Category: Essays And Commentaries

Long essays or op-ed length commentaries on the issues of the day or on topics of special interest.

How deadly is COVID-19, really?

2:40 pm

It is now almost twenty months since COVID-19 crossed the ocean from China and arrived in the United States. When it arrived there was great fear as its true deadliness at that time was unknown. Though the sparse data from China, South Korea, and the Diamond Princess cruise ship suggested it was merely a variation of the annual flu and not something to fear, the computer models put forth by a variety of scientific institutions at that time instead predicted millions were about die from it.

No one really knew for certain. Some legitimately argued that the lockdowns, mask mandates, and oppressive restrictions on normal activities were necessary to limit its harm.

Almost two years have now passed, and we can now assess realistically which of those scenarios was accurate. To best understand these things I strongly believe is always best to look at the big picture, the larger and bigger the better. In this case, let’s look at the entire U.S. and measure COVID-19’s impact by noting the total number of people in the United States who have become infected by COVID since its arrival and comparing that with the total number who have died. These actual numbers will tells us truly how deadly COVID has been, and whether our continued fear of it is justified.

CDC COVID estimates as of May 2021
CDC’s COVID-19 estimates as of May 2021

According to CDC estimates, as of May 2021, 120.2 million Americans had been infected by COVID, of which 101.8 million experienced actual symptoms. The CDC in these same estimates in May calculated that 767,000 people had died from COVID.

These CDC estimates were further supported by a Nature peer review study published in August 2021, which estimated that by the end of 2020 100 million Americans had been infected with COVID.
» Read more

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The COVID lies of governments and scientists

9:42 am

Liar Fauci
The man has been lying from day one.

Two stories this morning illustrate once again the utter dishonesty and untrustworthyness of the governments and scientists who have been promoting strict lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates as a response to COVID-19.

First, the NIH yesterday admitted in a letter to Congress that it had funded the gain-of-function research at China’s Wuhan lab, despite repeated blunt denials by it and former NIH Director Francis Collins and NIAID Director Anthony Fauci.

In a letter addressed to Rep. James Comer (R-KY), NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence A. Tabak cites a “limited experiment” to determine whether “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.” According to the letter, humanized mice infected with the modified bat virus “became sicker” than those exposed to an unmodified version of the same bat coronavirus.

[Lead scientists Peter] Daszak failed to report this finding, and has been given five days to submit “any and all unpublished data from the experiments and world conducted” under the NIH grant.

When Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) had accused Fauci of funding this research, Fauci had not only denied it, he accused Paul of being a liar. In truth, it was Fauci who was lying in his testimony to Congress. Fauci and the NIH provided a foreign government funding to do secret biological weapons research that, in the end, was used to attack our country.

Fauci should be fired forthwith. Collins had stepped down on October 5th, probably because he knew this information was about to be released, proving he had been lying.

The second story is as egregious. It appears that the mask study that the Australian government has touted to impose mask mandates throughout their country is filled with so many basic errors and faulty research procedures that it should never have been published in the first place.
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Did China test a hypersonic weapon in August?

10:14 am

Long March 2C rocket
China’s Long March 2C rocket

On October 17th The Financial Times published a story claiming, based on anonymous sources, that one of China’s five launches in August tested a hypersonic weapon, which supposedly circled the globe to impact the Earth only 24 miles from its target.

The Financial Times story is behind a paywall, but not surprisingly it was picked up by much of the mainstream press, with the conservative press — as illustrated by this Daily Wire story — accepting the weapon as fact, while the leftist press — as illustrated by this CNN story — giving China the opportunity to deny the claim.

Did it actually happen? I have no idea. I would add however that I would not trust any story dependent wholly on anonymous sources, considering the unreliability of today’s press and the repeated evidence that numerous federal agencies in the military and intelligence communities routinely feed it disinformation for their own political purposes. These agencies, including the Space Force, want to encourage Congress to fund them, and creating a bogey man threat that the press can tout has for decades been the standard way to do it.

To get a better idea whether this hypersonic flight happened, let’s review the actual Chinese launches in August to see if any might be a likely candidate. For a launch to fit the description, there would have to be almost no information about its payload, and that payload would have to have not reached orbit, since the hypersonic test circled the globe once and then impacted the Earth.
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Shatner vs today’s America

9:17 am

Shatner vs everyone else
Shatner, on the left, turns away from Bezos and the spray of champagne.

Capitalism in space: The profound, emotional, and thoughtful reaction of William Shatner to his short suborbital flight yesterday on Blue Origin’s New Shepard space capsule contrasted starkly with the crass, rude, and shallow response of his co-passengers and Jeff Bezos.

You can watch Shatner’s comments right after landing at the video at the link. Watch how he tries to express his thoughts to Bezos immediately, and is almost ignored as Bezos and the others instead want to spritz champagne at each other. Shatner turns away, almost in disgust. The screen capture to the right shows him turning away, not because he doesn’t want to be hit by champagne but because he doesn’t want that shallowness to steal from him the emotions he now feels.

Eventually Bezos realizes Shatner is going to say his peace, and that he better pay attention. Shatner, almost in tears, struggles to note how shocked he was at the relative thinness of the atmosphere. To him, the rocket so quickly zipped out of a blue sky into blackness. As he said,

“This air, which is keeping us alive, is thinner than your skin. It’s a sliver. It’s immeasurably small when you think in terms of the universe.

…”What you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine. I’m so filled with emotion about what just happened … it’s extraordinary. I hope I never recover, that I can maintain what I feel now. I don’t want to lose it. It’s so much larger than me and life.”

Shatner is an actor. For him, the emotion is the most important thing, as that is what he has specialized in expressing on screen to others for his entire life. At this moment, however, he was not expressing the emotions of a imaginary character he was creating on screen, but his own personal emotions. He managed to do it, in the best way possible. God speed William Shatner. We shall miss you when you are gone.

That Bezos was so unprepared for this moment from Shatner was very unfortunate. It made him look very shallow and foolish, which is a shame because, as Shatner so correctly noted, Bezos was the one who made that moment possible.

Shatner, at ninety years of age, is of a different more civilized generation that believed strongly in applying thought to one’s emotions, rather than letting those emotions rule. The contrast between him and all the younger people in this clip gives us a clear snapshot of an America now gone, replaced by the thoughtless emotional America of today.

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Millions have gotten COVID, almost none have died

2:21 pm

In questioning Health & Human Services (HSS) secretary Xavier Becerra during Senate hearings last week, Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) made a comment whose significance has largely gone unnoticed. In challenging the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates that demand everyone get vaccinated, even those who have gotten the Wuhan flu and thus have a natural immunity far better than any of the vaccines, Rand said the following to Becerra:

You presume somehow to tell over 100 million Americans who have survived COVID that we have no right to determine our own medical care?” Paul asked. “You alone are on high, and you’ve made these decisions? A lawyer with no scientific background, no medical degree. This is an arrogance coupled with an authoritarianism that is unseemly and unAmerican. You, sir, are the one ignoring the science.[emphasis mine]

Most of the reporting of this hearing and Paul’s questioning of Becerra has focused on the vaccine mandate and the obvious absurdity of forcing everyone to get it, even when there is no need.

The highlighted words however are far more important. » Read more

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How to discover interesting things on Mars

2:13 pm

Overview map

Today’s cool image will do something a little different. We are going to begin in orbit, and by step-by-step zooming in we will hopefully illustrate the great challenge of finding cool geological features on the surface of Mars.

The first image to the right is an overview map of the Valles Marineris region. To its east, centered at the white dot, is a vast region of chaos terrain, endless small buttes and mesas and criss-crossing canyons. Travel in this region will always be difficult, and will likely always require some form of helicopter to get from point to point.

What is hidden in that terrain? Well, to find out you need to take a global survey from orbit with a good enough resolution to reveal some details. Below is a mosaic made from two wide angle context camera pictures taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

Context mosaic of chaos terrain
For full images go here and here.

This mosaic, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, only captures a small section of the long north-south strips taken by MRO. The orbiter has taken tens of thousands of these strips, in its effort to produce a global map of Mars that shows some reasonable detail.

Do you see anything in this mosaic that looks interesting? Scientists need to pore over such images, one by one, searching for geology that is both puzzling and revealing. Sometimes the features are obvious, such as a single blobby crater in the flat relatively featureless northern lowlands.

Sometimes however the search can be slow and time-consuming because the terrain is complex, as is the example to the right. The many mesas and canyons can hide many interesting features. Since MRO can’t possibly take high resolution photos of everything, scientists have to pick and choose.

The planetary scientists who use MRO did find something here worth looking at in high resolution. Can you find it? Normally I’d provide a box to indicate it, but this time I’d thought I’d challenge my readers. Before you click below to see the feature, see if you can find it yourself in this mosaic. What would you want to photograph in high resolution?
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Blackballed professor at NC State sues

12:06 pm

The Bill of Rights cancelled at North Carolina State University
Freedom of speech cancelled at
North Carolina State University.

Fighting back: Stephen Porter, a tenured professor at North Carolina State University, has just filed a lawsuit against the university and several of its faculty for blackballing him for simply disagreeing with them on issues of politics and policy.

The introduction of the legal filing [pdf] outlines clearly the actions of the university’s faculty, designed to destroy Porter’s academic career:

[I]n retaliation for Professor Stephen Porter’s protected expressions of opinion on important societal issues, Defendants have intentionally and systematically excluded him from departmental programs and activities that are necessary for him to fulfill his job requirements, effectively hollowing his job out from the inside. They have done this in a deliberate effort to set the stage for his eventual termination. … Defendants are gradually forcing Plaintiff into what is effectively a “rubber room” in retaliation for his criticisms of the so-called “social-justice” ideology that now prevails both in his department and in academia more broadly.

Read the whole complaint. It describes in ugly detail the efforts by his supervisors to isolate and ostracize him so it would be impossible for him to teach and maintain his job.

So, what exactly did Porter do to bring the wrath of these petty dictators down upon him? » Read more

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The real human exploration of the solar system began on September 15, 2021

11:26 pm

Falcon 9 at T+13 seconds

Capitalism in space: First the news: On September 15, 2021 SpaceX successfully placed four civilians into orbit using its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule.

Thus began the first private manned orbital mission in space, planned to last three days and reach an altitude of 595 kilometers or 370 miles, the highest any person has flown in space in decades.

The first stage, on its third flight, successfully landed for reuse. The Dragon capsule, Resilience, was on its second manned flight. The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

31 China
23 SpaceX
15 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman

The U.S. now leads China 34 to 31 in the national rankings.

Now the significance: There was one moment about five minutes after lift off that revealed the fundamental difference between this real flight into space and the short suborbital hops that Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic did in July.

The three most critical moments of any launch had just been completed. The first stage engines had cut off, the first stage had separated successfully, and the single upper stage engine had ignited. It was now lifting the capsule towards orbit, with the only major technical task left were its engine cut off and the separation of the Dragon capsule.

At that moment John Insprucker, principal integretion engineer for SpaceX and frequent host during its launch live streams, made a quick comment that was clearly meant to illustrate the vast difference in achievement between this flight and those two July suborbital flights. He said,
» Read more

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Watching the first all-private commercial manned orbital spaceflight

11:20 pm

Liberty and freedom enlightening the world
Liberty and freedom enlightening not only the world,
but the entire solar system.

Bumped: I will be out on a cave trip for most of today, September 15, 2021, so I’ve moved this post to the top of the page, as it clearly will be the most important space news today. I should be back before launch, but if not, enjoy!

Original post:
————————
Capitalism in space: Let’s begin by underlining one fundamental fact about the Inspiration4 manned Dragon orbital space mission, targeted for a September 15th launch tomorrow evening, that makes it different from every other orbital space mission ever flown since Yuri Gagarin completed the first manned mission in 1961:

The government has nothing to do with it.

The launch facilities, the rocket, the capsule, the drone ship where the rocket’s first stage will land, and the entire recovery operation in the ocean are all controlled and owned by SpaceX. The passengers are private citizens, one of whom purchased the flight directly from SpaceX.

It is was organized by 38-year-old billionaire and entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who is also a highly-capable jet warbird aircraft pilot. When he found out from SpaceX he could be the first to fly an all-commercial mission in Crew Dragon, he fronted $100 million to $200 million required and partnered with St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in a campaign to give away two of the missions seats and raise $200 Million for children’s cancer research.

Every person you will see in mission control, at the launchpad, and on the recovery ships are also private citizens, working for a private company that just happens to be in the business of flying rockets, spaceships, and humans into space. None are government employees, and I would suspect that most don’t want to be.

Not only is this mission privately run, its goals are completely different. While all past space launches were flown for purposes decided by the government, this mission’s goals have been determined by the free participants themselves. SpaceX is making money on the flight, Isaacman and his passengers are getting the chance to fulfill their long-held personal dream of going into space, and Isaacman is also using this flight to raise money for cancer research, a personal passion of his.

The flight itself will be unusual. It will be the first manned mission in more than a decade, since the last shuttle repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, to not go to an orbiting space station. Instead, the capsule will spend three days free-flying in orbit around the Earth. To enhance the flight for the passengers, SpaceX removed the docking port on Resilience (the capsule) and replaced it with a viewing port with large windows.

The orbit itself will in a sense push the envelope, as SpaceX plans to loft the capsule to an altitude of about 370 miles, considerably higher than ISS’s orbit of about 260 miles and about 35 miles higher than the mission to Hubble. In fact, the Inspiration4 crew will be the farthest from the Earth’s surface than any human in decades, possibly going back as far as the Apollo era.

For watching this flight I have embedded SpaceX’s live stream below, which you can also find here. You will also be able to find that stream at SpaceX’s YouTube page, where the company is also airing preflight videos.

This mission illustrates the fundamentals that built the United States of America. Give humans freedom, don’t try to tell them what to do, and they will do astonishing and magnificent things, on their own.
» Read more

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The boom in commercial space continues

10:50 am

Starship on an early test flight
Modern rocketry soaring under freedom

Capitalism in space: In the last two days there have been so many stories about different space companies winning new contracts I think it is important to illustrate this in one essay, rather than in multiple posts. Below is the list:

The last two stories are possibly the most significant, because both show that the shift in space from government-built to privately-built, as I advocated in my 2017 policy paper, Capitalism in Space, is spreading to other countries. » Read more

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Flight anomalies occurred during Branson’s suborbital flight in July

9:08 am

Capitalism in space: According to a New Yorker story today, the suborbital flight of Richard Branson in July experienced several flight anomalies that the article suggests should have caused it to end early before reaching space.

The rocket motor on Virgin Galactic’s ship is programmed to burn for a minute. On July 11th, it had a few more seconds to go when a red light also appeared on the console: an entry glide-cone warning. This was a big deal. I once sat in on a meeting, in 2015, during which the pilots on the July 11th mission—Dave Mackay, a former Virgin Atlantic pilot and veteran of the U.K.’s Royal Air Force, and Mike Masucci, a retired Air Force pilot—and others discussed procedures for responding to an entry glide-cone warning. C. J. Sturckow, a former marine and nasa astronaut, said that a yellow light should “scare the [“#$%#] out of you,” because “when it turns red it’s gonna be too late”; Masucci was less concerned about the yellow light but said, “Red should scare the crap out of you.” Based on pilot procedures, Mackay and Masucci had basically two options: implement immediate corrective action, or abort the rocket motor. According to multiple sources in the company, the safest way to respond to the warning would have been to abort. (A Virgin Galactic spokesperson disputed this contention.)

Aborting at that moment, however, would have dashed Branson’s hopes of beating his rival Bezos, whose flight was scheduled for later in the month, into space. Mackay and Masucci did not abort.

Virgin Galactic’s response, including the FAA’s statement, can be found here. The company noted that the flight deviation occurred because of unexpected high altitude winds. The FAA’s comment I think provides some reasonably perspective:
» Read more

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Why only NOW is there mounting concern over President Biden’s mental health?

12:36 pm


Biden as he forgets what truths we hold as self-evident in March 2020.

A Daily Mail story from last week reported on the growing concern of doctors and other health experts about the mental state of Joe Biden, the oldest American president ever.

Questions have been raised about US President Joe Biden’s cognitive wellbeing after a car crash interview over his handling of the unfolding Afghanistan crisis. America’s oldest president provided jumbled responses to questions and mixed up details about his son in an interview with ABC. The stumbles did not make the broadcasted version but were revealed when a full transcript of the interview was published overnight.

It revealed the President incorrectly stated his late son Beau Biden worked for the Navy in Afghanistan, before correcting himself that he served for the Army in Iraq. It follows a spate of gaffes and slips of the tongue since the 78-year-old ran his successful presidential campaign in 2019.

This story only highlights a growing slew of news stories and op-eds that have appeared recently during the ongoing debacle in Afghanistan, in both the right and leftwing press, that have noticed how President Biden appears repeatedly confused in interviews while showing signs that he does not quite understand what is going on around him.

Of course, for the press and the political class to recognize these facts now, after Biden has become president, is equivalent to closing the barn door after the animals have escaped. As I noted in October 2020, before the election, these cognitive issues have been obvious for the last two years, and had been getting steadily worse throughout 2020 during the election campaign. As I wrote then,
» Read more

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