Lionel's explosive's train was pre-rigged to explode on hitting a section of track that jostled it. No firecracker required.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/view/

In the 1990's, a sharp thinking, Brooksley Born was on the shortlist for Attorney General, but Clinton thought she wasn't riveting enough so he instead offered her the head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. This obscure commission was the pulpit from which Born would issue a prediction that unregulated markets would eventually implode. Her logic, though basic, almost unassailable, brought her notoriety. As she decided derivatives needed oversight, eventually she would come up against Clinton's "working group," Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, and then in congressional hearings, Phil Gramm. Eventually she would resign, and the first warning of things to come, the collapse of Long Term Market Capital in 1998, would be swept under the rug as an anomaly.

"We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market," says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency -- the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] -- who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country's key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis. "They were totally opposed to it," Born says. "That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?"

It was Arthur Demarest who referred to the irregular shapes of Mayan polity borders in his and Conrad's seminal Ideology suggesting there was a function to their shape (it should be read). Here is another view of Maya polity relations, in the genre of Edward Tufte's books, from Nikolai Grube and Simon Martin's Chronicle of the Maya Kings. Here we have a simplified chart of major polities arrayed to provide the user with a view of how complex the Maya civilization's exchange was. Smaller and distant polities are necessarily omitted.

http://books.google.com/books?id=JeiEprPiGvAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=XOgNAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_similarbooks_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Masters of the sub-universe, Goldman Sachs looks as if it simply games out no-loss situations in 'proper' precentages that have the potential to trigger collapses at its own reward (nothing new or self destructive until the edges of the market are pushed). While buying into full range mortgage securities, cash-swap defaults to 'insure' them, staking other banks to take similar positions and also having them insured (in this case Societie General), and then making trades planning for a housing collapse, it became Goldman's best interest to destroy AIG by both being paid its 'insurance' and retaining control of the securities. By carefully observing its structure from a puppetmaster level, Goldman survives and thrives while massive shops like Bear Stearns and Lehman are revealed as mere amateurs whose planning and percentages skewed slightly too positive. If this activity remains legal and underwritten by our Government, there will be no end to this exotic envelope pushing. Greed will destroy our species. A metaphor would be building a plane that breaks the sound barrier but is always destroyed attempting it, the occupant's survival only possible if the military steps in to rescue. Sure we broke the sound barrier, but did we? The U.S. spends taxpayer's dollars insuring the smart and help liquidating the dumb.

sectional quotes from a brilliant narrative in the NY Times:

“Al probably did not know it, but he was working with the bears of Goldman,” a former Goldman salesman, who requested anonymity so he would not jeopardize his business relationships, said of Mr. Frost. “He was signing A.I.G. up to insure trades made by people with really very negative views” of the housing market.

By July 2007, when Goldman demanded its first payment from A.I.G. — $1.8 billion — the investment bank had already taken trading positions that would pay out if the mortgage market weakened, according to seven former Goldman employees.

On Nov. 1, 2007, for example, an e-mail message from Mr. Cassano, the head of A.I.G. Financial Products, to Elias Habayeb, an A.I.G. accounting executive, said that a payment demand from Société Générale had been “spurred by GS calling them.

On Aug. 18, 2008, Goldman’s equity research department published an in-depth report on A.I.G. The analysts advised the firm’s clients to avoid the stock because of a “downward spiral which is likely to ensue as more actual cash losses emanate” from the insurer’s financial products unit.

Ancient temple found under Lake Titicaca, estimated 1000-1500 years old.