I’m surprised more attention hasn’t been given to the acoustic signature of the murder event. Due to the multiple reflective surfaces surrounding the stage, I can understand that bystanders could mistake the direction from which the “rifle report” came, but what about time of arrival? For a rifle-fired-from-a distant rooftop theory to have equal plausibility as the exploding microphone scenario, it’s necessary that the sound of the gunshot and arrival of the bullet be simultaneous. I’m not knowledgeable about firearms, but I think I know that the speed of a rifle bullet starts supersonic and quickly decays to subsonic due to resistance of the air. So there is a distance at which arrival of bullet and sound of the shot are concurrent – perhaps it’s the 150 or so yards at which at which the “shooter” is said to have been standing. But if there’s a big mis-match of computed vs. observed distance to the shooter, wouldn’t that suggest his rifle was not fired? If there is a match, is it possible to be too good a match, i.e. would represent a considerable coincidence that the fake-shooter happened to pick that particular distance without pre-calculation? I’m not real optimistic about demonstrating “too-good a match” – because of short time of travel and various uncertainties, I’d guess the radius of uncertainty surrounding the computed sweet spot could easily be a dozen yards or more – but perhaps somebody with more knowledge about rifles than me could look into this.

I think I understand what you’re saying, i.e. that Trump’s clownishness is helping the world to cast off a yoke of oppression. But if his personality held a little more Bozo and less Stalin it would make the process much more bearable.

What people need to be told in a convincing way is that Trump is very, very sick in the mind and extremely dangerous. Two very simple examples of his unhingedness, taken in combination, provide a sufficient case for removal from office based on mental incapacitation:
1) That photographic portrait of him, dramatically lit from below, making him look like the Wolf Man or Dracula or other menacing monster from a 30’s or 40’s horror movie was not intended as a piece of humor – it was meant to be taken seriously. I’ve created similar pictures of myself which I’ve used as a background for Zoom meetings with co-workers. I’m not trying to intimidate anyone – it simply shows that I’m a wise-ass with a lame sense of humor that amuses hardly anyone but myself. I meant nothing by it, but because of me, everybody in my Zoom group has been banned from supplying their own background. But Trump actually means it, which people seem unable to grasp. He ‘s boldly and overtly telling people that he’s not a person to be trifled with, and anyone who tries to do so will be punished.
2) Not too long ago (maybe 7 or 10 days) he made a simple and blunt statement to the effect that he does not approve of anyone who criticizes his Administration. It was so straight-faced yet off-the-wall that people must have assumed it embodied some form of wry or sardonic humor that slipped by their comprehension. But that statement was intended to convey menace, as shown by the fact that anyone who disrespects him does in fact get punished by crude libelous smears targeting their competence and honesty, or spurious, meritless lawsuits that nonetheless drain the target’s resources of time and money, or . . .well, by now we’re all acquainted with his ample repertoire of dishonorable techniques to enrich himself and punish his enemies.
It’s too obvious to escape notice that he’s way-the-hell-far-out on at least two spectra of psychiatric disorder: those of attention-seeking and grandiosity. Those are two somewhat commonplace afflictions that don’t necessarily destroy the ability to function within civil society. But, in this case they have served to camouflage the deeper mental disturbances described above. This problem won’t solve itself. The level of rancour and hatred afflicting society will rise and more blood will flow until some dam may burst that engulfs us all in horrors not known since the French Revolution.
As far as “extremely dangerous” – well, you know how Trump constantly is flip-flopping on Ukrainian issues, with the latest being that he’s willing to see Ukraine supplied with unlimited weaponry with no restrictions on its use. So, if one of our missiles lands in the Kremlin, and given promises made by Putin and Medvedev, and the fact of “dead-hand” control of much of Russia’s retaliatory arsenal . . . how do you feel about the prospect of engulfment by 5000K radioactive plasma?
In the first week of his administration this past January I saw a problem had arisen in Trump’s mind that demanded resolution by Congress with a keep-the-lights burning, sleep-in-your office urgency. Why no one else saw it I still can’t understand. The options of removal by impeachment or by the mental-incapacitation Amendment still remain and are infinitely more desirable than whatever remains if we wait too long.
I recall an excellent cartoon by Gary Larsen showing a patient on a psychiatrist’s couch, with a scrawled note on the doctor’s notebook, “Just plain nuts.” I wonder if Larsen would be willing to license that slogan? I’d be thrilled to join a million-man march to the White House under that banner.

Mercurial? Nothing so fancy. The best short description I can give is “has the fixity of purpose and intellectual depth of a squirrel.” He’s just a huckster, booster, promoter, swindler, carnie-show barker. People who talk about his “3-D chess” are nuts. 1-D checkers is all he can manage.

MAD. Mutually Assured Destruction. Was that not a foundational tenet of our nation’s stategy to stabilize the world, by giving assurance that no aggressor could launch nuclear missiles without itself being destroyed? It may still be a fundamental principle, for all I know. For decades now, it’s been self-evident, to me anyhow, that the best way to secure the peace and well-being of the Middle East would be to supply Iran with nuclear warheads and any necessary launch and targeting technology. Isn’t it utterly perverse that we’ve pursued exactly the opposite goal? Is it Iran that’s a renegade nation, that will suffer no restraint on the growth of its nuclear arsenal by either treaty or public opinion, and that has expansionist objectives? The situation is plain nuts, twisted inside-out and upside down in every way that it can be, and when will people finally notice?

The French make movies that are intellectually venturesome, quirky, poetic. and visually stunning, and they I believe are the world’s premier cinematic artists. Here are a few personal favorites:

Philippe Jeunet: Amelie, Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children, The Young and Prodigious T. S. Spivet.
Luc Besson: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec.
Jean Cocteau: Orpheus, Beauty and the Beast
Georges Franju: Eyes Without a Face, Judex
Edith Scob in “Eyes” was a revelation: ethereally gentle, graceful, and caught up in such a web of horror! Impossible not to fall in love with her. And the entry of the magician carrying a dead dove into the wedding reception in “Judex” was masterfully realized.
Leos Carax: Holy Motors. So much non-sequitur, and so little explained. And at the end, a random allusion to John Collier’s novelette “His Monkey Wife.” I don’t understand, but since Collier is one of my favorite authors, I heartily applaud.
The Frogs’ frequently clunky sense of humor is possibly their greatest weakness. So many “comic” police inspectors following exactly the same stereotype. And they admire Jerry Lewis!
A few more randomly selected (non-French) movies: “Paper Moon,” “Seconds” (with Rock Hudson in a serious role. The crescendo of horror at the end is marvellous). And “Tunes of Glory,” reputedly Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite movie.

‘Johnny Got His Gun’ is deeply disturbing, belongs as much to the horror genre as anti-war, and is a fine piece of work.

Incidental to the general topic of discussion – you’ve stated that use of an “X” in place of a signature is an indicator of illiteracy, but Bergen Evans, the long-time English Literature professor at Miami (OH) University, identified that as a popular fallacy some time ago. He says that, in fact, it was a method to guard against forgery, since it was understood that for certain purposes a signature was invalid unless accompanied by signature of witness(es). Since an “X” would equally serve the purpose in such cases, and did not involve disclosure of a signature that it might be prudent to hold private, that “X” might indicate the opposite of what is commonly believed. I remember reading a review of some scholarly work or other discussing the historic progress of literacy, that based its findings largely on rates of occurrance of the “X,” and thinking “Hoohah, yet another “scholar” wannabe that deserves to be exposed and discredited.” It’s been at least thirty years since I read Bergen’s book, and I forget the title and don’t think it’s still in my collection. I’ll take a quick browse through the shelves the next time I’m at the library and see if I can lay my hands on it.

Also, I haven’t noticed any mention of the continued exchanges between Joe Sobran and Charlton Heston in the pages of National Review on the authorship question, which I found fascinating. I thought Sobran had the better case (as opposed to Heston’s case for the glover’s son), if only on the grounds that the known works of Oxford “just sounded like” Shakespeare, to my ear. Shakespeare of an inferior order, to be sure, but then much of Shakespeare is of that order, since we tend to remember only the best works of any author. On the the other hand, if you read Francis Bacon, it doesn’t sound the least bit like Shakespeare, and how an author of such sophistication as Twain could have advocated for him is hard to understand.

“AI might not align with human values or interests” – you mean it might grow a pair of triple brackets around it? God help us all . . .

To amplify my meaning a little bit – dissected terrain contains many ravines which could provide channelization of upward flame propagation. It has been remarked how capricious has been the distribution of burned vs. non-burned homes, e.g. a single unburned surrounded by burned. I’d be surprised if the atmospheric dispersion modeling that I envision did not supply some hints as to the reason. You’d think some insurance adjusters board or other, if no one else, would take an interest in funding such an investigation.
If some sites are deemed unrebuildable, could not those locations be put to a better public use than rich people’s architectural self-glorification? Some kind of micro-biomes, perhaps, to provide sanctuary to commonplace critters that have no other place to live? I delight in feeding the possums and coons that pop up in the back yard of my Midwest suburban home, no matter how much it annoys the neighbors (or perhaps because it does). I’d enjoy the frisson of disgust experienced by some arrogant rich dude confronted by the face of Nature in his own back yard.

As you say, the influx of air at the base of the flames causes the fire to propagate upwards – it’s the well known “chimney effect.” My first thought is how easy it would be to use simple equations known to every meteorologist to do detailed computer modeling of flame spread, under a variety of meteorological conditions. Most of the country – I’m sure LA included – has been mapped with publicly-available Digital Elevation Models with resolution better than one foot in both the vertical and horizontal dimensions, which should be easily sufficient to judge the best places to put firebreaks, and the places where kindling must not be allowed to accumulate, and places where structures must not be built. This could easily be accomplished, over a grid of a few hundred square miles at a six or twelve inch resolution, accompanied by a suitable land-use inventory, using an array of high-end engineering workstations. Perhaps just a few dozen EPYC-class units harnessed in parallel would suffice. The total petaflops needed to get useful results would probably be less than required for a modern CGI movie like Avatar. I’ve never done wildfire modeling myself, so I’ll confess my ideas are largely speculative.
The talk of politicians is how urgent it is to rebuild. Instead, shouldn’t we proceed more slowly, and plan to rebuild in a way that doesn’t allow the same chain of events to occur again? Instead, it’s just an opportunity for opposing parties to issue recriminations and hurl cheap jibes at each other, with no pragmatic, constructive solutions offered.
I’m a relic of the 1950’s, personally, and God how I miss the days when we were a can-do nation.

Now that we have an official national bird, we should also designate the official national brain parasite: Israel.

How can the public be so easily diverted from the central issue surrounding young Biden’s legal problems? No one should care about the petty problem about owning a gun while drug addicted. If anything, focussing on that creates sympathy, because it smacks of striking at Joe Biden by damaging a family member, which is contemptible. What matters, to my mind, is the obstruction of justice that obviously occurred when a substantial income tax case against young Biden was slow-walked to allow a statute of limitations to expire. I read the long testimony that IRS Agent Gary Shapley gave to a House Committee in July of 2023 – about a hundred double-spaced pages including questions asked by committee members – and I remember there were only about three people who seemed to be in a position to commit the obstruction – one was David Weiss, and I forget the two others. Thus I was astonished when AG Merrick Garland named David Weiss as Special Counsel to investigate. I wondered – had an arrogant, contemptuous middle finger just been raised in the public’s face? In any case, even if Weiss is totally innocent – is that the norm, for an investigator to himself have involvement in the situation being investigated?
The press has pointed out that young Biden’s pardon may further the cause of justice, in that he becomes stripped of protection from self-incrimination. That being the case, I suggest that newly-inaugurated President Trump issue pardons to a number of officials with potential involvement in this and related obstructions – numbering possibly dozens, up to but not including the level of Merrick Garland – and then proceed with an aggressive, truly independent investigation.
Here’s a link to Gary Shapley’s opening address:
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Shapley-Testimony.pdf
Finally, I apologize for not reading this whole thread, and possibly rehashing subject matter already addressed. It’s late, I’m lazy – you know how that works.

Your response is a little oblique, with its blending of disparate marriage metaphors of man/wife and government/private, and hard for me to understand, so rather than replying, I’ll simply append a short meander to my original trickle of meaning. The great weakness in our Constitution that allows its present advanced state of collapse apparently is the lack of enforcement mechanism. The fundamental law of the land binds the useless dullards bearing the authority of government from committing offense against the rest of us. You and I can’t violate the Constitution can we, at least not without being somehow entangled with the government? There was a recent thread on Moon of Alabama (an excellent site, by the way) where the commenter deplored cooperation between private parties and government to throttle speech, but he proceeded to identify the private parties as culpable, and I wanted to jump through the screen to throttle him. How can people be that obtuse? We all know the Good Old Boy social club of crazed avaricious weasels that meets under the Capitol Dome commits multiple depredations against the Constitution during every week with seven days, and who is going to perform enforcement against them? Themselves, by the impeachment process? You must be kidding. I have no solutions to the problem, but somebody has to come up with one, or the condition of this country is most definitely terminal.

Many people view Mussolini as one of the fathers of modern fascism, and I call baloney on that. I starting reading the pretentious claptrap you linked to, and bailed out almost immediately. In fact the essence of fascism is amalgamation of corporate and government interests, with each providing services to the other that they themselves cannot do. An example is political speech – our government (theoretically anyway) cannot directly regulate political expression, but they exert pressures on privately owned platforms to attack “hate speech” and “disinformation” in order promote the agendas of private actors (of which many are campaign donors). The process almost always entails consolidation of political power and enfeeblement of lesser sovereignties. The father of fascism in the western world in fact is Abraham Lincoln. Do you know how many newspaper editors he jailed, and how opprobrious the term “consolidation” was generally held to be in his time, inasmuch as it connoted destruction of liberties? Before the War, the Bill of Rights was a shield to be raised by the states to deflect the spear of aggression from the central power, but after the War, many of the Amendments somehow were transformed into the spear itself. For instance, do you know the First Amendment was initially understood to protect everyone’s right to an established church? Many early states did in fact have an established church – Ohio for example, in its original constitution of 1803. Now, if you don’t understand that preference for any particular religion transgresses the fundamental law of the land, you’re some kind of knuckle-dragging backwoods ignoramus, like that Southern judge (Roy Moore, I think his name) who thought he could get away with posting the Ten Commandments on his courtroom wall. Getting back to Lincoln – in his Memorial, have you noticed the decorative motif of fasces in the supports for his chair, and do you think there’s not a logical reason for it? Likewise for the fasces of the back of the Roosevelt dime. It was the fad then and is now, despite the emblem being avoided.
Establishment of the European Parliament and diminishment of the European national identities is the most striking example of modern growth of fascism. Expanding NATO aggression also should be mentioned. To wrap it up – to say fascism is growing is true, and it’s a very, very unfortunate development.

This question I’ve asked (why was the shooter’s DNA analysis so readily at hand) may become important if there’s any substance to the claims being made about Maxwell Yearick:
https://www.caclubindia.com/assets/maxwell-yearick/
Given Yearick’s arrest record, it’s not unlikely that the analysis would be on file. Can Mr. Yearick be found, to allow him to state an opinion?

I picked up a detail in the news reporting (by the London Daily Mail) that should not pass unnoticed:
“Special Agent Kevin Rojek, the FBI officer in charge, said Crooks had been identified using DNA as he was not carrying any ID on him.”
Why did they have his DNA on file? Had he committed a prior offence allowing it to be entered into a government database? Possibly, but more likely it confirms what most of us have long suspected: in the interests of “keeping us safe,” the government has infiltrated every possible depository of information that is supposed to be kept private, including the raw DNA data held by testing services such as 23andme and MyHeritage. And, given enough data and computing power, it’s not difficult to reconstruct any pedigree desired. The intelligence agencies invented the term “Total Information Awareness” some time ago, and in our naive simplicity, we are reluctant to believe that they really, really mean total.

Well, we’re not communicating effectively, then. What is it that we want to communicate? For me, it’s 1) control of reality – “who controls the past, controls the present, who controls the present controls the future” – you know, the whole Orwell shtick; 2) intimidation. An iron boot is pressed on our neck, forcing our face into the muck, with a voice commanding us “Black is white. Defense of Semites is Anti-Semitism. Now repeat after me . . .” 3) fear. I mean that very literally, and not in a figurative or rhetorical sense. For me, fear began just a few weeks ago, when, on this site, I found a couple of articles that, if widely read and understood, I was utterly certain would make a difference. They were
1) You’re aware of that blue tee shirt that members of the IDF have been seen to wear, right? With an image of a burka-clad pregnant woman, with gunsites superimposed on her belly and a caption to the effect of “two for the price of one?” And you’ve assumed that it must be the work of the kind of outlier punks that infest any military or paramilitary organization, police included, and you can’t impugn the decency of a whole organization based on a few weirdos among them? Well, according to the article, those shirts are official government issue. If that were widely known and didn’t make a difference, then what possibly could? Doesn’t it make it utterly clear that Netanyahu and Gvir are just as stomach-wrenchingly evil as Heidrich, Himmler or Goebbels?
2) A link was posted to a YouTube interview of a young Israeli religious-studies school student expounding on the teachings of Moses Maimonides (“Rambam”) which apparently are foundational to modern Talmudism. He made the usual mentions of goyim being lesser beings without souls, existing only to serve the Chosen, and the duty of observant Jews to spit on Christians and defecate in their cathedrals. At first the student seemed unsympathetic, but gradually I realized he was bemused or even repelled by the moral uncleanliness of what he was saying. There’s a bas relief of MM mounted in one of the U.S. Houses of Congress, by the way.
I’m slow getting to my point regarding “fear,” but here it is: I sent an email to an acquaintance, saying “here’s a couple of links that could make a difference.” Later, with the view of trying to make a difference, I looked in my outbox and couldn’t find it, so I emailed my acquaintance and asked him to send it back to me. He replied that he didn’t have it and didn’t remember it, and moreover “that damned J– run Microsoft has started marking my emails as spam and sending them to his spam folder.” I’m not well acquainted with Outlook, but I think the contents of the spam folder have only a short residence time before being expunged.
Spam filters undoubtedly embody Artificial Intelligence, and we all know that AI is growing by leaps and bounds and is the cause of alarm to some. My explanations for the vanished email, in descending order of probability, are 1) I misremembered; 2) my email provider (which is not Microsoft) has grown careless and forgetful; 3) I’m paranoid; 4) humanity is teetering on the brink of practically complete Loss of Reality. Almost everything we know about everything that has every happened is based on aural or written communication, and all of that is being digitized and infiltrated. Powers-that-be lust after quantum computing, I’m not sure just why, but I’m sure the computing power involved can easily consign reality-as-hitherto-known to the land of things-that-never-happened.
This is getting borderline overlong, so I’ll give the short version of what I could have said: visitors to this site who merely want to let off steam and chat among themselves, as opposed to devising effective strategies for convincing others, are pretty darned useless.

Everyone in this thread seems to be missing the obvious reason why a homely daughter-in-law would be viewed as desirable – it’s because they don’t want their son to be cuckolded, with a resulting loss of their bloodline. As far as the reason given, at the top of the thread, that Chinese want their sons to spend more time planting rice than planting children – why that’s ridiculous. We all know how proverbial it is, all over the world, as to how much grandparents dote on their grandchildren. It’s a second chance to correct the errors made when raising their own children.
None of this is specific to the Chinese, and in fact I’ve never perceived their women as homely.

I don’t understand – why do we all refrain from pointing out the obvious fact than nearly all Palestinians, Muslims and Christians alike, are themselves Semites? That’s always been the significance of the word throughout my lifetime – it’s a linguistic term referring to a family of languages, and by association, the races of people for whom it is their native tongue. Wouldn’t it help our case to point out how deep is the degradation and self-abasement that causes us to deny the meaning of language, and of reality itself?

It’s all utterly surreal. It’s long been understood by most educated people that Palestinians are semites (including the Christians), and they haven’t suddenly forgotten that fact. They know how bizarre it is that if they complain about mass murder of Palestinians (i.e., semites) they will be denounced in the most vicious terms as antisemites, but apparently simple fear of the smear is enough to keep them quiet.
Likewise, many are aware that the “untermenschen” so greatly despised by Hitler were the Slavs, and in particular the Russians. And, the obvious need to kill as many Russians as possible is so urgent as to justify placing the whole world in jeopardy of nuclear holocaust.
The same explanatory principle directs much of today’s violence, i.e. the need to shield Racial Supremacy from the dual threats posed by the Amalekites, and the land of Gog/Magog in the North. The perpetrators of mass-murder hardly bother to conceal their motivations any more – they glory in their supreme mastery of public opinion.

We know about the Amalekites – the people of the Old Testament who warred against the Israelites and who, like their modern day counterparts, the Palestinans, had to be utterly exterminated. But let’s not forget about Gog and Magog – the people and their land in the north foretold to war against Israel in the last days, as explained by Dr. Roger Barrier:

https://www.crosswalk.com/church/pastors-or-leadership/ask-roger/gog-and-magog-who-are-they-and-what-do-they-have-to-do-with-the-last-days.html

Let’s not forget about the Christian Dispensationalists when assigning blame for violence in the Mideast and the Ukraine.

Floyd was murdered because he was exposed to stress during his apprehension? Really? Would the situation have been different if a foot chase were involved, and Floyd had keeled over from the sudden unaccustomed exertion? At the first heavy snowfall of every winter, dozens or hundreds of flabby, out-of-shape middle-aged men are discovered dead with snow shovels clutched in their hands. Does this produce a hue and cry against snow shovels? I’m sure your legal explanation is correct, and I suspect we agree that the State’s argument is plain nuts.

News reports insist that Floyd complained repeatedly of being unable to breathe while Chauvin had a knee on his neck (or back, as some have said). For instance, here. Yet, a transcript of the arrrest shows Floyd calling out that he couldn’t breathe both before and after being laid on the ground, and moreover the arresting officers noted symptoms of anxiety and panic and the concomitant sense of being unable to breathe while they were still trying to extract him from his car. See the wikipedia article on panic attack. That being the case, isn’t it a reasonable surmise that the knee on neck or back had nothing to do with his breathing distress, except insofar as it sustained his anxiety? The wikipedia article says that the panic-induced breathing difficulty is not physically dangerous, but nonetheless, despite having no medical training, I assert that it could cause short-term hypoxia, which (for all I know) might augment the fentanyl toxicity. And, the possibility of hyperventilation due to panic is mentioned – that’s where you breathe too much, causing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the blood stream to become depleted (“hypocapnia”) which in turn, because rising bloodstream CO2 is the stimulus prompting the urge to breathe, produces temporary cessation of breathing. I’ve read that one of the first pieces of advice given to a person training to become a pearl diver is to not hyperventilate before a dive, to charge your blood with oxygen, because you’ll deplete your CO2 to the point where you won’t notice you’re drowning until it’s too late.
I suspect the knee on throat or back is nothing but a red herring. Do you notice how the national media never mention that the breathing difficulty began before he was placed on the ground? All in all, it has the hallmarks of YAHH (yet another hate hoax), and the biggest national disgrace of them all

After the floors have fallen, there’s a whole lot of emptiness left behind where the floors were, isn’t there? And ahead of the falling floors, there’s pressure forcing air out, and behind, suction drawing it in. And the suction of a chimney doesn’t rely on the effect of a piston, as I may have inadvertently suggested – it results from temperature differential inside vs. outside, and height of the chimney.
In my last posting I insisted that molten temperature must have first occurred at a low elevation, near the street. Having given it more thought, I’m confident I was wrong (again), the reason being: A modern high-performance incinerator usually is designed with two chambers, with the first (the primary chamber), into which the waste material is fed, being operated severely starved of air. The purpose of the starvation is to hold turbulence down and thereby suppress particulate emissions. The gases entering the secondary chamber (essentially pyrolysis gas) have a lot of remaining fuel value, which, with the entry of secondary air, allows combustion temperatures high enough for virtually total hydrocarbon destruction.
Well, videos show multiple floors of prolonged smokey, smoldering combustion, which (as others have correctly noted) is too cool to melt steel. But what about the fuel load of pyrolysis gas that may have been created, and would have ascended above the pyrolytic zone? I think a sudden influx of secondary air would have caused things to get very hot, very fast, and I can visualize the interior of the column lighting up like a candle. The incinerators I’m describing are refractory-lined by the way, because steel can’t hold up to those high temperatures.

During Oscar Wilde’s American tour in 1882, do you know how he responded to a reporter’s request for his impression of Niagara Falls? “The wonder would be if it didn’t fall.” Well, the same reply pertains to climate change: the wonder would be if it didn’t warm. You’ve heard of the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, right? The fourth-power formula allowing a calculation of the equilibrium air and surface temperatures, given knowledge of solar output and the thermal absorption profile of the earth’s blanket of atmosphere?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law

This is the fundamental law underlying all predictions of climate change resulting from changes of atmospheric composition. It’s been known since the late 1880’s and is not in dispute. And if I mock the global warming hysteria (as I do) I’m sure to be called a “climate change denier,” and just what is it that I deny? It sure isn’t the credibility of Max Planck or Herman Boltzmann, two great physicists of unimpeachable authority. What I do say is that, since the 1890’s, when Lord Rayleigh published estimates of the infrared absorption characteristics of CO2, water and other common greenhouse gases, it has been virtually a trivial task to generate a first-order approximation of future global temperature as a function of atmospheric concentration, using nothing more than a pocket calculator, slide rule, or table of logarithms. By “first order” is meant everything else, like cloud coverage and reflectivity, etc. are assumed to remain unchanged. And the accuracy of the results, compared against reality could be called “not too bad.” It might miss the increase the increase of high-altitude cloud reflectivity, and consequent suppression of surface temperature rise resulting from coal usage in the mid-20th century (If I have this right. I’m not an authority), but those simple calculations would have prompted action if considered alarming. But the numbers didn’t prompt a sense or urgency, if they were noticed at all. So if there hasn’t been any news in all that time (and there hasn’t) then why are we running around in a mood of mounting crisis and hysteria now, but not earlier? Well, I’ve got an answer that I’ll sketch very tersely.

You’ve seen those big fancy buildings scattered all over the earth with crosses, crescents etc. atop them? Churches, mosques, temples, synagogues, etc.? The religious impulse has been a primary driver of civilization for quite a few millennia now, and it still exists, and in forms that are essentially stable. There’s still a notion of innate depravity. Before, coming from Eve’s disobedience in the Garden, but now, the subject of two computing doctrines: the original sin of racism, and the original sin of environmental despoliation. At this moment, the EPA is working to merge and reconcile them within the concept of “environmental justice.” Likewise, there still are theories of penance and atonement and justification, and the word “sanctimonious” has a freshly invigorated significance. I’m sure the driver of an electric vehicle draws great satisfaction from knowledge that his exhaust don’t stink.

Anyhow, what I’m saying is that environmentalism involves some of the most important scientific issues of our time, but the science is not that of meteorology or physics or anything that’s usually assumed. It’s theology, or comparative religion, or ethnology, or psychology of mass movements, or something along those lines. The issues need to be resolved by whatever means are appropriate to religious disagreements, not by wasteful, cultish and technologically semi-literate engineering fixes.

I agree with the remarks made by a number of people to the effect that the extreme smokiness of the fire precludes achievement of optimal combustion at the elevation where the smoke is emitted. It’s almost like a smoldering fire. But air infiltration at an elevation higher than the smoky floor can permit a stoichiometric ratio, as in the secondary combustion chamber of an incinerator.
Really, I think the combustion at higher levels is an irrelevant distraction, except insofar as it explains how a disastrous chain of pancaking could have been initiated. I suggested that the topmost floors were denuded of their asbestos protection, so maybe that figures into it, especially if exposed structural members lay in a “secondary combustion chamber” zone.
The real action where total collapse began I feel sure was much lower, practically at street level. That’s where the inrush of air trailing the falling piston of floors, creating a blowtorch effect, was greatest, and also where the consequences of weakened metal are greatest because of the superincumbent weight of the entire skyscraper. Leastwise, that’s how it plays out in my mind.

“I’d stick with the analysis of the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth website. They’re the structural experts.”

Really? Does NIST identify them as such? I would have guessed, based on very superficial knowledge, that if one organization was crank and the other non-crank, NIST was the latter. Now that I know a tiny bit more, my confidence in my first impression is increased, and I feel a little embarrassed that I dabbled here when I could have gone first to NIST and probably learned a whole lot more.

You mention the shredded aluminum from the plane body. The Smithsonian Channel has a video “How Aluminum May Have Collapsed the Twin Towers” that mentions the very high temperatures that aluminum can produce due to its pyrophoric nature. I haven’t taken time to study the video, but it sounds like a plausible thesis.

I made my own posting about glass tubing before I opened the earlier email from you conveying the same observation. I think your point is very valid. The temperature achievable when air is abundantly supplied is much higher than when the supply is restricted by the slow process of diffusion.

I’m weak in the Talmud but am proud of my pilpul. Above all, I glory in my language skills, e.g. gibberish, jargon, doubletalk, and cant.

Ron: Do you have a job posting for “mocker in residence?” Can I apply? I enjoy it so much that I’ll even do it to myself. And just parenthetically, I want to say how grateful we all are for the leniency of your moderation. Humor, whether intentional or not, always is soothing to the soul.

To elaborate on the “falling piston” that I just mentioned: the huge outrush of air would create an enormous dust cloud, which is what the videos show. But that outrush must be balanced by a great in-sucking trailing the piston, and that, I imagine, might have brought the structural elements to almost instant incandescence.
Ever bend glass tubing with your Gilbert chemistry set? Holding the tubing in a candle flame and blowing air on it though a little nozzle quickly brings the glass to cherry-red temperature.

I read it again, and it didn’t quite make sense to me either. Maximum outrush precedes the falling piston of collapsed floors, while maximum inrush trails it. I still picture maximum temperatures being achieved relatively low in the structure.

If we go on as we are, doing nothing, what’s going to happen? Is our country going to turn into a barren, dessicated lunar landscape? Really? Do you think so? Have you ever flown to Las Vegas, and looked out the window, and seen what lies below? It looks to me like it’s already happened to million of acres (whether human-caused or not), but do we give a damn? Hell no! Or else we’d do something about it, wouldn’t we? You’ve heard the saying “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Well, a lot of us – those born in this country during the Truman administration, let’s say – are in this sense refugees from a foreign land. We grew up and formed our opinions when this was a “can-do” nation, when we had vision and ambition to undertake massive projects to benefit ourselves and all our foreseeable posterity. Now we’re the great global, historic paradigm of “can’t do.” There’s no grand project to improve the human (and animal) habitability of the Earth that wouldn’t be tied up by decades of obstructionist environmentalist wrangling. The foreign land that we’re occupying in our declining years is almost unrecognizable in many ways, this being one of them.

An example of what I’m talking about is the notion entertained during the 1950’s of building a giant pipeline to raise Great Lakes water over the continental divide and discharge it into the headwaters of the Colorado. All those millions of gallons of fresh water flowing down the St. Lawrence river, to be blended with salt water, are going to waste, are they not? Will a massive new outflow from the Lakes depress the water level? I hope so. You’ve heard the saying “real estate is always a good investment – after all, they don’t make it any more.” Well, we can. Millions of acres of land, representing a new frontier, could be created. It would be at the expense of corresponding acres of surface water, but – if you see water extending to the horizon, and travel to the horizon, and see it still extending to the horizon, and do that a few times, isn’t there a point where all that water seems redundant? Meanwhile, while we dither, the water table in the Southwest drops lower and lower, until inevitably there must come a day when all wells start to draw dust.

There are a lot of similar examples I could adduce – for example, there was “Operation Plowshare” to use nuclear bombs to blow a few key peaks off mountains in the Cascade Range to bring more rain to eastern Washington. I’m not saying these are all good ideas. That could be determined only by engineering analysis and a national discussion of priorities. But as it stands, if there be a nation on Earth with the vision to undertake grand projects, it must be China, and if it be true that “Without vision, a people perishes,” we look like a bunch of perishers destined to disappear from the world stage of significant actors (and perhaps pretty soon).

A long time ago, I used this advertisement to taunt a friend of mine in a state EPA, in pursuit of my theme of “environmentalism kills:”

I think I recall reading that asbestos removal had begun, starting at the top floors, but had been interrupted for some reason. Thus, on the day of the impact, the upper floors were entirely denuded of that life-saving mineral. I doubt if I could find the article again after so many years. I hope any computer modeling to simulate the day’s occurrences properly represents the asbestos absence. Can anyone add to this?

Inhaled asbestos causes mesothelioma in other parts of the body, such as the abdominal cavity, in addition to the pleura of the lungs, with the reason being the mucociliary transport mechanism which cleanses the lungs and allows contaminants to drain down the throat into the stomach. At least, I was told this during the two or three weeks of toxicology training that I received as part of becoming an OSHA industrial hygiene inspector in 1985. I don’t know the relative proportions, pleural vs. peritoneal. This is something to bear in mind if you’re trying to infer a radiation exposure based on excess cancer incidence.

I agree, a whole lot of puzzling things demand an explanation, including many of the items on your list. But if anyone makes silly suggestions like “the CIA edits tables of thermodynamic properties like flame temperature,” it brings the whole subject matter into disrepute, and makes likely-bogus official explanations all the more likely to prevail.

Murrikkkan” with three K’s! Wow, you’re on to me all right. I can’t hide the white muslin sheet over my head, but I’ll try to use a denser weave, to hide the shiny reflections from the aluminum foil hat beneath it.
The intent of my comments was merely to stick up for my old buddy William of Ockham, with whom I used to go bar-hopping many years ago. Once, he flashed a razor at me, and muttered something about “Thou shalt not multiply explanations beyond necessity.” It was an obvious attempt at intimidation, but nonetheless I took it to heart, and have frequently recalled the event thereafter.
In this case, I question whether it’s necessary to invoke mysterious midnight skulkers whose cloak of invisibility somehow extends to the long detonator cord trailing behind them, before adequately disposing of the question of whether characteristics of ordinary materials and fuels can explain what happened. That’s all the insight I intended to offer, which admittedly is not much.
In conclusion, I wish to cordially thank you (and Notsofast as well) for needed instruction in the concept of “fever swamp.” I thought I knew the subject, but one is always improved by the knowledge of experts.

The smokiness suggests to me, too, that the oxygen supply was sub-stoichiometric, and hence could not support the highest-possible temperature, but your statements of “much lower” and “much too low” are almost too nebulous to be of practical value. And there must have been variations of richness/leanness across the tower cross section, perhaps with localized achievement of stoichiometric ratio.
My theory that pancaking of floors was important may have been worth developing further, by stating that it was almost certain to have been self-accelerating. That is, the first few failures occurred at significant intervals, then everything collapsed practically all at once. And what was important in terms of producing molten-metal temperatures must have occurred down near the base, where in-rush of air due to chimney effect would be greatest. And your statement that not “any damage” could have been done to the steel by elevated temperature is extreme. The columns don’t need to be brought to molten or even softening temperature to yield to the weight of an entire skyscraper pressing on them.

Dang, the shiny reflections off my tin foil hat attract notice wherever I go. It’s getting so I can’t push my loony theories anywhere, anymore.

That’s a good question – you’d think there would be a huge fireball exterior to the building. Perhaps there was – I haven’t studied much camera footage. But I’ll point out that there were tons of combustible materials in the furnishings (chairs, carpets, perhaps the wall coverings, etc) that shouldn’t be neglected when estimating the fuel input available toward the building’s destruction.

I’m not a student of the forensics of the 9/11 collapse – I know there are sites devoted to that subject, which I have never browsed – but based on a quick search just now, I gather that it’s not universally accepted that thermite spherules were in fact present in the debris. For instance this article appears credible: https://www.machinedesign.com/home/article/21830429/another-blow-for-wtc-conspiracy-theorists The final few sentences happened to catch my eye: the writer is complaining that all the steel structural support was around the perimeter of the towers, and he wouldn’t want to spend much time inside such a building. I myself have noticed 10 or 12-story buildings going up of pure reinforced-concrete construction, i.e. without any skeleton at all, and thought it looked pretty scary. I know there are earthquake codes to protect against tumbledown construction, but my state (Ohio) and NYC I assume to be rated at low risk. Anyhow, it aligns with my theory that inadequate pancaking resistance was strongly contributory to the collapse.
Thermate (as opposed to thermite) is something I’d never heard of, but I’ll point out that sulfur in the steel and concrete are potential sources of sulfur in the debris.

The statement that kerosene will burn at no more than 1832 deg.F in air is obvious nonsense. It’s easy to look up the adiabatic flame temperature of kerosene, e.g. on wikipedia, where it’s listed as 3801 deg.F: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiabatic_flame_temperature
A key phrase that almost never appears in explanations of the building collapse is “chimney effect.” That’s where a continuous empty column creates a suction that causes air to be drawn into the combustion zone and produce nearly perfect turbulent mixing that allows a close approach to the adiabatic temperature. A chimney obviously was created inside the building, as evidenced by the downward propagation of the flame front, as shown by video coverage. This must have been due to pancaking of floors, which opened an empty column downwards.
Most people have no accurate mental image of turbulent combustion. They’ve seen diffusion flames in their fireplace or kitchen range, which is a gentle kitten compared to the raging monster created when turbulence creates near perfect access of atmospheric oxygen to combustible materials.

I took the chimpanzee family in Holy Motors to be a random, inexplicable allusion to His Monkey Wife, a novelette by John Collier (a very fine, under-appreciated writer, by the way).

I think the computer made those utterances in the same way the Mechanical Turk played chess:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk

When are we going to see an extended and updated version of Mackay’s “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds?” Isn’t it about time?

Structural racism is not a will-o-the-wisp. It’s verbalized and reified by enormous accumulations of legal code and judicial opinion that create a thing as solid as a building. We all know the twin pillars that support the structure: the doctrines of affirmative action and disparate impact.

I know one aspect of the German race that can literally be erased from the pages of history – their genetic record. I sent my 23andme DNA file, showing about 40% German ancestry (Mennonite and Quaker, mostly) to MyHeritage.com in Israel, for the purpose of identifying living cousins who can help me fill out distant branches of my family tree. They analyzed my data – the same data that 23andme analyzed as 40% German – and lo and behold, I was cleansed and purified! I’m no longer German! Zero percent! “German” was not listed, nor any other ethnicity identifiably German. Germany never happened. It’s a myth that will rapidly vanish from human memory, thanks to those kindly custodians of memory centered in Israel.
On another day, let me tell you about another use being made of these DNA databases. The identification of living relations of persons who, in very distant times and places, owned slaves. Reparations, you see . . . shake downs . . . blood guilt. They can play this blood guilt game too, you see.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but — what about people who already have Covid? Would they benefit from being given the vaccine? Has the question been addressed? You’d think existing severe cases would have highest priority, if they would benefit.

Tangentially on the topic of post #185, I sent my 23andme data file, analyzed to show 42% German ancestry, to MyHeritage in Tel Aviv, for incorporation in their database. Their analysis showed me as having exactly . . . zero German ancestry. Amazing! It’s almost as if a certain racial or ethnic group wanted to see a certain other racial group vanish from the pages of history and human memory itself.

Having re-read my post #183, it strikes me as downright silly. A dog that won’t cooperate with his different-looking harnessmates is simply left out, and probably dies of exposure. There’s no need to invoke bi-directionality of selective pressure.
The point of my second paragraph stands, however. Just as there is no effect without cause, there is no violence without incitement. We need to trace the incitement back to its source and forward through its channels and parse it sentence-by-sentence. Let’s start with New York Times reportage immediately after the death of George Floyd.

My 23andme results told me that I had ancestry from County Cork, Ireland and Canton Aargau, Switzerland, as well as many less-specific places. By conventional genealogy, I know this is true. I had a pair of grandparents come from Cork in 1833, and another from Aargau in 1843. That’s astonishing. Switzerland I can understand, because mountains are natural barriers, but Cork!! Isn’t it flatland around there?
A commenter in some influential journal or other, whined that these racial attrbutions are borderline fake, because they told her she was 88% Ashkenazi, whereas she was certain she was 93%, or some numbers like that. To me, at least in my instance, the accuracy seems almost miraculous.

This calls to mind the beneficial relationship between dogs and humans through the ages – how, through partnerships involving hunting and (in polar regions), warmth and locomotion, each species has materially contributed to the survival of the other. It’s nearly a truism that dog personality is the product of human selection, but is it not also likely that, to a degree, we are the product of dog selection? In a park where dogs are taken off-leash, do they frisk and frolic freely among themselves, big and little, squat and sinuous, without distinction, or do they coalesce into cliques, like with like, bonded by their glowering hostility toward the others? I think it’s mostly the former, and as a fact of empirical observation, I believe we are very doggish, perhaps due in part to their enlightened choice of human partners. We recognize at a glance the essential humanity of others, regardless of how different their appearance.
The point that I’m working toward is that harmony is the natural human state, and to have a Summer of Hate like we’ve just had requires incitement, and of that we have had an abundance – constant, unending, ceaseless, promoted mostly by a fairly small number of organs of influence. The One who said “blessed are the peacemakers” left unspoken the corollary that those who find harmony, and convert it to conflict, embody the soul of wickedness. It should be our mission to call out every single instance in the unending series of hate-hoaxes, and analyze and explicate every single paragraph and sentence and lay the blame at the doorstep of those at fault.

Dogs, stick to dogs, if you really want to influence large numbers of people. It’s my understanding that the between-breed variance is of magnitude comparable to intra-species variance, and in that regard is analogous to the relationship of races within the human species. Once people are told that, by the same reasoning that tells us that race is a social construct, the apparent difference between a Chihuahua and a Newfoundland is not grounded in biological reality, they’ll realize what a colossal line of guff they’ve been fed. Use actual numbers for the F1st statistic – they’re out there somewhere. Let people know that the Lewonten “fallacy” is actually a hoax, and one of the most socially destructive hate-hoaxes in all history, in that it gives pseudoscientific grounding to the notion that negroes have been victimized by systemic racism spanning all of time and place.

Is it true that “Iranian” is an alternative spelling of “Aryan?” It’s a common belief, whether correct or not. Does that belief do anything to explain Jewish animus toward Iran?

“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” – this statement by Sherlock Holmes is the foundational doctrine of modern biology, not anything that Darwin said. God is impossible, therefore no intellectual contortion to rationalize the theory of evolution is too extreme.

A movie, 7 Years in Tibet was made about that country in the period just after WW II, starring Brad Pitt, with a large role for the Dalai Lama’s sister Jetsun Pema. Like her brother, she seems like a person of considerable charm and intelligence.

I have long believed that the “fig sign” originated in the Middle East, commemorating an occasion when an arrogant potentate, touring a subjugated land, detected that his camel was suffering discomfort due to a date pit lodged in his anus, and commanded a bystander to dig it out with his teeth. I’m not sure who the potentate was, but it may have been Mohammed. Yet, the wikipedia article omits this explanation. Does anyone else remember it like I do?

The work that needs to be brought up to date, and Steve would be a good person to do it, is “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” Or perhaps it should be crowd-authored, with Steve having overall editorial control.

Two short sentences explain nearly everything about current events: “Nothing has been forgotten” and “It’s payback time.”

Is it correct to say that the argument that “race is a social construct” applies with equal validity to dog breeds? If you think a mastiff is not a suitable purse dog for Paris Hilton, you’re engaging in invidious stereotyping? This, I think is the most accessible argument to convince the public that they’re the victims of perhaps the most colossal scientific hoax of all time. This spurious theory is, after all, the basis for all affirmative action, disparate impact, and implicit bias ideology. What other quack pseudo-scientific concept has been as consequential as this one? If the public could only have it explained to them in terms they can understand, the upheaval of institutions would be enormous.

My favorite chemical engineering professor gave an illustrated lecture 40-odd years ago. To depict “the average human being” he showed a doctored image of a person with one large breast in the center of his/her chest.

Here are the amounts of Indian blood required to belong to various tribes:

https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/native-news/what-percentage-indian-do-you-have-to-be-in-order-to-be-a-member-of-a-tribe-or-nation/

For Cherokees, it’s “lineal descent.” Question: how does one person descend from another except lineally? I often hear the phrase “directly descended from.” How else do you descend from someone? I’ve been a genealogical hobbyist for thirty years, and still don’t know the answer. I have reason to believe my 57-times great grandfather was King of Munster during the 6th century. If I compute one-over-two to the 57th power, I find I don’t have a single princely nucleotide. Is there a single-nucleotide criterion to be a Cherokee? I guess not.

A bizarre posting utterly detached from reality. Don’t you understand that if a blustering lunatic presses a megaton-pistol against our collective foreheads and threatens to pull the trigger, it represents a very disquieting situation? And if we contemplate actions that would cause a million utterly harmless and innocent Koreans to be incinerated, to prevent a million of our own brains from being blown out, aren’t we allowed to do so without being accused of being vile bigots that think yellow gook lives are worthless? Aren’t we entitled to any instinct of self preservation at all?
What the Korean situation obviously entails is a high-stakes experiment in human psychology. All that attention-seeking little freak probably wants is to be treated with respect, and like somebody important. Trump started out in a sensible way, by treating Kim courteously, but for that he was pilloried by the insanely-partisan opposition within his own party – McCain I’m mainly thinking of. That’s the true obstacle to a sane resolution of the problem. I say if the twerp would feel good if we gave him a tickertape parade down Fifth Avenue and a day pass to Disneyland, we should do so – it’s small enough a concession in view of what’s at stake. But if rabid congress-critters obstruct propitiation, then intimidation and even preemptive megadeath may be all that’s left.

Double jeopardy worked in the Rodney King case. Why can’t it here?

Meanwhile, the issue of repealing birthright citizenship (if the concept ever actually existed within the law, to begin with) has been forgotten about. Where’s the logical coherence to building a border wall on the one hand, if on the other, we’re going to offer the greatest possible inducement to cross the border, i.e. the prospect of a better life for one’s children?

This is a shockingly ignorant and wrongheaded article by Ron, insofar as it discusses the magnitude and period of prevalence of lynching. Enough so, as to make me wonder if anything he writes is reliable. The 50’s and 60’s were the height of the Klan’s modern power? Rubbish. It was virtually extinct, and a figure of fun. It had peak political importance in the 1920’s, and lynchings peaked around 1900. The numbers killed were substantial – see this listing:

http://www.chesnuttarchive.org/classroom/lynching_table_year.html

To trivialize the phenomenon by throwing around the figure “only 15 killed” is, well, deplorable.

I would think Lincoln’s would be the most vulnerable Memorial on the Mall. I know of no statement on the races by Washington or Jefferson more succinct and to the point than this:

I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, — that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

There’s a basic question about the Colonization Society that Lincoln favored that I’ve never seen adequately answered: was the repatriation to be, in all cases, voluntary? A basic distinction between Northerners and Southerners of the time was that the latter were comfortable with the presence of Blacks in their fields, kitchens and nurseries, while Northerners viewed their presence with abhorrence. Lincoln’s own state of Illinois banned free slaves, and Lincoln obviously imbibed the Northern attitudes. I have to wonder – was Lincoln’s opposition to slavery in part due to the fact that the slaves’ economic value as slaves posed an obstacle to shipping them all out of the country?
Next on the agenda: stigmatize the name of Darwin and purge it from civilized discourse, for reasons that should be obvious by now. His books certainly shouldn’t be allowed in school libraries. Imagine the potential lawsuits on behalf of triggered and traumatized students.

The “what is to be done” list leaves out something important: AIPAC should be required to register as foreign agents. And the problem is much bigger than just AIPAC; if I understand the concept of hasbara, a great deal of pro-Israel agitation and so-called news on the internet is directly and secretly funded by Israel.

I meant “supplement” not “supply,” and “does not exist.” Sorry. I must have been feeling especially obnubilated yesterday morning. And while I’m wasting the reader’s time with “by the way’s,” let me add another. A meme the world greatly needs is “The Simpson Defense.” I’m speaking of Bart, not O. J. That is, “Don’t blame me! I didn’t do it! It was like that when I got here!” Bart spoke with the utmost epistemological and juridical rigor (or whatever kind of rigor it was) when he spoke those words, and if we draw abuse by noting racial differences, then the irrefutability of the Simpson Defense should be enough to demolish our abuser and even make his head explode.

“the race does not exist concept.” Arrgh.

Is it true that Lewontin’s analysis would equally apply to breeds of dog, so that one could argue that there is no true biological difference between a yappy little purse dog and a ferocious Rottweiller? This would bring the “race does exist” concept to a level within the public’s understanding, so they would know how JPS it is. This is a new initialism the world desperately needs, by the way, to supply LOL and FWIW and so on. We at this site know how many of the world’s “truths” are Just Plain Stupid, and barely worth the time to discuss.

Somebody should write a movie script based on this. It would be better than American Hustle – call it Pakistani Hustle, maybe.

Fracking is an enormous boon to humanity, because of the way it alleviates the burden of poverty by reducing fuel costs. The difference between a $150 and a $300/month wintertime home heating bill means very little to me, but for the elderly poor trying to get by on $700/month social security, it could make an enormous difference in quality of life. And, cheaper polymer precursors lower the cost of all kinds of consumer products. My complaint is with the profligate rate at which we are using up our mineral wealth. What’s the big hurry to beggar our posterity? Wouldn’t we rather beggar Saudi Arabia’s posterity first? It’s madness to run baseload power plants on natural gas, the highest grade of fuel, that should go instead to domestic furnaces, clothes dryers and kitchen ranges. Meanwhile, coal combustion has been priced out of the market by envirohysteria. Our great-grandchildren will resent the fact that the era of cheap natural gas is as dead as the passenger pigeon, but screw-em – what has our posterity ever done for us, anyway?

“Russia retaliated [against the Magnitsky Act of 2012] by prohibiting American families from adopting Russian children.”

If I recall, a major reason for Russia stopping American adoptions was the Newton and Truong case. That is, because American law offers insufficient protection against predation by degenerates. People in other countries are more familiar with the names Newton and Truong than we are, due to the rigorous self-censorship of our press. Any American journalist knows that if he visited that topic he might be Eich’d out of civilized existence, or at least suffer a major change in standard of living.

Quakers and Mennonites took a stand against slavery long before 1782. The declamation against slavery drafted in Thones Kunders’ house in Germantown in 1688 is sometimes referred to as one of this nation’s foundational documents. Robert Pyle was another influential Quaker abolitionist, who published his views in 1698. Kunders and Pyle were both grandparents of mine, FWIW, and believe me, I’m proud of my dissenting oddball antecedents. I have to concede truth to the statement that many Quaker owned slaves, however.

Fertility means the number of children that result from the marriage. Maximum number of offspring I’d think would be ideal for the perpetuation of. the line.
Mules have their merits, I guess, or they wouldn’t have seen such service as pack animals. If they have mulish personalities, that’s to their credit, to be rebellious against servitude. I flaunt my own mulishness when I can get away with it.

I believe that endogamy and exogamy both have benefits to survival of a racial line, and the greatest level of sexual attraction corresponds to an unconsciously-perceived balance between the two. I read somewhere that the degree of consanguinity optimal from the standpoint of fertility is fourth-cousin.
To say that sufficient consanguinity is a “necessary condition,” though, is nonsense. The concept of hybrid vigor pertains to humans as well as other species. Many half-breeds have been highly estimable individuals – Will Rogers, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, even Obama if you’re politically so inclined.

The conventional explanation for the Catholic Church’s prohibition of cousin marriage is the desire to weaken clan loyalties that act in competition with allegiance to the Church. Likewise, the prohibition of priestly marriage was required to prevent multigenerational dynasties and resultant competing power-centers. The same principle unlies the prime directive of every system of governance, which is to destroy all sense of community outside the government, e. g. by forced integration of schools and obliteration of racial and cultural homogeneity, destruction of family structure, marginalization of private charity, and supplanting of collective bargaining with state paternalism. Complete power requires destruction of all competition. It has been so, ever since the Pharaohs conflated themselves with deity and state-parentage. God the Father is properly defined as the highest power of which the mind can conceive, which for most people is the government, and we all know the one true God is a jealous God.
“Progressives,” so-called, think the state’s provision for all our needs is the latest thing, at the forefront of progress. Ramses the Great would laugh – he knew better.

William and Mary, too, and Edgar Allan Poe, and the Hapsburgs. People of Quality have always been reluctant to share their genes outside the family. And Cleopatra – wasn’t she the product of seven generations of brother-sister marriage? She was enough of a babe for wars to be fought over.

We’re overlooking a key benefit of mass immigration, which is the introduction of more-emancipated women to our society, which can only be a positive. Here’s a key quote from Sylvia Weber, Frankfurt’s Secretary of Integration, from this Breitbart article.

“Weber hailed the rate of single motherhood amongst women of foreign origin, which the report showed was significantly higher than that of native Germans in the city, as “a possible sign that female migrants are emancipating themselves. . .”

Numb the ball — that’s my advice to re-invigorate the game. Not by a lot – by just enough to reverse some of the distance-creep that has rendered so many fine old courses obsolescent. I caddied for the club membership in 1989 after a lapse of 20 years and was shocked to see the drives of 11 handicappers go as far as 3 handicappers used to. Jack Nicklaus brought discredit to the concept many years ago by proposing so drastic a numbing as to change the essential character of the game and broaden the participation. Golfers swilling beer, wearing tank tops, and pulling hand carts over 25-acre courses are fine with him so long as the developers make money, I suppose. Improved equipment has disrupted existing course design strategy and you can push the tees back only so far, so it’s time to partially reverse the trend by careful tinkering with the ball’s size, mass, or resilience, without going so far as to diminish the game’s patrician aspects.

Remember, you have only half of your parents’ DNA – otherwise, you’d have 200% of a normal genome. What you get with each succeeding generation is governed by a binomial or multinomial distribution, i.e. it’s the flip of a coin. Thus it’s impossible to refute distant ancestry of a particular type with a single autosomal test. A certain person who’s third or fourth on my brother’s list of 1250 closest relatives is absent from my list of 1250 (on 23andme). Thus your sibling could easily show interesting stuff that your own genome doesn’t.

It’s off-topic, but I thought this article by Roger McGrath was particularly interesting:

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2017/June/41/6/magazine/article/10839553/

Anymore, it’s as impermissible to say that anyone but blacks were enslaved, as it is to deny the One True Holocaust.

FWIW, I found this statement in the wikipedia article for X_chromosome:
“For reasons that are not yet understood, there is an excess proportion of genes on the X-chromosome that are associated with the development of intelligence, with no obvious links to other significant biological functions.”
If there’s truth to this, then you would expect the mixed-race children of white mothers to be brighter, since all of them carry a “white” X, whereas male children with a white father can get their X only from their mother.

It had positive effects, didn’t it? So why should good-thinking people try to discourage the phenomenon, by stigmatizing it in some way? It’s one of the few ways that the perpetrators can get a warm feeling of accomplishment.

Just about everything of value.
You’ve got a pretty good schtick. You’ve conned a lot of people into thinking you’re some kind of troll, but actually your mission is to make the opposing viewpoint appear as ridiculous as possible, and you’re a virtuoso at it.
Maybe I should keep quiet about it, but you’ve certainly blown your cover with your latest post. I want to be the first to say Kudos, friend!

This discussion, to my mind, gives too little emphasis to the two barriers to intermarriage that traditionally been thought responsible for racial types: language and religion. Many traditional racial classifications (Semitic, Hamitic, etc.) are, after all, linguistic categories. The example of the three different language areas of Switzerland demonstrating micro-geographic resolution is borderline foolish, inasmuch as it demonstrations the height of the language barrier even in the face of geographic proximity, rather than geographic resolution per se. Likewise, Catholic-Protestant intermarriage was nearly unheard of until recently, even where the populations are physically intermingled. Is the Roman Catholic religion distinguishable in the genome, and if not, why not? Likewise, Ashkenazi or Sephardic Judaism? 23andme allows self-assignment to the Ashkenazi category, but wouldn’t it be a slam-dunk for them to do the categorization themselves? Why does 23andme refrain from doing the analysis – is it too politically fraught an issue?

On every occasion like this when a chemical weapons atrocity causes a stir, discussion always neglects the question I find most interesting, which is: we all know that traditional methods, like bullets that make heads explode like overripe melons, and shrapnel that flings entrails into picturesque sausage-like festoons are licit and acceptable to enlightened humanity, but use of chemicals is outside the pale of decency. But why is that? I think this article contains clues to the answer, but I can’t seem to follow the exact line of reasoning:
J.B.S. Haldane on chemical warfare