Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman

“Insane” & “Mad rush” to escape New York & San Francisco

June 9, 2020 2:40 pm Robert Zimmerman

As people always do, they flee fascist and oppressive states. And now they are doing so from the Democratic Party strongholds of New York and San Francisco.

In both cases, I am sure it isn’t just fear of the Wuhan flu. People are also fleeing the lock downs, the violence and looting in connection with protests related to George Floyd’s death, and the overall tyrannical bankrupt rule by Democrats in both places.

Trust me, it is only going to get worse. I have great doubts the voters will throw these bankrupt Democrats out of office in November, which means the mad rush will continue. Just like East Germany in the 1950s, people will not sit and suffer in a communist fascist state, if they have an option to leave. And just like in East Germany, I will not be surprised if the leaders in both New York and San Francisco, assuming the voters make no change, take more restrictive actions to stop the flight.

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OSIRIS-REx spots sun-caused erosion on Bennu

June 9, 2020 10:08 am Robert Zimmerman

Click for full figure.

An analysis of images taken by OSIRIS-REx of the asteroid Bennu has allowed scientists to identify places where the changing temperatures from day to night has caused the surfaces of rocks to flake away, a process geologists label exfoliation.

The image on the right, cropped and reduced to post here, is from figure 1 in the paper. The yellow arrow points to a typical example of exfoliation, which is a process you can see on many rocks here on Earth.

Rocks expand when sunlight heats them during the day and contract as they cool down at night, causing stress that forms cracks that grow slowly over time. Scientists have thought for a while that thermal fracturing could be an important weathering process on airless objects like asteroids because many experience extreme temperature differences between day and night, compounding the stress. For example, daytime highs on Bennu can reach almost 127 degrees Celsius or about 260 degrees Fahrenheit, and nighttime lows plummet to about minus 73 degrees Celsius or nearly minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit. However, many of the telltale features of thermal fracturing are small, and before OSIRIS-REx got close to Bennu, the high-resolution imagery required to confirm thermal fracturing on asteroids didn’t exist.

The mission team found features consistent with thermal fracturing using the spacecraft’s OSIRIS-REx Camera Suite (OCAMS), which can see features on Bennu smaller than one centimeter (almost 0.4 inches). It found evidence of exfoliation, where thermal fracturing likely caused small, thin layers (1 – 10 centimeters) to flake off of boulder surfaces. The spacecraft also produced images of cracks running through boulders in a north-south direction, along the line of stress that would be produced by thermal fracturing on Bennu.

The typical erosion processes that can cause exfoliation (weather, gravity) are not possible on tiny Bennu, so the solution appears to rest with sunlight and sunlight alone.

This is not really a surprising result, but it is the first time it has been documented by data.

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ULA on schedule for maiden flight of Vulcan in early 2021

June 9, 2020 9:49 am Robert Zimmerman

Capitalism in space: According to ULA, the development program for its new Vulcan rocket remains on schedule, and will make its maiden flight in early 2021 as initially planned.

The launch will send Astrobotic’s privately built Peregrine lander to the Moon, carrying NASA science instruments.

The article provides a good overview not only of the status of construction, but also the political history that forced the development of Vulcan, that being the insistence by Congress that ULA stop using Russian engines in its rockets.

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A global map of rockfalls on the Moon

June 9, 2020 9:40 am Robert Zimmerman

Click for full resolution image.

A review of more than two million Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) images of the Moon has allowed scientists to compile the first global map of lunar rockfalls.

The map on the right comes from the paper. From the press release:

The result is a map of the lunar surface between 80 degrees northern and southern latitude that shows 136,610 rockfalls with diameters of more than two and a half meters. “For the first time, this map enables us to systematically analyze the occurrence and causes of rockfalls on another celestial body”, says Dr. Urs Mall from MPS.

Previously, scientists had assumed that lunar quakes in particular were responsible for the displacement of boulders. The new global map of rockfalls indicates that impacts from asteroids may play a much more important role. They are apparently – directly or indirectly – responsible for more than 80 percent of all observed rockfalls.

“Most of the rockfalls are found near crater walls,” says Prof. Dr. Simon Loew of ETH Zurich. Some of the boulders are displaced soon after the impact, others much later. The researchers hypothesize that impacts cause a network of cracks that extend in the underlying bedrock. Parts of the surface can thus become unstable even after very long periods of time.

Though the map suggests vaguely that these rockfalls are more scattered on the lunar farside and more concentrated in the mid-latitudes on the nearside, I suspect this is likely not so. If it is however it reveals something about the Moon that needs to be explained.

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NASA endorsement allows SpaceX to shift focus to Starship

June 9, 2020 9:25 am Robert Zimmerman

Capitalism in space: Three different news stories today about SpaceX point out strongly the direction in which the company is heading, both in its design focus and in where it will be doing it.

First, SpaceX has informed the Port of Los Angeles that it is now definitely abandoning all plans to establish a Starship manufacturing facility there.

The company made this announcement on March 27th, which means it is not directly related to the tiff that Musk had with Alameda County officials about keeping his Tesla factory open during the California Wuhan panic lock down, which occurred in early May. Nonetheless, this decision, combined with Musk’s May 9th statement that he was going to move Tesla from California, suggests strongly that he and SpaceX is losing patience with California politics, and is likely to increasingly minimize the presence of Musk’s companies there.

This also means that the company will be expanding its Starship operations in both Texas and Florida.

In a second related story, it appears that — with the success of the first manned Dragon mission — Musk now wants SpaceX to shift its development focus entirely to Starship. Prior to that successful Dragon launch, NASA had made it clear that it did not want the company distracted by Starship, and instead stay focused on fixing any issue that might delay Dragon. As NASA is SpaceX’s biggest customer, the company was obliged to comply.

With the Dragon success however SpaceX has completed the job, so Musk now feels free to shift the company’s development teams over to Starship. And NASA is even helping him do this (today’s third SpaceX story) by agreeing at last to permit the company to use reused Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon capsules for future manned missions.

In a wholly unexpected turn of events, a modification to SpaceX’s ~$3.1 billion NASA Commercial Crew Program (CCP) contract was spotted on June 3rd. Without leaving much room for interpretation, the contract tweak states that SpaceX is now “[allowed to reuse] the Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Crew Dragon spacecraft beginning with” its second operational astronaut launch, known as Post Certification Mission-2 (PCM-2) or Crew-2.

NASA in the past was very slow to accept the use of reused capsules and rockets. It now appears they have abandoned this reluctance entirely, so much so that we could even see American astronauts flying into space on a reused rocket and in a reused capsule before the end of the year.

I want to pause to let this fact sink in. SpaceX has turned what what was considered only a few years ago as an absurd, dangerous, and wholly insane idea into the only and right way to do things.

This big endorsement of reusability by NASA also means that the agency is now willing to let SpaceX make its shift to Starship, since refurbishing rockets and capsules does not take the manpower as building new equipment.

Expect the action in Boca Chica to ramp up quite spectacularly this summer.

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STØDIG: Exploring the Arctic on a Repurposed Lifeboat

June 8, 2020 6:01 pm Robert Zimmerman

An evening pause: From the youtube webpage:

Two architects re-purposed a 100 person marine survival lifeboat; Stødig, into a self sufficient expedition home to travel 3500km from the UK to the Norwegian Arctic in 2019.

Hat tip Cotour.

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Sunspot update: The deep minimum deepens

June 8, 2020 12:07 pm Robert Zimmerman

NOAA last week did its monthly update of its graph for tracking the monthly activity of sunspots on the Sun’s visible hemisphere. Below is that updated graph, annotated by me to show the past and new solar cycle predictions.

May 2020 sunspot activity

The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community for both the previous and upcoming solar maximums. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007 for the previous maximum, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The blue curve is their revised May 2009 prediction. The red curve is the new prediction, first posted by NOAA in April 2020.

Since last month NOAA has done some further revisions to this graph, and improved it significantly since their first redesign, released in April. You can see the difference just by comparing it to my previous update last month. For scales covering longer periods, they have eliminated the diamonds, making the curve much more readable. They have also increased the size of the graph, which also serves to make it more readable as well. Kudos to the people at NOAA for these changes.

As you can see, sunspot activity in May plunged from the slight uptick in April. This is even more clearly shown by the SILSO graph below.
» Read more

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A gun-control Democrat in Chicago calls for defunding the police

June 8, 2020 10:15 am Robert Zimmerman

At least one Chicago alderman is now demanding that the city defund its police force as her solution to the rioting and looting and gun violence occurring there and nationwide.

She is also clearly in favor of the strict gun control laws in Chicago, which means she, like Democrats in California, New York, Minnesota, and elsewhere, sees the lawbreaker as her base and the ordinary and innocent citizens as her enemy.

UPDATE: It occurred to me that there is another aspect to this story that needs noting. If you go to the link, you will see a video news report that includes an interview of alderman Rodriguez-Sanchez as well an “activist” and a representative of the ACLU, all strongly in favor of defunding the police. Amazingly, the reporter, Will Jones, apparently never once thought to ask any of these individuals about the strange conflict between their desire to defang the police, while maintaining Chicago’s very strict gun control. Tells us a bit about his own biases, or maybe his own lack of depth in thought.

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A Catholic archbishop chooses sides, and picks Trump

June 8, 2020 9:44 am Robert Zimmerman

This might be a first: A Catholic archbishop, Carlo Maria Viganò, has written a public letter condemning very forcefully the “deep state” and those supporting the riots, the looting, the lockdowns, and the race-baiting of the last few months, and telling Trump he is fighting on the side of the angels.

In society, Mr. President, these two opposing realities co-exist as eternal enemies, just as God and Satan are eternal enemies. And it appears that the children of darkness – whom we may easily identify with the deep state which you wisely oppose and which is fiercely waging war against you in these days – have decided to show their cards, so to speak, by now revealing their plans. They seem to be so certain of already having everything under control that they have laid aside that circumspection that until now had at least partially concealed their true intentions. The investigations already under way will reveal the true responsibility of those who managed the Covid emergency not only in the area of health care but also in politics, the economy, and the media. We will probably find that in this colossal operation of social engineering there are people who have decided the fate of humanity, arrogating to themselves the right to act against the will of citizens and their representatives in the governments of nations.

We will also discover that the riots in these days were provoked by those who, seeing that the virus is inevitably fading and that the social alarm of the pandemic is waning, necessarily have had to provoke civil disturbances, because they would be followed by repression which, although legitimate, could be condemned as an unjustified aggression against the population. The same thing is also happening in Europe, in perfect synchrony. It is quite clear that the use of street protests is instrumental to the purposes of those who would like to see someone elected in the upcoming presidential elections who embodies the goals of the deep state and who expresses those goals faithfully and with conviction. It will not be surprising if, in a few months, we learn once again that hidden behind these acts of vandalism and violence there are those who hope to profit from the dissolution of the social order so as to build a world without freedom: Solve et Coagula, as the Masonic adage teaches. [emphasis in original]

This statement by Viganò is significant in that during the past few elections the Catholic church remained disgustingly neutral, even after it was quite clear that the party of Obama was aggressively working to restrict the freedom of religious people, especially in the context of the homosexual agenda. It was as if the order had gone out from on high that they were not to take any sides politically, either out of fear of losing their tax-free status, or (more likely) because too many powerful church leaders cared not a whit for the principles as outlined in the Bible and were in fact in favor of the left’s agenda.

I wonder if the recent madness related to the Wuhan flu and George Floyd has finally caused the scales to fall from their eyes.

Hat tip Tom Biggar.

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Minneapolis city council will disband police force

June 7, 2020 4:35 pm Robert Zimmerman

Boy would I be hiring moving vans: The Minneapolis city council today announced at a George Floyd protests that it now has a veto-proof majority determined to disband that city’s police force.

Minneapolis’ left-leaning City Council members on Sunday announced a veto-proof push to disband the Minneapolis police department, ramping up a major conflict inside the city following the death of George Floyd while in police custody.

Many activists have been pushing at least for their cities to defund local police departments, a move many other analysts considered unrealistic. The measure has been the main focus for many people protesting against police brutality.

The city council members spoke at a protest at Powderhorn Park, a neighborhood in Minneapolis. The number of supporters in attendance represented a veto-proof majority to push the measure through, Fox 9 reported.

It appears the council members supporting this measure are all from Minnesota’s version of the Democratic Party, the same party in the state legislature that only three months ago passed bills making it easier to confiscate citizens’ guns and more difficult for citizens to get them.

So, let’s sum up: The Democrats in Minnesota are demanding that citizens be disarmed, while simultaneously working to eliminate any police protection. Sounds like a plan, doesn’t it?

What these policies illustrate is that these Democrats see the ordinary citizen, from all races, as a justified target, and are doing whatever they can to facilitate their murder.

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New data suggests COVID-19 is weakening in deadliness

June 7, 2020 3:36 pm Robert Zimmerman

New research, as well as impressions from scientists in a number of locations worldwide, is suggesting that the Wuhan flu is becoming with time a less lethal disease, mimicking behavior seen previously with other similar coronaviruses.

[S]everal …American scientists, including some at Arizona State University, announced findings in May that could bolster claims that the virus is less deadly than it once was.

The scientists at ASU said that they had detected a gene deletion in one sample from several hundred Arizona patients that potentially reduced the fitness of the disease. Notably, they claimed it was similar to a deleted sequence observed in the 2003 SARS virus that was observed near the end of that disease’s epidemic—possibly signaling that COVID-19 may be bound for a similar fate.

Those conclusions were echoed by scientists in Spain this week, who proposed that COVID-19 may have adopted what the researchers call a “don’t burn down the house” strategy, “reducing the severity of the infection and tissue damage without losing transmission capability.” In effect, the disease could be opting to become less lethal so that it can spread more easily—a hallmark of evolutionary behavior, and also a boon for anyone who gets infected with the milder strain.

Meanwhile, the evidence continues to suggest that the overall mortality this year is not significantly different than other years, and that the Wuhan flu “isn’t much worse than than a bad seasonal flu.”

Finally, the leftist demonstrations yesterday and today prove that the demands that we social distance, that we wear masks, that we shut down the economy and bankrupt a quarter of the population in order to slow the spread of COVID-19, were all a lie. Suddenly, it’s okay to march down streets in crowds, as long as that crowd is in favor of the bigoted organization Black Lives Matter and opposed to Donald Trump.

But then, it was all a patently obvious lie from the beginning. First we were to social distance for a few weeks to slow the spread (not stop it) so that hospitals would not be overwhelmed. Then we had to close-down all businesses arbitrarily chosen by governors as non-essential (noting that this choice almost never included big corporate chains). Then the lock-downs and social distancing had to be extended, sometimes forever, in order to stop the disease. And then we needed to wear masks everywhere, even though it is clear from the scientific evidence that masks do little while actually increasing the wearer’s health risk.

The moment however the left, which was where most of these demands were coming, had a new cause that required demonstrations and protests, these new “norms” went out the window. At least they are out the window for the next few days, while the George Floyd protests continue. Once those die down, expect the demands to return, and to be applied (as they have so far) selectively, aimed mostly at hurting those the left sees as their enemy.

Winner of the 2003 Eugene M. Emme Award of the American Astronautical Society.