Time's up

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about some people who allegedly time traveled back here from as far away as the 95th century, which is pretty impressive until you listen to what they actually say (my post includes links to YouTube videos, if you're interested), at which point you are driven to the conclusion that the whole lot of them are loons.

That assessment, of course, is insufficient to get said loons to shut up and sit down, nor apparently to get people to stop believing them.  So today we have:

A time traveler who says another time traveler is responsible for 9/11.

I ran into the story over at Mysterious Universe, in an article by Paul Seaburn.  Seaburn, fortunately, seems as simultaneously amused and mystified by the claim as I am, which is reassuring.  But the guy in the YouTube video (of course he's also in a YouTube video), who says his name is Michael Phillips (born in 2043), is pretty unequivocal about the foul-ups, potential and otherwise, that have been caused by people leaping into the past and messing about with things.  Phillips says:

Another time traveller from, I think it was 2038, he came back, his name was Titor.  He came back to 2000, I do believe, and he thankfully stopped a civil war in America which was supposed to kick off in 2008…  It was decided that America needed a single unifying event to bring the country together and to revert a civil war – and that event was 9/11…  He did change the timeline so the civil war in 2008 didn’t happen.

The person he's referring to is John Titor, a name that showed up on various online sites in 2000 and 2001, and who claimed to be a US soldier from Tampa, Florida, who had jumped back here from the year 2036.  So at least Phillips is citing a real time travel claim, which is one up from what most of these wingnuts do.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But citing a claim is a far cry from showing that it's the truth.  And in the case of Titor, there were a variety of problems that cropped up, problems that Phillips decided it wasn't prudent to mention, so I will:

• None of Titor's predictions came true.  He, for example, said there was going to be a civil war on US soil in 2004, and I remember 2004 quite clearly and do not recall a war.  I'm pretty sure I would have been aware of it had it happened.
• He was pretty dismissive of the people back then.  "Perhaps I should let you all in on a little secret.  No one likes you in the future.  This time period is looked at as being full of lazy, self-centered, civically ignorant sheep.  Perhaps you should be less concerned about me and more concerned about that."  Of course, I really can't find much to argue with about this statement. 
• Also in his favor, he said, "I did not come back here expecting to be believed."  So at least he had that part taken care of.
• The biggest problem, though, was that research by investigative reporters in 2009 showed pretty conclusively that Titor was a hoax perpetrated by two brothers, Larry and John Haber.  So the fact that Titor seems not to exist kind of punches a hole into the claim that Michael Phillips came back here to protect us from him.

Be that as it may, Phillips has his own dire predictions about our future:

I do want to tell you about North Korea because they do attempt to launch a nuclear weapon at the United States – that happens later on this year in late 2018.  Hopefully we can change the timeline so it doesn’t happen.  That’s a partial reason for creating this video...  North Korea does attempt to attack a US territory – that’s what I’ll call it – in response the US sends two cruise missiles laden with nuclear tips.  Two of those to Pyongyang.  Unfortunately what happens as a result of this nuclear exchange, in 2019 World War Three does happen.  It kicks off.  It wasn’t an unlimited war – nowhere near the scale of World War One or World War Two, however, I have to try and stop it from happening. I don’t want people to die.

So then why doesn't he time-travel back to before Kim Jong-Un was born and give his dad a condom, or something?  Isn't that kind of thing supposed to be what time travelers are good at?

If that wasn't bad enough news, Phillips also said that Donald Trump would be reelected in 2020, and would be succeeded in 2024 by someone named "Michael McIntosh."  Whoever that is.  Oh, in 2022 an earthquake measuring 10.2 on the Richter Scale will hit Los Angeles and level it completely.  Then California will sink into the ocean or something.  Honestly, at that point I kind of stopped listening.

Anyway, there you have it.  Time travelers trying to foil other time travelers.  I probably shouldn't criticize; that's the basic idea of my novel Lock & Key.

Of course, it bears mentioned that there's that little word posted on the spine:

"Fiction."

Crowdfunding the scientific method

As a skeptic, I'm all for testing claims.  That's what the scientific method is all about.  You think you have an idea about how some physical process works?  Design an experiment, collect some data, and see if you can support your hypothesis.

Which is the approach that businessman Paul Salo is taking...

... with respect to whether or not a jet collision could have collapsed the Twin Towers.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I kid you not.  This guy wants to recreate the World Trade Center disaster, in the name of science, to test the conspiracy theorists' claim that 9/11 was caused by explosives planted in the building, not the jet collisions.  So he's started an IndieGoGo campaign to raise money.  Here's how he describes his project:

Many people want to know more about 9-11.  We are like a Mythbusters for September 11th.  It's an important project for many reasons.  Many people doubt various details of 9-11. As the world has changed our trust in government and media has declined significantly.  We want to see for ourselves.  We don't need people to guide our thinking. In this project we will recreate 9-11 to the best of our ability given the funds raised.  Our ultimate goal is a fully loaded 767 and a similar structure to the WTC.  We will crash the fully loaded (with fuel) plane (complete with black box) into the building using autopilot at 500 MPH... 

You can be a part of this.  How will it end up?  Will the plane disintegrate?  Will the black box disappear?  Will the out of date passports we scatter in the plane survive?  You will see it all.  We aren't trying to prove anything either way.  We will recreate the event and let the chips fall where they may.

Which, I suppose, is approaching things the right way.  It only raises a couple of teeny little problems, though: in order to recreate 9/11, you need to purchase, and then destroy, a 767 jumbo jet and a 110-story-tall skyscraper.  Also, given that most skyscrapers are in cities, you have to be willing to smash an airplane into a building in the middle of (for example) downtown Newark.

Or, more accurately, the people who run Newark have to be willing.  Which I have a hard time imagining, even considering that it's Newark we're talking about.

Salo and his team are aware at least of the financial repercussions of his proposal:

We need about $1,500,000 to purchase the plane and building and to pull this complex event off.  The fuel alone is over $100,000!  I'll document everything on 911redux.com and you will be on our newsletter and have full access to our weekly webinar updates.

I'm pleased to report that so far, Salo has received $105 in donations.  Off to the races!  Only $1,499,895 to go!

He's pretty optimistic about the whole thing, although he did admit that there's a possibility that he won't meet his goal.  Undaunted, he says that if he doesn't, he will simply "purchase a smaller plane and building."

Notwithstanding that he is raising cockeyed optimism to unprecedented heights, I can't fault his general approach.  You want to understand something, you design a way to find out.  Crowdfunding is uniquely suited to this type of thing, even if his goal does seem a little pie-in-the-sky.

And his experiment also has the other appeal of Mythbusters: the pure joy of watching things explode.  If Salo really can run this test (even with "a smaller plane and building"), I would watch the hell out of this.  So I wish him the best of luck.  Although if he does succeed, I would caution him against moving on to bigger and better things.  Recreating the eruption of Mount St. Helens, for example, would probably not end well.

Floating cities and fused books

Confirmation bias really bugs me.

This is the tendency of people to accept minuscule amounts of evidence if it seems to support what they already believed.  It's a natural enough human failing, I suppose; as Kathryn Schulz points out, it's only possible for us to consider being wrong in the abstract.  When we try to think, in the here and now, of what we might currently be wrong about, it's impossible to come up with a single thing -- even if we know it's highly unlikely that we're right about everything we believe.

But still.  Confirmation bias is such an amazing fuel for woo-woo belief, it's hard not to hate it.  And I saw two examples of headdesk-quality confirmation bias just in the last two days, claims that would be immediately ridiculous to anyone who didn't already have their heads in the clouds.

I use the clouds analogy deliberately, because the first claim has to do with there being a giant floating city in China.  This particular far-fetched tale is popular amongst the crowd who thinks that what we experience is constantly being manipulated by HAARP and "Project BlueBeam" and other such mind-altering ray guns from space.  Here's the photograph that gave rise to the claim:

Now, I have to admit that it's pretty creepy looking, and that if I saw something like this, I'd be mighty freaked out.  But listen to how the source I linked above explains it:

Project Blue Beam... claims that NASA will soon attempt to inaugurate the Illuminati-sponsored Satanic New World Order (NWO) agenda under the authority of the Antichrist by using holographic image projection technology to simulate the second coming of Christ, or a space alien invasion of Earth.

There's also a bit in there about this signaling the "return of the biblical Fallen Angels."

The problem is, even if this isn't a digitally-altered photograph, there's a perfectly reasonable natural explanation -- that this is an example of atmospheric refraction, where strong temperature gradients in the atmosphere causes the air to bend light rather like a lens.  On rare occasions, this leads to the illusion that a distant object is hovering above the horizon.

But of course, understanding that requires that you know some physics.  Much easier to babble about the Illuminati and Fallen Angels.

The second claim has to do with the revelation that someone found a bible page "fused to a piece of steel beam" after 9/11.  Much is being made of the fact that the page is the "turn the other cheek" passage from the Gospel of Matthew, and that this is god sending us a personal message.

Notwithstanding the religious conundrum of why an all-powerful god would choose to make a page from the bible survive rather than all of the innocent people on the hijacked airliner, we also have the minor problem that (1) the earliest iteration of the story dates from 2011, not 2002 as mentioned in the claim, and (2) paper, being flammable, would not "fuse to steel."  It would simply burn to ash.

This didn't stop The This Isn't Really History Channel from doing a documentary about it in 2013 (and also claiming that the discovery was made in 2002 and for some reason kept secret for nine years), and from the religious passing the story around on social media as if it were some kind of miracle, rather than being evidence that god has an odd set of priorities.

You see what you want to see.  Whether it's god sending message in 9/11 debris, or floating cities heralding the beginning of the Satanic New World Order.

The whole thing is kind of maddening.  I know we all do it, to some extent; there may well be unconsidered parts of my own belief system that I am taking for granted because of the same kind of confirmation bias that plagues everyone.  I get that.  But it sure would be nice if we spent more time doing analysis of what we're claiming -- and applying a little bit of rationality to what we believe to be true.

The tour guide in CrazyTown

I'm being driven to the conclusion that Ben Carson is insane.

This has very little to do with his stance on actual issues.  From what I've heard, when he sticks to talking about policy, there's not much to distinguish him from the other candidates for the Republican nomination.  But as soon as he veers off script, Carson very quickly ends up leading us on a guided tour of CrazyTown.

[image courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore and the Wikimedia Commons]

Let's start with his comment earlier this year that there's no such thing as a war crime. "There is no such thing as a politically correct war," Carson said, in an interview on Fox News.  "We need to grow up, we need to mature.  If you’re gonna have rules for war, you should just have a rule that says no war.  Other than that, we have to win."

You have to wonder if he thinks the Nuremberg Trials were justified.  After all, the Nazis didn't have to fight a politically correct war, right?  They were just trying to win.

Then we have his dire claims about Obamacare, which ring a little hollow after a Rand Corporation study done earlier this year that found that 17 million more Americans have health insurance since the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

But no reason to let a little thing like facts get in the way.  Obamacare is the "worst thing since slavery" (direct quote, there), Carson told us on one occasion.  On another, he said that the ACA "has been even more damaging to the United States than the terrorist attacks of 9/11."  When the aghast interviewer asked him to elaborate, Carson said, "Things that are isolated issues as opposed to things that fundamentally change the United States of America and shift power from the people to the government.  That is a huge shift.”

Then we have his comments that the events that occurred in Nazi Germany could happen right here in the United States -- which is actually sensible until you put it in juxtaposition with some of his other statements.  At a campaign event in New Hampshire, Carson said that some people believed that the rise of something like Nazism would never happen in the USA.

"I beg to differ," Carson said.  "If you go back and look at the history of the world, tyranny and despotism and how it starts, it has a lot to do with control of thought and control of speech...  If people don't speak up for what they believe, then other people will change things without them having a voice.  Hitler changed things there and nobody protested.  Nobody provided any opposition to him."

Hitler also swayed a lot of Germans by convincing them that they were at risk of losing their cultural identity from such threats as the Jews.  Kind of curious, then, that Carson is employing the same kinds of tactics, but aimed instead at gays -- whom he said were responsible for the fall of Rome:

I believe God loves homosexuals as much as he loves everyone, but if we can redefine marriage as between two men or two women or any other way based on social pressures as opposed to between a man and a woman, we will continue to redefine it in any way that we wish, which is a slippery slope with a disastrous ending, as witnessed in the dramatic fall of the Roman Empire.

Of course, he may not be all that sure of his own facts, because he said at another time that political correctness was what destroyed the Roman Empire:

You know, there is no society that can long survive without values and principles.  And if we get so caught up in political correctness, that nothing is right and nothing is wrong, then we go the same route as Ancient Rome.  They did exactly the same thing.  And they forgot who they were.  They stood for nothing and they fell for everything and they went right down the tubes.

So the fall of Rome couldn't have had anything to do with mismanagement by crazy leaders and their being attacked by a shitload of barbarians?

I can understand why Carson wouldn't want to draw attention to the former, at least.

The whole thing may be a moot point anyhow, because Carson went on record as saying that there "may be so much anarchy going on" in 2016 that the elections will be cancelled.

I'm willing to believe that a lot of the candidates, on both sides of the aisle, are pandering to their voter base, and saying whatever it takes to get elected.  When you look at campaign statements, and then what the victors actually do once they're in office, it becomes pretty clear that there's often a pretty big disconnect between the stump-speech rhetoric and the reality of policymaking.

Carson, though... when he speaks, in that soft, patient, utterly reasonable tone of his... I think he honestly believes everything he's saying.

Which makes his position as a frontrunner for the Republican nomination absolutely terrifying.  If this man gets the nod, and has even a prayer of a chance of winning the presidency...  well, let me just say that there are precedents in world history for insane but charismatic ideologues taking control of a country -- and none of them end well.

Divine message recognition module

Superstition in general leaves me a bit mystified.  As long as I can remember, I've never understood how people can believe in good luck charms and actions that will curse you to its opposite, or that some purely natural phenomenon is a sign from god... or a message from his infernal counterpart.

This is why I responded with frank bafflement at people's reaction to the photograph that went viral this week in the aftermath of the tornado that struck Moore, Oklahoma.

The photo was reposted tens of thousands of times on social media, usually with messages like, "God is with us even in difficult times!" and "Praise the Lord!  He is here!"  This elicited two main questions in my mind:  (1) Aren't telephone poles always shaped like a cross?  And (2) if the Almighty wanted to send the people of Oklahoma a sign of his presence, wouldn't it have been more considerate to do it without smashing the shit out of the town first?

This last question is especially pertinent, given that Moore has been hit by tornadoes seven times in the past twenty years, with the ones in 1999 and 2013 being particularly devastating (the tornado in 1999 cut a 38-mile-long swath of destruction, and resulted in the highest windspeed ever measured on the Earth's surface -- 301 miles per hour).  So my guess is that given the choice between receiving a cross-shaped sign from god, and not being blasted to smithereens by a tornado again, most of the citizens of Moore would choose the latter.

So I found people's responses to the photograph pretty perplexing.  Of course, I had the same reaction to the kerfuffle over the cross-shaped chunks left in the wreckage after 9/11:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Because, after all, this is what the intersection of two girders looks like.  But this one resulted in a war of words between people who wanted to clear away the debris and people who saw this as a holy message from god and wanted it left as-is.  In the end, it was installed on a pedestal at Ground Zero, and has become an object of devotion by the religious.

[image courtesy of photographer Samuel Li and the Wikimedia Commons]

Once again, I find this kind of incomprehensible.  You'd think if god wanted to send a sign to the faithful, a bunch of writing in the sky an hour earlier saying "THERE ARE CRAZIES WHO HAVE HIJACKED AIRPLANES AND ARE ON THE WAY TO DESTROY THE WORLD TRADE CENTER, GET OUT NOW!" would have been more to the point.

Note that this is a completely separate question from the question of whether an all-powerful deity exists in the first place.  My only point here is that if there is a deity, then leaving behind cross-shaped debris after something has wreaked destruction, ruin, and death is a pretty peculiar way to communicate with his followers.

On the other hand, I guess if it brings people solace after a tragedy, there's some benefit to it.  It's better than despair, after all.  But while I went through times in my life when I desperately wanted to believe in the supernatural -- during my teens and early twenties, I was pretty much constantly casting about for evidence of such phenomena -- the whole "Sign from God" thing never made sense to me.  Which is probably why it used to piss me off no end in English Lit classes when the teacher would tell us that in chapter 3, the Clouds In The Western Sky were foreshadowing the horrible events that would unfold for the Main Character And His Doomed Lover in chapter 7.  "Oh, come on," I recall thinking.  "They're clouds.  As in big blobs of condensed water droplets.  They don't give a rat's ass about the Main Character And His Doomed Lover."

Nor, I suspect, does the broken telephone pole in Moore, Oklahoma have anything to do with a divine message.  It's a striking photograph, yes, but no more than that, especially given that telephone poles are already more-or-less shaped that way.

Or maybe I'm just missing the Divine Message Recognition Module in my brain.

New studies show that the author of Skeptophilia is brilliant!

I would love it if some psychologist who studies the effect of media on people's beliefs would do a specific experiment, and then let me know the results.

The experiment I'd like done is to have a series of fake news articles that test subjects would read.  There would be two different kinds of articles -- ones in which the headline basically summarized what the text of the article said (as it should be), and ones in which the headline made a statement that was at odds with what the text of the article actually claimed.  Then, subjects would answer some questions, and see which had a greater impact in their memory -- the contents of the headline, or the contents of the article text.

I strongly suspect that when the text of an article and the headline conflict, it's the headline that will have the biggest effect on what readers remember.  It's the first thing they see; it's in bold print; and it gives a catchy, terse summary of what the story supposedly is about.  All of the details in the text, I think, are much more likely to be lost, misremembered, or ignored outright.

This comes up because of an article sent to me by a friend, which was entitled "New studies: ‘Conspiracy theorists’ sane, while government dupes are crazy and hostile."  The story, which appeared in 21st Century Wire, is making a pretty bold claim -- that what the conspiracy theorists have been claiming all along is correct.  All of us skeptics, who have scoffed at the chemtrails and Illuminati and mind control and RFID chip implants and evil Satanic Masonic rituals, are not only wrong, we are the crazy ones.

Naturally, I was pretty interested to read about this.

The first paragraph basically mirrored the headline, stating that "those labeled 'conspiracy theorists' appear to be saner than those who accept the official version of contested events."  Then, we hear about the first study:

The most recent study was published on July 8th by psychologists Michael J. Wood and Karen M. Douglas of the University of Kent (UK). Entitled “What about Building 7? A social psychological study of online discussion of 9/11 conspiracy theories,” the study compared “conspiracist” (pro-conspiracy theory) and “conventionalist” (anti-conspiracy) comments at news websites.

The authors were surprised to discover that it is now more conventional to leave so-called conspiracist comments than conventionalist ones: “Of the 2174 comments collected, 1459 were coded as conspiracist and 715 as conventionalist.” In other words, among people who comment on news articles, those who disbelieve government accounts of such events as 9/11 and the JFK assassination outnumber believers by more than two to one. That means it is the pro-conspiracy commenters who are expressing what is now the conventional wisdom, while the anti-conspiracy commenters are becoming a small, beleaguered minority.

By this time, I was already bouncing up and down in my chair, yelling, "Just wait a moment!  That doesn't support what the headline said at all!" at my computer.  So we have double the number of conspiracist comments as conventional ones posted on news websites -- we're supposed to conclude from this that the conspiracists are more likely to be right?  Or sane?  All it means is that conspiracist comments are common, which is hardly the same thing.

I don't even think that the we can even conclude from this that the conspiracists themselves outnumber the "conventionalists."  For that, we'd need to make the further assumption that people of all beliefs are equally likely to post, which seems like a leap, considering what a rabid lot some of the conspiracy theorists seem to be.

Then, we hear about the second "study:"

(T)hese findings are amplified in the new book Conspiracy Theory in America by political scientist Lance deHaven-Smith, published earlier this year by the University of Texas Press. Professor deHaven-Smith explains why people don’t like being called “conspiracy theorists”: The term was invented and put into wide circulation by the CIA to smear and defame people questioning the JFK assassination! “The CIA’s campaign to popularize the term ‘conspiracy theory’ and make conspiracy belief a target of ridicule and hostility must be credited, unfortunately, with being one of the most successful propaganda initiatives of all time.”

In other words, people who use the terms “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” as an insult are doing so as the result of a well-documented, undisputed, historically-real conspiracy by the CIA to cover up the JFK assassination. That campaign, by the way, was completely illegal, and the CIA officers involved were criminals; the CIA is barred from all domestic activities, yet routinely breaks the law to conduct domestic operations ranging from propaganda to assassinations.

Ah.  So because (1) conspiracy theorists don't like being called conspiracy theorists, and (2) the CIA engaged in some nasty business surrounding the JFK assassination, the conspiracy theorists are actually sane when they babble about chemtrails and the Bilderberg Group.  Got it.

Then, we have an alleged conclusion from psychologist Laurie Manwell, of the University of Guelph, summarized as follows:

Psychologist Laurie Manwell of the University of Guelph agrees that the CIA-designed “conspiracy theory” label impedes cognitive function. She points out, in an article published in American Behavioral Scientist (2010), that anti-conspiracy people are unable to think clearly about such apparent state crimes against democracy as 9/11 due to their inability to process information that conflicts with pre-existing belief.

So, I did a little digging on Manwell -- and as you might already be anticipating, the author of the article in 21st Century Wire is misrepresenting her, too.  Turns out Manwell thinks that laypeople of all stripes tend to ignore factual information, and pay more attention to claims that support what they already believed.  Take a look at what she wrote in a June 2007 paper, "Faulty Towers of Belief:"

Most laypersons would agree with research showing that attitudes influence a person's evaluation of a subject -- whether it be an idea or another person -- and that the stronger the attitude, the greater influence it will have in evoking a positive or a negative evaluation.  However, the types of reasoning processes that laypersons believe they use when evaluating information are not necessarily the processes that they actually use.  Research repeatedly shows that what people say they are doing, and what they are actually doing, are often two very different things... Thus, in evaluating the events of 9/11, we need to keep in mind that there are many factors that influence our judgments, including previously formed attitudes and beliefs, many of which are resistant to change, and some of which we may not even be aware of at the time of evaluation.

So, the bottom line is that Manwell's contention is that we're all prone to confirmation bias, which is hardly the same thing as claiming that the conspiracy theorists are clear-eyed exponents of the truth, and the skeptics are dim-witted obstructionists.  And as far as who is entering the argument with more "previously formed attitudes and beliefs," might I just ask you to consider that question from the standpoint of contrasting Alex Jones with, say, Michael Shermer?

Oh, but don't let that stand in the way of your drawing the conclusion you'd already settled on.  Here's the last line of the article in 21st Century Wire:

No wonder the anti-conspiracy people are sounding more and more like a bunch of hostile, paranoid cranks.

So, there you have it.  Take some actual research, claim it supports the contentions you already had, then turn around and accuse your opponents of doing what you just did.  Craft a nice, inflammatory headline that basically says, "You Should Believe Me Because the People Who Disagree With Me Are Big Fat Liars," and call it good.

Chances are, the most your readers are going to remember about what you wrote is the headline, anyway, which gives me an idea.  Maybe I should start giving my posts headlines like "New Studies Show That You'll Have Good Luck If You Send Gordon Money."  It's worth a try, because attempting to become independently wealthy as a writer seems to be a losing proposition any other way.

Conspiracy theories and the fall of the Twin Towers

Christen Simensen, a materials scientist with Norwegian research firm SINTEF, has provided a scientific explanation of how collision with jets brought down the Twin Towers.  [Source]

In a recent paper in the journal Aluminum International Today, Simensen describes how the jet fuel alone could have heated up the aluminum in the fuselage to its melting point.  The molten aluminum would have reacted with water from the sprinkler system, generating hydrogen gas, an explosion, and a rapid heating to 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit -- sufficient to melt the steel girders, resulting in the building's collapse.

This, Simensen claims, should put to rest all of the claims by conspiracy theorists that 9/11 was an "inside job," as it convincingly explains all of the observed data, including the explosions that preceded the collapse of the building.  These explosions are some of the main points in arguments made by people who think that someone -- variously claimed to be the Bush administration, the Bilderburg Group, the Illuminati, the Jews, and probably a whole host of others -- planted bombs in the Twin Towers, prior to the airplane collisions, to assure that the buildings would fall.

To which I say: Mr. Simensen, you are an optimist.

Conspiracy theorists have no respect for data, logic, and science.  I would not hesitate to guess that the conspiracy theorists you think will be silenced by your paper will now only squawk the louder, and claim that you were paid to write what you did.  That's the trouble with folks who believe in conspiracies; if you argue with them, they merely shake their heads and add you to the list of Conspirators.

Coincidentally, last Thursday Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is in New York City for a meeting of the UN General Assembly, met with reporters from the Associated Press, and stated that "as an engineer," he thinks it is impossible for two planes to have brought down the Twin Towers.  He stopped short of claiming the the US government was complicit in the catastrophe, but that was clearly what he was implying.  I seriously doubt that Ahmadinejad would be at all convinced by Simensen's paper -- given that he considers the Holocaust a "mythical claim" that the Jews fabricated in order to facilitate the creation of Israel.  Believe me, if you can discount tens of thousands of photographs, records, and first-hand accounts of a catastrophe that killed six million, you can certainly ignore an argument in Aluminum International Today.

Conspiracy theories are kind of like taking the idea of confirmation bias and running off the cliff with it.  Confirmation bias, you may remember from yesterday's post, is when you already have decided what you believe, so you exaggerate the importance of tiny bits of evidence in favor of your claim, and ignore mountains of evidence against it.  Proponents of conspiracy theories take it a step further; they look on a complete lack of evidence as a point in their favor.  "Of course there's no hard evidence," they say.  "They're a wily bunch, those conspirators.  They wouldn't just leave evidence hanging around."

The whole thing reminds me of the story of the man whose friend, every time he came for a visit, would stop in the doorway, put his hands together as if in prayer, and intone, "May this house be safe from tigers."  After this had happened several times, the man said to his friend, "Why do you keep doing that?  It's pointless.  I've never seen any tigers.  There's probably not a tiger within a thousand miles of here."

The friend smiled.  "It works well, doesn't it?"