So his advisor Kent didn’t have health insurance (denied due to pre-existing condition – which wouldn’t happen under ‘obamacare’ – gets sick, goes into a coma, racks up $400,000 in medical bills, dies. Ron Paul and friends set up a fund to pay his bills. It topped out at $38,000. The people at the ‘tea-party debate’ were cheering for Mr Kent to die on the street with no care.

This guy ‘took his own risks’ (or more likely, couldn’t ‘afford’ health insurance or was denied entirely) died and left us with the bill. Hey, that sure sounds like a great plan. It is time America controlled healthcare costs and provided universal coverage, just like every other first world country.

Interesting answer about health care at the 3:58 minute mark, even brings in the concept of “church care” vs. kowtowing to insurance companies…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=szHkBgXnS38

You wrote “had his recommendations been put in place 4+ years ago America would have made some tough adjustments but would not be better off now.”

Could not agree more. If we had followed dear Doctor Paul’s Way, we would be totally borked right now (instead of mostly borked) o wait, yes, I realize you probably meant to remove the “not” there… or r u jes messin wit me?

To clear up a couple of your misconceptions:
On the economy, he has warned of exactly what is happening now for years and had his recommendations been put in place 4+ years ago America would have made some tough adjustments but would not be better off now. As it stands America still has all its fundamental economic problems.

About the Health Care thing, that’s true about his position in a way, but his point is that the current system and Obama’s plans will still turn sick people away. Look closer at his Health Care proposals (view his site maybe?) for details.

Isn’t he the guy that said health insurance should be a personal responsibility? And who had a campaign manager, young guy, who died. Bankrupt. Without health insurance. Did the crowd cheer at the recent TeadTard debate? Oh wait, it never came up… just more grunting about Perry’s awesome record (234 executions)

Yeah, Ron Paul. The guy that sounds great with about 20% of his schtick, it is the other 80% that is bark-out-loud-crazy (must be a Texas thing)

If the planes had hit the base of the towers, and the whole of the buildings collapsed onto that lower impact zone AND the time period from collapse start to finish showed some lag from the resistance of crumbling floors, then I would give some credence to your theory of a pancake collapse. As it stands, the North Towers was struck between the 93rd and 98th floors out of a total of 110. The lower sections were built stronger to hold up the upper sections. That some 17 floors and gravity could turn those lower 93 floors into almost complete rubble all by itself is a little silly.

To get a pancake result, you’d have to lift those 17 floors waaaaaay up into the air and drop it on the lower floors and even then it would be deflect by the core columns (path of greatest resistance) outwards to slide off to the side. Try it with any scale model, you’ll see.

I am not sure anyone prior to 9/11 was an expert in jumbo jets whacking into (some of the ) tallest buildings ever constructed.

The theory published by Thomas W. Eagar and Christopher Musso in JOM in
December 2001,[1] and adopted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) study, postulated that the floor connections broke due to fire, leading to a “pancaking” collapse of the floors.

This theory does not provide an explanation for why the core structure also failed, and it was rejected by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) study. …NIST’s findings do not support the “pancake theory” of collapse, which is premised on a progressive failure of the floor systems in the WTC towers.

http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2010/ChandlerDownwardAccelerationOfWTC1.pdf

As for my calculating the potentail energy, no need to do so myself. This has been calculated numerous times. The obvious conclusion is that it is not sufficient to smash some 80 floors of steel and concrete virtually all the way to the ground. FYI, here’s a good explanation by experts, written in layman’s terms so all but the illiterate can understand it: http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2008/TheMissingJolt7.pdf

the “most aggressively engineered buildings ever constructed”

“this is one of the world’s tallest and most aggressively engineered buildings ever constructed” yes yes wwnj, caught me w a grammar error, should be “these are” now gfy

At the time they were indeed some of the most aggressively engineered systems ever constructed. I lived there, I’ve been there, I held my unborn child in my wife’s belly beneath those towers and said ‘these are the new cathedrals, the new monuments to reason and rationality, to commerce and trade and cooperation’ It seemed like an awfully bright and hopeful future in 1999 (ah the Clinton era, we’re living off our savings from that era)

A bunch of religious zealot cave men knocked them down. They caught us with our pants down. I wish we could find a smoking gun that leads back to Cheney and dumbya, I just don’t see it. ymmv

As a expert I am sure you have already calculated the enormous potential energy stored in X number of metric tons in the top portion of those buildings. Gravity is a biotch. It always wins. Always.

Enk, You’re not a demolition expert? Lorry! It’s okay, here’s an expert:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6D4dla17aA

Not a structural engineer either, apparently, since you use the argument that they were the “most aggressively engineered buildings ever constructed” in a contradictory way – as such then they would have stopped a top down collapse. Truth is, the lower floors were built even stronger to hold up the higher floors. Look to physics for what happens when a smaller mass falls onto a stronger, larger mass, you have not done your homework my friend. Also, you speak of the “weakened damaged steel beneath them” & that’s not true, there were some 80 intact floors & hundreds of massive steel columns beneath yet there was no meaningful slowing of the collapse(s).

I’m no demolition or physics expert, but it sure looks like the tops of those two buildings buckled onto the weakened, damaged steel of the floors beneath them. Recall that this is one of the world’s tallest and most aggressively engineered buildings ever constructed. There are incredible forces just from the sheer weight of material above the damaged areas. Controlled demolitions tend to have a series of pops as the *bottoms* of the structures are cut out and then they let gravity take them down. Gravity does the work. Gravity did most of the destruction, the planes and fires just made for a cascading series of eventually catastrophic top down failures inevitable.

I think it far more likely that Cheney and his criminal cronies allowed, nay willed this to happen. The Pentagon strike does seem very suspicious: a beginner pilot like that would probably have augured in long before he hit the building.

But it is a huge stretch to say they planted tons of explosives (ok, sprayed on [eye roll] thermite or pixie dust, whtvr). I just don’t think they were competent enough. Time magazine (the kids love it, bah) had a 9/11 commemorative issue. They have black n white portraits of lots of the majors… Cheney’s portrait makes him looks like a crazy psychopath (even my wife mentioned it).

ymmv
(Mittens sez Darth Cheney mucho presidential – nice pander to the nutbars mitt!)

You must have meant Richard S. Muller. (Nice picture of him on Beck’s show here: http://muller.lbl.gov/ , a quick scan of a few of his writings shows that he seems to be willing to give his opinion on everything regardless of whether or not he’s done any real research on the subject.)

The book you mention is just a first year textbook (replacing “Physics 10″)that presumably uses the Tower collapse as a teaching tool to motivate students, as such you can bet it is unduly simplified and that the assumptions used are tweaked – as NIST did – to show forces necessary in an false model to result in a collapse. That’s far from impressive and light years less convincing than the actual research done by the teams of structural engineers, architects and physics professors at http://www.ae911truth.org/

Massive skyscrapers are not supposed to be slammed by giant jetliners full of fuel. Rich Miller has a book called Physics for Future Presidents, there is discussion of the energies involved and why it is no mystery why these giants collapsed.

But when you consider how batsh!t crazy the right wing has gone over the last few decades… I am not so sure they wouldn’t

I mean the wwnjs tripled our debt (thanks Ronnie Raygun!), then doubled it again (f u dumbya). They crashed the global economy into a crater so deep, it makes every other recession look like a picnic, we’re into Depression territory, lads! Then when Balack Obama is elected suddenly the cause of our economic problems is public debt and the gubermint (also, negroes n mexicans). They are already reneging on the August debt ceiling ‘deal’/fiasco (gotta get those other rating agencies to dump on the US, eh TeaTards?) A vast Right Wing Insurgency, violent, armed, psychopathic, devouring a information stream so toxic and full of lies, sane folk can do little but shake their heads while the lunatics in revolutionary war costumes grab the media’s microphones and commandeer ‘the debate’.

(2) While technically “thousands of people” would have played a part, only a few people would have full knowledge of what was really going down. The rest just needed to follow their orders. (A possible example: the columns in the towers underwent fireproof insulation upgrading in the months proceeding the attack, the workers did not need to know that the spray-on material contained nano-thermite as the liquid and dried application is stable until properly detonated. What are they to think afterwards, except “Gee, I guess I didn’t do a very good job?”)

http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1053604–bush-s-toronto-appearance-cancelled?bn=1

knarly, I’ve always said I wouldn’t put it past them (the Bush admin) to do something like that, my whole thing was, and still is, that to pull something like that off would involve thousands of people and somebody would have come forward by now.

Whatever. A better assessment is here:

Another interesting phenomenon is the strong emotional reactions that many have to 9/11, an event about which they have little information. Even the lead members of the 9/11 Commission itself have said that information was withheld from them and the commission was set up to fail. People who rush to the defense of NIST do not even know what they are defending as NIST refuses to release the details of the simulation upon which NIST bases its conclusion.

There is no 9/11 debate.

On the one hand there are credentialed experts who demonstrate problems in the official account, and on the other hand there are non-experts who denounce the experts as conspiracy kooks.

“The Critics of 911 Truth: do they have a case?”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26520