Subject: Summing up Anthrax Truther Arguments

The past 12 years of arguing with Anthrax Truthers have been summarized in the past 24 hours in a debate with DXer/Anonymous.

DXer wrote HERE:

Adnan El-Shukrijumah is the anthrax mailer

I researched his claim and found he had no real evidence to support it.  It even appeared that his suspect was in Afghanistan at the time of the anthrax letter mailings.

DXer responded HERE with this argument:

Is there any evidence in the thousands of detainee interrogations — after announcing his intention to his mom upon 9/11 that he was coming to the US — that he did not come? … that he was he was still in Afghanistan at the time of the anthrax mailings? No

So, DXer wants the FBI (or me) to prove that his suspect was NOT in the U.S. at the time of the attacks.

I argued that the FBI has infinitely more evidence that Bruce Ivins was the anthrax mailer than DXer has against the person he believes sent the anthrax letters.

DXer responded HERE with this attack on the FBI:

But it’s not like the FBI Agents spend all their time rummaging around for a man’s semen-stained panties so that the prosecutor then can threaten to call his family in front of a grand jury to ask about problems at home.– and then close the case and declare victory upon his suicide.

That's pretty much how our arguments have gone for the past 12 years.  Only his attacks are usually upon me.

These same basic arguments are used by all Anthrax Truthers.   The only difference with DXer is that he buries his arguments inside an endless stream of meaningless blather.

Ed

Subject: Putting 2 and 2 together

Conspiracy theorists and True Believers have once again demonstrated how they think.  Just look at their theories about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.  Each theorist has a different theory.

But, most of all, they show how they start with a theory and then find things to support that theory, ignoring any fact or evidence that contradicts their theory.  How else could someone connect a Muslim terrorist attack in Pakistan that involved a peddler's fruit cart to the fact that there was a cargo of fruit aboard Flight MH370, and conclude that the two events are evidence that Muslim terrorists hijacked MH370?

Here are some examples of Anthrax Truthers putting 2 and 2 together to get 739 or 395 or 55 or 38 or 1,233,754: 

1.  Ivins couldn't have made the spores at USAMRIID using standard procedures.  Everyone is required to follow procedures at USAMRIID.  Conclusion: Ivins must have been innocent.

Counter argument: Ivins didn't follow standard procedures.

2. Ivins didn't have time to make the spores.  It takes months to make that many spores.  Conclusion: Ivins must have been innocent.  

Counter argument: Ivins used spores from his lab trash that were already made. 

3.  I believe the spores were weaponized with silica.  I believe Ivins didn't know how to weaponize spores with silica.  Conclusion:  Ivins must have been innocent.

Counter argument:  The spores were NOT weaponized with silica.  They contained natural silicon.  

4.  Ivins could not have used the lyophilizer to dry the spores without contaminating the entire area. The lyophilizer was too big to move into a BSL-3 suite.  Conclusion: Ivins must have been innocent.

Counter argument: The spores were air dried.  The lyophilizer was not needed.

5.  Ivins seemed like a nice guy who couldn't hurt a fly.  Ivins was a blabbermouth, so he couldn't have sent the anthrax letters without telling other people about it.  Conclusion: Ivins must have been innocent.

Counter argument:  Ivins routinely did things and even committed crimes he didn't tell others about.  

Ed

Subject: Belief-based arguments

What we seem to really need is to have is one of Dr. Ivins' co-workers try to argue his or her beliefs against the solid facts which show that Ivins was the anthrax killer.  Such a conversation might go something like this:

Believer: The case against Bruce Ivins is full of holes.

Researcher: What makes you say that?  Like what?

Believer: It would have been impossible for Dr. Ivins to have grown all the spores in all the letters in shaking flasks without someone noticing what he was doing.  Even with the shakers running 24-hours a day, it would have taken him about a year!

Researcher: But, the facts say that the spores weren't grown in shaking flasks.  They were grown in autoclave biosafety bags in a corner somewhere - probably in his lab.

Believer: What facts?

Researcher: First of all, the spore powders contained traces of agar.  You use agar when growing spores in plates.  You do not use agar in shaking flasks.  Secondly, there was no sign of the kind of growth media they use in shaking flasks.   Thirdly, the spores showed signs of growing "under stress," which occurs when they grow at less than the ideal temperatures in an incubator.

Believer: Where did you read that?  They didn't say that in the Amerithrax Investigative Summary.

Researcher: It's in the supporting documents.   The University of Maryland assisted with the testing, and they found traces of agar in both the New York Post and the Leahy powders.

Believer: It would still have taken a lot of plates and a lot of time, wouldn't it?  People would have noticed.

Researcher: No, it wouldn't and they wouldn't. Growing spores on plates was part of Ivins' job.  He would inoculate about 180 plates a day when preparing for challenges.  And, according to the National Academy of Sciences, it would only have taken 463 plates to grow all the spores in all the powders.  Ivins used 546 plates for some mice tests shortly before the attacks.  If you leave those plates in autoclave bags for a week or two, you'll have all the spores needed for the letters.  And, if anyone noticed the autoclave bags lying around, they didn't say anything, because Ivins was known to leave such things lying around for weeks.  They'd grown used to it.  So, no one ever said anything.  And, he used flask RMR-1029 as the source for the seed spores, so the spores on those plates would be exact matches to what was in the letters.

Believer:  But Ivins would have had to dry the spores.  Ivins didn't know how to dry spores, and he couldn't possibly have used the lyophilizer that was located in Suite B3.

Researcher: That's just more nonsense.  Every microbiologist knows how to dry spores.  They all know that if they leave a Petri dish inoculated with anthrax alone, in a couple weeks it will be covered with DRY spores.  Like everything else, anthrax spores will dry all by themselves if left exposed to the air.  Ivins could dry all the spores he needed in 2 and a half hours inside the bio-safety cabinet in his lab.  He could speed up the drying process by adding heat.  He certainly didn't need a lyophilizer.  The FBI and DOJ only mentioned the lyophilizer because Ivins lied and claimed he didn't know how to use it.  Plus, they could not prove that Ivins did NOT dry the attack spores using the lyophilizer.  The idea that Ivins wouldn't have known how to clean up after himself is just more nonsense.

Believer:  But, but, but, there are people who claim the spores were weaponized with silica.  Ivins didn't know how to do that.

Researcher: The spores were NOT weaponized with silica.  Silicon from the growth media gets absorbed into spore coats when spores are grown at room temperature.  Ivins grew the spores at room temperature in autoclave bags in a corner of his lab.  It's just crazy to assume that because it is the standard procedure at USAMRIID to grow spores in an incubator at higher temperatures, that a microbiologist like Ivins wouldn't know that spores can also grow at room temperatures.  There's testimony from witnesses who looked at plates Ivins left around inside autoclave bags for weeks, and those plates were covered with dry or nearly dry anthrax spores.  And, any competent microbiologist knows that if you let spores dry in the open air they can aerosolize all by themselves and kill you.  Nature makes them that way.

Believer: There's no proof that Ivins knew that silicon would be absorbed into spore coats from the growth media.

Researcher: So what?  Ivins made the spores in flask RMR-1030, and 6 percent of those spores had the same silicon signature as the attack spores.  So, there IS proof that Ivins could create spores with that silicon signature -- even if he didn't know what he was doing.  It's so easy to do that he could do it unintentionally.

Believer:  Well, I don't care what the facts say, I'm going to believe what I want to believe.

Researcher:  Yes, I know.

Ed

Subject: Meaningless questions

Here are some recent questions posted to start a thread on Lew Weinstein's blog:

"Who Was The Only Person In [Redacted] Spoke To About The Dried Aerosol Project?  Was the sample that Dr. Ivins says he was told was from Iraq — but wasn’t — actually from the dried aerosol project that had been launched at USAMRIID unbeknownst to Dr. Ivins? Who brought it to him? Where did it come from? Who worked alone on the dried aerosol project in Building 1412 and what does he or she say about the research? Was virulent Ames ever made into a dried powder in Maryland or Virginia?  Why did the FBI keep evidence of John Ezzell’s dried powder from the NAS?"

More questions from other threads in the same blog:

"Into what weapons did Yazid Sufaat attempt to load anthrax?  Why is Ivins’ polygraph not disclosable under FOIA?  Why doesn’t the FBI offer America a credible story? Why don’t we know who is responsible for the 2001 anthrax attacks?"

These questions pose some other questions:  If you do not expect anyone to answer your questions, why ask the questions?  Is it just to show ignorance?  How many thousands of such questions have you asked?  How many of the questions have been answered?  If you want answers, why ban people who might have the answers from answering?  If you are asking the questions of people who do not read the blog, who do you think will answer?

Ed

Subject: Certainty

“Certainty? In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“One of the few certainties in life is that persons of certainty should certainly be avoided.”
― Willy Russell, The Wrong Boy  

“Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one's voice.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary 

“There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing.”
― Robert Burns, The Works of Robert Burns  

“At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty 

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
Erich Fromm
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/certainty.html#uMExZaKHqRbXtHth.99

"The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers."
― Erich Fromm

"To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it."
― Bertrand Russell

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
― Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man 


Ed

Subject: Truthers

After years of observations, here are some common traits that appear to apply to all Anthrax Truthers:

1.  They all believe the government is wrong in saying Bruce Ivins was the anthrax killer.

2.  They all believe that they know "the truth," which is that someone other than Bruce Ivins did it.

3.  They cannot make any kind of meaningful case against whomever they think did it.

4.  They cannot provide evidence which proves their theory is better than the government's.

5.  They can only argue that the evidence against Ivins is not convincing to them.

6.  They do not seem to understand circumstantial evidence.

7.  They claim that the evidence against Bruce Ivins "isn't really evidence."    
 
8.  They do not fully agree with any other "truthers" about details of their own beliefs.

9.  Many "truthers" totally disagree with other "truthers" about who sent the anthrax letters. 

10. They endlessly seem to argue that beliefs and opinions are more important than facts.

11.  When presented with evidence that they are wrong, they ignore it and continue to just believe what they want to believe. 

12.  They believe their standards for evidence are the only acceptable standards for the world.

Example:

"Anonymous" has recently claimed once again HERE that the T in "NEXT" in the media letter was not highlighted. Here is what he wrote:

It is a FACT that the "T" in next has not been shown to have been double-lined and so the entire code was crock.

Here is an enlargement of the T in "NEXT" in the media letter:

Compare that T to the ones "Anonymous" doesn't seem to dispute, the T's in the two spellings of the word "TO" in the media letter, especially the T in the second "TO" below:

Can there be any dispute that the horizontal line in the T in NEXT is traced over in way that is virtually identical to the T in the second TO in the image above?  Isn't it perfectly clear that the horizontal lines in the T's in DEATH are NOT traced over the way the other T's are traced over?   

Example:

In a post HERE, R. Rowley quoted my point #5 in an earlier post and wrote his response:

5. It's a FACT that the message in the media letter CAN be decoded to be either "PAT" or "FNY" or both.
----------------------------
And literally hundreds of thousands(if not millions) of other things, rendering it worthless.

In other words, unless there is only one way to interpret "PAT" and "FNY," and that evidence points directly to Bruce Ivins, then the evidence is worthless.

Example:

In a post HERE, "Max" wrote this about the decoding of the hidden message in the media letter:

The FBI found nothing. There is no message.

PAT is not a message.
FNY is not a message.

What is Max's reasoning?  Try to make sense of this:

If you want to claim otherwise, then you need to show that you expected to find PAT before the "decoding". Of course, nobody did.

He appears to be saying that a person needs to expect to find "PAT" is the decoded message before they decode the message, otherwise "PAT" is not the decoded message?  Who but a "Truther" would think that kind of reasoning makes sense?

13.  When you attempt to get a "truther" to explain what he means, he either disappears or he changes the subject. 

Ed

 

Subject: Facts versus Facts

Click on the image above to view a larger version.

The picture above of snow on the pyramids is claimed to be a fake by Esquire magazine HERE, and a web site HERE, while a web site HERE suggests that it is real.  Which is it?  Real or fake?

The initial evidence of fakery seemed to consist entirely of three FACTS:

FACT #F-1: The picture seems to have been shot from the same spot as the picture below:

FACT #F-2: The two pictures seem to be tilted at the exact same angle.

FACT #F-3:  There are some KNOWN FAKES of snow on the pyramids on the Internet.

But those three FACTS didn't seem sufficient to prove it's a fake.  

There are also some FACTS which say that the picture COULD BE real:

FACT #R-1: Snow DID fall in Cairo on December 13, 2013.  Click HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE for news stories.  

FACT #R-2:  The pyramids are less than ten miles from the center of Cairo.

FACT #R-3: The weather system that caused the snow covered hundreds (maybe thousands) of miles and buried many places north of Cairo in deep snow. 

FACT #R-4: Because of the unrest in Egypt these days, tourists are discouraged from visiting the pyramids. Combined with the fact that it's winter and snowing, and since some vendors near the pyramids have become violent,  there wouldn't be hundreds of tourists taking pictures of the snow on the pyramids. 

FACT #R-5:  The KNOWN FAKES were not created in the same way as the picture in question would have to have been created (IF it is a fake).

Here is some information about the known "fake" pictures of snow on the pyramids:

FRAUDS. There are other pictures of snow on the pyramids which are KNOWN to be FRAUDS.  A fraud is something that is represented as something it is not.  Example, the picture below is a REAL picture which supposedly shows snow on a pyramid:

But, it's snow on the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas, which is shaped like a pyramid.  So, it's a real picture, but it's not a picture of the actual pyramids.  That makes it a fraud.  Here's another fraud:

The picture above is actually a model of the Sphinx and a pyramid in a park in Tokyo.  It was really covered with snow.  So, it's a REAL picture, but it's not a picture of what it is claimed to be.

Here's another shot of the Sphinx model from another angle at a different time of year:

TRICKS.  The are real pictures of the real pyramids which supposedly show them covered with snow, but it is a TRICK done in a computer by simply altering colors.  The yellow sand and granite are made white.  Example from the British newspaper Mirror and wafflesatnoon.com:

FACT R-5: The picture at the top of this blog thread did not appear to be either a "fraud" or a "trick."  It seemed that IF it was a fake, it was a true work of art "fake" piicture that someone spent a lot of time and effort to DELIBERATELY create.  They would have had to

1.  Replace the sky and get the new sky to fit perfectly around the blocks of the pyramid.
2.  Add the two men into the picture without any indication they were artificially added.
3.  Change the color and lighting on the pyramids.
4.  Remove objects on the ground to make them appear to be covered with snow (see below),
5.  Remove the shadow of the column (near the man's foot).
6.  Add a cloud haze around the top of the pyramid.
7.  Paint a layer of snow on the stone block at lower left.

Here's a larger view of the snow covered stone block in the lower left corner of the "fake" (top) and the same stone block from the real picture (bottom):

This illustration shows some interesting things.

First, it shows that the area in the lower right in the "real" picture has uneven spots and debris on the ground which do not appear in the "fake" picture.  So, they would have to be removed.  Or, if the picture is real, the rough spots and debris were simply covered over with snow.

Second, if you click on the image to make it larger, you'll clearly see that the snow atop the block is not smooth.  The light playing on the surface of the snow covering shows the snow is uneven as if it is a layer of snow on an uneven surface.  That is NOT easy to create.  It's either the work of an artist, or it's an indicator that the picture is real.

Third, notice that the stone blocks BEHIND the block in the foreground are slightly different.  You can see more of the rear blocks in the real picture than the rear blocks in the "fake" picture.  There are two possible explanations for that: (1) The snow is piled pretty high and thus covers more of the block that is behind, or (2) the "real" photograph was taken from a position a few inches higher than the "fake" picture.  That would mean that the "fake" picture was NOT made from the real picture.  The "fake" is also real.

"Waffles" at Wafflesatnoon.com kindly provided this color adjusted version of the real picture:

And he provided the animated GIF file below which flips between the real picture and the "fake."  His intent, presumably, was to show that the "fake" is simply a color adjusted version of the real picture.

But, for me, the animated GIF just illustrated the vast differences between the pictures.  It showed the changing sky.  It showed the snow on the stone block at the lower left appearing and disappearing.  It showed the two men in the bottom center appearing and disappearing.  It showed the haze on the top of the Great Pyramid appearing and disappearing.  But most of all, it showed the light changing.  Notice particularly how the long platform behind the middle of the pillar changes from dark to light, indicating more than a simple color adjustment.  There's also a big change in the direction of the light source.

So, I hunted for the sources for the "real" picture and the "fake" picture.  Much larger versions would allow me to make a much better comparison.

Finally, I was supplied with NEW evidence.  Someone provide a link to the web site of post-apocalyptic art HERE.  It supplied some NEW FACTS:

FACT F-4:  That web page was created on April 27, 2013, before the snow reports in Egypt.

FACT F-5: The version of picture of the snow on the pyramids is equal in size to the largest version I have been able to find elsewhere.  It's the same size as the picture at the very top of this thread.

FACT F-6: It is all that it needed to be to convince me it was not a real picture, i.e., it is a work of art that took someone a long time to create.   

So, while I was once 95% certain that the picture was real, the NEW FACTS have convinced me that the picture is a work of art that was fraudulently presented on the Internet as being a real picture.  I'm 99.99% convinced of that.  But, I'm still open to SOLID proof that shows me to be wrong again.

A COMPLICATION: There is another picture (shown below) from a web site HERE which supposedly shows snow on the pyramids.  And, it shows similar wintery clouds in the sky.  But, it also seems to have a matching picture on the Internet that does not show snow.  And, in addition to the very different sky and coloring, there are also some very subtle minor differences between the two pictures:

One of the less subtle differences is that the picture with the snow also contains a man on a white camel in the lower right corner of the picture.  The man and camel are not there in the picture without snow.

Plus, there may be some unknown reason for people to take pictures from that spot (and the other spot), since I found another picture HERE that was taken from nearly the same angle:

And here's another:

So, do the FACTS say this picture is "fake" or do the facts say it is "real"?

On January 15, 2013, someone provided me with a tool to find other versions of the picture.  Using that tool, I found this version:

It also shows the same man on the camel.  And it shows the same clouds.  And, there still appears to be snow on the ground and on the pyramid even though it is not blue color adjusted like the other version.

So, does it really show snow on the pyramids?  It doesn't seem like another "work of art."  The web page where the photo is for sale says it was taken by Andre Klaassen, but it doesn't say WHEN it was taken. However, some research find that Andre Klaassen also took the picture which doesn't show the man on the camel, and he seems to do work on manipulating images to create works of art.

So, I feel, with about 95 percent certainty, that the facts say it is a work of art,  and NOT a REAL picture of snow on the pyramids. 

However, I am always open to new and better facts which solidly prove it one way or the other.

Ed