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Nicely stated: former ethics chief Richard Painter on impeachment
Richard W. Painter @RWPUSA
We’re tired of the argument that impeachment is useless because the senate will acquit.
Acquittal of @realDonaldTrump in 2020 by Moscow Mitch et al. may happen, but will have the same credibility as an all white jury acquitting a Mississippi Klansman in 1965. Voters know that.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212440183
Helicon double-layer thruster
I can hear it now, "engage helicon double-layer thrusters and deploy deflector shield".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicon_double-layer_thruster
Applications[edit]
The primary application for this thruster design is intended for satellite station-keeping, long term LEO to GEO orbit transfers and deep space applications. While a typical design could provide a 50-year life span,[citation needed] or a saving of 1000 lb (˜454 kg) of launch weight for large satellites, this type of thruster could also significantly reduce the length of interplanetary space trips.[4]
For example, a trip to Mars could be shortened to 3 months instead of the 8 to 9 months with conventional chemical rockets.[5]
Stephen Colbert - Monologue and Opening - 9/5/19
Corporate America Is Finally Getting Sick of Your Guns
Did you hack into the family album pictures of Rooster and Harley?
Well after all that time off you decide to lead with an ignorant rant that mostly projects what you pathetic Trumpanzees own.
Pay attention, shithead:
"..racist, anti Semitic, basement dwelling collection of losers.."
Perfect description of the racist pricks that Trump described as being some of the many 'fine people' in Charleston.
You recall, the ones chanting 'the Jews will not replace us'? You righty jackasses own those dickheads, as well as the KKK and white supremacists who have openly expressed their support for Trump.
As for learning how to beat Trump? The '18 Congressional and gubernatorial elections and a wave of GOPER retirements are a lesson and a precursor for what is in store for Trumpisatnians.
In case you haven't noticed he is polling behind in every swing state he won against whichever Dem he's matched up against.
Lastly, you've got the wrong partnership. It's Putin and his ball washer Trump who will be crying in their Borscht come Jan of '21.
I remember it well, first because I was a week away from boarding a train to travel to Camp Lejeune for my first summer camp. A train because there was an airline strike.
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/today-in-labor-history-airline-workers-strike-in-196/
And then again, 21 years later, when it was
immortalized/satirized, darkly, in Full Metal Jacket.
"Before you ladies leave my island you will all be able to do the same thing."
Close up on the face of the increasingly deranged private Pyle. A visage that could serve for all of the crazed mfr's who would follow him, and actually do the same thing.
All 3 links are still live on the site I originally posted them.
Luckily I posted enough of the content, particularly the 'death rates by state'.
Let's see how these work. Yep, they worked in the preview so here you go:
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/death-by-gun-top-20-states-with-highest-rates/4/
http://vpc.org/press/states-with-weak-gun-laws-and-higher-gun-ownership-lead-nation-in-gun-deaths-new-data-for-2017-confirms/
http://vpc.org/state-firearm-death-rates-ranked-by-rate-2017/
This fact based vent of mine to a Trumpanzee nutter on another board was taken down because I forgot to remove the URL for the site.
It's too good not to live on, here. LOL!
Nobody is passing the buck. The absence of uniform background checks insures the flow of illegal guns from weaker gun control States to States and cities with stronger gun control, and it increases availability of guns for people who shouldn't have them within States with weaker controls, like IN.
Prove that is inaccurate or stop posting to me on this subject, and spare me your math illiteracy RE gun death rates.
That's why it's called influence. Glad your leg's OK though.
I pull my share, but it's usually pretty obvious when I do.
Donald Trump's Hurricane Dorian Map Appears to Be Doctored With a Sharpie to Include Alabama
This is just insane.
President Trump Receives Briefing On Hurricane Dorian At White House
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
By Charles P. Pierce
Sep 4, 2019
This is beyond belief. Even by this guy's standards for cheap lying, this is off the charts, across the floor, down the storm drain, into the river, and long gone off up the gulfstream.
Remember the other day when the president* said that Hurricane Dorian posed a threat to Alabama, and then the National Weather Service told all the people in Alabama to relax because the president* didn't know what he was talking about, so they all shouldn't run off to the Piggly Wiggly to buy 250 loaves of bread?
Whereupon, the president* expressed his annoyance at his own National Weather Service for its role in helping him look foolish? Again. (Maybe it was just their turn.) This resulted in a couple of days of social-media snark directed at the president*s Very Great Brain.
Cut to Wednesday morning in the Oval Office. From NBC News:
The map Trump displayed was the same as a model produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last week showing the hurricane's projected path cutting through central Florida— with one key difference. Where the original projection ended, a smaller, black circle that appeared to be drawn in sharpie was produced to include Alabama in the model.
Sharpie? He either doctored—or had doctored—the map with a freaking Sharpie? I wonder if he did it himself or contracted out the work to the Department Of Embarrassingly Clumsy Fakes, led by Secretary Of Embarrasingly Clumsy Fakes Epstein's Mother.
"I know that Alabama was in the original forecast," Trump told reporters later on Wednesday. "We have a better map... in all cases Alabama was hit... they gave it a 95% chance." Asked about the discrepancies with the original map, Trump said: "I don't know. I don't know."
A Sharpie.
This is just insane.
It's also possibly a federal crime.
Completely insane.
Pic Of The Moment: That NRA Logic
Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West Virginia, mountain mama/pastors' wives
Take me home, country roads and quick reloads
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212436815
Argument Between West Viriginia Pastors' Wives Ends With Gunfire in Church Parking Lot
Melinda Frye Toney, 44, is accused of pulling out a pistol that accidentally discharged during an argument with another pastor's wife at New Life Apostolic Church in Oak Hill on May 11.
Toney is the wife of New Life pastor Earl Toney while the other woman, Lori Haywood, is married to New Life's youth pastor, David Haywood,
Fayette Sheriff's Detective Kevin Willis told the Beckley Register-Herald the animosity between the two women had been simmering for some time. Their husbands had thought the women should publicly bury the hatchet to avoid additional strife.
"The pastor and the youth pastor had thought, 'Maybe we could get them together, we can hash this out and fix this before it escalates,' " Willis said Wednesday. "Of course, it just made it worse, I think."
https://www.newsweek.com/pastors-wife-gun-parking-lot-1457652
All in a day's work for Cadet Bone Spur.
It's the Astoria, OR underneath the name on the boat that he was having trouble with.
I don't know what the ad looks like on a phone or on a screen without script size enhancement, zoom level, above 100%.
But wait, there's more! Bonus #Sharpiegate images
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212439142
Well yeah, proximity to reservations probably merited more air time.
I don't remember hearing a single one of these in Chicago.
"We Were All Wounded at Wounded Knee", "The Witch Queen of New Orleans", "Wovoka", and "Maggie"
Can you dance to "We Were All Wounded...."?
Kick up your computer's zoom level.
And all of those little girls named Brandy are now 47ish.
I wonder if eyes glaze over when they tell people they were named after that song?
Another one hit wonder, most recently used in JCPenney TV ads.
At precisely the 18 sec mark the name on the back of the boat appears. The Pacific NW skies are often overcast as in the video. That's what I remember. And the fir trees in the background.
S'ok, I'll just sharpie my ass back on.
The lyrics tell of Brandy, a barmaid in a busy seaport harbor town which serves "a hundred ships a day." Though lonely sailors flirt with her, she pines for one who has long since left her because he claimed his life, his love, and his lady, was “the sea.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandy_(You%27re_a_Fine_Girl)
Name popularity effect[edit]
Following the song's release in 1972, "Brandy" increased in popularity as a girl's name in the United States.
According to data from the Social Security Administration,[8] drawn from "Social Security card applications for births that occurred in the United States," Brandy was the 353rd most popular name in 1971, 140th in 1972, and, in 1973 (the first full year after the song's popularity), 82nd.
Weekly charts[edit]
Chart (1972)
Peak
position
Australia[10] 10
Canadian RPM Top Singles[11] 1
New Zealand (Listener)[12] 5
South Africa[13] 14
UK 51
U.S. Billboard Hot 100 1
U.S. Billboard Easy Listening[14] 7
U.S. Cashbox[15]
Aside from a 'there's a port on a western bay' and Astoria, OR under the boat name, no clues. LOL!
Brandy | F-150 | Ford
Nice adaptation of a song to an ad. The cloudy skies look like those over the Astoria I remember driving through.
Did Trump Display an Altered Hurricane Dorian Map Showing Alabama in Its Path?
True
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/president-trump-dorian-map-sharpie/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Debunker%20-%20Wednesday%20September%204%202019%20-%20Did%20Trump%20Display%20an%20Altered%20Hurricane%20Map%20-%20recUn7D59zivvCgxx&utm_content=Daily%20Debunker%20-%20Wednesday%20September%204%202019%20-%20Did%20Trump%20Display%20an%20Altered%20Hurricane%20Map%20-%20recUn7D59zivvCgxx+CID_a53cc1f902a01760e557a8e923031982&utm_source=CampaignMonitor&utm_term=Read%20more
A National Hurricane Center graphic purporting to show the storm's path and displayed at the White House carried something of a black mark.
We sent questions to the White House asking why the black mark was drawn onto the map that was displayed during the briefing , and why President Trump displayed that particular map (which was outdated by almost a week) instead of a current one. We have not yet received answers to our questions.
Godot will show up sooner than the answers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot
The word 'think' nowhere belongs in any sentence describing Trump's words or actions.
They did a remix with these lyrics for Trump....
Now Sharpiegate does not bother me
Does your conscience bother you?
Tell the truth
Trump Showed Off A Fake Hurricane Dorian Forecast Map To Support His False Claim It Would Hit Alabama
Asked why the map appeared to be altered with a Sharpie, Trump told reporters, “I don’t know.”
Picture of Julia Reinstein
Julia Reinstein
Posted on September 4, 2019, at 3:47 p.m. ET
President Trump on Wednesday displayed a Hurricane Dorian forecast map that appeared to have been doctored to falsely show the powerful storm was on track to hit Alabama.
Trump showed off the map in the Oval Office after falsely stating in a tweet Sunday that Alabama was among the several states expected to face impacts from the hurricane, raising the ire of meteorologists and government forecasters.
About 20 minutes after Trump’s tweet Sunday, the National Weather Service office in Birmingham took the unusual step of tweeting that “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian.”
NWS Birmingham
? @NWSBirmingham
Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will remain too far east. #alwx
James Spann, a renowned broadcast meteorologist in Alabama, also hit back at the president’s false claim, tweeting, “Alabama will not be impacted by Dorian in any way.”
“I have zero interest in politics. Dorian will not affect Alabama in any way. That is not a political statement,” Spann said in a tweet.
Trump’s tweet was later fact-checked by Jonathan Karl on ABC World News, prompting the president to lash out at the reporter, calling it a “phony hurricane report by [a] lightweight reporter.” Trump went on to claim — without citing any sources and contrary to his own government’s forecast — that “under certain original scenarios, it was in fact correct that Alabama could have received some ‘hurt.’”
On Wednesday, Trump doubled down on the false claim, displaying a map that appeared to have been marked up with a Sharpie to show the hurricane’s trajectory extending into southeastern Alabama.
Spokespeople for the White House and National Weather Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Under federal law, it is illegal to pass off a doctored National Weather Service forecast as official, weather journalist Dennis Mersereau pointed out.
“Whoever knowingly issues or publishes any counterfeit weather forecast or warning of weather conditions falsely representing such forecast or warning to have been issued or published by the Weather Bureau, United States Signal Service, or other branch of the Government service, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ninety days, or both,” the law states.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/juliareinstein/trump-hurricane-dorian-fake-weather-map-alabama-sharpie
Hey to them it's just recess and passing out crayolas.
Take another look, I've improved it.
Trump releases photo showing he's taller than Obama
Sharpiegate
trump* releases new 'official' proof of his inauguration crowd size
28. That's gold, Jerry!
Gold!
8. Gee,
another self-inflicted wound to the Orangerest!
He started a sharpie meme. Cool!
19. Heads above
President Obama is heads taller that the dumbest persons on earth. He stands much taller than djt in decency, intelligence, empathy, kindness and the list goes on an on. DJT is a very small man inside.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212437698
Americans Shocked by Spectacle of Legislative Body Taking Action
By Andy Borowitz
10:33 A.M.
Photograph by Tolga Akmen / AFP / Getty
LONDON (The Borowitz Report)—Americans were shocked on Tuesday by the spectacle of a legislative body appearing to take action.
Across the U.S., television viewers watched with mouths agape at startling images of legislators seemingly intent on performing their constitutional duties.
Adding to Americans’ sense of astonishment, the legislators showed evidence of putting their country before party in an effort to rein in the actions of a reckless leader who had not garnered the majority of his nation’s votes.
Even more baffling to U.S. viewers, the legislators were furious that the leader had reduced the number of days that they had to show up to do their jobs.
Harland Dorrinson, who watched the bizarre proceedings on television at a bar in Pittsburgh, was “totally perplexed” by what he saw.
“From what I could tell, the legislators were providing oversight over the executive branch in order to protect their country from disaster,” he said. “It was so weird.”
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/americans-shocked-by-spectacle-of-legislative-body-taking-action?source=EDT_NYR_EDIT_NEWSLETTER_0_imagenewsletter_Borowitz_ZZ&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Borowitz_090419&utm_medium=email&bxid=5be9d70d24c17c6adf3edd69&cndid=24399211&esrc=NYR_BOROWITZ_BLOG&mbid=&utm_term=TNY_Borowitz
If he were a Dem the RW blogosphere conspiracy theory machine would report that Trump is near death.
Governing by Owning the Libs
When a president’s entire motivation is to antagonize the people who didn’t vote for him.
By Tom Scocca
Sept 03, 2019•5:45 AM
Donald Trump looks smug as he gestures toward a crowd at a campaign rally.
President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 2018.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/09/donald-trumps-innovation-governing-by-owning-the-libs.html
Fine: Donald Trump wanted to buy Greenland, or at least wanted to talk about wanting to buy Greenland. Presidents are allowed to be silly and imperialist; taking over Greenland is mild stuff compared with, say, planting a flag on the moon.
But the original Wall Street Journal story that broke the news of Trump’s desire contained one truly alarming passage, and it was supposed to be reassuring: One of the Journal’s sources said that the president’s interest in buying Greenland was probably not “a serious inquiry,” because “Mr. Trump hadn’t floated the idea at a campaign rally yet.”
This—like the rapid melting of the Arctic that would make Greenland an attractive future acquisition—was simply a background fact: If the president of the United States is serious about doing something, he will announce it at a campaign rally.
There are many recurring themes that help explain what’s happening in the United States under Donald Trump: incompetence, cruelty, racism, self-dealing, misogyny.
But the perpetual campaign rally gives shape to all the others. The Trump presidency is the result of politics organized around unending partisan aggression, which has driven out even the pretense of other aims. The only goal of power in the Trump era is to own the libs.
Owning the libs is the purpose behind an otherwise purposeless policy agenda. Why would the administration roll back methane emission limits and fuel-efficiency restrictions, when the power and automotive industries have asked it not to? Why would it go to the trouble of announcing restrictions that would make it harder for a small fraction of members of the armed forces to get citizenship for their children? Why force a losing legal battle on adding a citizenship question to the census?
In the permanent campaign rally, the point of governing is to let everyone know who’s who.
“As president,” Eric Levitz wrote in New York magazine last week, “Trump has shown a singular disinterest in appealing to—or showing even the smallest bit of deference to the interests of—those outside his party’s coalition.”
Levitz was responding to the president’s expressions of contempt for Puerto Rico, as another hurricane closed in on the island, and to a Trump-Pence fundraising email declaring, of the Democrats, “this is our country, not theirs.”
It’s true that Donald Trump has no interest in acting as president of the entire country. At most, he gestures toward the idea of making the country so rich and so proud that the people who’ve been against him will eventually have to submit to him in gratitude.
But the us-versus-them message is not just an expression of Trump’s individual personality defects—rather, Trump is president because his personality defects harmonize with the political movement that was already in control of his party.
Last month, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin dropped by the Kentucky Democratic Party’s booth at the state fair. For the occasion, Bevin was wearing a bright blue-and-white blazer printed all over with images of Donald Trump’s face. Matt Bevin was elected in November 2015, before Trump had even won the Republican nomination for president.
It’s notable—though far from dispositive—that the Democratic booth staffers disputed news reports that called the governor’s visit “trolling,” saying instead that they had a “nice long conversation.” The Trump regalia, then, was part of what passes for the everyday order of business.
It was normal, for people who live in Kentucky, that the governor of their state, performing his ceremonial duties at a century-old event for the full citizenry, should choose to make himself a billboard for the president’s face. In the same way, it’s normal for Bevin to be fighting a running court battle to try to force hundreds of thousands of people off Medicaid, because Medicaid expansion was part of the Affordable Care Act, and the Affordable Care Act was a win for the Democrats. It’s just the team he’s on.
In the permanent campaign rally, the point of governing is to let everyone know who’s who. This is why Ken Cuccinelli, the acting head of Citizenship and Immigration Services and another figure whose taste for partisan warfare predates Trump, gloated on Twitter about the work his office was doing to block immigration, writing “the best is yet to come!”
It’s why when pressed about the poem at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, the tired and the poor and so on, he disavowed the message—just as Stephen Miller, the baleful engineer of the administration’s anti-immigrant machinery, had disavowed it two years before. The ruling party has no use for the Statue of Liberty, because the Statue of Liberty is understood to belong to everyone.
This has been developing for a long time: Next year will be the 25th anniversary of the government shutdown led by Newt Gingrich, when the speaker of the House decided it was better to disable the day-to-day operations of the country than to cooperate with a Democratic president.
At the time, it was understood to be a showdown between one governing agenda and another. In the intervening years, though, the deed itself became the point, an act of pure negation.
By 2013, when the Tea Party and Ted Cruz shut down the government, the purpose was simply to sabotage the Affordable Care Act—not to produce any alternative policy but to try to use control of a single house of Congress to nullify what had already been made law.
Some might have gullibly taken the Tea Party for a group with identifiable policy priorities. But the Tea Party yelled about fiscal restraint because it wanted to restrain a Democratic president from being able to spend money. When a Republican got back into the White House, the budgetary restraint went away.
And THAT is the Rosetta Stone for understanding the hypocrisy, double standards, moral imbecility and fiscal irresponsibility of Trump and his mother f'ing Trumpanzees.
Opposition was the only principle. Eventually, inexorably, this led to the moment that Mitch McConnell simply refused to consider any Supreme Court nominee Barack Obama might nominate—followed by John McCain, the mascot of old-fashioned statesmanship and civility, declaring his intention to block any nomination that might be made by a President Hillary Clinton, as well. The alternative to a Republican justice would be no justice at all.
And a broken government is better than a shared one. In Trump, the party has found a figure who frees it from even pretending to care about running the country.
Where the George W. Bush administration boasted that “when we act, we create our own reality,” the Trump administration dispenses with action and reality alike.
Every decision or announcement or tweet is pure antagonism, a boast of a win built on taunting the losers. By the time anyone tries to figure out what happened—whether the wording of the executive order makes legal sense, or the draft memo ever came to be, or where anybody put the detained babies—the president has gotten bored and moved on.
The insight of Donald Trump and the people around him, then, is that the spirit of negation is not just for obstructing what your opponents want to do, but can extend to the entire project of being in charge of the government.
If you’re weak enough to care, by the way, the Federal Election Commission just joined the list of disabled institutions, with one of its four existing commissioners—out of a body that’s supposed to have six—resigning at the end of August.
That leaves it without a quorum and therefore unable to enforce election law. The vacancies are there because the Trump administration abandoned the traditional practice of filling the seats two at a time, by naming one Republican and one Democratic nominee. Instead it submitted a single name, a former Trump campaign lawyer. The libs have been owned.
Actually, it's just a lease and the buyout for the U.S. will be a terrific deal.
I demurred from posting that one. Been swatting at the cheap shots, pun not intended, on Chicago gun violence, with a real idiot on another board. Educated myself thoroughly on the subject though.
Mayor nailed it, just as I've been doing right along:
‘Keep Our Name Out Of Your Mouth’ About Gun Control
Lori Lightfoot hit out at the Republican Texas senator after he cited Chicago as an example for why “gun control doesn’t work.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ted-cruz-chicago-mayor-gun-control_n_5d6e5935e4b0cdfe0575a972
Lori Lightfoot??Verified account? @LightfootForChi
Follow Follow @LightfootForChi
60% of illegal firearms recovered in Chicago come from outside IL—mostly from states dominated by coward Republicans like you who refuse to enact commonsense gun legislation. Keep our name out of your mouth. https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1168602589254029313 …
Ted Cruz??Verified account? @tedcruz
Follow Follow @tedcruz
Ted Cruz Retweeted Breitbart News
Gun control doesn’t work. Look at Chicago. Disarming law-abiding citizens isn’t the answer. Stopping violent criminals—prosecuting & getting them off the street—BEFORE they commit more violent crimes is the most effective way to reduce murder rates. Let’s protect our citizens.
She kept her knife out and cut hapless Ted, again.
Lori Lightfoot
? @LightfootForChi
Replying to @LightfootForChi
When @tedcruz and the @gop dismiss common sense gun policies, they disrespect victims and their families, who deserve to live without pain and fear.
Lightfoot struck a similar harsh tone with Ivanka Trump, an adviser to and the daughter of President Donald Trump, last month after she posted an error-strewn tweet about Chicago’s gun violence.
“It’s important when we’re talking about people’s lives to actually get the facts correct, which one can easily do if you actually cared about getting it right,” Lightfoot said at the time.
https://www.npr.org/2017/10/05/555580598/fact-check-is-chicago-proof-that-gun-laws-don-t-work
State lines don't stop guns
It's important to remember here that Chicago is very close to two states that have relatively weak gun laws: Wisconsin and Indiana. So while it's easy to pick on Chicago (or any other high-crime city) for its ugly statistics, says one expert, taking bordering states into account weakens this gun-advocacy talking point.
"It's not a scientific study. It's an anecdote," said Philip Cook, a professor of public policy studies at Duke University. "They might have pointed to Washington, D.C., back in the days when D.C. banned handguns and yet had high gun-violence rates. Those bans are only at best partially effective, because the borders are permeable."
D.C. borders Virginia, which does not have strong gun laws. (It gets a D from the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.)
Neither Wisconsin nor Indiana requires licenses or permits to purchase a gun, for example, nor do they require waiting periods. While Illinois has that B+ rating from the law center, Wisconsin has a C- and Indiana a D-.
And there's good evidence that being next-door to those states keeps Chicago criminals well-supplied with guns.
A 2015 study of guns in Chicago, co-authored by Cook, found that more than 60 percent of new guns used in Chicago gang-related crimes and 31.6 percent used in non-gang-related crimes between 2009 and 2013 were bought in other states.
Indiana was a particularly heavy supplier, providing nearly one-third of the gang guns and nearly one-fifth of the non-gang guns.
Other evidence corroborates this — a 2014 Chicago Police Department report found that Indiana accounted for 19 percent of all guns recovered by the department between 2009 and 2013.
New firearms trace data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives released last week likewise shows that Illinois as a whole faces a massive influx of guns. Of around 8,700 firearms recovered in Illinois and for which the bureau found a source state, more than half came from out of state — 1,366, nearly 16 percent, came from Indiana alone.
By comparison, 82 percent of guns recovered in Indiana and traced were from within Indiana, suggesting that criminals in that state don't have to cross state lines, like those in Illinois, to get their weapons.
Good start.
Bayou Brief, also the name of a LA discount men's underwear outlet where Rooster gets good deals.
I knew you were in there, but I also know that neither of us knew about the anti-sway slosh-buckets or most of the details that went into the engineering.
NOW we ALL do.
Also, you didn't have any Ghostbusters lines in your original post.
Column: Vista Tower tour reveals the engineering secrets that hold up Chicago’s latest skyline standout
Available for your viewing, from a distance, this Thur. evening as the cameras scan north from Soldier Field for the kickoff game of the 100th season of the NFL.
Also loving views will surely be had of the newly unveiled statues of NFL founder G.S., and W. Payton.
The attention to detail that has gone into the design and construction of this particular building is mind boggling.
I started copying and pasting this before I finished reading the entire story. Damned post is nearly as long as the building is tall.
By Blair Kamin
Chicago Tribune |
Sep 03, 2019 | 5:00 AM
A view to the northwest from the open 83rd-story blow-through floor of Vista Tower on Aug. 27, 2019. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)
As real estate agents like to say, the view from the 83rd floor of Chicago’s under-construction Vista Tower is to die for. The vast blue-green expanse of Lake Michigan spreads to the east, north and south. Downtown skyscrapers look like toys.
But this raw concrete space, roughly 25 feet high, is never going to become some billionaire’s penthouse.
Instead, it’s going to remain empty even though a unit here would likely sell for well over $10 million. The floor will be covered by a screenlike perimeter wall that lets Chicago’s famous winds whip right through the space. This so-called blow-through floor, the first of its kind in Chicago, is expected to dramatically cut wind-induced sway.
Chandeliers in the condominiums above and below won’t rattle. Whitecaps won’t appear in the toilets. Residents won’t reach for motion sickness pills, as they’ve done in other supertall buildings plagued by high winds.
Neither will Dogs and cats, living together or not, howl and meow in terror.
Welcome to the Vista Tower, which will be Chicago’s third-tallest building when it opens next year. Designed by Chicago star architect Jeanne Gang, it’s also going to be the world’s tallest building designed by a woman.
On Tuesday, Tribune photographer Brian Cassella and I took a tour of the 101-story, 1,191-foot skyscraper to see firsthand the engineering features that undergird its striking curvilinear shape. Few of these elements are visible to passersby, but they’re essential to making the tower stand up — and make a profit for its developers.
We saw other unusual things besides the quirky blow-through floor. Vista’s perimeter columns step outward or inward instead of going straight up.
We also viewed the outside of one of six tanks tucked in the tower’s top. The tanks will hold more than 400,000 gallons of water.
When the wind pushes the tower one way, the water will slosh in the opposite direction, joining with the blow-through floor to counteract sway.
Monroe Harbor is seen from the 64th floor of Vista Tower on Aug. 27, 2019. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)
These things are not frills. A skyscraper’s structure, including foundations and the aboveground assembly of columns and beams, can account for up to 30% of its construction cost, according to Dave Eckmann, who runs the Chicago office of Magnusson Klemencic Associates, a Seattle-based structural engineering firm with a branch office in Chicago.
Eckmann, who attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s architecture school at the same time as Gang, was our tour guide. From the outset, he and other members of the firm teamed with the architect on the Vista Tower design.
“I like to work with engineers early on in any project,” said Gang, whose father was a civil engineer in Boone County, which encompasses her hometown of Belvidere. “It gives you more insight: What are the main forces (of wind and gravity) that you’re going to have to resist, that you’re having to put money into? Knowing that up front is important."
Backed by a joint venture of Chicago Magellan Development Group and China’s Wanda Group, the Vista Tower occupies a complex multilevel site at 363 E. Upper Wacker Drive. The first 11 floors above East Wacker will contain a hotel.
There will be 396 condos on floors 13 to 93. Additional levels, including mechanical floors at the tower’s top and parking underneath, bring the overall height to 101 stories.
Vista Tower, which is still under construction, as viewed from Navy Pier on Aug. 27, 2019. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)
Combine that jumbo size with a prime riverfront site and eye-catching geometry — stacks of tapering, truncated pyramids that alternate between right-side-up and upside-down — and you have a tower that has redrawn Chicago’s skyline.
Vista’s snaking curves stand out in a city where the right angle has long been king. So does its sleekness, which contrasts with the muscular X-bracing of the former John Hancock Center and other high-rises that boldly express the hidden heavy lifting. The tower is further distinguished by its ultraskinny top, which is nearly six times as thin as the highest floor of the adjoining Aon Center.
“It’s definitely a different aesthetic,” said Daniel Safarik, who edits the journal of the Chicago-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, which monitors skyscrapers worldwide. “For lack of a better word, luxury is communicated by smoothness or sleekness as opposed to musculature.”
Beginning with the internal frames of steel that made skyscrapers possible in the 1880s, Chicago has long been a center of innovative structural design. But the developers cranking out formulaic apartment high-rises in the current building boom have shown scant interest in breaking out of the box.
As a result, many of the city’s top architects have been exporting their best ideas to fast-growing parts of the world, like China, that are more receptive to new ideas. Now, ironically, Chinese money — in the form of the Wanda Group’s investment in the Vista Tower— is bringing leading-edge concepts back to Chicago.
Engineering the Vista Tower
The three stalks of the Vista Tower reach up to 1,191 feet tall, which will make it Chicago's third tallest building. At the top of the tower, the footprint is smaller than other super tall structures in Chicago. Here are some of the key innovations used by engineers to create the structure.
Buttressed core and ‘spine’ wall
The core structure of the Vista Tower has two key features.
‘Spine’ wall: A concrete wall in the tower’s midsection links the two outer cores. This helps the two towers act as one unit. The wall is perforated so doors and hallways go through.
Buttressed core: The core structures in the two outer stalks are built out to the outer edge of the building. The outer walls are also perforated, leaving openings for windows.
Walking columns
The inward and outward curves (zigzag shape) of the towers are supported by columns that shift in or out between floors.
Columns move in or out 5 inches per floor
Floor plate
The columns on floors where the inner and outer angles intersect, where the building shape is most narrow, do not shift.
Tuned liquid sloshing dampers
Six pools of water, containing more than 400,000 gallons of water, are positioned in the top floors of the tower to reduce the effect of wind.
Blow-through floor
A double-height floor at level 83 is left vacant without windows allowing the wind to blow straight through. Special, perforated covers will allow air to flow through.
Those are sort of being reexported and we’re adapting them to the American market,” Safarik said.
As we waited for the construction elevator that would take us up the tower’s south side, Eckmann took out a pen and drew a diagram of the Vista Tower’s unusual floor plan.
These days, a typical skyscraper is shaped like a square or rectangle, with an elevator core encased in concrete set in the middle. Like a silo, the core helps brace the high-rise against the overturning force of the wind. Vista is different.
Its three high-rise tiers, which wags have compared to a cellphone’s signal bars, are offset. That gives the building eight corners instead of the usual four.
More important, the tower’s midsection has two elevator cores (one on the east, the other to the west) linked by a concrete wall that runs between them. Other walls, also perforated to make way for doors, extend the core to the building’s perimeter, further strengthening it against the wind. The engineers call the arrangement a “buttressed core.”
David Fields, a Magnusson Klemencic senior principal who worked on Vista Tower with the firm’s CEO, Ron Klemencic, compares the design to a skier who spreads his stance to create stability.
A tree offers another useful metaphor. “Its shape perfectly demonstrates what’s needed," Fields said in a telephone interview. "It gets thinner at the top. When the wind blows, it’s not going to fall over.”
A view of Buckingham Fountain and the Museum Campus from Vista Tower on Aug. 27, 2019. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)
How does Vista Tower compare?
http://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/blair-kamin/ct-biz-vista-tower-structure-kamin-20190903-duclxwejdbfktkfwatd3judnim-story.html
John Hancock Center Vista Tower Willis Tower Trump Tower Aon Center
Completed: 1974 2009 2020 1973 1969
1,451 ft 1,389 ft 1,191 ft 1,136 ft 1,128 ft
The arrangement also has an urban design benefit: It means that the middle tier doesn’t have a core that needs to anchored in the earth. That leaves the ground free for a pathway that will link a park in the middle of the Lake Shore East development, of which Vista is a part, with the vibrant downtown riverwalk.
After the hoist elevator took us upward, Cassella and I got a taste of the high life that one of the building’s occupants will enjoy. The roof of Vista’s middle tier doubles as an 8,000-square-foot outdoor deck for a 71st floor penthouse in the building’s top tier. The deck will be outfitted with an elevated infinity pool — a nice spot to sip a pina colada after a tough day at the office.
Yeah, anyone who can afford a unit? Their 'tough days at the office' were over long ago. The nut was made, pour another pina colada; thank you very much.
Climbing 12 flights of stairs (an elevator wasn’t available), the tour group reached the blow-through floor on 83. The prevailing winds, which come from the southwest, were howling. That’s typical at high elevations, Eckmann explained. There’s nothing to get in the wind’s way.
According to the engineers, the blow-through floor is expected to cut wind-induced sway by nearly 25%. But it can’t single-handedly stabilize the tower’s uppermost floors.
Call in the aforementioned water tanks, which go by the name of “tuned liquid sloshing dampers.”
Eckmann pointed his smartphone’s flashlight at a concrete wall that encloses two of the dampers, which are tucked inside the 83rd floor’s elevator core. Four smaller pools will be hidden in mechanical levels at the top.
Other superthin Chicago high-rises, like 150 North Riverside, use dampers to counteract sway. But none has an exterior as complex as Vista’s.
To accommodate the building’s curves without sacrificing usable floor space, the engineers worked with Gang to make Vista’s perimeter columns step inward and outward instead of going straight up. Each column projects about 5 inches outward or inward from the one beneath it.
The arrangement, which the engineers call “walking columns,” was visible as Cassella and I looked through the windows on the 64th floor. Viewed from afar, the stepping pattern creates the illusion of Vista’s curves.
It’s also functional. Had the perimeter columns been set on a diagonal, about 5 feet of interior space would have been unusable because of the gap between the column and the exterior walls, Eckmann said. Such a tight fit was equally important in Vista’s hotel rooms, which are considerably smaller than the condos.
“Every inch counts,” Gang said.
A view of Lakeshore East from Vista Tower on Aug. 27, 2019. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)
With construction workers still putting interior stud walls and the rest of the tower’s glass into place, it remains to be seen whether form truly follows function at the Vista Tower.
When I posted pictures of the skyscraper and Gang’s famously curvaceous Aqua Tower on Twitter last week, the architecture critic Witold Rybczynski derisively labeled them “architecture as product design.”
But when I interviewed Gang, she said the tower’s design is functional, saying it accommodates a variety of uses, from the hotel to large and small condos.
Other elements of the design, which might seem purely aesthetic, also have a purpose.
Consider the tapering frustums, which are sheathed in greenish glass that shifts from dark to light. The darker glass is meant to prevent the narrower sections of the frustums from overheating. The lighter glass opens the wider sections, which are less prone to solar gain, to daylight. The glass itself is not highly reflective, Gang said, which should reduce the chance of bird collisions.
Sometimes skyscrapers are as fascinating in this in-between construction stage as when they’re finished. That’s certainly the case at the Vista Tower, which is sure to be a topic of conversation and debate at the upcoming Chicago Architecture Biennial, the big design exhibition that opens Sept. 19, and the Council on Tall Building and Urban Habitat’s 10th world congress, which starts here Oct. 28.
The engineers may be overlooked in the publicity brochures for Vista, but without their expertise, the tower would be impossible.
“We don’t get involved in projects (where the clients say) ‘Here it is — go engineer it up,’ ” Eckmann said. “That not where we can bring value.”
Blair Kamin is a Tribune critic.
Unskilled Man Fears He Will Lose Job in Recession
By Andy Borowitz
Photograph by Chip Somodevilla / Getty
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—A man with no identifiable skills is deeply worried that a recession could cause him to lose his job, people close to the man have confirmed.
The man, who has barely clung to his job for the past two and a half years, is justified in believing that an economic downturn would result in his unemployment, experts said.
“When the economy is good, it’s possible for someone like him to hold down a job for which he is woefully unqualified,” Harland Dorrinson, a human-resources specialist, said. “But when the economy goes south, look out.”
Dorrinson said that the unskilled man’s résumé, which lists six bankruptcies and multiple business failures, could come under scrutiny in the event of a recession.
“His employers might find themselves asking, ‘How did he get this job in the first place?’ ” Dorrinson said.
Additionally, the man’s near-total lack of education—evidenced by his inability to spell common one-syllable words or to identify the century in which the airplane was invented—could make him vulnerable to termination, the human-resources expert said.
“On the plus side, he enjoys watching television for eight hours a day,” Dorrinson said. “During a recession, he’ll be able to do even more of that.”