James Redford
06-20-2006, 08:49 PM
john.gravois@chronicle.com
Courtesy copy: editor@chronicle.com
Title of email: Thank You for Your Article on 9/11
Dear John Gravois,
I thank you very much for your recent article entitled "Professors of Paranoia?: Academics give a scholarly stamp to 9/11 conspiracy theories" (Chronicle of Higher Education, Section: The Faculty, Vol. 52, Issue 42 [June 23, 2006], Page A10).
By focusing on this subject you help bring to people's attention the absurdities of the U.S. government's official line on the 9/11 attacks. Your article is copiously filled with scrumptiously delicious irony that makes a mockery out of suppporters of the U.S. government's inane story. Not a great many people are up to the level of penning a satire as rich as yours. If you were in my presence at this very moment I would give you a hearty pat on the back for a job well-done.
As with a lot of good satire, sometimes it's the little details that make it particularly savory. As an example of this, I found your remark on Alex Jones being a "boyish-looking man" notably droll. This is a classic example of how those who support government fictions use the logical fallacy of ad hominem attack in order to divert people's attention away from the irrationality of their own position. That is, the implication being here that because Alex Jones is a "boyish-looking man" that he is probably also mentally immature, and hence what he has to say can be disregarded as if coming from the mouth of a prepubescent boy.
But that's not where the genius of this remark of yours principly lies. What makes it especially delightful is that Alex Jones is, in fact, a testosterone-laden mammoth of a man, as can be seen in the picture of him in the below article:
"Best TV Personality: Alex Jones," Austin Chronicle, October 5, 2001:
http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2001-10-05/boar_test5.html
http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2001-10-05/boar_test5-3.jpg
The Greek gods must certainly be envious. Boyish, indeed! I doubt that there is any deficit of grown men who wish they could be half as "boyish" as Alex Jones. Irony such as this is a true treasure. Mr. Gravois, I thank you for enriching all of our lives with this bit of subtle satire.
But that little bit of irony aside, now we come to your following comment:
""
Soon after Mr. [Steven E.] Jones posted his paper online, the physics department at Brigham Young moved to distance itself from his work. The department released a statement saying that it was "not convinced that his analyses and hypotheses have been submitted to relevant scientific venues that would ensure rigorous technical peer review." ...
The Brigham Young college of engineering issued an even stronger statement on its Web site. "The structural engineering faculty," it read, "do not support the hypotheses of Professor Jones." However, his supporters complain, none of Mr. Jones's critics at Brigham Young have dealt with his points directly.
""
Rich, truly rich. Especially since it's so easy for people to look up the following bit of information on Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Steven_E._Jones&oldid=59581783 ):
""
A few department chairmen at Jones' university have issued critical statements, though none of these has yet addressed any of the points which Jones made in his paper and at his presentation at BYU. Chairman of the BYU department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Dr. Miller, is on record stating in an e-mail, "I think without exception, the structural engineering professors in our department are not in agreement with the claims made by Jones in his paper, and they don't think there is accuracy and validity to these claims".
The BYU physics department has also issued a statement: "The university is aware that Professor Steven Jones's hypotheses and interpretations of evidence regarding the collapse of World Trade Center buildings are being questioned by a number of scholars and practitioners, including many of BYU's own faculty members. Professor Jones's department and college administrators are not convinced that his analyses and hypotheses have been submitted to relevant scientific venues that would ensure rigorous technical peer review." The Fulton College of Engineering and Technology department has also added, "The structural engineering faculty in the Fulton College of Engineering and Technology do not support the hypotheses of Professor Jones." [3]
In April 2006, BYU removed those statements from their website following a letter saying that Jones' paper was, indeed, peer reviewed. The letter, written by linguistics professor Richard McGinn to Alan Parkinson, Dean of the Fulton College of Engineering and Technology, also says that McGinn is entitled to file an ethics complaint with the American Society of Civil Engineers against Parkinson for continuing to run those statements. An excerpt from the letter follows:
"...no dean has the right to represent individual faculty, much less the entire faculty of BYU’s Engineering College, on the issue of whether they do (or do not) “support” a colleague’s research, whether published or in-progress. The offending statement is a breach of collegiality, and seems as well to infringe upon Professor Jones’ academic freedom.
Most poignantly, it is inconsistent with the code of ethics of the American Society of Civil Engineers, by which you, as dean of the Engineering College, are bound, given that your web site claims to represent the opinions of an entire faculty of BYU engineers. The ASCR Code states in part:
"CANON 5.
g. Engineers shall not maliciously or falsely, directly or indirectly, injure the professional reputation, prospects, practice or employment of another engineer or indiscriminately criticize another's work."
If members of the College disagree with Dr. Jones' assertions in his paper that the official FEMA and NIST reports are inadequate as they stand, then they should be specific in their reasons for supporting those reports, neither of which provides (routine) visualizations for finite element analyses..."
""
As truly delightful as my previously-quoted comment of yours is, you really outdo yourself in the below:
""
Others have brought up this notion as well, so Mr. Jones has carried out experiments in his lab trying to get small quantities of molten aluminum to react with rust. He has not witnessed the reaction and so rules it out. But Mr. Eagar says this is just a red herring: Accidental thermite reactions are a well-known phenomenon, he says. It just takes a lot of exposed surface area for the reaction to start.
Still, Mr. Eagar does not care to respond formally to Mr. Jones or the conspiracy movement. "I don't see any point in engaging them," he says.
""
So, no doubt Prof. Thomas W. Eagar has witnessed a lot of thermite reactions brought about by pouring molten aluminum on rust. And no doubt there must have been a great amount of rust on the construction steel of the World Trade Center buildings, given the apparently widespread leaks in the buildings which have been under-reported on until your article.
But as Prof. Steven E. Jones responds in advance (see "Experiments with Molten Aluminum," Steven E. Jones with Wesley Lifferth, Jared Dodson, Jacob Stevenson and Shannon Walch, circa June 2006 http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org/ExptAlMelt.doc ),
""
Just in case Greening was right, the students and I stood well back from the heated and very rusty angle-iron as Wesley Lifferth poured molten aluminum onto the rusted steel surface (see photos). Lifferth has had considerable experience with aluminum and had never seen “violent thermite” reactions or explosions of any kind while working with molten aluminum, so he was willing to pour the molten aluminum without special precautions.
""
So, Wesley Lifferth, who has much experience with molten aluminum, didn't think it was necessary to take protective measures against the accidental thermite reactions which Prof. Eagar thinks are so well-known. Perhaps Prof. Eagar would care to demonstrate these accidental thermite reactions. You know, like a scientist is supposed to do.
Moreover, the photograph appearing in Draft 6.4 of Prof. Jones's paper "Why Indeed did the WTC Buildings Collapse?" (i.e., "hotSlag.jpg") shows a yellow-hot piece of iron or steel slag being pulled from the ruins of the World Trade Center. It's dripping at the bottom, hence we know that it must be eutectic (i.e., mixed with, e.g., sulfur [such as from thermate] to lower the melting point, as otherwise construction steel or pure iron would be white-hot at melting temperature). Indeed, even the FEMA scientists report that there was eutectic molten iron or steel at the World Trade Center complex (see Prof. Jones's previously cited paper for the references on that).
I also found your following comment on the humanities rife with irony:
""
He [Prof. Steven E. Jones] is now co-chairman of a group called the Scholars for 9/11 Truth, which includes about 50 professors — more in the humanities than in the sciences — from institutions like Clemson University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Wisconsin.
""
The implication being that only scientists in the empirical fields are qualified to comment on the 9/11 attacks, as opposed to other *scientists* (in the literal meaning of that word) in the fields of the humanities.
Yet even though the physicalist case against the U.S. government's 9/11 attacks story is absolutely certain, most of the evidence that the 9/11 attacks were staged from beginning to end by the U.S. government comes from the historical record, i.e., mainstream media reports and government primary documentation, etc. This is an area where the scientists in the humanities are particularly trained for (at least in those fields of the humanities that deal with history and the study of human action).
While although your entire commentary is a mass of satirical absurdity, the below is your crowning achievement:
""
In recent months, interest in September 11-conspiracy theories has surged. Since January, traffic to the major conspiracy Web sites has increased steadily. The number of blogs that mention "9/11" and "conspiracy" each day has climbed from a handful to over a hundred.
""
This running dido of yours throughout your article is the ultimate in your sardonicism. It's so utterly vulgar and expected, and hence all the more sublime.
So far as conspiracies go, they are ubiquitous. Everyone is in agreement that the 9/11 attacks were the result of a conspiracy. But those who are genuinely knowledgeable and care about the truth reject fallacious conspiracy theories, such as the U.S. government's lying, self-serving, a-historical, a-factual, and provably false official fairy tale conspiracy theory concerning the 9/11 attacks.
More than four times the amount of non-combatants have been systematically murdered for purely ideological reasons by their own governments within the past century than were killed in that same time-span from wars. From 1900 to 1923, various Turkish regimes killed from 3,500,000 to over 4,300,000 of its own Armenians, Greeks, Nestorians, and other Christians. Communist governments have murdered over 110 million of their own subjects since 1917. And Germany murdered some 16 million of it own subjects in the past century. (The preceding figures are from Prof. Rudolph Joseph Rummel's website at http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/ .)
All totaled, neither the private-sector crime which government is largely responsible for promoting and causing or even the wars committed by governments upon the subjects of other governments come anywhere close to the crimes government is directly responsible for committing against its own citizens--certainly not in amount of numbers. Without a doubt, the most dangerous presence to ever exist throughout history has always been the people's very own government.
Needless to say, all of these government mass-slaughters were conspiracies--massive conspiracies, at that.
In closing, Mr. Gravois, I thank you for your effort in trying to wake people up by making the supporters of the U.S. government's position look so absurd. You are a true patriot, and a friend of humanity. Let us all hope that you don't get picked up and tortured to death via the U.S. government's practice of "extraordinary rendition" (even conducted against innocent U.S. citizens). While although White House counsel Prof. John Yoo may smile at you suffering such a death, others in America would be saddened by it (assuming that we knew that you were picked up and tortured to death in said manner; it may be that you just go missing and are never heard from again, so far as the public knows).
Sincerely,
James Redford, author of "Jesus Is an Anarchist," revised and expanded edition, June 1, 2006 http://www.geocities.com/vonchloride/anarchist-jesus.pdf
Courtesy copy: editor@chronicle.com
Title of email: Thank You for Your Article on 9/11
Dear John Gravois,
I thank you very much for your recent article entitled "Professors of Paranoia?: Academics give a scholarly stamp to 9/11 conspiracy theories" (Chronicle of Higher Education, Section: The Faculty, Vol. 52, Issue 42 [June 23, 2006], Page A10).
By focusing on this subject you help bring to people's attention the absurdities of the U.S. government's official line on the 9/11 attacks. Your article is copiously filled with scrumptiously delicious irony that makes a mockery out of suppporters of the U.S. government's inane story. Not a great many people are up to the level of penning a satire as rich as yours. If you were in my presence at this very moment I would give you a hearty pat on the back for a job well-done.
As with a lot of good satire, sometimes it's the little details that make it particularly savory. As an example of this, I found your remark on Alex Jones being a "boyish-looking man" notably droll. This is a classic example of how those who support government fictions use the logical fallacy of ad hominem attack in order to divert people's attention away from the irrationality of their own position. That is, the implication being here that because Alex Jones is a "boyish-looking man" that he is probably also mentally immature, and hence what he has to say can be disregarded as if coming from the mouth of a prepubescent boy.
But that's not where the genius of this remark of yours principly lies. What makes it especially delightful is that Alex Jones is, in fact, a testosterone-laden mammoth of a man, as can be seen in the picture of him in the below article:
"Best TV Personality: Alex Jones," Austin Chronicle, October 5, 2001:
http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2001-10-05/boar_test5.html
http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2001-10-05/boar_test5-3.jpg
The Greek gods must certainly be envious. Boyish, indeed! I doubt that there is any deficit of grown men who wish they could be half as "boyish" as Alex Jones. Irony such as this is a true treasure. Mr. Gravois, I thank you for enriching all of our lives with this bit of subtle satire.
But that little bit of irony aside, now we come to your following comment:
""
Soon after Mr. [Steven E.] Jones posted his paper online, the physics department at Brigham Young moved to distance itself from his work. The department released a statement saying that it was "not convinced that his analyses and hypotheses have been submitted to relevant scientific venues that would ensure rigorous technical peer review." ...
The Brigham Young college of engineering issued an even stronger statement on its Web site. "The structural engineering faculty," it read, "do not support the hypotheses of Professor Jones." However, his supporters complain, none of Mr. Jones's critics at Brigham Young have dealt with his points directly.
""
Rich, truly rich. Especially since it's so easy for people to look up the following bit of information on Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Steven_E._Jones&oldid=59581783 ):
""
A few department chairmen at Jones' university have issued critical statements, though none of these has yet addressed any of the points which Jones made in his paper and at his presentation at BYU. Chairman of the BYU department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Dr. Miller, is on record stating in an e-mail, "I think without exception, the structural engineering professors in our department are not in agreement with the claims made by Jones in his paper, and they don't think there is accuracy and validity to these claims".
The BYU physics department has also issued a statement: "The university is aware that Professor Steven Jones's hypotheses and interpretations of evidence regarding the collapse of World Trade Center buildings are being questioned by a number of scholars and practitioners, including many of BYU's own faculty members. Professor Jones's department and college administrators are not convinced that his analyses and hypotheses have been submitted to relevant scientific venues that would ensure rigorous technical peer review." The Fulton College of Engineering and Technology department has also added, "The structural engineering faculty in the Fulton College of Engineering and Technology do not support the hypotheses of Professor Jones." [3]
In April 2006, BYU removed those statements from their website following a letter saying that Jones' paper was, indeed, peer reviewed. The letter, written by linguistics professor Richard McGinn to Alan Parkinson, Dean of the Fulton College of Engineering and Technology, also says that McGinn is entitled to file an ethics complaint with the American Society of Civil Engineers against Parkinson for continuing to run those statements. An excerpt from the letter follows:
"...no dean has the right to represent individual faculty, much less the entire faculty of BYU’s Engineering College, on the issue of whether they do (or do not) “support” a colleague’s research, whether published or in-progress. The offending statement is a breach of collegiality, and seems as well to infringe upon Professor Jones’ academic freedom.
Most poignantly, it is inconsistent with the code of ethics of the American Society of Civil Engineers, by which you, as dean of the Engineering College, are bound, given that your web site claims to represent the opinions of an entire faculty of BYU engineers. The ASCR Code states in part:
"CANON 5.
g. Engineers shall not maliciously or falsely, directly or indirectly, injure the professional reputation, prospects, practice or employment of another engineer or indiscriminately criticize another's work."
If members of the College disagree with Dr. Jones' assertions in his paper that the official FEMA and NIST reports are inadequate as they stand, then they should be specific in their reasons for supporting those reports, neither of which provides (routine) visualizations for finite element analyses..."
""
As truly delightful as my previously-quoted comment of yours is, you really outdo yourself in the below:
""
Others have brought up this notion as well, so Mr. Jones has carried out experiments in his lab trying to get small quantities of molten aluminum to react with rust. He has not witnessed the reaction and so rules it out. But Mr. Eagar says this is just a red herring: Accidental thermite reactions are a well-known phenomenon, he says. It just takes a lot of exposed surface area for the reaction to start.
Still, Mr. Eagar does not care to respond formally to Mr. Jones or the conspiracy movement. "I don't see any point in engaging them," he says.
""
So, no doubt Prof. Thomas W. Eagar has witnessed a lot of thermite reactions brought about by pouring molten aluminum on rust. And no doubt there must have been a great amount of rust on the construction steel of the World Trade Center buildings, given the apparently widespread leaks in the buildings which have been under-reported on until your article.
But as Prof. Steven E. Jones responds in advance (see "Experiments with Molten Aluminum," Steven E. Jones with Wesley Lifferth, Jared Dodson, Jacob Stevenson and Shannon Walch, circa June 2006 http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org/ExptAlMelt.doc ),
""
Just in case Greening was right, the students and I stood well back from the heated and very rusty angle-iron as Wesley Lifferth poured molten aluminum onto the rusted steel surface (see photos). Lifferth has had considerable experience with aluminum and had never seen “violent thermite” reactions or explosions of any kind while working with molten aluminum, so he was willing to pour the molten aluminum without special precautions.
""
So, Wesley Lifferth, who has much experience with molten aluminum, didn't think it was necessary to take protective measures against the accidental thermite reactions which Prof. Eagar thinks are so well-known. Perhaps Prof. Eagar would care to demonstrate these accidental thermite reactions. You know, like a scientist is supposed to do.
Moreover, the photograph appearing in Draft 6.4 of Prof. Jones's paper "Why Indeed did the WTC Buildings Collapse?" (i.e., "hotSlag.jpg") shows a yellow-hot piece of iron or steel slag being pulled from the ruins of the World Trade Center. It's dripping at the bottom, hence we know that it must be eutectic (i.e., mixed with, e.g., sulfur [such as from thermate] to lower the melting point, as otherwise construction steel or pure iron would be white-hot at melting temperature). Indeed, even the FEMA scientists report that there was eutectic molten iron or steel at the World Trade Center complex (see Prof. Jones's previously cited paper for the references on that).
I also found your following comment on the humanities rife with irony:
""
He [Prof. Steven E. Jones] is now co-chairman of a group called the Scholars for 9/11 Truth, which includes about 50 professors — more in the humanities than in the sciences — from institutions like Clemson University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Wisconsin.
""
The implication being that only scientists in the empirical fields are qualified to comment on the 9/11 attacks, as opposed to other *scientists* (in the literal meaning of that word) in the fields of the humanities.
Yet even though the physicalist case against the U.S. government's 9/11 attacks story is absolutely certain, most of the evidence that the 9/11 attacks were staged from beginning to end by the U.S. government comes from the historical record, i.e., mainstream media reports and government primary documentation, etc. This is an area where the scientists in the humanities are particularly trained for (at least in those fields of the humanities that deal with history and the study of human action).
While although your entire commentary is a mass of satirical absurdity, the below is your crowning achievement:
""
In recent months, interest in September 11-conspiracy theories has surged. Since January, traffic to the major conspiracy Web sites has increased steadily. The number of blogs that mention "9/11" and "conspiracy" each day has climbed from a handful to over a hundred.
""
This running dido of yours throughout your article is the ultimate in your sardonicism. It's so utterly vulgar and expected, and hence all the more sublime.
So far as conspiracies go, they are ubiquitous. Everyone is in agreement that the 9/11 attacks were the result of a conspiracy. But those who are genuinely knowledgeable and care about the truth reject fallacious conspiracy theories, such as the U.S. government's lying, self-serving, a-historical, a-factual, and provably false official fairy tale conspiracy theory concerning the 9/11 attacks.
More than four times the amount of non-combatants have been systematically murdered for purely ideological reasons by their own governments within the past century than were killed in that same time-span from wars. From 1900 to 1923, various Turkish regimes killed from 3,500,000 to over 4,300,000 of its own Armenians, Greeks, Nestorians, and other Christians. Communist governments have murdered over 110 million of their own subjects since 1917. And Germany murdered some 16 million of it own subjects in the past century. (The preceding figures are from Prof. Rudolph Joseph Rummel's website at http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/ .)
All totaled, neither the private-sector crime which government is largely responsible for promoting and causing or even the wars committed by governments upon the subjects of other governments come anywhere close to the crimes government is directly responsible for committing against its own citizens--certainly not in amount of numbers. Without a doubt, the most dangerous presence to ever exist throughout history has always been the people's very own government.
Needless to say, all of these government mass-slaughters were conspiracies--massive conspiracies, at that.
In closing, Mr. Gravois, I thank you for your effort in trying to wake people up by making the supporters of the U.S. government's position look so absurd. You are a true patriot, and a friend of humanity. Let us all hope that you don't get picked up and tortured to death via the U.S. government's practice of "extraordinary rendition" (even conducted against innocent U.S. citizens). While although White House counsel Prof. John Yoo may smile at you suffering such a death, others in America would be saddened by it (assuming that we knew that you were picked up and tortured to death in said manner; it may be that you just go missing and are never heard from again, so far as the public knows).
Sincerely,
James Redford, author of "Jesus Is an Anarchist," revised and expanded edition, June 1, 2006 http://www.geocities.com/vonchloride/anarchist-jesus.pdf