-existent matter to keep the theories going. So physicists instead chose a more insidious route, and invented one of the most ridiculous ideas of the 20th century:

Dark Matter.

In positing the existence of Dark Matter as an escape from abandoning their theories, scientists fell into the same philosophical fallacy as influential philosopher of biology Alvin Plantinga when he stated that the following form of reasoning is “compelling”:

If X were true, it would be inconvenient for science; therefore, X is false.

The X in this instance is the proposition “Our theories are false.” So there’s a little bit of history, explaining how Dark Matter theorists fell into an egregious logical fallacy, on top of an already absurd empirical farce.

Understanding Dark Matter

It is not difficult to understand Dark Matter, because there is quite literally nothing to understand. No one has seen it, felt it, or heard it. Yet because the Universe is such an eerie place, we are supposed to accept on faith the statements of the high priests of theoretical physics. The Pope of science, Stephen Hawking, explains to us – merely on his own authority – that all “cosmologists” think that the edges of spiral galaxies are “dominated by dark matter that we cannot see directly.” His loyal disciple and lackey Brian Greene simply asserts – again on mere authority – that there is “strong evidence” that our world is “permeated with dark matter.” For these thinkers it is inconceivable that their theories could be wrong. Instead, they blame the Universe.

The Child/Physicist Analogy

Physicists, in this respect, are like children who are afraid of the dark. They cannot explain the empty closets opposite their beds. The child reasons thus:

Why is my closet so empty, so dark? Surely there should be something in my closet; closets are after all, according to my explanatory framework, made for things. Indeed I remember putting my toys away just yesterday. And besides, Stephen Hawking says there just must be stuff in my closet. But I can’t see it! Therefore: monsters.

This is exactly how physicists think about Dark Matter. They see an empty darkness, they haven’t any notion of what is happening, and so they create invisible monsters as explanations.

The Troubled Waters of Intelligent Design

First, I should say that I like Intelligent Design. It questions cherished assumptions held by arrogant scientists and other scholars. Furthermore, it strives very hard to be just like science, in order to undermine it. This is a noble goal, reminiscent of Obama’s biography, where he reminisced about being “behind enemy lines” in corporate America.

However, just because something falls under the category of muckraking, doesn’t mean that it is always good. There are many examples of bad muckraking. In fact, bad muckrakers like these give bad names to the rest of us. I can’t count the number of times people have assumed that I was one of these people, before even looking at my arguments! It’s quite frusrating. You have to be able to distinguish between good controversial figures, and bad ones. Legitimate commentators like nutritionist Kevin Trudeau, and complete quacks like Denise O’Leary. So without much further ado, I will just list a few of the difficulties I have with Intelligent Design.

Intelligent Design is not really Science

All Intelligent Design does is concede ground. Real science gains ground. Can anyone point to an example of Intelligent Design winning an argument? I sure can’t. Intelligent Design has also failed to acheive a paradigm shift. All people do in Intelligent Design is leave the movement. This has all the characteristics of a cult. But back to paradigm shifts, Hans Küng has taught us that scientific shifts occur best when left alone by religion. Who is Dembski to lecture Küng? And who is O’Leary to lecture Dembski? Ipso facto, who is O’Leary?

Intelligent Design fails to produce technology

It has long been obvious that the halmark of science is building neat things. What are some of these neat things? Escalators, pop machines, cures for diseases, spaceships, and lasers. Name one technological innovation produced by Intelligent Design. I bet you can’t name one. And all this for a movement with “intelligent design” in the middle of its very name.

Intelligent Design contradicts the law of entropy (aka the Law of Thermo Dynamics)

The arguments of intelligent design continually get more and more complex and absurd and overly wordy. But according to entropy, things get simpler (and, ergo, more appealing). How then does Intelligent Design survive? This is one of the lesser known objections to ID. Note that ID people often use Entropy against evolutionists! Can you believe it? More serious scientists have pointed out their flaws.

Those are just three things to think about. I would point out as well that not all critics of Evolution are silly. I myself have posted a simple conceptual objection to Modern Synthesis. But there are others. One might take a hint from David Berlinksi, a very well-respected mathematician who has posited interesting critiques. You can watch him below, and I leave you with this video.

Nazi Technocrats Harness the Power of the Sun

As you no doubt have heard, IBM has begun taking over the sky, consildating corporate and educational power, and attempting world domination and mind control.

This should worry everyone. Unlike Google, IBM does not have a good human rights record.

What can be done about this monstrosity? Perhaps nothing. The end may be near.

CNN and the War on Science

Anderson Cooper, star of CNN

As a great many of my colleagues have pointed out, CNN is regressing to the Middle Ages of journalism by eliminating all of science from the public discourse, forever. My thoughts on this are as follows:

This is excellent for science.

CNN’s decision, which goes against the grain, is a warning shot across the bow of science saying basically, “Look, you’re not relevant, you’re boring, you’re obscurantist; much of what you say isn’t even true.” I believe that CNN’s decision marks the beginning of a Küngian paradigm shift. The only question I have to ask is, what took so long? We’ve had these contemporary equivalents of witchcraft spouting their dribble all over the press in recent years. First it was that godawful NOVA series, then that New Age mockery of reason What the Bleep do We Know?, and then Brian Greene’s two propaganda publications. One has to thank one’s lucky stars tha such saviors as Peter Woit and Bill Dembski have arisen in recent years. But they aren’t enough without popular pressure. As Noam Chomsky recently noted, progress is won from below, not given from above. And this is historically confirmed by such LaRouchian works as A People’s History of Science, which you can read about here, here, and here.

Basically, what Küng, Hung, Hempel, and others have shown, is that science requires outside pressure in order to progress. Internal consistency is not enough. The trick is overcoming what Chomsky has in another context called “community norms” (cf. Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, 142 ff). Chad Orzel wants to suggest that scientists make progress by yelling at each other. And notice that he fails to cite the “book” he is supposedly reading. Well what Orzel (and, giving him the benefit of the doubt – his book) fails to realize is that the shouting must come from outside.

And indeed this is what Blitzer, Cooper, and the rest have done for us. They have given an ultimatum to science, much like Congress has given an ultimatum to the auto industry. Except there is no one to bail out the scientists but themselves. The one area where perhaps Orzel is correct is in the Creation/ID/Evolution three-way mud-wrestling match, where the latter of the three regularly resorts to ad hominem, and often tacitly admits doing so.

Well, that’s all I have to say for now. Everyone from Whitehead to Reichenbach would be pleased with this development; so then should contemporary scientists be.