May 26, 2020 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
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Category: Points of Information
Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
Weird central peak in Martian crater
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on March 18, 2020. It shows a very strange central peak in a crater on Mars. Not only does this peak stick out like a sore thumb in a relatively flat crater floor, its surface is strangely textured, patterned with what look like scallops.
The overview map below shows the area covered in the crater by the full image.
My guess is that the peak is the final impact melt from the original impact. Think of a pebble thrown into a pond. You get ripples (the crater rim) as well as an upward drop of water (the central peak). Unlike pond water, the material in a crater freezes quickly, leaving both the ripple and the upward drop frozen in place.
This peak however also reminds me of volcanic cones found in the American southwest, the remnant cone of a much larger volcano that has long ago eroded away.
The textures might be evidence of that erosion process, as they resemble scallops that wind and water erosion can cause on rock faces.
We also could be seeing dunes on the slopes themselves, though I think this is unlikely. This crater is on the edge of the vast Medusae Fossae Formation, the largest volcanic ash deposit field on Mars, as shown by the white cross on the overview map below. Thus, being on the edge of this ash field there is a lot of available dust and sand that can pile up on these slopes.
Still, the sunlight side of the ridge suggests the scallops are in bedrock, not sand dunes. And to assign their origin to either wind or water or ice erosion I think is a stretch.
So while the peak is probably the frozen melt remains of the original impact, the scallops are a geological mystery that needs unraveling.
SpaceX’s first manned Dragon launch scrubbed due to weather
UPDATE: They were forced to scrub at T-16:54 because of weather. They will try again in three days on May 30th, at 3:22 pm (Eastern). I will post the live stream here on Behind the Black late Friday night.
Original post:
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I have embedded below SpaceX’s live stream of the first manned Dragon mission, set to launch at 4:33 pm (Eastern). The stream begins at about 12:15 pm (Eastern). Feel free to watch as the day unfolds. Sadly, it is being managed by NASA, not SpaceX, and thus is filled with a lot of the agency’s fake hype.
I have also set it to remain at the top of the page until after the launch, or if it is scrubbed.
On a side note, NASA is now aiming for an August 30 launch of SpaceX’s next manned Dragon mission, the first official operational flight.
Below the fold I am also posting images captured, with some commentary.
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Justice Dept recommends Trump veto of FISA bill
The Justice Department yesterday recommended that President Trump veto of the new reauthorization bill of the FISA court presently working its way through Congress.
Sadly, Justice’s reasons for this recommendations is that they reject House amendments to the bill by Democrats that would weaken its ability to spy on Americans.
The bill reauthorizes three surveillance programs and makes some changes to the court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). But the Senate, when it took up the bill earlier this month, added language to create new legal protections for some FISA warrant applications, a change that garnered pushback from the Justice Department.
[Assistant Attorney General Stephen] Boyd said on Wednesday that the Justice Department had offered “specific fixes to the most significant problems” stemming from the changes made by the Senate but signaled that they had been ignored by House lawmakers.
Instead, the House will vote on an additional amendment to the legislation as part of its debate on Wednesday that would tighten the limits on the FBI’s ability to access Americans’ web browsing history.
Boyd warned that the Justice Department believes the proposed change from the House would “weaken national security tools while doing nothing to address the abuses identified by the DOJ Inspector General.”
The good news here is that this recommendation, as odious as its goals are, will give Trump ammunition for vetoing the bill, which in the end will end this corrupt court. And that goal should be the goal of every freedom-loving American.
SpaceX’s first Starship tourist customer accused of tax evasion
Capitalism in space: Yusaku Maezawa, the first person to buy a ticket to fly on SpaceX’s Starship around the Moon, has now been accused in the Japanese press to have evaded $4.6 million in taxes.
The reports, which first appeared in the Yomiuri newspaper, suggested that Mr Maezawa had failed to fully declare the personal use of a corporate jet owned by his asset management firm over a three-year period.
Japan’s national tax agency declined to comment.
Maezawa has vigorously denied the allegations on Twitter.
Virgin Orbit provides update on LauncherOne failure
Capitalism in space: Virgin Orbit has posted a detailed update on the failure of its LauncherOne rocket on its first launch on May 25.
About 9 seconds after drop, something malfunctioned, causing the booster stage engine to extinguish, which in turn ended the mission. We cannot yet say conclusively what the malfunction was or what caused it, but we feel confident we have sufficient data to determine that as we continue through the rigorous investigation we’ve already begun. With the engine extinguished, the vehicle was no longer able to maintain controlled flight — but the rocket did not explode. It stayed within the predicted downrange corridors of our projections and our Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) launch license as the vehicle fell to the ocean, posing no risk to public safety, no danger our aircrew or aircraft, and no significant environmental impact.
They note that the rocket’s release and engine ignition went as planned, which is for them positive news. They say they their next rocket is being prepared for launch, but do not say when.
I have embedded their video report of the flight below the fold. It does include video of the rocket’s release, ignition, and shut down, but cuts off at that point.
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OneWeb requests FCC approval for 48,000 satellite constellation
Capitalism in space: Despite declaring bankruptcy in March, the satellite communications company OneWeb has applied for an FCC license to launch as many as 48,000 satellites in its planned constellation to provide global internet access.
This suggests the company fully expects to continue operations after exiting bankruptcy procedures.
Amazing layers
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The science team for the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) today released a cool captioned image entitled “Exquisite Layering”, showing a place on the floor of Holden Crater where the dust and sand that normally covers most of the Martian surface has been wiped away, cleared off because these layers are on higher sloping terrain.
The image to the right, cropped to post here, focuses in on that exposed layering, believed to be sedimentary and must have therefore happened in the eons following the impact that caused the crater.
The overview map to the right shows with the red box the location of this layering inside Holden Crater. The map also illustrates why this crater was considered a candidate landing site for Curiosity. Like Gale Crater, it has evidence — the large meandering canyon system flowing into the crater — that suggests it had once been filled with a water lake. These sedimentary layers support that hypothesis, suggesting that this lake was intermittent. Each time it refilled and then dried up, it laid down a new deposit of those sedimentary layers.
Democratic election fraud documented in Michigan
Link here. Altered ballots, forged ballots, trashed ballots, all to benefit Democratic candidates.
Nah, no election fraud to see here. Let’s go to 100% mail-in ballots so that we can protect the practically zero number of people who will die from the Wuhan flu.
Democratic election fraud documented in Texas
Link here. Multiple mail-in ballots, all filled out by the same person with the same handwriting, all from a nursing home, and all mailed at once, and all voting for the same Democratic candidates.
Nah, no election fraud to see here. Let’s go to 100% mail-in ballots so that we can protect the practically zero number of people who will die from the Wuhan flu.
Almost all COVID-19 deaths occur in long-term nursing homes
Not only has the death rate for the Wuhan flu inflated falsely by government officials, they have obscured the fact that almost all the deaths have occurred not in the general population but within long term medical health facilities for the elderly.
Fact #1: 1.7% of the population in the US resides in long-term medical care facilities (LTMCFs) and total 5.7 million.
Fact #2: The residents of LTMCFs accounted for 38,800 or 53% of all COVID-19 deaths (based on recent data). The rest of the country, the 98.3%, have experienced approximately 34,600 deaths, or 47% of the nation’s total COVID-19 deaths.
That means the death rate, deaths expressed as a percent of those living in medical care institutions, is 0.682%, more than 50 times the death rate of the rest of the population at 0.012%. The death rate for the overall populations is 0.022%.
That should leave you speechless.
In other words, the death rate for the Wuhan flu is pretty much the same as the flu, and is really only a threat to the elderly sick. Protect that population, as Florida did, and you reduce the risk to everyone to practically nil.
Which means the demands upon us all — the lock downs, the social distancing, the requirement to wear masks — are all fake theater and are pointless in all ways but one: They give power to the thugs now running our government.
COVID-19 deaths likely inflated by a minimum of 25%
The number of people listed daily by state governments throughout the United States are likely inflated by 25%, based on the policies from numerous different health departments.
The policy has been to count any death with even the slightest hint of the Wuhan flu, even without any tests, to be caused by it. This was discovered in Colorado when they listed a death as caused by coronavirus, when in reality it was a drunk who died from alcohol poisoning. The state was forced to change its counting system, slightly.
Colorado has switched to a dual recording system. It still keeps a broader category of “deaths among cases,” and the smaller category of “deaths due to.” But you have to go directly to its web site to see that. The number still reported to the CDC and thence to data aggregation sites like Worldometers or the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center to count Colorado deaths and U.S. deaths remains “deaths among.”
The dual system essentially amounts to an asterisk. Nevertheless, the difference is marked. The “due to” category is about a fourth smaller than the “caused by” one. And there’s no reason to think it’s different in other states. So when the nation hits the 100,000 Covid-19 death mark soon, if you subtract 25%, it would still be proportionately far less than half the 1968-1969 “Hong Kong Flu” (H3N2) which killed an estimated 100,000 Americans at the time — or 170,000 when adjusted for U.S. population increase.
And no, the economy wasn’t destroyed and constitutionally protected civil liberties suspended for the Hong Kong Flu.
Democratic Party states like Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, and others have all been found to fudge their numbers in the same way, and don’t yet make it obvious that they are doing so.