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I volunteer to serve as foreign affairs. :)

It's disturbing to see how happily some humans support the heinous treatment of other humans, so long as it's not them.

The future is looking a little cloudy for the USA. The national debt is too high and that combined with the madness and wavering in policy is beginning to cause a lessening of confidence in the safety of the dollar. Good leadership and a little willingness to prioritize the things that matter are obviously not in the short term plan and probably not in the longer term either. Hopefully things at least stabilize after the fever breaks when the clown show finally ends. Most likely this marks the end of an era but what the new era brings is a very open question.

Oh, I agree it'll swing. The problem with that is that the more it swings in one direction, the more it'll swing in the other, too -- cancelling out any real chance of actual progress. Imagine a battleship being steered by having the wheel turned back and forth -- wastes a whole lot of energy, without actually changing course. Wendy P.

Yesterday I saw a meme with 2 confronting images side by side. On the left was a train from 2nd world war Germany, the right was prisoners boarding a plane to El Salvador. The caption was “First trains, now planes”

Three women die together in an accident and go to heaven. When they get there, St. Peter says, "We only have one rule here in heaven: don't step on the ducks!" And sure enough, there are ducks all over the place. It is almost impossible not to step on a duck. Although they try their best to avoid them, the first woman accidentally steps on one. Along comes St. Peter with the ugliest man she ever saw. St. Peter chains them together and says, "You two will be chained together for all eternity. Now go." The chained couple departs, and the other two women asked St Peter why? He said, "she stepped on a duck, and so as punishment she gets chained to an ugly man for the rest of time." The next day, the second woman accidentally steps on a duck and almost immediately along comes St. Peter with another extremely ugly man. He chains them together and says: "You two will be chained together for all eternity. Now go." The third woman has observed all this and, not wanting to be chained for all eternity to an ugly man, is very, VERY careful where she steps. She manages to go months without stepping on any ducks, but one day St. Peter comes up to her with the most handsome man she has ever laid eyes on ... very tall, long eyelashes, muscular, and thin. St. Peter chains them together and tells them to get along. The happy woman says, "I wonder what I did to deserve being chained to you for all of eternity?" The guy says, "I don't know about you, but I stepped on a duck!"

My grandparents were born in Ireland before the advent of airplanes. Ireland was still reeling from the effects of the potato famine that happened about 40 years earlier, and no one was really doing well. She was a potato farmer; his family owned a sheep farm, which meant he was a bit richer than she was. But richness is relative, and when they decided to emigrate to the US, all their savings together could barely pay for one ticket. So my grandfather came over first. The New York he arrived in around 1925 was very anti-Irish. There were strict immigration quotas, and they were stricter than normal for the Irish since there weren't many in the country at that point. I don't know how he got past that, but he did. He came into the US, found a place to stay, and got his bearings. Then he did something that would make him a criminal today - he started to work. It is how most illegal immigrants become illegal immigrants today. He had to work to make enough money to wire it back for my grandmother to come over. But back then that was legal, and thus he worked at odd jobs until he could send for her. Jobs were very hard to find; "Irish need not apply" was a common sign seen back then, due to the common knowledge that Irish immigrants were ignorant, brawling drunks. They lived together in Queens for decades. He passed a New York civil service test which was lifechanging for them, because he could then get steady work as a city bus driver. My grandmother worked at the Chemical Bank cafeteria. And while they lived there they had two girls - my mother and my aunt. The tenement they lived in was classic Old New York, with no elevators, massive stone steps, huge air wells so that people could have light throughout their apartments, a good half inch of paint on everything and antiquated, dim lighting fixtures in the hallways. It always smelled like boiled cabbage in the hallways. I think about them often when I hear about the immigration debates today. As Irish they went through what Hispanic immigrants are going through today; everyone just "knows" that they are a problem. They are criminals, lazy, leeches etc. Which is sad, and I think indicates most people haven't met many. Over the years I have met, in person, perhaps a dozen illegal immigrants. Out of all of them, only two were what the media portrays as illegal immigrants. These two I met on the way back from Eloy after a long weekend of skydiving. I saw them standing next to a broken down car in the 105 degree heat, and figured I would stop to see if they needed anything. As I rolled to a stop I realized that the car was standing on four flats and hadn't been driven in months, if not years. The people there were two Hispanic guys who asked me in broken English if I could give them a ride to San Diego. I told them that I couldn't, but did leave them with all the water/food I had left over from the weekend. I hope they made it somewhere safe. The rest started out legally - then violated immigration law and became illegal immigrants. One was a member of the Swiss national skydiving team who came here on a tourist visa - and then offered to coach someone for a few bucks. She was then an illegal immigrant; she had violated immigration law. Another was legal but had a paperwork problem with his green card. His only legal option was to leave the US while it was sorted out, since his visa had expired. But he did not, since he had a company to run. He was, at that point, an illegal immigrant. A co-worker had his visa renewal delayed, and on the day the renewal was supposed to arrive, he waited by the mailbox all day. It did not arrive. He was then illegal. To his credit he did the best he could, and moved to Mexico the next day to await the arrival of the visa. Our company helped as much as they could, setting him up for remote work and pressuring the INS to move on the paperwork. Now, right wingers reading this may claim "but they're not REAL illegal immigrants! They came in legally and there was just a paperwork problem!" The thing they miss is that MOST illegal immigrants fall into this category. About 40% just plain overstay their visas. About 35% work illegally. About 10% have problems with paperwork that makes them illegal. (And many fall into two or three of those categories.) The image of illegal immigrants crossing the border illegally under cover of darkness - that's less than half of all illegal immigrants. Now these people, again by the letter of the law, would have a very hard time becoming legal if they were honest. I've helped a few people with green card and citizenship applications, and the applications ask a very important question - have you violated US immigration law in the past? And if you have, it is VERY difficult to get a green card, because you have a history of not following the law. So most people just say "no" and it usually works out, because the INS is a government program that politicians love to cut. But there's a catch there, too. If you obtain a green card, or become a citizen, under false pretenses, it will be revoked. Thus those people just have to pray that no one looks at their history very closely. This brings us to two of our most famous illegal immigrants - Elon Musk and Melania Trump. Musk first came to Palo Alto in 1995 under a student visa; he said he was going to go to school at Stanford. But he never did. He never even enrolled. Instead he began working at a startup called Zip2. He flew under the radar for a while until 1996, when potential investors looked at everyone's immigration status, and required both Musk and his brother to get a visa within 45 days. Derek Proudian, who was with Zip2 at the time, said that “their immigration status was not what it should be for them to be legally employed running a company in the U.S. We don’t want the founder being deported.” Given that Musk then quickly got his work visa, it is safe to say that he lied on that application, and said he had never violated immigration law. Melania Trump (Melanija Knavs at that point) came to the US in August of 1996 on a B1/B2 tourist visa. Under a tourist visa, of course, it is illegal to work. Per employment records, she was paid for 10 modeling assignments between September 10 and October 15. Then on October 18, 1996, Knavs got an H-1B visa, the visa intended for skilled workers, allowing her to legally work. Again given the speed that she got the visa, she did not admit she had violated immigration law. So although people rail against illegal immigrants, it might be wise to afford them the same opportunities to skirt the law that was afforded to Knavs and Musk. It would have been a bad thing for the US economy to have deported Musk just because he was an illegal alien.

It's cute that you think 'not moving forward' is what you have to worry about here.

It's a follow-on to the doctrine during the Iraq war that torture was OK as long as it wasn't on US soil (e.g. Gitmo and extractions). Funny how decisions have consequences. Wendy P.

Not that I recall.. There was that Coffelt propaganda article claiming Flo,,, mentioned "sad". That article is riddled with errors.

It's also hard and costly to get a battleship started up when it's stopped or slowed. Wendy P.

Ryan's book isn't available yet..

I agree with you pretty much 100%. Unfortunately, people like us, who vote on what someone knows and can learn, don't appear to be in the majority now. I'm really concerned about my country right now. I've lived in what it looks like it's becoming, and it's generally a great place to be privileged, or subservient. But not for the kind of people who actually settled this country. Wendy P.

Everyone approaches the Cooper case as a normal crime... as the only unsolved hijacking it is extraordinary and something extraordinary happened for it to remain unsolved for so long.. for example Cooper died in the jump... I think that is extremely unlikely but something unique happened, an error, a mistake, luck or something significant occurred for this case to remain unsolved by the FBI. Distributing sketch A as Cooper perhaps.. something big undermined this case. Trying to solve this as a regular crime won't cut it. That didn't work for the FBI and it won't work now. In 1976 the FBI concluded that there is no prosecution without Cooper's cooperation due to weak evidence and faded witnesses.. Cooper is dead by now, evidence isn't much better, DNA is a dead end, fingerprints were unlikely Cooper's and obfuscated. The palm print is possibly Cooper's. So, how is this thing ever solved 100%...

Not many. McCoy, of course, was a pilot. Frank Sibley was an actual 727 pilot. Those are the only ones I can think of. That profile is mostly OK, but it gets quite a few things wrong fwiw, is sometimes contradictory, and goes against what the FBI themselves stated that they believed on a few occasions. It says Cooper didn't offer to tip the stews with ransom money, but used his own money. We know that's not true. It says Cooper smoke eight cigarettes in eight hours. Cooper had seven cigarettes and was only on the plane for just over five hours. They extrapolate that he was a one-pack a day smoker because of this. They're neglecting that he actually smoked all seven in under three hours. There is no indication that he was smoking at any point after they landed in Seattle. It says he jumped with the dummy chute and they imply he should have known it was a dummy chute if he knew parachutes, yet I think it's reasonable and safe to say that he did not jump with the dummy chute intending for it be a reserve chute. The FBI themselves state elsewhere that they think he just tossed it out of the back. It says he became "somewhat childish in his actions and comments while counting the money." Yet Tina says Cooper never counted the money and also I think they are taking Flo's "childish" comment out of context. It says that he was not an experienced criminal because of how he acted when he received the ransom money but then it says he exhibited an "unusually calm manner throughout the whole hijacking." It says that the hijacker was "not well prepared for the hijacking", but makes no mention of the mystery bag being a foil to such an idea. It says that the hijacker engaged in a small argument with one of the passengers. Not true. A few weeks ago I asked John Douglas if they ever had him create a Cooper profile and he said he didn't. Would have been interesting to see his. Although honestly, Cooper's profile is just really hard to pin down given how little he said, how few people saw him, and what he left behind.

How many hijackers were actual pilots? To me a pilot indicates that they were likely an officer in the military. Not exclusively, but typically. And if they became a pilot as a civilian in 1971, then that might indicate they had money or resources, as well as intelligence. If this is the same FBI profile I’m looking at, they say Cooper was a high school graduate with some college, but also listed as executive type. I don’t put executive type as being someone with just a little college. My issue is that both Vordahl and Hall have been touted using just portions of the profile. If using this profile, then it makes sense to use the whole thing when referencing suspects.

Pop the champagne. We agree on something. Joseph Henry Johnston is probably the closest template for Cooper out there IMO. And no it's not Frank. I don't think this new suspect is Cooper, but the researcher has put a lot of effort into him, so I'll be glad to support his suspect reveal. This suspect is the closest match to Bing I've ever seen. I didn't think it was possible to get someone to be a closer match to Bing than Burnworth, but here we are.

Don't want to lead you astray here. In videos I'm not always able to articulate my thoughts fully or I say things rather clumsily. There is an FBI profile created by Charlie Farrell in 72. I've got an entire chapter in my book devoted to the Farrell/Cooper profile. I'll link Farrell's profile in full below. What I was meaning in the video is that there is no agreed upon profile of Cooper among the Cooper "community" when analyzing suspects, nor is there anything remotely close. Cooper is a bit of a Rorschach test when it comes to suspects. You can interpret the evidence in any way you see fit in order to shoehorn a particular suspect into being Cooper. This is the great difficulty with Cooper. There is some evidence that could lead you to think he's super smart and also evidence that could make you think he's a bumbling crook. He's a true enigma. A good example of this is that I wouldn't fall out of my chair if I found out that a brilliant guy like Roman was the hijacker but I also wouldn't fall out of my chair if it turned out that some dope like LD Cooper was the hijacker. I've gone back and forth many times and what I expect Cooper to be, but my current understanding of the case makes me lean toward him just being a low-rent crook with a capacity for divergent thinking and a big set of balls. I do think he had some sort of aviation background though. We can see with Paul Cini what it looks like when someone without an aviation background tries to do this. It's ugly. As for other profiles of Cooper, the one suggested by Dr. David Hubbard, author of “The Skyjacker”, isn't bad. He was a psychologist who interviewed close to one hundred hijackers during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Hubbard’s experience and training led him to assess Cooper's profile thusly: “As an individual, he was a personal failure who had lost the capability of earning a living in our society. In actual fact, Cooper was an early middle-aged mentally deteriorated ex-aircraft pilot. He had flown in the Vietnam War, and undoubtedly had taken part in the airdrops in which the tailgate of a 727 was used for dropping materiel." Not sure I agree with him about Cooper having flown in Vietnam (he seems a little old for that), but the rest is pretty close. Cooper-Profile.pdf

Um, maybe no one has told him we're back. Works for me. Wendy P.

No one I know was afraid for themselves. We were afraid we would get it and pass it on to vulnerable family members. We were concerned about the hospitals that were overflowing with the ones among us who were the unlucky. We wanted everyone to do everything possible to bring the event to a quicker end. To me and those I know it was about doing the right thing for others. My wife was drafted as a nurse into working ICU and watched as many patients died. Fortunately most lived due to the extreme measure that artificial ventilation is. Not once did she complain about having to switch from her regular job in outpatient cataract surgery to 12 hour overnight weekend shifts in an environment she never trained for but was needed. The healthcare system is still not fully recovered from this event. People did not get hysterical, they got on and did what was needed to be done. Except for a subset of self entitled complainers who got hysterical when they were asked to make the sacrifice of wearing a mask and helping to protect the vulnerable. I have not forgotten and will likely never forget who refused to help and only complained about the inconvenience.