Saturday, September 15, 2018

Colectiv 2015

In a month or so there will be 3 years since the disaster in the Collective Club in București (pronounced Boocooresht, meaning joyful in Romanian) during the night of Halloween 2015. According to media, 64 people died, many more wounded due to a fire that spread rapidly during a free concert by the metal band "Goodbye to Gravity". The name of the lead guitarist, Vlad Țelea. Pretty close to Vlad Țepeș. (4 of the members of the band supposedly died).

First the coincidence of the date with the referendum scheduled for October 7 called in Romania by the organizers "Referendum for family". On a new law voted in 2013 the approval rate for a referendum was lowered to 12.5%. However this one will pass with much more cause Romanians are religious and the Church is involved. Worries are about future referenda with the same approval rate but much lower participation. Like only of one minority and Romanian citizens in the neighboring Hungary with right to vote. (Nevermind the signatures required for the initiative where on improvised forms with no date are more than 2 years old and there is no law on how the signatures need to be verified and nobody knows who did it.)

Never got to look close and without emotions at the all bare facts surrounding the event.

Weeks before the event i discovered something that at that time i liked because of the quality of voices and performance. Another version of a song by supposed Russian-Jewish Turetski choir. However i'm not sure anymore the're Russians. A bit Jews maybe.

There are visual and non-visual elements in this video that where later present in that fire and the events after. At the Collective the fire started with fireworks first setting on fire soundproofing foam insulation on the columns next to stage.

The bass vocalist in the video above looked a lot like then Prime Minister Victor Ponta. Nowadays i found that both look like the very popular Hungarian singer Akos Kocvacs. No wonder he's popular. He's got a great voice. I just saw some videos and listened and in some song his voice goes high and low enough to make me believe he's got the same vocal range.

Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta that week went in Mexico at the invitation of the President there for a minor conference. In the middle of controversies, like always in Romania in the last 30 years or since 89 anticommunist revolution, he said before he left. "I don't wanna step over bodies." (If he knew what was going to happen how come he didn't remained and try to prevent it).

Now i realize there could have been a coincidence between me posting that video either on fb or g+ (can't find it, i have several thousands posts on both) and him being pushed to resign at the time before the fire.

For me it was the week of 4 Steves. That Tuesday afternoon i was at Lucky Autobody owned by a Korean guy named Steve. Steve that day was drunk and was handling a shotgun by the (local) brand Leupold and Stevens. I was high from the smoke at the apartment but also in the parking lot there while trying to fix my truck (leaking intake gasket). A couple of F15s flew over. Juan the mechanic just came from Mexico. He had a red eye and also was busy because of the days off he took to go to Mexico. All the guys in the shop where around Steve arguing and trying to convince him of something.

That evening or the next days i heard on the news at the same time i was in that shop Steve Preston and other guy died in an explosion inside a tank owned by him he was renting for a film making. I knew about him cause i got towed once by one of his trucks and it had an army star on it and i asked the driver why and he said his owner is a fan of everything army. (Who uses live ammo in a private tank during a film making?).

So i searched another mechanic by asking quotes on the phone and went to Meineke accros the Four Square Church and the Masonic Temple in Tigard. There, another guy named Steve who was looking like an older celebrity, back then i could not identify them, i was in smoke all the time. Several days later, on Halloween eve in the morning, around the time the disaster happened (10 hours difference) i was in the Baxter store next to Texas Style Barbecue on 99 trying to buy some parts for the guys at Meineke (i think i replaced all the bolts for the intake with double threaded screws like those for exhaust and had a helicoil installed in a stripped thread etc. while the old gasket was found twisted and leaking) and a cop was telling the salespeople in the store a story about getting many phone calls from people asking to help someone but he can't because the victim is friend with his aggressor or something. I think those days i repeated a lot the words "burning reach" and "burning lean" while in conversations with mechanics. After they put the truck together it was still burning reach (too much gasoline in the mixture air/gas, too low mileage, too hot exhaust and catalytic also heating transmission and ruining clutches and catalytic converters, and also bad emissions) and later i found a missing gasket on the throttle body and another vacuum leak. Soon after i got mileages like 27 mpg, which did not happened at that truck even when it was new, then it dropped somewhere around 22. Could never make it that way again. Nowadays the last of the three cheap, aftermarket catalysts i installed is gone and i got bad emissions again (always had with that Ess 10, always for reasons).

Probably around May of 2016, after i bought a Chinese made basic Gibson guitar i saw online one of the victims of the fire that was making the news trying to play a guitar with no fingers by the time i bought my guitar from... Fry's in Wilsonville.

At the time the picture seemed photoshopped to me. Today i looked for more pictures and i found one done in 2017 that shows her right hand at the shoulder in a much worse shape. Don't know, i'm not a doctor but doesn't seem right.

Ever since i saw the first picture, others, i started to doubt that everything even happened they way they said. Or if it happened at all.

Next prime minister was a so called independent or technician. Today i realized his face was deliberately arranged to look like he was maybe... burnt?

His name, Cioloș, (unheard of before) supposedly was a Romanian euro-parliamentary or something at Brussels, specialist in agriculture) pronounced Cholosh , reminds of the Russian word человек, pronounced Cholovek, which means men. I identified him later as being the Hungarian actor György Cserhalmi with a bit of makeup or photoshop. At that time i already wrote a post about resemblances of Romanian and other politicians with actors in a post in december 2014, but had no idea of the dimension of the fact or they were all Hungarians, but his face, typical Hungarian for the first time rose to me that suspicion (To me that face certainly could not have been Romanian).

Was the whole episode Colectiv a (successful) attempt for brainwashing everybody who saw the post and take Ponta out of the public eye in the same time? It worked for me anyways cause i gave up saying Ponta looked like that bass vocalist, Evgeny Kulmis. Until last few days when i discovered the resemblance with Akos Kovacs as well.

BTW When French Minister Nicolas Hulot quit recently and i saw his face in the news i realized he looked like that of György Cserhalmi as well. With a different makeup of course.

In Romania a criminal lawsuit is usually combined or completed with so call civil parts. I this case there are hundreds of civil co-complainants that need to be all present at the terms of the lawsuit that started in March 21 2017 after one year and a half of investigation by prosecutors. Only the procedure of verification of their presence lasts up to an hour. If one is missing the session is rescheduled.

After many delays due to rescheduling, the judge in charge with the suite (no jurors in Romania) has retired as of August 31 this year and media says the suit will probably be re-started from scratch. Talking about 64 dead,  many more wounded and a country which is EU member.

Will continue, enough for tonight and the whole week.

Wednesday, September 12, 2018

Plângere penală și civilă.

Din momentul în care am aflat de Small Claims Court în SUA în mintea mea a început o mare nelămurire cu privire la sistemul de justiție american și modul în care se fac plângeri.

Ce este Small Claims Court. Pe lângă sau în cadrul a ceea ce în România sunt judecătoriile, curțile de cel mai de bază nivel în SUA adică cele municipale (Municipal Courts) și cele de comitate (District Courts) există așa numitele curți de plângeri mărunte. În materii civile oricine poate, atenție, fără avocat, să completeze un formular și să inițieze o acțiune juridică civilă pentru a-și recupera o pagubă, dacă acea pagubă nu depășește o anumită sumă.

În Oregon despăgubirea cerută în acele instanțe nu poate să depășească 10000 de dolari iar cheltuiala de judecată este de 90 de dolari + onorariul de servire plătit de obicei către șerif. (Asta dacă nu vrei să mergi tu să "servești" citația (subpoena) către partea pârâtă, după ce ai depus plângerea, când nu te costă nimic, dacă ai timp și cum să ajungi acolo).

Eu am folosit sistemul o singură dată când am intrat într-un contract de 700 de dolari pe 2 ani la o sală de gimnastică fără să-mi dau seama. Pentru mine 700 de dolari e o sumă importantă. Deci am mers la curtea de plângeri mărunte de pe lângă Curtea din comitatul Washington din Oregon, am plătit în total vreo 90 de dolari ceea ce includea servitul, nu am ajuns să servesc citația, deci nu știu cum se face, am plătit la șerif.

La scurt timp după, m-au sunat cei de la Bally, proprietarii sălii și au oferit să renunțe la contract dacă renunț la plângere ceea ce am și făcut. Nu mai știu dacă i-am pus să plătească cheltuielile de judecată, așa ar fi fost normal, poate așa a fost și am scăpat de contract. După aceea am aflat și trucul. Bally sau orice firmă mare trebuie să plătească unui avocat local o sumă de zece ori mai mare decât ce am cerut eu doar ca să-i reprezinte. Sau să-și deplaseze un avocat, avion, cazare, diurnă, pe care trebuie să-l ia poate de la un caz important de milioane de dolari așa că probabil până la o anumită sumă oricine dă în judecată o corporație poate să câștige prin aranjament în afara curții înainte de data stabilită de proces.

Aceste curți de plângeri mărunte nu sunt însă cu nimic diferite, ca sistem de justiție, de curțile normale. Poți să aduci chiar și martori, tot așa, când mergi la curte să depui plângerea poți să ceri și o citație pentru martori sau eliberare de informații. La data de când ai proces, mergi în sala de judecată, explici judecătorului problema, vine și pârâtul, cu sau fără avocat, explică și el, (dar dacă e corporație nu poate fi decât un avocat, etc..)

Deși sunt considerate plângeri mărunte, Small Claims ca principiu nu diferă de curțile obișnuite. În unele state din SUA chiar poți să duci un caz în fața unui juriu pentru o plângere măruntă, deși în majoritatea cazurilor problema se rezolvă ca o discuție între judecător și părți. Taxa de judecată de exemplu pentru un proces cu 6 jurați în Oregon este de 236 de dolari pe zi.

Curțile de nivel cel mai de jos în SUA sunt curțile municipale unde se judecă plângeri mărunte, amenzile din trafic (orice amendă de trafic este de fapt o citație, pe care o poți plăti înainte de termen sau te prezinți, vine și polițistul, explici judecătorului) etc.. Pentru o plângere de peste 15000 de dolari trebuie să mergi la o curte la nivel de comitat, ceea ce este echivalent cu județ sau sector în România.

Deci la o plângere pentru sume mai mari îți trebuie avocat. Care avocat în SUA costă începând de la 150 de dolari/oră pentru debutanți. Avocatul va depune pentru tine plângerea împreună cu taxa de depunere.

Ce idee vreau să desprind din toate acestea. Plângerile civile și penale se judecă în curți. Însă o persoană obișnuită nu poate în general să facă o plângere penală.

Dacă o persoană a fost vătămată din punct de vedere fizic sau material trebuie să facă o reclamație la poliție. De obicei prin sistemul de apelare de urgențe. Dar poți să mergi și la sediul poliției să vorbești cu un agent. Care de obicei nu stă acolo, este un telefon, îl ridici, vorbești cu un dispecer care cheamă un agent. Nu există formulare de reclamații în scris. Agentul își notează, scrie un raport care poate ajunge sau nu în fața District Attorney. DA este echivalentul procurorului din România. Este de fapt un avocat (attorney = lawyer, avocat) care reprezintă orașul în care este acea curte municipală. Sau statul sau federația mă rog în funcție de jurisdicție.

Am căutat de multe ori și am renunțat dar am găsit astăzi. Iată un formular de plângere penală din SUA, am găsit doar pentru curți de comitate. Nu știu dacă există și pentru curți municipale, etc.. Voi mai căuta pentru că am o listă lungă de plângeri în mintea mea. Cam una pe zi, dar în ultimul timp s-au înmulțit. Dar pe formular scrie. United States vs. defendant. Deci cum poți să scrii acolo numele tău și să semnezi în numele Statelor Unite? Acolo își pot pune numele și semna doar District Attorneys. Așa pare.

Ideea este că orice plângere, penală sau civilă se face în fața unei curți. Nu cred că justiția în România să fie diferită. La poliție sau la procuratură poți face o reclamație iar procuratura, care de fapt sunt avocați de partea statului, în urma unui raport al poliției, care investighează plângerea ta, depun plângerea respectivă DACĂ ei constată că s-a comis o faptă penală adică împotriva statului.

Căci fapta penală nu este numai împotriva ta ci împotriva statului deși tu ești victima directă. Procurorii sunt niște avocați ai statului, nimic mai mult. Ei nu sunt interesați în mod direct să obțină despăgubiri pentru victimă, ci doar de pedepsirea făptuitorului.

Pe de altă parte tu ca victimă nu poți să ceri direct unui judecător ca făptuitorul să fie pedepsit cu închisoarea ci numai despăgubiri bănești. Pentru că nu poți fi avocatul statului sau procuror. Dar dacă mergi în fața unui judecător și ceri despăgubire civilă pentru o faptă penală, poate judecătorul să ignore aceasta și să nu administreze pedeapsa penală?

Tuesday, September 11, 2018

România, spectatoare

Ori de câte ori am adus dovezi suficiente despre impostura unei persoane publice, aceasta a dispărut din ochiul public, câteodată pentru totdeauna. Când dovezile au fost insuficiente ei s-au întors și au continuat să-și desfășoare nestingherit activitatea. În această postare de blog mă voi concentra numai pe cântăreți.

Angela Similea - Ágnes Agi Bánfalvy

Irina Loghin - Patsy Cline. Patsy Cline a murit la 5 martie 1963 într-un accident de avion la 31 de ani.



Ion Dolănescu - Dan McCafferty

Mihai Constantinescu - Sonny Bono




Anda Călugăreanu - Cindy Lauper

Corina Chiriac - Tennille Toni, Horia Moculescu, Daryl "Captain" Dragon

Mihaela Runceanu - Ann Wilson
Loredana Groza - Cicciolina

Alexandra Ungureanu - Shania Twain

Laura Stoica - Debbi Peterson

Nicu Alifantis - Arlo Guthrie


Andreea Bălan - Faith Hill


Va continua Nu va mai continua pentru că postarea a devenit prea lungă pentru a mai putea adăuga ceva. Câți mai sunt. Probabil majoritatea, dacă nu toți. Dar ăștia mai noi sunt foarte greu de găsit pentru că unii sunt celebri în România și necunoscuți în altă parte sau noi etc..

Saturday, September 8, 2018

World Trade Center Failure Analysis

(Re-edited several times, for syntax errors, clarity, broken links.)

This post contains images with emotional impact.

A new video about WTC popped on youtube which prompted me to write this blog post because i suspect the number of casualties by dust, unreported to this day, where many times more than those who died in the towers.

04/09/2019 Video is gone, can't find quickly a similar one without the offensive music. Here are some pictures showing the scale of the disaster brought by dust. I don't believe people could really survive in that dust for more than a few seconds.


Until WTC designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki and after, all high rise steel constructions were done in the "classic" fashion with structural vertical and horizontal rolled steel beams with cross reinforcement joints and numerous interior walls. As the looks suggests, this type of design is solid and can't be easily damaged.

WTC structure was made only of two so called tubular frames or cages, using about half the steel the old design uses. Outer frame was made of prefab panels that were actually made of three vertical, square section, rolled steel beams (2nd image below) welded together with other three huge pieces of sheet metal. This image, like many others, is tricky cause it suggests the building in the distance was built in a similar way. It only appears so because of its shape, no other building has ever been designed in this way.

The prefab panels themselves seem to be inspired from a Buddhist architecture ornament called Torana. (Torre means tower in  Spanish and Italian, and toro means bull with two horns of course).



Panels were put together in a new, revolutionary, also unique design:
 An outer tubular frame made of prefab inter-positioned panels (outer cage) and an inner core of "classical design" (inner cage), though only for elevator and shafts, with vast floors in between that were connecting and preventing the inner and outer cage to sway or buckle (bend) in or out.



Outer frame panels are connected together with four bolts at the end of each rolled steel square tube.

This type of joint would take a lot of vertical compression, as much as allowed by the rolled steel maximum compression load, some horizontal or side compression, limited by the bolts, (which have a cross section far less than of the cross section of the rolled steel) and could take almost no bucling (bending in and out of the cage wall) because of the prying effect on the bolts at the joint level.

Buckling and shear of the outer cage was was dealt with by inter-positioning of the of the panels and by floor trusses between inner and outer frame (cage) which allowed  the construction to stay vertically.

I tried to search to see how many bolts held together the structure and could not find. It's 12 per each prefab panel. Can't find how many panels either. What i found is many other analysis were blaming the bolts for the failure. But not those, the bolts holding together the floor trusses to the walls.

Even with this design (outer-inner cage) building would have behaved differently if the vertical square rolled beams making the outer cage where of one piece from bottom to top or anyways, fewer than one per 3 floors or assembled with a smaller square beam in between called "inner sleeve". This type of joint can take almost as much bending (side compression), shear and buckling as a continuous beam.

When assembled, however, the building had the appearance of outer cage beams being continuous also because of the aesthetic aluminum cladding installed on the outside on top of the each beam. From one of the images below it results some 258 vertical (interrupted every 3 floors) beams all around the building, which makes for 86 panels per each 3 floors, 110 floors, resulting approximately 4,730 prefab panels and 56,760 structural bolts (and nuts). Most of these bolts popped during cascading failure of the building, which apparently was designed in such a way that each the concrete floor turned into dust when falling onto next.

These are called bridge trusses making up the vast floor and connecting inner and outer cages. Thin, nothing like the sound, solid "classical" design seen in the second picture in this post (above), used in all high rise buildings before and after.

This design provided indeed ample floors with no walls in between.

Diagram (above): Constructional features of a prefabricated floor unit

21 Floor covering
22 In-situ concrete (4 inches)
23 Trough decking (1 1/2 ", ribbed)
24 Bar joist
25 Electrical services duct
26 Air-conditioning duct 

In this image after first impact on South Tower or WTC2 one can see prefab panels taken as a whole at least at one end, caused by failure of bolts. Pieces of the concrete floor missing.

This is a picture of the the exit area of the first hit tower. It was not until i have seen this picture that i realized the failure started at the concrete and steel components of the floors.

After impact, fuel spread across the vast floors caught fire and the expanding concrete and metal trusses making the floor heated by fire started to push, mainly alongside the trusses, and steel decking ribs on top, inner and outer cage against each other in the same time with floor buckling of the floors in other places creating a prying effect on the bolts connecting connecting trusses with the cages and those connecting panels with each other. Floor's structural role in stabilizing the sway of the outer cage in this case reverted to causing buckling of the cage caused by floor elongation (by heat expansion) and gradually breaking the bolts between panels and between cages and floors by prying effect. When enough of those bolts broke the floors started to fall onto each other.

Towers' "revolutionary" tubular design made of only two cages (tubes) (inner and outer) had several major design flaws.

Vast, relatively thin floors, where floors were/are also made of rolled steel beams played only a "minor structural role" compared to outer and inner frame, except sustaining selves, the concrete, and holding the outer cage to prevent sway or buckling. Without floor trusses and steel decking connecting inner and outer cage, the outer cage could not keep its shape, but sway, buckle, or bend inward or outwards and break.

About half of the weight of the floors was supported by a single shell or the outer cage with lack of redundancy. When that frame failed, there was nothing else to prevent the whole building from collapsing.

Ultimately, lack of inner walls and vastness of the floors due to unique design contributed to spreading of fuel and fire almost instantly to an entire half of the building (on several floors), when the floor expanded, heated by fire, and because of the length, the expansion was in the range of several feet.

Thermal expansion during hot summer days and the contraction in the winter times is the reason all bridges made of steel reinforced concrete have expansion gaps, while the roads themselves loose enough heat to the ground underneath not to expand and buckle. But if the temperature raised not with 20 or 50 degrees or whatever but with several hundred degrees, those gaps would not be enough. There is also a thermal inertia which prevents the bridge from heating all the way during the summer days while cooling during night time

Unusual hot summer may have been the cause for collapsing of that bridge in Genoa, Italy.

Another examples of metal structure that expand with heat was supersonic Concorde' fuselage. At 2 times the speed of sound, because of intense friction with the air, Concorde's (and other's supersonic planes) fuselage was expanding as much as one foot while of course the cabin's floor inside stayed at room temperature).

"heating had a significant impact on the construction of Concorde. Perhaps the most important issue designers had to contend with was the fact that heat causes materials to expand. I've seen different values on exactly how much the aircraft expanded, but most sources indicate that the air-frame stretched by 5 to 12 inches (12 to 30 centimeters) at Mach 2. Given the aircraft's normal length of 204 ft (62.2 m), that change amounts to little less than a 5% increase in the size of the Concorde fuselage."

http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/planes/q0199a.shtml

Thermal expansion by heat was the direct cause of failure of only one or two floors. But when those floors fell on to the next one the accumulated weight of all the above floors accelerated by gravity lead to a cascade failure of all the other floors and corresponding walls of the cages. Concrete component of each floor, that was made by a certain recipe, was turning explosively into dust upon hitting the next floor.

There is little doubt in my mind that the towers were designed on purpose like a card castle, to create some day, when the right moments arrives, this type of spectacular frightening failure.

When re-editing this post and was searching for different shapes (sections) of rolled steel (for the purpose of further documenting this blog post) and on a site i found out some shapes are no longer available as a result of America's steel industry decline. There are probably also not many civil engineers left to deal with these kind of things or write on blogs or on forums and actually no more high rise buildings to be built. Or too few to matter.

Wednesday, September 5, 2018

Brothers and Sisters, Revisited

Could find nothing of my old spirit back then. Is the soul ever changing?

Aprox 20 years ago: