Messages

Okay, okay, so I'll turn my ""debunking brain"" off.

Please list all the effects of the death ray, so we can get the death ray's capabilities out on the table here. I'm hearing dustification, weird heatless fires, paint peeling and also rusting, but all of these are different phenomena.

So once and for all: What does the death ray do, exactly? How does it work?

[Cover-up and Censorship]

Cover-up and Censorship

You cannot deny the extraordinary evidence Judy Wood has compiled. Never mind the extraordinary explanation; for now, just turn off your debunking brain for a moment and allow the evidence to sink in. The fact that the extraordinary evidence has only just recently been brought to our attention (via me, via a random YouTube video discovered by me in January this year) strongly implies a deliberate suppression or cover-up of that information. Bear in mind Judy Wood took this evidence to court in 2007 - eight years ago!

Yeah, that's good. Let's all just not use our brains and believe her. Sorry, did that, the resulting thing didn't make any sense at all. Any argument that starts with "Don't think about it too hard" that doesn't end with "because this is just a silly story" is not one I'm apt to have any faith in.

This is so patently ridiculous. Also, her Wikipedia page was taken down because she isn't notable. People's Wikipedia pages get taken down all the time!!!! That's not proof of a giant conspiracy of silence!!!!!!

You're talking about her right now in the open!!!!!! She has her own website!!!!!!!!!!! She is not being censored!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Just because nobody believes her outlandish claims and nobody wants to humour her and give her space on their websites, doesn't mean a spooky government is covering up the facts, it means she's a conspiracy theorist with nothing relevant to say about anything!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am sick and tired of people thinking they're being censored when in reality they never shut up and want to push their wild conspiracies to every corner of the earth!!!!!! People not taking you seriously is not a coverup! People not taking you seriously is not censorship! How many times does that have to be explained before it gets through people's heads??!?!!?!!

The car park...Surely whoever was controlling the death ray must have sneezed while destroying the twin towers. This makes perfect sense because it was allergy season. Death ray...lmao. You're forgetting one thing monkey. Your death ray doesn't light cars on fire, and it isnt a paint stripping machine, it turns things to dust remember...please make up your mind. How many settings does thing have?

Don't forget it can also melt steel while keeping organic material nice and cool, and light fires that give off light but no heat! And it affects things across town while conveniently not affecting other things! It's a wild uncontrollable laser with random FX!!!

Seriously, this turgid procession through the ashes of a tragedy is embarrassing. Nothing Judy Wood has said has any basis in any science possible, and her unyielding obsession with tedious minutae without a glimmer of hope that she would actually produce any interesting science about how such a death ray was possible is excrutiating. Any evidence at all, any odd thing, is proof of this laser that doesn't exist. Even when it's been explained ad nauseum as nothing paranatural. But still it goes on, and on, and on, and on, and it's so intensely boring because I know that nobody is going to get to anything interesting about a potential laser superweapon. The laser superweapon could be the hand of friggen Yahweh for all it matters. All that matters is that you quibble over dust and paint flecks until everyone else gives up and goes home, and you get to feel super smart because nobody will argue it with you, because there's nothing to argue that you can't just say "Well, it's part of the coverup" to!

I hate that. It's so dull and there was a real opportunity to discuss actual lasers but instead we have this catch all vague superweapon that does whatever Judy Wood says it does and constant insistence that she's right because if she wasn't right people wouldn't be trying to refute her. This is so utterly boring and aggrevating to read. I can't stand it, and it doesn't even friggen matter. Okay, so what if it was a laser superweapon or some rubbish. What then? It can't go anywhere because if you try to follow the lines of logic it attempts to have, nothing corroborates it. Nobody but Judy Wood thinks it's an energy weapon. Nobody takes that seriously. The government would be using it three times a day on some poor blighted middle eastern village if they had it. They would test it there as well.

All of this is just such utterly pointless blather.

[The Samaritan Paradox]

Claimed The Samaritan Paradox, thankyou! I'll be sure to play the heck out of that one.

Well, I tested it out myself. It works fine in windowed mode, which is what I use most often to test it, but fullscreen mode requires the following registry fix, the following is for Heatwave:

Code: AGS

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DirectDraw\Compatibility\Heatwave]
"Name"="Heatwave.exe"
"Flags"=hex:00,08,00,00
"ID"=dword:4d672ee4

(You can get it in a .reg file here if you want)
This is something, from my meagre testing, that works on all instances of the executable (the only other computer I have available runs it fine anyway), so hopefully a dev can just make one version of it when they release their game. The ID you have to get from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DirectDraw\Compatibility\MostRecentApplication, but once you've done it once you never have to do it again (unless you recompile the game, I guess, but if you're just testing it, you should use windowed mode).

Interestingly enough, I don't think AGS even sets the desktop color depth in windowed mode at all, but in fullscreen you get the classic 8-bit colour warping on the desktop.

Hopefully Scavenger will release a tutorial (and template) soon.

Would this be something people would be interested in? I've been working with 8-bit AGS for years and I know how to make it do whatever I want mostly, and I know most of the bugs AGS has with handling it.

Was it Pleurghburg - Dark Ages?

Why wasn't it "faked" better?

Because governments in conspiracy theory land are simultaneously capable of future alien tech beyond the current understanding of men (like giant laser beam arrays that disintegrate buildings), but haven't got the scientific knowhow to do something relatively simpler, say, like buying a plane and crashing it by remote control. That's just way beyond the mastermind's plan - because as everyone knows, government scientists are completely useless at anything that's not complete science fiction.

Besides which, it opens up an avenue for the conspiracy theorist to feel smart when they've UNCOVERED THE REAL TRUTH BEHIND THE GOVERNMENT'S LIES.

Honestly this feels like a badly written airport thriller novel (you know, the really thick hardcover ones with the gold author text) more than an actual sequence of events that would actually happen.

It really is, for some people, simply impossible to accept that nine-eleven was done in the name of [peaceful] religious beliefs. 

Why do you keep highlighting "peaceful"? That's twice in the same thread you've done it, and it's making me feel uncomfortable, like there's some subtext there going on in the background.

[Scav]

Scav

1) Re: Filing cabinet. You reckon heat melted the filing cabinet? Ok. Heat from where? Fire? Fire needs oxygen to burn, so i suspect there would have been oxygen present. To burn paper, you need heat + oxygen. So why didn't the paper burn?

Look here.

Hey look at that picture, looks like it didn't melt, it was just charred and crushed. Like a pancaked Baked Alaska. Can you show me a picture of an actually melted filing cabinet to compare?

And what's THIS? Burnt and crushed together paper with unburnt paper in the middle? OH MY. Something sandwiched between those bits could have been protected by the outer layer!

2) Re: Steel-cap boots. As Dr Wood says: "When your oven starts to melt you know the turkey is done!" Why were there no reports of burnt feet?

Give me evidence the steel in the boots was melting, and not the soles. Besides which, a firefighter's boots have multiple layers of insulation. Their boots are designed to protect them, even if the outer layers of the boots (perhaps the rubber in the soles?) loses integrity.

3) Re: Toasted cars. Was the dust superheated? No witnesses reported this. In fact they reported the dust was cold / warm. However the cars definitely appeared to be on fire. But organic things like trees, paper, etc were not affected. Why?

Wood is an insulator, and especially in a place like New York, it's pretty wet, it doesn't catch fire easily. Metal (perhaps on CARS) is a conductor.

You've given me no evidence it was a energy beam. And the website is a nightmare to navigate, it has no clear direction, it's the diary of a madman.

Dr. Wood would probably argue that the " Who" and the "Why" are not important enough to even consider until you can define "What" actually happened...

She hasn't even demonstrated the "How" yet, I don't think she'll ever get to the "Who" and "Why".

(Seriously, I've scoured her website for any kind of scientific testing of energy weapons that can "melt" metal but leave organic material untouched, nothing. All she does is say "Nuh uh!" to other conspiracy theorists.)

If the metal melted, why didn't the paper burn?

If steel-cap boots melted, why didn't feet burn?

If cars were destroyed, why was the metal affected but not paper?

Oh come on, this is easy stuff.

1) The metal filing cabinet was found in the debris. To melt metal, you need only massive amounts of heat. To burn paper, you need heat + oxygen. The paper didn't burn because there was insufficient oxygen to burn the paper. Not to mention, the pressure and heat might have weakened the filing cabinet and crushed it into an unrecognizable mess, but might not have melted it.

2) The steel toe capped boots are designed to protect the feet. Either the people working didn't stand long enough for their feet to burn, or they did get burned and didn't notice. It's almost as if the steel toed boots are made to protect against this kind of thing, even at the expense of their own integrity. Gasp!

3) Superheated dust and ash particles landed on the cars, heated them up. Cars are a bigger target than pieces of paper, which could have been blown there by the wind. And there was a lot of burnt paper, too.

Now, how does all of this evidence point towards a fictional energy weapon again? You're doing exactly what conspiracy theorists are known to do. "But what about these additional other pieces of unrelated data!!!!?".

Prove the energy weapon can exist, then I'll take her seriously.

So those cars that mysteriously caught fire blocks away...was that because they tested the weapon on a Nissan Maxima first? Or because the weapon malfunctioned and hit some cars far from the real target? Or they decided to destroy cars blocks away because it was so much fun destroying the towers that they got trigger happy and couldn't control themselves?

That Nissan Maxima was KEY to the Government's plan. They needed to destroy it in suspicious circumstances, otherwise who knows what untold damage it could do to their cover story?

Experiments by John Hutchison trying to replicate the work of Nikola Tesla show that materials can do strange things when placed in an electrostatic field (generated by a Van de Graaff generator for example) and subjected to interfering electromagnetic radiation. Hurricane Erin could have provided an electrostatic field.

Come on guys. It's not rocket science.

Okay, now demonstrate the science that makes a giant energy weapon powered by Windy Tesla Coils disintegrate a skyscraper without any visible setup or equipment. You know, replicate the results seen on 9/11 on a smaller scale. That's science. Without experiments and testing of theories, it's just conjecture. If you can show me an energy weapon disintegrating boots and not feet, and destroying matter entirely, and creating fire without heat, then you will have my ear.

You see, science is replicable. If you have a result that is the same over a long period of time, and is demonstrable as a phenomenon, then you have a basis for a scientific theory. Dr. Wood has not built any energy weapon, or even demonstrated that such a weapon could possibly exist in real life. Her claims are bombastic, and completely anecdotal. You can't build a scientific theory like "The Government has Energy Weapons That They Fired At The WTC and Used Planes As a Distraction" without a significant grounding in actual science. Does Judy Wood build Energy Weapons? Does she even know if the things she is supposing are physically possible?

No. She spends most of her time flippantly dismissing other people's conspiracy theories, according to her website. I haven't seen any kind of actual scientific theory from her. Just:

"Stuff happened --> Ergo secret beam weapon, obviously. How stupid do you have to be to not believe in the secret beam weapon? It's called Star Wars!"

Spoiler

BTW, not to steal the thread, but in Soviet Russia we have our own 9/11 folklore.
Here's some russian magazine, published just few days before the attacks (9th September, I think):

Spoiler

[close]

As you may see, it displays the WTC towers crossed, as if it were warning not visiting them in nearest future.
Also, if you zoom a photo, you may see something like a mason sign in the left-bottom corner.

[close]

YES, IT ALL FITS!

Not at all, it's literally taken from my favorite cyberpunk novel.

[FACT:]

Ok. Let's try this again..

FACT: Cars were destroyed in unexplained ways by apparent spontaneous combustion as shown in many photographs and videos. The cars were curiously "toasted" AFTER destruction of the towers. No organic things like people or trees were toasted though. Some videos show cars that appear to be on fire, but the "weird fire" targeted certain materials on the car e.g. a police car plastic lights and tyre were not affected but the surrounding metal was.

Give me evidence it was laser beams that did this and not, say, the normal consequences of fire and flying debris and shockwaves?

Oh, and some rebuttals for the other points. Luckily, these only took me two minutes to read through, far less time than a 2.5 hour conspiracy video.

Until you have actual scientists doing actual tests and trying to reproduce the actual evidence with your sci-fi energy gun, you're just barking a conspiracy theory. Again, show me the laser beaaaaams. Show 'em! Show me that technology has progressed enough that laser beams that can destroy metal but can't destroy organic matter are possible in the realms of physics!

[FACT:]

Even if she can't give any absolute and undeniable proof that this new weapon was indeed what caused it, one could argue she does a pretty good job at (implicitly) debunking the jet-fuel theory at least.
(skip to 2:00:30 to see it all summed up in a nice table)

Jet fuel doesn't need to melt steel beams. Oh my god, do you not know that heat causes expansion in metal and also metals to become more pliable and weaker at higher temperatures? We wouldn't hot forge swords if this wasn't true! And it's not as if the large amount of pressure from a huge falling weight coupled with the massive amount of flammable material inside of the WTC couldn't have raised the temperature! As FEMA puts it:

The large quantity of jet fuel carried by each aircraft ignited upon impact into each building. A significant portion of this fuel was consumed immediately in the ensuing fireballs. The remaining fuel is believed either to have flowed down through the buildings or to have burned off within a few minutes of the aircraft impact. The heat produced by this burning jet fuel does not by itself appear to have been sufficient to initiate the structural collapses. However, as the burning jet fuel spread across several floors of the buildings, it ignited much of the buildings' contents, causing simultaneous fires across several floors of both buildings. The heat output from these fires is estimated to have been comparable to the power produced by a large commercial power generating station. Over a period of many minutes, this heat induced additional stresses into the damaged structural frames while simultaneously softening and weakening these frames. This additional loading and the resulting damage were sufficient to induce the collapse of both structures.

The jet fuel set the fires, it was additional combustion within the WTC that weakened the structure. All the fuel had to do was spread fire. It didn't have to be particularly hot. It just needed to set enough OTHER fires that WOULD become hot enough to weaken the steel frames.

FACT: Cars were destroyed in unexplained ways by apparent spontaneous combustion. There are many photographs and videos including news reports showing this. There is even a before and after photograph of a full car park; the cars were curiously "toasted" AFTER destruction of the towers. The images did not receive much publicity in the aftermath.

Ah yes, the large shockwave from the building's collapse, the hot air expelled from it couldn't have anything to do with it, it must have been lasers... which wouldn't have caused the cars to be toasted, since the laser would have to have been going on way after the building's collapse, and we would have noticed it.

The planes obviously took center stage and got all the attention that day. But just because we saw it on TV replayed again and again and again does not make it any more true than the cars. The planes appear to be a distraction from the other stuff going on.

Ah yes, the planes are a distraction from.... the giant laser beam setup the government obviously had. Tell me again why they would want to cover this up? If the enemy has the Hand of God, why did they need planes for a distraction again?

Just remember people often act in what seems like strange and unpredictable ways, so saying "they had no reason to do it" is not exactly a sound argument against what looks like scientific evidence.

No, no, it is. What you're saying is:

"There is no reason not to believe that hundreds, if not thousands of people, worked on a top secret laser project to blow up the World Trade Center while planes were flown into them, and it was set up and deployed without anyone knowing or caring about the outcome, causing the needless deaths of thousands of people, without a single one of these people stepping forward to admit that they worked on a top secret Superweapon that blew up the World Trade Center. This technology, far beyond what lasers are capable of, was built completely secretly and the planes were just a DISTRACTION from the REAL weapon, even though the use of this superweapon for whatever reason would have got the sympathy of the American public far more easily than a couple of planes. This weapon was never, ever used again in any circumstance, nor any technology like it. The government successfully covered it up until a single person managed to uncover the truth, which for some reason hasn't been silenced by the Government which is perfect in it's covering up of this giant laser right up until now."

You may as well say that aliens came down and blasted the WTC, because there's no reason to believe that they didn't! And there's no reason not to believe that Russell's Teapot didn't fall from the sky onto Building 7 and caused it to collapse, because there's no reason that teapots can't do that apparently. You literally have to believe that the US Government is a cartoon villain who is smart enough to build a giant laser beam, and dumb enough to try and cover up attacking their own people with planes hitting their laser beam target. It's utterly ridiculous.

Once again, prove that this weapon exists, and then this theory will be taken seriously. Until then, I'm not wasting hours of my life on 9/11 truther videos.

[WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION]

To avoid bias, let's not label this conspiracy. Let's call it what it is. It's simply evidence you weren't aware of until now.

It's conjecture at best, and most of these are based on faulty assumptions anyway.

But even if it were true, to what end? What possible reason would the US Government have for setting loose a Sci-Fi Superweapon on the WTC, but not use it elsewhere? Surely it would be a pretty amazing weapon if we were able to disintegrate buildings without ever having a visible setup for them. And it's been, what, 15 years? Why hasn't it been used again? Why attack the WTC? To get people on your side for a war? Well, that would have pretty much have failed immediately, since people were widely and vocally against war anyway. There is no possible reason for the laser beam theory to actually be there without the US Government being both too smart to be caught by the populace and too dumb to know the consequences of their actions.

Why didn't the US Government just say "Hey, the terrorists have a WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION, we should stop them before they use it again!". That would have been great for riling people up for war! Why even include planes at all?

If the attacker wasn't part of the US Government, why dress it up like a plane hitting the building? They could just say "We have the fucking hand of God here, stop your heathen ways" and then that would have been a way better terror attack than a plane.

Like, the plane-hitting-the-WTC theory is pretty robust. Desperate people using desperate measures against the USA.

The laser beam theory just... doesn't have any grounding in anything that came before it.

But here's my counter argument to your "evidence":

That weapon doesn't exist.

Prove that it exists, can be reproduced, and that the technology was available in 2001 and then I'll entertain it. And if such a weapon exists, why isn't it being used in lieu of drone strikes, which are our current unmanned siege weapon?

I don't think there's enough people out there sensitive to swear words to worry about. Slurs, on the other hand, you may want to avoid them, or make up a whole new set of them to describe the sociopolitical layout of the world.

Just don't make your game as swear-wordy as The Orion Conspiracy, haha.