On Little Cat Feet

Fog

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Carl Sandburg

Being There

Every time I think of Reagan, I think of Chance the Gardener of Being There as both were perceived by power brokers and politicos alike to be great communicators even though the notion of innate gravitas was totally absent in both individuals by every stretch of the imagination.

In all fields of public affairs—from diplomacy to the economy—the president stunned Washington policymakers by how little basic information he commanded. His mind, said the well-disposed Peggy Noonan, was “barren terrain.” Speaking of one far-ranging discussion on the MX missile, the Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, an authority on national defense, reported, “Reagan’s only contribution throughout the entire hour and a half was to interrupt somewhere at midpoint to tell us he’d watched a movie the night before, and he gave us the plot from War Games.” The president “cut ribbons and made speeches. He did these things beautifully,” Congressman Jim Wright of Texas acknowledged. “But he never knew frijoles from pralines about the substantive facts of issues.” Some thought him to be not only ignorant but, in the word of a former CIA director, “stupid.” Clark Clifford called the president an “amiable dunce,” and the usually restrained columnist David Broder wrote, “The task of watering the arid desert between Reagan’s ears is a challenging one for his aides.”

I like to watch.

Repeated lines, initially referring simply to his lifelong habit of watching television.

This is just like television, only you can see much further.

Riding in a car for the first time.

That was a very small room.

Stepping out of an elevator.  

[while watching Chance on television] It's for sure a white man's world in America. Look here: I raised that boy since he was the size of a piss-ant. And I'll say right now, he never learned to read and write. No, sir. Had no brains at all. Was stuffed with rice pudding between th' ears. Shortchanged by the Lord, and dumb as a jackass. Look at him now! Yes, sir, all you've gotta be is white in America, to get whatever you want. Gobbledy-gook!

Being There - Jerzy Kosinski

Sound familiar? - St. Reagan, a man for all seasons. :)

Can I Use ...?

Can I Use...? is a terrific site showing what devices can use what tech on the net. Not bad, not bad at all.

Bomb Cyclone

Just saw the news of a 'Bomb Cyclone', (created by two weather cells colliding with a 24+ millibar drop in air pressure in less than 24 hrs) but this one's different as said storm, heading for the UK, will generate temperatures 70 degrees above normal at the North Pole.

It’s as if a bomb went off. And, in fact, it did. The exploding storm acts a remarkably efficient heat engine, drawing warm air from the tropics to the top of the Earth.

The GFS model projects the temperature at the North Pole to reach near freezing or 32 degrees early Wednesday. Consider the average winter temperature there is around 40 degrees below zero. If the temperature rises to freezing, it would signify a departure from normal of over 70 degrees.

A bomb has gone off but it's only the beginning. When will the so called Repugs actually acknowledge the fact something's rather remiss. Just pray to god the east coast doesn't get a strong La Niña to amp up hurricane season to the max with assistance to rising ocean/air temperatures courtesy the continued burning of fossil fuels to the nth degree.

Map showing projected mild temperatures at the North Pole
(north of Greenland) on 30 December 2015.

When looking at this latest anomalous instance of GW, the WTF moniker applies as per a quote given to me by a close friend of mine who has far more knowledge about all things relating to climate than yours truly: "These idiots in Washington have no idea what's coming but I do and it's scary, scary as hell, particularly for future generations who will reap the whirlwind of a man-made catastrophe the likes of which we have never seen."

Yet another take on Xmas

Nicholas Was from 39 degrees north on Vimeo.

Makes one think about the meaning of Christmas without question.

Universality writ large :)

BRT has often waxed poetic about phase transitions where two or more conditions give rise to profound changes in a given environment like that of ice covering a pond when the temperature hits 32 degrees because the day before the pond is completely covered, 50% of the pond's surface remains ice free, which mirrors, in statistical fashion, fluctuations in the stock market, interaction of predator/prey populations in a pond or growth patterns of trees in a tropical forest located next to the Amazon. To whit...

Systems of many interacting components — be they species, integers or subatomic particles — kept producing the same statistical curve, which had become known as the Tracy-Widom distribution. This puzzling curve seemed to be the complex cousin of the familiar bell curve, or Gaussian distribution, which represents the natural variation of independent random variables like the heights of students in a classroom or their test scores. Like the Gaussian, the Tracy-Widom distribution exhibits “universality,” a mysterious phenomenon in which diverse microscopic effects give rise to the same collective behavior. “The surprise is it’s as universal as it is,” said Tracy, a professor at the University of California, Davis.

When uncovered, universal laws like the Tracy-Widom distribution enable researchers to accurately model complex systems whose inner workings they know little about, like financial markets, exotic phases of matter or the Internet.

“It’s not obvious that you could have a deep understanding of a very complicated system using a simple model with just a few ingredients,” said Grégory Schehr, a statistical physicist who works with Majumdar at Paris-Sud. “Universality is the reason why theoretical physics is so successful.”

Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine

Whereas “uncorrelated” random variables such as test scores splay out into the bell-shaped Gaussian distribution, interacting species, financial stocks and other “correlated” variables give rise to a more complicated statistical curve. Steeper on the left than the right, the curve has a shape that depends on N, the number of variables.

Nature is inherently modular in how she expresses herself to us rubes. Pretty awesome don't you think? :)

Merry Xmas

Merry Xmas to all from BRT. :)

Peccadillo yet not ...

This Dilbert's wonderfully nonsensical verbiage is not as powerful as schlonged but it will do in terms of mimicing all the ignored and ignorant bloviating about all things related to governance, foreign policy and science the other GOP candidates are spouting off while Trump get all the free airtime one could possibly want, based on a Yiddish term that fits in perfectly with George Carlin's famous seven words one cannot utter on tv but can be as The Donald well knows.

H20+

A short clip with emphasis on water is the theme of this video. The oil on water part was shot on town land trust property so chances are, it's either a natural phenomenon or a small spill from long ago. Enjoy.

Iconic Image II

The Pale Blue Dot in high res seen from the limb of the moon. Stellar says it all but NASA says it better then yours truly can. :)

The Earth straddling the limb of the Moon, as seen from above Compton crater. Center of the Earth in this view is 4.04°N, 12.44°W, just off the coast of Liberia. The large tan area in the upper right is the Sahara desert, and just beyond is Saudia Arabia. The Atlantic and Pacific coasts of South America are visible to the left. WAC E1199291151C (Earth only), NAC M1199291564LR (Earth and Moon); sequence start time 12 October 2015 12:18:17.384 UTC [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

SHARETWEETredditSUBMITEMAIL

Here's the original :)

Carl Segan would be proud. :)

George Orwell was right

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. - George Orwell

Sound familiar? NONE of the bozos ranting at the last Republican debate have ever served in the military yet they talk tough and act as if they know what theyy're doing. The only one talking sense was Rand Paul in stating just how important it is to use discretion and intelligence when discussing the effective ways of countering an enemy as virulent and intelligent as that of ISIS, an entity the US created when "W" stupidly invaded Iraq based on a lie whereupon he DID NOT HIRE THE PEOPLE YOU CONQUER, the policy the Brits used to great advantage when they had an empire back in the day where the sun never sets.

From this "debate", where skin in the game does NOT apply to the participants in question, the reaction of the military, who do, is most profound and thoughtful, something these fools did not anticipate when trying to show America that they are the ones who should be invested with power that can end civilization with a touch of a button.

To whit:

The U.S. military still is rebuilding after a decade of repeated deployments and overworn equipment. And the prospect of endless quasi-war thousands of miles away—even if it’s fought mostly by drones and elite special operations forces—is not tenable, they argue. These commanders are too focused on recovering from the last war to hear politicans talk about the prospect of a future one.

And so in the course of conversation, plots of a different kind emerge—contingencies in case Trump really is elected to the White House.

“This is not the country I joined to defend.”

“I am turning in my papers.”

“I’m moving to a farm.”

None of the candidates’ proposals appeared to gain traction at the building Wednesday.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz announced that he wanted a bombing campaign on places like Raqqa, Syria—ISIS’s capital—that was both indiscriminate—he used the term “carpet bombing”—and ultra-precise.

“You would carpet bomb where ISIS is, not a city, but the location of the troops. You use air power directed—and you have embedded special forces to direction the air power. But the object isn’t to level a city. The object is to kill the ISIS terrorists,” Cruz said.

“Did you hear what Cruz said? How the hell do we do prick point carpet bombing?” asked one service member Wednesday to a colleague.

“Like we can just level a city,” responded another.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said he would shoot down Russian jets flying in a no-fly zone that would be in place over Syria under his presidency.

“I remember the no-fly zone over Iraq [during the 1990s]. That was so expensive,” one Air Force officer responded about the proposal.

Neurosurgeon Ben Carson suggested that flattening ISIS-controlled cities would be “merciful,” even if it killed civilians as it would eliminate the threat.

“How does brain surgery prepare you to be president?” one Marine asked.

And Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said “we need to destroy ISIS in the caliphate” by investing in the military, but didn’t spell out how that would happen.

Still another soldier said, “Good luck with that.”

Last but not least, yours truly served so listening to the Repugs spouting off, without knowledge of all things relating to the military, makes me rather skeptical as to the overall competency of this sorry crew when it comes to leading a nation that's in serious trouble in more ways that can be articulated in a post such as this.

End of Rant.

The Stellarator - Fusion Power with a Twist

Getting sustained fusion to work has been fraught with frustration, expense and failure, something that maybe finally coming to an end thanks to a bizarre design that just may work. 

Stellarators face the same challenge as all fusion devices: They must heat and hold on to a gas at more than 100 million degrees Celsius—seven times the temperature of the sun’s core. Such heat strips electrons from atoms, leaving a plasma of electrons and ions, and it makes the ions travel fast enough to overcome their mutual repulsion and fuse. But it also makes the gas impossible to contain in a normal vessel.

Instead, it is held in a magnetic cage. A current-carrying wire wound around a tube creates a straight magnetic field down the center of the tube that draws the plasma away from the walls. To keep particles from escaping at the ends, many early fusion researchers bent the tube into a doughnut-shaped ring, or torus, creating an endless track.

But tokamaks have serious drawbacks. A transformer can drive a current in the plasma only in short pulses that would not suit a commercial fusion reactor. Current in the plasma can also falter unexpectedly, resulting in “disruptions”: sudden losses of plasma confinement that can unleash magnetic forces powerful enough to damage the reactor. Such problems plague even up-and-coming designs such as the spherical tokamak (Science, 22 May, p. 854).

Stellarators, however, are immune. Their fields come entirely from external coils, which don’t need to be pulsed, and there is no plasma current to suffer disruptions. Those two factors have kept some teams pursuing the concept.

Seen below is the stellarator. Gotta love the insane design set made possible only by visionary use of supercomputers and manufacturing of precision hardware that borders on the supernatural. :)

Addendum: It works.

But the team reported earlier today that using just 2 megawatts of microwave radiation, they were able to heat hydrogen gas to 80 million degrees for a quarter of a second. This might not sound like much, but again, it’s a proof of concept, and the team says they’re conceivably able to scale things up to heat the hydrogen gas to that 100 million degree benchmark, and also sustain the resulting plasma for much longer.

12/21/15

STARTING DECEMBER 21, the FAA wants you to register your drone. If it weighs more than 0.55 pounds and less than 55 pounds, you’re legally required to tell the country about it. (Which, yes, is all insane given that you don’t have to do the same for a gun.) The FAA says this is being done in the name of safety, and that consumers have until February 19 to register. The system, thankfully, is simple: You can do it all online starting December 21, here. And hey, if you get it all taken care of before January 20, 2016, the FAA will waive the $5 registration fee! (Yes, that’s right, there’s a $5 registration fee.)

Makes a lot of sense doesn't it. Kinda like our foreign policy where ready, fire, aim kinda says it all if you ask me.

https://www.faa.gov/uas/registration/ 

A Newport Visit

A short visit to Newport with emphasis on Trinity Church, a N.E. treasure, along with winter light over the Atlantic. Enjoy.

Yet another TL but ... :)

Yet another TL but this one's pretty cool without question. I guess this is the pre-xmas eye candy show from BRT as seen by the last few posts from the blog. Enjoy. :)

Orange & Black

Had to add one more as orange and black let in a little more color into the wonder of nature. Enjoy.

Red & Black

The grandeur of nature, when distilled down to limited color sets like red & black with a touch of yellow, gives one pause as to just how powerful reality truly is. enjoy. :)

Solitude

Solitude is a good thing, particularly when one can get away from the never ending noise of NOOZE. :)

George Carlin - "Jesus is coming, look busy."

BRT has quoted the great GC many times as Carlin made you laugh and cry at the same time while describing the human condition that was prescient to a fault. To that end, here is a small snipped of 50 quotes of this modern day philosopher courtesy The Thought Catalog.

1. The very existence of flamethrowers proves that sometime, somewhere, someone said to themselves, “You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.”
2. By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.
3. And what can we do to silence these Christian athletes who thank Jesus whenever they win, never mention his name when they lose? Not a word. You never hear them say “Jesus made me drop the ball.” “The good lord tripped me up behind the line of scrimmage.” According to these guys Jesus is undefeated, meanwhile these assholes are in last place. Must be another one of those “miracles.”
4. The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse: You cannot post “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” and “Thou shalt not lie” in a building full of lawyers, judges, and politicians. It creates a hostile work environment.
5. How can [God] be perfect? Everything He ever makes dies.”
6. Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky, who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer and burn and scream until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you and He needs money.

Any questions? :)

PR

Century of the Self, a ground breaking British Documentary, is a very long video of which seeing just short snippets of same, tells volumes about how PR, aka Propaganda, when skillfully applied, generates public consent in all things related to war, commerce and politics using sophisticated techniques espoused by men such as Gustave Le Bon, Sigmund Freud and Edward Bernnays, among significant others.

Propaganda - Edward Bernays

CHAPTER I
ORGANIZING CHAOS 

      THE conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. 

      We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. 

      Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet. 

      They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world. 

Sounds familiar doesn't it as we see the continual push for never ending war beginning with  Making the world "Safe for Democracy", the slogan Bernays created for Woodrow Wilson when he declared war with Germany on April 2, 1917.

Gustave Le Bon

Sigmund Freud

Edward Bernays

Factoid: Bernays was Freud's Nephew

Click Rule From the Shadows to get more info on this most fascinating of subjects.

Did you know? - rev 2 :)

Dinosaur Comics is rapidly becoming a favorite @ BRT with it's whimsical take on the world. 

Not a good thing

Back in 2008, BRT talked about how dams kill rivers. Here's a video showing why this is so.

Addendum: The State of the World's Rivers enables us rubes to check out the health of the 50 great river basins of planet earth. Pretty stellar without question.

Adaptation

The movie's not bad either.

Our $$ @ Work - Rev 2

BRT posted a blurb about the DOD spending a cool 43 mil on a gas station in Afghanistan. Adding fuel to the fire is news about 150 mil spend on luxurious accomodations to make sure the well connected live large on our money conducting a war that cannot be won. Awesome don't you think? 

The $150 million was spent on world-class accommodations for contractors, visitors, and between 5 and 10 Task Force staff. Almost all of the money was awarded to three contractors—Triple Canopy ($57 million), Defense Group Incorporated ($51 million), and Muscogee Nation Business Enterprise ($40 million)—to provide an array of creature comforts. 

Triple Canopy, for example, stocked the villas with queen-sized beds, flat screen TVs, and DVD players.

So far, DoD has ignored all of SIGAR’s inquiries about the Task Force, which shut down in March. SIGAR currently has several ongoing criminal investigations related to the Task Force.

Gotta love it, right?

New Horizons - It's even better

This video shows how exquisite tech not only delights but enlightens. Awesome! :)

Simply spectacular says it all but here's another reason why this is so.

It will take at least a year for all the images and data gathered during the July flyby to be sent back to Earth. The data is stored on two onboard, solid-state, 8 gigabyte memory banks. The spacecraft’s main processor compresses, reformats, sorts and stored the data on a recorder, similar to a flash memory card for a digital camera.

One issue for why it is taking so long to get all the data returned is simply the time it takes to get data from New Horizons as it speeds even farther away from Earth, past the Pluto system. Even moving at light speed, the radio signals from New Horizons containing data need more than 4 ½ hours to cover the 4 billion km (3 billion miles) to reach Earth.

In the past 40 years ...

BRT has talked about environmental degradation quite often as a result of pollution and overshoot, now comes a frightening scenario regarding food production vis a vis our continued assault on planet earth driven, in part, by GW, fossil fuel use and habitat destruction in the form of soil erosion to the max.

A new study found that the world has lost a third of its food-producing land in the last four decades. Erosion and pollution are two of the biggest reasons that we’re losing fertile soil, and it’s happening at a rate far faster than the natural processes that replace diminished soil. Researchers are taking this message to world leaders this week in Paris, in an effort to command environmental policies that call for agricultural practices that would slow the land loss.

The study comes from the University of Sheffield’s Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures, where researchers found that the losses had been “catastrophic” and that projected future land loss might necessitate major changes in agriculture. The rate of soil degradation is the most troubling aspect of the problem, since soil is being eroded up to 100 times faster than the rate at which it would normally be replenished, which takes about 500 years for 2.5cm of top soil.

Click here to download the Sheffield study that shows how man can change this path to something sustainable before it's too late. Click here to go to the Sheffield site. You will not be disappointed.

On the love of birches

Old birches, nearing the end of life, are magical with bark so delicate, resembling crumpled up book endpapers that long ago, resided on the finest books made long before the advent of the computer. 

As often stated in BRT, nature never disappoints.

Had to add another. :)

334/351

351 mass shootings in 334 days, not bad America, not bad with 29 days to go in good old 2015. 

Let's hear what fearless leader Wayne LaPierre has to say about this.

Eye Candy never disappoints. :)

EUMESTAT's amazing pix of the Ross Ice Shelf is eye candy to the max. :)

It never happened

A forgotten bit of history is no longer forgotten, thanks to an insightful article in Salon describing how the proposed UN 1948 Palestine partition never happened. 

68 years ago yesterday, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine, with General Assembly Resolution 181. The deal was a bad one as Palestinians were 2/3rds of the population but offered 43% of land.

It get better

Seen above is the U.N.’s map of the proposed partition. The blue areas comprising roughly 57 percent of the land were to be allotted to Jews; orange areas were to be allotted to Palestinians. Jerusalem was to be left under the governance of the international community, because of its historical and religious importance for numerous religions and cultures.

The Partition Plan was never implemented, however. The very next day after it was voted on, the 1947-1948 war broke out.

In this war, Zionist militias systematically ethnically cleansed large portions of historic Palestine, sacking hundreds of Palestinian villages and expelling more than 750,000 people — around two-thirds of the indigenous Arab population. Prominent Israeli historian Ilan Pappé notes that, in Israel’s Plan Dalet (also known simply as Plan D), “veteran Zionist leaders” created “a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.” They dispatched military orders in March 1948, Pappé explains:

“The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be employed to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning.”

Plan D “spelled it out clearly and unambiguously: the Palestinians had to go,” writes Pappé. “The aim of the plan was in fact the destruction of both the rural and urban areas of Palestine,” he adds, and it “contain[ed] a repertoire of cleansing methods that one by one fit the means the U.N. describes in its definition of ethnic cleansing.”

Seems the cleansing continues ever onward as Israel continues to build illegal settlements (300+ and counting) while pushing out more Palestinians on land that is unquestionably theirs. 

What's even more interesting is this.

When they founded the country, Israel’s leaders purposefully did not declare official borders; they sought to continue expanding. (They did not write an official constitution either. Still today, the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, admits that “Israel has no written constitution in the formal sense.”

Question, what are the odds this story shows up on mainline NOOZE in any way, shape or fashion given how biased the US is regarding this tragic state of affairs. For this rube, < then 0 sounds like a plan to me.

Collapse 101

How Much comes through again with its take on economic collapses beginning way back when. The elements of collapse is multi faceted as seen by the HM listing seen below. Check this out as this may be where the world's heading given just how much debt the world has incurred over the past 50 years, not to mention the spectre of climate change, environmental degradation and resource/population overshoot as additional prime drives of potentially making this a grim reality to civilization in its entirety as we move further into the 21st century.

• Fiscal: inability of the government to finance its regular activities 
•  Credit: reduction in the general availability and accessibility of loans 
•  Financial: value of financial institutions or assets suddenly drop 
• Currency: doubt as to whether a country’s central bank has enough reserves to maintain the country’s fixed exchange rate 
• Economic: country experiences sudden downturn brought on by a financial crisis 
• Hyperinflation: extremely rapid period of inflation, usually caused by fast printing of money 
• Supply Side Shock: unexpected event that changes supply of product, resulting in a sudden change in price 
• Speculative Bubble: spike in asset value with a particular industry caused by exaggerated expectations of future growth 
•  Stock Market Crash: sudden decline of stock prices across a large part of the market

This not only applies ...

When you think about it, this Jesus & Mo 'toon' not only applies to religion but also to freedom of speech as freedom of speech, in Salman Rushdie's words, begins with a question and ends with the perfect answer, What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. as FOS is the one indispensable concept that's being suppressed not only in universities in the US but also in countries all over the world, something most disquieting to say the least.

Enceladus

Mysterious Enceladus, a tiny moon of Saturn, may harbor life in a way
not thought possible, until now. Science, like rust, never sleeps.  :)