July 21, 2021 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
» Read more
Category: Behind The Black
The Bangles – You Were On My Mind
An evening pause: Recorded live in 2000 of this 1960s hit by the group We Five.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
New studies show that the biggest risk to kids from COVID are the policies of governments
New studies about COVID-19 and its effect on children continue to show that the strigent health policies being demanded by government agencies like the CDC and WHO and many Democrats are actually the biggest health threat for children than the virus itself.
First, a major survey of 48,000 children who had become infected with COVID-19 has found that absolutely no healthy children died from the disease.
Dr. Marty Makary is a medical expert and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Carey Business School. His research team “worked with the nonprofit FAIR Health to analyze approximately 48,000 children under 18 diagnosed with Covid in health-insurance data from April to August 2020.”
After studying comprehensive data on thousands of children, the team “found a mortality rate of zero among children without a pre-existing medical condition such as leukemia.”
Let me repeat that. They looked at tens of thousands of kids under the age of 18 and could not find one case where a healthy child died. All recovered. None needed a vaccine, as their young and very strong immune systems did what those immune systems have always done, fought off a sickness to give them an immunity for the rest of their lives.
So kids are safe from COVID, even if they are not vaccined and actually catch the virus and get sick.
At the same time, other studies have found that both masks and the vaccines are actually a greater health threat to children than the virus itself.
» Read more
Another “What the heck?” photo from Mars
Click for full image.
The cool image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken a decade ago, on August 25, 2011, by the context camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), It shows a flat plain with a sudden clump of mounds or hills at the center.
This is one of those pictures from Mars which I like to call a “What the heck?” image. What caused the mounds, and why are they found only in this concentrated clump, with the rest of the terrain around them generally flat?
Though the context image was taken a decade ago, no follow-up high resolution images were taken of this area until very recently.
Below is the one recent high resolution image taken by MRO on May 12, 2021, cropped and reduced to show the bottom half of the mound clump as shown by the white box. It makes the mystery even more puzzling.
» Read more
Today’s blacklisted American: Army chaplin, threatened with punishment for criticizing Biden administration, sues and wins Pyrrhic victory
No first amendment allowed for conservatives.
Today’s blacklist story illustrates a growing trend I am finding in these stories of the modern leftist effort to silence and blackball anyone who criticizes or opposes it. Increasingly, the victims of this intolerance are fighting back, both in public and in the courts. How successful that resistance has been however remains unclear.
In today’s story, a decorated Army chaplin had posted in January on Facebook strong criticism of the incoming Biden administration’s decision to allow men who claim they are women (and vice versa) to serve in the military, and was immediately sanctioned by his superiors for doing so.
[U.S. Army Chaplain (Major) Andrew Calvert] objected to the anticipated government policy change. “How is rejecting reality (biology) not evidence that a person is mentally unfit (ill), and thus making that person unqualified to serve. There is little difference in this than over those who believe and argue for a ‘flat earth,’ despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary,” Calvert wrote in his comment, according to Army Times.
“The motivation is different, but the argument is the same. This person is a MedBoard for Mental Wellness waiting to happen. What a waste of military resources and funding!” he concluded.
Following an investigation, Calvert was issued a General Officer Memorandum of Reprimand (GOMOR) on April 22 by Lieutenant General Robert P. White.
In May Calvert obtained legal support and sued. Less than a month later, the Army backed down, ending its persecution of Calvert, clearing his record.
That Calvert fought the effort by the military to reprimand him for his opinions is commendable. Nonetheless, in this case the victory appears somewhat hollow.
» Read more
NASA funds hopper to jump into shadowed lunar craters and find ice
Capitalism in space: NASA has awarded a $41.6 million contract to Arizona State University and the private company Intuitive Machines to build a tiny hopper that will be used to explore the permanently shadowed craters near the Moon’s south pole, looking for water ice.
Micro-Nova can carry a 1-kilogram payload more than 2.5 kilometers to access lunar craters and enable high-resolution surveying of the lunar surface under the flight path. Intuitive Machines’ Micro-Nova, a lunar hopper that will explore permanently shaded regions of the moon.
…“Intuitive Machines’ Micro-Nova is our first-ever chance to explore from within a lunar permanently shaded region (PSR),” said the mission science lead Mark Robinson, of ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration. “We will be able to take very high resolution color images near the hopper and black and white images of about half the PSR. What will we see, that is the question!”
This tiny hopper, only 30 inches square, will be built by ASU and launched on Intuitive Machines’ first Moon lander, Nova-C, presently scheduled for launch in December 2022.
Democrat proposes new tax on private manned spaceflight
That didn’t take long! Mere hours after New Shepard completed its first suborbital manned commercial flight, a Democrat in the House of Representatives introduced a bill in Congress to impose a tax on private manned spaceflight.
Oregon Democrat Rep. Earl Blumenauer, who is a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, on Tuesday introduced what he is calling the Securing Protections Against Carbon Emissions (SPACE) Tax Act, which would create excise taxes on commercial space flights carrying human passengers for purposes other than scientific research.
“Space travel isn’t a tax free holiday for the wealthy,” Blumenauer wrote on Twitter. “We pay taxes on plane tickets. Billionaires flying into space—producing no scientific value—should do the same, and then some.”
The measure would include a per-passenger tax on the price of a commercial flight to space and a two-tiered excise tax for each launch into space. The first tier would apply to flights between 50 miles and 80 miles above Earth’s surface, while the second “significantly higher” rate would apply to flights more than 80 miles above Earth’s surface.
This typical Democratic Party response to the acheivement of others reminds me of a pertinent quote from Ronald Reagan:
Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
While Reagan was describing many of the actions of politicans from both parties, the Democratic Party is today particularly abusive. Private enterprise has in the past decade done things in space the government and NASA spent years trying to accomplish, with zero success, while wasting billions of taxpayer dollars. The Democrats resent that success, and are very eager to squelch it. Rather than have any American achievement in space, created by the citizens of the nation and independent of their interference, they would rather destroy it. Even as they extort as much money as they can from it.
Russia launches Nauka, its first new ISS module in 11 years
Russia today used its Proton rocket to successfully place in orbit its new ISS module, Nauka, the first new Russian module in eleven years, and fourteen years after it was originally supposed to launch.
After launch and orbit insertion, the module, MLM-U Nauka, is now performing an eight day phase to the Station for an automated docking on July 29 to the nadir docking port of the Zvezda service module, a port currently occupied by the Pirs module.
Upon arrival, Nauka will become the third largest module of the Russian segment of the ISS and will add 70 cubic meters of space to the Station’s internal volume, a third Russian-side sleeping location, an additional toilet, as well as new water regeneration and oxygen production systems — augmenting some of the original systems in Zvezda that are showing their 22 year age.
The main task for the Nauka module will be to conduct scientific experiments. The pressurized compartment of the module contains 21 universal working places (URM), including four locations with sliding shelves, a glove box, a frame with an automatic rotating vibration-proof platform, and a porthole with a diameter of 426 mm for visual and instrumental observations.
The article above provides a very interesting review of Nauka’s complex and difficult history.
The leaders in the 2021 launch race:
23 China
20 SpaceX
12 Russia
3 Northrop Grumman
The U.S. still leads China 29 to 23 in the national rankings.
Israel: Airborne High Power Laser Weapon test
An evening pause: I’m not sure if this fits as an evening pause, but the engineering is startling, and has ramifications both good and bad, for the future. The first half of the video shows the test, the second half explains it.
Israelis are surrounded by neighbors dominated by a culture that wishes to kill them all. They need this kind of defense, especially because the world will no longer defend them against this threat of genocide. In fact, many of our ruling “intellectual” class celebrate that possibility.
That they are forced to develop this technology sadly means that some bad actors will get it soon as well. The dark age is so fast approaching that it takes the breath away. That this is where we are, on the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, is tragic beyond words.
Hat tip Jim Malamace.
Ice-filled craters in Mars’ glacier country?
Click for full image.
Today’s cool image returns us to the chaos region dubbed Protonilus Mensae, the middle of three adjacent mensae regions in the northern hemisphere that I like to dub Mars’ glacier country because there is so much evidence of buried ice there.
The photo to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on May 31, 2021 by the high resolution camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Titled “Layered Feature in Crater in Protonilus Mensae,” the section I have posted focuses on several craters, with the one with the central mesa likely the picture’s target. Based on many similar features found in craters in this region, it is somewhat safe to assume that this mesa is made of buried ice.
The overview map below as always provides the context.
» Read more
Today’s blacklisted American: Catholic hospitals threatened with cancellation by University of California
Religious beliefs: Banned by University of California.
The modern dark age: The Board of Regents of the University of California (UC) on June 23, 2021 voted to end its affiliation with all Catholic hospitals if they do not agree to perform “abortions, euthanasia, assisted suicide and the direct sterilization of patients,” in direct violation of their Christian religious beliefs.
The policy states that UC physicians practicing at a sectarian hospital must be permitted to provide any treatment at that location to a patient who can’t be safely transferred to another facility — even if the treatment would violate religious restrictions. Affiliated hospitals will have until Dec. 31, 2023, to comply with the policy, or the affiliation agreement must be canceled.
“We know that transfers are not always in the patient’s interest”, board Chair John A. Pérez, who crafted the key language approved by the board, said after the board’s meeting, conducted remotely Wednesday afternoon. [emphasis mine]
Do you see the lie in the highlighted words? All of these treatments are optional, and can be scheduled. I can see almost no medical issue preventing the safe transfer of a patient from of a Catholic hospital in order to get one of these procedures. In fact, I can’t even see a reason for any patient who wants an “abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, or direct sterilization” to even be in a Catholic hospital.
The only reason the university’s Board of Regents has for imposing such a rule is to either force Catholics to violate their religious beliefs, or to get such religious hospitals blackballed from serving any patients,. and thus in the long run destroy them as institutions.
As noted by the Alliance of Catholic Healthcare,
» Read more
On the radio tonight
For those who have nothing better to do with their time, I will be making another two hour appearance on Coast to Coast with George Noory tonight, beginning at 10 pm (Pacific).
I expect in the first hour we will talk about commercial space and the ongoing exploration of Mars. The second hour is usually reserved for questions from listeners.