Educating the Skeptics

9/11 Truth Outreach and A.N.E.T.A. Make Inroads
by Wayne Coste and Tim Michel

During the weekend of May 29 to 31 the Skeptics Society hosted their conference entitled, In the Year 2525: Big Science, Big History, and the Far Future of Humanity. Volunteers from A.N.E.T.A (Association for Nine Eleven Truth Awareness). and 9/11 Truth Outreach attended the conference. Those researching and doing outreach around the events of 9/11 know the Skeptics Society dances around a dichotomy – when to apply their foundational principles of using logic and the scientific method – and when to abandon them.

Their dichotomy is apparent (and their credibility is lost) when it comes to their explanation of the events of 9/11. For example, in the Skeptics Societies position paper Conspiracy Theories: Who Believes Them and Why and How to Determine if a Conspiracy Theory is True or False, Founders Michael Shermer and Pat Linse conclude their section on the destruction of the Twin Towers, “9 Single Facts v. Convergence” (page 5) with “once one truss failed, others failed, and when one floor collapsed (along with the ten stories above it) onto the next floor below, that floor then gave way, creating a pancaking effect that triggered the collapse of the 500,000-ton building.”

Unfortunately for the credibility of the Skeptics Society – and its founders – they repeat this assertion without looking at the evidence. In other words they ignore the basic ground rule for the scientific method. The authors should be able to support their assertion easily by showing pictures of pancaked debris with one floor below the debris of another floor which is below the debris for the next higher floor etc. But there is no way they can do this because there was no visible pancaking effect. Photographic evidence and the story of the survivors of the North Tower such as the “Miracle of Ladder 6” show that their assertion of a gravity-only pancake collapse is unsupportable because there is virtually no debris within the footprint of the North Tower. This means no floor-upon-floor-upon-floor pancakes . Therefore, there is no evidence of a mass capable of doing the crushing because it would have landed in the lobby of the North Tower.

Michael Shermer likes to quote Carl Sagan which is ironic because Carl’s wife, Lynn Margulis, and his two sons have spoken out publicly about the falsehoods of the narrative about 9/11. The Skeptics Society promotes the false narrative even in the face of overwhelming evidence of the explosive demolition of the three skyscrapers at the World Trade Center.

The May 29–31, 2015 Conference

The conference was entitled, “In the Year 2525: Big Science, Big History, and the Far Future of Humanity” and covered a wide range of topics where discussion of the issues of 9/11 has a place. A partial list of speakers and their topics included:

Rizo represented A.N.E.T.A. and Tim Michel represented 9/11 Truth Outreach at the conference. Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins, and other top skeptics, saw that 9/11 Truth advocates as considerate and intelligent. If these presenters were committed to reason and intellectual discourse, the conversations should help open their awareness of 9/11.

For example in a conversation over lunch with Michael Shermer, Tim built on earlier presentations related to evolution, when he observed that “deception has a Darwinian component because deception is often employed in nature as a survival tactic and certainly humans have been known in the past to employ this in the past.” I said you find this in nature by observing a chameleon, cuttlefish or octopus. Michael simply said, oh yeah, I can see that. Richard Dawkins was asked a follow-up, "As the result of my research it became appearance to me that since 9/11 two forms on control of culture and politics, deception and trauma, have become more significantly employed than they were in the past. Do you feel this has a Darwinian aspect to it?” Neither Michael Shermer nor Richard Dawkins couldn't see how this would be an evolutionary strategy by those that feel their genes have become dominant.

Later in the day I asked Lawrence Krauss if my understanding of space and matter was correct. I said that empty space as we know it is simply the universe in it's ground state and that matter, protons, electron as we know them are just points in the universe at elevated or excited states, similar to the quantum mechanical ground and excited states of electrons in an atom. Kraus replied, "that is exactly correct, we call empty space the vacuum field and elevated states as vacuum fluctuations. He continued further saying, "your thinking on this is absolutely correct, that is premise from which we work in particle physics." I kind of knew that when asking the question and the reason I asked it is because I didn't want to belabor the 9/11 point and I knew that my understanding of particle physics might be vindicated which would lend credibility to what I had previously said about 9/11 and using deception and trauma to mold cultural and political structures.

I talked to Michael Shermer at dinner about having future conferences where we could broaden the topic slightly so we could include discussions about how 9/11 affected that way the American government and perhaps governments in general perceive using deception and trauma to mold the psyche of populations. I gave him a copy of "9/11 Explosive Evidence - Experts Speak Out" because he said he hadn't seen that particular video but to give it to him later during the closing festivities.

I was mostly trying to connect with the speakers and learn where they were coming from so I present the idea of Skeptic911 and the idea of how 9/11 radically changed the way we approach cultural and political problems and how that tied into the discussions. I was only mildly successful, as I was playing catch up all day. I didn't get a chance to talk to Jared Diamond, though I wanted to engage him on his work in Paupua New Guinea, whose history I am familiar with and how their reluctance to give up war to settle disputes is similar the United States reluctance to give up war to subjugate the world.

I gave him some of our 9/11 Truth Outreach Fliers like I had done with several other people I encountered during the conference, got his email address and then discussed the dynamics of the falling block theory used to described the way the Twin Towers were destroyed. I said the key element in the destruction of the Twin Towers was the lack of deceleration when the upper block encountered the intact lower part. He said there wouldn't be a jolt as the energy would just ripple through the lower structure. I said there would only be energy to ripple through the lower part of the building if the upper block imparted that energy to the lower block. I continued developing this argument by saying that for energy needed to be imparted to the lower block we would need to see the acceleration of the upper block be reduced when the upper block encountered the lower in tack building otherwise there is nothing to produce the wave energy which could then ripple through the lower part of the building. I left it at that and told him to look at the brochure and then headed back to the auditorium.

I talked to John McWhorter at length and he was cautiously receptive to what I had to say about 9/11 and others standing around had read the quote about someone within the Neocon hierarchy of the Bush White House having boasted that they make history that the rest of us will research and study, when addressing a group of journalists." The conversation ended on that note as John got distracted by someone else wanting their book signed.

There was a group of High School students and two them had interesting questions, like "should we require our political representatives to be versed in science?" Unfortunately, as many presenters at the conference demonstrated, it is not a lack of knowledge about science that is the biggest hurdle, it is an unwillingness to challenge the prevailing paradigm – even when science demands that challenge be made.