Category: Behind The Black

Midnight repost: The uncertainty of climate science

11:59 pm

The tenth anniversary retrospective of Behind the Black continues: Tonight’s repost, from 2015, can be considered a follow-up to yesterday’s. While many global warming activists are absolutely certain the climate is warming — to the point of considering murder of their opponents a reasonable option — the actual available data is so far from certain as to be almost ludicrous.

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The uncertainty of climate science

For the past five years, I have been noting on this webpage the large uncertainties that still exist in the field of climate science. Though we have solid evidence of an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we also have no idea what the consequences of that increase are going to be. It might cause the atmosphere to warm, or it might not. It might harm the environment, or it might instead spur plant life growth that will invigorate it instead. The data remains inconclusive. We really don’t even know if the climate is truly warming, and even if it is, whether CO2 is causing that warming.

While government scientists at NASA and NOAA are firmly in the camp that claims increasing carbon dioxide will cause worldwide disastrous global warming, their own data, when looked at coldly, reveals that they themselves don’t have sufficient information to make that claim. In fact, they don’t even have sufficient information to claim they know whether the climate is warming or cooling! My proof? Look at the graph below, produced by NOAA’s own National Centers for Environmental Information.
» Read more

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Obama misused intelligence agencies for years to spy on political opponents

4:56 pm

We now have substantial evidence going back years — well before its illegal misuse of the FISA court — that the Obama administration and officials in its FBI and Justice Department misused National Security Agency (NSA) databases to illegally spy on its political opponents.

The article at the link is very long and detailed, but this is necessary to unpack the history that not only documents that spying before 2016, but why Justice and FBI high officials felt compelled then to use a fake dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign to get a warrant from the FISA court. Once they lost access to the NSA databases that year, they needed something that would allow them to continue that spying.

During the time-frame of December 2015 through April 2016 the NSA database was being exploited by contractors within the intelligence community doing unauthorized searches. On March 9, 2016, oversight personnel doing a review of FBI system access were alerted to thousands of unauthorized search queries of specific U.S. persons within the NSA database.

NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers was made aware. Subsequently NSA Director Rogers initiated a full compliance review of the system to identify who was doing the searches; & what searches were being conducted. On April 18, 2016, following the preliminary audit results, Director Rogers shut down all FBI contractor access to the database after he learned FISA-702 “about”(17) and “to/from”(16) search queries were being done without authorization.

In other words, the NSA database of phonecalls between Americans, an illegal database in its own right (the Constitution forbids such indiscriminate spying on Americans without a warrant), was being used by unauthorized individuals to gain information on Americans. From the article it becomes clear that those individuals were Obama administration operatives, and the Americans they were digging dirt on were their political opponents.

When Rogers shut down access to this keyhole, it was then necessary to instigate an unjustified warrant from the FISA court to allow these same Obama officials the right to continue their spying. At the same time they also instigated an effort to get Rogers fired.

What infuriates me about this is that even now, years later, no one has been indicted for any of these clearly illegal acts, despite substantive and documented evidence. We get reports, we get leaks, we get outraged Congressman on cable networks, and we get Trump tweets ranting about how terrible it is. What we don’t get is anyone behind bars.

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British Airways retires 747 fleet

9:03 am

Because of the crash in customer demand due to the Wuhan virus panic, British Airways has abruptly retired its entire fleet of 747s.

This retirement had been planned, as the 747 is expensive to operate. The airline had planned however to phase them out over several years. Now they simply don’t need them, as they are flying so few passengers.

I am fortunate that I got to fly on one in 2019, in a vacation trip to Wales with Diane. This might have been the only time I ever flew on a 747, and it was a remarkably smooth flight, both during take-off and landing. It is sad to see this magnificent American achievement finally leave us.

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Midnight repost: Murder for the sake of climate idealogy

11:59 pm

The tenth anniversary retrospective of Behind the Black continues: Tonight’s repost follows directly from yesterday’s, though it was written seven years earlier in 2010. Mindless hate always begets mindless violence, and Americans could have seen the mindless violence of today’s leftists a decade ago, if they had only being willing to look.

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Murder for the sake of climate idealogy

This video has been making the rounds on the web. Though I warn you that is somewhat graphic, it is essential that you watch it.

When I first saw this about a week ago, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. It was so vile and offensive I could not believe that it was legitimate. It obviously wants to pay some homage to Monty Python, but even Monty Python never went this far. How could anyone possibly think that killing small children in the name of environmentalism was in any way funny? And how could anyone ever believe that this video would persuade anyone to go along with the 1010 environmental campaign? If anything, the video does an excellent job of discrediting this organization and everyone involved with it.

Thus, despite what some bloggers were saying, I held back commenting, just to make sure the video was real and not a terrible prank meant to sabotage.

There is now no reason to hold back. Late last week, the 1010 organization itself issued an apology, admitting that this video was their handiwork. Before I continue, I think it is worthwhile for you to also read their apology, in all its venal glory. In many ways, it condemns them and their allies far more than the video did:
» Read more

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NASA: Dragon crew will return to Earth August 2nd

9:17 pm

Capitalism in space: Assuming that the weather cooperates, NASA has now set August 2nd as the date the manned Dragon capsule will return to Earth with its two man crew.

Assuming good weather and a smooth final few weeks on the International Space Station, astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken are scheduled to undock from the orbiting research outpost Aug. 1 and return to Earth the next day to wrap up a 64-day test flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spaceship.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine confirmed the target dates for the Crew Dragon’s undocking and splashdown in a tweet Friday. A few hours after departing the space station, the Crew Dragon will fire its Draco thrusters for a braking burn and re-enter the atmosphere, targeting a parachute-assisted splashdown at sea. “Splashdown is targeted for Aug. 2,” he tweeted. “Weather will drive the actual date. Stay tuned.”

Note that the recovery operations, as has been the case with everything else on this flight, will be run entirely by SpaceX and its employees. NASA’s only real role is that of a customer and observer, though obviously agency officials are taking a hands-on part in determining the landing date.

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More polygons on Mars!

2:21 pm

Lava polygons on Mars?
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image, rotated, cropped, and contrast-enhanced to post here, focuses on polygons found near the equator of Mars. It was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on May 22, 2020, and shows what the science team labels as “well-preserved polygons.”

Previously I have posted cool images showing polygons (here and here), but those images were located in the northern mid-latitudes, and were thought to have been formed in connection with some form of freeze-melt-drying water process in permafrost.

Today’s image however is likely not related to water. It is located in the equatorial regions, where little water is expected. It also has a more permanent nature, which suggests that it is the result of some sort of volcanic or tectonic process. That the polygons are depressions suggests the latter, since a volcanic process is more likely to have filled cracks and left ridges more resistant to erosion, as explained by this article.

In this case the topography suggests instead some form of spreading and cracking process that left behind these polygon-shaped cracks. In mud, such polygons are found when the mud dries, but once again, these are in a very dry region. If formed in that manner they must have formed a very very long time ago, when the climate here was very different, and were somehow preserved for eons since.

The location, as shown in the overview map below provides some context, though it really doesn’t answer any questions..
» Read more

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Actual data: COVID-19 is only a threat to the old AND sick

12:24 pm

Link here. The author does a nice job of summarizing the data we now have detailing the mortality demographics of the Wuhan virus. What that data tells us is that almost no one in the general population is threatened by this disease, at all, and thus all the extreme society-wide measures so far taken (lock downs, masks) are completely absurd.

First, the average age of those who have died is 78 years old, which also happens to be the normal average life expectancy of Americans. That means the virus has done nothing to change that overall life expectancy.

Second, of those who did die from the Wuhan virus, 75% already had underlying medical conditions. Like the flu and pneumonia, if you were old and sick, the virus acted to put the final nail in the coffin. For everyone else, it was not an issue at all.

Third, of those aged and elderly who died, 42% lived in nursing homes, many of whom were victims of bad state policies that exposed them unnecessarily to infected individuals while being confined to these facilities.

Let’s recap what the available data have shown us so far. Those dying of COVID-19 are overwhelmingly very old and most often very unhealthy, and nearly half of them lived in nursing homes, where less than one-half of one percent of our country’s population lives. Though the media seem uninterested in reporting any of that, we know well, and as near to precision as we might expect in a viral pandemic, whom COVID-19 actually kills.

Nor is this all. Of those in the healthy younger population, the data now tells us that COVID-19 is one third less deadly than the flu or pneumonia. When compared to these other diseases, fewer young people get the Wuhan virus, or even show symptoms if they do, and of those who do show symptoms one third fewer people die from the disease.

In other words, society has no reason to be afraid of this virus. We should have continued life as normal, with the exception of taking some extra care to protect the elderly sick.

Instead, we are becoming a society of fear and ignorance, covering our faces for no reason, isolating ourselves from our fellow man, and fearful to even go outside and enjoy life, out of fear not only of the Wuhan flu but in terror that others will ostracize us to being normal and unafraid.

It is time for this idiocy to stop. Sadly, I do not expect it to. We have fallen in love with this fear, and want to embrace it instead.

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Victory in NY for socialist/communist

11:17 am

Long time moderately leftwing Congressman Eliot Engel (D-New York) yesterday conceded defeat in his Democratic primary to Jamaal Bowman, an ally of communist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York).

Engel’s loss, which came despite the support of Democratic Party leaders, shows that the traditional incumbent advantages ― cash, name recognition and high-profile endorsements ― don’t inoculate party veterans against the challenge of a left insurgency.

That’s particularly true in New York City, which was also the site of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s landmark primary win in 2018. That Bowman, an unabashedly left-wing Black candidate, was able to prevail in a district that includes predominantly white, affluent suburbs is, in some ways, even more remarkable.

…In his announcement video, which captured Bowman walking through the subway, he described his vision for a brighter future ― one with “Medicare for All,” tuition-free public college, a Green New Deal and racial equity ― from the vantage point of someone who grew up in poverty and remains on the front lines of the fight against it. “As educators, we work with children and families who suffer from poverty, asthma from pollution, homelessness, lack of health care,” he said.

Venezuela here we come!

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Launch update on Mars missions

9:24 am

The launch status of the three missions to Mars:

First, the launch of UAE’s Hope orbiter by Mitsubishi’s H-2A rocket has been pushed back to July 20th due to bad weather. Their launch window extends to August 3rd, so they still have two weeks before it closes.

Second, China has rolled to the launchpad the Long March 5 rocket, with the Tienwen-1 orbiter/lander/rover. Though they have only said that the launch will occur between July 20th and July 25th, based on past operations, they usually launch six days after roll-out, putting the launch date as July 23.

China has also provided some clarity as to Tienwen-1’s landing site on Mars. According to this Nature Astronomy paper [pdf], published on July 13th, their primary landing site is in the northern lowland plains of Utopia Planitia. The Tienwen-1 science team has also considered [pdf] the northern lowland plains in Chryse Planitia, on the other side of Mars.

Since they will spend two to three months in Mars orbit before sending the lander and rover to the surface, it could very well be that they won’t make a final decision until they get into orbit.

Finally, on July 7th Perseverance was mounted on top of its Atlas-5 rocket for its July 30th launch. Its launch window closes on August 15.

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Midnight repost: It’s the hate, not the violence

11:59 pm

The tenth anniversary retrospective of Behind the Black continues: Though tonight’s essay was written in June 2017 it still applies today. The mindless hate that moves the left has now escalated beyond Trump and the Republican Party to encompass all of American history.

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It’s the hate, not the violence

The last few days have probably been the ugliest I have ever seen in American culture. Not only was an attempt made to commit mass murder against a group of Republican elected officials, the response from too many mainstream Democrats has generally been tone deaf and even supportive of the violence. Worse, the violence appears to be on-going, with no sign of relief.

My list is hardly complete. The stories above are only a small sampling of the ugly stuff I have read since the shooting on June 14. The best I have seen from some Democrats is a hint that maybe they have let their rhetoric get out of hand, but even here they often backtrack to blame Republicans and only Republicans for the shooting.
» Read more

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Omar in trouble in Minnesota?

5:43 pm

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.

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Ballot harvesting in Oregon’s vote-by-mail system demonstrates Democratic strategy to steal elections

2:34 pm

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.

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NASA confirms Webb launch delay to October 2021

2:12 pm

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.

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Deaths from COVID-19 in hospitals is dropping

1:25 pm

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.

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Starship prototype being prepped for first hop

10:14 am

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.”

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Solar Orbiter’s first images, the closest ever of Sun

10:07 am

Campfires on 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.

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Midnight repost: A visitor’s look at Israel

11:59 pm

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.

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Seismic signal from recent Martian impact detected by InSight?

11:54 pm

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.

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Martian acne?

2:48 pm

Acne on Mars?
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, shows what the scientists from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) label “fretted terrain.” In an earlier post describing evidence found by Europe’s Mars Express orbiter of glaciers in the northern mid-latitudes of Mars, fretted terrain was described as follows:

As is common with fretted terrain, it contains a mix of cliffs, canyons, scarps, steep-sided and flat-topped mounds (mesa), furrows, fractured ridges and more, a selection of which can be seen dotted across the frame.

These features were created as flowing material dissected the area, cutting through the existing landscape and carving out a web of winding channels. In the case of Deuteronilus Mensae, flowing ice is the most likely culprit. Scientists believe that this terrain has experienced extensive past glacial activity across numerous martian epochs.

In that case the fretted terrain was in the transition zone between the northern lowland plains and the southern cratered highlands, and actually resembled chaos terrain. What we see here looks far different, a surface that resembles the bubbly surface of a vat of thick molten stew.

This image is also deep in the cratered southern highlands, though still in the mid-latitudes at 41 degrees south latitude. While the presence of ice close to the surface is possible at this latitude and could definitely explain what this image shows, it would be a big mistake to accept this explanation without skepticism. A lot is going on here, and much of it suggests volcanic-type processes. The volcanoes might have been spewing mud or ice instead of molten lava, but then again, all is uncertain.

What is certain is that I can’t help thinking of the pock-marked skin of an adolescent teenager when I look at this photo. And for all we know, the processes that produce both surfaces could be in many ways similar.

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Northrop Grumman launches U.S. reconnaissance satellites

9:25 am

Capitalism in space: Northrop Grumman today successfully used its Minotaur-4 rocket to launch four U.S. reconnaissance satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office.

Minotaur-4 is essentially re-purposed military ICBM that had been decommissioned, refurbished, and upgraded for orbital flight. This was its first launch from Wallops Island in Virginia. This was also Northrop Grumman’s second launch this year, which still leaves them out of the 2020 launch race leader board:

16 China
10 SpaceX
7 Russia
3 ULA

Today’s launch however puts the U.S. ahead of China in the national rankings, 17 to 16.

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Midnight repost: The Lie that is Orion

11:59 pm

The tenth anniversary retrospective of Behind the Black continues: This essay, written in July 2016, might provide modern readers with some background and context into the uselessness of NASA’s over priced, over designed, and behind schedule Orion capsule. The only thing that has changed in the four years since is that NASA has stopped claiming Orion is an interplanetary spaceship. They now freely admit that to get to Mars they need to build and assemble much larger ships, of which Orion will only be a tiny part.

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The Lie that is Orion

Several weeks ago NASA put out one of its periodic press releases touting the wonders of the engineering the agency is doing to prepare for its future missions to Mars. In this case the press release described a new exercise device, dubbed ROCKY (for Resistive Overload Combined with Kinetic Yo-Yo), for use in the Orion capsule.

“ROCKY is an ultra-compact, lightweight exercise device that meets the exercise and medical requirements that we have for Orion missions,” said Gail Perusek, deputy project manager for NASA’s Human Research Program’s Exploration Exercise Equipment project. “The International Space Station’s exercise devices are effective but are too big for Orion, so we had to find a way to make exercising in Orion feasible.

As is their habit these days in their effort to drum up support for funding for SLS and Orion, the press release was filled with phrases and statements that implied or claimed that Orion was going to be the spacecraft that Americans will use to explore the solar system.

…engineers across NASA and industry are working to build the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System rocket that will venture to deep space for the first time together…

…Over the next several years, NASA’s Human Research Program will be refining the device to optimize it not only for near-term Orion missions with crew, but for potential uses on future long-duration missions in Orion…

These are only two examples. I have clipped them because both were very carefully phrased to allow NASA deniablity should anyone question these claims. For example, in the first quote they qualify “deep space” as specifically the 2018 unmanned lunar test flight. And the second quote is qualified as referring to missions to lunar space. Nonetheless, the implied intent of this wording is to sell Orion as America’s interplanetary spaceship, destined to take us to the stars!

Don’t believe me? Then take a look at NASA’s own Orion webpages, starting with the very first words on their Orion Overivew page.
» Read more

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Fake BBC report: Population to crash by end of century

11:33 pm

Global fertility rate since 1950

No one is gonna be born! According to this garbage BBC report of a even more vapid science paper, the on-going decline in the fertility rate will cause the world’s population by the end of the century to shrink by about a billion, with some countries losing half their populations.

Falling fertility rates mean nearly every country could have shrinking populations by the end of the century. And 23 nations – including Spain and Japan – are expected to see their populations halve by 2100. Countries will also age dramatically, with as many people turning 80 as there are being born.

What is going on? The fertility rate – the average number of children a woman gives birth to – is falling. If the number falls below approximately 2.1, then the size of the population starts to fall. In 1950, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime.

Researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation showed the global fertility rate nearly halved to 2.4 in 2017 – and their study, published in the Lancet, projects it will fall below 1.7 by 2100. As a result, the researchers expect the number of people on the planet to peak at 9.7 billion around 2064, before falling down to 8.8 billion by the end of the century. [emphasis mine]

The key word in the quote is highlighted. It is also illustrated in the graph above, taken from the BBC article but annotated by me to indicate the time period in red where we have absolutely no data at all, and no one really knows anything. While the decline in fertility since the 1960 is well documented, caused by prosperity and greater choices for women worldwide, the projections beyond 2017 are not worth the money that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation paid for it. Those projections are based on models, and from what I can tell, those models are more opinion that anything. We really can’t predict what is going to happen, because the factors that have caused the fertility decline in the past half century might simply not apply in the next eighty years.

In fact, based on the completely unexpected disaster that occurred this year because of the Wuhan virus panic and the possible fundamental changes, for the worse, that this panic will likely bring to worldwide culture, the prosperity that fueled the fertility drop in the past half century might vanish, bringing about changes that make any projections into the future pure guesswork.

In fact, these models are probably as useless and as wrong as the models used to predict that millions would die from COVID-19 in the first year. In fact, this model is likely comparable to most scientific models that attempt to predict the future. You have a better shot at guessing what will happen by looking at tea leaves.

The sad thing is that the BBC is still reporting on a model like this as if it were real data, and therefore must happen. You’d think they’d learn.

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Thousands of scientists and doctors condemn COVID-19 panic

1:48 pm

Censensus! Since May literally thousands of scientists and doctors, including a Nobel Prize winner, have publicly condemned the heavy-handed lockdowns and restrictions on freedom imposed by governments because of its panic over COVID-19.

The article provides details. It is very clear that a very large number of scientists are appalled by the over-reach by government health officials that has led to the shut downs and the requirements for mask use. (Obviously these scientists are all white supremacists and racists, and should be cancelled immediately!)

The article also led me to this research from Oxford University, which concluded in April that the death rate from the Wuhan virus is just about the same as the flu:

Taking account of historical experience, trends in the data, increased number of infections in the population at largest, and potential impact of misclassification of deaths gives a presumed estimate for the COVID-19 IFR somewhere between 0.1% and 0.41%.

The website states that they update regularly when new data arrives, but it appears that since April nothing has caused them to revise this conclusion. The first link above also notes that Dr. Anthony Fauci of the CDC agreed with this conclusion in a peer-reviewed March article for the New England Journal of Medicine. (Obviously Oxford and Fauci are white supremacists and racists also, and should be silenced forthwith!)

We should stop this madness and go back to normal. Our government has failed us so completely in its response to COVID-19 it should be fired completely. And that includes every single one of the health officials who pushed for lockdowns, mask rules, and social distancing.

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