No God, and the Old Elm Tree

Recently, someone named nogod on a message board www.oldelmtree.com, linked to a blog of mine about two 9/11 researchers who post at the Reality Shack forum, Max Konrardy & Simon Hytten. nogod explains why:

Since Simon Hytten has repeatedly refused to answer my questions I was forced to search elsewhere for the answers. What I came across was a blog by another truther. (the link is below)

I guess I have to take this guys word for it since Simon chooses to ignore my direct questions. Be sure to read Simons reaction below the article in the link. Enjoy!

nogod's putting "truther" in italics leads me to believe he is in the opposing camp---what is generally known as a "skeptic." I don't know what questions he'd previously asked of Simon that had remained unanswered until he discovered my blog. I read through the ten-page thread and found nothing that was pertinent. The sections of my blog he quotes speak to the authenticity of authorship of the work attributed to Simon Shack and hoi poloi, but I quite clearly make no claims one way or the other.

nogod downloaded from my blog and reupped to his thread a photograph I'd posted of Max and Simon, which I'd taken in Rome. This caused Simon Shack to break his OldElmTree silence, and he posted a request to the thread:

Dear administrators,

I ask you to remove the above picture. It was copied-and-pasted by member 'nogod' from the blog of Steven Welch (aka "Steven Warran"). Steven was my guest in Rome for 2 weeks, during the 6-month span in which my fellow researcher Hoi Polloi and I were working on the "Vicsim" research.

We both let Steven snap pictures of us all along - asking him specifically NOT to publish them on the internet - for obvious privacy reasons. As soon as Steven returned to the USA, he posted pictures he had snapped of both of us on his blog.

Thanks for removing the above picture - besides, it's a very unflattering one: I have no such beer-belly ...hehe...that's a gust of wind filling up my T-shirt !

Within 15 minutes an administrator of the board, "Andrea," wrote "I will remove the picture," and she did so, but nogod got the last word in, saying

"Sorry that wasnt called for to post his photo. But non the less it was fair, but still not proper."

Whatever "questions" nogod had of Simon must not have been very important, because the thread died at this point.

All of this does call into question the issues of fairness, propriety, and the "obviousness" of privacy, but it also speaks to a larger issue of public identity, which lies at the heart of the 9/11 conspiracy, and hence our search for truth.

Any number of prominent 9/11 researchers, such as Richard Gage, Judy Wood, Dick Eastman, Paul Thompson, Jim Hoffman, Aldo Marquis, and Phil Jahan, are publicly known by their names and images, both online and in "real world" gathering places, such as research symposium.

A different class of players has operated anonymously online in blogs, web sites, and message boards.

Max Konrardy & Simon Hytten were working anonymously online under the nicknames Simon Shack and hoi poloi until just before I posted the first of two blogs about them. Both of their names were already "outed" on a blog called killtownsecretarchive, which focuses on policing an entity known as "Killtown," who is a 9/11 research colleague of Simon and Max's.

The saga between the online 9/11 archivist called Killtown, and its equally anonymous nemesis, Killtown's Secret Archive, ran a course over the past year, and the central issue there was also the public identification of "personas," or the outing of covert agents/actors/players who figure in the 9/11 narrative, for the "real" underlying human beings. Killtown had identified individuals like Val McClatchey, and Mark Humphrey as somehow being illegitimate. Apparently this was a major breach of covert etiquette, but even amid their rancorous infighting, the Secret Archive never dared to out Killtown himself/herself, singular or plural.

It is interesting to note that Simon and Hoi are aligned with others such as Killtown, where they apparently must wear masks to hide some covert reality behind "obvious" rationals.

In my own 9/11 work I've found no need for the privacy that Simon feels is so necessary. My home address, and telephone number, are as easy to locate online as they once were through a telephone book. Even though I have espoused some pretty radical positions, which were sure to alienate and arouse many different factions involved in 9/11, only once in the past five years have I received an annoyance phone call, and that was from somebody who was charmingly drunk.

I address all of this for a specific reason, and that is the same reason I posted images of Simon and Hoi in the first place---the construction and maintenance of an overt public record.

Simon makes two serious errors of fact in his request to the administrators of the OldElmTree board.

First, I was only a guest at Simon's house outside of Rome for one week, not two. I spent a second week at an hotel in Rome, and Simon and a friend came into town on my last night there to have dinner with me. I don't mean to minimize his hospitality, but it is interesting to note that Simon seems to have experienced the visit through my eyes, and not his own.

Secondly, Simon says that as soon as I returned to the U.S. I published photographs of the both of them, and this statement is wrong on two points. First, it wasn't until I was banned from participating on the Reality Shack forum, which Simon and Hoi administrate, that on October 29, I posted the blog Reality Shack 9/11: The Famous hoi polloi, aka Max Konrardy at Work, which was my attempt at explicating the strange interpersonal dynamics I found myself confronted with vis-a-vis Simon and his research collective. (And I only posted a single, obscured image of Max/Hoi then--not of the both of them.)

Two weeks prior, on October 15, I had posted a blog Jeannieann Maffeo and Ruth Magdaline, which was my first effort working under the new research paradigm of the Vicsim report (and let it be said that none of our interpersonal conflict impacts on the validity of that insight.)

Simon left friendly comments on that blog praising my work, and four days later, he came out with a YouTube video on the same subject. I may have fed him some information concerning inconsistencies in a BBC interview, but if so, he certainly didn't give me any credit. However, shortly thereafter, a message board that opposes the work of Simon, Hoi and myself, PumpItOut, came out with an attempt at minimizing the damage of the news report we'd highlighted.

It wasn't until six months later, after Simon had been impressed with my subsequent work on the phenomena of false victim identity that he asked me to rejoin the Reality Shack forum, but where I was summarily dismissed for a second time, that I chose to publish what I thought was an important, and not gratuitous, photograph of the pair for the historical record.

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"Thus (through perspective) every sort of confusion is revealed within us; and this is that weakness of the human mind on which the art of conjuring and of deceiving by light and shadow and other ingenious devices imposes, having an effect upon us like magic... And the arts of measuring and numbering and weighing come to the rescue of the human understanding-there is the beauty of them --and the apparent greater or less, or more or heavier, no longer have the mastery over us, but give way before calculation and measure and weight?"^[7]
Plato's Republic, Book X, 602d.