The 2006 Nawlins battle will be determined this week. My team is the nawlins napsters.

Already today, my 3rd Baseman, Aramis Ramirez of the Chicago Cubs, is 2 for 2, with a home run and 4 rbi's. I hope this trend continues. You never know. Aramis might get only 2 more singles the rest of the week. That's baseball.

Not like anyone else cares but me. I'll post the winner next week.

You know what television entertainment programming really is ... manufactured populism, because rather than stimulating people to occupy their time with something that is self-initiated, the television is meant to merely pacify its victims while it feeds your mind with fantasies and illusions. Take a panoply of gender stereotypes, cast them into a few predetermined roles, and then pack weeks, months, even years of time into a single hour. And what you see is a suggested reality, created by the vision of individuals because the camera cannot convey the exactitude of the moment. This can be a highly brilliant, insightful depiction of life, but instead the vast machine of Hollywood manufactures a daily ether world of heroes, villainy, and everyday people.

Which reminds me of that stupid contemporary commercial of a family with glowing TV ratings on their head that is currently shown in between the baseball games I stream on broadband. How ridiculous is the premise that TV is something we have to "protect" our kids from, because they might get exposed to the raunchy, sexist real world. Certainly those magazines on the rack at the Supermarket check-out line don't have barely clothed women advertizing their cleavage. Certainly the average commercial isn't skirting the edge between blatant promiscuity and overt pornography. So from what exactly are the children being saved?

To me, this is just another PR campaign by the cable companies. You know the one's that preach the high tone of higher standards, but have yet to actually act like they bother to enforce or ensure them. Just like McDonald's trying to convince everyone that their food is a great experience for the kiddies, or that their stale coffee is exotically fresh. Fresh. I love that word. As if the very notion that something being "fresh" makes it better or different than the norm, rather than something you should actually take for granted.

Ah ... Nothing like fresh bad coffee from a smiling uniformed and underpaid maiden who started work at 4 O'Clock in the morning so that lazy, indolent people can drive thru and pick up some phosphate enhanced processed food product.

Which is exactly what I generally think of 99.9999% of Hollywood : fresh bad coffee and really unhealthy food. Every year the tube networks pump out the shows, even changing them frequently to keep the content "fresh", but it's like a ride at the amusement park where you remain seated the entire time absorbing the content. Gradually this content becomes the everyday background noise, since all that is absorbed by the mind becomes one with that mind by the very essence of the contact. We cannot separate our self from what we experience with the senses. The notion of being able to "control" this experience is ridiculous, because you cannot separate yourself from your experience. If the phenomenom goes into your eyes and ears, your mind has registered a recognition, and your thoughts have to interact with that which has been recognized. We are, we become, what we choose to imbibe.

I get home today, and this is what I read in the Washington Post [here]

U.N. inspectors investigating Iran's nuclear program angrily complained to the Bush administration and to a Republican congressman yesterday about a recent House committee report on Iran's capabilities, calling parts of the document "outrageous and dishonest" and offering evidence to refute its central claims.

Officials of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency said in a letter that the report contained some "erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated statements." The letter, signed by a senior director at the agency, was addressed to Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, which issued the report. A copy was hand-delivered to Gregory L. Schulte, the U.S. ambassador to the IAEA in Vienna.

The IAEA openly clashed with the Bush administration on pre-war assessments of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Relations all but collapsed when the agency revealed that the White House had based some allegations about an Iraqi nuclear program on forged documents.

After no such weapons were found in Iraq, the IAEA came under additional criticism for taking a cautious approach on Iran, which the White House says is trying to build nuclear weapons in secret. At one point, the administration orchestrated a campaign to remove the IAEA's director general, Mohamed ElBaradei. It failed, and he won the Nobel Peace Prize last year.

To great applause throughout Europe, I might add.

If you can't see where this administration is headed then God help you when you finally see them for the lying hoodlums that they are. This administration was 100% completely wrong in Iraq. The IAEA was 100% completely right.

But go ahead, believe the chuckling man who sits in the cockpit while he and his goons fly this plane out of orbit. When everything goes completely wrong again you can still blame all your mistakes on the opposition -- those whiny Democrats who warned you beforehand.

The report was never voted on or discussed by the full committee. Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the vice chairman, told Democratic colleagues in a private e- mail that the report "took a number of analytical shortcuts that present the Iran threat as more dire -- and the Intelligence Community's assessments as more certain -- than they are."

Privately, several intelligence officials said the committee report included at least a dozen claims that were either demonstrably wrong or impossible to substantiate. Hoekstra's office said the report was reviewed by the office of John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence.

Negroponte's spokesman, John Callahan, said in a statement that his office "reviewed the report and provided its response to the committee on July 24, '06." He did not say whether it had approved or challenged any of the claims about Iran's capabilities.

Mind you, this is the same Negroponte who oversaw the death squad operations in Honduras in the 1980's. Now he is director of National Intelligence, the new agency created to oversee the operations of the CIA, FBI, and Homeland Security.

Can you say Adolph Eichmann?

Answer the following question (don't cheat)

1. 1975-1959
   
2. 1953-1950
   
3. 1945-1941
   
4. 1918-1917
   
5. 1865-1861
   
6. 1783-1775
   
7. ????-2001
   

I also put together a paper about the plane that hit the Pentagon. I analyzed the energy it would take to vaporize the aluminum plane that was said to have occured.

Go here if you want to read it.

Now mind you the Aluminum did not just melt, it boiled. Aluminum vaporizes at 2519°C (4566.2°F.) At less than half this temperature all living flesh and carbon-based items would vaporize without a trace -- because at those temperatures there is enough heat to cause the carbon in our organic body cells to unite with free oxygen. Yet the government insists it gathered DNA identification of 96 of the passengers on the plane that hit the Pentagon. I even heard a spokesperson for the debunker911 folks reiterate this meme.

How could they have gotten DNA if the DNA would have been completely destroyed when the Aluminum of the plane supposedly vaporized in the one hole of the Pentagon?

Hmmm...

This is unbelievable for even a friend of mine who vehemently disagrees with 98 percent of my thinking on these matters. If the wings folded up along with the two 9 ton engines and if the entire plane then vaporized in that one hole of the Pentagon, then how on Earth could they have gotten DNA samples? The DNA, all organic matter, AND all materials with a specific heat less than Aluminum would have all chemically burned into combustion gases and water vapor. There would have been no cell structures or DNA intact.

The Truth According to this site , here , here, and even here is not truth at all. Let me brieftly explain why.

The Physics from the Physics blogger Dr Frank Greenings (here ) analyzed the amount of energy that would be created from the Towers falling at free fall speeds. This energy however was created due to the collapse, and cannot at all have been the energy which presumably weakened the steel in the towers. The steel could not have been weakened from an energy that was created after the fall of the towers, since the energy that weakened the steel would have had to be present before the falling of the towers.

But more importantly, Dr. Greenings also assumed that the 110 stories all came down because all 44 central steel cores suddenly failed at the same time and at all places up and down the building. He does some basic time of gravitational fall calculations. Dr. Greenings then elaborates on what he calls the MOMENTUM TRANSFER THEORY OF THE WTC COLLAPSE or his version of the Pancake Theory, in which the stacks fall on top of lower stacks and gradually accumulate energy on the way down (you can read his PDF file here.)

But how this transfer theory could have had the energy to immediately pulverize concrete and spew dense fine particles outward in Pyroclastic flows cannot be explained. The paper says it "sufficiently explains" the pulverization but neglects to mention that all of the kinetic energy calculations and momentum series regression cannot provide energy to the top of the collapse. And how can 44 steel columns suddenly collapse equally all up and down the 417 meters of height, so that the end result was remarkably equal length sections of sliced steel columns in a pile at the footprint of the collapse. Natural or accidental collapses would have been irregular rather than staight-down, and would involve much twisting and warping of the columns due to the weight instead of clean breaks at an extreme angle to the beam. And if the steel did indeed collapse due to weight, how come the collapse began at the very top and traveled symmetrically downward rather then somewhere more near the center of gravity of the building? Or how come the top of tower didn't just slump and fall off? But instead for the first-time in the history of engineering, not one, but three buildings were said to have collapsed when the steel failed due to kerosine fuel based fires.

Pyroclastic flows are heavier-than-air gas-particle emulsions that travel across the ground at velocities ranging from 10 m/sec to 300 m/sec. They can attain temperatures of over 1000 C. They range from high density flows that move down valleys and can move beneath water, to dilute flows that extend over mountains and can move across water.[SOURCE] Pyroclastic flows like what occurred in the aftermath of the towers collapse do not occur because buildings fall down, they occur as the result of tremendous explosive energy. They are quite different than smoke and dust clouds in general by their velocity and density of material. In nature, a pyroclastic flow occurs when a volcano explodes.

How could concrete and office furniture become completely pulverized into fine particles and then horizontally projected outward in dense rapidly moving clouds that traversed 10 plus city blocks and hovered out over the Hudson River for nearly an hour? Had the towers simply fell down, there would have been much larger chunks of office furniture and concrete, and therefore not enough fine material for a pyroclastic flow to occur because most of the energy of the fall would have gone into the motion of these larger sedimentia. And recall that the expelled dense clouds of fine material began to occur at the very top of the towers fall, before the weight of the building could have had an impact. If it were this easy to crush concrete into fine dust (after falling 3 to 10 seconds in mid-air), a lot of companies have been wasting their money.

Hold a brick up above your head and drop it. Does it get pulverized into fine dust particles when it hits the ground? Drop it from a 20 story building -- or a 100 story building -- and it still doesn't pulverize the brick into fine dust particles, but many various stone-sized broken pieces. The density of small particles is not possible when most of the weight is in the form of broken pieces. And since most of the weight is contained in larger pieces, so too is most of the energy dissipated from the scattering of these larger pieces. Nevertheless, the pulverization occurred in mid-air, not underneath the weight of the building.

I don't presume to know what happened because I don't know. But I do know the laws of Physics. If the heat inside the towers was so great that it would have weakened the steel, the windows (which have a melting point close to that of steel : 1420 °C versus 1353 °C) would have all exploded outward from the massive pressure minutes before the towers began their collapse. But that didn't happen. A firefighter was able to radio a call from the 82nd floor, but he would have evaporated into flames if there would have been enough contained heat to weaken the steel.

Airplane fuel burns between 1400 and 1800 degrees Fahrenheit. The core of the towers was also specifically designed to seal off the potential of a chimney effect. So how could steel weaken that was specified to last 6 hours at 2300 degrees Fahreneheit without loss of strength?Go here to see an easy to read table of temperature. Accordingly, Plate Glass slumps at 1500 °F and Aluminum (of the plane) melts at 1218 °F . Dr. Greenings mentions that even at temperatures of 500 °C (1000°F), the steel could have suffered a 20% weakness, but the breaking into sections all along the length of the steel can be even less explained at this lower temperature, given that the steel was heavily reinforced at each floor with horizontal cross-beams which would have dissipated this energy. This would have prevented the accumlation of high temperatures and stess at any one location.

The structure of the towers is like a 110 story of vertical AND horizontal interconnected bars into small grids. The entire building was also wrapped in a blanket of steel. There were something on the order of 10,000 joints of this meshed steel in the buildings. A few slices in maybe 6 floors, the added weight of a passenger plane, and the burning of jet fuel cannot explain the collapse of the towers because at least 50% of the steel would have had to been the exact temperature of fires that could have at most burned at 1800 in maybe 3 to 4 floors using the most generous assumptions. There is no way the rest of the steel could have been even close to this temperature, so why didn't the top just slump over and fall off? The weight of the building is not enough to "pancake" and cause the steel in the 70 floors below and the basement to fail. If the section of 5 to 10 floors in the middle did indeed fail, the failure of those stress points alone releases the energy of the weight which engendered their failure.

There are other papers which push this notion of bracket creep. The added weight of the airplanes is not different in stress load than a day of high 30 mile per hour winds, which does occur in New York City. The heat could not have raised the temperature of all that steel to anything remotely close to 500 degrees Fahrenheit. This idea of "bracket creep" makes one think that the grid of steel in the towers didn't exist, or that all linkages involved up or down stress release points, when in fact, the stress release points were in all directions, even diagonal. But never you mind, there is an integral equation which says that one of the joints would fail, so therefore all of the 9,999 others must also fail as well. After looking at the mathematical paper which floated this idea I came away with a surprised understanding that you can use math to model any preconceived assumption you like. Your peers can even agree about the math being correct. But as for the original assumptions, here is where all of the best models fail.

All of this puffery put on the website is actually quite dishonest, because as I just point out, the debunkers are proving by assumptions based on a false primary argument. There are too many times when the ripostes and criticism offered is hardly credible, or really only based on opinion -- which is excusable but still not a substitute for genuine substance and factual description.

One such example (go here ) is when the site presumes to "debunk" Mr. Jones video of the squibs by showing a picture from SouthWest of building Number 7 AT A DIFFERENT TIME OF DAY! You can tell by the incidence of the sun with the building that the sun was higher in the sky. Look at the nearly 45 degree angle of the sun in the picture on the building to the right (near the center of the pic.)



This is the pic our impenetrable debunker used. That angle of the sun is between 2 and 3 pm in New York City at that time of year. Building 7 collapsed at approximately 5:30pm EST. That's a 2 to 3 hour difference in time folks. Interestingly enough, it was also the time at which that fire raged the most and then started to cool off. By the time WTC7 fell, the fires were smaller and the smoke was less dense, which is typical of our historical experience with fires in high-rise steel buildings.

Oh and here's the best. The Jones pic the site provided was actually one frame from a video (watch it here and slo-mo zoom here ) which showed a sequence of puffs just before the building plummeted. And it's the visual motion of that sequence in time that is the whole point of the evidence. They choose one frame to criticize an entire video, how lame is that? The debunker site makes much ado about the smoke coming out of the side, even derisively castigating the researchers for their inability to show this photo. (But look, see, there it is above, 3 hours before the building falls in less than 10 seconds.)

A motion gif	The pic the debunker site uses

But alas, critical thinking comes cheap these days. Selecting one frame from evidence that is meant to be a video, and then trying to tie that frame to an event that occurred 3 hours earlier is apparently what the debunkers tried to do. Notice how this frame is zoomed in so that the distortions of the pixels could indeed seem to arise from smoke on the edge of the building. It's hard to believe someone who would pick one frame from a video then zoom it to distortion before linking it with a time 3 hours earlier.

Oh, and I love this bit

Puffs of smoke or simply damaged panels hanging on for dear life coming away from the building during a violent collapse?

What would the purpose be in setting off charges in that corner of the building anyway? A question not answered in this conspiracy story. The only purpose this has is to create evidence around another fuzzy anomaly.

Sounds like it wants to make sense, except two things. Those fires in building 7 could never have been hot enough to cause the steel to fail. The notion that an entire building could just suddenly shake (watch the video, that's what happens) and then plummet symmetrically to the ground in less than 10 seconds is not "simply damaged panels hanging on for dear life." Never once has a building ever fallen like WTC7 because of fire, despite their being plenty of fires that were much worse and on older buildings.

And is this trickster really asking that second question? Uh, like, surprise, surprise -- you can't bring a steel building down any other way! Okay. How about that. If there were other ways, then why do building owners hired controlled demolition experts to bring down steel buildings? And then this punk follows by stating his question is not answered and says the only purpose is "to create evidence around another fuzzy anomaly" ?

Gosh golly me, did I read that correctly. Creating evidence? Is that a freudian slip, or why would anyone credible even put those two words together? The sentence makes no sense at all. If an "anomaly" has been clarified as "fuzzy" then why does evidence need to be "created" ? "Fuzzy" implies that one doubts the veracity of whether somethings exists (namely, the truth.) An "anomaly" by definition is something out of the ordinary. So follow me now, if something doesn't exist that isn't out of the ordinary, your purpose is to create evidence? Surely this is either just fuzzy reasoning surrounded by pugnacious obscurity, or the mad hatter laughing hysterically.

This rank sidestepping amateurism doesn't debunk anything, however, much less does it come close to ruining Mr. Jones's credibility.

Furthermore, on the same web-page, our fearless debunker has this to say about the odd squibs:

They say this anomaly is an explosive charge going off and a sure sign of Controlled Demolition. It's often followed by more video of charges going off in real Controlled Demolitions. But if we examine the anomaly closely we see these [would be] explosives work in reverse to an explosive blast. They tend to spurt out then increase with time. An explosive works in reverse to this. It's strongest point is the moment the charge is set off. It doesn't increase it's explosive strength with time.

I also don't follow the criticism of the picture which is used to indicate the use of Thermite explosives [ here.] That picture was taken by someone who remembered when he took the picture. Your article however makes much ado about some apparent ambiguity of when the picture was taken, when the timing of the photo is not ambiguous. It was taken during the two weeks of rescue operations. You even cede this point, to make another ridiculous point that the picture of a wielder and a sliced steel beam refutes the angle cut in the original picture.

But it's not even the same angle. The angle from Thermite is greater than 45 degrees, whereas the slice provided in your picture looks more like 30 degrees.Go to the [ debunker site here] and see for yourself.

Here is how you estimate the angle. The cut makes a right triangle, with 2 legs that meet at a right angle. If the cut is such that the two legs are equal length, the angle of the cut is 45 degrees. Notice that the line of the cut is pointed to a place much lower than the top of the square, indicating an angle less than 30 degrees -- to me it looks like 2/3 rds. The pic with the fire-fighters however appear to have a ratio of height to base 1.5 to 1 (or at least 1.25 to 1) which indicates an angle larger than 45 degrees. In fact the angle can be determined by using the arctangent function on the ratio. Hence,

Arctan(1.5)= 56.3 degrees
Arctan(1.25)= 51.34 degrees
Arctan(0.66)= 33.69 degrees

Why is this signifigant? If a human being slices steel, it would take longer time to make the 45plus degree cut -- because the length is longer -- in addition to being a lot more difficult. This is precisely why the steepness of the angle in the original picture is the mark of a Thermite cut because the steep cut allows the steel to slide downward! There would be no need for a human to make this difficult type of cut in order to break apart the steel beam. It is also a waste of material. Shamefully, your refutation misses this point, because it is precisely this point that makes the entire argument of Thermite explosives quite plausible.

And yet once again, while admiting those steep cuts were of thermite origin, the debunkers don't realize the most damning point that the very steepness of the cuts makes the entire argument of Thermite explosives quite plausible.

(Don't know what A Thermite reaction is? Educate yourself. Do a google on "Thermite". You'll find an australian scientific experiment video and plenty of info.)

How pompous and self-righteous do you have to be? A hotmail account is the only contact ? There is no address or anything linking you to anyone. Not even a name. The only debunking done at this pitiful site is the debunking of its own myths that it actually does quite well doing through its sloppy, self-flatulent articles. Notice how I provide links to the articles that I am criticizing. Isn't it odd how the debunker site can't seem to do the same.

Here is a good place to go to read the articles the debunker was implicitly criticizing. This site is a repository for a growing lot of physicists and engineers who leave their real names and their sources from peer-sourced reviews (as opposed to one anonymous email link.) In my opinion, there is more substance and detailed analysis -- minus the boisting tone of the mysterious debunker site and the smug authority of its Physics blogger assistant, Dr Frank Greenings.

Yea, I believe in the JFK single bullet theory too. And the Liberty League did not attempt to get General Smedley Butler to head a military coup against Roosevelt in 1933 either (so did that Congressional trial where General Butler told all to a shocked American public really occur? ) Henry Ford never funded the Nazi Party in Germany, and Prescott Bush did not use a New York Bank to finance Germany until 1942. Nor did the Chiefs of Staff all sign operation Northwoods in 1962 before it was presented to and rejected by President Kennedy. And the arms for hostages deals with the Iranians, that did not happen either. Yea right.

There is nothing theoretical about any of these matters. They are not myths. I don't care to speculate about the implications, but I cannot in good conscience deny what I know to be true. It is a matter of irrefutable historical record that Men will do and have done despicable deeds in order to achieve grand designs of power.

From the BBC

"We are experiencing dangerous human disruption of the global climate and we're going to experience more," Professor John Holdren [president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science] said.

He emphasised the seriousness of the melting Greenland ice cap, saying that without drastic action the world would experience more heatwaves, wild fires and floods.

He added that if the current pace of change continued, a catastrophic sea level rise of 4m (13ft) this century was within the realm of possibility; much higher than previous forecasts.

To put this in perspective, Professor Holdren pointed out that the melting of the Greenland ice cap, alone, could increase world-wide sea levels by 7m (23ft), swamping many cities.

Except maybe from the White House.

Nuclear materials need large conglomerations of nuclear material to make nuclear weapons. This isn't just a few garbage bags full of stuff. We are talking material on the order of 500 tons, or about 30 train-loads full. In addition to the bulk, nuclear materials can (and are) easily viewable from satellites using all kinds of spectral analysis. There is no place on Earth that is secretly doing anything without the foreknowledge of the United States.

They just want to scare you into thinking we need to invade and bomb Iran.

And if nuclear materials getting in the wrong hands was truly the concern of the administration how come they abrogated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty and stopped working with Russia to monitor the proliferation of nuclear materials? How come Bush withdrew from the Salt Treaties and The International Criminal Court? How come they destroyed a covert operation by exposing the company Brewster-Jennings when they outed Valerie Plame if the purpose of the operation was meant to track nuclear materials? Does that make sense to you?

Now if they were so worried about Iraq and Iran that they fumed about them regularly in print and speech since 1997 (Cheney & Rumsfeld's signatures were on the original PNAC document) ... then why did they ignore all of the abundant warnings about September 11th? Why did the administration order the FBI to stop its investigation into the Flight Schools and the charitys of the bin Laden's? Why was Dick Cheney looking at oil field maps of Iraq at Energy Task Force meetings in April 2001? Why were the names of oil-conglomerate firms written on those maps? Here's the source for these maps.

If nuclear weapons are the main concern, you'd think getting rid of all of them would be priority number one. You'd think they would be pushing the investigations and covert operations, not destroying and hindering their progress every inch of the way.

You can't really stack shit this high, can you?