Juice ...

Lightning is a mind blower. Juice to the max courtesy Mother Nature. 

Seems Brazil has the record holder for length of bolt. Unreal.

On Halloween in 2018, the sky tore open above Brazil. A single gargantuan lightning bolt sliced through the atmosphere over the country's southern tip, stretching more than 440 miles (700 kilometers) from the Atlantic coast into the edge of Argentina.

According to a new analysis from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), this epic "megaflash" was the single longest lightning bolt ever recorded.

How they tracked it.

A satellite view of the monstrous megaflash that zapped over Brazil on October 31, 2018.A satellite view of the monstrous megaflash that zapped over Brazil on October 31, 2018. (Image credit: WMO)

Juice ... to the max indeed.

D Flies + 1 :)

Damsel Blue

The Perfect Predator

An Onyx Visitor

Patience is a virtue

Blue Darter/Portrait X

There's gold in them thar hills. :)

Extracting valuable metal from tech is hard as, in most cases, recycling has been dirty, expensive and all around nasty until now.

A new study led by Yeongran Hong of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology involves a chemical with an impressive affinity for gold. Subject some circuit boards to an acid treatment to release its materials and this stuff will gather up all the dissolved gold. And after it lets go of that gold, it’s ready to be used again.

The researchers’ gold-scrubber is based on an organic compound called a porphyrin. Linked together in a polymer, it possesses lots and lots of little pores that, energetically, want to host a metal atom. That’s the kind of structure chemists look for to help with recycling.

It's a start, right?

Planet Earth Report/The Daily Galaxy

The Daily Galaxy is a favorite destination of yours truly as the articles they post are informative, provocative and vetted. This blurb's a point to their Planet Earth Report, an interesting read without question. Love their pix, awesome to the max.

Enjoy.

Ineptness as art form

Outside of the disaster of Vietnam and the fallout from Shock & Awe, the worst strategic initiative the US has ever done, the US was still considered competent due to the strength of the dollar, the world's reserve currency, and the military might it projected to the world. With the ascent of The Donald and his disastrous handling of COVID-19, combined with the inability of the nation to build anything of consequence, thanks to the offshoring of virtually all manufacturing to China and significant others, all bets are now off, an emerging stark reality most distressing to a once-great nation known as America.

I thought of this as I watched the scenes of protest and violence over the killing of George Floyd spread across the United States and then here in Europe and beyond. The whole thing looked so ugly at first—so full of hate, and violence, and raw, undiluted prejudice against the protesters. The beauty of America seemed to have gone, the optimism and charm and easy informality that entrances so many of us from abroad.

At one level, the ugliness of the moment seems a trite observation to make. And yet it gets to the core of the complicated relationship the rest of the world has with America. In Tinker Tailor, Haydon at first attempts to justify his betrayal with a long political apologia, but, in the end, as he and le Carré’s hero, the master spy George Smiley, both know, the politics are just the shell. The real motivation lies underneath: the aesthetic, the instinct. Haydon—upper class, educated, cultured, European—just could not stand the sight of America. For Haydon and many others like him in the real world, this visceral loathing proved so great that it blinded them to the horrors of the Soviet Union, ones that went far beyond the aesthetic.

Le Carré’s reflection on the motivations of anti-Americanism—bound up, as they are, with his own ambivalent feelings about the United States—are as relevant today as they were in 1974, when the novel was first published. Where there was then Richard Nixon, there is now Donald Trump, a caricature of what the Haydons of this world already despise: brash, grasping, rich, and in charge. In the president and first lady, the burning cities and race divides, the police brutality and poverty, an image of America is beamed out, confirming the prejudices that much of the world already have—while also serving as a useful device to obscure its own injustices, hypocrisies, racism, and ugliness.

It's different now ...

Even in previous moments of American vulnerability, Washington reigned supreme. Whatever moral or strategic challenge it faced, there was a sense that its political vibrancy matched its economic and military might, that its system and democratic culture were so deeply rooted that it could always regenerate itself. It was as if the very idea of America mattered, an engine driving it on whatever other glitches existed under the hood. Now, something appears to be changing. America seems mired, its very ability to rebound in question. A new power has emerged on the world stage to challenge American supremacy—China—with a weapon the Soviet Union never possessed: mutually assured economic destruction.

Any questions?

A How To ...

It's a horserace in terms who knows more about us, Google or Facebook. I'll take Google as search, Gmail and quality of code + AI dwarfs FB in terms of capability to do the deed of data scarfing on us rubes.

Google collects a staggering amount of personal data about its users -- far more than you might even realize. The company records every search you perform and every YouTube video you watch. Whether you have an iPhone ($699 at Apple) or an Android, Google Maps logs everywhere you go, the route you use to get there and how long you stay -- even if you never open the app. When you look closer at everything Google knows about you, the results can be eye-opening, and maybe even a little unsettling. Thankfully, there's something you can do about it.

Starting in June, new Google accounts will automatically delete private data for you. But only after 18 months by default. And only if you're a brand-new Google user. That's great if you're just now deciding to create a Gmail address or you just got your first Android phone, but if you're among the 1.5 billion people on Gmail or the 2.5 billion people using Android already, your account is set to hold onto your private data forever unless you tell Google otherwise.

We're going to cut through all the clutter and show you how to access the private data Google has on you, as well as how to delete some or all of it. Then we're going to help you find the right balance between your privacy and the Google services you rely on by choosing settings that limit Google's access to your information without impairing your experience.

Read the CNET piece to learn how to claw back some of your data. I know I will. :)

The death of retail/rev II

BRT has waxed poetic about the slow-motion death of retail due to cost savings and efficiencies of doing business online. Now, with the advent of COVID-19, the acceleration of the death of retail goes prime time.

Microsoft announced today that it is closing all of its 83 Microsoft Store retail locations. The company says that will result in a charge of $450 million against its earnings for the second quarter of 2020. In an important way, what Microsoft is doing is a sign of what we will see in the future from a lot of retailers.

The shutdown has necessitated rapid learning by retailers about these trends and it looks like Microsoft, and many others, are listening. Consumers have figured out how to do all or nearly all their shopping online and retailers are figuring out how to do all or nearly all their selling online, too. Shopping by livestream, video appointments, chat and and other technologies have put convenience into consumers’ hands and facilitated sales while stores are closed. No one knows how much of these new habits will stick when the pandemic is over but it won’t be zero and stores have to adapt.

Yes indeed.

Eye-candy of a different kind

Eye candy of a different kind ...

The Domino Theory 2020

Nam, a war based on a lie, was sold by the government to America and the world using the domino theory because ... if South Vietnam fell to the Communists, the rest of Southeast Asia was sure to follow. In 2020, the domino theory regarding depression, financial chaos and civil unrest computes at levels Nam never did.

The pandemic lockdown will be blamed for the Greater Depression, but the lockdown only toppled all the dominoes that were already lined up. The lockdown would have been survivable if the economy hadn't been over-indebted, over-leveraged, burdened by insanely high costs, stripmined by greedy monopolies, dependent on stock market fraud, destabilized by extreme inequality, corrupted by political pay-to-play and addicted to speculation.

The apologists always blame depressions on central banks not printing money fast enough, while overlooking the real drivers: debt, high costs and dependence on speculative bubbles. As noted here many times, revenues and income can quickly slide lower, but debt must be serviced regardless of revenues and income.

Once debt payments dominate expenses, any wobble in revenues / income / cash flow triggers default.

Everyone who was barely keeping their head above water in making their debt payments is already in default or will soon be in default. Since the banks and shadow-banking lenders have gorged on the profits skimmed by loaning huge sums to marginal borrowers, now that these marginal borrowers are defaulting en masse the banks and lenders are about to be crushed by one wave of catastrophic losses after another.

Student loans--already in mass default. Credit cards--the wave is rolling in as we speak. Auto loans--looking like Waimea Bay on a big day. Mortgages--better not to look.

Corporate debt has exploded to unprecedented levels, and this is what will break the financial system. Zombie corporations are rushing to borrow billions of dollars (thanks to the Federal Reserve) but increasing their debt is only doing more of what created their fragility in the first place.

Forgot to add the "healthcare" bomb of 3.4 trillion and rising. That plus the MIC will finish the job of bankrupting America without question.

 Fragility rules ...

10 years ... and counting :)

10 years showing off the vagaries of Sol, courtesy NASA/Goddard. 

Time killer to the max, the sun is a restless entity without question. :)

As of June 2020, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory — SDO — has now been watching the Sun non-stop for over a full decade. From its orbit in space around the Earth, SDO has gathered 425 million high-resolution images of the Sun, amassing 20 million gigabytes of data over the past 10 years. This information has enabled countless new discoveries about the workings of our closest star and how it influences the solar system. 

Enjoy.

Who says you can't take it with you :)

The IRS sent stimulus checks to more than 1 million people who had died because it initially believed it did not have the legal authority to withhold them, according to an independent watchdog.

Who says you can't take it with you :)

Either Or ...

A possible unknown entity meets its maker. 

A distant object that could be smallest known black hole, or the largest known neutron star, has been spotted by the LIGO–Virgo gravitational-wave detectors. The 2.6 solar-mass object appears to have merged with a 23 solar-mass black hole, creating gravitational waves that were detected here on Earth in August 2019. Unlike a previously observed merger between two neutron stars, no electromagnetic signal was observed. At nearly 9:1, the ratio of masses of the two objects is the greatest ever detected by LIGO–Virgo.

End game.

“I think of Pac-Man eating a little dot,” quips Kalogera, adding “When the masses are highly asymmetric, the smaller neutron star can be eaten in one bite.”

Sounds about right. :)

They're everywhere ... :)

Black as Nite

Bringing home dinner

Blue is the color

Green Darter

Persistence is a virtue :)

50 years ago ...

A 50-year-old theory that began as speculation about how an alien civilization could use a black hole to generate energy has been experimentally verified for the first time in a Glasgow research lab.

In 1969, British physicist Roger Penrose suggested that energy could be generated by lowering an object into the black hole's ergosphere—the outer layer of the black hole's event horizon, where an object would have to move faster than the speed of light in order to remain still.

Two years later, another physicist named Yakov Zel'dovich suggested the theory could be tested with a more practical, earthbound experiment. He proposed that "twisted" light waves, hitting the surface of a rotating metal cylinder turning at just the right speed, would end up being reflected with additional energy extracted from the cylinder's rotation thanks to a quirk of the rotational doppler effect.

Now, researchers from the University of Glasgow's School of Physics and Astronomy have finally found a way to experimentally demonstrate the effect that Penrose and Zel'dovich proposed by twisting sound instead of light—a much lower frequency source, and thus much more practical to demonstrate in the lab.

All parties were and are right without exception. :)

A possible game-changer in terms of renewable energy may be at hand. :) 

ARM rules ...

This blurb's a bit wonky but worth a read as Apple's taking the ARM plunge and tech will never be the same. In one way, yours truly is channeling David's Brin's Earth, a brilliant SF novel written back in 1990 predicting what the world would be like in 2040. Yours truly recommends anyone trying to get a handle on what tech is doing to society, along with global warming waxing poetic, should read Earth as it's that good but ... 2040 is now 2020 as the envisioned tech is already here. :)

Microprocessor-based system on a chip

RISC ...  reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architectures for computer processors goes primetime and Apple's taking the lead by designing really fast 5nm chips using the original ARM concept as start point.

1. The ARM transition. Within two years, all of Apple’s new Macs will use Apple’s own silicon. Intel Macs will continue to be supported for the foreseeable future — and some new ones will even be released this year. The ARM transition presents a series of complicated decisions for both users and developers.

2. iOS apps running natively on the Mac. Apple spent surprisingly little time on this given what a monumental shift it could be for the Mac ecosystem. The iOS app ecosystem absolutely dwarfs the number of apps on the Mac. And, crucially, they don’t work like Mac apps.

Since we are still years away from ARM-based Macs becoming a majority of the current install base, some of this complexity won’t come into play for a while. iOS apps just won’t work on Intel Macs, after all.

But look four or five years out when there is a plurality of Macs running on Apple’s silicon. Say you’re a developer. Do you make a “native” Mac app that looks, acts, and feels like a traditional Mac app? Do you make a web or Electron app (Apple, after all is contributing to the Electron project to help optimize it for ARM)? Or do you simply see that you can make an iPad app and you’ll get it in the Mac App Store for free, no extra work required at all?

4. macOS Big Sur, which is also macOS 11. Apple characterized it as the biggest change since at least the OS X transition and therefore deserving of a new number. I don’t think that’s hyperbole. Particularly relevant for this discussion isn’t the ARM support but the redesign. Big Sur looks different. Big Sur looks very iPad-y.

Control Center on macOS Big Sur.
Tell me these buttons and sliders weren’t designed for your fingers.

The notifications look just like iPhone notifications. There’s a Control Center in the menu bar that is full of buttons and sliders hand-to-god look like they’re designed for touchscreens instead of mouse pointers. From the iconography to the size of window navigation bars, the whole thing feels like it was designed to make iPad and iPhone apps feel a little more at home.

Are macOS and iPadOS merging? “No.” macOS isn’t merging with iPadOS, it’s subsuming it — just like Chrome OS did with Android (well, hopefully better).

Engame ...

The OS = It is, as the old Steve Jobs saying goes, a truck. Trucks are designed to haul stuff.

Any questions?

Endgame ...

"We make the whole widget. - Steve Jobs

Kinda sums it up ... No. 3200

He's fatter now ...

Asymmetrical Warfare/rev 1

Cheap, lethal, AI-controlled, easily concealed and truly scary, every country on planet earth will have or do have their version of this tech, abled to be built by the millions. Eminently logical to a fault. The day of manned armies is coming to a close as is manned aircraft. Skynet anyone?

The manufacturer says that Kargu, a name that literally translates as "hawk" in Turkish, and which is also used to refer to small mountain watchtowers, "has been engineered specifically for anti-terror and asymmetric warfare scenarios." The 15-pound Kargu-2 can fly at up to 90 miles per hour and can remain airborne for up to 30 minutes. It has a line-of-sight control link with a range of around six miles.

The Kargu-2 can also fly higher, has a longer range, and has the ability to remain in a designated area for a longer period of time compared to the earlier models. It also has updated targeting capabilities and improvements to reduce its auditory signature, the latter of which helps reduce the chance that an opponent will spot the drone before it's too late.

Any questions?

Seeing for the first time ... with XRAY eyes

Credit: Jeremy Sanders, Hermann Brunner and the eSASS team (MPE); Eugene Churazov, Marat Gilfanov (on behalf of IKI)

Seeing for the first time ... with XRAY eyes depicts the universe in an all-new light without question.

A million X-ray sources revealing the nature of the hot universe – this is the impressive harvest of the first scan of the entire sky with the eROSITA telescope onboard SRG. “This all-sky image completely changes the way we look at the energetic universe,” says Peter Predehl, the Principal Investigator of eROSITA at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE). “We see such a wealth of detail - the beauty of the images is really stunning.”

The annotated version.

Had to show another. :)

The Shapley supercluster of galaxies is one of the most massive concentrations of galaxies in the local universe at a distance of about 650 million light-years (z~0.05). Each of the dozen extended structures is itself a cluster of galaxies, consisting of 100s to 1000s of individual galaxies, each denoting an intersection of filaments making up the large-scale structure in the Universe. 

XRAY eyes indeed.

The odds are ...

As tech gets better, more planets like earth will be found without issue ...

To be considered Earth-like, a planet must be similar in size to our planet, orbit a sun-like star called a G-type star and be a rocky or terrestrial planet. And, naturally, it needs to orbit in the habitable zone of its star. This is the distance where the planet is just the right temperature, not too hot or too cold, to host liquid water, and potentially life, on its surface.

But some of these unique characteristics also make them harder to find in the search for exoplanets because they're small and distant from their stars.

However, astronomers at the University of British Columbia have discovered that there may be as many as 6 billion Earth-like planets across our galaxy. That means that there could be one Earth-like planet for every five sun-like stars in the galaxy.

Seems scientists have one candidate in hand ...

Some 3,000 light years away from Earth, researchers believe they have found an Earth-size exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star.

The star is known as Kepler-160, and it was observed during NASA's exoplanet-hunting Kepler mission between 2009 and 2013. It's similar in size and temperature to our sun.

The planet candidate has been dubbed KOI-456.04. It is less than twice the size of Earth and receives a similar amount and type of light from its sun-like star.

The planet candidate is also orbiting at a distance that places it within the habitable zone of the star, where the surface temperature of the planet could support liquid water — and the potential for life. That's similar to where Earth sits in relation to the sun.

And it has an orbital period around the star of 378 days, similar to the Earth year it takes to complete an orbit around the sun.

The odds are ... looking pretty good are they not? :)

Juneteenth

Yours truly did not know what Juneteenth meant until the murder of Geroge Floyd, something that NEVER SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED. As seen by the document above, Lincoln, on September 22, 1862, proclaimed that slavery was to end on January 1, 1863 via his Emancipation Proclamation, an act that took guts and vision to right a long-standing wrong started when slavery was introduced into America in 1619. Now, in 2020, Juneteenth is being weaponized in ways not thought possible until now.

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was killed in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest for allegedly using a counterfeit bill.[1] Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, knelt on Floyd's neck for almost nine minutes while Floyd was handcuffed and lying face down, begging for his life and repeatedly saying "I can't breathe".[2][3] A second and third officer further restrained Floyd while a fourth prevented bystanders from intervening.

Most Americans have heard about the Emancipation Proclamation. But too few Americans know the whole story of African American freedom during and after the Civil War. It wasn’t at all like the sudden switching-on of a light. Even after the end of the war, it took time, and continued pressure, for emancipation to take hold throughout the still-fractious nation.

President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation banned slavery throughout the rebellious Confederacy as of Jan. 1, 1863, and the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution permanently banned slavery across the nation in early 1865. But even after the surrender of the Confederacy and the official end of the war, in early April 1865, Texas still refused to comply.

The hustle ... unacceptable behavior, perpetrated by a few bad people both black and white,
are given a pass.

The scenario is playing out in Atlanta now, where one Rayshard Brooks was shot while violently resisting arrest after passing out in a Wendy’s drive-thru and failing a sobriety test. Mr. Brooks had a long rap sheet for activities such as domestic battery and cruelty to children. He was on probation for a previous driving-under-the-influence conviction. A new one would have sent him to jail, knowledge of which, perhaps, prompted him to assault the two arresting officers and attempt to taser them— a saint in-the-making, for sure

Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard has charged officer Garrett Rolfe with felony murder, which carries the death penalty under Georgia law. The DA decided to forego an official inquiry by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The DA has made self-contradictory public statements about whether a taser is a deadly weapon or not. The charges may not stick. In which case, does Atlanta burn down next? The Atlanta police have engaged in job walk-offs. Maybe this will be America’s first test of how a major metro area works when there is no law enforcement.

Yet another question to be asked.

YouTube commentator Scott Adams, creator of the comic-strip Dilbert, raised an interesting question the other day about the re-energized push for “reparations” to black America and the difficulty of actually calculating it. What if it turned out to be something like a negative $11 trillion? That is, if you figure in the accrued costs to non-black America in the century and a half since the civil war. After the past several weeks, with epic looting and burning in many cities, that number may be looming larger in the national consciousness.

On the white side of things, Trump gives a pass to people just as bad in supporting Stephen Miller, his senior aid with a negative take on anyone who happens to be a minority.

It was a discovery that would end the careers of most political figures. But among calls for Miller’s resignation, a common theme emerged: a lack of surprise that the architect of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda endorsed white supremacist views.

“Stephen Miller has stoked bigotry, hate and division with his extreme political rhetoric and policies throughout his career,” a coalition of 55 civil rights groups wrote to the president this week. “The recent exposure of his deep-seated racism provides further proof that he is unfit to serve and should immediately leave his post.”

Senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller shaped the 2016 election coverage of the hard right-wing website Breitbart with material drawn from prominent white nationalists, Islamophobes, and far-right websites, according to a new investigative report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

Miller also railed against those wishing to remove Confederate monuments and flags from public display in the wake of Dylann Roof’s murderous 2015 attack on a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and praised America’s early 20th-century race-based, restrictionist immigration policies.

Emails from Miller to a former Breitbart writer, sent before and after he joined the Trump campaign, show Miller obsessively focused on injecting white nationalist-style talking points on race and crime, Confederate monuments, and Islam into the far-right website’s campaign coverage, the SPLC report says.

You can't handle the truth yet again.

Gravity ... is everywhere

Artistic impression of the background hum of gravitational waves permeating the Universe. Carl Knox, OzGrav/Swinburne University of Technology 

Gravitons, the force carriers of gravity, are everywhere and now, researchers are beginning to monitor subtle blackhole merger events previously unseen to better understand how the universe works at deep level.

Last year, the Advanced LIGO-VIRGO gravitational-wave detector network recorded data from 35 merging black holes and neutron stars. A great result—but what did they miss? According to Dr. Rory Smith from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Gravitational Wave Discovery at Monash University in Australia—it's likely there are another 2 million gravitational wave events from merging black holes, "a pair of merging black holes every 200 seconds and a pair of merging neutron stars every 15 seconds" that scientists are not picking up.

Dr. Smith and his colleagues, also at Monash University, have developed a method to detect the presence of these weak or "background" events that to date have gone unnoticed, without having to detect each one individually.The method—which is currently being test driven by the LIGO community—"means that we may be able to look more than 8 billion light years further than we are currently observing," Dr. Smith said.

"This will give us a snapshot of what the early universe looked like while providing insights into the evolution of the universe."

How cool is that?

Artistic impression of the background hum of gravitational waves permeating the Universe. Credit: Carl Knox, OzGrav/Swinburne University of Technology

Bigger than you think ... :)

Antares, a super red giant, is on the way out like it's well-known cousin Betelgeuse as both are running out of fuel, which, in a few thousand years, both will supernova and become black holes. Seems Antares is quite a bit bigger than previously thought after detailed research, done by ALMA using radio waves instead of light to see see the full extent of it's whispy atmosphere.

To whit:

An international team of astronomers has created the most detailed map yet of the atmosphere of the red supergiant star Antares. The unprecedented sensitivity and resolution of both the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) revealed the size and temperature of Antares’ atmosphere from just above the star’s surface, throughout its chromosphere, and all the way out to the wind region.

Red supergiant stars, like Antares and its more well-known cousin Betelgeuse, are huge, relatively cold stars at the end of their lifetime. They are on their way to run out of fuel, collapse, and become supernovae. Through their vast stellar winds, they launch heavy elements into space, thereby playing an important role in providing the essential building blocks for life in the universe. But it is a mystery how these enormous winds are launched. A detailed study of the atmosphere of Antares, the closest supergiant star to Earth, provides a crucial step towards an answer.

Radio images of Antares with ALMA and the VLA. ALMA observed Antares close to its surface in shorter wavelengths, and the longer wavelengths observed by the VLA revealed the star’s atmosphere further out. In the VLA image a huge wind is visible on the right, ejected from Antares and lit up by its smaller but hotter companion star Antares B.

How they did it.

The ALMA and VLA map of Antares is the most detailed radio map yet of any star, other than the Sun. ALMA observed Antares close to its surface (its optical photosphere) in shorter wavelengths, and the longer wavelengths observed by the VLA revealed the star’s atmosphere further out. As seen in visible light, Antares’ diameter is approximately 700 times larger than the Sun. But when ALMA and the VLA revealed its atmosphere in radio light, the supergiant turned out to be even more gigantic.

“The size of a star can vary dramatically depending on what wavelength of light it is observed with,” explained Eamon O’Gorman of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in Ireland and lead author of the study published in the June 16 edition of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. “The longer wavelengths of the VLA revealed the supergiant’s atmosphere out to nearly 12 times the star’s radius."s 

ALMA's cool interactive graphic app rules. :)

Appearance is realtiy ...

Buck Rogers, the legendary salesman for IBM, often said Appearance is reality in terms of first impressions and how they cannot be taken away when seeing something evoking either emotion or questions, which applies to Trump's seance at West Point where possible perceived physical weakness should give pause to his bid to be reelected on Nov 4, 2020.

What to call it—“Photo-oops”? “Glass of Watergate?”

Whatever the label, when the videos appeared on Saturday of President Trump shuffling down that ramp at West Point, a general walking attentively by his side, and using two hands to guide a water glass to his lips, the response on liberal Twitter threatened to deplete America’s Strategic Schadenfreude Reserve.

The same man who ran for office by mocking the height and stamina of his rivals, who celebrates dominance as the cardinal virtue of leadership, whose 2016 campaign compiled similar slips by Hillary Clinton into a dark TV commercial accusing her of lacking the strength to serve as president, found himself looking like a longtime resident of Shady Grove Home For the Weary.

The images led to some elaborate online speculations and diagnoses, and for Trump, the attention clearly struck a nerve. Why else would the president take to Twitter to offer the excuse that the ramp was “very slippery” (a claim that a New York Times story labeled highly dubious)?

He might well be revealing his own insecurities. But he’s also right about one important thing: just how damaging such a picture of weakness can be. It may sound trivial, and it’s often unfair, but when a modern president, or even a candidate, exhibits physical weakness, it comes with a political cost.

Appearence is reality indeed.

It doesn't help :)

Neither do I. :)

The Truth hurts ...

Watch this film, it will change how you view our place in the world, forever.

"The planet isn't going anywhere. We are." - George Carlin. 

The Truth hurts ...

You Can't Handle the Truth/rev II

"You can't handle the truth!"  the title of a BRT blurb written way back in 2008 listed many reasons why the US was in trouble 12 years ago. Seems today, the country's even worse off, particularly regarding the so-called press and the suppression of the 1st Amendment by the angry right and the enraged left who detests anything reminding them of Agent Orange and the people who support him. Having read Cotton's NYTimes Op-Ed piece titled Tom Cotton: Send In the Troops, I found it pretty reasonable. No bomb-throwing, no mention of war with Iran or rabid support of Trump but rather a rather nuanced history of how the military was used by previous presidents to quell violent protest as needs warrant.

U.S. Senator Tom Cotton calls for “an overwhelming show of force.”

Credit...Pool photo by Andrew Harnik

To whit ...

For instance, during the 1950s and 1960s, Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson called out the military to disperse mobs that prevented school desegregation or threatened innocent lives and property. This happened in my own state. Gov. Orval Faubus, a racist Democrat, mobilized our National Guard in 1957 to obstruct desegregation at Little Rock Central High School. President Eisenhower federalized the Guard and called in the 101st Airborne in response. The failure to do so, he said, “would be tantamount to acquiescence in anarchy.”

More recently, President George H.W. Bush ordered the Army’s Seventh Infantry and 1,500 Marines to protect Los Angeles during race riots in 1992. He acknowledged his disgust at Rodney King’s treatment — “what I saw made me sick” — but he knew deadly rioting would only multiply the victims, of all races and from all walks of life.

Sounds reasonable, right?

The Klown Show on both sides rules.

Our president, Donald Trump, is a clown who makes a great reality-show villain but is uniquely toolless as the leader of a superpower nation. Watching him try to think through two society-imperiling crises is like waiting for a gerbil to solve Fermat’s theorem. Calls to “dominate” marchers and ad-libbed speculations about Floyd’s “great day” looking down from heaven at Trump’s crisis management and new unemployment numbers (“only” 21 million out of work!) were pure gasoline at a tinderbox moment. The man seems determined to talk us into civil war.

But police violence, and Trump’s daily assaults on the presidential competence standard, are only part of the disaster. On the other side of the political aisle, among self-described liberals, we’re watching an intellectual revolution. It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.

The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.

They’ve conned organization after organization into empowering panels to search out thoughtcrime, and it’s established now that anything can be an offense, from a UCLA professor placed under investigation for reading Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” out loud to a data scientist fired* from a research firm for — get this — retweeting an academic study suggesting nonviolent protests may be more politically effective than violent ones!

Now, this madness is coming for journalism. 

Jessup's spot on, America Can't Handle the Truth!