Twits

H/T: https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/

No Western Civilization, No Science

"Without western civilization, you would most likely be a slave or a serf. Without western civilization, you would have less rights and justice. Without western civilization, you would most likely be living in abject poverty. Without western civilization, you would not have free market capitalism nor the industrial revolution. Without western civilization, you would have no university. Without western civilization, superstition would reign. Without western civilization, there would be no science.
(...)
But here’s the twixt, Western Civilization started only once in history and in only one place in the world: Medieval Christian Europe. Canadian Psychologist Jordan Peterson correctly claims, and I paraphrase, “The Bible is central to western culture and is the central document to western culture.” Simply put, without Jesus, we would never have our Bible and without our Bible, we would never have Western Civilization and without Western Civilization, we would have no science."

10 Christian Beliefs that Ignited the Scientific Revolution

Independence Day

Socialism

"Socialism begets communism, and communism is evil. It’s as evil as its nationalist cousin Nazism, and between Pol Pot, Chairman Mao, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Josef Stalin, has murdered more people even than the Nazis killed. It reigned longer and in more places, leaving piles of dead everywhere it took power. It still exerts thuggish control over North Korea, China, Cuba and to a great extent Venezuela. There is no excuse for anyone who lived through the Cold War to support any form of communism or its socialism cousin now. But many do. It’s fashionable in academia and the media and a growing chorus in the Democratic Party."

(...)

"2019 marks 30 years since communism cracked up. Thirty years on, are we really going to forget what we won, and why? Will the world wake up in time?"

https://pjmedia.com/trending/right-here-right-now-the-almost-anthem-of-a-war-weve-forgotten-why-we-won/

Oderint, Dum Metuant

Marriage in Alabama

I agree that if you and your spouse consider yourselves married then the state shall acknowledge the marriage.  It is a simple matter of liberty and the state has no other legitimate purpose than to uphold individual liberty.

"Advocates say the new law will require judges to treat all marriages as equal under Alabama law. Critics say it provides cover to biased judges and harms the wedding industry."
https://www.al.com/news/2019/05/alabama-lawmakers-pass-bill-to-end-marriage-licenses.html

HT: https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/331461/

Clumps of Cells

Ancient Roman Engineering

                       Analogy between an invisibility cloak and ancient Gallo-Roman theaters.

Stephane Brûlé et al.

                                           

It is interesting to see how nature guides the path of our structures and makes me wonder what forces shaped ancient buildings.

"Co-author Stephane Brûlé, a civil engineer at a Lyon-based company called Menard, demonstrated the possibility of this kind of large-scale acoustic and seismic cloaking a few years ago with colleagues from the Fresnel Institute in Marseille. The researchers drilled a periodic array of boreholes into topsoil and discovered that sound waves reflected most of their energy back toward the source when they encountered the first two rows of holes. Brûlé noticed a similar foundational structure while on holiday in Autun (a town in central France), thanks to an aerial photograph of the semicircular structure of a Gallo-Roman theater buried under a field.

When Brûlé superimposed a more detailed archaeological photograph of the theater's structure over an image of one of the invisibility cloaking metamaterials he and his Fresnel colleagues had made in the lab, the ancient theater's pillars lined up almost perfectly with the microscopic elements in the metamaterial. He discovered similar overlap with images of the foundational structure of the Roman Colosseum and other, fully enclosed amphitheaters from the same era.

Roman engineers may not have done this deliberately; they could have just been lucky, according to Brûlé. Or they might have noticed over the centuries that certain structures were more resistant to earthquake damage than others and modified their designs accordingly. "Rigorously, we cannot say more for the moment," he told Physics World."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/05/study-says-ancient-romans-may-have-built-invisibility-cloaks-into-structures/

No Corn for Ethanol-Gasoline Mixtures

It is time to remove the market distortion for corn that is the government's economic incentive to produce more corn.  If we insist on burning gasoline-ethanol mixtures, it should make energy, hence economic sense.

"· It takes more energy to make ethanol from corn than you get from the ethanol.

· Corn requires a whole lot of fertilizer, and the runoff goes into the Mississippi River and runs down to the Gulf of Mexico, where it creates a dead zone the size of New Jersey.

· A gallon of ethanol has only about 2/3 the energy of a gallon of gasoline; hence, your miles per gallon will decrease if you use gasoline containing ethanol.

· Making corn into ethanol for our cars is tantamount to burning our food, and it is driving up the cost of the food left to eat. Corn is a staple food for hogs, cattle, sheep, and chickens, so the cost of all meat and poultry are going up, along with the cost of corn itself.

· Ethanol loves water and soaks it up from its environment, so it can’t be shipped in long-distance pipelines with gasoline, because the water will corrode the piping and pumping machinery. The ethanol will dry out pump seals. Consequently, it has to be transported in trucks at a higher cost and mixed with the gasoline near the end-use consumer market.

· The only good reason for making corn into ethanol is for whiskey." https://www.econlib.org/the-chemistry-of-ethanol/ 

Mental Illness Expressed

Transgenderism is a mental illness and pretending otherwise does a disservice to those who suffer from it.

"In 1961, at age 12, I was one of two-dozen black children who integrated an all-white junior high school in Richmond. White parents jeered me outside the school, and inside, their kids stuck me with pins, shoved me in the halls and pushed me down the stairs. So when the group of Google employees resorted to calling names and making false accusations because they didn’t want a conservative voice advising the company, the hostility was reminiscent of what I felt back then — that same intolerance for someone who was different from them."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-wanted-to-help-google-make-ai-more-responsible-instead-i-was-treated-with-hostility/2019/04/09/cafd1fb6-5b07-11e9-842d-7d3ed7eb3957_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.9f501119b11e

Trump's Threat

"Therefore, it seems to me there is only one logical response to the president’s threat — or promise. For non-sanctuary cities and states, it would be: “Thank you, President Trump, for not saddling us with the costs of this crisis.” For sanctuary cities and states, it would be: “Welcome to all illegal immigrants. And thank you, President Trump, for rewarding us with all the benefits they bring.”"

Read the whole thing:

Sending immigrants to sanctuary cities has consequences — and that's a good thing

Illegal Immigration

"The other day I noticed for the first time that I have a lot more fear of an oncoming car in rural California than I had of intersections in Libya; a lot more worries about a wild stray dog wandering into my yard than I did while living in Greece; a lot more anxiety of being shot or robbed than I did when visiting the current Middle East; and a lot less hope of being treated promptly in extremis at the local emergency room than I would have expected in Eastern Europe."

Read the whole thing:

Are There Any Limits to Illegal Immigration?

An End to Mueller

HT: https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/

Getting Back on the Horse

These are some hardy men.

"NASA astronaut Nick Hague and his Russian colleague Alexey Ovchinin, who both survived a dramatically aborted Soyuz launch last year, were joined on the smoothly-executed trip by NASA astronaut Christina Koch.

The rocket blasted off without incident from Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and docked at the ISS less than six hours later, more than 400 kilometers (249 miles) above the Earth at 01:01 GMT, a few minutes ahead of schedule.

During a live broadcast via high-definition cameras aboard the ISS, the mission commander Ovchinin reported that the mooring mechanism was engaged. A NASA commentator then confirmed the "capture."

The liftoff was closely watched after the two men's space journey was cut short in October when a technical problem with their Soyuz rocket triggered a launch abort two minutes into the flight."

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/astronauts-aborted-soyuz-launch-blast-off-again-iss-131638235.html

https://www.9news.com.au/2018/10/12/11/35/soyuz-ms10-spacecraft-russian-alexey-ovchinin-american-nick-hague

Here is the failed MS10 launch:

https://newiberian.blogspot.com/2018/10/adventures-in-manned-spaceflight.html

Quantum Monism

I have always been a bit disturbed by the many worlds view of parallel universes.  I could not make any sense of it and it offended my reasoning as to how the universe operates.  Upon reading an article in "Scientific American", a missing piece of information fell into place and suddenly the universe was whole again.

"Both quantum monism and Everett’s many worlds are predictions of quantum mechanics taken seriously. What distinguishes these views is only the perspective: What looks like "many worlds" from the perspective of a local observer is indeed a single, unique universe from a global perspective (such as that of someone who would be able to look from outside onto the entire universe).

In other words: many worlds is how quantum monism looks like for an observer who has only limited information about the universe. In fact, Everett’s original motivation was to develop a quantum description of the entire universe in terms of a "universal wave function.” It is as if you look out through a muntin window: Nature looks divided into separate pieces but this is an artifact of your perspective."

You can read the entire article here:

Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics

America's Mandarins

Imperial China was run by bureaucratic scholars.  They studied and strived for credentials in order to climb the ladder of achievement in the Chinese bureaucracies.  Driven by Progressive policies, the United States has been moving steadily toward this model for some time now.  The result is a ponderous federal bureaucracy that is unanswerable to the People of the United States.   These policies are anathema to the founding principles of the Unites States.

The pendulum of change is beginning to swing back in reaction to this historical crime.  There is and will be much strife as the modern-day mandarins fight to keep the power they have taken.  Hopefully, we will avoid an all out civil war and economic ruin.

Below is an article that exemplifies these American mandarins and their mindset.

"I know you’re working on that book about the new socialism, and I think it will be timely. It seems to me that totalitarianism is not arriving in the U.S. via the stern face of Big Brother staring down from the screen. It’s coming from the college student who says we shouldn’t view a photo of pure, untrammeled joy. And the thing is that they can’t see that joy, not just because they’re puritans, but because they have no historical consciousness. They have no sense of what so many Americans sacrificed in the years leading up to that famous kiss because they never really learned it. I’m not a gung-ho America First guy—I’d be an expat in a second if I could get my wife on board—but the K-12 textbooks have gotten insane. They really do stress the failures of the country, the bad angle of every story, the endless aggressions-in-hindsight that form the modern wokescold.
Look, I get it: this country has done terrible things. We continue to do terrible things. But there are no pure good guys and pure bad guys. We are crazy if we don’t think for one second that the things we consider good and just today will be denounced as oppressive in 30 years. To say that we shouldn’t look at an image that shows the joy of having just defeated the f’ing Nazis is just insanity."

Click here for the article: Life Among The Wokescolds

HT: https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/

Does a Beresheet on the Moon?

The SpaceIL team with the lunar lander.

 Photo: SpaceIL

I looks like we will find out in a week or so.  "The $100 million joint venture between SpaceIL and state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd. was financed mostly by Jewish philanthropists including Morris Kahn, SpaceIL’s president and a founder of Amdocs Ltd., and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. The probe ended its “ride share” on SpaceX after 38 minutes and, if all goes according to plan, will land in the Sea of Tranquility on April 11, the project’s leaders said several days before the launch."(https://www.bloombergquint.com/technology/one-giant-step-for-israel-as-probe-set-to-lift-off-for-the-moon#gs.QaWsfBK3)

It will land on the moon between where Apollos 15 and 17 missions remain.  I do not know if they will be pointing a camera to look for the Apollo sites but if they do and we see the images I would consider that to be awesome in itself.

You can watch SpaceX launch and rocket recovery in the video below.

Read more at: https://www.bloombergquint.com/technology/one-giant-step-for-israel-as-probe-set-to-lift-off-for-the-moon#gs.uQinS05g
Copyright © BloombergQuint

Read more at: https://www.bloombergquint.com/technology/one-giant-step-for-israel-as-probe-set-to-lift-off-for-the-moon#gs.uQinS05g
Copyright © BloombergQuint

Read more at: https://www.bloombergquint.com/technology/one-giant-step-for-israel-as-probe-set-to-lift-off-for-the-moon#gs.uQinS05g
Copyright © BloombergQuint"

Ludwig van Beethoven - Moonlight Sonata ( 3rd Movement ) Tina S Cover

Wonderful

Watershed Cartography is Fascinating

I have always been fascinated by maps.  From the road maps I used until GPS navigation became common to the topographic maps we used for land navigation in the service.

These maps by Hungarian cartographer Robert Szucs are works of art.

Spread-eagled across the central part of the United States, the Mississippi's drainage basin covers all or parts of 32 U.S. states (and two Canadian provinces). The easternmost point of Ol' Man River's catchment area is really far east: Cobb Hill in northern Pennsylvania. Here rises the Allegheny, tributary of the Ohio, which in turn flows into the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois. Image: Grasshopper Geography

See more: The world's watersheds, mapped in gorgeous detail

Mmmm, Coffee!

I usually drink a pint of espresso every morning.  Seeing articles such as this one is always heartening.

"Coffee, it seems, prevents or somehow leads to the repair of damaged DNA, at least according to the findings of some researchers from Bratislava. Their paper, published in The European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, reported that drinking 500 ml of freshly brewed, dark roast coffee every day for 4 weeks resulted in a 23% reduction in DNA "strand breaks" (1).

Their study involved 100 healthy men and women recruited from a general Central European population. The subjects were randomized into a coffee group and a water group. (No double-blind placebo design was necessary because we're all going with the assumption that DNA isn't susceptible to the placebo effect.)

The scientists concluded that "...the regular consumption of a dark roast blend has a beneficial protective effect on human DNA integrity in both men and women.""

Tip: Drink This Much Coffee to Repair DNA

HT: https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/

Shutdown Silver Lining

Aside from watching President Trump humiliate Nancy Pelosi et al., there are many useless government drones re-evaluating their career choice.  I came across this interesting take on the shutdown from a federal official still on the job, without pay.

"The lapse in appropriations is more than a battle over a wall. It is an opportunity to strip wasteful government agencies for good.

On an average day, roughly 15 percent of the employees around me are exceptional patriots serving their country. I wish I could give competitive salaries to them and no one else. But 80 percent feel no pressure to produce results. If they don’t feel like doing what they are told, they don’t.

Why would they? We can’t fire them. They avoid attention, plan their weekend, schedule vacation, their second job, their next position — some do this in the same position for more than a decade."

(...)

"The president’s instincts are right. Most Americans will not miss non-essential government functions. A referendum to end government plunder must happen. Wasteful government agencies are fighting for relevance but they will lose. Now is the time to deliver historic change by cutting them down forever."

Read the whole article: I’m A Senior Trump Official, And I Hope A Long Shutdown Smokes Out The Resistance

Hate Speech

"What is again odd about these examples of open progressive racist, cultural, and class contempt for the American interior, is not just how ubiquitously politicians and journalists voiced them, but also how candidly and indeed confidently they repeated notions of smelly, toothless, ape-like, lazy “garbage people.” In that sense, who hated Trump and what he represented also explains precisely why so many went to the polls to elect him, and perhaps also why Trump’s own uncouthness was in its own manner contextualized by his supporters as a long overdue pushback to the elite disdain and indeed hatred shown them.

What does all this hate speech signify?"
Read it all here: A License To Hate

HT: https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/

BMF into ARA

I realize this is a re-post but sometimes I just feel the awesomeness and that is that.  I watched C-5 Galaxies flyover me for months and even rode in on one.  This, however is simply something more bigger.  I recorded this aircraft coming into Acadiana Regional Airport one day.   Oh, turn your sound up.
You can see more here: https://www.youtube.com/user/chipanderson

The Farside of the Moon

You may wonder why the Chinese chose the farside of the moon for their "explorations".  Wonder no more.  They are there in order to counter the planned American presence at L2 in 2021.


Here is a link to the NASA 'site: https://jwst.nasa.gov/index.html

Build that Wall

NBPC Vice President Art Del Cueto on border security: “It has nothing to do with political parties. You all have to ask yourselves this question, ‘If I come to your home, do you want me to knock on your front door or do you want me to climb through that window?’”

Click on image for the video.

AvEx and FedEx

In New Iberia, Louisiana Aviation Exteriors(AvEx) paints aircraft at Acadiana Regional Airport. Here is an example of the work that they do for FedEx. https://about.van.fedex.com/blog/every-plane-bears-a-name/

R.I.P. Daryl Dragon

Merry Christmas!

A Song From Miriam

For Rebecca

Fascinating GDP Animation

I ran across this during my afternoon perusals of the WWW.

Here is a link to the animation:

https://twitter.com/Ian_Fraser/status/1073357036283420672

HT: https://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/

Merry Libertarian Christmas

HT: https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/

Goliath Introduction Music

I have discovered Goliath, starring Billy Bob Thornton.  The intro is visually appealing and the song by "The Silent Comedy" is catchy.  Here is the intro song, crank it up.

Thomas Sowell

The desired end result is achieved but many have lost their way and are still stumbling around in the darkness where they are taken advantage of by the unscrupulous.

"If you don't get a good education, whatever else you get is not going to make a major difference, economically or socially. That's why I'm so much in favor of the successful charter schools. This happens too often in the history of ideas. Segregation was made the reason the black kids weren't doing well, so people attack that factor. But now you have black kids doing well in predominantly black schools, and people are against them because they haven't been integrated. Integration was a means to an end, and when you achieve the end, you don't condemn the end because you didn't get there by the means you thought you were going to get there by."
http://reason.com/archives/2018/11/26/thomas-sowell-returns

Space and Rockets

I incorrectly stated hat it was a Falcon 9 but it turns out that it was a Progress MS-10.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/9zgyim/heres_what_a_rocket_launch_looks_like_from_the/

Update with Youtube Video.

They Should Have Worn Their Brown Pants

Click Here: https://twitter.com/WorldOfSporf/status/1065552368740245504

HT: David Thompson

Word of the Day

I see unfamiliar words every now and again. I read one just a moment ago and was compelled to look it up. That word is "struthious".  As in, "“The opinion correctly held, as we believed, that the defendants could not be so struthious as to ignore the overwhelming evidence in front of them that Mrs. Pichardo was in fact female,” said lawyer Ryan Marks."

Here is a link to the original article:

Grandma mistakenly booked into a Miami jail as a man. Court ruling details who was to blame.

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/latest-news/article222363520.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/latest-news/article222363520.html#storylink=cpy

Draining the Swamp

This agency is a good candidate for dissolution.

"WASHINGTON (AP) — Mark Robbins gets to work at 8:15 each morning and unlocks the door to his office suite. He switches on the lights and the TV news, brews a pot of coffee and pulls out the first files of the day to review.

For the next eight hours or so, he reads through federal workplace disputes, analyzes the cases, marks them with notes and logs his legal opinions. When he’s finished, he slips the files into a cardboard box and carries them into an empty room where they will sit and wait. For nobody.
He’s at 1,520 files and counting."

Memos to Nobody: Inside the work of a neglected fed agency

Cold Civil War

"Political scientists sometimes distinguish between normal politics and regime politics. Normal politics takes place within a political and constitutional order and concerns means, not ends. In other words, the ends or principles are agreed upon; debate is simply over means. By contrast, regime politics is about who rules and for what ends or principles. It questions the nature of the political system itself. Who has rights? Who gets to vote? What do we honor or revere together as a people? I fear America may be leaving the world of normal politics and entering the dangerous world of regime politics—a politics in which our political loyalties diverge more and more, as they did in the 1850s, between two contrary visions of the country.

One vision is based on the original Constitution as amended. This is the Constitution grounded in the natural rights of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution written in 1787 and ratified in 1788. It has been transmitted to us with significant Amendments—some improvements and some not—but it is recognizable still as the original Constitution. To simplify matters we may call this “the conservative Constitution”—with the caveat that conservatives have never agreed perfectly on its meaning and that many non-conservatives remain loyal to it.


The other vision is based on what Progressives and liberals, for 100 years now, have called “the living Constitution.” This term implies that the original Constitution is dead—or at least on life support—and that in order to remain relevant to our national life, the original Constitution must be infused with new meaning and new ends and therefore with new duties, rights, and powers. To cite an important example, new administrative agencies must be created to circumvent the structural limitations that the original Constitution imposed on government."

Read the whole thing:
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/americas-cold-civil-war/

A Cold Winter is Coming

"Sept. 27, 2018: The sun is entering one of the deepest Solar Minima of the Space Age. Sunspots have been absent for most of 2018, and the sun’s ultraviolet output has sharply dropped. New research shows that Earth’s upper atmosphere is responding.

“We see a cooling trend,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center. “High above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold.”"

Above: An historical record of the Thermosphere Climate Index. Mlynczak and colleagues recently published a paper on the TCI showing that the state of the thermosphere can be discussed using a set of five plain language terms: Cold, Cool, Neutral, Warm, and Hot.

The Chill of Solar Minimum

The Sound of the End of World War I

"One of the astonishing things about World War I is that for generations to come we will be able to hear it end. It was the greatest slaughter the world had ever seen. Something close to 20 million soldiers and civilians on both sides perished. Under the Armistice in which the Central Powers finally capitulated a century ago, the time for the end of the conflict was set at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

Until that moment, the thunder of battle engulfed the front. The machine guns crackled constantly, and the howitzers kept reporting. The sound was God-omnipresent. We know that because of recordings, including ones made near the Moselle River. Yanks were there as part of a broad push that had been ordered by the Allied commander, Marshal Foch."

Read and hear it here:
https://www.nysun.com/editorials/birdsong-of-peace/90460/