Thursday, January 24, 2013

Do you have to be stupid to be a liberal? But does it help.


JOHN NOLTE 23 Jan 2013,

On Brietbart’s Big Journalism

Anti-science Salon landed in hot water today for posting an article defending conspiracy theorists, including 9/11 "Truthers." After much criticism, the piece was yanked with an apology, but Ace of Spades highlights the best part.

Salon:

But unlike with Sandy Hook, 9/11 conspiracy theories flow from a scientific fact: whatever the 9/11 Commission Report might claim, fire generated by burning jet fuel is not hot enough to melt steel.

Ace:

Ahem.

Look, I don't mean to sound like a smarty-pants here, but here's a scientific fact these ignoramuses want to check out:

Many solids change suddenly into liquids as they hit their melting point. Water ice, for example.

But water ice is just one kind of solid. There is an entire class of elements -- we call these "metals" (and no I'm not trying to be silly-- they're really called "metals") which change from solid to liquid gradually and gracefully, rather than abruptly.

There is a sharp distinction between water ice and water liquid -- the things have entirely different properties. But metals transition slowly as heat as applied. Metals do not suddenly go from a perfect crystalline solid to a perfect amorphous liquid as water does.

Rather, at high temperatures well short of their actual melting point, they slowly begin losing some properties of a solid and start gaining some properties of a liquid.

For example: You can't bend ice. Ice does not bend. Ice breaks.

But you can bend metal. Metal is deformable, without actually breaking.

This is what happens when you watch Rosie instead of reading a book.

[ I Added to the comments stream on this article. Here is the statement by MRBUNGLE, with my comment.

MRBUNGLE

LOL...i could see one tower collapsing but not three...........google  WTC 7    this building was not hit by anything and collapsed in it's own footprint.  a demo crew could not have done it better........how come they found molten steel weeks after the collapse???  ....and how hot does jet fuel burn and how hot is a smelting furnace? 

JimG33

You obviously don't live in NYC. WTC7 was so close to the south tower that debris could not have missed it. It was closer to the Tower than the Winter Garden across West Street that was pierced by flying I-Beams that went through that building. Similar flying beams took out the skin of the new American Express Building on the other side away from the collapse site. The old ATT building is just north of WTC7 but its steel frame was wrapped in masonry, it still stands, though it was holed up and down its east and south side. WTC7 was a glass curtain containing a steel frame. Also WTC7 contained tanks of diesel used for co-generation; these tanks were low in the building and burned for hours. Just above them were main structural members, a condition that has been covered above. [In a situation when fuel tanker trucks burn under a highway overpass.] To the south the hotel was buried and the Cass Gilbert building just south of that had its facade sheared off. I won't mention the Deutsche's Bank building that stood as an empty burned out hulk for years.

Now I'm just a retired cabinetmaker, but I do live in downtown Manhattan and have for years.
You are a moron without the slightest understanding of structure and materials. And I would advise you to shut your pie-hole at this time.

"It is better to stay quiet and have people think you a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt"

 WARNER TODD HUSTON 19 Jan 2013 

at Brietbart’s Big Hollywood

Actor and hardcore progressive Danny Glover should add revisionist historian to his growing resume of left-wing activism after a recent visit to Texas A&M University where he told students that the Second Amendment was mainly meant to keep African Americans in slavery and to kill Native American peoples.
During his January 17 appearance at the university, Glover thought to teach the students attending about the real purpose of the Second Amendment.

"I don't know if people know the genesis of the right to bear arms. The Second Amendment comes from the right to protect, for settlers to protect themselves from slave revolts and from uprisings by Native Americans. So, a revolt from people who were stolen from their lands or revolts from people whose land was stolen from. That was the genesis of the Second Amendment."

This is simple historical revisionism. Slave revolts had yet to become the constant, nagging fear it was later to become for southern slaveholders. There was no such preoccupation in the late 1780s, during the debate over the Constitution, or in the decades previous to that; and it certainly wasn't a cause for northerners to worry. [Though runaways were a problem.]

Glover is completely wrong in every respect.

Slave revolts were a factor in the later decades after the Constitution was enacted, of course. Fears of slave revolts took hold in the south because of several major revolts that frightened whites here and elsewhere. But previous to the debate and ratification of the U.S. Constitution, there had been few such revolts, and none of them really served as the basis of any pervasive fear.

One of the most famous slave revolts of the founders' era was that in Haiti made famous by the leadership of a former slave named Toussaint L'Ouverture. The revolt shocked the world, for sure. But this revolt didn't start until 1791, four years after the U.S. Constitution was a done deal. This revolt played no part in the creation of the Second Amendment.

There were slave revolts before 1787, though. One slave revolt in the founder's recent memory was called the Battle of the Lord Ligonier and occurred back in 1767. But that occurred on a ship in the Atlantic, not on our own shores. Another revolt termed the New York Conspiracy happened in 1741. The next one back, called the Stono Rebellion, occurred in South Carolina in 1739. (And, remember, the famous Amistad incident wasn't until 1839.)

None of these revolts that occurred before the framing of the Constitution had much impact on the founders' thinking.

It should also be remembered that, when the founders were debating the Second Amendment in 1787, slavery had yet to become the economic powerhouse it was later to become. [Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were in constant debt and they were not able to just sell off their slaves to make ready cash. In the case of Washington he refused to break up families for sale. In the case of Jefferson the Hemmings were closely related to his late wife’s family. During times of inflation prices and the markets were slow and no money could be made in this market. Especially when the Congress debased the currency.]

Previous to 1810, slavery was developing a bad reputation throughout the country--even in the south--and by 1810 manumission had been bestowed upon nearly 200,000 slaves. [Washington granted it at his death.] Then came the growth of the South's plantation economy and with it a growing refusal of southerners to consider the end of their "Peculiar Institution." But that came a few decades after the invention of the cotton gin in 1793.

For an economic barometer of the times, cotton exports went from 500,000 pounds in 1793 to 93 million pounds by 1810. This abrupt change made slavery an economic necessity if the south were to continue growing as it had. But, again, all of this was years after the Constitution was in place.

So, while it is true that southern plantation owners would eventually develop a bone-shaking fear of slave rebellions and because of that would begin a vicious routine of suppressing blacks, this fear didn't manifest itself until the 1820's and 30's when slavery had become an important and growing institution for the southern economy. [The saddest thing about this, that I have learned from the book "Bound of Iron", is that slaves who upgraded their skills were trapped in a maelstrom of inability to control their lives. But that's just it, isn't it.] 

The truth is, the 2nd Amendment was a philosophical ideal based on humanity's long history of using government force on a disarmed public, force that resulted in oppression and in the subsequent loss of religious freedom, and as a result of the fact that the founders wanted a weaker, decentralized federal government that could not harm the rights of the people.

It had nothing at all to do with slavery and Indian attacks, Mr. Glover. Nothing at all.

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