Recommendable! Let's see whether Giorgia Meloni can pull it off by end of 2023! Remember e.g. Italy is a G7 member country!
Monday, July 31, 2023
Russia Ukraine War: Why Saudi Arabia Wants to Play Peacemaker with Palki Sharma
Good news! Blessed are the peacemakers! When the current U.S. President is senile, demented and corrupt, others will try to fill his shoes. Bravo Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Who burnt the Quran in Sweden in an attempt to prevent Sweden from becoming a new NATO member?
Let me guess that Putin the Terrible or Iran was behind this well timed surely infuriating incident! Cui bono! Follow the money trail!
This suspicion should be thoroughly investigated!
Cape and Islands DA calls on Merrick Garland to investigate the DeSantis Martha's Vineyard migrant flights
That stupid fool and ultra partisan Garland should go right ahead an investigate! More reason to impeach him as well!
We should be so thankful that Garland did not become a U.S. Supreme Court Justice! Thank God!
Impeachment now! Devon Archer tells Congress Burisma pressured Hunter Biden to deal with Ukrainian prosecutor
Please wait no longer finally file the impeachment proceedings against the senile, demented, known and notorious lifelong pathological liar and corrupt 46th President!
This is hopefully an opportunity for the Dimocratic Party to regain again a better reputation by not obstructing any longer!!!!!
Until then America has come to look more and more like a banana republic to the rest of the world! Make America great again!!! Show and demonstrate to the world what should happen to a criminal and corrupt president! President Nixon was a great example, but the 46th President is even worse!
"... "Devon Archer testified that the value of adding Hunter Biden to Burisma’s board was 'the brand' and confirmed that then-Vice President Joe Biden brought the most value to 'the brand,'" the source said. "Archer also stated that Burisma would have gone under if not for 'the brand." ...
Archer also directly contradicted Joe Biden's long held claims he never met with Hunter Biden's foreign business associates, telling the committee America's current president got on speakerphone more than 20 times with his son's business clients.. .."
Archer also directly contradicted Joe Biden's long held claims he never met with Hunter Biden's foreign business associates, telling the committee America's current president got on speakerphone more than 20 times with his son's business clients.. .."
Must Spain Cobble Together Another Frankenstein Government? – Analysis. Really!
What an utterly ridiculous headline!!! Who calls the Basques or Catalans monsters?
Abrahamic Religions Each Share Their Own Decalogue
I did not have time to read the whole article, but nobody should underestimate the immense and paramount importance of the Ten Commandments in the history of human civilization!
These Ten Commandments plus some other attempts of ancient civilizations at codification and the rule of law (e.g. Code of Hammurabi, Edicts of Ashoka) are some of the central tenets of human civilization! Without them we would still be more like the great apes!
No Humans Needed: Kroger Opens Grocery Store Without Cashiers or Baggers
Good news! Cashless is king in the digital age!
E.g. the Fry's Foods app sucks, which allows you to clip digital coupons (how quaint is that!!!), but it does not allow you to scan all items in your shopping cart so you can pay immediately except e.g. for items that need weighing.
Ukraine: Die ersten Unternehmen kehren trotz Krieg in das Land zurück
Gute Nachrichten! Bravo! Der Wiederaufbau des kriegszerstörten Landes wird teuer und er wird lange dauern! Russland sollte dafür zahlen!
Urlaub in der Toskana: Wo selbst Russen und Ukrainer sich vertragen
Natürlich verstehen sich wahrscheinlich die meisten russischen und ukrainischen Bürger sehr gut!
Wahrscheinlich würden die meisten russischen Bürger auch den Krieg verurteilen und sofort beenden, wenn sie mehr über die Tatsachen des Angriffskriegs bescheid wüssten!
Hoffentlich werden die russischen Bürger eines Tages einsehen, dass sie möchtegern Zaren und größenwahnsinnige Kriegsverbrecher wie Putin der Schreckliche verhindern müssen. Die ganze Welt wäre sehr dankbar!
Vor Hitler kam Stalin! Auf Stalin folgte Putin der Schreckliche!
Lufthansa verlangt nach Blockaden Schadenersatz von Letzter Generation. Endlich!
Gute Nachrichten! Bravo Lufthansa! Hoffentlich werden Andere folgen!
Wurde auch höchste Zeit diese mittelalterlichen Fanatiker zur Kasse zu bitten oder sie, je nach Schwere der Straftat, in den Knast zu schicken zur Abkühlung und Warnung!
Don't mess with Texas: Texas' branding is as old as the state itself. Really!
However, the Dimocratic Party and allied and other delusional radicals are working tirelessly to destroy the brand of Texas!
"STATE MOTTO.The word Friendship was adopted as the Texas state motto by the Forty-first Texas Legislature in February 1930. The word was probably chosen because the name Texas or Tejas was the Spanish pronunciation of a Caddo Indian word sometimes translated to mean "friends" or "allies."" (Source)
"Texas is nicknamed the Lone Star State for its former status as an independent republic, and as a reminder of the state's struggle for independence from Mexico." (Source)
"... Could that change? The state's reputation has taken some hits recently (the February 2021 winter storm, the Robb Elementary School shooting, Texas's border operations straining relations with Mexico), but for now, hundreds of thousands of residents from other states are still moving here. And who can argue with that? ..."
Amending nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes
Amending the very famous quote by Benjamin Franklin. Don't we all like to stand on the shoulders of giants? But which one?
"Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."
— Franklin, in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, 1789 (Source)
Let's add to this famous quote following (in no particular order and it will be further amended as needed):
- Permanent competition among humans
- The only constant is change
- The worst addiction of all: The endless lust for as much as possible power and control over other human beings by too many human beings
- The always present pretense of knowledge by many human beings. Goes hand in hand with hubris and lack of humility. Although Socrates already taught us that we know essentially nothing (or little)! In particular, higher educated individuals suffer most often from this pretense. A very bad habit by too many!
- A very deep longing for the Mensch like e.g. freedom of religion
- Love conquers All
Milton Friedman’s Vision in Education Becomes Reality on his 111th birthday
Recommendable! However, where is the Milton Friedman of our time???
The two authors of the below article strangely gloss over or ignore how much of Milton Friedman's classical liberalism agenda has worsened over the past few decades. Just a hint: E.g. how much Western governments have abused and still continue to abuse the Global Warming hoax and the Climate Change religion propaganda and demagoguery to impose massive socialist central planning and other restrictions on individual freedom!
AIAi: Top 8 machine learning trends in 2023
Recommendable!
However, the first (General Adversarial Network (GAN)) and the penultimate (Unsupervised machine learning) trend are actually very old hats!
Included is also a brief history of machine learning, but the history is too short and lacks a lot of events etc.
Detransitioner: Immer mehr Fälle bekannt, in denen die Opfer Therapien oder Operationen bitter bereuen
Schlagzeile des Tages! Genau! Das D fehlt in LGBTQ! Habe hier auch vor drei Tagen dazu gebloggt.
Für Frauen/Mädchen die transition wollen bedeutet dass weibliche Genitalverstümmelung und doppelte Mastektomie! Das wird dann beschönigend "geschlechtsbejahende Pflege" genannt.
"Dass die in England und den USA blühende „Jung und trans“-Mode ohne Opfer bleibt, ist ein Irrglaube. Der Idee, ein anderes Geschlecht zu sein, folgen gefährliche Eingriffe und irreversible Hormongaben. Die sie in Anspruch nahmen, sind oft für's Leben gezeichnet. Immer mehr melden sich zu Wort, die zurück wollen, was in vielen Fällen nicht möglich ist. ..."
Fetisch, Swingerklub, Gruppensex, Lack und Leder sind längst Mainstream
Berichtet heute die früher eher konservative Neue Züricher Zeitung!
Was ist dran? Ein Reißer? Oder geht die Gesellschaft mal wieder dekadent zugrunde? 😊
Economic Community of West African States threatens use of force if President Bazoum of Niger is not reinstated
Good news! This seems to be an unusual development! Are African nations more willing to restore government by the people? Will ECOWAS be able to reverse the very recent military coup in Niger?
Sunday, July 30, 2023
What Does Sweden’s and Finland's NATO Membership Mean for Russia?
Very recommendable! For this grave miscalculation alone the megalomaniac and war criminal Putin the Terrible should be ousted the Russians ASAP!
U.S. Senator Rand Paul announces DOJ criminal referral for Anthony Fauci over claims about gain-of-function research
What the heck took so long!!!! The involvement of the U.S. government in financing and supporting controversial pathogen research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (a facility, where possibly civilian and military research was conducted side by side) was already well known by around mid 2020 or latest by end of 2020. I have extensively blogged here about that since 2020 (e.g. label coronavirus)!
Unfortunately, the current, ultra partisan U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland needs to be impeached first!!!!
This U.S. government sponsored research at that Chinese lab was most likely in circumvention of existing U.S. regulations regarding such research!
"Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, announced that he formally sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department regarding Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director.
Paul cited an email from February 2020 in which Fauci wrote that scientists discussed whether COVID-19 was produced through genetic engineering at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
"This suspicion was heightened by the fact that scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine the molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan," he wrote in the email, which was published by RealClearNews reporter Philip Wegmann on Saturday.
"This directly contradicts everything he said in committee hearing to me, denying absolutely that they funded any gain-of-function, and it’s absolutely a lie. That’s why I sent an official criminal referral to the DOJ," Paul wrote on Twitter in response to Wegmann's tweet."
Korean team claims to have created the first room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor
Good news! I am running out of time for today! Wow! Room-temperature and ambient-pressure!!!!
If superconductivity is finally cracked by human ingenuity, then e.g. Global Warming and Climate Change religion will immediately end up in the dustbin of history, where they belong!
I briefly looked up the senior author/last author of this paper, i.e. Young-Wan Kwon. According to Semantic Scholar he has a very low lifetime citations count. He is not listed on Google Scholar (or perhaps under a differently spelled name).
"A team of physicists affiliated with several institutions in South Korea is claiming to have created the elusive room-temperature/ambient-pressure superconducting material. Their work has not yet been peer reviewed. They have posted two papers on the arXiv preprint server."
Renters less likely to be kicked out where eviction filing fees are higher. Really!
Don't you love very naive and simplistic journalists? This is also another example of racializing everything! The phony disparate impact demagoguery was applied again!
Did you know that Princeton University has an Eviction Lab? Did you know that luminaries like "Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation • .... • Chan Zuckerberg Initiative • Ford Foundation" are funding it?
This pseudoscience was then also accepted and published as a research article in an economic policy journal. Although, it obviously follows the propaganda playbook/narrative that landlords are villains and tenants are severely exploited angels.
These pseudo economists are talking about first round effects! This is highly misleading and false!
If e.g. the eviction fees were higher then perhaps these rentals would not even be offered or rental apartments would be converted into something else etc. etc.
"Places with higher fees for filing eviction cases have lower eviction rates — even when other factors are considered, new research from the Eviction Lab at Princeton University shows.
The research, published in the journal Housing Policy Debate in May, showed higher filing fees motivate landlords to work with tenants rather than turning to the legal process. "
From the abstract
"Eviction is a common and consequential event in the lives of tenants and is shaped by the legal environments in which it takes place. In this study, we show that eviction filing fees, or the amounts of money it costs landlords to begin formal evictions, have a large effect on eviction practices. Specifically, fees that are higher by $76 (one standard deviation) lead to lower eviction filing rates by 1.71 percentage points (0.26 standard deviations) and lower eviction judgment rates by 0.49 percentage points (0.19 standard deviation). Filing fees affect not only the rate but also the purpose of filing, as lower fees make landlords more likely to file serially against the same tenants as a form of rent collection. Each of these effects appears to be disproportionately large in majority-Black tracts, suggesting that low filing fees have disparate impacts on Black renters. These findings contribute to our understanding of the legal basis of housing insecurity and the racialization of eviction practices in the United States."
Electrophysiology: The Skin Battery
Recommendable! A nice overview article about the electrophysiology of the skin!
Giant underwater waves affect the ocean’s ability to store carbon
This is not the very latest research, it was published already in March of this year, but it goes to show how little we still know about what is going on in our vast and deep oceans!
Apparently, we learn more and more among other things that there are gigantic processes going in the oceans that take several decades to complete and which may very well influence global climate.
Global Warming is a hoax and Climate Change is a religion! Climate models are largely junk!
Even this study uses the very dubious propagandistic term "anthropogenic carbon"! When ideology trumps science!
"An international team of researchers, ... quantified the effect of these waves and other forms of underwater turbulence in the Atlantic Ocean and found that their importance is not being accurately reflected in the climate models that inform government policy. ... While these underwater waves are already well-known, their importance in heat and carbon transport is not fully understood. ...
Ocean circulation carries warm waters from the tropics to the North Atlantic, where they cool, sink, and return southwards in the deep ocean, like a giant conveyer belt. The Atlantic branch of this circulation pattern, called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), plays a key role in regulating global heat and carbon budgets. Ocean circulation redistributes heat to the polar regions, where it melts ice, and carbon to the deep ocean, where it can be stored for thousands of years. ... “Many climate models have an overly simplistic representation of the role of micro-scale turbulence, but we’ve shown it’s significant and should be treated with more care,” ..."
Ocean circulation carries warm waters from the tropics to the North Atlantic, where they cool, sink, and return southwards in the deep ocean, like a giant conveyer belt. The Atlantic branch of this circulation pattern, called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), plays a key role in regulating global heat and carbon budgets. Ocean circulation redistributes heat to the polar regions, where it melts ice, and carbon to the deep ocean, where it can be stored for thousands of years. ... “Many climate models have an overly simplistic representation of the role of micro-scale turbulence, but we’ve shown it’s significant and should be treated with more care,” ..."
From the abstract:
"Diapycnal mixing shapes the distribution of climatically important tracers, such as heat and carbon, as these are carried by dense water masses in the ocean interior. Here, we analyze a suite of observation-based estimates of diapycnal mixing to assess its role within the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). The rate of water mass transformation in the Atlantic Ocean's interior shows that there is a robust buoyancy increase in the North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW, neutral density γn ≃ 27.6–28.15), with a diapycnal circulation of 0.5–8 Sv between 48°N and 32°S in the Atlantic Ocean. Moreover, tracers within the southward-flowing NADW may undergo a substantial diapycnal transfer, equivalent to a vertical displacement of hundreds of meters in the vertical. This result, confirmed with a zonally averaged numerical model of the AMOC, indicates that mixing can alter where tracers upwell in the Southern Ocean, ultimately affecting their global pathways and ventilation timescales. These results point to the need for a realistic mixing representation in climate models in order to understand and credibly project the ongoing climate change."
Significance of Diapycnal Mixing Within the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (open access)
Figure 1
Medicine is plagued by untrustworthy clinical trials. How many studies are faked or flawed?
As if we had not known it for some time!
Make no mistake, the situation in other sciences is often not much better. E.g. some of the machine learning & AI research is also difficult to scrutinize or evaluate by third parties.
Remember: Climate models are largely junk too!
"... Over three years, he scrutinized more than 500 studies.
For more than 150 trials, Carlisle got access to anonymized individual participant data (IPD). By studying the IPD spreadsheets, he judged that 44% of these trials contained at least some flawed data: impossible statistics, incorrect calculations or duplicated numbers or figures, for instance. And 26% of the papers had problems that were so widespread that the trial was impossible to trust, he judged — either because the authors were incompetent, or because they had faked the data. ..."
Nantucket's topless bylaw working swimmingly, police report
Uh, prudish Americans are going nudist! 😊
"Nantucket has the skinny on the island going topless this summer.
“We haven’t received a single call complaining about it,” Nantucket Police Department spokesman Lt. Angus MacVicar told the Herald.
“I’m not saying people haven’t gone topless,” he quickly added, but no one has dialed 911 to call out any untoward exposure. ..."
Israel Aerospace Industries successfully launches commercial satellite enabling all-weather, night coverage from India
Amazing stuff!
"Israel Aerospace Industries launched the DS-SAR satellite at 4 a.m. on Sunday, which successfully entered orbit and now enables 24-7 all-weather coverage.
Launched using a PSLV C56 launcher from India, the satellite carries a Synthetic Aperture Radar payload and is based on IAI’s success with the Ofek and TECSAR satellites. ...
India’s Space Research Organization said that ST Engineering will use it for multi-modal and higher responsiveness imagery, and geospatial services, for their commercial customers. ...
India’s Space Research Organization said that ST Engineering will use it for multi-modal and higher responsiveness imagery, and geospatial services, for their commercial customers. ...
In March, a new Israeli spy satellite, Ofek 13, was successfully launched into space.
While Ofek 13 is tailored for military use, the DS-SAR satellite is customized for commercial use, including by foreign customers.
The vast majority of the technology remained the same, though there are likely various changes to prevent classified Israeli capabilities from being compromised. ..."
Israel and Saudi Arabia to be linked by future railway – Netanyahu
Good news! Peace at last! Blessed are the peacemakers!
Somebody please tell me or pinch me that I am not dreaming! Rejoice!
The Abraham Accords by President Trump keep on giving!
"Israel and Saudi Arabia can be linked by a future railway the opening leg of which Israel is embarking on now with a NIS 100 billion project to construct a high-speed train linking Kiryat Shmona in Israel’s north with its furthermost southern city of Eilat, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.
“Today we are launching the "One Israel" project - connecting the entire country by high-speed train from Kiryat Shmona to Eilat,” Netanyahu said prior to his government’s approval of the project at its weekly meeting in Jerusalem.
He linked that project with the potential of an Israeli-Saudi normalization deal, which is expected to be part of any deal between Riyadh and Washington that is now under discussion between those two capitals. ... we will also be able to connect Israel by train to Saudi Arabia and the Arabian Peninsula. We are working on that too,” Netanyahu said. ..."
He linked that project with the potential of an Israeli-Saudi normalization deal, which is expected to be part of any deal between Riyadh and Washington that is now under discussion between those two capitals. ... we will also be able to connect Israel by train to Saudi Arabia and the Arabian Peninsula. We are working on that too,” Netanyahu said. ..."
US-Saudi deal to normalize Israel ties may be on the way
Good news! Blessed are the peacemakers! It would almost be a miracle if the often lethal Arab-Israeli conflict since 1948 would finally come to an end. Rejoice!
The Abraham Accords by President Trump keep on giving!
Whether to trust an announcement by the senile, demented, and corrupt 46th President, who is also known as a lifelong pathological liar, is another question.
It very much appears that the young Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is trying to make a positive difference! See also e.g. my other blog here today about MBS.
If this peace deal goes through, all these decades long petty conflicts with the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza strip would most certainly go away! These Arabs could have long lived in peace and prosperity had they not sought military conflict with Israel all the time!
Merz rudert in Sachen AfD zurück - Niemand hat die Absicht, die Brandmauer einzureißen
Wann wird dieses schlaffe Überbleibsel (Merz) der schrecklichen SED Kanzlerin Merkel endlich abserviert! Wieviel mehr grün kann die CDU noch werden! Die CDU braucht dringend besseres Führungspersonal!
Die AfD is legitim! Sie ist eine ernste Alternative zu dem seit Jahren vorherrschenden, krassen Dilettantismus in Berlin!
Zwingt mich nicht, AfD zu wählen
Eine gelungene Schlagzeile!
Der Artikel wurde geschrieben von einem "Rechtsanwalt und Publizist mit langjähriger, politischer Erfahrung als ehemaliger Abgeordneter (FDP). Der heute „parteipolitisch heimatlose Liberale“"! Mir würde es sehr ähnlich gehen!
China-Founded Rivals Shein and Temu Ramp Up War for American Shoppers
In many respects this seems to be an interesting, developing story!
"Shein and Temu, two of the fastest-growing shopping platforms in the U.S., have taken the gloves off in a globe-spanning fight that accentuates a strong reliance on China that both companies are trying to play down."
"The two companies have slapped lawsuits on each other in U.S. courts, alleging corporate dirty tricks, including bullying suppliers to pick sides and trademark infringement. Less publicly, the dispute is playing out on the ground in China, where most of their supply chains and back offices are. The firms are fighting for suppliers and workers and are demanding long hours as part of a competition to get cheap goods to woo thrift shoppers in the U.S.—their biggest market."
Saudi Arabia to Host Ukraine Peace Talks as Part of Western Effort to Woo Global South
Good news! Bravo! Highly unusual! Saudi Arabia as a global peacemaker! When I saw the headline, I almost choked! What!
The still new, much younger Saudi crown prince has aspirations! He makes waves! Blessed are the peacemakers! Wish him luck!
With a senile, demented, and corrupt 46th President others have to fill his shoes in world politics! Carpe diem Mohammed bin Salman!
Asia's Age of Hydropolitics
Food for thought! Life is water and water is life!
"Most of Asia's major rivers originate in China and flow into countries like India, Bangladesh and Vietnam. China has earned the title of "upstream superpower," but concerns over the weaponization of water, the responses of nations downstream, and climate change are stirring up water politics and stoking tensions.
The visually rich three-part Nikkei Asia series titled Asia's Age of Hydropolitics explores the effects that the actions of upstream nations -- exacerbated by climate change -- have on countries downstream."
U.S. Oil and Gas Association fears Biden to declare climate emergency, seize powers like COVID pandemic
This is a very real risk! Some idiotic western governments might indeed try to declare another emergency (climate crisis) to usurp extraordinary power!
A Dimocratic Party that e.g. totally fails to censure a sleazy U.S. Representative like Adam Schiff! What has become of this political party!
Who in the Dimocratic Party was responsible for supporting a then already senile and demented presidential candidate in 2020 who was a frequent and confirmed pathological liar all his long political career.
The global Covid-19 pandemic and its attending extraordinary emergency government powers was a prelude and an exercise!
Would it not be very convenient for the senile, demented, and corrupt 46th President and his dubious administration to distract from all these scandals by declaring an emergency just 15 month before the November 2024 elections?
Was it e.g. not Hitler, who declared a phony emergency, to grab power? It is a very old trick in the playbook of power hungry politicians.
"... "They're leaning to that direction," U.S. Oil and Gas Association President Tim Stewart recently told Just the News. "If you grant the president's emergency powers to declare a climate emergency, it's just like COVID.” ..."
U.N. Chief Guterres Declares "Terrifying Era of Global Boiling Has Arrived"
What an idiot! This clown should be fired instantly!
Saturday, July 29, 2023
Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and other tech firms agree to AI safeguards set by the White House. Really!
The senile, demented, and corrupt 46th President has no clue! Many members of his administration are dubious and/or clueless as well. You have to wonder!
Among other things, they want to use watermarks to counter AI generated content. This seems to be a rather futile endeavor! What about e.g. open source projects and so on. Or what about genuine human works that somehow got contaminated with those watermarks e.g. by a bad actor.
MIT professor designs an ultrasound bra to detect breast cancer
Is this just a nutty professor or is there something useful about it?
800 great white sharks have visited Cape Cod in recent years: 'The Cape is among the larger white shark hotspots worldwide'
Who is hunting the apex hunter? Is this a sign of overpopulation?
AMD plans to invest $400 million in India by 2028
Good news! Let the chips fall where they may (in India)! 😊
"AMD plans to invest around $400 million in India over the next five years and set up its largest design center in the country’s southern city of Bengaluru as the chipmaker joins the growing list of firms that are backing the South Asian nation’s ambition of becoming a semiconductor manufacturing hub.
AMD CTO Mark Papermaster announced the chipmaker’s investment plans on Friday at the annual semiconductor conference SemiconIndia 2023 in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat. ..."
Salvage crews board a large cargo ship burning off the Netherlands. It was loaded with electric vehicles
Unfortunately, I do not have the time to do more research! Plus, there is a curious news outage on this incident. They don't want the owners or prospective buyers of electrical vehicles to know what they are buying.
Is this the second cargo ship loaded with electric vehicles that went ablaze?
The spontaneous combustion of EVs and how difficult it is to extinguish a burning EV are a taboo subjects for governments and carmakers! And the media are compliant and meek!
It appears the news about these two events are deliberately being suppressed! The involvement of electric vehicles in this fire barely mentioned! Or whether it was even the spontaneous combustion of such an EV that triggered the fire on board.
It's not climate change that's causing heat waves this summer but no one wants to explain why
Recommendable! The so called record temperatures this summer in some regions of the northern hemisphere is a bad hoax and a scam! It's mostly nasty demagoguery repeated over and over!
Staatsverschuldung auf Rekordhoch (2,4 Trilliarden Euro): Energiekrise und Corona-Pandemie
Was erwartet man auch anders von einer Bananenrepublik Deutschland! Sie lebt über ihre Verhältnisse!
Während der Pandemie haben westliche Regierungen riesig Geld zum Fenster rausgeworfen, wie selten zuvor! Ohne Hirn und Verstand! Je mehr, desto besser!
"Die hohen Kosten im Kampf gegen Energiekrise und Corona-Pandemie haben die deutschen Staatsschulden auf ein Rekordhoch getrieben. Ende 2022 standen Bund, Länder, Gemeinden und Sozialversicherung einschließlich aller Extrahaushalte mit 2,368 Billionen Euro in der Kreide, wie das Statistische Bundesamt am Freitag zu seinen endgültigen Ergebnissen mitteilte. Das sind zwei Prozent oder 47,1 Milliarden Euro mehr als Ende 2021. Die Pro-Kopf-Verschuldung nahm um 244 Euro auf 28.164 Euro zu. Berücksichtigt werden in dieser Statistik nur Verbindlichkeiten gegenüber dem nicht öffentlichen Bereich, also etwa Banken sowie privaten Unternehmen im In- und Ausland. ..."
Off shore Oil drilling permits at a slow creep under Biden
However permits for ugly offshore windmill farms are processed quickly! Wind power is unreliable, intermittent, and absolutely not environmentally friendly!
What was one of the first acts of the senile, demented, and corrupt 46th President? He stopped the Keystone Pipeline!
The 46th President willfully sabotaged the energy independence of the U.S.!
"And since President Joe Biden came into office in 2021, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which manages offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, has issued 105 new drilling permits, an almost 30 percent decline from the last two years of the Trump administration. ..."
‘Strange metal’ sends quantum research in circles
Amazing stuff!
If we humans can crack superconductivity than e.g. the Global Warming hoax and Climate Change religion will go away like a Fata Morgana and will quickly end up in the dustbin of history of failed human obsessions where it belongs!
"... Identified more than 40 years ago, strange metal is a state of matter found in many quantum materials — including certain superconductors that scientists say may be vital for high-tech products of the future. The “strange” part of strange metal is its electrons: they defy the traditional rules for electron movement and conductivity.
Unlike most metals, in which electrical resistance increases with the square of temperature, strange metals have an electrical resistance that increases in proportion to temperature. This “linear-in-temperature” behavior defies physicists’ understanding of how electrons move in solids. ...
in the study, ... found a discernible, circular scattering pattern in the way electrons move within strange metal. ...
Using a method called resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS), they saw that electrons created fluctuating waves of electrical charge in all directions. ..."
Unlike most metals, in which electrical resistance increases with the square of temperature, strange metals have an electrical resistance that increases in proportion to temperature. This “linear-in-temperature” behavior defies physicists’ understanding of how electrons move in solids. ...
in the study, ... found a discernible, circular scattering pattern in the way electrons move within strange metal. ...
Using a method called resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS), they saw that electrons created fluctuating waves of electrical charge in all directions. ..."
From the abstract (Unfortunately this abstract was written only for nerds. Some scientists have bad habits!):
"Most resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS) studies of dynamic charge order correlations in the cuprates have focused on the high-symmetry directions of the copper oxide plane. However, scattering along other in-plane directions should not be ignored as it may help understand, for example, the origin of charge order correlations or the isotropic scattering resulting in strange metal behavior. Our RIXS experiments reveal dynamic charge correlations over the qx-qy scattering plane in underdoped Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ. Tracking the softening of the RIXS-measured bond-stretching phonon, we show that these dynamic correlations exist at energies below approximately 70 meV and are centered around a quasi-circular manifold in the qx-qy scattering plane with radius equal to the magnitude of the charge order wave vector, qCO. This phonon-tracking procedure also allows us to rule out fluctuations of short-range directional charge order (i.e., centered around [qx = ±qCO, qy = 0] and [qx = 0, qy = ±qCO]) as the origin of the observed correlations."
Low-energy quasi-circular electron correlations with charge order wavelength in Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ (open access)
Fig. 3. Models of phonon softening for QCDCs and directional order.
U.S. Senate Minority Leader McConnell (age 81) defiant amid calls to step down following public freeze
Welcome to gerontocracy!
When old, lifelong career politicians become stubborn and highly irresponsible like the senile, demented, and corrupt 46th President! Hanging on to power until their last breath!!! That is called addiction!
We urgently need term limits for all elected representatives!
It was reported that this old U.S. Senator had other, previous medical episodes! E.g. he he apparently fell and sustained a concussion in March.
New York City will ban single-use plastic silverware beginning Monday. Really!
How stupid and naive is that! This is a pretentious busybody Big Government! Germans have tried this for several decades with mediocre results!
This is government tokenism to make your life miserable!
This is misanthropy by government force!
This is socialist central planning of your life in the name of environmentalism!
There are many other ways and better ways to preserve the environment!
Social media amplify tribalism, misinformation, censorship, silencing, superstition and more!
Social media are a great invention thanks to human ingenuity! The positive function/effects have significantly outweighed the negative ones.
However, there is also a considerable dark side to social media as we have learnt over the years! They offer many echo chambers for millions of users! In the worst case, major achievements of human civilization could suffer or have already suffered a setback. Propaganda and demagoguery can easily be disseminated daily!
How do you distinguish a so called influencer from a demagogue? Social media are an ideal medium for demagogues!
There is a pervasive censorship and silencing of minority or opposing opinions going on!
Mob rule and tyranny of the majority come to mind! Or how very active minorities and individual zealots try to dominate discourse and much more!
Then there is the amplification of narcissism on a grand scale! The craving for those few minutes of fame and remuneration.
Image of the day
I have not followed the saga surrounding the Twitter X rebranding. However, I don't think this was Elon Musk's smartest move!
It is understandable and it makes sense to expand the functionality and capabilities of Twitter to match e.g. the Chinese WeChat, but it was not necessary to slay the blue, cute Twitter bird. Competition waits for no one to get it on!
Foreign visitors to China can finally go cashless like locals
Good news! Cash is becoming obsolete faster than you can think in the digital age! Cashless is king!
So far unresolved: How to oversee and regulate digital currency and how to protect citizens and businesses from government abuse of digital currencies and the like.
"This week, China’s two dominant mobile payment solutions, WeChat Pay and Alipay, announced that foreign users can now pay at Chinese retailers by linking their foreign credit cards, including Visa, Mastercard and Discover. ..."
U.S. Senator calls for disciplinary action after member of Hunter Biden's legal team reportedly called court pretending to be from House Ways and Means Committee
Good news! Bravo!
This extremely disturbing phone call has now been reported several times in the last few days! This is incredible! Has America become a banana republic?
Goes to show one more time what a sleazy character the son of the 46th President is!
"... Latham and Watkins lawyer Jessica Bengels, who works on Hunter Biden's legal team, apparently called the clerks for U.S. District Judge Maryellen Norieka, who is currently overseeing the criminal tax evasion case against the president's son, and asked for the clerk to place the House Ways and Means Committee's Amicus Brief under seal. Reportedly, Bengels falsely told the clerk that she was doing this at the behest of the House Ways and Means Committee, which is also investigating Hunter Biden's business dealings. ...
At least one Senator, Pete Ricketts (R) of Nebraska, isn't buying it. "I’ve heard from countless Americans who are concerned our justice system is being weaponized against President Biden’s political opponents while his son gets preferential treatment," Ricketss told Fox News. Ricketts also wrote on Friday to the bar organizations in New York and Washington, D.C., requesting an investigation into possible ethics violations by Biden's legal team, including Bengels' supervising attorney Christopher Clark.
"I write to you regarding the apparent unethical conduct of members of the New York State Bar and the District of Columbia Bar... I am asking both the New York Departmental Disciplinary Committee for the First Department and the District of Columbia’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel to take swift action to examine the actions of attorneys Christopher Clark and Jessica L. Bengels," the letter said. ..."
Qatar's PM has pledged 100 million dollars in humanitarian aid to Ukraine plus $20 million to restart grain exports
Good news! Bravo! Qatar also offered to mediate the return of the thousands of abducted Ukrainian children by the Russians.
Faster than anything else in the Black Sea': See Ukraine's latest sea drone
Recommendable! Witness the war technology of the 21st century in action!
Friday, July 28, 2023
Inside China’s Plan to Dominate the High Seas with Palki Sharma
Very recommendable! China is now the only country besides the U.S. to be able to project forces in any potential theater of conflict around the world. Naval bases in Djibouti and now Cambodia. Apparently, the Chinese apply dual use (civilian and military) to their overseas ports of which there are currently 78 ports in 46 countries.
Why India's Pinaka Rocket Launchers delivered to Armenia Are Bothering Azerbaijan with Palki Sharma
Recommendable! It seems, India is dropping its once famous non aligned movement and non violence status very fast. This time to support its indigenous arms industry.
Why is Saudi Arabia Building a Mega-Refinery in Pakistan? with Palki Sharma
Recommendable! Always remember, Pakistan is the only Muslim country with nuclear weapons so far.
Hong Kong Court dismisses government bid to ban protest song ‘Glory to Hong Kong’, questions effectiveness of move
Are there still courageous Hong Kong judges who defy the de facto Communist Party of China takeover of Hong Kong in gross violation of the One Country, Two Systems agreement? Hope and pray!
Biden admin proposes 58 mpg fuel efficiency standard, sets target date at 2032. Really!
Insane! Worthy of a senile, demented and corrupt 46th President! The lifelong pathological liar and career politician will say and do anything to stay in power! It is despicable!
Impeachment now!
This is Big Government! This is socialist central planning pure and simple under the pretext of a highly controversial emergency like Hitler!
Indian Preeminence In South Asia
I did not read this op ed, but the headline speaks volumes! India, a rising superpower and countervailing power to China in the 21st century!
Is India developing a sort of Monroe doctrine towards China and Russia?
Beyond the pork barrel and the sausage factory allegories of modern Western democracies
These are gigantic red herrings! This is an unfortunate byproduct of Western democracies! However, they usually and typically reflect peaceful political compromises between often legitimate opposing demands etc..
However, this should not distract attention from the far more important issues:
- Government is not the solution! The best government ought to be limited and small. Prevent e.g. constant and expanding overregulation and so on!
- Balanced budget requirement (except in war or extremely extraordinary situations)! Extravagant lifelong career politicians find always an excuse to spend more. To live within one's means applies to government too!
- Constitutional caps on government debt! Servicing ever increasing government debt is a huge burden!
- We urgently need constitutional term limits for all (lifelong career) politicians. The term limits for the U.S. President were not enough! The caste of lifelong career politicians in Western democracies has been a curse and a huge problem. The looming gerontocracy is another good reason to finally implement term limits. Like the great example of George Washington (like Cincinnatus before him), a citizen ought to become a temporary politician when the urge and necessity arises.
25 years ago, ‘Saving Private Ryan’ presented a rare portrait of a Jewish soldier in film
What makes great American movies that stand the test of time like the works of Shakespeare? Here is an example! This is by far not the only reason why Saving Private Ryan is such a great movie.
Like the great The English Patient (1996, Distributed by Miramax Films (United States)) introduced the viewers to a Sikh soldier!
"According to the Jewish Virtual Library, 550,000 Jews served in the United States armed forces during World War II. There were 38,338 Jewish casualties, while 26,000 Jewish soldiers “received citations for valor and merit.”
But in high-profile TV and film, identifiably Jewish soldiers have been a rare sight.
One exception came 25 years ago this week, when Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” hit theaters. ..."
Rabbis, monks and bats: A religion scholar and a zoologist find a new way to map early Jewish-Christian relations
Recommendable!
"What did rabbis of late antiquity know about Christianity?
To find out, an Israeli religion scholar turned to an Israeli zoologist who studies bats.
Their strange-bedfellows paper on the topic uses network analysis — a mathematical field used to visualize data — to map the connections of the rabbis of the Talmud with Christians who were writing and teaching at the same time, including new insights into how the literature of Christian monks made its way into Jewish thought. ...
their approach, once it becomes widely used, could revolutionize the field of Jewish-Christian studies.
Their visualizations — picture color-coded dots representing rabbis and church elders connected by a spider web of relationships — are “a snapshot of a multi-faceted reality spread over many decades and thousands of kilometers in which Jews and Christians interact in various ways with one another,”...
The Babylonian Talmud, a vast anthology of rabbinic law and lore, was produced in present-day Iraq between the 3rd and 7th centuries CE. At the same time, Christianity was evolving from a heretical Jewish sect to a religion with growing influence across the waning Roman Empire. Like most scholars of rabbinic Judaism ... rejects a dated theory that Jews and Christians “parted ways” in the early centuries of the Common Era and had limited contact. But she also wanted proof beyond the painstaking scholarly method of comparing passages in Jewish and Christian texts. ...
In one example, they demonstrate the extent to which the “Sayings of the Desert Fathers” — a 5th-century collection of Christian monastic literary traditions — feature in multiple rabbinic passages. ...
The authors acknowledge that their paper is only a “proof of concept” [this is also my impression] and that traditional methods have long revealed the different types of literary interactions between the rabbis and Christians, from fierce anti-Christian polemics to shared theological concepts to the occasional parody. ..."
In one example, they demonstrate the extent to which the “Sayings of the Desert Fathers” — a 5th-century collection of Christian monastic literary traditions — feature in multiple rabbinic passages. ...
The authors acknowledge that their paper is only a “proof of concept” [this is also my impression] and that traditional methods have long revealed the different types of literary interactions between the rabbis and Christians, from fierce anti-Christian polemics to shared theological concepts to the occasional parody. ..."
From the abstract:
"The development of the two religions: Christianity and Judaism, is a topic of much debate. Whereas Judaism and Christianity are known as separate religions, in fact, these two religions developed side by side. While earlier researchers conceptualized a “parting-of-the-ways,” after which the two religions evolved independently, new studies reveal a multi-layered set of interactions throughout the first several centuries CE. Until recently, this question was explored with the limited source material and limited tools to analyze it. While working on a limited set of data, from a specific corpus, this project offers a new set of methodological tools, borrowed from computer sciences, that could ultimately serve for understanding the connections between Jews and Christians in late antiquity. We generated models of inter-religious Christian–Jewish networks that demonstrate the scope, nature, and advantages of network analysis for revealing the complex intertwined evolution of the two religions. The Jewish corpora chosen for this research are rabbinic writings from late antique Babylonia and Palestine. Christian texts range from the first through sixth centuries CE. Instead of representing interactions between people or places, as is typically done with social networks, we model literary interactions that, in our view, indicate historical connections between religious communities. This novel approach allows us to visually represent sets of temporal–spatial–contextual relationships, which evolved over hundreds of years, in single snapshots. It also reveals new insights about the relationships between the two communities. For example, we find that rabbinic sources exhibit a largely polemical approach towards earlier Christian traditions but a non-polemical attitude towards later ones. Moreover, network analysis suggests a temporal–spatial familiarity correlation. Namely, Jewish sources are familiar with early, eastern Christian sources and with both Eastern and Western Christian sources in later periods. The application of network analysis makes it possible to identify the most influential texts—that is, the key “nodes”—testifying to the importance of certain traditions for both religious communities. Finally, the network approach is a tool for pointing scholarly research in new directions, which only reveals itself as a result of this type of mapping. In other words, the network not only describes the known data, but it is itself a way to enlarge the network and lead us down new and exciting paths that are currently unknown."
Network analysis reveals insights about the interconnections of Judaism and Christianity in the first centuries CE (open access)
Fig. 1: Inter-religious literary networks.
Disease Scent Signatures Disclose What the Nose Knows
Recommendable!
I would also argue that the sense of smell has been underutilized in medical diagnosis for the past 130 years or so (e.g. 1895 discover of X rays). Other diagnostic techniques took over.
Despite the fact we have had very powerful chemical analysis techniques at our disposal to analyze air and so on for many decades, but they were not really applied to smell coming from breath or body odor etc.
I bet machine learning & AI will make a huge difference in the near future!
"... Scent is a powerful time portal, reviving long-forgotten memories in stark detail. The human brain begins to build a library of smells in infancy, which grows into adulthood. For people with hereditary hyperosmia—a rare, heightened ability to detect and discern scents—this smell repository can be vast and remarkably fine-tuned. Joy Milne, a retired nurse, patient advocate, researcher, and grandmother, discovered this superpower as a child.1 Milne’s grandmother—also a super sniffer—trained her to identify scent signatures, as her own mother had taught her. As a nurse, Milne acquired an extensive clinical scent library, recognizing patterns between disease symptoms and diagnoses. After her late husband’s Parkinson’s disease (PD) diagnosis, she realized that the musky smell he wore at the nape of his neck for over a decade was an early warning sign and that she could detect it in other PD patients. "
First-ever 'Fat Con' to hit Philadelphia: A convention to help fat people navigate 'this fatphobic world'. Really!
I am not sure there is anything to celebrate or to be feeling good about obesity especially when it is primarily caused by the lifestyle, behavior and the diet of the individual!
One should also not confuse naturally rotund good looking people with fat people!
The fatphilia of some of obese individuals should not be encouraged!
Everybody has some responsibility to live a healthy life as best as is possible whether it is smoking, drinking, eating, lack of exercise, dangerous hobbies etc.!
Gender, Klima, Queer: In Deutschland dominiert der grüne Zeitgeist
Die schreckliche SED Kanzlerin Merkel hat mächtig dazu beigetragen die CDU in eine Grüne Partei zu verwandeln! Wie konnte sich Helmut Kohl bloss so vergucken! Der angerichtete Schaden dauert an in der Bananenrepublik D.!
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