The Crash Site of Flight 93 Is Still REALLY FREAKING WEIRD

I still can't figure out what happened if we assume the official crash scenario.

 The biggest smoking guns for me are

1) the crater makes no sense for the official story of how the plane went in

2) the lack of any significant sized debris near the crater

3) the lack of disturbed earth around the crater-- what happened to the dirt in the hole and remember supposedly most of a Boeing 757 is in the bottom of hole underneath some dirt, too

4) the crater generally seems to small for a huge plane to go in there at 600 mph and blow up completely

Good Summary of 9/11 Being An Inside Job

 Best Example of State-Sponsored False-Flag against one's own citizens (Synthetic Terrorism)

-- Italy's "Strategy of Tension" in the 1970's and 1980's; Operation Gladio

Best Example of US Considering Synthetic Terrorism
-- Operation Northwoods Plan (early 1960's)

Best Examples that 9/11 was not Unexpected
-- NORAD and other government agencies running terrorist hijacking drills and hijacked planes into building drills prior to 9/11

Best Example of General Forewarnings of 9/11
-- FBI whistle-blowers warning of Arabs in flight schools

Best Example of Specific Forewarnings of 9/11
-- Suspicious trading of American Airlines and United Airlines stocks right before 9/11 (trades were not by the terrorists since story has been covered up)

Best Examples that US intelligence agencies knew about the attacks
-- Extensive interactions between CIA, Pakistani Intelligence Services (ISI), Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden: contacts went back to when US supported the Afghanistan Muhajadeen against the UUSR
-- Pakistani ISI Chief (General Ahmed) approved money transfer to lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta
-- FBI informant lived with two 9/11 hijackers in San Diego right before attacks
-- FBI agents told government lawyer David Schippers specific time and date for 9/11 attacks

Best Examples that there is more to the 9/11 story than the official version

-- Live-fly hijacking exercise and mutiple other wargames run by NORAD on 9/11

-- National Reconnaissance Office (NRO, in charge of satellite monitoring) was running a plane into building exercise on 9/11

-- Not one of the eight pilots on the four hijacked planes signaled they were hijacked to air traffic control: how did knife and boxcutter-armed hijackers manage surprise take-overs on every plane?

-- the hijackers should not have been able to to fly jumbo jets effectively with their level of training

-- Perfectly controlled collapse of WTC building 7, a 47 story building housing several government agencies including the CIA and Secret Service: building had only a limited fire and was not hit by an airplane

-- Witnesses described bombs in WTC towers: officials and media have covered this up

-- Rudy Giuliani was told WTC towers would collapse right before it happened yet the collapse was completely unexpected by most people

-- WTC towers had massive central core section that was built to withstand impact with large jet airliner: WTC structure has been misleadingly portrayed by the media to promote pancake collapse story

-- Jet fuel fires should not have been hot to enough to weaken steel beams in WTC tower core

-- Strange and very difficult flight path taken by flight 77 pilot to hit Pentagon

-- Damage to Pentagon limited to recently renovated and sparsely occupied part of building

-- Complete lack of air defenses over Washington DC on 9/11 when DC should have been a top priority for air defense and hijacked planes were heading back towards the area

-- President Bush's Air Force One plane was threatened with attack using secret code words that only top level government officials knew

Best Examples of Administration Cover-Up
-- Stonewalling of appointment of the 9/11 commission
-- Appointment of Henry Kissinger initially to chair the commission
-- Limited time and budget allotted to 9/11 commission
-- Bush and Cheney testify to commission together
-- Complete lack of mention of the NORAD wargames running on 9/11 in the 9/11 commission report
-- US forces ISI Chief General Ahmed into retirement
-- Terrorist connections to the information services company P-tech which had access to FAA and other important government databases
-- Sibel Edmonds, the former FBI-translator, is being gagged from telling what she knows about 9/11


Reasons and Motives for 9/11
-- geopolitical strategy, maintenance of US global dominance by creating permanent US bases in middle east and asia
-- incitement to war to capture middle-east and asian oil reserves
-- disgruntled military officers wanted a war after many years of relative inaction
-- Neocon motives: clash of civilzations with the west and Islam; Islam perceived as threat to long-term US global dominance and to Israel
-- Massive insurance fraud by Larry Silverstein, owner of WTC, and others
-- Establishes political dominance by Republicans/Conservatives-- provides all purpose cover for radical government policies

I posted this years ago, but I'm not sure the source of this -- if I wrote it, or took it form somewhere or more likely modified it from someone else's post. 

"We Have a Real UFO Problem. And It’s Not Balloons."

We seriously are not alone. UFOs or UAPs are no joke.

On a clear, sunny day in April 2014, two F/A-18s took off for an air combat training mission off the coast of Virginia. 

The jets, part of my Navy fighter squadron, climbed to an altitude of 12,000 and steered towards Warning Area W-72, an exclusive block of airspace ten miles east of Virginia Beach. 

All traffic into the training area goes through a single GPS point at a set altitude — almost like a doorway into a massive room where military jets can operate without running into other aircraft.  

Just at the moment the two jets crossed the threshold, one of the pilots saw a dark gray cube inside of a clear sphere — motionless against the wind, fixed directly at the entry point. The jets, only 100 feet apart, zipped past the object on either side. 

The pilots had come so dangerously close to something they couldn’t identify that they terminated the training mission immediately and returned to base. “I almost hit one of those damn things!” the flight leader, still shaken by the incident, told us shortly after in the pilots’ ready room. 

We all knew exactly what he meant. “Those damn things” had been plaguing us for the previous eight months. 

I joined the U.S. Navy in 2009 and underwent years of rigorous training as a pilot. Specifically, we are trained to be expert observers in identifying aircraft with our sensors and our own eyes. 

It’s our job to know what’s in our operating area. That’s why, in 2014, after upgrades were made to our radar system, our squadron made a startling discovery: There were unknown objects in our airspace. 

Initially, the objects were showing up on our newly upgraded radars and we assumed they were “ghosts in the machine,” or software glitches. But then we began to correlate the radar tracks with multiple surveillance systems, including infrared sensors that detected heat signatures. 

Then came the hair-raising near misses that required us to take evasive action. These were no mere balloons. 

The unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) accelerated at speeds up to Mach 1, the speed of sound. They could hold their position, appearing motionless, despite Category 4 hurricane-force winds of 120 knots. 

They did not have any visible means of lift, control surfaces or propulsion — in other words nothing that resembled normal aircraft with wings, flaps or engines. 

And they outlasted our fighter jets, operating continuously throughout the day. 

I am a formally trained engineer, but the technology they demonstrated defied my understanding. After that near-miss, we had no choice but to submit a safety report, hoping that something could be done before it was too late. But there was no official acknowledgement of what we experienced and no further mechanism to report the sightings — even as other aircrew flying along the East coast quietly began sharing similar experiences. Our only option was to cancel or move our training, as the UAP continued to maneuver in our vicinity unchecked. Nearly a decade later we still don’t know what they were.   

(snip) 

If the phenomena I witnessed with my own eyes turns out to be foreign drones, they pose an urgent threat to national security and airspace safety. If they are something else, it must be a scientific priority to find out.

 

 

 

Why the Whole Lab Leak Theory for the Origin of COVID Is A Nonsensical Argument

For me, I just gotta say this whole argument about a lab leak is dumb because-- why should we worry about viruses leaking from research labs if the general population can't be convinced to fucking take pandemics and public health seriously??? And yes, this is due to fucking conservatives, the same assholes who promote the lab leak theory!!!

 NoMoreMisterNiceBlog has much more on this:

David Wallace-Wells of The New York Times wags a finger at liberals:

We’ve Been Talking About the Lab-Leak Hypothesis All Wrong

He wants us to imagine a world that experienced the same pandemic the real world has been experiencing, except this world is devoid of right-wing politics:

Imagine yourself, if you can, in the months before the Covid-19 pandemic. Imagine being told then that a novel virus would emerge in China that would then spread around the world, infecting much of the global population, by some estimates killing more than 20 million people, and upending much of humanity’s social, political and economic life along the way.

Imagine you were then told that some experts believed that this new virus raised questions about the safety of certain kinds of scientific research, in which virologists collected rare viruses out in the wild, brought them to facilities in or near cities and in some cases tinkered with them there to help prevent or better respond to future pandemics.

Imagine that none of this was presented to you in partisan or nationalistic terms. Imagine that Donald Trump had not been president and that nobody used the term “bioweapon.” And then imagine that a question was put to you: What would the chances have to be that a lab accident was the origin of the pandemic to justify a broad and public conversation about the safety of that research?

Wallace-Wells believes -- and, really, I get this -- that even a very small chance that carelessness caused the pandemic should have made us rethink lab safety:

... personally, I think that if I were asked what the chances of an accidental outbreak would have to be to justify a loud and public reckoning over lab safety, I would put the number much lower than full proof. In fact, much lower even than “preponderance of evidence” — as low as 5 percent, perhaps, or 1 percent or less. Truthfully, I’m not sure that it would need to be any higher than zero, given that early in 2020, many of those scientists who would become the most stalwart critics of the lab-leak theory privately acknowledged that the origins of the pandemic were very much up for debate and that a laboratory leak was a perfectly plausible — perhaps even the most likely — explanation for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan a few months earlier.

But we can't "imagine that none of this was presented ... in partisan or nationalistic terms." We can't "imagine that Donald Trump had not been president and that nobody used the term 'bioweapon'" -- or, more memorably, the phrase "China virus," a name Trump first endorsed on March 11, 2020, when COVID was barely a presence in much of the United States, and then used repeatedly in speeches and on Twitter.

(See also: "Chinese coronavirus," "Wuhan virus," "Wu flu," etc., etc.)

Right-wingers poisoned our COVID discourse from the start, the way they poison our discourse on so many other issues. Writing about our COVID debates as if they can be imagined without right-wing demagoguery is like talking about the real estate market in East Palestine, Ohio, as if the train derailment never happened. The housing stock is wonderful! The schools are first rate! Yes, but there are deadly toxins in the air, water, and soil. The derailment determines what we talk about when we talk about East Palestine, just as right-wing demagoguery sets the terms for how we talk about ... well, pretty much anything these days.

Instead of saying that "we" -- meaning right-thinking liberals -- deserve blame for failing to advocate better lab safety, Wallace-Wells should be angry at the right for making reasonable debate impossible. We're seeing it again as Republican politicians and the right-wing media respond to news that the Department of Energy believes the pandemic resulted from a lab leak, a conclusion the FBI had already reached. Downplayed in right-wing rhetoric -- which is flooding the zone right now -- is the fact that other agencies still dispute this conclusion, as The Washington Post noted on Monday:

... other intelligence agencies involved in the classified update ... were divided on the question of covid-19’s origins, with most still maintaining that a natural, evolutionary “spillover” from animals was the most likely explanation....

The overall view — that there is as yet no definitive conclusion on the virus’s origin — has not changed since the release of an earlier version of the report by the Biden administration in 2021, according to the officials.

“The bottom line remains the same: Basically no one really knows,” one of the officials said.

Moreover, it appears that no agency believes that the virus was altered in the lab.

But the agencies are united, the official said, in the view that the virus was not developed as a bioweapon.

“‘Lab’ does not equal ‘man-made,’ the official said, noting that lab workers could have collected the virus in nature and stored it at the lab from which it escaped. “Even if it was a leak from a lab," the person added, intelligence analysts "still think it would be a naturally occurring virus.”

If even agencies that believe the virus spread via a leak believe it was "a naturally occurring virus," then presumably it was not even the product of "gain of function" research designed to test responses to potential future pathogens.

But the agencies' actual conclusions -- and ongoing uncertainty about whether a lab was involved -- aren't preventing Republican demagogues from proclaiming that (a) it's settled fact that COVID came from a lab and (b) it's certain or nearly certain that the virus was engineered, in all likelihood as a bioweapon:

Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) bluntly asked at the House Select Committee’s hearing about Communist China if the totalitarian regime created the coronavirus as a bioweapon.

Directing his question to former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger, Banks cited a recent statement from FBI Director Christopher Wray indicating that the coronavirus came from a Wuhan lab.

“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” Wray told Fox News. “Here you are talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab.”

... In his question, Jim Banks took it a step further by asking Pottinger if the virus did not simply originate from a lab leak, but if China actually created a bioweapon.

“Mr. Pottinger, less than an hour ago, the FBI Director, Christopher Wray, confirmed that COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan lab. Do you think there is a chance that the Wuhan lab was involved in bioweapons research?” asked Banks.

... “We know for certain that the Chinese military is involved in research in coronavirus,” [Pottinger] said. “We know that they were experimenting using U.S. technology to work on chimeric viruses. That is ones that had been engineered.”

“We know that the Chinese government and military had been involved in trying to develop vaccines for coronaviruses. I think that this is an area that there is still a great deal of information that has yet to come out that will show that there was an enormous amount of interest,” he added.

(Emphasis added.)

Christopher Wray confirmed nothing. But this is how the right dictates the terms of the debate. If the rest of us feel we can't talk about lab safety without feeding right-wing demagoguery, you can't blame us.

Also, please note that the right-wing narrative -- ChiComs deliberately unleashed COVID on the world -- suggests that we don't have a lab safety problem. In the view of the right, the Chinese are evil supervillains. Supervillains don't make mistakes -- every diabolical thing they do is deliberate. So maybe the right deserves even more of the blame for the fact that we're not talking about lab safety.

Incredibly Dumb and Toxic Rightwing Conspiracy Theories Spread on FoxNews and Twitter

On Feb. 3 a train carrying hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. Some of the contents immediately caught fire. Three days later authorities released and burned off additional material from five tankers. These fires caused elevated levels of harmful chemicals in the local air, although the Environmental Protection Agency says that the pollution wasn’t severe enough to cause long-term health damage. 

Train derailments are actually fairly common, but you can see how this one might become a political issue. After all, the Obama administration tried to improve rail safety, for example by requiring superior modern brakes on high-hazard trains, and then the Trump administration reversed these regulations. As it happens, these regulations probably wouldn’t have prevented the Ohio derailment, because they were too narrow to have covered this particular train. 

Still, the events in East Palestine would seem, on the face of it, to strengthen the progressive case for stronger regulation of industry and hurt the conservative case against regulation. Instead, however, the right is on the attack, claiming that blame for the disaster in Ohio rests on the Biden administration, which it says doesn’t care about or is even actively hostile to white people. 

This is vile. It’s also amazing. As far as I can tell, right-wing commentators have just invented a whole new class of conspiracy theory, one that doesn’t even try to explain how the alleged conspiracy is supposed to work. 

 Conspiracy theories generally come in two forms: those that involve a small, powerful cabal and those that require that thousands of people colluding to hide the truth. Historically, theories about powerful cabals have often been tied to antisemitism, to the belief that the Elders of Zion and/or the Rothschilds were shaping history — a view promoted by some actually powerful people, including Henry Ford. 

These days, however, the most prominent example is QAnon, with its claim that a secret ring of pedophiles controls the U.S. government. And at this point, of course, QAnon adherents hold significant power within the House Republican caucus. 

The thing about secret-cabal theories is that while they’re generally absurd, they’re hard to definitively disprove. Is President Biden actually a shape-shifting alien lizard? The White House physician will tell you no, but how do you know that he isn’t a lizard, too? 

The other kind of conspiracy theory, by contrast, seems as if it would be easy to disprove, because thousands of people would have to be in on the plot, without a single one breaking ranks. A prime example, still highly influential on the right, is the assertion that climate change is a hoax. To believe that, you have to claim that thousands of scientists are colluding to falsify the evidence. But that hasn’t stopped the belief that climate change isn’t real from being widespread, maybe even dominant, on the U.S. political right. 

The Big Lie about the “stolen” 2020 election would seem to fall into the same category, requiring malfeasance by election officials across the country. Yet a large majority of Republicans told pollsters that they didn’t believe Biden actually won.

 And there’s a new conspiracy theory in town: the claim that the war in Ukraine isn’t really happening, that it’s some kind of fake. Who could possibly believe that all the reporting, all the film footage is concocted? Well, Donald Trump’s first national security adviser is apparently now a Ukraine war truther (Mike Flynn), and I won’t be surprised if we start to hear this from many people on the right. 

But the conspiracy theorizing about the Ohio derailment takes it to a whole other level. When Tucker Carlson suggests that this happened because East Palestine is a rural white community, with another Fox News host going so far as to say that the Biden administration is “spilling toxic chemicals on poor white people,” how is this even supposed to have worked? How did Biden officials engineer a derailment by a private-sector train company, running on privately owned track, which lobbied against stronger safety regulations? 

The administration also hasn’t stinted on disaster aid. Multiple federal agencies quickly arrived on the scene, and Ohio’s Republican governor says of the federal response, “I don’t have complaints … we’re getting the help that we need.” But never mind. Something bad happened to conservative white people, so surely woke progressives must have been responsible. 

Given what we’ve learned about how Fox handled claims of a stolen election — feeding the Big Lie in public while mocking it in private — it’s a good bet that the network and other right-wing commentators know perfectly well that their accusations about the derailment are junk. 

But they know their audience, and probably believe that it’s good business to propound racist conspiracy theories even if they make no logical sense. 

Of course, it does no good to appeal to the right’s better nature. But let me make a plea to mainstream media: Please don’t report on this as if there were an actual controversy about who’s responsible for the East Palestine disaster.