Tribal power not truth is what passes for MORAL nowadays. Example from Politico: Hunter Biden corruption before and after the election.

 

Puget Sound salmon deaths traced to tires, not climate change.

 Urban streams in the Puget Sound and Seattle area have Coho salmon mortalities of 50% before reaching spawning areas, notably after big rainfalls.  The easy villain was "climate change".  The surprise villain is leached tire preservative combined with ozone in urban stormwater runoff.  This was confirmed in the Los Angeles and San Francisco area too.  See University of Washington report (hat tip Alan Watts)

Picture at WU story

The detective work reported is fascinating leading to an unsuspected chemical whose general formula they figured from the salmon deaths but whose source they initially knew nothing about.

6PPD is added to extend tire life. Particles worn away from tires have a byproduct of 6PPD-quinone after reacting with ozone.  The chemical signature with 18C 22H 2N and 2O matched.

The most economical and recommended fix is to look for other tire preservatives.  Treating storm water at that level is impractical.

YouTube Chokes Opinion: Not Allowed Question: Was their fraud in key US election counts?

From a legitimate question publisher.

YouTube announced Tuesday it will take down videos questioning the integrity of the U.S. presidential election that millions of Americans, most notably President Trump, believe was stolen through numerous fraudulent actions, lawfare chicanery and computer manipulation.

From an illegitimate question publisher: 

YouTube said content “that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome” of the presidential election will be removed. ... YouTube said Wednesday it will start removing any content uploaded to its platform that contains allegations of widespread fraud or errors in the 2020 presidential election after Tuesday's so-called safe harbor deadline that essentially locked in President-elect Joe Biden's victory.

Does "Bureaucracy" Explain Washington Better Than Saying "Politicized Institutions"? "Who's the boss?" is the question.

Yes, Washington institutions are staffed by Democrat types and generally work against their current president, Donald Trump.   Richard Grenell, previously acting DNI, points to another factor in this Epoch Times interview.    Transparency is not welcome in Washington because controlling information is power and to open up is to lose power.  That explains why so many officials said publicly they had evidence the Russian Collusion story was real but under oath and away from the cameras, they said they did not.  If they wished to be transparent, the matter would have been settled in a few weeks and the initiative would be from the Executive Branch and not from their Fiefdom.   Who's the boss?  Institutions as high up as FBI, CIA, Justice have been significantly captured by inside players.  Regulatory capture.

Glaucoma fix coming soon. "Hydrogel"

 My grandmother took eyedrops every six hours for twenty years by night and by day to save her sight from glaucoma

.  Now a major fix is coming.    Glaucoma has a build up of fluid pressure inside the eye that eventually damages the optic nerve and turns you blind.  Coming soon:   A tiny injection twice a year slips some hydrogel between two outer layers of the eyeball and this hydrogel adjust to hold open a tiny channel that allows pressure to drain away.    

The aqueous humor fix has been done in animals, not people and lasted four months, not six months yet but seems like a sure thing.  Glaucoma is the main cause worldwide of irreversible blindness. 

Story at medicalxpress.com/news

Become less ignorant about the Caucasus struggle: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Russia.

Read over this article from Defenceindepth.co in London and adjust opinions about the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict.   The bits of news easily available helped me to the ignorant belief that I knew something of the region.    At the link you'll get a much bigger view based on Russian sources.   Another resource to follow is Mike Doran at Twitter's doranimated where you'll get an insider's view from a connected American who was in Azerbaijan during the conflict.

The key points are that Russia likes frozen conflicts in its near abroad with all parties looking to them for military peacekeepers and clout, thus keeping NATO out of the area.  It also means that Turkey is getting hit harder over in Syria as a message that it's role (with Israeli support) was unwelcome even though the outcomes are satisfactory for Russia. 

Van Morrison says:

 "I'm not telling people what to do or think", Van Morrison  says, "the government is doing a great job of that already".

 

 

ISRIB: A pill to fix dementia.

 Age-related declines in memory and mental flexibility, or a significant component thereof,  have been reversed in mice and almost with a single dose.  Source is at medicalpress.com

The back story.  When cells are stressed by viral or cancer gene attacks, they try to throttle protein production in those cells.  Aging brain cells are getting some of this throttling too.    "ISR" is "Inegrated Stress Response" and "IB" is "Inhibitor".   ISRIB turns off the throttling and a couple doses seems to restore quite a bit of the cognitive decline in aging and brain-damaged mice without stopping the body's ISR defense against viral and cancer gene attacks.  A single treatment was enough to get aging mice to try flexible maze solutions like their younger counterparts.

An implication:  Senility may be more about idled repair machinery and less about long term degeneration of nerves.

This is almost too good to want to believe, that a generic response to stress casts its net too wide.

Liquid water can have another form. One is 20% less dense than the other, but elusive.

 At -63C, liquid some H20 water molecules restructure to a 20% less dense form.  Because no one could observe water at that temperature without it turning to solid ice, this couldn't be proven until high speed recording captured the change before the solid ice could form.  It seems to be a dynamic equilibrium at local levels and the authors wonder if this property of water might appear at body temperatures in minute loci, affecting biological communication.  The geometry behind the density isn't described at the link.

A new look at World Wars 2 from Victor David Hanson

 The review linked here has many surprises.  The Axis mostly killed and starved non-combatants and the Allies mostly killed combatants.  LeMay repurposed the B29 bomber for low altitude flights with much higher bomb loads.  The Japanese jet stream played a role.  WW2 was multiple wars.  Production dispersed away from the battlefield helped Russia (factories moved east of the Urals) and Japan (factories dispersed in civilian areas which were not attacked initially) and USA  (no serious effort was made to bomb the USA).  In an existential war, the side that can destroy the other side's homeland is the winner.  Hitler's unforced move to declare war on the USA is highlighted again as a major failure.  The London Blitz was a strategic mistake after Berlin had been bombed when Hitler should have stayed focused on bombing air fields, aircraft factories and radar.  And more.

Update:  I'm just finishing my copy.  Very readable.  The exceptional can redirect a war but outcomes favour the one building and delivering the most killing resources.  Immense detail included about tanks, planes, infantry weapons and repair issues and how many were fielded and how fast they were fielded.

Competing narratives on assassination of top IRAN nuclear scientist, Fahkrizadeh.

Just the facts please.  Do you choose the remote control version or the pulled-him-out-of-the-car version. Both tales have veridical moments with "remote" winning for innovation and "by hand" for past track records.  The "remote" version is quoted from an Israeli write-up which in turn comes from an IRGC press release.   "Remote" is presumably bogus and makes the security people look less ineffective.  As a followup, the spin has competing narratives too:  "Sabotaging diplomacy" or "Iran has a clandestine program". 

UPDATE  More detail for the likely version, dozens involved in the planning and execution.

Gaming revenue chart: From the arcade to handhelds (and VR).

Sourced here. 

 

 

Space News November 2020

 Just for fun:  Alien art installation in Utah.  About a year ago someone placed a polished monolith in a remote desert location.  Fun if it really were aliens.

There's possible evidence of an active volcano on  the Tharsis volanic plateau of Mars.  A smudge showed up on a Mars photo October 22nd that wasn't there a few days earlier.  Spacenews.com October 25th

From Japan comes a detailed study of the last magnetic pole reversal of Earth about the time our species started moving out of Africa.  Sea sediments were studied in unprecedented detail.  A major finding is the change may have taken twenty thousand years with a long period of instability leading up. 

Planetary atmospheric surprises:  Recent years have brought photographic records of new phenomena:  Sprites and ELVES, gravity waves in clouds, STEVE and now reported this month, "little green cannonballs" on the edge of STEVE.

A meteor, 2020 VT4  the size of a small house,  scooted by Earth November 13th and was discovered the next day.  5-11 meter diameter, not big enough to alarm people but you wouldn't want it landing in your neighbourhood.  It passed below the space station orbit.

Sodium tail on Mercury:  A nice photo was published of the sodium trail, like the tail of a comet, that tags along with Mercury on the away side. It's a composite with filters, made dramatic by including trees peripheral to the view.

There's been progress looking for evidence of past supernovas that impacted earth.  A 3% spike in Carbon-14 is considered a strong signature.  Brakenridge tried to match four known events of the last  40,000 years with the patched together record of tree growth rings.  There was a correlation but the time signatures were too fuzzy to brag about.

NASA is putting together plans for a radio telescope on the far side of the moon.  It would be a wire mesh shape following the contour of an existing dish-like crater.   Great idea, anticipated years ago by Heinlein and made more appealing as the Arecibo observatory is being shut down without a funding plan to safely rebuild the suspension cables.   NASA has asked for proposals to set up a nuclear power plant on the moon and on Mars with the moon one ready to launch in 2026. .  Of course!    And China launched a mission this week to bring back a couple kg of moon samples.  What struck me is the plan to dig down up to six feet.

Buried "cave" in Antarctica:  This story is probably an artifact of the pixels but the possibility of a large unexplained opening to an underground void exists.  The NY Post includes a chatty 11 minute video clip that has some striking google earth imagery.

Hubble has a photo of one galaxy falling like a waterfall into the middle of a larger one.

Crazy but likely true:  

An asteroid trailing Mars appears to be a chunk blasted from our own moon.

The group of "Trojan" asteroids that trail along after Mars orbit has one rock whose spectral image doesn't belong.  "The spectrum of this particular asteroid seems to be almost a dead-ringer for parts of the Moon where there is exposed bedrock such as crater interiors and mountains," explains AOP astrochemist Galin Borisov.

First ever rogue planet found drifting through our galaxy without a home star.  The moment you think of it, it's obvious there will be many more to find.  This one was found by gravitational micro-lensing, tiny blips in the light of some stars it passed in front of.  Estimated size is close to that of mother Earth.

Tunguska explosion update:  Evidence is stronger that it was a near miss by a meteor twice the length of a football field

October report in Forbes:  No extra-terrestrial debris has ever been found from the 1908 event that flattened trees over an immense area.  It was seen over a distance of 700 km which rules out an ice object that would have vaporized.  The Siberian Federal University did computer simulations that ruled out ice and estimated the object's size.  There were a series of air bursts that left high atmospheric dust explaining glowing clouds reported later in Europe.

Once again, the very wealthy hold more than 80% of the rest of America combined.

 See chart but think about it too.

There's no data for "the common man" before the seventies but the wealthy data points cover a century.
Before the stock market crash and well into the 1930's, the very wealthy held a similar immense share of all of America's wealth.
That the immensely wealthy have again as big a share of the pie as they did 90 years ago may not indicate dysfunction.  Missing from the chart is a report on how much the pie has grown since then for the benefit of all.
When you add up the top tenth of a percent, the top one percent (presumably excluding the top tenth of a percent)  and the eighty percent, there's a lot of wealth held by the other 19%.
And remember that much of what we call "poor" means "young" as new entrants to the workforce are at the bottom rungs of their career and earning power.