Comments on I Give Up

This is quoted by Republicans in general, much less 9/11 Truthers.

I hope they all died in the unseasonable rain while standing outside, ignoring the oscillations in global weather and local weather patterns worldwide.

Or drowned in one of the hurricanes.

Yeah. Like turkeys, Truthers don't know when to come in out of the rain. Fortunately, their irrelevance is inevitable.

I can't wait until they come out with a statement that the United States is really just a territory of Great Britain due to a handshake deal between Queen Elizabeth and Nixon. (That's the best conspiracy I've ever overheard; it was in a donut shop at 12 AM.)

Hey Truthers, weather != climate, you dumb kooks.

I love these guys. Can they get a column? Or a regular spot on the Slog?

@4, I think that's a LaRouche line. These guys really need to get together.

The Flat Earth Society is pretty much defunct now, I think, and those with a desire to feel special via relegation to the fringe had to go somewhere.

The entire article titled Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered is published in the most recent issue of Physics and Society on the APS website (American Physical Society)

http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/monckton.cfm

It is bald faced lie, dude. Or sometimes bold faced lie, depending. But it is definitely NOT "bald face." It is faced, with a -d on the end. "Bald face" with no -d is grammatically incorrect. Please make a note of it.

I mean people make out like correct English is so fucking hard, but is it really that hard to get simple things right? Is it?

Also, I'd love it if you had your own Stranger column. You should make some calls.

We aren't really here on earth anymore. Earth actually blew up millions of years ago and we are all just the echoes of a civilization that keeps reliving the final era of the planet in an endless loop, hoping to change the outcome but failing. The real truth of 9/11 is that it is responsible for starting the countdown to earth's destruction every time. Global warming is an illusion, something our minds have invented to keep us occupied as once again we plummet toward our eventual destruction.

Making this shit up is fun. I should start my own movement...

911 Truthers are united in their ability to believe anything, provided it is from some "underground" source. Curiously, almost all their beliefs can be found on Alex Jones' website. Many of them also don't believe in evolution, and that moron who made Loose Change is a total Jesus freak (which is relevant, since it's indicative of his inability to differentiate between fact and fiction).

actually language is defined by usage. there are no "rules". language evolves.

So, Alex Jones is a quack???

Actually, those are facts. Really. I read them at the Vancouver Science Museum this past weekend. Really. The past 10,000 years have been the most stable in Earth's existence. We are overdue for a warm spell, just like the ones that let Vikings live on Greenland. Shit happens. The Earth will still be here and will recover with some sweet species. We may not. Booohooo.

While I realize it makes a lot of people feel good (read : righteous), it does need to be said that this entire issue is one of the more pointless ones in existence (which is saying something).

This planet goes through spells. Might we humans be speeding up one of these spells? Quite possibly. But either way, there's eventually going to be (at the very least) another ice age coming down the pike that will wipe us out nice and cleanly. And even if that doesn't come, or we're somehow able to survive it, eventually, the sun will blow up real good, and poof goes the whole enchilada.

Have a nice day!

@ 13 - Yez, langwich do evolves -- and evolution might give us all another a-hole but we don't have to be happy about it. And while we're at it, nothing is ever "fresh baked." It might be "freshly baked" or it might be "fresh, baked" but it is never "fresh baked." Lord help me, I might even allow it to be "fresh-baked" but never "fresh baked." The rules do change and this one may but it hasn't yet. And need not it doesn't do.

Paul, this post is a bit disingenuous of you. When, last year, you interviewed several people -- including me -- for the mostly-uninformative but generally-fair article you wrote about the local 9/11 Truth Movement, you were told that local activist groups had recently splintered over the advancement of ideas that went well beyond a disbelief in the story that our government told us all just hours after the disaster of 9/11, before they resisted any investigation until pressured by family members of the victims to initiate such an investigation. At that time, it was made abundantly clear to you that the Seattle offshoot of We Are Change set its sights on topics far beyond the need for a thorough and truly independent investigation of the events surrounding 9/11.

Even the people who headed the 9/11 Commission now admit that their report was incomplete and based on misleading information. Why don't you post something about "truthers" Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton?

If you want to poke fun at people who still question whether the roots of global warming lie with mankind, please, go for it. But you know damned well that we still don't know what happened on September 11, 2001, and that we'll never find out as long as stupid fucking credulous hacks repeat without question the stories relayed to them by the Bush administration.

Amen brother!

The following was written by Peter Tatchell of The Guardian and published on September 12, 2007. The original contains links to supporting information that I am unable to replicate here due to Slog's two-links-per-comment rule. (emphasis added):

9/11 - the big cover-up?

Even the chair of the 9/11 Commission now admits that the official evidence they were given was 'far from the truth'.

Six years after 9/11, the American public have still not been provided with a full and truthful account of the single greatest terror attack in US history.

What they got was a turkey. The 9/11 Commission was hamstrung by official obstruction. It never managed to ascertain the whole truth of what happened on September 11 2001.

The chair and vice chair of the 9/11 Commission, respectively Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, assert in their book, Without Precedent, that they were "set up to fail" and were starved of funds to do a proper investigation. They also confirm that they were denied access to the truth and misled by senior officials in the Pentagon and the federal aviation authority; and that this obstruction and deception led them to contemplate slapping officials with criminal charges.

Despite the many public statements by 9/11 commissioners and staff members acknowledging they were repeatedly lied to, not a single person has ever been charged, tried, or even reprimanded, for lying to the 9/11 Commission.

From the outset, the commission seemed to be hobbled. It did not start work until over a year after the attacks. Even then, its terms of reference were suspiciously narrow, its powers of investigation curiously limited and its time-frame for producing a report unhelpfully short - barely a year to sift through millions of pages of evidence and to interview hundreds of key witnesses.

The final report did not examine key evidence, and neglected serious anomalies in the various accounts of what happened. The commissioners admit their report was incomplete and flawed, and that many questions about the terror attacks remain unanswered. Nevertheless, the 9/11 Commission was swiftly closed down on August 21 2004.

I do not believe in conspiracy theories. I prefer rigorous, evidence-based analysis that sifts through the known facts and utilises expert opinion to draw conclusions that stand up to critical scrutiny. In other words, I believe in everything the 9/11 Commission was not.

The failings of the official investigation have fuelled too many half-baked conspiracy theories. Some of the 9/11 "truth" groups promote speculative hypotheses, ignore innocent explanations, cite non-expert sources and jump to conclusions that are not proven by the known facts. They convert mere coincidence and circumstantial evidence into cast-iron proof. This is no way to debunk the obfuscations and evasions of the 9/11 report.

But even amid the hype, some of these 9/11 groups raise valid and important questions that were never even considered, let alone answered, by the official investigation. The American public has not been told the complete truth about the events of that fateful autumn morning six years ago.

What happened on 9/11 is fundamentally important in its own right. But equally important is the way the 9/11 cover-up signifies an absence of democratic, transparent and accountable government. Establishing the truth is, in part, about restoring honesty, trust and confidence in American politics.

There are dozens of 9/11 "truth" websites and campaign groups. I cannot vouch for the veracity or credibility of any of them. But what I can say is that as well as making plenty of seemingly outrageous claims; a few of them raise legitimate questions that demand answers.

Four of these well known "tell the truth" 9/11 websites are:

1) Scholars for 9/11 Truth, which includes academics and intellectuals from many disciplines.

2) 250+ 9/11 'Smoking Guns' a website that cites over 250 pieces of evidence that allegedly contradict, or were omitted from, the 9/11 Commission report.

3) The 911 Truth Campaign that, as well as offering its own evidence and theories, includes links to more than 20 similar websites.

4) Patriots Question 9/11, perhaps the most plausible array of distinguished US citizens who question the official account of 9/11, including General Wesley Clark, former Nato commander in Europe, and seven members and staffers of the official 9/11 Commission, including the chair and vice chair. In all, this website documents the doubts of 110+ senior military, intelligence service, law enforcement and government officials; 200+ engineers and architects; 50+ pilots and aviation professionals; 150+ professors; 90+ entertainment and media people; and 190+ 9/11 survivors and family members. Although this is an impressive roll call, it doesn't necessarily mean that these expert professionals are right. Nevertheless, their scepticism of the official version of events is reason to pause and reflect.

More and more US citizens are critical of the official account. The respected Zogby polling organisation last week found that 51% of Americans want Congress to probe President Bush and Vice-President Cheney regarding the truth about the 9/11 attacks; 67% are also critical of the 9/11 Commission for not investigating the bizarre, unexplained collapse of the 47-storey World Trade Centre building 7 (WTC7). This building was not hit by any planes. Unlike WTC3, which was badly damaged by falling debris from the Twin Towers but which remained standing, WTC7 suffered minor damage but suddenly collapsed in a neat pile, as happens in a controlled demolition.

In a 2006 interview with anchorman Evan Soloman of CBC's Sunday programme, the vice chair of the 9/11 Commission, Lee Hamilton, was reminded that the commission report failed to even mention the collapse of WTC7 or the suspicious hurried removal of the building debris from the site - before there could be a proper forensic investigation of what was a crime scene. Hamilton could only offer the lame excuse that the commissioners did not have "unlimited time" and could not be expected to answer "every question" the public asks.

There are many, many more strange unexplained facts concerning the events of 9/11. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to be puzzled and want an explanation, or to be sceptical concerning the official version of events.

Six years on from those terrible events, the survivors, and the friends and families of those who died, deserve to know the truth. Is honesty and transparency concerning 9/11 too much to ask of the president and Congress?

What is needed is a new and truly independent commission of inquiry to sort coincidence and conjecture from fact, and to provide answers to the unsolved anomalies in the evidence available concerning the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Unlike the often-stymied first investigation, this new commission should be granted wide-ranging subpoena powers and unfettered access to government files and officials. George Bush should be called to testify, without his minders at hand to brief and prompt him. America - and the world - has a right to know the truth.

Notice that Tatchell does not mention climate change, electromagnetic scalar weapons, or lizard-men.

Over the past seven years, we have based a lot of really bad domestic and foreign policy on an unwavering belief in the story that George W. Bush and his cronies trotted out within hours of the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, yet even those who were in charge of the investigation of the disaster say that we still do not know the full truth about what happened.

I am baffled by people's resistance to a call for a thorough and truly independent investigation of the events surrounding 9/11.

@20 - the answer to your final statement is, sadly - especially in light of excellently written, level-headed stories like this one you've posted - more and more obvious every day :

They may not like what they hear.