Minnie Riperton – Lovin’ You
An evening pause: Performed live 1975.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
Year: 2020
Omar in trouble in Minnesota?
Good news? Ilhan Omar’s (D-Minnesota) opponent in her August 11th Democratic primary has raised seven times more money than she has.
Melton-Meaux, a mediation lawyer who emerged on the DFL scene late last year to challenge Omar, told the Star Tribune he raised a staggering $3.2 million between April and the end of June, with $2 million cash left in the bank before the Aug. 11 primary. He dramatically outraised Omar, who took in $471,624 during the same time period. Omar’s campaign said she has $1,111,861 left on hand ahead of the primary election.
This big influx of cash would suggest that the Democrats in this Minnesota district really want to get rid of Omar, who has made it clear since she gained office that she is American-hating bigot and anti-Semite. She is also corrupt, marrying her brother and then, after getting a divorce, marrying one of her employees to whom she has since been funneling illegally more than a million in campaign funds into his business.
I remain pessimistic. Democrats these days think Omar’s policy positions are cool, especially the ones that involve persecuting their opponents. And in New York they flocked to give a primary victory to Omar’s communist ally Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez, with 70% of the vote.
Ballot harvesting in Oregon’s vote-by-mail system demonstrates Democratic strategy to steal elections
Link here. The article describes what the Democrats do when they make voting-by-mail legal.
[I]n Oregon’s vote-by-mail system, county elections offices don’t just sell your party registration and voting history, they also regularly inform campaigns of the status of the voter’s ballot, usually daily throughout Oregon’s lengthy 18-day voting window. Ballot harvesting is when campaigns determine exactly which voters have already turned in their ballots, and then they come after those who have not. Lots of phone calls, lots of door knocks, lots of robocalls. If you purposely wait to vote until the last day (voters have realized that many major scandals haven’t surfaced until the final days of a campaign), the efforts border on outright harassment.
In a primary election, most “1×4” and “2×4” voters are not as likely to vote. That’s when the unions go to work. Dozens and dozens of public employee union workers build and track voter files daily on Democrat-leaning voters. Then they turn their public employee armies loose to gin up votes for their candidates.
Imagine the knock at your front door. The union member offers you a flyer for their candidate, then asks if you’ve voted yet (they know you haven’t). Next they offer to wait while you fill out your ballot. Maybe then they offer to return your ballot envelope. (If you indicated a preference for the other primary candidate, do you think your ballot will really be delivered?)
None of this is illegal. All of it should be done by Republicans also, but then, the Republican Party has too often shown itself as cowardly wimps eager to lose. The result is that Democrats harvest a lot of extra mail-in votes. And I am sure they use the mail-in system to put their finger on the scale to disqualify or lose as many Republican votes as possible, as mailed ballots are so easy to manipulate.
This is their plan for November. They are now pushing for mail-in-voting nationwide, and will certainly get it in many more states before the election. In each case they will use it to up their vote count, as the Republican Party twiddles its thumbs.
It seems to me that rather than buy lots of stupid television ads, Trump and the Republicans should be investing in the same kind of door-by-door army, harvesting their own votes in this manner. It seems a far more effective way to win elections.
NASA confirms Webb launch delay to October 2021
NASA today confirmed that the launch date of the James Webb Space Telescope will be delayed again, from March 2021 to October 2021.
As schedule margins grew tighter last fall, the agency planned to assess the progress of the project in April. This assessment was postponed due to the pandemic and was completed this week. The factors contributing to the decision to move the launch date include the impacts of augmented safety precautions, reduced on-site personnel, disruption to shift work, and other technical challenges. Webb will use existing program funding to stay within its $8.8 billion development cost cap. [emphasis mine]
Note the highlighted words. Vague, eh? They are trying to make it seem that this new delay is solely because of the Wuhan virus panic, but that’s simply not justifiable. Notice how SpaceX has kept on launching Falcon 9s as well as testing new Starship prototypes throughout the panic. Somehow that private company was able keep its schedule going.
The truth is that as early as January, long before COVID-19 was even a blip on the horizon, the GAO was warning everyone that it was unlikely NASA and Northrop Grumman could meet the March 2021 launch date.
Webb is now more than a decade behind schedule, and once launched will have cost 20 times what it was originally budgeted ($500 million vs $10 billion). Let us pray that it works once it gets to is proper orbit, a million miles from Earth, since it will then be too far away to fix.
Deaths from COVID-19 in hospitals is dropping
But we’re all supposed to die! New research now suggests that the deaths from COVID-19 occurring in intensive care units in hospitals has declined by one-third as doctors gain a better idea of how to treat the disease.
The study, which was conducted by researchers in the United Kingdom and published in the journal Anaesthesia, offers a hopeful message to front-line workers actively taking care of critically ill patients. The authors systematically reviewed and performed a meta-analysis on all studies that looked at ICU deaths for adult patients around the world admitted with COVID-19. The death rate for these patients in May was about 40%, down from nearly 60% at the end of March.
Over the past seven months, scientists around the world have coordinated efforts to try to find a way to cure the disease. Our knowledge of how the virus spreads, latches onto its host and causes infection, has tremendously increased, and so too has our understanding of managing severe complications that often result in ICU admissions. [emphasis mine]
I know this will fall on deaf ears, but there really is very little to fear from the coronavirus. Children are immune to it, healthy adults younger than 60 fight it off with no problem (with most showing no symptoms at all), and it only appears to be a threat to those over 60 who also have other chronic illnesses. And now, we are getting better at treating those patients.
Starship prototype being prepped for first hop
Capitalism in space: SpaceX engineers, having successfully completed its tank pressure tests of its fifth Starship prototype, are now preparing the ship for its first static fire engine test, to be followed very quickly thereafter by its first hop to 150 meters.
SN5 [the fifth prototype] is being prepped for a flight test right out of the gate. SpaceX does not plan to perform an extended ground test campaign with SN5 after beginning Raptor engine testing.
It is understood that one good static fire test could be enough to clear the way for a 150-meter hop test. Furthermore, only a few days may be required to prepare SN5 for the flight test following a successful static fire test. If a static fire occurs this weekend, this will put the earliest possible hop date in the first half of next week.
As always, this schedule could change during testing.
The article also describes the status of both the sixth prototype, as well as the eighth being assembled now, noting that “if the 150-meter flight of Starship SN5 is successful, SpaceX is expected to quickly move on to Starship SN8 for an upcoming higher altitude flight test – potentially skipping a flight test with the SN6 prototype.”
Solar Orbiter’s first images, the closest ever of Sun
Click for full image.
The Solar Orbiter science team today released the first images taken during the spacecraft’s first close fly-by of the Sun.
The image to the right, reduced to post here, highlights what they are touting as their first discovery, what they have dubbed “campfires” on the solar surface, small flares previously not known to exist.
The campfires shown in the first image set were captured by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) from Solar Orbiter’s first perihelion, the point in its elliptical orbit closest to the Sun. At that time, the spacecraft was only 77 million km away from the Sun, about half the distance between Earth and the star. “The campfires are little relatives of the solar flares that we can observe from Earth, million or billion times smaller,” says David Berghmans of the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB), Principal Investigator of the EUI instrument, which takes high-resolution images of the lower layers of the Sun’s atmosphere, known as the solar corona. “The Sun might look quiet at the first glance, but when we look in detail, we can see those miniature flares everywhere we look.”
The scientists do not know yet whether the campfires are just tiny versions of big flares, or whether they are driven by different mechanisms. There are, however, already theories that these miniature flares could be contributing to one of the most mysterious phenomena on the Sun, the coronal heating.
Much more to come in future orbits, as the spacecraft works its way even closer to the Sun.
IG report: NASA’s Orion is a program of lies
In a report [pdf] released today, NASA’s inspector general confirmed unequivocally what I have been saying for years, that the agency’s project to build the Orion capsule has been built on lies, from the beginning.
First of all, the report slams NASA for purposely excluding from its public budget almost 60% of the total cost for the entire Orion project.
» Read more
Midnight repost: A visitor’s look at Israel
The tenth anniversary retrospective of Behind the Black continues: Almost my entire family now lives in Israel, or more precisely, in a variety of settlements in the West Bank. I thus periodically go there to visit, and when I do, I have almost always written one or more essays giving my perspective of the situation there in the West Bank, as seen up close and free from the distorted narratives of our bankrupt media.
The following links will take you to all these essays. I strongly recommend that you read them in order, especially because the first five came from my 2013 visit, and form as a group a deeper analysis. The last three, from 2014, 2017, and 2018, provide some more recent perspectives.
I am sure my readers will find themselves very surprised by what I have learned.
Seismic signal from recent Martian impact detected by InSight?
According to a science paper released today, a small impact that occurred about 25 miles south from the InSight lander between February 21st and April 6, 2019 might have been detected by the spacecraft’s seismometer.
From the paper’s abstract:
During this time period, three seismic events were identified in InSight data. We derive expected seismic signal characteristics and use them to evaluate each of the seismic events. However, none of them can definitively be associated with this source. Atmospheric perturbations are generally expected to be generated during impacts; however, in this case, no signal could be identified as related to the known impact. Using scaling relationships based on the terrestrial and lunar analogs and numerical modeling, we predict the amplitude, peak frequency, and duration of the seismic signal that would have emanated from this impact. The predicted amplitude falls near the lowest levels of the measured seismometer noise for the predicted frequency. Hence it is not surprising this impact event was not positively identified in the seismic data.
Based on this data, they now think they will only be able to detect about two impacts per year with InSight’s seismometer, a decrease from the previous estimate of as many as ten.
July 14, 2020 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
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Marcel Remy – 94 years old and back on the summit
An evening pause: I like his words near the end: “Anytime something can happen to you. Sometimes you just put this thought aside and have fun.”
Hat tip Phill Oltmann.