SPACEX, Not NASA Gives Bang For The Buck. Dragon VS Orion And No Hidden Fees.

NASA's Orion:  20 years to first launch in 2023.
SPACEX's Dragon Capsule:  13 years to complete 12 manned launches by 2020.

NASA by 2023 will have cost $20 billion, about half of it in hidden budgets.
SPACEX by 2020 has spent $6 billion and would have launched sooner if NASA hadn't delayed it.

Here's a made-up metric for timely value:
NASA  20 years x $20 billion divided by 1 launch =  400 launch units per flight.
SPACEX:   13 years   x $6 billion divided by 12 launches =  6.5 launch units per flight.
ADVANTAGE SPACEX by over 60 fold.

Story including the bit about hiding the true budget in other areas at "behindtheblack.com".

Yes, Twitter has secret blacklist buttons.

The Twitter hack July 15th led to a reveal of the admin panel used by twitter monitors.  Plain as day, algorithms are overruled by admin choices.  "Jack" lied to congress. if this screen shot is verified.  Summary story is that a hacker paid $2000 to a Twitter insider for his login.

Universal Covid Vaccine Will Probably be Dangerous

"Vaccines are hard to develop, and can be dangerous. This is a vaccine for a disease where 40% (at current estimate, up from 35% before) have no symptoms, and where only about .4% die. It’s also a widespread disease — this isn’t Ebola where you could vaccinate 50,000 people and bring an outbreak to an end. You’d have to vaccinate a billion or more. When you vaccinate huge numbers of people for a disease that isn’t very dangerous, your vaccine has to be very safe to be better than the disease. That doesn’t go well with a rushed development effort."

Quoted convincingly at Instapundit with links beyond.  July 14 2020

Boston Dynamics Robot Does Back Flips and More.

Twisted stats about twisted covid stats

Covid reporting is full of distortions, imbalance and deliberate misdirection at times but this chart doesn't put it right.  If you look up "Tuberculosis", 1.5 million died from it in 2019 which gives about 4000 deaths per day, not 1014.   There are about 500,000 death attributed to Covid19 worldwide which gives about 1400 per day.  No way 56 per day is correct.  Chart appeared in July 13 open thread comments at Instapundit.

My Life Doesn't Matter Meme

from Imgflip Meme Generator

Big Company Boycotts Hardly Dint Facebook Advertising

Facebook gets the bulk of its income from smaller players and worldwide.  The mega corporate temporary ad boycotts don't tip the scales much.

Do you agree with the theories of Schrodinger?

Covid charts from WUWT: Hospitalizations, Deaths, Test Numbers, Positives.

In summary, the outdoors are safe, hospitalizations and deaths are way down, there was no spike after crowd and riot events, the number of tests is way up. Detail and discussion at Wattsupwiththat.
(In the first two charts, the blue line marks the date of public protests in crowds.)

White Throated Sparrows Suddenly Singing New Song Across Canada

An extraordinary change has come to White Throated Sparrow songs. In BC in the mid-nineties, a new song was being heard. By 2004 it was adopted across half of Alberta.  In 2019 it was spreading through Quebec.  For such a baked-in distinctive to change so rapidly is astonishing.
Was:  "Oh my sweet Canada, Canada, Canada" and is now, "Oh my sweet Cana-Cana-Cana-Canada".
Crowd-sourced recordings available on the internet fueled this story.

Lying dog-faced pony soldiers report Mt. Rushmore speech.

Some things that President Trump actually said:

They enshrined a divine truth that changed the world forever when they said: “All Men Are Created Equal!”
This left-wing cultural revolution will never be allowed to destroy our way of life or take away our freedom.
No movement that seeks to dismantle these treasured American legacies can possibly have a love of America at its heart.
We believe in equal opportunity, equal justice, and equal treatment for EVERY American!

What the press reported:

Red Guards and Democrat Mobs

Quoting straight from Wikipedia, and the parallels are strong.  For "Mao", substitute Leftist leaders in the Democrat machine who think they are going to lose honest elections.

Cancel culture

(The Red Guards)" were formed under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1966 in order to help party chairman Mao Zedong combat “revisionist” authorities—i.e., those party leaders Mao considered as being insufficiently revolutionary. Mao was thus making a bid to regain control of the CCP from his colleagues, but the Red Guards who responded in August 1966 to his summons fancied themselves as new revolutionary rebels pledged to eliminating all remnants of the old culture in China, as well as purging all supposedly bourgeois elements within the government. Several million Red Guards journeyed to Beijing to meet with Mao in eight massive demonstrations late in 1966, and the total number of Red Guards throughout the country may have reached 11 million at some point. While engaging in marches, meetings, and frenzied propagandizing, Red Guard units attacked and persecuted local party leaders as well as schoolteachers and school officials, other intellectuals, and persons of traditional views. Several hundred thousand people died in the course of these persecutions. By early 1967 Red Guard units were overthrowing existing party authorities in towns, cities, and entire provinces. These units soon began fighting among themselves, however, as various factions vied for power amidst each one’s claims that it was the true representative of Maoist thought. The Red Guards’ increasing factionalism and their total disruption of industrial production and of Chinese urban life caused the government in 1967–68 to urge the Red Guards to retire into the countryside. The Chinese military was called in to restore order throughout the country, and from this point the Red Guard movement gradually subsided."

UPDATE:  At Instapundit July 6th.

And the underlying article, right on point, is here.

Strange new disrespect

Governments overplayed their hands with mandates that they are losing the ability to enforce. I was talking to a friend about this today and he was like, “A lot of people who never noticed are noticing that the government is made up of idiots and nothing happens if you break their rules.”

Copied from Instapundit.  Link to the rest of it here. 
While left-loving politicians blessed the disorder of BLM and Antifa and Marx, better grounded and happier people were coming to a different conclusion.

One ring to bind them: The enemies of democracy and of the rule of law are coalescing.

Stephen Green:

“It’s getting harder and harder to craft individual blog posts when so much news keeps coming down the pike and it’s all related to everything else. Antifa is riots is #BlackLivesMatter is #DefundThePolice is Marxist revolution is cancel culture is civilian disarmament is George Soros is mainstream media bias is the Democratic Party.”

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them,
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

Space News July 2020

Comet NEOWISE will probably be visible to the naked eye later this month.  It brightened by 2.2 magnitudes in four days as it heads behind the sun. (June 30th report).

Expand to view cross-eyed

Noctilucent clouds are prominent this season, now in 3D.  About 80 km high at the edge of space, the couple- kilometer-thin layer of puffs of meteor dust was cleverly photographed by two friends who lived 120 km apart.  They doctored the joint imagery so you can glimpse the 3 D structure of the clouds.  If you cross eyes properly, you can see for yourself.

Mercury isn't a comet but it has a tail, a faint one of sodium vapour. From AstroBob: Day-side temperatures run to 450C and night-side to -170C. Heat strips heavy atoms.  Sodium scatters sunlight well so it is a good target. Solar wind pushes the atoms away to form a faint tail.  Italian amateur astronomer, Alessandrini, took the photo.   (There's an SF story about Mercury in which the perpetually turned away side was named "June" because "What is so rare as a day in June".)



A detailed colour-coded geologic map of the entire moon has been published. There is zoom-in detail available on line.  See expanded article at EarthSky.org

How much room does the Universe have to record information about itself?  This overlaps the question, can the universe be self-aware?  This PBS ten-minute Space Time talk eyeballs it.    (Black holes feature prominently). Information  capacity is proportional to surface area, not volume.  The smallest unit imagined that may be used for a mark is a Planck unit.  This leads to an eyeball number of 10¹⁸⁰ Planck units in the universe and some eyeball calculations that match a Planck unit to each element in the visible universe.  The conclusion, a great deal of self-reporting is possible.          This is an interesting question.   The mass of our ideation is tiny and an improbable event, the child of a child of an improbable vortex of probability, yet somehow consequential.  As one author wrote, we weren't predicted but the universe expected something like us would be along.

A treasonous few have the bullhorn but they will not prevail. Michael Flynn describes today's attacks on America.

Posted in the Western Journal by Michael Flynn:

'I was once told if we’re not careful, 2 percent of the passionate will control 98 percent of the indifferent 100 percent of the time.
The more I’ve thought about this phrase, the more I believe it. There is now a small group of passionate people working hard to destroy our American way of life. Treason and treachery are rampant and our rule of law and those law enforcement professionals who uphold our laws are under the gun more than at any time in our nation’s history. These passionate 2 percent appear to be winning.'

Flynn was going to investigate billions of off-the-books money
that Brennan and friends managed.

'The attacks being presented to us today are part of a well-orchestrated and well-funded effort that uses racism as its sword to aggravate our battlefield dispositions. This weapon is used to leverage and legitimize violence and crime, not to seek or serve the truth.'

OpenRAN: A new way to advance 5G to beat Huawei subsidized attacks

Open Radio Access Network is being developed in the US.  This lets you pick and choose 5G system elements from different suppliers and have them work together, while saving a lot of money.  Huawei but also Nokia and Ericsson only sell package systems, not elements.  This makes prices higher and also makes it easier for a state actor like Huawei to make below-market forays into other nations. The mix and match networking has price points below the system pricing.

I didn't know the Pentagon has a $200,000,000 5G budget and this is helping researchers.
OpenRAN information from this article in the Washington Post.

Send Money!

Canada has a Receiver General whose chief purpose is to receive money.  I'm told that one of the first banks in the USA started by putting out a sign, "Deposits Accepted".  This joker has the right idea, offering to protect people from bad thoughts.

Old Mice Gain Muscle and Lose Fat When ATB Receptor Is Prompted. Humans Have Similar Pathway.

Maybe not too good to be true:  Brown fat in mice has a lot of ATB sensors which when prompted, signal a burn off to the brown fat.   Muscle tissue has some of the same receptors.  When those ones are signaled, more muscle tissue is laid down.  This is a "two-fer" made in heaven if it safely works on seniors who could lose fat and bulk up muscle at the same time.  The net result in the mice was a slight loss of weight and a younger figure.  The mice burned almost 50% more oxygen and the healthy changes were in place after just four weeks. The conclusion, of course, is that more research is needed. Research by Prof. Dr. Alexander Pfeifer from the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University Hospital Bonn summarized at Science Daily.

Three Gorges Dam End of Life Approaching; UPDATE

This photo published in Epoch Times shows Three Gorges dam appears to have deformed in the last ten years.  China at first said the photo was deformed by digital processing.  Another party said the dam is built of blocks linked to each other, not massively anchored to bed rock and the movement is plausible.  Chinese academia thinks the dam should expect a 50 year life time.   Twenty million people live downstream.  Best case may be another 40 years.

UPDATE: I leave this image up but it's wrong. The image below I was able to verify however.

UPDATE:   When did this start?  Google Earth shows a computer generated picture of the dam, not the real dam.