Initially I was confused about the rationale behind holding up a Mexican flag at a U.S. political rally, then I figured out what is going on:

These poor Mexicans came up North on vacation or something and got lost!  When they were asking for directions about how to get home someone gave them some mis-information as a joke and they ended up at a Trump rally.  Probably George Soros having a little fun.  Anyway, the flag is a desperate cry for help.  I myself am not a flag waver so I can see what a powerful feeling these people must have for the great nation of Mexico that they would carry the flag around and display it.  It is heatbreaking to see these poor lost souls missing their nation so.  Being the big-hearted American that I am, I'm in favor of giving them a lift to the other side of the wall so they can get back to the home that they love so much.

If these lost souls did find some things to like about the U.S. while they were on their visit, they could work toward re-creating them down South of the border.  I'm sure that Vincente Fox and his billionaire pals would love to work with them to make that happen.

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More seriously, one cannot help but notice the benefit these acts of violence are having toward substanciating the fears of the reactionary Right and galvanizing people behind a movement which promises to 'build a wall.'  As is my nature, I always have to hold open a hypothesis that the violence is actually engineered by elements of the TRUMP side.   Standard cui bono?

I don't believe this hypothesis to be correct in part because I notice that Trump's strategy seems to be mainly his.  So far his strategy has been clever but completely ethical.  It consists mainly of skillful trolling and 'harm' in such an operation is directly attributable to a weakness of the victims themselves.  Also, it would be terribly risky and desperate and it is the Left who are both prone to such strategies and in a desperate enough place to need to employ them.

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Another very interesting thing is that ABC and George Snuffilufagus have been out in front of a fast pack in underhanded media attacks on Trump.  Suddenly they changed their tune and if anything overplayed the recent violence in San Jose.  Very interesting.  Why day do dat?

I suggest the possibility that the mainstream media has shifted strategy to actually utilize the 'terrorism' that these thugs have been cultivating.  That is to say, they are now actively trying to discourage citizens from attending Trump rallys due to personal safety concerns.

I'm going to take the opposite side of this one.  In my opinion, people engauged in investigative journalism should be able to push the envelope in order to validate or invalidate a narative.  This is very similar to the people who were investigating whether Planned Parenthood was running a chop-shop for baby parts.  They got busted for engauging in the behavior that they were investigating which is absurd and wrong.  And, or course, PP was let off the hook.

I, for one, am fine with people investigating the purported issues in our firearms system simply because I want to have the best information I can get available to me.  I am also deeply grateful that Couric et-al made such asses out of the whole mainstream-media-gun-grabber nexus.  I already believed that these people have a hidden agenda and cannot be trusted and this simply adds weight to my contention.

As for background checks, I have to get one every time I buy a gun and have for the last 20 years.  I see and always have seen the danger in such record keeping, but I also see the danger in not doing so so on balance I am currently in favor of background checks.  I want to know if their are holes in the system so I can make inteligent decisions and arguents and not be a bozo when doing so.  I believe that the appropriate way to work around the dangers of a background check system is to legislatively insert 'poisen pills' such that if/when there are any hints of abuse, the problems the gun grabbers face will become exponentially more difficult for them.

Estimates I've heard are around $1,000,000,000.  Absurd, but the asbestos scare was pretty powerful and made a lot of people a lot of money in 'abatement' and the standards got out of whack in order to perpetuate the take.  I'm sure that (non-evil non-Jew) Larry Silverstein would rather have the 4 billion or whatever in insurance money than coughing up the 1 billion in demolition costs if done to code.

With a 'one-world' political and monetary system, where are these 'super-rich' going to go?

In practice they will probably go anywhere they like and be quite happy since it is they who will be designing the system, but this will certainly be an element of the sales pitch used to sell it to the Bernie-bot class.  As Thatcher says, Socialism works OK until you run out of other people's money.  Making sure that said 'other people' cannot escape before being fleeced will have a powerful marketing potential.

My concern about Sanders is that he might be able to be convinced that a 'one world government' would result in the kind of socialist utopia he dreams of.  I've heard various people who are hard left and possibly even communist blame the West for ruining the promise of the Soviet Union's more advanced (in their eyes) political system.

I don't doubt that Sanders was at one time an 'Americans firster' but he might be able to be shifted.  If the military power of the U.S. was what it would take to create a uni-polar world, I could see him playing his role as president to help the project along.  Of course he and his followers would be discarded like a jiz-rag when their work was complete.

I won't argue the ratios because I don't know and it is difficult to get reliable information.  I suspect that you are correct and in recent years there have been strategic operations to 'import' people who are NOT the 'best and brightest' and the reasons are political.

I remain steadfast in my belief that a great many immigrants from Mexico are here and that they are 'better than average' as I define it.  Again, my definition rests significantly on their work ethic an organizational capabilities which allow them to run successful small businesses.

I'll will use the Hispanic turnout vote for trump to validate or invalidate my feelings about this.  I am not at all surprised to see Hispanics voting for trump in part because of my view on what kind of people a certain fraction of them are.

I will also say that one of the political motivations for this recent 'crisis' is classic divide-n-conquer.  I'm not playing this game and when I see people pumping it I immediately am suspicious.  No matter which side they are coming from.

...and nobody would open their mouths, eh?

https://youtu.be/7gwcQjDhZtI?t=1m53s

RIP Aaron Russo

Sounds a little conceited.  I've worked with several Mexican software engineers at a company who had fairly rigorous hiring practices and who were at least on par skills wise.  They both happened to look quite 'white', but two is a small sample size.  Both were from Mexico City.  Not sure where they got their graduate degrees (many people from all over the world do that here.)

More importantly, their are countless small businesses run by Mexicans of more mixed ancestry.  The work ethic of the people who are within our borders, however they got here, strikes me as vastly superior to what I see from a median cut of the lily white born-n-bred losers I run across.  I have a much higher respect for a person or family getting by running a small business than someone who is a business exec in a corporation, but that's just me.  I personally am quite happy to absorb as many of these people who wish to nationalize as possible, and especially if they have a fundamental understanding and agreement with so-called 'American values.'

Everything about the guy in Wilikon's picture tells me that he is exactly the kind of person who would be of great value to our country.

Internally I use the word 'trawl' rather than 'troll'.  I find it a more applicable analogy for what the people I respect as high-end 'trolls' do.

To me 'troll' means 'truth' in almost all cases of high quality.  The defining aspect of a 'troll' would be that it 'gets people's goat' and 'causes a reaction.'  An undeniable truth which conflicts with someone's prefered outlook is highly effective here.  People either lash out or stay mum and over time adjust their defective outlook for the better.

Thus, a high quality troll is a valuable and healthy thing.  And often a hell of a lot of fun.  The cherry on the top is that it is highly ethical since any pain and outrage it may cause is a direct result of deficiencies in the victim that are, ideally, on the mend.  Like a wound which itches as it is healing.

When I call Donald J. Trump a 'troll', I do so as a compliment.

 ---tvbcof: Trolling the net since the usenet days.

A good angle for trolling is to state that at the end of the day, women are biologically programmed to prefer a strong male in leadership positions.  Especially when there are threats and dangers lurking.  Thus, Trump will not end up having big problems here.

This suggestion also happens to have an element of truth to it which is a key factor in the most effective trolls.

Or he'll make a big deal about how the media is totally greedy and won't do charity right, and tie in establishment Hillary with them.  The media probably is plenty greedy and do not wish to set a precedent where they are on the hook for providing revenue neutral airtime any time someone wishes to score political points and suggest it.

If I were Trump, I would state that as one of my '100 day' bullet points, I'll do a debate with Sanders when I am president.  It will be a low budget production available to on-line to everyone who is interested in the study of political science and philosophy.  And in the mean time, of course, Hillary/Sanders debates are quite appropriate until and unless Sanders stops winning so much and drops out.

At this point 'the system' can make some very practical and efficient decisions about what people need on an individual basis.  This by widespread gathering of information (e.g., activity patterns, search and posting habits on the net, etc) and algorithmic processing of this data.  Many many people 'need' various kinds of drugs (psychotropics, statins, vaccination catch-ups, etc) but the distribution systems is not fully developed.  There is a sort of a gap between when the time food is purchased and when it is swallowed which could be closed to make a fairly efficient system for drug distribution.  Robotic preparation of food along with cashless strong-identity payment methods could go a long way toward closing this gap.  For the betterment of society of course.

There might exist a little bit of a problem in that if, say, a family member were sharing food with other in their family, but people could have the ability to state the alternate parties and have parcels individually labeled.  Also, the pharmacological treatments could be such that the doses are minimal and would cause no 'scientific' harm if ingested by the wrong party, and designed to work on a 'maintanance does' regime.  Big pharma seems to have little trouble convincing outfits like the FDA and CDC that their products are 'safe and effective' these days, and that is all that really matters for these types of projects.

...

Fixed quotes

edit:  and for 'double dose' of fun:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW-4LU79qbU

What is 'unfair' is that the U.S. dropped tons of agent orange on Vietnam in a project driven primarily by the desire to make a bunch of defense contractors wealthy and never made any reparations that I know of and the people and environment suffered greatly for it.  If we have extra money kicking around to apply toward projects outside of our borders, near the top of my list would be to try to partially make up for this crime against both Vietnam and against humanity.  Instead it seems like most of our 'excess' money is used to creates waves of similar destruction and grief currently focused on the people of the Middle East.

No, let's.  I went an hour or two not giving any real thought to the buildings collapsing on 'intuition'.  I went a week or two not giving any thought to 'conspiricy' due to rejection of my intuition.  Only when I got back to intuition (mine and very many other highly trained peoples) did I start to make any progress in really understanding 9/11 and what it meant for our nation.


As I recall (from decades ago study), impulse is the second time derivative of velocity, the first being acceleration.  The amount of time the energy wave could have influenced the movement of the '4 ton' member would be in most cases the time it took the collapse wave to cover the distance of several floors above to several floors below.  This creates an implulse of very high magnitude when measured in energy density.

Now it is true that the interplay between available energy and various kinds of leverage can and does produce some extraordinary behaviors.  Drop a log on a random pile of different sized logs and once in a while one will flip up in the air and travel a surprising distance (and hopefully not result in loss of life and limb in the process.)  These are statistical anomalies however.  When to many logs display the same behavior to often and/or all turn into toothpick sized shards, something else is at work.

I will also say that connections between structural members are often surprisingly tenacious and in many cases sap most of all of the energy available to induce motion.  Most recently I've been falling and yarding trees and working with a 20 ton excavator and moving a lot of brush.  A surprisingly small sliver of wood can cause much grief.  Back when I did demo, the same behavior could be noted only more so.  A simple electrical conduit would often sufficiently hold up a mass of structure from falling where and when I wished it to.  Connecting bolts and gussets were even worse.  Any member which flew out of the towers would have had to 'pay' such costs in terms of their energy budged before tallying up the input needed for their impulse.  Again, not statistically impossible but quite rare in practice.

To be honest, I figured very early on in my research of who Trump even was that if he did not have some exposure to and experience with 'the mob' it would be a miracle.  This, of course, because of his vocation.  I decided that if Trump used the mob to intimidate people with bodily harm as part of his 'deals toolkit', I would not support him (and continue to hold this view.)  If he simply over-payed for some concrete, and especially if it helped deal with union issues, I'm actually pretty OK with that all things considered.

Speaking of 'the mob', in some circles I read that 'they' quit litterally moved right into banking as an evolutionary path, and at the highest levels of the biggest banks.  This compared to the rhetorical throw-away words like 'banksters.'  I actually don't rule this out especially after observing the likes of Paulson in relation to the 2008 financial goings-on.  I mention it because in this case Hillary and the massive money she gets from 'the banksters' for flapping her gums in front of them for a bit comes into focus.

When the military can mis-place 2 TRillion dollars it is fairly plausible that the goobmint can make just about anyone whole when needed if there exists the will to do so.  More than whole if that what it takes to make people clam up.

One would expect the insurers who suddenly owed Silverstein (who is definitely not an 'evil Jew') multiple billions of dollars to have a bit of a glitch in their market cap.  Someone who is good at and who enjoys research might want to look into that.  I've not run across anything one way or another.  Just something I thought up just now.

Free-fall release of potential energy results in a well know acceleration.  Any tapping of this energy (e.g., ripping apart steel structual members or pulverizing steel reinforced concrete mid-air) would necessarily arrest this free-fall acceleration to some degree.

My intuitive sense is that given the structural design of this particular building the collapse would be fully arrested with a fair part of the building standing, some of which would have shed the floor pans and outer framework which would be more likely to sluff off with at most a tiny few forcefull ejections of smallish bare members.)

The above if several stories above and below the impact site simply vanished.  In an increasingly plastic collapse such as that which the 'fires did it' people try to argue, the top would simply fall off due to the asymmetries.  Probably again partially stripping some of the floor pans on one side.  We would also see deflection of the tower building due to the polar moment of the clearly tipping upper section.  This would either be to great for the structure to sustain in which case it would topple laterally, or it would not and we would see the lower level standing.

Somewhere along the line I ran across some pretty good footage detailing the various 'upward' trajectories.  Cannot see it now, but in less focused footage plenty of interesting trajectories, accelerations, and mid-air pulverizations are noticed:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhyu-fZ2nRA

Of course there are a lot of interesting stills as well:



Anyway, for the sake of argument, let's say that there were zero incidents of debris moving past normal to the fall vector (e.g., upward of horizontal).  The energy input needed as impulse to create the lateral velocity noted are more interesting and significant than that needed to create an upward vector from a normal one.  Again, all of these energy sinks and others rob from that available to accelerate the structure on it's collapse path.


This has been quantified from a very early time in the independent analysis.  In looking around, I see a presentation which I'd not yet run across which is interesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiHeCjZlkr8

This kind of illustrates the mental simulation of the behavior I intuited for such a collapse.  I think it is fair to say that my intuition on such things us above par having spent time taking down buildings as an occupation (albeit exclusively large wooden ones for salvage purposes) and having training level exposure to demolishing various kinds of structures using explosives.

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Just for fun, here's the kinds of techniques one can use to gauge quantitatively some energetic activities on sort of an order-of-magnitude scale:

1) How much energy is available in a reinforced concrete floor panel due to PE-gravity?  A) How much diesel does a crane use to lift it to it's place.

2) How much energy is necessary to pulverize said concrete floor panel?  A) How much diesel does a jack-hammer use in doing the job?

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On intuitive thoughts, let's consider the aluminum aircraft parts parsing the steel box columns.  What happens when we intersect 1/13" thick aluminum skin with the 1.5" thick steel box structures at:

 1) 1 m/s
 2) speed of sound
 3) in a ccomputer animation probably done by some failing grad student who wanted a degree and a goobmint job.

Note how Spendulus like to have it two ways.  First, the potential energy due gravity was responsible for the launching upwards and outwards of multi-ton steel members, the pulverization of steel reinforced concrete, etc, etc.  Second, he does not believe that the transfer of energy would arrest the acceleration of the collapse.  But, ya know...eight grade physics...