May 22, 2020 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
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Year: 2020
CDC confirms COVID-19 tiny death rate, comparable to flu
Are you enraged yet? The CDC has confirmed that the death rate for the Wuhan flu is probably less than 0.4%, slightly higher than the flu’s 0.1%, but when all factors are considered, including the data that shows it is almost completely harmless to everyone but the elderly who are chronically sick, the disease is essentially just another new flu epidemic, requiring no extreme measures other than acting to protect the vulnerable.
Plus, ultimately we might find out that the IFR [infection fatality rate] is even lower because numerous studies and hard counts of confined populations have shown a much higher percentage of asymptomatic cases. Simply adjusting for a 50% asymptomatic rate would drop their fatality rate to 0.2% – exactly the rate of fatality Dr. John Ionnidis of Stanford University projected.
More importantly, as I mentioned before, the overall death rate is meaningless because the numbers are so lopsided. Given that at least half of the deaths were in nursing homes, a back-of-the-envelope estimate would show that the infection fatality rate for non-nursing home residents would only be 0.1% or 1 in 1,000. And that includes people of all ages and all health statuses outside of nursing homes.
There’s more. Read it all.
What infuriates me the most is that the early data (not the fake models) all pointed in this direction, quite clearly, as noted in detail in this March 17 post, just when panicked state governors were beginning to impose totalitarian rule by edict. Even then it was clear that lock downs made no sense, and would only worsen the situation.
I repeat: Any disease like this requires a rational aggressive and focused response. We can’t ignore it. People need to voluntarily self-quarantine if they feel sick, or if they have older and sick relatives living with them. We should also wash our hands regularly, and avoid unnecessary physical contact with many other individuals.
At the same time, we mustn’t waste our energies doing things that are unnecessary, foolish, or downright counter-productive, such as releasing entire prison populations into the general population.
We also should be outraged by politicians who are using this situation not to deal with it but to impose their pet totalitarian rule over the population, such as passing entirely irrelevant gun bans and shutting down businesses willy-nilly and imprisoning everyone in their homes.
These actions will do little to ease the epidemic. Instead, they might worsen the situation by causing panic (as they have apparently done). Panic is not what this situation warrants. Instead it needs a calm rational response, something that only civilized rational people can give it.
Are we that? Watching what is happening I must sadly say I have my doubts.
In retrospect, it appears if many of our leaders have any rationality, they apply it exclusively to creating schemes for increasing their power and ability to oppress everyone else. Serving the nation and its citizenry appears the last thing on their mind.
U.S. universities have pocketed $6 billion from hostile enemy countries
Our new fifth column: An investigation by the Department of Education has found that U.S. universities have taken $6 billion in unreported donations from hostile coutnries, all of which could be in violation of the law.
A probe by the Department of Education into colleges that accept foreign investments and donations has uncovered $6 billion in previously unreported foreign donations from US adversaries including China and Russia, a report said Friday.
House Republicans were monitoring the investigation into the schools to determine if they were violating Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which prohibits an “Institution of Higher Learning” from failing to properly report foreign gifts of $250,000 or more, Town Hall reported.
It also appears that some of those universities are now uncooperative, apparently placing their loyalties more with their foreign backers than with their own country.
This evidence is not surprising, and is reinforced by the numerous arrests in recent months of many university professors taking money secretly and illegally from China. The culture in the American university community has been downright hostile to the United States for decades. In the past it was dressed up as their effort to not be jingoistic. That was a long time ago. For at least two decades the academic community has been an anti-American fifth column, working as much as it can with foreign powers to both indoctrinate its students against their own country, while providing aid and comfort to authoritarian countries like Russia and China.
Patrick Acton – Matchstick artist
An evening pause: Hat tip Thomas Keener.
SpaceX successfully completes static fire dress rehearsal of manned Dragon Falcon 9
Capitalism in space: SpaceX today successfully completed its standard static fire dress rehearsal prior to launch of the Falcon 9 rocket that will place the first manned Dragon capsule, carrying two astronauts, into space on May 27th.
Today NASA also gave its final okay for the launch. It is now set to happen.
More pits found on Mars
Click for full image.
Since 2018 I have made it a point to document every new pit image taken on Mars by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The list of can be found at the bottom of this post.
In the most recent release from MRO, a number of new pits were photographed. All continue to suggest that Mars has a lot of underground voids, some caused by lava flow, some by tectonic activity, some by water ice erosion, and some almost certainly caused by processes we don’t yet know. The images also suggest that we have only identified a small fraction of those underground voids.
The first image to the right, cropped to post here, shows the one new pit in the northern lowlands of Utopia Planitia, near a series of meandering channels and canyons dubbed Hephaestus Fossae and Hebrus Valles.
This appears to be the fifth such pit found in this region. Previously I had documented the first four. The overview map to the right adds this fifth pit. Note how the pit is much closer to the head of Hephaestus. In the full image you can see fissures both to the north and south, as well as many nearby aligned depressions, suggesting the existence of more underground passages, some possibly linked to voids under this very pit.
The pit itself seems filled, with no apparent side passages, though to the southwest there might be something leading off in the shadows.
The overall terrain in this region, including these pits, the fissures, and the many aligned depressions, strongly suggests a lot of underground voids. As I noted in 2019:
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On the radio, today and Sunday
For those who want to hear me on the radio, I will be doing one hour at 6:00 pm (Central) later today with Robert Pratt on Pratt on Texas, aired on 790-AM KFYO in Lubbock, 1470-AM KYYW in Abilene, and 1290-AM KWFS in Wichita Falls.
We will be talking about space, and also about masks and the tyrants presently found in many statehouses nationwide.
On Sunday I will also be talking space and science with Steve Thompson in Minnesota on WCCO-AM, also for an hour, beginning at 6:00 pm (Central).
Star to get within a trillion miles of Sun in 1.4 million years
Using the precise location and motion data obtained by the space telescope Gaia, astronomers have identified a star that 1.4 million years will come within a trillion miles of the Sun.
That distance puts it well within the outer parts of the theorized Oort cloud at the edge of the solar system. Since the star, Gliese 710, has a mass half that of the Sun, it will thus disturb many objects in that Oort Cloud, causing many to eventually fall sunward and produce a hail of comets several million years later. It will be, for a long time, the brightest object in the night sky, by far.
The data also identified a number of other stars that have in past or will in the future get close to the Sun. The most important result is not that these close approaches occur, but that they have found that they are relatively rare, and even the closest, Gliese 710, never really gets that close.
The universe is big, far bigger than we can really imagine.
“Spots” orbiting Milky Ways central black hole
Using the ALMA ground-based telescope array in Chile, astronomers have detected two energetic “spots” that appear to be orbiting Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star), the super-massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
The spots appear to be regions in the accretion disk surrounding the black hole that are emitting energy.
Their scenario is as follows. Hot spots are sporadically formed in the disk and circle around the black hole, emitting strong millimeter waves. According to Einstein’s special relativity theory, the emission is largely amplified when the source is moving toward the observer with a speed comparable to that of light. The rotation speed of the inner edge of the accretion disk is quite large, so this extraordinary effect arises. The astronomers believe that this is the origin of the short-term variation of the millimeter emission from Sgr A*.
The team supposes that the variation might affect the effort to make an image of the supermassive black hole with the Event Horizon Telescope. “In general, the faster the movement is, the more difficult it is to take a photo of the object,” says Oka. “Instead, the variation of the emission itself provides compelling insight for the gas motion. We may witness the very moment of gas absorption by the black hole with a long-term monitoring campaign with ALMA.” The researchers aim to draw out independent information to understand the mystifying environment around the supermassive black hole.
Everyone please repeat after me: Though this scenario makes sense, based on the facts and our knowledge, there is a lot of uncertainty about these conclusions.
Russians successfully launch military satellite
The Russians today used their Soyuz-2 rocket to successfully launch a military satellite designed to detect missile launches from other countries.
The leaders in the 2020 launch race:
8 China
7 Russia
6 SpaceX
3 ULA
The U.S. still leads China 11 to 8 in the national rankings.
Dani Wilde – Deeper than Black
An evening pause: Hat tip John Jossy.
The only opposition that will matter to today’s lock down fascism will be opposition expressed in the ballot box
In the past week or so there have been numerous stories in the press suggesting that Americans have finally lost patience with the unreasonable Wuhan flu lock downs that have been arbitrarily imposed in the past two months by elected officials, sometimes indefinitely, for no justifiably rational reasons.
In Michigan there were armed protests, and then barbers began publicly defying the lock down orders of their fascist governor.
In New Jersey a health club defied the order of that state’s fascist governor and reopened to cheers from its customers.
In Baltimore a pastor stood at the pulpit and ripped apart the shut down order by that city’s health department.
In Minnesota the Catholic church announced it was reopening for church services, in direct defiance of the orders of that state’s governor.
I could cite many other examples, across the country, in both conservative and liberal states.
Are these push backs necessary? Certainly. These fascist governors and mayors, most of whom have been Democrats, have imposed unreasonable and blatantly illegal arbitrary restrictions on the freedoms of Americans, which must be resisted at all costs.
Are these push backs real? Forgive me if I must sadly remain skeptical. For fifty years I have watched as politicians, mostly from the Democratic Party but with more than ample support from large numbers of Republican Party hacks, have slowly but steadily worked to erode the freedoms of Americans.
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