As it fell…
The truthers and fellow Unicorn hunters have some more data to play with and dissect today after the release of a three year study on the collapse of World Trade Center building 7.
“Heating of floor beams and girders caused a critical support column to fail,” said Shyam Sunder, the lead investigator. “Video and photographic evidence combined with detailed computer simulations show that neither explosives nor fuel oils played a role in the collapse that brought the building down.”
No one died when 7 World Trade Center fell, nearly seven hours after the twin towers came down. But the collapse of the adjacent tower — once home to branch offices of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Secret Service and to the Giuliani administration’s emergency operations center — is cited in hundreds of books and Internet sites as perhaps the most compelling evidence that an insider secretly planted explosives, intentionally destroying the tower.
Read the full NIST report before you leave a comment.
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This is not Georgia despite the similarities.
Russian tanks smash over the border into a satellite state. NATO at a loss to explain why or how, or more importantly, what to do about it. You think Georgia / South Ossetia was the first time this has happened? Not hardly.
This week is the 40th anniversery of the of the Prague Spring that was crushed by Russian tanks crossing the border and replacing the more liberal minded government with one more to their liking. The Spiegel magazine has a good reexamination (in English) of those events, utilizing documents from the NATO archive that show just how unprepared the West was for this event.
When it was over, Western officers, awkwardly, seemed surprised. Against their will they had to admit the camouflage hiding the march of Warsaw Pact troops into Prague had been “good,” and the speed of their divisions “impressive.” The way the Kremlin led units out of the western part of the Soviet Union “unnoticed” was also noteworthy. The enemy, in short, had scored a “tactical victory.”
This was the verdict on Aug. 27, 1968 from NATO headquarters in Brussels on “Operation Danube” — the suppression of the legendary Prague Spring. A week earlier, 27 divisions of Soviet Russians, Poles, Hungarians and Bulgarians — around 300,000 men, armed with 2,000 heavy cannons — marched into the small state of Czechoslovakia to end the experiment of “socialism with a human face.” It was the largest military operation since the World War II, and the West was caught off guard.
It’s a pretty good article outlining the failures of the West and the success of the Russians. Worth a review if you are still wondering what happened then (or now).
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The Olympics are that way
While the US may likely lose in the ‘gold first’ medal table (but prevail in the ‘total medal’ table) the one thing that is becoming obvious is that one of the clearest paths to the Olympics is to go to college in the United States. Watching some of the athletics and other sports, I’m constantly surprised at that announcer saying ‘while he maybe from Zimbabwe, he goes to school in Arizona’ or ‘he’s running for Trinidad now, but he used to run for the University of Oklahoma’.
I’ve tried to pull together a list of all the Olympians and where they went to college, but it’s pretty much a lost cause. There’s simply too many and no orderly way of pulling them all together. I can say that of the 8 or so sprinters in the 100m, nearly all went to school in the USA.
I’m going to try to put that list together. I think it would be interesting.
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Answer: 
