You have probably watched a samurai movie – and know about Seppuku. Ritual suicide to avoid the shame of being dishonored – particularly by defeat in war.
VW is in the process of committing Seppuku.
The electric car serving as its samurai sword.
The imbecile shame over having “cheated” government emissions tests (like “cheating” a speed trap by using a radar detector) being the motivator for the disembowelment-in-process.
Which takes the form of a corporate decision to embrace the electric car shibboleth; to stake the future of the company (and whatever money’s left for R&D after paying off Uncle and the lawyers) on electric car development rather the IC-engined (diesel or gas) cars. This being the equivalent of a person accused of making a racially offensive remark holding a cringing public apology-fest with Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton (maybe both) standing by the offender’s side.
It is not going to fix the problem.
Growing a pair would, but VW management doesn’t appear much interested in that.
At the Paris Auto Show this week, the Kick Me Company will unveil the first of a lineup of new electric cars, based on its MEB (Modular Electrification Kit) platform.
Mark that.
A platform, in car-industry talk, is the basis of several models, each sharing the same … platform. Usually, this means a common chassis/suspension and sometimes also drivetrain, with most of the obvious differences being cosmetic (e.g., exterior sheetmetal and trim, interior design and so on).
But the point is, multiple vehicles built off the same common architecture.
So what VW means is it intends for electric cars to be more than a sideshow (viz, the current eGolf, the electrified version of the otherwise popular Golf compact hatchback) as has been the case so far.
The electric car will be – auf Deutsch – die zukunft.
The future.
Well, everything is the future. This cannot be helped. The question is whether die zukunft will be good… or bad.
It looks like it’s going to be bad.
The model slated to be on display in Paris is not a concept car – a one-of-a-kind engineering demonstration project never to see the light of a production line. It is a sneak peak at what the company will be mass producing – and attempting to sell – as soon as model year 2018.
Next year, in other words.
“The vehicle is as revolutionary as the Beetle was seven decades ago,” says VW’s Herbert Diess.
Well, maybe Diess knows something we don’t. But I hear desperate echoes of wunderwaffe circa January ’45.
Because – so far – no one has been able to design (and actually build) an electric car that makes any kind of economic sense. That isn’t too expensive to buy vs. whatever it saves to drive. That can be sold without huge subsidies (that is, at a loss).
If VW’s plan for die zukunft is to stop developing cars that can be sold without subsidies in favor of cars that must have them and which still don’t sell … er… well… hmmmm.
How long before VW management begins to chew the carpet and wail, der krieg ist verloren! ?
Plus the inconvenience.
The batteries that are the heart of an electric car not only cost too much, they can only store so much energy. All the flapdoodle aside, this remains as true now as it was 20 years ago.
As it was 50 or 75 or 100 years ago.
And – worse, from a consumer marketing point of view – EV battery packs can only be recharged with energy at a rate that is unacceptably slow – necessary to avoid damaging them – and, thus too long for most people to buy into. Would you be willing to spend at least 30 minutes – best case – waiting for your electric car to recharge?
How about several hours?
Keep in mind that the touted best-case “fast” charge recharge assumes access to a fast charger. These are often not accessible, in which case, hours.
VW says the range of its new EV will be 250 miles. I will believe this when I have driven the thing 250 miles myself. At highway speeds of 75 MPH or so. In winter, with the headlights (and heater) on. 
So far, the best range on battery power I have personally experienced – and I’ve driven pretty much all electric cars currently (and recently) for sale to the general public – is about 50 miles. This was in the 2017 Chevy Volt (my review here) which smartly carries around its own “fast charger”… an IC engine. So you don’t have to wait. And aren’t hobbled by a radius of action that’s less than even a gas-guzzling V8 muscle car (which can be refueled in five minutes, anywhere).
But you are carrying around an IC engine. Why not just skip the middle man – and get rid of the battery pack and motors?
It would certainly make more economic sense.
And that’s the nut of the problem – which (like the emperor’s new clothes) it seems no one in the car industry or the car press wants to discuss openly, even though many of them have to know the truth.
And the truth is that even if the range/recharge problems can be figured out, it is the cost that ultimately makes electric cars non-starters as other than politically correct make-work projects.
The car on display in Paris looks slick and will get lots of oohs! and ahhhs! It will also cost too much. Expect a base price – a subsidized base price – of around $30,000.
Diess and the others addled by the electro-zukunft don’t grok that what made VW’s bones back in the day was affordable (and thus, sensible) transportation.
Not politically correct transportation.
An original Beetle was cheaper than other cars and cost less to drive. That is why it sold, at a profit. It did not need to be subsidized.
VW needs a car like that in its zukunft.
And so do we.
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Talking about conspiracy,
What happened to the reply button for
bevin
September 29, 2016 at 6:56 pm?
RE that post,
I was in NYC (actually Kings Point) shortly after the 93 bombing of the WTC.
I remember a conversation about the bombing and how it was obvious that “we need to retrofit our buildings with explosives” to protect ourselves from liability in the event a tall building were to fall over.
And for you hard core conspiracy guys:
The median income for a household in the village was $116,957 in 2000.
First place in the country to have cameras with plate readers at all 19 entrances into the village in 2011.
I made it less than four blocks into the village driving a Renault Alliance in 1993 before being pulled over. (I was escorted to the house I was visiting and made to enter the security code after producing and using the key before the the boys in blue left me alone because the owners were not home.)
Even 53 years after Chrysler’s death, apparently Walter’s neighbors didn’t like those nasty AMC cars dirtying up the neighborhood.
And yes, they folks I was visiting were NYC real estate moguls. (Joos)
I feel I have to call bullshit on just one more mega-corporation that eric loves so much. Back in 2004 Google had all kinds of money they were spending on various things including climate change. They were also going to make a cheap, electric car for the masses. They’re taking their time.
Hi Eight,
Goo-guhl is the modern (and actual) panopticon … along with Mugbook. They’ve managed to get everyone, almost, to freely embrace Big Brother. Which is exactly what we are talking about. They are as “private” as the “federal” reserve is federal.
VW facing another $9 billion in claims from 1,400 German investors
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-37429466
Volkswagen engineer James Liang pleads guilty in Detroit Federal Court
http://www.clickondetroit.com/automotive/volkswagen-executive-named-in-criminal-investigation
Dear Tor,
Sheeeeet mang!
This stuff is straight out the pages of “Atlas Shrugged”.
Ayn Rand was wrong about the feasibility of minarchism. But she was not wrong about the infeasibility of altruism/collectivism/statism.
Actually, we should not be all that surprised that governments are doing all these things that seem irrational.
They are only irrational if we still cling implicitly to the assumption that governments exist to “serve the people”, i.e., us mere mundanes.
If we remind ourselves that governments exist in order to enable the 0.000001% extract out energy by means of the Matrix, then it all makes perfect sense.
PS: Actually, this strategy by the PTB is still irrational. Even they would be better off under a government-less meritocracy. The problem is that they are sociopaths and cannot and will not see this. They are run by they pathological drives, not rational self-interest.
It’s the paradox behind “criminal geniuses”. The Rothschilds and the Rockefellers are undeniably “smart”. They are shrewd. They are cunning. But they are not wise. If they were, they would be Hank Reardens instead of James Taggerts. They would realize that win/win would be better even for them.
“They would realize that win/win would be better even for them.”
Perhaps that is why the price of kerosene, the main consumer product of petroleum, went steadily down during the last 1/4 or so of the 19th century, even though Rockefeller’s Standard Oil held a near monopoly.
And similarly w/steel, despite Carnegie’s hold.
But that wasn’t good enough for the gunvermin. They had to bring in the ‘trust-busters.’
Dear Phil,
Yup. They have actually held back human progress, in every sense of the word. Not merely technologically, but even socially.
Long story short.
The world’s ruling elites may be the apex predators in one sense. They are clearly the most adept at exploiting fellow human beings, by creating a Matrix and sucking the life force out of them (us).
Therefore they assume they are the most evolved beings on the planet, and enjoy the “Divine Right of Kings”.
But from an evolutionary perspective, they most assuredly are not. Anyone who understands the NAP and attempts to live by it is already vastly more spiritually evolved as a human being than the seedy “elites” such as David Rockefeller and Jacob Rothschild, who are subhuman predators.
Their egos and psychopathy won’t let them be any other way. They are bent as in B E N T. They are cunning and relentless and have no morals. They have to try to appear to have human feelings, all the while not having them and just imitating what they see others do. They are sociopaths and psychopaths. They consider only themselves in any scenario. The Bush bunch is another example and even though they had to do more to blend in since they started with a little of nothing, the Clintons fall into the same category. Both of them are predators, just like the predators they pay to keep them safe only moreso. It’s the very reason cops have turned pure predator. I know. I’ve seen it up close and personal.
Dear 8,
It’s now 2016, a decade and a half after the watershed “New Pearl Harbor” of 9/11, and I still have to pinch myself sometimes.
Has the nation that was relatively speaking at least, the freest on earth, really degenerated into an undiluted police state this swiftly, this readily, with so little overt resistance?
Have We the People really morphed into We the Sheeple so thoroughly and completely in such a short time?
This is most assuredly not a domestic American problem. These sociopaths and psychopaths have global ambitions. Everyone alive on planet earth is already a victim of their bankster scams. On top of than, many have been murdered by them in the past, and many more will be murdered by them in the future.
Everyone speaks of how we’ve become a police state since 9-11….
We’ve been a police state for decades before that, already. Our slavery was formally established in 1913 with the creation of the income tax and the Fed. Pretty much at any time during our history, if you lived in a city, there was a cop walking a beat on virtually every block (But at least rural folk were relatively free into at least the 70’s).
Prohinition; fishing/hunting licenses; speed traps; eminent domain; property/sales/income/death/capital gains taxes -the list goes on and on.
They’ve just put the finishing touches on it lately; gotten people used to the gov’t interfering in every aspect of one’s life; and of course, added high-technology to the mix.
The only good prospect is that all of these things are the very things which cause the downfall of any empire which comes to practice them. (The bad thing is: People don’t ever seem to learn, and will just keep building new empires up, over and over again, just as they have in the past.)
The difference this time around though, although admittedly the Western world is right at that point in time where all empire civilizations have collapsed, the movement of information across all social and language lines potentially gives hope to those who want to turn this sinking ship around before it capsizes.
I wont say that it will happen, in fact I don’t believe it will happen (I hope to be proven wrong), but open and instant communication of information channels (as well as international travel) being available is arguably the game changer this time around.
A personal opinion here, but most libertarian mindset Americans of all ages I’ve met have been awoken and shaken from their mental shackles from online “free-speechers”, and are some of the most understanding and awake people I know. Without a doubt, their mind would not have been awakened without the internet, so there is hope, however the “recovery” I’m witnessing is too slow and too small at this point to convince me it will reverse.
I am trying to get back into shape… in anticipation of what’s coming. Thank my vanity I haven’t let myself slip too badly. Never got fatter than 218 (heavy for me) and am almost under 200 again (190 being “fighting weight” for me).
Part of my motivation is also to stay the fuck out of the clutches of “health care” for as long as possible…
Trouble is, A.J. I meet far too few libertarians -both in real life and on the web. Most people are motivated politically by what best materially benefits them, and secondly by how they can use their vote to force others to abide by their values/ideals.
Witness the fact that we live in a day when so many are willing to vote for people like Bernie Sanders and Hitlery. They just don’t care, as long as they think they will receive some largess at the expense of others.
The powers that be know this, and use it pander to various groups…as long as those groups aren’t libertarian. Thus, they always manage to keep their power, no matter which particular group they are appealing to.
Despite the exponential growth in the availability of information, I actually see the above getting worse instead of better, as the average person is becoming less intelligent (largely thanks to the dumbing-down of government schools) and spends far less time actually thinking, as their lives are now constantly occupied by gadgets and games and media. They’ve become automatons, like never before. Walking around like zombies, with their heads buried in their phones and tablets, immune to the reality around them, as they are told instead what is “reality” by an image on a screen and a voice on a speaker.
Ron Paul’s garnering of only 3% of the vote in the ’08 primary pretty much says it all. Us libertarians are less popular than communists and traitorous criminals.
Announce another new threat; drop a few bombs or crash a few planes, and perish-the-thought, turn off the electricity, and most of humanity will be rendered completely helpless and totally enslaved, more so than most already are.
We’re either going to have to find a place where we can step aside and watch the world burn from a safe distance, or we are going to go down with the rest of them, ’cause it ain’t gettin’ any better.
Hi Nunzio,
I agree… much as I hate to.
I’ve been giving thought to how best to ride out what’s coming, and what’s already here.
There’s no ideal or foolproof solution – short of an FTL drive (and a viable planet to escape to). But I’m thinking a small, largely self-sufficient cabin on a piece of out-of-the-way land is among the best realistic options.
If the country goes batshit, you’d at least have more time to take another step (as in, leave entirely; by hiking out, if need be) and if it doesn’t go completely batshit, you could at least probably live a semi-free life in terms of the everyday things.
Sometimes, I think maybe the “elites” are right… the masses are cattle and it’s best to regard them as such.
eric, Nunzio, here’s a great article on that subject, a very worthwhile read.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Police-Killings-Won-t-Stop-by-Chris-Hedges-Corporate_Democracy_Police-Abuse-Of-Power_Police-State-160926-309.html
I guess I’m lucky to be alive. The wife put on a movie and the first I knew of it was the loud roar of a lion. CJ, lying on the bed looking out the window for boogers realized there was one in the living room. With a more than proportionate growl I could hear him exit and hit the tile floor desperately digging for traction. After an inspection yielding nothing he could find he slid up to me in PtB’s library where I was reading a Larry McMurtry book, got nose to nose, eye to eye and gazed into my soul to see if I knew something I wasn’t telling. After a stare-off, I emitted my own growl saying s’git’em. So much for my left foot but he was off again, banging walls and doing his 4 foot burn-out, but still, no luck. Some day he’s going to catch that friggin lion. His predecessor Ace, was a tv watching fool. He’d lay on the couch and watch intently. When something would run left to right across the screen he couch and everything between it and the tv suffered. He’d run around the right side and look behind it. Horses especially set him off and he was destined to never find the horses. Life just ain’t fair but I’d be the last to say it could be.
“Most people are motivated politically by what best materially benefits them”
H L Mencken called it: “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”
Dear Nunzio,
You won’t get an argument from me.
This is something people here at EPAutos have hashed out before.
Just when did it all begin to go wrong?
9/11?
LBJ and The Great Society?
FDR and The New Deal?
WW and WWI?
AL and the Civil War?
GW and Whiskey Rebellion?
Name one. Name them all. The fact is that minarchism is merely Stage I totalitarianism.
I hear it all the time from older people. At the PO yesterday speaking to a farmer buddy, this 76 year old woman gets her mail, turns around and says “The govt. is just controlling every part of our life and we can’t do anything about it”. I didn’t have to give her the old saw about not complaining if you don’t vote. We all know better than that too.
Dear 8,
It never ceases to amaze me how people can’t seem to get this truth through their thick skulls.
One one acquiesces to the premise that some external entity may override one’s natural rights and individual sovereignty, it will not matter how “benevolent” that entity may have seemed at the outset.
It will sooner or later morph into today’s nightmarish totalitarian police state.
bevin, I found a couple dogs yesterday, found a number on one’s tag and called it. The guy who showed up I didn’t really know but had met before. Strange how you don’t know somebody who lives 4 miles away and has lived in this county most of his life.
He and I got to talking and it led to a two hour hash on the side of the road. I found out he was pretty much of the same mind as me. I don’t think he sees the Republicans as quite as dangerous as Democrats but that has more to do with taxes and welfare and Obamacare. He made the point that what LBJ did in the 60’s with his welfare act was to make sure black people were made slaves and were kept on the plantation, the projects, etc. and as long as the fed money came to keep them living lives of nothingness they’d continue to be slaves. Same for illegals. They get what would seem to be a good deal we can’t get and in ways of healthcare it is but just let them start making a good living and they get it shoved up their ass just like anyone else.
I NEVER speak to people my age who don’t see what’s happening and has been happening out entire lives. TPTB are just waiting for all us oldies to die off since we’re the only ones who really recall some freedom. It’s the very reason Texas was singled out as a “hostile” state. We grew up doing whatever we wanted with no official intervention. We weren’t criminals then, just pretty free. Now we’re criminals as deemed by BO and Co. just because of our white skin, our age and sex. We have been labeled years ago as “domestic terrorists”.
Dear 8,
“TPTB are just waiting for all us oldies to die off since we’re the only ones who really recall some freedom. ”
Yep. I get that feeling too. Sure, I know it sounds like a bad script writers’ cliche. A bunch of old fuddy duddies railing about how the young whippersnappers don’t known anything and how it used to be.
But it’s true. I’ve been away from the US since 1992, and even from what I see online, I can see that America is nothing like what it was when I left.
As Der Fuhrer has been quoted as stating so succinctly in a 1933 speech:
“When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.’”
Ain’t it amazing how appropriate our Dear Leader’s initials, because he no smell so good.
bevin, during our conversation I spoke of gun confiscation, the only significant(probably not even that significant since the Donald will support the PoLeez and courts)difference between Hitlery and Donald. He said they’ll get my guns after a big firefight. I know I won’t live through it but…. I told him, from past experience they’ll bring helicopters(unlimited budget) and a shitload of ground troops. I was surprised when he said “I have something that will take that Blackhawk right out of the sky”. I didn’t query him. He’s a very smart person. He wasn’t just talking out the wrong end.
Dear 8,
Despite The Donald’s apparent opposition to provoking WWIII, I cannot possibly vote for him.
One key factor is his “Law and Order” declaration about the “death penalty for anyone who shoots a cop”.
That made me sick to my stomach. Just another friggin’ coprophiliac.
Hello, Bevin,
Well-said!
I always think of Lincoln’s crime, and then the crimes of 1913 as watershed moments, but really, you are right. It’s the establishment of power/the formation of “the state” which is the underlying problem; the disease which started the rot to begin with- and the establishment of minarchism, even if well-intentioned, and an improvement over England, was still nothing less than the establishment of the state/concentrated power.
The illusion of freedom breaks down quickly, once one acquaints themselves with the details. Learning that George Washingto was arrested for riding his horse on a Sunday pretty much shatters any illusions quickly.
The further in our history one goes back, the freer those concerned about freedom may have had the opportunity to be- but only because the state had not yet grown so big; there was no sophisticated technology, and one still had the ability to live in the wilderness.
“I always think of Lincoln’s crime, and then the crimes of 1913 as watershed moments.”
Those were just downturns in the ‘slippery slope’ we were already on, not originating, but speeding the process.
Dear Phil,
Actually, as critical as those were, they were hardly the first.
By then the process was well on its way.
Shay’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion already showed that the new system was defective.
Bevin,
I was not intending to imply that they were the first, but they were major.
1812 and Mex-Amer War would go in that timeline as well.
Dear Phil,
Absolutely. I knew that you knew.
I was merely making it more explicit, for the record.
As you astutely noted,
“Those were just downturns in the ‘slippery slope’ we were already on… ”
It all started with the “social contract” of the US Constitution, and the ludicrous premise that any contract can be binding on someone who did not sign it.
Interestingly enough, Thomas Jefferson, who was one of the most philosophically oriented of the Framers, had begun to suspect this.
“I am increasingly persuaded that the earth belongs exclusively to the living and that one generation has no more right to bind another to its laws and judgments than one independent nation has the right to command another.”
― Thomas Jefferson
He didn’t know how right he was.
Dear Nunzio,
It’s sad but true.
I just finished watching an old 2008 biographical miniseries about John Adams.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0472027/
It made me realize that even though they meant well, the “Founding Fathers” screwed up, royally. They merely replicated what they had before under King George.
Hell, arguably they made it even worse. At least under a monarchy, you know the government isn’t “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”.
Under the new system they created, it wasn’t long before they were once again enslaved, only worse. This time the system enslaved them but gave them the illusion of being free.
Very, very true, Bevin and Phil,
Bevin; That brings to mind one of my favorite quotes: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free”.
Seems to be a recurring theme throughout history. The Protestants thought they could just reform the system established by the Catholics; The Founding Fathers thought they could start a new England and keep it free of the vices of the old England.
Guys, 1913 was something entirely new in my opinion though. Sure, it was another step among many which preceded and followed it; but it was probably the single biggest act of tyranny, in that it formalized our slavery and legally established the unconstitutional power of the gov’t over virtually all aspects of life.
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
Couldn’t recall whose quote that was.
Had to look it up.
Goethe.
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/0c/bc/85/0cbc85964869aa1de0306684a4aa8b46.jpg
“’New Pearl Harbor’ of 9/11″
If 9/11 was the ‘new Pearl Harbor,’ does that mean that whoever was responsible for it was encouraged, even manipulated into it, by the President and his administration?
Phillip, one thing is certain: Those 2 planes didn’t bring down those 3 buildings (Kinda makes ya wonder if one of the other planes of that day which crashed elsewhere, was really intended for #3, and even though it didn’t make it, someone just threw the switch at some point, and down it suddenly came, just as fast as the 2 next-door) -and even for the 2 planes to hit those buildings, required PRECISE timing with the Air Force “training” that “just happened” to be going on in the vicinity at that very moment- so at the very least, we KNOW it had to be an orchestrated event designed to provoke fear, war, and “patriotism”.
Nunzio – have you seen the reports that the hole in the Pentagram looked like it could have been made by the fuselage of an airplane, but there was no damage from the wings. Nor were the wings sheared off and lying on the ground outside. In other words, not an airplane, but a missile!?!
Nunzio, You not be believin the ‘fishal’ story on 3? You not believin good ol Larry when he said he misspoke(yeah, he did, he didn’t know the world could hear him) when he said “pull it”, that what he meant to say was “pull it over”?
My college buddies and I debated this and they were pitifully ignorant of what it would take to pull over a building. While I’m no architect nor structural engineer I do know my equipment and what it can do. I seriously doubt that with weeks of work hauling in the largest dozers on earth along with cable or chain large enough to take the strain or enough men to attach said chains or cables that there are enough dozers in the US to pull down a building that size.
I saw a pic of a couple large track hoes with some tiny cable going off into the air and then a pic of the top of a building with a couple similar sized cables attached somehow at an angle that would have contacted the ground at some point.
Quite simply, it can’t be done in that time frame and probably not if you had six months to do the rigging. An excavator is not made to push but simply move itself so that’s another fly in the believable ointment.
Something like a dozer operates by weight. Too many times I’ve seen dozers sent to a site and not be large enough to address the problem. I’ve seen dozers such as a D6 not be able to move some really big rock or sometimes, have to simply dig around a tree to get it down. “Pulling it over” is the easiest lie to knock off if you know anything about big earth moving equipment and how a building like WTC 3 is made.
Too many coincidences? Fred….of “Fred who believes too much establishment bullshit” recently wrote a piece on conspiracy theories heavily laden with sarcasm. For all his “larnin” and a huge vocabulary, he has a hard time sorting the shit from the shinola.
Hi Eight,
I saw Fred’s piece on 911 too. Very disappointing. He wrote not one word about WTC7, which is the “problem” that can’t be explained away except by controlled demolition.
Now, it is possible that WT7 and other tall buildings were/have been pre-wired for demolition, perhaps when they were built, as a safety measure – in case they had to drop the building because of some emergency. Maybe that emergency came on 911, when (perhaps) it was decided that the building was unstable and might topple over.
But controlled demolition it was.
That fact has to be addressed.
It defies belief that all WTC7’s critical structural supports failed symmetrically, in just the manner needed for the building to collapse inward and straight down. That it “just happened” … that the building neatly collapsed at freefall speed onto its own footprint… as they say in Russia… how is possible?
It can’t be explained except as the result of controlled demolition. So, therefore, the building had been pre-wired.
If that was done years prior as part of some hidden-from-the-public “safety” protocol, ok – tell us (and provide the facts). It would at least make a case for other than what it appears to be… i.e., a staged event, designed to terrify Americans into accepting a terrorist government in perpetuity.
I am also very suspicious about what happened at the Pentagon. I grew up in the DC area; lived there until 2004. There are cameras everywhere – security and tourist cameras. Video and still. Thousands of them. On a clear, sunny fall day in DC… and not one video or still pic of an incoming airplane?
Ever see the initial videos of the Pentagon wall immediately after the “plane” strike? Just a single round entrance wound. Nothing on either side (what happened to the wings? The huge jet engines hanging underneath each wing?) or above (what happened to the tail?)…
These are not crazy questions.
And – as far as I know – there have never been good answers to any of them.
eric, the Pentagon and WTC 7 are “the smoking guns” so to speak. How come the computers that held the only known financial books for the military are destroyed yet not much of anything else?
I care not if anyone believes my expertise with big equipment but I KNOW for a fact a building that size(7)can not be “pulled down”. And of course the video of it collapsing at what you rightly call freefall speed is damning in it’s own right.
You’ll notice all of the first responders, firemen mainly and cops, have stayed mute since not too long after the deed, most likely after they were threatened with extinction of them and their families. But, at first, all those guys whose job it had been to be on site at controlled demolitions for public safety, all said the same thing “You could hear the explosions floor by floor just like a controlled explosion”. I quit believing in coincidence long ago. A building not made to specs as the WTC towers were, to take a direct hit from a plane and not fall has been made many times before and some have been hit. The Empire State Building was hit broadside by a B 47 and no real drama or at least no danger of it falling.
If anyone would like to explain to me how metallurgy and building technique have gone downhill since that building was built, I’m all ears as Ross would say.
If the twin towers hadn’t fallen in their footprint, I’d be more liable to believe the official story.
When I was in college I used to go watch building taken down. No explosives used and some took longer than the contract with the company taking monetary hits every day for running overtime on taking them down. And, to this day, no other high rise building in the entire world has succumbed to fire and some have burned almost every floor from bottom to top. Had either twin tower leaned a bit from that hit, I’d be ready to believe they COULD have gone down from it.
But man, I have done too much construction and destruction to believe that crap. I’m very familiar with the capabilities of what big equipment can and can’t do. I don’t believe for a second WTC 7 was “pulled over”. Those who do are ignorant and don’t wish to hear the truth.
And you are correct eric, there have never been any plausible explanations.
“the Pentagon and WTC 7 are ‘the smoking guns’”
Yes, they are the 2 biggest, but there is also the paucity of wreckage from the 4th plane, the one the passengers supposedly took control of and crashed. The evidence would seem to lean toward that plane being destroyed in mid-air.
As for ‘pulling down’ a building, my uncle had a clay tile silo, 16 x 40′, built during WW II, that needed to come down because the land had been sold to a developer. It didn’t look that sturdy, the surface kept flaking off the tiles, and we held our breath every fall when we filled it. Hooked a dozer to it with log chain and just spun the tracks. Took a hammer and went around the base, breaking out every other tile. Tried again, still no joy. Took the chain and ran it through the holes from the missing tiles. Pulling that let the thing lean, still supported by 1 or 2 tiles. Then hooked the chain to the top again and pulled. Now it came down – intact. Contractor ended up digging a trench next to it, pushing it in, and burying it.
Dear Eric, et al,
Some defenders of the official 9/11 fairy tale claim that allegations of controlled demolition are absurd because there was no opportunity to plant any demolition charges.
Nonsense.
Here is one article that points to how and when the demolition charges could have been planted.
If the hypothesis of controlled demolition is considered, there inevitably arises one serious obstacle to its plausibility. And that is the fact that thousands of pounds of explosives would have had to have been planted in and around the buildings’ core columns and throughout its clearly restricted internal framework.
So how, the skeptical questioning goes, did anyone planting these explosives have such ready access to such intimate parts of the building?
As with so many of the essential questions raised by 9/11, what often appear at first to be strong arguments against any kind of ‘conspiracy theory’ that 9/11 was an inside job turn, suddenly, into stunning revelations about heretofore uncovered information that ultimately serve to confirm and strengthen the suspicions about 9/11 being, indeed, a well-orchestrated conspiracy theory.
Take, as an example, this question of how the explosives were planted. How could the security apparatus of the World Trade Center Complex, which was presumably highly sophisticated after the 1993 bombing, allow or not notice the laying of the explosives that supposedly felled the buildings?
Well, upon investigating this security apparatus at the WTC, we quickly stumble into the fact that Marvin Bush, George W.’s younger brother, was a principal in a company called Securacom (now Stratesec), the very company in charge of security at the WTC in 2001. Again, it is important to note that the author is not making this up.
“Marvin P. Bush, the president’s younger brother, was a principal in a company called Securacom that provided security for the World Trade Center, United Airlines, and Dulles International Airport.”
And not to be outdone by this fact, we also learn that “from 1999 to January of 2002 (Marvin and George W.’s cousin) Wirt Walker III was the company’s CEO.”
That this stunning, remarkable fact is not front-page news in every newspaper in the country is a mystery I cannot answer, nor solve.
That there were well documented power outages and swaths of whole floor shutdowns and evacuations in the weeks leading up to 9/11, perfect opportunities to carry up and plant necessary explosives under the guise of ‘maintenance’ and/or ‘retrofitting’ work, only fuels well-placed suspicions.
In a People magazine article, Ben Fountain, 42, a financial analyst with Fireman’s Fund who worked on the 47th floor of the South Tower, confirmed these evacuations by saying, “How could they let this happen? They knew this building was a target. Over the past few weeks we’d been evacuated a number of times, which is unusual. I think they had an inkling something was going on.”
http://www.911hardfacts.com/report_09.htm
The so-called elites manipulate the masses to primarily hold back those that would oppose them. They do not hold us in check, the people around us do. If I step out of line and challenge the belief system it’s never david rockefeller or similar who shows up to socially attack and isolate, it’s a bunch of regular people.
The great problem is those of us who find such a thing abhorrent are at a considerable disadvantage. More evolved or not, they have the winning method.
Dear Brent,
True. I realize that’s how they game the system.
They are not wise and benevolent.
But they are undeniably ruthless and cunning.
Something just hit me.
Remember “Lord of the Flies”?
The PTB are akin to Jack, the boy who reverts to savagery, but who is adept at manipulating the other boys into ganging up on Piggy and Ralph, the boy who retains his humanity and rationality.
Basically the world we inhabit circa 2016, is the island in the novel. We are lorded over by a real life analog of Jack, and his dark side.
They won’t ever have to ban cars, they will just run them all out of business. Don’t think they wouldn’t do it? Ask the people who were working for ITT (one of the “for-profit” colleges that ran afoul of the Obama regime) last week.
The car biz went from being mostly independent and profitable, to not being profitable to taking taxpayers money. Those of course come with string attached. And that money can go away when they don’t want them around no more.
That’s what happens when you take tax dollars. You lose control.
I keep reading about VW’s commitment to electrics and scratching my head. The new car electric market is all but saturated and that’s with heavy subsides artificially inflating market demand. You practically have to give them away used. Is it their intent to purposely go down the tubes just so they can say “I told you so”? It makes zero sense and is pure insanity from a business perspective.
Apres moi, le deluge.
Or, “After me, the flood.”
They don’t care, they got their money and f-ck everyone else….
It’s amazing, isn’t it? This world has gone completely MAD! The decisions that people are making -from heads of state, to executives, down to the idiot on the street, are just astounding. It’s as if every iota of reason and common sense have been lost by all.
From holding the stupid Olympics in a crime-ridden 3rd-world slum, to making cars that nobody wants nor can afford, to running a presidential candidate who openly admits she will flood the country with more immigrants who are hostile to our culture, and who promotes war, to paying hamburger-flippers $15 an hour, and subsidizing the making of babies by the lowest segment of the population through various redistribution-of-wealth schemes….
You can read 1984 and Atlas Shrugged now, and think that they are describing the good old days by comparison to what is now the reality.
If I were VW, I would give Uncle the ginger and tell him to shove it; not pay the “fines”; abandon the American market, and just carry on in Yerp [Europe] where they have a bigger percent of the market, and could salvage their business -because clearly, paying Uncle’s extortion will kill them, as will making cars which meet Uncle’s requirements (Because doing so reduces or eliminates the very qualities for which people buy them).
Increasingly, such a scenario will be the wave of the near future. Before long, no one will want to do business with the US anymore, because we are too absurd and just not worth messing with.
“The finger” not “the ginger”…LOL
He might like ‘the ginger.’
The problem for VW is that the US banksters are in bed with the German central bankers as well (look at how entrenched they are in German politics with the Euro migrant crisis), so they know they’ve got VW by the balls so to speak, so they’re doing all they can to milk them for everything they’re worth.
Wealth transfer in broad daylight, and done under the guise of saving the planet. Sickening really, but that’s what a complacent ignorant public does for you.
Dear AJ,
“Sickening really, but that’s what a complacent ignorant public does for you.”
As the bandido Calvera put it in the classic Western “The Magnificent Seven”,
“If God didn’t want them sheared, he would not have made them sheep.”
That is their attitude.
We’re pretty much already at the point where the rest of the world doesn’t want our business. There’s a huge niche market for the euro Ford diesel Ranger and the TDI. It’s not worth the hassle to sell them here. VW’s only way out of this is fighting. A massive counterpropaganda campaign and buying lots of better politicians. I don’t think their nomenclatura have the stones.
I like electric cars. Once the battery and charge time issues are solved, I would love to have a high performance, long range electric car, an electric version of what I drive today.
Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’m surrounded by guilty wealthy people who think that electric cars make them clean, eco-conscious people, and that everyone should do the same for mother earth. I’m surrounded by pro-electric car, pro-solar power propaganda in the news, advertising, and looking at nearby rooftops.
What really rubs me the wrong way is the willful blindness people have when thinking about their “eco” lifestyle. First, your electric car is not zero emission, its emissions happen elsewhere to produce electricity. In some states, like CA, it’s on-par with gasoline cleanliness, most places it’s worse. Your lithium batteries require strip mines and energy intense refining processes, which are horribly polluting. This pollution is outsourced to China and south America, but you’re still paying for it. Lithium batteries oxidize and lose capacity, they won’t last the life of your car, so you’ll need to strip mine some more for a new pack eventually (I’ll just have to replace 6 piston rings). Solar power is starting to make sense, but it still has the outsourced pollution issues for panel production.
I’m not rich. My car choices are driven by cost, with perhaps a little extra spent on things like horsepower or fun to drive factor. I’m getting quite tired of being told how I should live by people who make several times as much as I do, and in addition, being taxed to subsidize their solar panels and Teslas, which I can’t afford for myself.
“Once the battery and charge time issues are solved, I would love to have a high performance, long range electric car”
Who wouldn’t? The point is, that is not the case now, not even close, and no one should be forced to pay part of someone else’s ‘guilty pleasure.’ Nor the R&D costs to create such a vehicle.
When they become practical, (and they most likely will at some point) there will be no need for subsidies – that’s the beauty of the ‘free’ (unmanaged) market
Electric cars already are producible in a relatively lost cost and practical format via series electric range extenders and high voltage/amperage speed controllers/switchers plus super capacitor packs coupled to multi cell NiMH ‘reserve’ packs. I’ve already played around with EV kits and DIY conversion sets to know practical EVs are well within range (pun intended) of being produced, so it’s always baffled me that people talk about EVs as if they are impossible to produce, because in many ways they are far easier to produce than IC vehicles, that is, until I realized why.
What’s not currently available is the an electric car that can be 100% data mined, operated and controlled by SOMEONE ELSE.
That is why the only companies that are actually pushing hard for “real” EVs are GM and Tesla, government controlled companies. There’s no talk of existing battery technology, no talk of current infrastructure, no talk about genuine low emission range extenders, no talk of real solutions, only carrot and rabbit stick nonsense. The high ups know this however, and that’s why everyone else is just shoving “high tech” drive packs in pre-existing shells or makes blanket statements for PR purposes to appease the deluded public until the massive electric bubble pops, because when it does, the public will realize just how easy it is to make electric vehicles, and how nefarious the government has been in their desires to “save the world” with their “green” crap.
Hi AJ,
That – and weight.
I don’t doubt that a functionally practical and economically sensible electric car could be built. If it did not have to comply with all of the government’s “safety” mandates… which have made even compact cars into preposterous fatties relative to what they could and should be.
The Tesla weighs almost as much as a Tahoe!
But imagine a 1,500 pound electric car.
That could work.
But it would not be “high performance” and it would not be “safe” as far as meeting government tests and complying with all the mandates.
One can make an argument regarding emissions; that others are affected, etc. But “safety”?
Why is it any other person’s legitimate business whether my car has air bags or can withstand a rollover without the roof crushing?
The answer is, it ain’t.
Not morally speaking.
I and every other free human being have the absolute right to take whatever risk we see fit with our lives and our stuff.
So long as we’re not causing harm to anyone else.
Otherwise, it’s no one else’s business and it’s a got-damned outrage that some people think otherwise.
Those people need two things: a deep river and a large rock.
“Why is it any other person’s legitimate business whether my car has air bags or can withstand a rollover without the roof crushing? ”
Because they assume that if you are injured, your medical expenses will be ‘a burden on society.’ They do not, under any circumstances, believe in personal responsibility. Even for you.
PtB, me….me…..ME….I can answer it. When mandatory insurance is the law of the day, insurance companies, in their infinite ignorance, believe what air bag makers say, car companies make uber bucks off ’em as do repair shops so it’s a win/win for everybody, well, except the car owner and that just makes more profit for the lenders. It’s really a win/win/win/win/win/……….
You don’t want to do this but if you should, you could find no studies to indicate there’s an advantage for airbags or seatbelts in big trucks. I know two people who were in truck wrecks(truck drivers are seldom injured in wreck with cars, it’s almost always other large trucks that cause injuries…….or trains). Both those drivers were wearing seat belts and both got knocked well down the road…..belted in their seats. One was obviously dead, lying there on the side of Ranch Road 33 balled up in a barbed wire fence and the other survived(amazing) for several agonizing months before succumbing to those injuries. It was the seat belt I had always feared, the one that was hell to get unlatched that nearly led to my demise with the Northern Pacific. I was lucky. A trucker died two weeks before at the same crossing at that malfunctioning light. Hell, I could have avoided injury and the truck wouldn’t have been damaged if that big crossbar would have let me back up or go forward. It came down the instant I stopped on the tracks. I locked the differentials and couldn’t bend or break the thing. I tried reverse and hit it hard, same result. Those things are boxed steel and strong like you wouldn’t believe. Once the train was past I went back to the truck and took it out of gear. The drivers(tires) on both axles had eaten through the pavement but that crossbar didn’t let up. I knew some people who stopped(barely)at a non-working signal like that in their pickup. The crossbar crushed the roof of the cab. Don’t mess with RR crossbars is the lesson to be taken I guess. Be REAL CAREFUL at blind crossings since the lights don’t always work.
“no studies to indicate there’s an advantage for airbags or seatbelts in big trucks”
Ya think maybe that’s the reason they don’t put’em in skewl buses?
In this state, skool buses are limited to 55…..and you know that’s 1mph below the speed anyone can get hurt. It’s a no-brainer, being thot up by skool administrators and the NHTSA.
Stop fighting against EV’s. After all, they are so much safer than IC engines.
http://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/disasters_and_accidents/one-of-county-s-newer-electric-transit-buses-catches-fire/article_d232829b-b6e8-586a-be99-56de19fff502.html
Phillip, the notice those genius commenters going on about what a”clean” vehicle it was. I suggest they move somewhere just northeast of the Okla-Union powerplant and live a while.
Electric vehicles DO have their use cases. But the constraints that were listed do exist, and in the end, what they serve to do is limit the movement of the cattle outside of their fenced-in zone. There will be fewer travels outside of one’s commutation loop anywhere by any means of transport other than ones that have security checkpoints. Many people who might otherwise travel halfway across the country will stay where they are at all times, making it easier to collect tax revenue from them.
Ya know….I hadn’t thought of it that way. 10 years ago I would have laughed at that. Now I can’t help but think someone somewhere in a dark government room is mapping that plan out.
We would have limited mobility and need to carry our papers with us wherever we go. If you misbehave, not government electricity for you.
Growing a pair would, but VW management doesn’t appear much interested in that.
I don’t think the last three or four generations of German males have been capable of “growing a pair” (the current rapefugee crisis in Germany illustrates that better than anything else). VW as it is today is simply a metaphor for the sludge of what now remains of what was once one of Europe’s most powerful, innovative, vibrant, influential, and masculine cultures.
A sad, sorry, sickening fucking shame.
Clovers HATE oil. They detest oil. And the one and only reason is because oil has done so much for human comfort and human freedom.
An electric car will offer less human freedom and more control. THAT is why a Clover will embrace it. The Clover cares not a whit about Mother Gaia and keeping her panties clean.
The Clover cares not a whit about Mother Gaia and keeping her panties clean.
Precisely. It’s all about signaling to other Clovers. I wonder how many of these products they would be willing to forgo.
Not too damn many, I think.
We watched a movie last week, The Ides of March, which is an indictment of the whole perverted political process. They focus on the Democrat who has the best chance of winning. In one speech he says “in ten years it will be illegal to make a car with an internal combustion engine”. The crowd cheers. I laughed. I guess he found my 1960 edition of Popular Science.
Every time I hear people speak of electric powered this and that I consider the white papers I’ve read about the national electrical distribution system and how over-burdened it is and how the continuous updating can’t keep up with demand. Clover probably has her own battery powered drinking straw not to mention her vibrating underwear.
I recently read of Energizer Corp. boasting of recycling 4% of old batteries to make new ones which accounted for 10% of the power of a new battery. Whoa, now, hold the phone, this is astounding news. So what happens with the 96% leftover of recycled batteries? They don’t mention how much electricity and petroleum products alone, not to mention the other parts, needed to produce a AA battery.
You notice tree huggers never mention how the energy required to make everything “earth friendly”, what the hell ever that is, or CO2 friendly, a misnomer if ever there was one, is going to come about. It’s all power companies can do to keep up with current(sic) demand much less increasing it to power a couple cars for every adult. I can see me driving that new Peterbilt with all electric, “non-polluting” power. Next they’ll make tires out of hemp, a highly over-rated future product itself. Hemp fibers only come from the outer part of stems so the amount of things made from hemp will be only made from a small percent of hemp. The rest you burn(and produce electricity?…..like corn into ethanol?) or turn into fertilizer.
I can guarantee I’ll never live long enough to see petroleum supplanted by another source for virtually everything we need for life in our society. Yep, we could go back to living in holes in the ground and if they’re deep enough, we won’t need to burn something for heat. I sure look forward to wearing fur(possum, skunk, coyote, coon, and buckskin or leather with hair) in the winter and a bit of nothing in weather like this(ok, so I do that anyway….sitting here in underwear and boots, 94 degrees right now, probably peaking at 98, a relatively cool day this year).
Even as sparsely populated places such as where I live, there won’t be enough animals to eat or use their hides. For clovers hanging in big population centers, extra food stocks should last a couple minutes at which the popular new trend will be cannibalism……the only trend other than death.
Yep, I just can’t wait to have no more oil wells drilled so me and my neighbors can fight for the rats between us and them. Hot dog, CO2 free me.
I know we’re just a bunch of know-nothings here in Tx. but it sure seems to be the popular place to move. I took our garbage(veggie and meat waste)out to the tank earlier and spooked the wild hogs, our very valuable hogs when there is no oil. We’ll keep the home fires burning and traps set for clovers, our new national resource.
BTW, my parents grew up without electricity during the earlier parts of their lives and grandparents got a dose of electric lights and stuff like ice when they rode into town. I never heard any of them lamenting the good old days of sitting round the coal oil lamp and cooking in the cook house over a wood stove. Natural gas changed all that in the late 40’s and during the 50’s and 60’s. Then, almost everybody had electricity.
“…no one in the car industry or the car press wants to discuss openly, even though many of them have to know the truth.”
Years ago I was at the debut of the Audi e-tron concept, press only presence, and of course the press was fawning over it like a bunch of Musk worshipers would. Since I have a short tolerance for B.S., I brought up the issues that have always surrounded EVs and likely will for a long time. Naturally I ended up in an argument in which I defend my stance with facts, and they defended themselves by name calling. I was largely ridiculed and left to be the laughing stock of the believers.
Later that day I was approached by an elderly man who asked me why I was so against EVs. I told him my stance again and listed facts (probably more angrily than I should have) and explained why EVs were not sustainable as transportation. He listened graciously though, and then asked me about Tesla. I told him it was doomed to fail from the start for the same fundamental reasons. He smiled, nodded, and replied with his German accent “I agree.”
Later I found out he was the head engineer for VWs EV program. So in short yes, you’re right. The higher ups know it’s all a sham, it’s pure publicity.
Hi AJ,
You and me both!
I’ve been at this since the mid-1990s; I have come to know a lot of people in the business and many of them are now friends who trust me enough to talk about things like this off the record. Several of them have come to hate the business – and are just hanging on long enough to be able to afford to retire and forget all about it.
Dear AJ,
Man oh man, that is a great story.
So glad you shared it.
Head engineer for VW’s EV program. LOL!
Only a wild premise, of course. But is it possible that VW’s repentance, and willingness to support the manipulators of the zeitgeist’s love of electrics, will allow Uncle to forgive them of their transgressions, and thereby keep some of those billions?
Bingo
It’s PR. EV’s don’t make profit, and won’t for a good long time.
I recall another German company getting screwed by uncle. F.A.G. bearing in Joplin, MO
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Schaeffler+Group,+F.A.G.+Bearing/@37.0486096,-94.4857586,2476m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x87c87cb2138c7e4f:0x6ec7792ec5feb3e2!8m2!3d37.0462034!4d-94.4687319
http://www.fourstateshomepage.com/news/fag-bearings-lawsuit-settlement
I did the investigative drilling and soil sampling (6 weeks of 12 hr days for 2 drill crews) on this site and the higest “hit” we had was 30 ppb TCE. The only other location where we had a detection was for 2 ppb.
The geology of the site is residual limestone (red clay with chert erratics) over highly fractured limestone and karst formations. The soil is very permeable when dry (the cracks in the soil open up) but not so much after a rain (cracks swell shut). The upper limestone is also highly fractured (plus karst).
I would have to agree with F.A.G. corp that the evidence does not support the legal decision.
Oddly enough, I also worked for a time at another Joplin factory
https://www.google.com/maps/place/2609+S+Rangeline+Rd,+Joplin,+MO+64804/@37.0578285,-94.4735247,2475m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x87c87ca039edf295:0x431b35189caf4a83!8m2!3d37.0619039!4d-94.4781113
https://dnr.mo.gov/env/hwp/permits/mod007129935/information.htm
this place was highly contaminated and there were more lawyers present than workers, AND the location is nearby the F.A.G. facility, hmm….