One of the more persistent zombie myths peddled by the Sandy Hook denialist cult is the absurd claim that Sandy Hook Elementary School quietly closed in 2008, leaving it conveniently empty when Adam Lanza (who, depending on which conspiracy enthusiast you ask, may not have even existed) carried out his attack on December 14, 2012. This supposed closure was so stealthy that not a single local media outlet bothered to report it. Impressive, right?
This fantasy appears to have originated with professional conspiracy theorist James Fetzer—a bloated carny who pads his retirement by cranking out increasingly unhinged (and laughably lazy) books like Nobody Died at Sandy Hook. Nearly every word in that masterpiece, by the way, is lifted straight from pre-existing blog entries. Fetzer’s modus operandi? Declare everything—moon landings, the Boston Marathon bombing, you name it—a grand hoax.
Despite an Everest-sized pile of evidence proving the school was open (think: countless photographs of a bustling campus, years of PTA meeting minutes, facilities surveys, news articles, job listings, etc.), Fetzer has staked his ludicrous claim on a shaky foundation of outdated information and a total—and likely willful, though that might be giving him too much credit—misunderstanding of how the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine works. That’s his entire case.
But what exactly is the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (or “The Wayback Machine”)? Let’s start with Wikipedia’s definition:
The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web and other information on the Internet created by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization, based in San Francisco, California, United States. The Internet Archive launched the Wayback Machine in October 2001. It was set up by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, and is maintained with content from Alexa Internet. The service enables users to see archived versions of web pages across time, which the archive calls a “three dimensional index.”
Since 1996, they have been archiving cached pages of web sites onto their large cluster of Linux nodes. They revisit sites every few weeks or months and archive a new version if the content has changed. Sites can also be captured on the fly by visitors who are offered a link to do so. The intent is to capture and archive content that otherwise would be lost whenever a site is changed or closed down. Their grand vision is to archive the entire Internet.
Hopefully, you caught the important part: The Wayback Machine revisits sites “every few weeks or months.” This concept is reiterated later in the same article:
The frequency of snapshots is variable, so not all tracked web site updates are recorded. Sometimes there are intervals of several weeks or years between snapshots.
And just in case that still isn’t clear enough, the Wayback Machine states this again—right there as a disclaimer on their calendar view page:
So, with that in mind:
“Arguably, the most compelling evidence that SHES had long been abandoned before the 2012 massacre is the testimony from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine of the school’s lack of of Internet activity from the beginning of 2008 through all of 2012.” pg. 34
Oof.
Let me make this crystal clear: archived versions of websites, sporadically crawled by the Wayback Machine, are not the same as “Internet activity.” Confusing the two demonstrates a level of technological ignorance best described as “absolutely staggering.” (Although, to be fair, it’s still not quite as ludicrous as the commenter who claimed “all Internet connections” were “severed”—as if someone stormed the school’s networking closets with a pair of gardening shears and just went to town on the cabling.)
“The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the Internet which uses a special software to crawl and download all publicly accessible World Wide Web pages. It was Jungle Server who first discovered that the Wayback Machine shows an absence of Internet activity from SHES since 2008 — the same year when the school was found to be contaminated with asbestos.” pg. 34
There is absolutely no evidence that Sandy Hook Elementary School was any more “contaminated” with asbestos in 2008 than it was in 1956—when the school was built. For context, my own home wasn’t suddenly more “contaminated” with asbestos when I had the original siding replaced a few years ago than it was when it was built in the mid-1950s, back when asbestos was commonly used in construction materials.
Since the book predictably fails to provide a source for this asbestos claim, I had to trace it back to Maria Hsia Chang’s completely wretched blog, Fellowship of the Minds. Chang, in turn, cites a single short paragraph from the Newtown Bee, published on November 7, 2008. While the original URL is no longer live, the article remains accessible via—wait for it—the Wayback Machine. You can view it here.
Here’s what it says:
Hopefully, your reading comprehension isn’t as poor as Maria Chang’s. But in case you’re confused, let me reiterate: in November 2008, asbestos levels in Newtown schools—presumably including Sandy Hook Elementary, although it isn’t named—were deemed safe and posed no threat to students or faculty. In other words, Chang’s own source doesn’t corroborate her claim.
And if Sandy Hook was allegedly “contaminated” enough to be closed (it wasn’t), what about the high school and middle school, which were specifically identified as having “evidence of asbestos”? Were they closed too?
To drive the point home, the Connecticut Department of Education’s 2011 school facilities survey gave Sandy Hook Elementary a perfect 4/4 score (“Not a problem”) for “Asbestos remediation.”
“To verify Jungle Surfer’s claim, I searched for SHES’s website, http://newtown.k12.ct.us/~sh” pg. 34
Here’s where things really go off the rails: Sandy Hook School’s website hasn’t been located at http://newtown.k12.ct.us/~sh since the summer of 2006. That’s when the Newtown public school district’s webmaster changed the addresses for all the district’s school websites, not just Sandy Hook’s. The address would change again in 2011.
If you search the Wayback Machine for any of those outdated URLs, you’ll find similarly sparse—if not more extreme—results:
This isn’t obscure information. The fact that Newtown changed its school website addresses in 2006 is readily available, as I’ll show you in a moment. Yet somehow, the authors of this book missed it (or ignored it), demonstrating once again just how incompetent—or deliberately dishonest—they are. They cannot be trusted to report facts, and their failure is particularly damning in a book that spends so much time vilifying the so-called “mainstream media.”
Even though the Sandy Hook address cited in the book is incorrect, the main website for Newtown’s public schools in 2008 was indeed http://www.newtown.k12.ct.us. Plugging that into the Wayback Machine yields the following results:
The first thing you’ll likely notice is a significant gap in snapshots: apart from a single one in January 2010, there’s nothing between November 2007 and July 2011. I’ll explain why in a moment. But if you look at the last snapshot before the gap (November 20, 2007), you’ll see that the listed address for Sandy Hook Elementary was http://www.newtown.k12.ct.us/shs:
This address is confirmed by an edition of The Sandy Hook Connection—the school’s official newsletter—dated January 8, 2009:
When you enter this correct address into the Wayback Machine, the gap narrows significantly, covering only April 2008 to October 2010:
That’s a far cry from the original claim of four full years. And April? Did these geniuses think the school closed with two months left in the academic year?
But even a two-and-a-half-year gap might seem long. So what’s going on? There’s a simple technical explanation, as outlined in the Wayback Machine’s FAQ:
How can I have my site’s pages excluded from the Wayback Machine?
You can exclude your site from display in the Wayback Machine by placing a robots.txt file on your web server that is set to disallow User-Agent: ia_archiver. You can also send an email request for us to review to info@archive.org with the URL (web address) in the text of your message.
What’s a robots.txt file? From Wikipedia:
The robots exclusion standard, also known as the robots exclusion protocol or simply robots.txt, is a standard used by websites to communicate with web crawlers and other web robots. The standard specifies how to inform the web robot about which areas of the website should not be processed or scanned.
And guess what? On June 4, 2008, the Newtown public schools’ webmaster added the following two lines to their domain’s robots.txt file:
"User-agent: *"applies to all web crawlers."Disallow: /"tells the crawlers not to visit or archive any pages on the site.
Once those changes were made, the Wayback Machine—by design—stopped archiving pages for all schools in the Newtown district, not just Sandy Hook. This isn’t speculation. Anyone with a few spare minutes can replicate these steps and confirm these results. Unlike the shameless contributors to this execrable book, I encourage you to do so.
If this is James Fetzer’s “most compelling evidence” that Sandy Hook Elementary closed in 2008 to prepare for an imaginary drill, what does that say about the rest of his claims?
Of course, there are still a few who’ve talked themselves into remaining unconvinced, like self-proclaimed IT professional Ruth Teltru, who writes:
Still very suspicious that it just so happens Sandy Hook Elementary is the only school in CT. that had the internet archive issues.
First, as already explained and demonstrated in this article, this claim is patently false. The robots.txt file was applied at the root level of Newtown’s website, affecting every school in the district, not just Sandy Hook. So, right out of the gate, Ruth’s comment falls flat.
But it gets worse (as it always seems to with these folks). Even if we generously replace “Sandy Hook Elementary” with “Newtown Public School District,” her claim is still demonstrably wrong. Unlike Ruth, I actually checked the Wayback Machine results for every school district in Connecticut before making any claims.
Out of all those districts—and trust me, there were a lot to go through—nineteen had gaps exceeding Newtown’s 30-month span. Three of those districts had gaps of over four years:
Once again, a Sandy Hook denier not only fails miserably in challenging my work but also manages to make another demonstrably false claim in the process.
And Ruth, assuming she’s actually interested in the truth, might be surprised to learn that Connecticut schools are not alone in this apparent “phenomenon.”
According to Sandy Hook denialist cult leader Wolfgang Halbig’s publicly available résumé—which, for the record, often contradicts his own claims—he worked at both Lake Mary High School and Lyman High School in Seminole County, Florida. But here’s a pressing question: how do we know that these schools haven’t been secretly shuttered for years, perhaps as part of an elaborate setup for some future false flag operation?
Let’s start with Lake Mary High School. Its website can be found at http://www.lakemaryhs.scps.k12.fl.us/. Plugging that address into the Wayback Machine returns the following results:
Wait a second—there are not one, but two rather suspicious gaps in “Internet activity” here. The first spans from April 2003 until December 2005—over two and a half years of complete radio silence! The second gap is nearly as dramatic, running from February 2009 to July 2011, save for a lone snapshot in February 2010 (clearly added just to keep us guessing). That’s almost five years of supposed inactivity since 2001.
But what about Lyman High School? Using their website, http://lyman.scps.k12.fl.us/, we see nearly identical results:
Obviously, this can only mean one thing: suspicious activity. And given that Wolfgang Halbig once served as vice principal at both schools, it’s practically guaranteed he’s involved in whatever covert operations might be taking place. We also know Halbig has publicly admitted that the schools he managed were plagued with mold, so it’s entirely plausible they’ve been closed for years, perhaps repurposed as storage facilities for neighboring schools.
So, Wolfgang, when will you come clean and tell us the truth about Lake Mary and Lyman High Schools?
Additional reading: “When The Internet Archive Forgets”
That the school district prevented the Internet’s robots from crawling its pages producing the long web inactivity gap it did is very interesting, but doesn’t provide “fool-proof evidence” that any of the schools, including SHS, were fully or partially closed prior to the alleged Sandy Hook Elementary shooting of 14.Dec.2012. If anything, this lack of web activity on the part of the schools involved only adds to the massive confusion surrounding the event and provides debunkers ammunition to ridicule inexperienced investigators who admittedly jump into risky, unproven conclusions quite often.
The David-and-Goliath-style duel we’re witnessing between independent, rising, often crude investigators and the almighty mainstream media over the Sandy Hook event is far from over. Debunkers do well and score points at the expense of the obvious mistakes the young investigators make, but the sheer power of the incontestable evidence available on the web in the form of videos and photographs — captured and propagated by MSM itself — is turning millions of viewers’ heads towards a bright, clear sign that reads “HOAX.” I’m referring to the likes of laughing Robbie Parker, joking Wayne Carver, or sloppy-sniper David Wheeler playing the double roll of victim’s father and faux FBI agent the same day of the event.
Debunkers are seasoned sophists, who carefully craft arguments to push whatever case under the sun they’re paid to sell — and they’re quite good. But all we have to say to these snake-oil salesmen is “no thanks.”
Oof. Give me a break. First and foremost, there is no debate. None. If there was one – and it’d be almost impossibly generous for me to suggest that there ever was – it’s been over for quite some time now. And it likely wouldn’t have centered around whether or not the tragedy was “faked”, as it’s a ludicrous idea that has never been supported by so much as a shred of empirical evidence. Just because one side of this imaginary argument refuses to accept the facts and move on doesn’t mean that there’s a legitimate debate to be had. That’s silly. Twenty-six people died at Sandy Hook School, the Earth is not flat, etc. Just stop.
I refuse to accept that there is anything confusing or even all that interesting regarding the changes that were made to the district’s website back in 2008. In my opinion, the only people who are still confused are those who choose to remain so. Literally anyone can take a few minutes out of their day to do some basic research and familiarize themselves with the process, which is not all that technologically advanced. There’s also nothing even remotely suspicious about it. The first thing to keep in mind is that there is no four year gap in snapshot activity. Fetzer – likely intentionally – used the wrong URL to come to this conclusion. When you use the correct address, that gap ends in 2010, or two years before the shooting. That alone is enough, in my opinion, to shut this ridiculous theory down for good. But exploring it even further, remember that this prevented the website for every school in the district from being crawled (though this would have absolutely no impact on their accessibility or usability). So why anyone – and I guess the circle of co-conspirators has now grown to include Newtown’s IT staff – would deem this necessary in order to engineer a successful “false false” shooting at one of those schools four years down the line is well beyond me, and I have yet to hear a reasonable explanation from any denier. And it makes even less sense (assuming that’s possible) that they would take this step while continuing to meticulously outfit the school with thousands of dollars worth of modern technical equipment, up-to-date books and magazines, holiday decorations, even going as far as to start making pizzas for the crime scene walkthrough. Plus the hundreds of photographs taken in and around the school, the nearly two hundred articles that appeared throughout multiple local media sources, the supporting government documents, and so on, all of which appeared between 2008-2012.
You keep talking about “crude” or “inexperienced” investigators making “mistakes”, but James Fetzer has been promoting conspiracy theories since the early 90s. He wrote his first book on the Kennedy assassination back when I was a teenager. He has been doing this for a long, long time, whereas I have only been at it for a year now. Dismissing him as an amateur, prone to frequent slip-ups, is hogwash. The guy is a con-man, plain and simple. When he dedicates an entire chapter in his book to presenting crime scene photos out of order in an attempt to make the claim that the scene was staged, that is not a clumsy mistake, it is an outright lie. Hold them accountable. Stop making excuses for these goofballs. Be better than that. Be better than them.
No. Just… no. First of all, there are not millions of people who believe in this tripe. If you have any evidence to the contrary, please feel free to share it. I would love to see it. And in regards to this “incontestable evidence”, surely you are not referring to your ludicrous and long debunked claim that David Wheeler “played” an FBI sniper, are you? Come on, man. This one’s just laughable.
This just about sums it up, doesn’t it? A flat-out refusal of the facts (hey, at least you’re polite about it!), based on God-knows-what, and the allegation of paid opposition for good measure. Now is probably a great time to tell you about The Shill Challenge, which I created for people just like you, who are wholly unprepared to argue the facts and need to resort to baseless accusations instead. If you think I’m being paid (and I’m not, as I’ve stated multiple times), present the evidence, and I’ll donate $300 to your favorite Sandy Hook huckster (Halbig, Tracy, etc). It’s an easy way to support the cause and become a hero to the denier cult by discrediting me. But if you fail to back up your claim, you’ll be banned from the site. Do you have it in you?
You reveal yourself with all your “oofs” and ad hominem comments.
Do you have any actual problem with the work itself, or are you just acting on your insatiable urge to cry about something?
Lmao @Mike Smith. This is the typical mind of the truther. He doesn’t have a clue what robots.txt is, he doesn’t understand how archive.org or the wayback machine work, but that doesn’t stop him from typing a novel to expose how ignorant he truly is.
I’m starting a similar blog though it has a lot more personal opinion than this one. I wonder how many infowars retards are going to say that the government pays me to blog against a group of people they’ve successfully (and rightfully) ignored for years.
I already get accused of being paid by the government to post YouTube comments LMAO.
SHES hoaxers are the most intelligent people on the planet.
Because of course the only way anyone could ever disagree with their preposterous and offensive stories is if they were paid to. No other possible explanation exists. Shit, I should be so lucky.
Send me the link to your blog once it’s up, if you don’t mind. I’d like to see it. You can e-mail me at shillmurray at outlook.com.
Hah! ‘Young investigators’. Halbig, Fetzer, Mead, Weigel, Kusznir. Is Mr Smith in his nineties?
Great detailed entry. Thanks, Shill, for doing the work.
Thanks, William!
interestingly the FBI crime data by year state never seems to come up.
The FBI says no one died, are they altogerher wrong? Simply overlooked those ‘dead’
sure…
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/tables/8tabledatadecpdf/table-8-state-cuts/table_8_offenses_known_to_law_enforcement_by_connecticut_by_city_2012.xls
Murder and
nonnegligent
manslaughter
Newtown = 0
probably nothing to see here
This nonsense has been debunked about 1,000 times at this point, including here on this site. The zero is not how many murders occurred in Newtown, but how many were reported to the FBI by local police (the murders are in the state totals since it was state police who reported them to the FBI). In total, the shooting is explicitly mentioned fourteen times in the full FBI report. Get your head out of your ass.
Yep, and the FBI link you provided is still active almost 10 months later. Still very suspicious that it just so happens Sandy Hook Elementary is the only school in CT. that had the internet archive issues. Archival record counts on the internet don’t lie.
You who take a long time using a lot of words that make no sense to create confusion. Again back up your claim and show us the records where Newtown School’s IT department made these changes. There will be documented archives of those changes, which are already so suspicious. Las Vegas is another loose end deal…
First of all, as I pointed out in my previous reply, it wasn’t just Sandy Hook Elementary School that experienced this non-existent “issue” (it’s not an issue if it’s by design), but every school in Newtown’s public school district. That’s because the change was applied at the root level. And since you claim to be in IT, you should understand this. There are six other schools in Newtown’s public school district, all of which experienced the same “gap” in snapshots. Are you going to suggest that, based on those results, every school in Newtown shut down in 2008? Again, this is all covered in this article. Please read before you comment.
Secondly, did you actually check the Internet Archive results for every public school district in CT? I imagine it would be useful before making such a bold claim. My guess is that you didn’t, because I did and it turns out that – surprise – you’re wrong.
As discussed in this entry, when you use the correct URL for Sandy Hook’s site as it existed during that time period, there is a gap of two and a half years… or thirty months. So I consulted this list of websites for Connecticut’s public school districts and viewed the snapshot history for each and every one, comparing them to Newtown. Not counting the websites that are no longer active, I found sixty-two districts with a gap of twelve months or longer in between website snapshots. Fifty-four of those districts had a gap of eighteen months – a year and a half – or longer. Thirty-six had a gap of twenty-four months or more. Finally, nineteen whole districts had a gap of over thirty months. That’s nineteen districts that had a gap exceeding Newtown’s. Three districts (Windsor Locks, Torrington, and New Milford) had gaps of four years or more! So when you say that “Sandy Hook Elementary is the only school in CT that had the internet archive issues”, that is a demonstrably false (or, as it’s otherwise known, a lie).
Furthermore, maybe you missed this entry, but it turns out that the schools Wolfgang Halbig worked as a glorified hall monitor – Lake Mary and Lyman High Schools – also show huge gaps in Wayback Machine activity. Lake Mary has a gap of over two and a half years, from April of 2003 until December of 2005, which is longer than Sandy Hook’s. Were those schools closed?
Sure, but only when those archival records actually exist. The Internet Archive itself admits that their records are not complete. It’s on their site:
Which words, specifically, are you having trouble understanding? I have to admit this is the first time that I (you are talking to me, right?) have been accused of using too many words, or not making sense.
Once again, someone who has accused others of changing the subject is… changing the subject.
Shill, you are a shill as any half awake person can see. You don’t address any of the real issues. The school had been closed for over a year for sure. It was in a state of total disrepair as shown by the FBI photos. Etc. if you are trying to fool anyone you fail. Book bag and body bag. Peopke saying lies like this are a total give away. If you aren’t paid you have some other angle to be so crooked.
James Fetzer referred to this embarrassing misrepresentation of the Internet Archive results as “the most compelling” evidence that the school was closed. Alex Jones himself has cited the very same information on his show on more than one occasion in order to come to the same asinine conclusion. But now it’s no longer a “real issue”? Why? Because it’s been so thoroughly debunked? Give me a break. It’s about as “real” an issue as anything else as that makes up this nonsense theory can be.
You idiots can’t even agree on how long the school was allegedly closed! You say “at least a year”, Wolfgang Halbig says four years, etc. This is what happens when you base your goofball claims on total hokum.
Amazing. The school somehow manages to get worse and worse with every re-telling of this tall tale. First it was “dirty”, and now it’s in total disrepair. That’s obviously bogus, as any reasonable person knows. The truth is that it was a small, 50+ year-old public school in America, and it looked the part. That’s what a lot of public schools look like these days, and it’s unlikely to get much better. If any of you dopes saw some of the public schools in my area, you’d swear they were all preparing for some sort of “false flag”.
But of course you can continue to believe the alternative, which is that the United States government spent years as well as millions of dollars preparing for a fake shooting at an abandoned public school (a public school housing hundreds of children that managed to close so quietly that there is no mention of it anywhere on the Internet or elsewhere), going as far as to plant up-to-update magazines in a barely visible magazine rack, etc, only to somehow forget to make the place look habitable (or at least up to the lofty standards of conspiracy theorists) before they took thousands of crime scene photos. That one makes a whole lot of sense, right? And of course we’re told by these very same people that obviously the Lanza house was staged because it’s too clean.
My angle is that I hate bullshit and bullshitters, especially the kind that harass the families of murdered children. But if you’re so sure that I’m on someone’s payroll, prove it and I’ll send you $400. That’s the “Shill Challenge”, which I’ve written about a number of times on the Crisis Actors Guild Facebook page. I’ve been offering it as long as the site’s been up (about a year and a half now) and no one has even attempted to collect. Sad, but entirely expected.
You’re getting defensive and it’s not going to shut people up. Stop changing the subject and answer the questions with evidence. These folks are challenging YOU and YOUR CLAIMS. These people aren’t harassing any of the residents of Newtown as you falsely claim – they are demanding evidence and facts. For one, the person that did the ‘tango’ when trying to explain Newtown’s IT department’s reason for making changes to Sandy Hook elementary holds no water. I’m in IT and I want the records of those changes they made. If anyone killed anybody at that school, I can tell you right now that it wasn’t a crazy man – it was a sick, abusive, powerlust for gun control. Bottom line. It will always go back to that, but gun control isn’t going to stop school shootings! If you love America’s kids you will protect the schools first and foremost and stop using a school shooting to push a lame political agenda that doesn’t work (Look at Sweden!) Bad guys will ALWAYS have guns and will shoot our kids! We want zero school shootings – not ‘less’ school shootings. Get those badass, trained and licensed and sane U.S. Vets in the classrooms to protect our kids!
Who are you talking to? Who is getting defensive? Who is changing the subject? I can’t imagine you’re talking about me, because the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and the way it works (and, more importantly, it way it does not work) is the subject. At least it is for this particular entry. Other questions and claims have their own, separate entries. Familiarize yourself with site’s search bar. As far as evidence goes, there’s plenty here – far more than has ever been provided than the people making these ridiculous claims – you just choose not to accept it. I know that I’ve more than adequately explained not only why Wayback Machine snapshots are not in any way synonymous with “Internet activity”, but why the gap in snapshots exists in the first place. I also managed to demonstrate that those making this bogus claim are using demonstrably false information in order to do so (ie an outdated, incorrect web address).
I think you have this backwards: my claims are that theirs are nonsense. Both James Fetzer and Wolfgang Halbig are well aware of my site and the work I’ve done here in debunking their garbage, but neither one has had the balls to refute any of it. And thus far, their lackeys have done an absolutely miserable job in picking up the slack, relying on ad hominems, Gish gallops, or the doubling-down of their already debunked twaddle. I’ve always been open to correcting mistakes on the site, and I’d love for an intellectually honest challenge to my work, but the reality is that I’m usually just approving comments from brain-dead goofs that would rather call me a “shill” (or worse) than engage in any sort of actual debate. To be fair, one guy came close but ended up going a bit off the rails in the end. That’s one guy in… two years, I think it’s been. And even he agreed Fetzer and Halbigs were dopes.
Give me a break. When Lucy Richards called Lenny Pozner and told him, “You gonna die, death is coming to you real soon”, which evidence was she demanding? Did Jonathan Reich plead guilty to demanding facts? Get out of here with this garbage.
What are you talking about? Who is “the person”? And what do you mean by “did the ‘tango'”? The IT department did not make changes to just Sandy Hook’s site; they did it for the entirety of Newtown’s public schools. If you had read the article, in full, then you would know that.
There are a number of reasons why a webmaster would choose to prevent their site from being crawled, often due to dynamic content, and it was common enough that the Internet Archive mentions it a number of times in their FAQ.
Why on Earth would you need a record of a change being made when you can actually see the change being made, via the Wayback Machine? Again, this is all outlined in the article you are leaving a comment on. Simply look at the Wayback Machine’s snapshot of newtown.k12.ct.us – which is the domain that hosted the site for every school in Newtown’s public school district – from June 4th, 2008 and you can see the first appearance of the actual robots.txt file that excludes the site from web crawlers for yourself. Go back a bit further – to the snapshots taken in April and May of 2008 – and see that they were previously only using robots to block the crawling of their event calendar (possibly their only dynamic content at the time). Go back even further than that and you’ll see that the file did not exist. There, you’ve seen the change take place with your own eyes. Demanding anything further is just silly and quite honestly a perfect example of the kind of goalpost moving I’ve come to expect from your type.
As for any internal records that may or may not exist documenting the implementation of a robots file on a public school district’s website, what leads you to believe that you have a right to this kind of material? If you believe this information should be public, have you filed a FOIA request? If not, why? Take some initiative. After all, you’re in IT!
Now let’s say this documentation did exist and it was given to you; would you accept it and admit your mistake? Because I personally doubt it. After all, if you’re unwilling to accept the timestamped results of the Wayback Machine, explicitly showing the change being made, then why would you accept something that is much more easily faked? Maybe you’ll go on to demand a printout of the webmaster’s brainwaves from the moment they came up with the idea. Then maybe even a home video of their conception.
And you’re going to accuse me of changing the subject? Who’s talking about gun control? That’s well beyond the scope of this website, which is about debunking denier claptrap, so take this debate elsewhere.
So… school shootings do happen, just not at Sandy Hook? Which school shootings do you believe are legitmate? Do you even know?
By the way, if you are actually in IT and you do not understand the difference between snapshots taken by the Wayback Machine and “Internet activity” – as in packets in and packets out – then your job should be outsourced. If the guys on my help desk made such an ignorant, elementary mistake, I’d look to write them up.
So it is kinda odd that they gave asbestos a 4 meaning it was “not a problem”.
Even tho the school was noted as having high levels of asbestos. Were tests even done? This is a serious issue if they lied and said the school was safe when it was not.
And more importantly, why is there not a single story of any of the parents suing.
The Newtown Bee published an article about the high levels shortly after the shooting. Also high levels of lead. Just go to the website and do a search for “asbestos” for December 2nd, 2013. And you can read it yourself.
What I find interesting is that real crimes usually dont need lots of people to debunk things that do not add up. Because they just add up.
But please tell me that it was a mistake that the paper said there were high levels of asbestos and lead while reports claim the school was fine.
Also have yet to see anyone explain why the live CNN footage (still out there so check for yourself) shows cops running into the school. But weird, its not Sandy Hook. It was Rose Lima. Rose Lima did not have a shooting for those that wish to discredit this as mixing up tapes.
There is legit no reason for CNN to be claiming they are live overhead Sandy Hook when they are over another school.
And there is legit no reason cops would be running into Rose Lima.
But hey, its an easy cover to run under the “people died” claim.
People do not question it.
“High levels of asbestos”? According to whom? Because if we look at the article from the Newtown Bee that you yourself cited, the only mention of “high” anything occurs in the following sentence:
It doesn’t say that there are high levels of asbestos, just higher levels of asbestos, lead, and PCBs than expected. There’s a difference. And these levels were discovered in the construction debris. This is a very important distinction, and it’s why you had to cherry pick an article from a year after the shooting in order to find anything that supports your claim that the school had an asbestos problem, which it absolutely didn’t.
Which leads me to my next point…
Asbestos is not a problem until it’s disturbed, because it’s the asbestos dust that poses a health risk. The Twin Towers, for example, were constructed with 300-400 tons of asbestos, and 50,000 people worked there at any given time without any issue whatsoever. But first responders, rescue workers, survivors, etc. have been dropping dead from cancer ever since 9/11 due to exposure to asbestos dust and other harmful carcinogens present in the rubble. Hell, even my house was covered in asbestos siding up until a couple of years ago, when I finally had it replaced.
So the truth is that a school – or any other building containing asbestos – could (and many built through the 70s still do) contain high levels of asbestos and still be perfectly safe. Newtown was pretty open about the asbestos in their public schools, as we can see in the following quote from a November 7th, 2008 article in the Newtown Bee:
Notice only two of Newtown’s seven public schools are singled out as even showing evidence of asbestos, and Sandy Hook isn’t one of them.
Suing who? For what? A non-existent asbestos threat?
Again, it only says that there were “higher than expected” levels of lead. If you expect none, for example, then any level would be “higher than expected”. I’m not sure if this is a reading comprehension issue or you’re deliberately misrepresenting what’s actually in the article.
This is one of the worst shootings in American history. Up until Vegas, it was the third worst, behind Virginia Tech (32 killed) and Pulse (49 killed). But due to the age of the victims as well as the sheer brutality of it all, you could make the argument that it’s one of the worst shootings in the history of the world. So there aren’t many comparable “real crimes” that we can draw parallels between. And Sandy Hook in particular attracts more conspiracy theorists than most mass shootings (which must mean it’s true then, right? Isn’t that how it works? The more people that oppose an idea, the truer it is?), so naturally it’s going to attract more people interested in debunking them.
Do you also believe the world is flat? Because there are an awful lot of people out there debunking flat earth theory. If you don’t believe me, search YouTube for “flat earth debunked”. There are over 630,000 results. That’s more than Sandy Hook. So, using your goofball logic, that means that the theory is valid. Some people just enjoy debunking bullshit, especially harmful, ugly bullshit like the Sandy Hook hoax fairy tale.
First of all, things tend to make a lot more sense when you manage to get the basic facts right. So, sure, the idea that a school could be infested with asbestos and still get a clean bill of health is kind of odd, but Sandy Hook wasn’t actually infested with asbestos; you just made that part up. Secondly, just because something doesn’t “add up” to you personally doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. Get over yourself.
As demonstrated earlier, the only mistake here is the one you made when you quoted your source.
Okay, so make that two mistakes.
At no point does CNN claim that the footage was live. Again, you appear to either not understand your own source or you’re lying because you don’t expect anyone to look into it.
Again, CNN never claims that they are airing live footage. They chyron doesn’t say anything about it, and the word is never even uttered by anyone at any point during the entire three minute segment.
Are you for real? There was a shooting a mile away! As a result, all area schools were on lockdown, which is corobborated throughout the final report. Here’s a snippet from book 6, document 00152008:
And here’s an exchange between Newtown Sgt Kullgren and a Newtown dispatcher in this transcript of Newtown PD’s radio transmissions from the day of the shooting:
The Danbury Newstimes included a photo of police at St. Rose of Lima in a December 18th, 2012 article titled “911 Sandy Hook call shows early confusion”. The caption of the photo reads:
So we have an elementary school, on lockdown, approximately one mile away from a shooting at another elementary school. Do you honestly not understand why cops would show up?
Besides, what in the world do you think the cops going to St. Rose of Lima proves, exactly? How does that fit into your narrative?
And yet, here we are.
I lived in Bethel, CT at the time of the shooting. My daughter was in school at that time and I was notified by the school that the entire district was in lockdown due to a shooting in a school in the next town over. We were at least 15 miles away from Sandy Hook and our schools were in lockdown for about 3 hours. Many schools in Western CT were in lockdown that morning.
B.S . If you look at the root level for all 19 districts they would result in the same exact months and year. Your story still doesn’t add up.
According to whom? What is this based on? The same incredible research that led you – IT expert Ruth Teltru – to falsely claim that no other school in all of Connecticut had similar Wayback Machine results? And then I provided you a list of schools that did? Remember that? Probably not, otherwise I’m sure you would have admitted your mistake and apologized, right?
No “story” here; just a technical, easy-to-follow, and most importantly demonstrable explanation of how the Wayback Machine, web robots, and The Robots Exclusion Protocol all work. As such, I’m not even sure what you’re arguing at this point. Just take the L, Ruth.
Love the work you put into this. Glad to see you actively slap down anyone dumb enough to argue against your demonstration by blatantly ignoring said demonstration. Unfortunately, it seems they don’t want to learn, or think outside of the box they built for themselves.
Keep it up, I’ll be working my way through all your posts as I find time.
Thanks, David. I often wonder if I’m wasting my time, trying to reason with the unreasonable, but then I realize that there’s also value in giving these folks the opportunity to make themselves look foolish. Half the time, they don’t even need my help. Anyway, it’s good to know that people are not only paying attention to these exchanges, but appreciate them as well.
Anybody who has spent 30 minutes looking into Sandy Hook knows it was fake…
There was a bunch of garbage we’ve all heard a million times before down here but I did everyone a favor and deleted it. You’re welcome. – SM
Then maybe you should have spent 31, because everything in your Gish Gallop worth debunking has already been debunked. And has been for years.
P.S. – I’ve removed most of your comment because I’m through giving you chucklefucks a chance to spout your tired old nonsense, especially when it’s clear that you haven’t bothered to read the site before unleashing your binary diarrhea, otherwise you’d understand how stupid you sound parroting easily disproven shit like “Not a single victim brought out to the triage area”. Because there are multiple pictures on this site that debunk this zombie myth, and they’re not difficult to find.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you’re ever interested in pulling your head out of your own ass, I’d suggest starting here. Until then, hit the bricks.
Here’s something you can’t debunk that Halbig found. The company SYSCO who delivers food to these schools handed over their invoices from months prior to the “shooting”. The food was being re-directed to the Chalk Hill Middle School 15-20 miles away. There was no food or milk being delivered there months prior, no food, no milk = no kids. The school was empty and he’s got the invoices to prove it. You can find it on Youtube. That school was closed!
I can’t?
https://www.crisisactorsguild.com/2019/01/07/sandy-hook-students-were-not-moved-to-chalk-hill-prior-to-january-2013/
Please de-bunk:
Why did Sysco Foods and Dean Foods deliver their food and milk products to “Sandy Hook Elementary School” at 375 Fan Hill Rd, the Old Chalk Hill school from 09-01-2012 through 12-13-2012? Sandy Hook Elementary school was reported during the shooting aftermath as being at 12 Dickenson Drive.not Fan Hill Road.
(all documents are a matter of public record.)
Please direct me to these public documents as the food service program at Sandy Hook was run by Chartwells, which is a private company. Therefore it is extremely unlikely that information on their customers is part of the public record.
The asbestos report and the robots.txt file are both as fake as Adam Lanza’s computer-generated Sandy HOAX photos. Anyone who still believes this massive HOAX needs a brain transplant. Nobody died there. PERIOD.
“If I haven’t seen it, it doesn’t exist. But if I have, it’s fake.”
This is such a monumentally stupid claim, one you didn’t even bother to try and back up presumably because you know it would be impossible, that I almost feel like a sucker for even acknowledging it when it’s obvious that it doesn’t deserve that kind of validation. But I guess I just have time to waste today because here I am.
I’ll give you some credit: the idea that the robots.txt file cached by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine back in 2008 is somehow “fake” (what even is a fake file?) is a new one, at least to me. And I’d say that it’s because no one has been bold/insane enough to suggest something so ludicrous, but we know that’s not true because I’ve already written about the Super Bowl choir nonsense.
When you click on this link, the one towards the bottom of the article, you’re looking at a cached version of the Newtown Public Schools website as well as an actual copy of the robots.txt file that was hosted there, both of which are now physically located on the Internet Archive’s servers. It is a “snapshot” that was taken by the Wayback Machine as the site was crawled live on June 4th, 2008, in a process that (again) included actually copying the robots.txt file from Newtown’s web servers to those belonging to the Internet Archive. So that’s not just what that file looked like that day nearly eleven years ago, it is an actual copy of that file.
Now rather than waste my time even further by trying to explain to you just how difficult if not downright impossible it would be to “fake” that (and if you’re suggesting the folks at the Internet Archive are now complicit, then why wouldn’t they simply fill the alleged “gaps” in “Internet Activity” that birthed this hokum?), I’m instead going to ask for some evidence, any evidence at all, that the robots.txt file has been “faked”. I’ve already done the work, so now it’s your turn. After all, you’re the one making the claim, so the burden of proof is on you. You can start with explaining how a “fake” robots.txt file managed to impact the sites for all of Newtown’s public schools, and not just Sandy Hook.
As for the “asbestos report”, first of all, it’s not an asbestos report; it is a full school facilities survey. The asbestos score is just one item of many. This survey, like the robots.txt file, has been cached by the Wayback Machine, making it extremely difficult (again, if not impossible) to “fake” without the explicit help of the Internet Archive. And even if I were to accept your claim at face value (and I’m not, because it is beyond stupid and you haven’t provided any evidence whatsoever) and say “sure, the school facilities survey is a fake”, there was never any evidence that Sandy Hook had an asbestos “issue” in the first place. Maria Chang’s lone source for this lie – which you can find in this entry – says absolutely nothing about Sandy Hook. Nothing. The only schools mentioned by name with “evidence of asbestos” in Newtown are the high school and the middle school. So, like your claim that the school facilities survey is “fake”, the idea that there was an asbestos “infestation” or whatever in Sandy Hook is entirely without merit and not backed up by even a fraction of a shred of evidence.
Truly a failure on all levels.
Sandy hook was a hoax and there is more than enough evidence to prove it. The school did close down in 2008 with evidence to prove it. Adam Lanza also died before the hoax ever took place and his obituary is evidence of this. The victims of sandy hook were also seen alive numerous times after the hoax. They even sang at the super bowl with pics and vids to prove it.
There’s “more than enough” evidence, but you just so happened to choose “evidence” that I’ve already thoroughly debunked?
There is zero evidence that the school closed in 2008. Or any time before December of 2012. The fact that you’ve provided none speaks volumes.
Which “obituary” are you referring to? His actual death certificate (which you can order a copy of through Newtown’s town clerk) says that he died on December 14th, which is correct.
I’m sorry, but I can no longer mince words here: if you actually believe that the victims performed at the Super Bowl, especially after reading this extensive entry that I’ve written in regards to this particular claim (which I don’t believe you have), then you are an idiot.
Keep the nose to the wheel Shill. It may not seem so but your work here is appreciated by many.
Thanks.
Thanks, Pete. Comments like this certainly help.