Monday, 20 July 2020

Enhanced Video From Moon Landing

Beautiful to watch.  The source article tells how massive computing power interpolates from source video shot at 12 frames per second or less.   The first is a moon buggy ride from Apollo 16.  The second is footage of touchdown and emergence from Apollo 15.

Saturday, 18 July 2020

Covid deaths by State since the beginning: No Pandemic in about forty of them.

All the states death rates per million are posted in this one chart.  The anchor point to match the starting points is the first time deaths rose above a background level of  one in ten million.  Three quarters of the states hardly moved the needle.  New York and New Jersey are the biggest offenders or victims.

Covid deaths have declined steadily for 3 months, now at seasonal baseline. Media panic talk cases instead.

The grey lanes show normal seasonal deaths for pneumonia and flu.
Covid is history folks

Thursday, 16 July 2020

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.

Tuesday, 14 July 2020

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.

Monday, 13 July 2020

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.

Sunday, 5 July 2020

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.)





Saturday, 4 July 2020

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:

Friday, 3 July 2020

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.

Tuesday, 30 June 2020

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.