Kerch Bridge knocked out, both rail and road, minutes ago on Putin's Birthday. War changer.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1578602329514774528

Nordstrom NOT sabotage. How crap Russian maintenance efforts to unplug methane hydrates in cold pipes will generate kinetic forces and explosive spark.

 Forget the conspiracy theories:  Russia, US, Ukraine.  They don't add up. (Update below) This report from Lawdog files, a guy with gas pipeline experience, ticks all the explanation boxes.  As he says, "When anuything involving energy-industry hydrocarbons explodes...well sabotage isn't the first thing that comes to mind.  And honestly, when it comes to a pipeline running natural gas under Russian (non)mantenance, an explosion means that it's Tuesday.  Or Friday.  Or another day of the week ending in "y".  

Until I read his article, I was clueless about the actual baked-in dangers of a natural gas pipeline which we knew was in need of servicing.  We just assumed the servicing was 100% head-fake by Russia to bug the West.

In summary:  The Nordstrom pipelines were idle and and methane hydrates could be triggered to form and some would form into plugs.  Only very slow decompression over weeks from both ends of the pipe would safely lower the pressure for maintenance.  Local efforts to heat and remelt the plug are catastrophically dangerous.  Lowering the pressure from one end of the pipe is has a small chance of working but is likely to cause the plug to break loose at about 200 kmph.  The "diesel effect" on impact at a curvature in the pipe will then generate a flash.  17 hours separated the explosions.  We know there have been maintenance issues and that Russia (think Chernobyl) has a poor track record here.  We know the lines were idle and cooling.   Nobody is claiming responsibility for one of the most expensive industrial wrecks ever.   You can watch his video clip to see how the diesel effect works, producing ignition under impact pressure.  h/t  Instapundit.

Click the link to Instapundit above, not the jpg below.

Also, October 1st an update from LawDog showing the ruptures happened at angles in the pipes.

November 18th the Swedish government says this was definitely sabotage.

The possibility of a screwup should however have been part of the conversation instead of a fixation on what bad actor to blame.    Stupidity and Random Shit  often is a better explanation than Conspiracy.

More deetail:

"During analyzes carried out, residues of explosives have been identified on several of the foreign objects seized," the report said.   Reported at Zero Hedge.

Deceit is the norm in make-believe movie industry

 Note the drip bag, upper right.

 https://dilbert.com/

A small minority throughout history

 

 

 

What's this? Covid jabs are stripping protections from cancer by suppressing our native immune system? Can this be even partly true? EthicalSceptic

The killer chart uses a baseline of average weekly deaths by cancer.  In the past, it's been occasionally a little below, occasionally a little above the baseline until late 2021 when deaths exploded
after the Covid mRNA injections began.

He notes that the CDC has recoded cause-of-death since June 2 2022.
CDC "disappeared" about half the SADS deaths into other categories but was less able to juggle the cancer deaths.

 

 

When truth has no champion, this isn't funny.  hat tip to @curtegerer, Instapundit comments.

Google doesn't just misdirect. Google completely hides most search results. Try it yourself in the next three minutes.

From "Bright Insight"s 14 minute Rumble Video.
Google and Bing searches routinely give result tallies in the millions
but when you seek them, they're not there.
A controversial topic search like "climate change" has over a billion results
but after a few dozen pages, you hit a blank.
Click on the "see more results" button and a few more pages appear.
Somewhere around page 45, you hit the second blank and there is no way forward.
Mostly mainstream media results populate the pages you found and the other billion
cannot be reached.

This didn't use to be the case.
I remember going into the hundreds some years ago out of curiosity.
A more independent engine like BRAVE doesn't post the number of results.
It's entirely reasonable to truncate the results for the average person
but wrong to hide postings and knowledge beyond that wall.

 

 Found in Instapundit comments.

Ambulance calls for heart emergencies in young people way up. (Midlands, England). "Don't Say Vax"

 

Source: https://2ndsmartestguyintheworld.substack.com/p/pfizergate-official-government-reports

Truth without a Champion

 Truth without a champion will not set you free.

When everybody's lying, whom do you trust?

Massive shedding of trust is here.
When we go from sceptic to cynic, we believe nothing.
Government dignitaries,  hospital mandarins, scientist oracles,  billionaire CEO's,  fact checker pontifs and more have lost  gravitas and even lost all respect.

When we go from sceptic to cynic, we believe nothing we read or hear.
This makes us pawns in games others play
because we don't make timely distinctions between people in conflict, we fail to establish the relative value of one choice over another.  The somewhat good guys are tarred by the somewhat evil guys brush.
And this makes us less dangerous to hard-ball players.  While we harden ourselves somewhat against every claim, we become vulnerable to any bullldozer doctrine or scam that pushes hard.
The cynic's bubble is only shelter from small noxious affronts.

What touchstone will you use for truth, or to determine a degree of truth, or even to make an interim decision to trust someone until you get a better picture of what's happening?   This has always been a key question but today it faces us urgently.

The internet has brought this forward.  What people really said in private is often quickly heard in public and their hidden deeds from past years may be published promptly today.   There is a lot of falseness, spin, and (in my view) evil doing.  The same flood of news, mostly curated, may also bring cures to the problem.

I insist of hearing and seeing video of controversial statements and want it to be at least a few minutes long so I can evaluate the context and look for edits.  I look to see what other people have said that triangulate with or oppose the controversial statement.    On sites which promote thoughtful commentary written in paragraphs, I read sometimes hundreds of observations to get a better understanding.  And thenb settle on a view.  Even with this, I'm often blindsided and proven wrong, because some much of the information is data spun to entice and deceive.  But it's all I've got and I'm sticking with it.

Supernova near-miss didn't happen but Betelgeuse is pulsing oddly

 From spaceweather.com
Some scientists were worried about Betelgeuse going supernova but it did't make the main news feeds.(I don't see how to link individual spaceweather stories and hence have included the bulk of it.)

WHAT JUST HAPPENED TO BETELGEUSE? You've heard of a CME, a "coronal mass ejection." They happen all the time. A piece of the sun's tenuous outer atmosphere (corona) blows off and sometimes hits Earth. Something far more terrible just happened to Betegeuse. The red giant star produced an SME, or "surface mass ejection."

Above: An artist's concept of an SME on Betelgeuse. Credit: Elizabeth Wheatley (STScI)

NASA astronomers believe that in 2019 a colossal piece of Betelgeuse's surface blew off the star. The mass of the SME was 400 billion times greater than a CME or several times the mass of Earth's Moon. Data from multiple telescopes, especially Hubble, suggest that a convective plume more than a million miles across bubbled up from deep inside the star, producing shocks and pulsations that blasted a chunk off the surface.

"We've never before seen such a huge mass ejection from the surface of a star," says Andrea Dupree of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who is leading the study. "Something is going on that we don't completely understand."

After it left the star, the SME cooled, forming a dark cloud that famously dimmed Betelgeuse in 2019 and 2020. Even casual sky watchers could look up and see the change. Some astronomers worried that the dimming foreshadowed a supernova explosion. The realization that an SME is responsible has at least temporarily calmed those fears.

Above: A Hubble image of Betelgeuse located in the shoulder of Orion.

Betelgeuse's brightness has since returned to normal, but something strange is still going on. Astronomers have long known that Betelgeuse is a variable star with a 430-day period. Its metronome-like change in brightness has been observed for more than 200 years. As Betelgeuse recovers, however, those pulsations are no longer regular: See the data. Spectra taken by Hubble and the Tillinghast telescope in Arizona imply that years later the surface of Betelgeuse is still bouncing like a plate of gelatin dessert--a testament to the ferocity of the blowout.

Betelgeuse is so large that if it replaced the sun at the center of our solar system, its atmosphere would extend past Jupiter. Dupree used Hubble to resolve hot spots on the star's surface in 1996. This was the first direct image of a star other than the sun.

What's happening now "is a totally new phenomenon that we can observe directly and resolve surface details with Hubble," says Dupree. "We're watching stellar evolution in real time."

Asteroid alarms from the Daily Mail

If you want to know what's daily really zooming past earth, check spaceweather.com 
If you prefer exciting meteor stories, try the Daily Mail.
In the current week there are bigger and faster and nearer meteors on the way!

Interest is an information bridge connecting the present with the future.

 From John Mauldin's free newsletter which you can subscribe to.

"Intertemporal Bridge

As I explained earlier in this series (see Time Has a Price), interest rates aren’t simply prices; they are information. Artificially manipulated rates deliver wrong information, causing poor decisions. Ill-conceived central bank policies produce random noise, preventing markets from discerning the necessary signals. Chancellor has possibly the best metaphor I’ve ever seen to explain this.

“Imagine that the present and future are two countries, separated by a river. Finance is the intertemporal bridge that joins them together, connecting the present with the future. By acts of borrowing and lending, and saving and investing, we shift expenditures across time. Interest is the toll levied on borrowers for bringing forward consumption and the fee paid to savers for moving consumption into the future. The level of interest regulates the traffic on the bridge and its general direction. When the interest toll is raised spending is pushed into the future, and consumption is brought forward when the toll is lowered. In an ideal world, people should save enough to meet their future needs, but not so much that current spending is depressed. Under such circumstances, the traffic across the bridge is orderly in both directions.

“This delicate balance is upset when the market rate of interest falls below society’s ‘crystallized impatience.’ When the interest rate is higher than an individual’s time preference, he or she will save more for the future. Conversely, when the market rate is below the public’s time preference people borrow to consume. An abnormally low rate of interest boosts current spending, but the benefits don’t last. You cannot have your cake and eat it, at least not indefinitely. Cake is not the only item on the menu. People have a choice: jam today or more jam tomorrow. The rate of interest influences their decision.”

The problem isn’t just artificially low rates. Artificially high rates send wrong signals, too. The point is this process works only when it finds its own equilibrium. Outside interference—like that of central banks—distorts these intertemporal transactions.

It is important to remember that well past the middle of the last century the Federal Reserve concerned itself mainly with bank solvency, not interest rates. Greenspan was the first to realize that he could “juice” the markets and make everyone happy. It was the beginning of the current round of hubris."

Russian Soldiers Using SIM cards on the Ukrainian Network Reveal Troop Concentrations Exactly.

https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1524743911817850881

The information dates from the endof March.   Russian SIM cards inserted into stolen Ukrainian phones. Besides being out of date, this is complicated since there are areas where cell towers have been knocked down and it looks like the Crimea has a Russian cell service.  It also points to areas that are "captured" but are not controlled.  One commenter says the soldiers won't give up their phones to officers because the officers will steal them too.