Uvalde Shootings

Shooting In Uvalde

Charles Jordan

There are at least two kinds of mass killings.  One is a war where large groups of people try to kill large groups of people for specified reasons.  The two groups don’t agree about whose reasoning is correct, but the bottom line is a declaration of war between ideas.  The other extreme is a mass killing is where one person convinces him- or her-self with little or no discussion with the foe.  They may hold discussions with bystanders, but none at all with the targets, chosen mainly for self-glorification.  Once the idea of a glorification as seen in mass killings over time is internalized, a decision is made by the individual as to the method.  Some times bombs are used, or poisons, or diseases, but lately the method of choice seems to be guns with defenseless children targets for special effects. Many people reach for this glorification with words alone.The problem we have as a society is how to identify a real threat from empty words.

Many interactions with shooters in days/weeks before involves statements like "I hate you" "I'm going to kill you.", "I am buying a gun to shoot up a school." etc. Gun laws are a minor hindrance to an antisocial mentally bent misfit. There are already more than 200 million guns in private hands in the US.  We have to focus on the mentality. If someone says they're going to kill somebody, the system has to say don’t joke about it.   Our society promises as much liberty as possible but there are limits.  Of course the main one is “Thou shall not kill.”  But with a society of over 300 million people  liberties will need to be modified to cope with increasing densities of citizens.

I suggest the limitation “You’re not free to threaten to kill somebody.”  By now you don't joke about bombs when you are boarding an airplane." There needs to be funding of a police department group which looks for disturbing behavior and proactively focuses on intent to kill people.  We talk about having red flag warnings, but writing a law is not the same as training people to recognize the problem.  Many government “lawyers” feel that all we have to have is the rule of law, rather than the enforcement of laws.  The smooth enforcement of the laws requires much more attention and money than the writing of a law by a congressman to get reelected.

I remember fondly a telling exhibition by Governor Jerry Brown at his inauguration.  He had an old time bureaucrat assemble all the California laws at the time.  The pile of laws was about 6 ft tall.  Governor Brown intoned “We have enough laws.  We just need to govern to the good of the people.”

In order to avoid the inevitable gaming of the system, we need much more personal involvement. Try to take social media out of the equation as much as possible. The investment to cover the expenses of the important link in this chain, the person who hears specifically the words “I am going to kill someone.” shouldn’t be a deal breaker.  Many people won’t mind having some expense, but others might need a little help protecting our society. And reading from the story of the Uvalde killer, some of the people he interacted with were out of state and out of country.

Make it a citation to utter the words I am going to “kill' someone puts that person in the police records to track if the problem escalates.  It won’t take long before people stop trivially saying they are going to kill someone if they get cited for it.  Continuing problems might lead to the identification of a seriously dangerous person.  Some internet connections may be impossible to avoid.

Our society should be built on the protection of its citizens, not just the apprehension of a perpetrator of a crime. The preventative blocking of a potential perpetrator is necessary as our population grows. Statistically, a larger population increases the chance that attitudinal deviations in the population are more numerous.   But social media  and  main stream media enhance the individual stories. People die every day due to many causes.  More than 7 people per hour die a violent death,  roughly two per hour due to homicide. That’s 48 per day.  Many more than 19 at one school.  If we prevent every one of the murders of children at schools at the present rate, the overall death rate due to violence will scarcely notice it. The number of suicides, 75% of the total, which depend on guns for the main instrument, might offer a possible reason to restrict the number of guns.  But suicides are not very dramatic and one suicide doesn’t give a photo op to a politician.

But dramatic situations like school shootings give us a general impetus to improve all the numbers  There needs to be bounds to this red flag type program mentioned above. And I think it should be limited to the threat of murder.

Intercepting a developing murder threat is more complicated than solving a murder, but there are similarities of technique. The analyst need more training to help them develop methods which expose aberrant behavior and provide a simple means of developing a channel which can be trusted to not respond to trivial outbursts and not second-guessing the problem. The pressure of a police response to any statement of "I'm going to kill somebody" should start establishing a taboo on the use of a threat to create physical mayhem. The boundaries would soon be established by litigation, but preventative killing is like preventative medicine, more difficult, but obviously a better way to go.  Even though facing up to difficult psychological problems costs money, there are consequences of having a larger and larger population.  We need to spend money and effort to ameliorate the tail of our society who have lost the gamble of being born.  It’s much better than handing out money to everyone with no idea of what to expect. (except possibly votes)

Back in Texas, the idea is similar to the blandishment of "if you're going to draw your gun, you had better use it or I will use mine." Threats of killing someone should be taken seriously.

George Floyd

Charles Jordan

George Floyd had Covid-19, only one of his problems.  He must have had a problem with money because he was trying to pay for something in a store with a counterfeit $20 bill.  The owner noticed that and called the police.  The police came and arrested him.  

As they tried to put him in the back seat of the police car, Mr. Floyd seemed to think that they were going to kill him.  It seemed so irrational to the police that they discussed whether he was high on drugs.  According to a blood test he was, on fentanyl and metamphetamines.  He struggled, banging his head against his surroundings in the police car so they police took him outside and restrained him, finally using a standard technique of pressure to his breathing by means of a knee on the back of his neck. One of the policemen stated that they had to take him out of the car to keep him from hurting himself.

The restraint technique works by robbing the suspect of his ability to breathe if he struggles.  It is a standard non-lethal method of control.  Normally when the  suspect realizes that he can breathe when he doesn’t struggle, he stops struggling.  Pretty standard stuff, but the policeman doesn’t believe the suspect has Covid-19, a pulmonary disease, as the suspect keeps saying, thinking it a ploy to get them away from him.  Using a breath robbing technique on a suspect with a respiratory disease like Covid-19 is perhaps somewhat risky if he actually has it. It exposes the policemen to a theoretically deadly disease.  If he had known about the infection, he probably wouldn’t have touched him. I don’t know what the guidelines are for handling someone who you know has Covid-19.  

This scenario is another example of the difficulty of a policeman’s job.  He has to make a split second decision on the state of being of a suspect of a crime who says he has Covid-19, who acts like he’s high on drugs, is beating his head against the police car, calling for his mother (maybe he is a mental case, not on drugs, although apparently they knew each other incidentally much earlier in life.), and is struggling mentally and physically to find a way to keep from going to jail.

He knows that police have guns.  No way is he going to go quietly, even if going quietly would have clearly been the best decision.  Better to have your breath constricted than to get shot.  Another possibility for the police, of course, would been to let him go, stating that he had Covid-19 and find him later, but if you find him later why would anything be different?  What is he going to learn from this interaction but that if you struggle enough the police will let you go.  The whole idea of trying to arrest someone with Covid-19 is disconcerting.

Handling anyone with breath suppression techniques will cause them to think or say “I can’t breathe.”   If they can breathe easily, it’s not working.  Such techniques - which I assume have been used by most policemen since it is a standard - allow some breathing if you stop struggling.  The goal is to stop the struggling without killing the suspect and that’s what normally happens.   If the suspect has Covid - 19 and the policeman doesn’t know it, he may not realize the danger he is putting the suspect in.  In this case, it may have made all the difference between control and death.

Strike one - attention due to suspicion of criminal activity, Strike two - struggling against authority, Strike three - he has Covid-19 and has trouble breathing.

Given the equipment and training and numerical superiority, the policeman always has a feeling of superiority. He feels that his is the good guy with right on his side, and the suspect is the bad guy.  If the “human” policeman feels that he is the good guy simply because he is white-skinned, not just because he is enforcing the good guy laws, he is the only one who knows and we will find it hard to tell. And it’s not good enough to dig up something he said 10 years ago to conclude that he was killing the suspect because of his ethnic group. 

One thing is for sure, George Floyd wasn’t a hero and didn’t want to be a representative of Black people everywhere. He just probably wanted to get some money (in change for his fake $20) to get some more drugs? And there was no report that he had a mask on due to his Covid-19.  He was just a bad citizen with bad luck.  

Lynching, violent and non-violent

Charles Jordan

Overwhelmed by the mob atmosphere in Atlanta after the shooting of Rayshard Brooks in a DUI arrest entanglement I try to  imagine a similar situation in the old South.  The Atlanta scenario is not much different from a lynching even if its non-violent. I imagine a crowd of white people reacting to a black man who wrongly or rightly was thought to have caused the death of a white man.  Perhaps a lone white lawyer or judge type raises the cry  “let the police handle this.”  The crowd ignores him, because they don’t need any more proof.  They know what is right.

The black man might have done nothing wrong, but was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  He may have even tried to explain the misunderstanding to the crowd but the crowd found his obvious defensiveness proof of his guilt.  Eliminating him would clear the air of any misunderstanding.

As I watched the Atlanta video, I thought how human and reasonable Mr. Brooks seemed.  Surely nothing he might have done would justify  shooting him.  Yes, he was dead drunk and couldn’t admit it.  He didn’t know where he was and he had no ability to understand his position except that he was clearly concerned that anyone would find he was at fault and cause him to be rearrested while on probation for felony cruelty to children, false imprisonment, Simple Battery/Family, etc.  Human beings are complicated creatures.  Even the worst people in the world like Jeffrey Daumer can be pleasant people in a social situation.  I’m sure Hitler could be charming at a ball if you didn’t know anything about him.

A policeman has to size up a man for what he might do in a confrontation with the law.  A large man even without a gun can be dangerous, especially if he has the advantage of surprise, putting on a friendly front while desperate about his situation.  Forty minutes of small talk trying to get Mr. Brooks to admit that he had driven his car to the Wendy’s while being dead drunk -drunk enough not to be able to stay awake.  But after the amiable banter, when the policemen tried to place handcuffs on him, he struggles and as he is dragged to the ground reaches for a taser he sees, fires it at one officer, slugs the other, gets on his feet and runs away.  About 10 - 15 feet away, he turns and fires the taser again. He knows how it works.  He turns to continue fleeing and the policeman fires at him to stop him from escaping. Presumably the policeman was worried about his own safety, unsure in the rush of the moment, feeling the blow on his face as a sign he might be in danger, not trusting Mr. Brooks to act rationally, he fires three times.  

After the shooting Office Rolfe is trying to do CPR on Mr. Brooks. Somehow he is even more guilty in the press because he didn’t recover from shooting someone within 2 minutes to try to keep him from dying and asks Mr. Brooks to “hold on.” The finality of someone dying because you have shot them starts bringing you back to reality, I presume.

Now Officer Rolfe has been charged with 11 different crimes for what to him must feel like a denial of everything he was trained to do.  Sort of like the lynching mentioned above.  The district attorney must feel panicked just like the officer. A normal case where someone has been shot would presumably go through a couple of hearings before charging someone with murder.  The chief of police resigns to avoid having to discuss the situation so central to that job. What did she expect?  Did she think she wouldn’t have to face such an incident with large numbers of police with weapons trying to control a large metropolitan area covered with bars and cheap alcohol, people with guns, and thousands of human antagonisms.

But it’s hard for a human beings to be objective when they  feel that the whole of America is looking at them through the eyes of a voracious media  which still considers itself to  be the underappreciated defender of virtue rather than the untouchable dispenser of opinion.  Guilt is obvious to the media.  Only one side of the question is discussed.  Facts tend to be adjectives rather than nouns.  News remains news for many days.  News has legs rather than facts.  “If I use the word racism it sells.”  If I can connect the word “racism” to the President, it’ll sell more. 

 It’s their business model.

747 against World Trade Center. Who wins?

747 Kinetic Energy

Charles Jordan

A red glow from a melted mass was all that was left of the steel girders on which the World Trade Center was built. It had been five days since the building collapsed on September 11, 2001. There was a general disagreement as whether steel could become red hot just by falling, but one of the engineers/ physicists who had been hired to look into the horrific happening found that the kinetic energy of the steel falling from a maximum of 1350 feet down would be enough energy to melt the iron when it crashed to the ground, all those iron atoms bouncing into one another.

“Nonsense!" echoed the opinions of most people in New York City." There must have been something or someone incendiary messing with the building over the last year."

John Fulminery has been studying the age old records of heat-inducing chemicals and energy waves used by people like Isaac Newton to make alchemical changes in materials and thought these might be away to induce a change in steel from a rigid strong material to a floppy gelatinous mess.

When he suggested such a possibility, the investigators considered him to be a nutcase. There was a lot of iron at the base of the collapsed building and it was dense and red-hot.

If anything, they thought that the energy of a 747 striking the building containing a full load of gasoline should have been enough to heat the building supports to their melting point or at least weaken them enough to lead to a collapse.

But nobody could know what was in the minds of the perpetrators of this game, a single-minded group of jihadists whose world view reached back before Mohammadism to when Arabian science was at its zenith and Sufi mysticism was achieving magical transformations. 

The Motion of Sufi Dancing can generate energetic focal points which can change reality. If it can work for the human body, why not for large physical objects like airplanes. Perhaps there were complexes of motion involving the automatic pilots of the 747s which could lead to highly energetic resonances which could saw through or melt steel like butter.

Abdul Assiz had qualified to fly 747 airplanes early in their rollout into the industry.  But he quit flying with his family ask him to return to Konya as the oldest male Assiz in the family. Konya is the origin of the Whirling Dervish dancers whose connection with the loving center of the universe depends on body position and twist rate to generate a blood distribution in the head and states of ecstasy similar to drugs like LSD. It was through techniques like this that the Sufis managed to develop new ways to manipulate reality.

Assiz’s knowledge of the 747enabled these transformations of motion using the computer driven controls to enhance the energy content of the plane to levels high enough to weaken the ski steel girders and bring  down the buildings just due to the plane’s impact.

Stories of the attackers using box cutters to overwhelm the pilots were the only plausible way most people could understand how the jihadist could have succeeded, but the actual methods were more like the whirling dervishes than the criminal gangs.

Similar techniques where used to shield the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. The many-layered defense around the District of Columbia and our government were curiously quiet during this attack and never actually confronted a plane they seemingly couldn't see.

The last plane was planning to eliminate  the President and his family in the White House and it is amazing that one of the passengers had spent time in the US airbase at Incirlik,Turkey, just south of Konya. He recognized the motions of the attackers and managed to disrupt them causing the plane to dive into the ground in Pennsylvania, a heroic effort indeed.

Sufism is a way of life based on love, but any powerful method of relationships can bring energy to intent.  

Deterioration of Justice

Deterioration of Justice

Charles Jordan

January 29, 2020

It is more and more obvious that our justice system is distorted.  Enforcement of laws seems to be optional depending on the opinions of politicians and bureaucrats. Establishment of a law seems to rely on the policy preferences of single judges rather than the vote of Congress or the executive departments pronouncements. Executive orders take away the initiative of Congress due to that large group’s reluctance to do anything but fight the executive orders. Getting re-elected (staying elite) is a complicated thing. Reactionary government is bad. And it leads finally to reactionary leaders. To the have-nots outside of government, anything which will break down the delay and getting things done is a good thing.  They need change, the elites do not.  The elites lead their case with promises to help the have-nots since they represent a lot of votes, but find many reasons why the promises can not be kept.

The choice of Donald Trump as president is a case in point. He scorns the ineffective Congress as did Pres. Obama before him. President Obama was surrounded by the liberal elite who were doing quite well thank you. So he was inactive, not wanting to rock the boat. Whether Trump is visionary or just reactionary isn't clear, but he makes many people happy that something is happening in an over-the-hill country where anything goes.

Education for many an average student is a bust due to lack of motivation. “If I can’t handle the math, I’ll just stay home and mooch off my parents.”  The older elites in power are satisfied with just having power and enjoying it. Of course power requires being in control of the government, not solving the problems of the have-nots. Control requires ideological judges, friendly justice bureaucrats (FBI, CIA, DOJ), a media committed to political correctness, and a disdain for traditional verities.

Trump, with his unsocial outlook, partially due to his personal wealth, avoids fitting into a politically correct slot in the elites. Just by disturbing the status quo of the elites, he invigorates the have-nots and threatens the control of the elites.

Mind you, the word elites doesn't mean highly educated creative thinkers. It means "big guy on campus" manipulators like Bill Clinton, but with money. They drive the analysis with fear and smear. Cool headed thinking followed by constructive design and implementation is not their job.

How have the various problems that our black brethren face been addressed by our late black/white President Obama. His presidency was mostly a celebration of getting elected, of entering the elite. Pres. Trump trumpets the increase in black salaries, but he says it all wrong.

As many people have said, what we need is a redefinition of what standard-of-living means. Does the Dow Jones average define prosperity? Not if the structure drives more and more money into elite pockets. Is anyone “worth” $1 billion? I don't think so. On the other hand we are also not equal to each other. We can be equal before the law, but some will be found guilty and some innocent.  The new fixes we need to reverse some of these negative trends we face needs to be defined by laws that enable rather than disable our citizens.

Capitalism isn't perfect, but productive. Socialism is idealistic, but nonproductive. We live right now in a combination of capitalism and socialism. We just need to find a new mix to reverse the slide of assets from the middle class to the elites. I see the very poor as a separate case with more problems to solve requiring  special solutions to remove the stress which incapacitates them.

That would require a new classification of citizenry which most would find unacceptable. However, from the Greeks on, democracy never included the debilitated poor in their decisions.  In any case, serious problems require serious changes and even though things seem prosperous on Wall Street, there are serious structural problems clouding up the future of our unusual nation. A $1 trillion budget deficit is a problem. Can our first trillion dollar CEO solve it?

Charge for putting Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere?

“Time for Congress to put a price on carbon pollution?”  Barbara Boxer and Bernie Saunders  San Francisco Chronicle 1/9/2014

- A rebuttal by Charles Jordan

First of all, these two politically correct politicos aren’t talking about carbon, they are talking about carbon dioxide, not about the heavy hydrocarbons you used to hear about regarding air pollution due to incomplete burning of fossil fuels.  The theory is KISS “keep it simple stupid” and identify a simple villain, the goal of all politicians except when they need to obfuscate.

But carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.  Is water vapor a pollutant?  It is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.  But it has other uses as does carbon dioxide.  Both are central to life on earth, coming together particularly in plants.  My motto is “You can’t be green without carbon dioxide!”  To state the obvious, plants need carbon dioxide to grow.  Every fall, huge amounts of carbon dioxide go back into the atmosphere when leaves decay.  Do you notice it getting warmer in the fall? 

 Still the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, percentage-wise it’s           0.04%, is very small even when seemingly large amounts of carbon dioxide are generated by burning fossil fuels.  Right now 38.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year are generated by autos, power plants, trucks, etc. serving human activity which weren’t generated before the industrial revolution.  Sounds like a lot doesn’t it? (By the way,  only 10.4 Billion tons of that is carbon.  73% or 26 billion tons is oxygen which burning fossil fuels generates for the plants.)   Whenever we compare such a number to a reference like the .01 ton mass of the human body such numbers are impressive.  But comparing to a human reference is the classical mistake humans always make.  If we use our individual selves or even the total human endeavor as the reference, we risk overestimating our place in the universe. The total mass of the atmosphere is 5.3 Million Billion tons, so that new carbon dioxide is .0000072 of the present mass of the atmosphere per year.  And the mass of the atmosphere is one millionth of the mass of the planet.  We are indeed small fry compared to the earth. The sum of all the masses of all the humans (.01 tons each) is .018 of the carbon dioxide produced per year, .132/Billion of the atmosphere, and .132/million billion of the mass of the earth.  

Scientists have used what are called proxies (ratios of various isotopes)  to estimate the carbon dioxide levels millions of years ago to compare against the large temperature swings associated with major ice ages.  These estimates indicate that carbon dioxide has been at much higher levels earlier in the history of the earth, up to a factor of 20 times today’s level, even during major ice ages.

Even though the global temperature levels are up on the plateau associated with a non-ice age, this same plateau has been reached after the 4 major ice ages covering millions of years.  The actual measured global warming, an average over 100 years is an increase of less than 1/2 degree Celsius higher than that of the little ice age we are emerging from.  And, even though the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising smoothly, the temperature swings are oscillating rapidly with no particular correlation to the rise in carbon dioxide.  In fact, the average of the temperature oscillations has not increased in the latest 15 years and the oscillations seem to be more correlated to the oscillations in the water currents (El Niño, La Niña) than with carbon dioxide.

Climate scientists have programmed global climate models , their guesses about future developments in the climate. These models are not based only on physics laws, due to the lack of relevant starting values, an incomplete set of physical processes, and the lack of a comprehensive understanding of areas of science in which they are not trained.  They admit, in addition, that the models calculations are inaccurate due to the magnitude of the problem and the power of their computers.  Computer runs on the absolutely fastest computers in the world like Blue Waters (the petascale computer at the University of Illinois) take up to a month.  Then prediction of different models differ by as much as a factor of 5.  The gloriously incompetent IPCC reports have to include as many as 30 different calculations to give an idea of the uncertainty.  In addition, due to computational limitations, the models completely ignore local events like tornados, thunderstorms, hurricanes, monsoons, etc.   Pontifications about newsworthy events like the amount of rain, number of tornados, big hurricanes, power of monsoons, are manufactured out of whole cloth, handwaving arguments on general principles after the answer has been assumed.

Should we study climate change?  Absolutely!  Should we support alternative energy sources at a reasonable level?  Yes!  Do we know what we don’t know about the effect of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? No!  Do we even know whether more CO2 drives the avg. temperature up or down? No.  There are alternative explanations based on physics ignored by the climate scientists which project cooling rather than heating as we go forward and that is a lot more scary.  Should we tax the energy companies, the automobile manufacturers, and anyone who uses energy derived from burning carbon because carbon dioxide is a pollutant and give it to alternative technologies whose energy capacity will always be also-ran?  No!

Questions

Some things to think about!

Where does oil come from? (not from dinosaurs and plants) Look it up.

Is common sense inherited? I mean, Is it encoded in your DNA?

Are we all the same at some metaphysical(spiritual) level? Certainly not at a biological level!

What does it mean to say "The economy is doing well."?

Is there a happiness gene?

If a suggested truth can't be proven, only disproven, is there actual truth or only a set of opinions?

Prove that the world outside of yourself is not just a figment of your imagination.

There are two fundamental non-linear problems, investment and climate.
1. How can you tell what the next hot stock is going to be?
2. How can you tell what the weather in 100 years is going to be? 100 days? 10 days? Would you care to bet?

Have other questions for the group? Let's hear them!