Pat Rodz

[Headquarters @HQNewsNow]

The Republican Governor of Kansas endorses Democrat Adam Hamilton for Senate:

"Today our senator isn't fighting for the people back home either. That's why I'm endorsing Adam Hamilton for the United States Senate... Kansas needs a senator willing to stand up and say this isn't working. We need someone who listens and will fight to end the chaos and corruption in Washington."

[Democratic Wins Media @DemocraticWins]

BREAKING: JB Pritzker just announced that he and the Democratic Governors' Association are sending $1 million each to ensure that Democrat Gina Hinojosa has the resources she needs to crush Greg Abbott. Let's go.

[Pat Rodz @PatMRodriguez]

Please stop this hate:
https://t.co/r3bfBfvsKn
@NYCMayor

[Headquarters @HQNewsNow]

Trump says Zohran Mamdani is "off to a start" on the way to becoming a "great mayor"

[AdImpact Politics @AdImpact_Pol]

#TXPol: "Ken Paxton is the devil we know. Philanderer, fork-tongued, indicted crook, got big rich on a state payroll. Or there's James Talarico, who we really don't know yet ... The devil we know? Or the young, positive Texan with faith.

Moment of Truth PAC is up with it's first #TXSen ad.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

"A brand new CNN poll shows President Trump at an all time low in his approval rating ... look at his net approval rating now with pure independents -- it's negative 71 points! I mean, these are the deep depths of the ocean. You never see numbers like these. An 86 point shift away from the president!"

[Pat Rodz @PatMRodriguez]

The father of the 401(k) says the retirement plans mainly benefit high earners. His new savings plan aims to help less wealthy workers. https://t.co/mP7NtMtYM1

[Keith Edwards @keithedwards]

Andrew Yang just said that the leader of a frontier AI lab secretly told him the AI that hacked Hugging Face seeded the internet with self-replicating code.

That’s why they all suddenly want to slow down.

They’ve poisoned the internet. Now they need to use synthetic internet environments, which will slow development and cost them a lot of money.

[Headquarters @HQNewsNow]

Ron White to Joe Rogan: Talarico didn't cost this state $6 million in fines and lawsuits, and that happened with Ken Paxton. Guess who paid that $6 million? You and me paid the $6 million for his bribery. His own party impeached him. He's a criminal. He's a piece of shit.

[Tristan Harris @tristanharris]

Proud to report that tomorrow Sept 15th "The AI Doc" documentary film will be streaming on Netflix.

Feeling confused, anxious, or overwhelmed by the recent AI headlines, from rogue OpenAI agents carrying out cyberattack to prominent AI researchers resigning to warn about existential risks to humanity?

To understand how we got here, and what we can do, watch “The AI Doc” which is now streaming on Netflix starting Sept 15th as well as other major streaming platforms. Interviews 40+ experts on AI, including 3 out of the 5 majors CEOs of frontier AI companies.

Host a screening, share it with your friends. Clarity is agency. #theaidoc #theaidocfilm

cc @Liv_Boeree @DKokotajlo @PeterDiamandis @JeffLadish @aza @SnehaRevanur @ajeya_cotra @hendrycks @NPCollapse @davidevanharris @janleike @JasonGMatheny @Yoshua_Bengio @ESYudkowsky @harari_yuval @reidhoffman @rajiinio @RameshMedias @nitashatiku @ilyasut @ShaneLegg @demishassabis @sama @sanmikoyejo @_KarenHao @DarioAmodei @peteratmsr

[Patrick Svitek @PatrickSvitek]

The Senate Leadership Fund is jumping into #TXSEN, launching an effort in the state through Election Day starting with an eight-figure ad buy for Ken Paxton, a source familiar confirms. The spending will come through a new entity, Texas PAC.

First reported by @FoxNews.

[Medium Buying @MediumBuying]

#TXSen: D candidate James Talarico is up on TV with this spot --

Nick Schatzki voiceover:

"Ken Paxton's corruption endangers our kids. We don't need any more pedophile protectors in Washington"

[Alex Boge @alexboge]

I find these World Trade Center simulations by Kostack Studio fascinating because they remove the smoke and let you see the collapse much more clearly.

In the real footage, so much is hidden by fire, dust, debris, distance, and chaos that many people come away with the impression that the towers simply dropped straight down into their own footprints.

But that is not really what happened.

These simulations make it much easier to see that the collapse begins in the heavily damaged and fire-weakened region, the upper section starts moving and tilting, and the destruction then propagates downward through the structure.

The towers do not simply disappear vertically into their own footprints. Large portions of the upper structure and exterior are moving outward and to the side as the collapse develops. Much of that motion is simply obscured in the real videos once the enormous debris cloud forms.

And this is also why I find these simulations useful when people describe the collapses as looking like “controlled demolition.”

Strip away the smoke and dust and the resemblance becomes much less convincing.

What you see is a highly asymmetric structural failure beginning around the aircraft-damaged and fire-affected floors, followed by an enormous moving mass progressively overwhelming the structure beneath it. There is tilting, rotation, exterior columns peeling away, debris being thrown far outside the building footprint, and structural failure occurring chaotically as the collapse moves downward.

That is very different from the neat mental image usually implied by “controlled demolition,” where structural supports are deliberately severed in a carefully timed sequence to produce a predetermined collapse.

And importantly, we already know what preceded these collapses.

Both towers suffered massive aircraft-impact damage. Fireproofing was stripped from portions of the structure. Large, uncontrolled fires then burned across multiple floors - for about 56 minutes in the South Tower and about 102 minutes in the North Tower - heating and weakening structural components until collapse initiated.

Once that upper mass began moving, the loads imposed on the floors and structure beneath became vastly greater than anything they had been designed to carry.

The result was progressive collapse.

No, an animation is not proof simply because it looks convincing, and these are not official NIST simulations. They are visualizations built under particular assumptions.

But as visualizations, I think they are extremely useful.

They let you see something the original footage often cannot show clearly: beneath that enormous cloud of smoke and debris was a complicated, violent, asymmetric structural failure - not two buildings neatly dropping straight down into their own footprints.

A note on the simulation: this is not intended to reproduce the collapse down to the exact motion of every beam, floor panel, and fragment of debris. No practical simulation could do that. Its value is in modeling the large-scale structural behavior - how the major sections deform, move, tilt, separate, and progressively fail. Think of it as a visualization of the mechanics and overall collapse behavior, not a frame-by-frame reconstruction of where every piece of steel ultimately landed.

[Catherine Rampell @crampell]

@BulwarkOnline did a supercut of all the prior times Trump said he was about to give Americans a $5000 check or whatever.
It is glorious

[偏航 @pianhangx]

机器人跑太快不及刹车，撞上垫子后把腰折断了🤯

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

SNYDER: It's a long list of dictatorships that Trump has bailed out, directly or indirectly. He's bailed out Russia.

Russia's going to lose the war in Ukraine eventually, but if it weren't for Trump, they wouldn't have stayed in it this long.

Trump just made it so easy for them to keep fighting. Basically, he's made it possible for Russia to keep fighting.

Trump has bailed out Iranian regime with this manifestly disastrous war. And then China is the main example, right?

We've spent the last several decades talking about China's inevitable march to crossing United States, and so on.

But by the time of Biden administration, that was no longer really true. China was peaking, was topping out.

China was no longer on a path to be crossing US in all important indicators. What we've done under Trump.

We've allowed ourselves to drop so far that even though Chinese aren't performing as they're supposed to.

Our line is heading downward. We're bailing out Chinese in a big way. And that's in a kind of historical way.

That prophecy that China was going to outpace US, was just turning out not to be true by early 2020s.

Now Trump basically revived that prophecy. He's made it true just by sheer force of will from inside US.

He's destroyed so much. We've talked about war, but real sources of power, underneath military power.

Those three things: science, education, rule of law. Inside the US, Trump is ripping those things apart.

Which means that in the very long term, we will have a lot of work to do just to recreate ourselves back.

China just keep puttering along while we choose to break our own sternum and rip our own guts out.

[Mike Collier @CollierForTexas]

WE'VE HEARD FROM THE JUDGE.
He agreed we raised serious constitutional issues with Texas election law, but ruled it's going to take time and would be wrong to force the state to put me on the ballot this year. I respect that decision, but I’m far from finished.
#IndependentTexan

[Pat Rodz @PatMRodriguez]

Houston-area home prices drop for the first time in 15 years. Here’s where buyers can find the best deals https://t.co/f945PvNOcD

[Pat Rodz @PatMRodriguez]

Aussie soccer fans took over a Texas Walmart chanting 'We're getting deported' as police escorted them out https://t.co/LPQMtL8juO #FoxNews