(more pix below the fold)

Isn't change refreshing? Aaaaah... You can just feel the difference. Not. The fact of the matter is, the "number one threat" to the United States is the corporate two party system that does not serve the people. - Jon

Source: rawstory.com

1/15/2009

President-elect Barack Obama said Wednesday that Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden remain the "number one threat" to US security, after a new voice recording emerged from the terror group's leader.

"Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda are our number one threat when it comes to American security," Obama told reporters, after the recording warned the president-elect of new fronts in bin Laden's self-styled holy war against Western interests.

"We're going to do everything in our power to make sure that they cannot create safe havens that can attack Americans. That's the bottom line," Obama added.

The 22-minute audio recording, which the US-based Site Intelligence Group said it believes is authentic, was the first commentary from the Al-Qaeda leader in eight months.

The 116th peer-reviewed paper was published today in the Journal of 9/11 Studies:
“The Missing Jolt: A Simple Refutation of the NIST-Bazant Collapse Hypothesis,”
by Prof. Graeme MacQueen and Tony Szamboti. Take a look!
http://journalof911studies.com/volume/2008/TheMissingJolt4.pdf

This fine paper underwent several months of rather arduous peer-review preceding its publication in the Journal of 9/11 Studies. The paper supports work by James Gourley published in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics and recent analysis by David Chandler. A few quotes from the paper should wet your interest:

“In its Final Report on the Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers, the National Institute of Standards and Technology summarizes its three year study and outlines its explanation of the total collapse of WTC 1 and WTC 2.[1] Readers of the report will find that the roughly $20 million expended on this effort have resulted in an explanation of the total collapse of these buildings that is so vague it barely qualifies as a hypothesis. But it does have one crucial feature of a hypothesis: it is, in principle, falsifiable. In fact, it is easy to demonstrate that it is false.
In this paper we will, concentrating on the North Tower, offer a refutation that is:

• easy to understand but reasonably precise
• capable of being stated briefly
• verifiable by any reader with average computer skills and a grasp of simple mathematics.

[snip] Zdenek Bazant and Yong Zhou, with whose September 13, 2001 back-of-the-envelope theory (with subsequent revisions and additions) NIST largely agrees, have never hesitated to say that the upper block fell. [8] Bazant has likewise been frank about the need for severe impact as the upper and lower structures met: he believes the impact may have been powerful enough to have been recorded by seismometers. [9] In his view, collapse initiation of the lower structure required “one powerful jolt.”[10] Of course, if there was a powerful jolt to the lower structure there must also have been a powerful jolt to the upper falling structure, in accord with Newton’s Third Law.”

REINING IN THE IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY
Lessons and Recommendations Relating to
the Presidency of George W. Bush

http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/printers/110th/IPres090113.pdf

In a 487-page report out today recapping Bush’s “imperial presidency,” House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) recommends that “the incoming Administration finally begin an independent criminal review of activities of the outgoing Administration.”