The power of lies ...

The lizard lives in a new documentary. Can't wait to see this as Cohn was truly a lizard where truth was just a notion and lies, when properly used, was his gateway to power, especially when serving as chief counsel for Tail Gunner Joe (Mcarthy) , the eminently mediocre Wisconson senator who unleashed the anti-communism hysteria back in the 1950s that blacklisted and ruined the careers of innocent people almost too numerous to count.

Joe Mcarthy

Luckily, Cohn's "success" in demonizing people came to an end when Joseph Welch asked the famous question of Mcarthy & company ... 

To be continued.

Killing me slowly/rev XXX

Biodiversity, you know, having enough flora and fauna to keep earth and us alive, is rather important to sustain unless one is in pursuit of money, an activity proving to be most disquieting in light of the fact 29% of all the birds in America (and Europe) have disappeared since 1969 as articulated in an NYTimes piece Birds Are Vanishing From North America

Baltimore Oriole

Gary Mueller, Macaulay Library at Cornell Lab of Ornithology

The new study was not designed to determine why birds are disappearing, but the results — as well as earlier research — point to some likely culprits, Dr. Rosenberg said.

Grassland species have suffered the biggest declines by far, having lost 717 million birds. These birds have probably been decimated by modern agriculture and development.

“Every field that’s plowed under, and every wetland area that’s drained, you lose the birds in that area,” Dr. Rosenberg said.

In addition to habitat loss, pesticides may have taken a toll. A study published last week, for example, found that pesticides called neonicotinoids make it harder for birds to put on weight needed for migration, delaying their travel.

But insects are in trouble also.

An annual decline of 5.2% in flying insect biomass found in nature reserves in Germany
 – about 75% loss in 26 years.[1]

Several studies report what appears to be a substantial decline in insect populations. Some of the insects most affected include bees, butterflies, moths, beetles, dragonflies and damselflies. Anecdotal evidence has been offered of much greater apparent abundance of insects in the 20th century; recollections of the windscreen phenomenon are an example.[2]

Possible causes of the decline have been identified as habitat destruction, including intensive agriculture, the use of pesticides (particularly insecticides), urbanization, and industrialization; introduced species; and climate change.[3] Not all insect orders are affected in the same way; many groups are the subject of limited research, and comparative figures from earlier decades are often not available. The decline of the scientific field of entomology may also be contributing to errors in data analysis and overgeneralization from limited findings, resulting in exaggeration of the decline in insect populations.

In 2018 the German government initiated an "Action Programme for Insect Protection",[4][5] and in 2019 a group of 27 British entomologists and ecologists wrote an open letter calling on the research establishment in the UK "to enable intensive investigation of the real threat of ecological disruption caused by insect declines without delay".[6]

And we haven't even discussed the decline of life in the oceans due to pollution, climate change and overfishing.

Asymmetrical Warfare/rev XX

War and its blood relative, terror, is now a digital play where, if one has money and access to digitally-driven tools of great accuracy and range, mayhem and death will ensue at bargain base prices. To whit, the precise attack on the Saudi oilfields using tech from North Korea, China and Iran.

Regardless of their origin, when I first saw the damage, I felt like drones were potentially part of the attack, but likely not the only weapons employed. In fact, it looked a lot like a cruise missile strike with some of those weapons being equipped with shaped charges for penetrating fortified structures and others being equipped with general high explosives warheads for greater effects against unfortified structures. Whoever planned the strike had a very good understanding of the facilities targeted and what their components do, as well as their vulnerabilities and propensity for secondary effects. In other words, it wasn't just showering a target area with explosive-laden drones or even picking some important-looking structures targeting those. The targeting was systemic in nature and high in quality. 

That brings us to my next point, one you probably also thought to yourself when this happened—this was an unprecedented attack. Welcome to the murky world of unmanned warfare that I have been warning about for many years. I almost take this issue personally because people use to blow it off or even snicker at it. Now all the predictions I wish were wrong are coming true and at an alarming pace. 

The Department of Defense was ridiculously asleep at the wheel regarding this threat and is now scrambling to play catchup. Anyone who says differently is straight-up lying. It's well established what non-state actors can already do with relatively low-end unmanned aircraft technology—Houthi rebels alone have been using suicide drones for two and a half years—just imagine what a peer state will be able to do in the very near future. Instead of a mass of individual suicide drones layered in with other weapons, like cruise missiles, attacking a target simultaneously, imagine a swarm that is fully networked and works cooperatively to best achieve their mission goals, including jamming or killing air defenses in order for the swarm to make it to its final destination. America's adversaries are all too aware of this game-changing potential and the lack of defenses to counter it in any robust manner.

On the political end, the first question to ask is, why is the US potentially getting involved in a self-inflicted wound by MBS when attacking Yemen, thus creating the Saudi version of Vietnam, something eloquently articulated by Ron Paul in a piece titled. Will Trump Take Neocon Bait and Attack Iran Over Saudi Strike?

The recent attacks on Saudi oil facilities by Yemeni Houthi forces demonstrate once again that an aggressive foreign policy often brings unintended consequences and can result in blowback. In 2015 Saudi Arabia attacked its neighbor, Yemen, because a coup in that country ousted the Saudi-backed dictator. Four years later Yemen is in ruins, with nearly 100,000 Yemenis killed and millions more facing death by starvation. It has been rightly called the worst humanitarian catastrophe on the planet.

But rich and powerful Saudi Arabia did not defeat Yemen. In fact, the Saudis last month asked the Trump Administration to help facilitate talks with the Houthis in hopes that the war, which has cost Saudi Arabia tens of billions of dollars, could finally end without Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman losing too much face. Washington admitted earlier this month that those talks had begun.

The surprise Houthi attack on Saturday disrupted half of Saudi Arabia’s oil and gas production and shocked Washington. Predictably, however, the neocons are using the attack to call for war with Iran!

What is remarkable is that all of Washington’s warmongers are ready for war over what is actually a retaliatory strike by a country that is the victim of Saudi aggression, not the aggressor itself. Yemen did not attack Saudi Arabia in 2015. It was the other way around. If you start a war and the other country fights back, you should not be entitled to complain about how unfair the whole thing is.

Last but not least, the US Patriot Missles were useless against the drones and cruise missiles, something Putin alluded to when suggesting to SA that maybe buying the S-400 might be the better way to go.

The S-400 Triumf, is an advanced air and missile defence system intended to engage targets at ranges of up to 400 km, in an intensive jamming environment, says James Bosbotinis, a UK-based specialist in maritime and air force developments. 

Not only is it highly advanced, but it costs a fraction of its counterparts. The S-400 system costs around $500 million, in comparison to the Patriot Pac-2 which comes in at around $1 billion. This is one of the major reasons why the S-400 has garnered interest all over the world. 

It's a better deal is it not?

Plan A - Wargames 2019

Several months ago, researchers from Rutgers University, the University of Colorado Boulder, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research ran a simulation to see what a nuclear war between the US and Russia would do, and the findings were not pretty: Such a war would plunge the planet into a nuclear winter, with clouds of soot and smoke covering the planet. The study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, found that the nuclear detonations would inject about 147 million tons of soot into the atmosphere. That soot would then spread around the stratosphere, blanketing the Earth in darkness.

Not only would explosions, fires, and radiation exposure kill millions in targeted cities, but the resulting nuclear winter – which could last many years- would drastically alter the Earth’s climate. The growing season would be slashed by nearly 90 percent in some areas, and death by famine would threaten nearly all of the Earth’s 7.7 billion people.

Reassuring without question is it not and ... both countries are toast.

Last but not least, the 1984 WG original tells us not to play, right?

Late Summer 2019

Persistence

Success

A path less traveled. :)

Blue Darter

Fellow travelers of the orange kind

Red Darter

Red Darter II

Moving toward Dusk

Tough Viceroy

Tough DF

Taking a bow

Io's shadow ...

Don't panic, this isn't a massive hole on Jupiter.

All is well on our largest neighbor; NASA's Juno spacecraft just managed to spot the shadow of Jupiter's moon, Io, passing over its marbled clouds.

The Juno mission made its 22nd close skim over the gas giant around Sept. 11, when the celestial geometry was just right for Io to slip between the sun and the planet during one of its rapid-fire circuits of Jupiter. (The moon takes just 1.77 days to orbit the planet.)

This is an imperfect experiment to create a 360˚ horizon-to-horizon view over Jupiter during Juno's Perijove 22 flyover of Io's shadow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX1SYot-1vc

Cool without question.

Burning Man 2019

Short clip on Burning Man2019. The music works without question. So does the BMPCC6K camera. :)

Data as prime driver ...

Origami fascinates as it's mathematical to the max. Seems a brilliant VR game designer, Eric Chahi, has taken this notion to the max with his game titled Paper Beast where data becomes prime driver and everything's alive ... to the max.

Chahi knew this could make for an innovative and intriguing thematic base for a game, but he was unsure of how to realize his vision and connect the dots. From the first prototype, he was set on juxtaposing paper with big data and creating a world teeming with unique flora and fauna. “It’s not realistic, but there’s a connection to data,” he tells me. “The first use of paper is to write on it, which strongly connects it to data, [because] it’s a connection to information. So why not create a universe born out of big data?”

Wish this game was on the web. Elegant and thought-provoking comes to mind here without question.

Mathematical indeed.

B&W + 2 ...

Game on ...

Channeling Saturn

D Lion et al

Gradient

Harbor Stage Theatre

Peony + 1

Queen Anne's Lace 

A merger of a different kind ...

This simulation shows how a black hole merger would appear to our eyes if we could somehow travel in a spaceship for a closer look. It was created by solving equations from Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity using LIGO data from the event called GW150914. Credit: SXS, the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) project

Seems Einstein was right yet again as a merger of a different kind, i.e. two black holes combining into one, generates a chirp when the two becomes one.

To whit.

If Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity holds true, then a black hole, born from the cosmically quaking collisions of two massive black holes, should itself "ring" in the aftermath, producing gravitational waves much like a struck bell reverbates sound waves. Einstein predicted that the particular pitch and decay of these gravitational waves should be a direct signature of the newly formed black hole's mass and spin.

Now, physicists from MIT and elsewhere have "heard" the ringing of an infant black hole for the first time, and found that the pattern of this ringing does, in fact, predict the black hole's mass and spin—more evidence that Einstein was right all along.