Ted Gunderson, fake whistleblowers, and the “Patriot movement”

In the TruthMove forum, Mark has called attention to the news story Secret camps and guillotines? Groups make birthers look sane by Steven Thomma, McClatchy Newspapers, Friday, August 28, 2009.

This story mentions Ted Gunderson, who, back in the 1980’s and early 1990’s, was also a major proponent of the “Satanic Ritual Abuse” scare.

Interesting stuff in the Truth Action forum

In July, I participated for a while in the Truth Action forum. Alas, I thereby used up some time I might have otherwise had for deeper research into 9/11 itself. But I ran across a bunch of interesting threads pertaining not just to 9/11 but also to other issues as well, including some of my concerns about the 9/11 Truth movement.

Looking back again now at some of those threads ….

“United States corporation” and the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871 – more anti-“banker” misinfo (disinfo?)

Recently, someone urged a bunch of us to Google “United States corporation.” Supposedly, we would thereby learn about some horrible legislation, passed by Congress back in 1871, which somehow managed to nullify the U.S. Constitution by changing “Constitution for the United States” to “Constitution of the United States.”

Offhand, it doesn’t seem likely to me that a law passed by Congress could change the wording of the Constitution itself. That would require a Constitutional amendment. When I asked for more details about the alleged law, the person who had brought it up said he hadn’t yet researched it in detail himself, but he urged us all to Google it ourselves anyway. He seemed to think it was terribly important that we all learn about this horrible betrayal of the American Republic.

Okay, here goes. I Googled it. To make my search more specific, I Googled “United States corporation 1871.”

The “Act of 1871” is the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871.

“The Adventures of Max Photon” – a review

These past couple of days, I’ve been looking at a very unusual website called The Adventures of Max Photon, by one Paul Bouvet a.k.a. Max Photon. Given the author’s bizarre sense of humor, it’s sometimes a bit hard to tell what his actual views are, vs. what is intended as just satire. The site seems to be satirizing both the NIST report and some tendencies within the 9/11 Truth movement. Max Photon has also spent quite a bit of time in the JREF forum. (Here’s a collection of links to his JREF posts and a collection of JREFers’ flames against Max Photon.)

His main idea seems to be that thermite may have been used, not to cut steel, but just to weaken it, thereby making it easier for an otherwise “natural” collapse to occur. It so happens that I’ve been thinking along these same lines recently too. (See my post Twin Towers demolition hypothesis: Discussion with Pat Curley.)

Agent-baiting, guilt by association, and religious bigotry

When people in the 9/11 Truth movement accuse each other of being government agents, an all too common type of “evidence” is guilt by association. A has some connection to B, who in turn has some connection to C, who in turn has some connection to the CIA or some other spy agency, or perhaps a connection to an elite fraternity such as the Skull and Bones. Therefore, A must be an agent, or at least we should all worry that A might be an agent.

Similar “connections” to the Communist Party were a staple of the McCarthy-era witchhunts back in the 1950’s.

The problem with this kind of “reasoning” is that there are also huge numbers of innocent non-agents who, knowingly or unknowingly, are likely to have indirect connections either to spy agencies or to elite fraternities.

Identifying disinformation agents?

The online 911 Truth movement seems to have gotten caught up in an orgy of agent-baiting, with people on both sides of various divides either outright calling each other “disinformation agents” or, at the very least, insinuating that the leaders of the other side are probably disinformation agents.

The main divide is between what I think of as the saner and wackier branches of the movement. Admittedly my terminology is far from objective and makes clear where I stand.

By the wackier branches, I mean advocates of things like no-planes theories (especially WTC no-planes theories), video fakery, Star Wars beams, etc,. Many (though not all) of these folks also advocate claims about some vast, generations-old conspiracy that controls and micromanages the entire world, usually “the Illuminati.” (See The recent growth of anti-Illuminism: Dreadful ideology about the dreaded Illuminati and More about anti-Illuminism.) Some of their claims are blatant physical impossibilities. For example, a “Star Wars beam” powerful enough to “dustify” the towers would probably also ionize the air, causing the beam itself to glow like a lightning bolt. Obviously we didn’t see anything like that on 9/11.

By the saner branches, I mean those who (at least for the most part) reject stuff like the above, and who recognize the need for critical thinking and careful research.

But even some people in the saner branches seem to me to be way, way, way too quick to think of people on the other side as “disinformation agents.”

Now, it is indeed likely that there are government agents of various kinds among us, given the past history of COINTELPRO, and given more recent legislation such as the PATRIOT act. But, it seems to me, some of the kinds of behaviors that have been identified as “agent-like” behaviors are very commonplace among other people too, with other, more commonplace motives. So, it seems to me, these behaviors are far from a reliable way to spot an agent, although many of them are bad behaviors in their own right.