Space X recovers launch vehicle. We, the people, have a Plan B.

To watch SpaceX live recover the launch vehicle has been a highlight of my life.  They did it! Watch the replay from about the 30 minute mark. The joy of the SpaceX crowd filled me too and I sobbed in relief.  We are finally going to escape earth.  The cost of launching will drop almost ten fold.  We, the people, will have a Plan B.

How many miracles does it take?

It takes exactly one.  One miraculous cure, perfectly documented, is enough to redefine reality.  If a man can be made whole in a moment, then creation is a top down plan with the idea coming first, the physical reality coming second.   The evidence points the other way, that life forms and consciousness are emergent phenomena. 

"Mein Fuhrer, I can walk"

I read a lot about miracle cures and listened and shared in earnest prayer for healings and have concluded that the one miracle cure is not to be found among the thousands touted.  Yet, it just takes one cure that operates on a different principle to invalidate the architecture of current science.  Current science points to folding proteins to explain most life activity and emergent phenomena as the standard when new order appears. This is a bottom-up explanation. A single top-down cure, validated, changes everything.

Googling last minute gifts for husbands and wives

At Christmas, a lot of husbands are googling gifts at the last minute, some even on Christmas day while the wives are better organized and none are shopping December 25th.   Then look at the stats for people in love but not married.  Women are preoccupied on Valentines day and both single men and women sweat it to the last minute at Christmas. (Rest at The Washington Post).

Unelected Trump Is Acting President of the US

UPDATE December 24th, The Hill: 

"Trump has displaced President Obama as the central player on the political stage, with both parties reacting daily to his insults, tweets and attack lines."

Politicians shift to the breeze of culture because the greater shapes the lesser.   The King of Culture today is Donald Trump. He has begun to steer the state though holding no elected office.   Helmsman, Obama, is below decks beating up on Republicans.   Showman, Trump, harvests the media, 25:1 more coverage than the other GOP candidates but the real story is that he has opened a channel for the culture of all America and it's bubbling over into Canada's immigration plans, the Kremlin's accelerated expansion into Syria, and chatrooms where ISIS warriors are debating their next move.  His power comes from the culture's power and he has no peer today.

What people really care about powers the culture and to heed this is to listen to a messy dialogue, trialogue, polylogue.    Public discussion had shrunk to a PC monologue but Trump is moving the Overton Window or kicking down the doors and pent up voices are heard.   It's going to be messy but effective.     Deflations and depressions are messy too but they correct grave errors.

As to culture being king, rather than the pundits and rules, try this quote from The Evolution of Everything by Matt Ridley: The climate has no control knob, history has no five-star general

"Far more than we like to admit, the world is to a remarkable extent a self-organising, self-changing place.  Patterns emerge, trends evolve.  Skeins of geese form V's in the sky without meaning to, termites build cathedrals without architects, bees make hexagonal honeycombs without instruction, brains take shape without brain-makers, learning can happen without teaching, political events are shaped by history rather than vice versa.  The genome has no master gene, the brain has no command centre, the English language has no director, the economy has no chief executive, society has no president, the common law has no chief justice, the climate has no control knob, history has no five-star general."

Canada is Portugese: "Nothing to see here!"

I thought Canada was an Indian word but what if it's the original Newfie joke, by a Portugese explorer seeking gold?   A government webpage at Foreign Affairs and International Trade  reads:

"There are some (Portugese) historians that contend that the name itself, Canada, came from the Portuguese expression « Cá Nada », which meant « Here, nothing », and is attributed to the first Portuguese sailors who arrived in Newfoundland (Terra Nova), and were disappointed on the weather (very cold), and the lack of obvious resources. "

Wikipedia, with "The Iberian Origin",  adds a more likely version that no gold or silver was found.  The standard high school explanation is that the Huron-Iroquois word for village (Kanata) was part of Cartier's directions to the village of Stadacona where Quebec City now sits.

First map mentioning Canada, 1566.
Near the quarter point, upper right.

Obama just cant figure it out: Wheel of Fortune cartoon.

Trump on No-Go Zones in London

Trump:  ""We have places in London and other places that are so radicalized that the police are afraid for their own lives. We have to be very smart and very vigilant.""


London's Mayor:  "mocked the idea police would stay away from some neighbourhoods as “ill-informed” and “complete and utter nonsense” and said the comments were an insult to London’s “proud history of tolerance and diversity”
Scotland Yard:  "We would not normally dignify such comments with a response. However, we think it's important to state that Trump could not be more wrong,"


Serving officers in London: 'Trump's not wrong. He pointed out something that is plainly obvious'
We "fear being terror targets".   'I'm not allowed to travel in half blues to work anymore IN MY OWN CAR as we're "All at risk of attack"

Saying something is so doesn't make it so.  I'll go with the officers over the mayor and Scotland Yard.
This puts me mind of the Lincoln story:

"How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."

Obama's Legacy is Trump

Thanks to Barack, divides in America increased. "Trump is the perfect personality to exploit these divides, offering the promise of an authoritarian who represents the people in place of an authoritarian who represented the elites".   (At home in Canada, we have Mini-Me walking in Obama's footsteps.)

Domenech at the Federalist:

"President Obama’s America has given rise to Donald Trump. It is an America that is more tribalist, where people feel more racially and religiously divided; more politically correct, where people feel less free to speak their minds; and it is an America where trust in the nation’s elites, whose skills are credentialed but unproven, are at historic lows. These are the wages of progressivism at the end of the day. Big government inevitably leads to government incompetence. That incompetence leads to growing and now dominant distrust – both in government’s basic competence, and in the values of the people who still insist upon it".

And, hat tip to Instapundit:
 
Footnote from the National Review talking about the Overton Window (the range of acceptable political discourse):  "While many of Trump’s actual proposals are misguided, nonsensical, or untenable, by smashing the window, he’s begun the process of freeing the American people from the artificial and destructive constraints of Left-defined discourse. 

We interned Japanese Canadians. Crazy Trump is only asking for a Muslim moratorium.

From Pearl Harbor to 1949, Japanese Canadians were uprooted, forced to sell their goods at grave discounts and interned in BC's Interior. No shots had been fired in Canada and neither the RCMP nor the DND asked Mackenzie King to do it.  Whence the outrage when Trump says halt Muslim immigration until the US government figures out how to defend America?

As individuals, most Japanese were unjustly treated by Canada but was the policy wrong? If homes, cars and goods had been placed in tax-funded escrow instead of sold in distress, would this change your mind?  When the planes appeared out of the sky December 7th over Pearl Harbor and the jets struck the twin towers September 11th, there was no justice for the victims.  A response robust enough to secure the Dominion will deal injustly with some.

Years later, there is more than peace between Japan and Canada. The Japanese-Canadian community is large on the West Coast, the men and women I have met impress me, and if my sons or daughter wanted to wed a member, they'd have my blessing.   The world won't come to an end if Muslim immigration to the US is damped way down for a few years.

CBC archives: Forced evacuation from the coast to the BC Interior.

I since came across a similar but extended article posted at Instapundit.

Ban Guns For Lefty Enclaves

In Canada, cities vote to the left of the countryside and cities with seats of government even more so.  (Edmonton vs Calgary,  Saskatoon vs Regina, Quebec City vs Montreal).   I've been slow to accept that left wing politics and responsible gun ownership are in opposition and that it's safer to live among citizens, some of who are armed as they go about their affairs, than it is to live among shrill gun control advocates.  Who in their right mind thinks the ownership of all violence should pass into the hands of the people who won voting contests and the public service unions?

Source

Obviously there's more to understand.
The source site has some interesting links.
Instead of "Democrat", you can say cities have more shootings than the countryside
but most major cities have been run by Democrats for decades.
"Gun Free Zones" are the preferred slaughter zones.

Press asks Obama tough question

San Bernardino Slaughter: The only balanced reporting I have seen.

When horror hits, few report only what is known, preferring to star in a politicized drama.  This example hits the spot without pandering.

"So what do we know? It appears to be a case of premature detonation".  Everything I've read to date is acknowledged and yet Nicki at The Liberty Zone cuts a new path.

UPDATE: Although a perfect example above of how to write about something while information is missing, more is coming in.  Notable that the couple met Al Qaeda types in Saudi Arabia, that she pledged allegiance to Al Baghadi of ISIS after the attack, that the mother-in-law lived in the apartment where they were making bombs, that the press got into the apartment and filmed stuff including shredded documents, that the on-line presence of the couple was mostly "deleted" just before the event.Also, the FBI is calling this a terrorist investigation.










There is this, however, a new attitude to reporting when Islam is the trigger:

News from Outer Space, November 2015

Spectacular photos arrived from Pluto.

Snakeskin-like surface on Pluto

And from its moon, Ceres which has a dynamic surface that erases meteor impacts. 

Bright spots on Occator crater, Ceres.

Planet wide canyon on Charon

The moon, Charon, has cracking lines and a younger side that has been resurfaced as well as tar? stains at the pole.

Our sun's sunspots are flat-lining with prospects of some cooler climate ahead.  There's increased policy awareness (DARPA) of hardening infrastructure on earth from extreme electromagnetic pulses from the sun's fire.
On Mars, some sedimentary rocks are noted and the Curiosity Rover visited a small dune field.  There's further mention that Phobos can expect to decay and break up against Mars in the near future (30 million years).
The Philae comet lander woke up a bit and communicated with it's mother satellite (Rosetta) as the comet came around the sun.  They know within a couple hundred yards where it ended up on the comet.
Voyager1 has moved further beyond the solar system (beyond the heliopause) but the debate is still on about how far the system's field stretches since the whole darn thing has a bow wave as the earth does in the sun's field.
Planetary exploration now is galaxy-wide and recently inferred a field of cometary debris ( or an alien megastructure) around one sun and the outlines of a weather system on a planet of another sun. Papers like to tout stories about the first earth-like planet but they're getting ahead of themselves.

"The odd nature of the energy pulse is matched by
the odd locations of the start/finish of the pulse".

A mysterious pulse was picked up propagating through our atmosphere and others from outside the galaxy.  Astronomers are having difficulty ruling out artificial origin. It's probably natural.  Our species has advanced to the point of leaking photons and electromagnetic fields into space for a brief moment and may stop leaking such stuff within a hundred years.

Black holes are almost ho-hum these days but it was news to have come across a sun being torn apart at a black hole boundary.  This is being watched in real time.

Closer to home,  Elon Musk almost brought two rockets back to earth for recycling and Bezos brought one back.  (Not quite comparable rockets).  Perfect this and the cost of getting off-planet plunges.
A good spot to go for solar system updates is Astro Bob who specializes in things you can see with a good amateur telescope.

Drink Trivia

Rum and coke can be found on tap in Australia.

Hyderize.  You've been Hyderized if you cross the border from Canada into Alaska and down a 150 proof shot in one gulp at the Glacier Hotel in Hyder.  Comes with a certificate.  The Glacier Hotel has over $50,000 in autographed  bills on the walls and the only way out of town is back through Canada.

P.C. Asshole Tells Comedian To Loosen Up

Slyest writing ever on politically correct termagants:  Here's an excerpt only because the whole page must be savoured at McSweeney's, The Death Of Comedy.

“So a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim walk into a bar…”
“Stop, stop, stop!”
“What?”
“That’s not funny.”
“But I haven’t even done the joke yet.”
“Yeah, but it won’t be funny.  .....

“And the one guy says to the other guy…”
“Wait a minute — are they gay or straight?”
“They’re straight”
“Good. Are they Christians or Jews or what?”
“They’re atheists”
“Even better. This is going to be so funny now. I can feel it. OK, go ahead and make the   joke.”
 ..... 

Read the whole tickler.

Democracy 2.0 Unintended consequence of universal suffrage.

The vote was given to all citizens by men who thought they'd thereby win righteous leverage over wealth and hereditary power.  They didn't foresee they too would lose control.  In the last dozen years, anyone cheaply can make a pitch to the masses and the great unwashed can pitch right back (right click, enter).  Democracy 2.0 means the middle and poor classes can decide who rules.   The elite and the merely educated who dreamed big vote tallies would give them an advantage over  insider cash, are going to be gravely disappointed.  Carson and Trump and for that matter, Fiorina and Cruz are the evidence that appealing to the masses and all the LIV people too, is here to stay.  Expect more shocks.

How many decisions do you make by show of hands?  We decide who makes the decisions by show of hands, or paper ballots actually. When the crowd has a mind of its own, the unexpected happens.

Trudeau, serial hand-hugger.

Even with the Queen.
'The "Hand Hug" is seen as an invasion of intimacy when done by people who have just met'.
The Daily Mail calls this a "patronizing handshake".   If anyone besides my dear departed grandmother did that to me, I'd say, "Get your hands off me and get the hell out of my space".

Hand Hug: The hand hug is popular with politicians, and is when they choose to wrap your hand with their left hand creating this warm cocoon protecting your hand. When done to the right person, they are perceived as being warm, friendly, trustworthy and honest, and sometimes this handshake is reciprocated creating a pile of 4 hands. However, this type of handshake is only done genuinely with people who share close bonds, as similar to hugs, this handshake is seen as an invasion of intimacy when done by people who have just met.

With Her Majesty

With the Governor General

With Blair  
Cameron

Instability is the best prediction.

So Turkey shoots down a Russian jet.  WW1 started from less.  Putin says he told Washington the flight path and Washington passed it to Turkey.  As a NATO member, Turkey's Erdogan can ask NATO to hit back if Russia hits him.  Why the hell did he shoot down the plane in the first place?  Because Russia's target included Turkmen and because, Oil.  Putin may be right this is a deliberate provocation.  He just moved up his most advanced missile system to a Syrian port by Turkey's border.

Because Turkmen:  They were being targeted and are inside Syria and related to Turks and want Assad out.  Only Kurds and ISIS are allowed targets from Turkey's viewpoint.  Putin wants Assad in, making all three good targets.  Obama, weakly, wants Assad out and ISIS degraded while weakly supporting Kurds.  Shooting the plane while attacking Turkmen is Turkey's signal for Russia to back off. Did you watch the video of Turkmen firing at the parachuting pilots?  Did you know Russia mounted a Seals type raid and recovered the surviving pilot?  The jet was either in Turkey for up to seventeen seconds or a five mile exclusion zone inside Syria where Turkmen live and that Turkey wants to defend but no one else recognizes.  Protocol is to push back angry, not hit the kill button.

Because oil: In the last week there have been the first two bombings of the oil tankers that fund ISIS mayhem, one by the US (which dropped leaflets telling the drivers to run away) and one, less fussy, by Russia. The oil money adds up over a hundred million dollars in a year.  Who is buying this oil?  How about Erdogan's son?  Those tankers have been an easy target for ages.  (If you check the Russian story, the numbers are b.s. but the raid was real.)

How can anyone make sense of this when the facts above were heavily processed before release? Far more facts were overlooked.  Instability seems the best prediction, rather than confidence that any one outcome will prevail.    The bedrock motives of man include defending ties of blood and greed.  I highlighted Turkmen (blood) and the son's oil (greed).

UPDATE:   That the Turks shot down the jet and did so within 17 seconds – with the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, saying he gave the order to fire himself – suggests very strongly they were waiting for a Russian plane to come into or close enough to Turkish airspace with the aim of delivering a rather pyrotechnic message.

An American View: "Canada's new, liberal Prime Minister immediately moves to cripple their energy industry"

The headline is the story.  The goal is to "formalize a moratorium on crude oil tanker traffic on British Columbia's North Coast". 

A quarter of our exports is petroleum.   Kneecapping the Northern Gateway pipeline and rolling over happily for the cancelled Keystone pipeline,  Trudeau the Second  can steal prairie oil for below market "sale" to Montreal and Toronto.  When you can't ship south and you can't ship west, that just leaves east towards Ottawa's voter pod.  Sounds like NEP the Second.

PM Justin Trudeau likes to be liked.  He's on safe territory here.  My cousin who goes to stop-the-tanker rallies will be delighted, but even if everyone in Canada kissies up to the moratorium, Canada will still be diminished because, Math.

The Magna Carta rolled back the creation of National Parks

The Magna Carta has clauses constraining the government from setting aside national parks without compensation. For "government", read "king".  For "national park", read "royal forest".  The forests were game refuges, not necessarily treed expanses and were intended for the outdoor recreation of the crown.  In Canada, "the crown" has no face even though, in British Columbia, the crown owns 83% of the land.  In jolly old England of 1215, the crown was King John.

Source

Reluctantly, King John agreed to un-create the royal forests of his day.

Clause (47) "All forests that have been created in our reign shall at once be disafforested. River-banks that have been enclosed in our reign shall be treated similarly."

This topic resonates with me personally because my maternal ancestors brought the name "Woodworth" or Wood-warden" with them from England.