But there was another “incident” during the interview that CNN remarked on that truly caused a meltdown on the part of the left. At the beginning of the interview, Sinema’s ringtone on her phone went off. “Her ringtone is the refrain from a song in the musical ‘Hamilton’ that includes the lyrics “you don’t have the votes,” CNN noted. “It’s been her ringtone since 2015, the year the musical was originally released, her spokesman told CNN.” That caused the folks on the left to melt down, declaring their hate for her, while people on the right declared it a master troll. //

Dan McLaughlin
@baseballcrank
Troll level: 1790.

To acheive full thrust of the first stage F-1 engines of the Saturn V only liquid oxygen should be pumped into the combustion chambers. A mix of gaseous and liquid oxygen would reduce the desired mass flow of oxygen to the engines and may damage or even destroy the oxygen pumps. A reduced mass flow of oxygen would reduce thrust and endanger a successful liftoff.

But the LOX lines through the fuel tank had a bad ratio of surface to volume, much worse than the large oxygen tank. The heat flow to the LOX lines would cause the LOX inside to boil heavily.

By bubbling of cold gaseous helium through the LOX lines and tank the LOX was cooled before launch below the boiling temperature. The gaseous helium and oxygen at the top of the tank are exhausted through umbilicals and the evaporated LOX is replaced by toping of more LOX from the large tanks at the launch pad.

Just before ignition the helium bubbling is finished and the very cold LOX within the lines and tank does not boil as long as its temperature is below the boiling point. So the oxygen pumps and combustion chambers could be fed with pure liquid oxygen free from bubbles.

At a pressure of 1 bar, the temperature of liquid boiling oxygen stabilizes at 90 K. For sub-cooling of LOX, the temperature should be lower. It is possible to cool LOX by forced evaporation by a pressure lower than 1 bar. But the LOX tank in a rocket should be as light as possible. If the pressure inside the tank is substantially lower than outside, extra strength and weight is necessary. But according to these papers: (1) (2) and (3) there is another method.

Cold helium gas is injected at the bottom of the tank and the bubbles raise in the LOX. At the surface of the bubbles, LOX evaporates into the bubble and cools the remaining LOX. But extra space is needed for the bubbles in the LOX and for the gas mixture of helium and oxygen above the liquid level. For topping off, the injection of helium is stopped and the remaining space is filled with LOX. Figure 8 of the first paper shows the effect of different helium gas temperatures. The cooling works best with helium at 85 K, but even helium at 150 K cools the LOX.

A bubble injected into the LOX consists of 100 % helium and 0 % oxygen at first. The LOX around this bubble would boil just like in a vaccum because the partial pressure of oxygen in this bubble is zero. Even a bubble consisting of 50 % helium and 50 % oxygen is able to cool LOX at 90 K. Without sub cooling in a tank with boiling LOX at 90 K, the gas above the liquid is 100 % oxygen and the partial pressure of oxygen is 1 bar. If the partial pressure of oxygen is lower than 1 bar in the gas above the liquid or inside the bubbles, the LOX is cooled by evaporation.

At the launch pad the LOX may be precooled using a heat exchanger with ground suplied liquid nitrogen boiling at 77.355 K. To save weight of the rocket, this heat exchanger should be outside the rocket but close to it. Liquid nitrogen and oxygen should not be mixed to avoid solving of nitrogen within the LOX. Cooling with helium bubbles may be used within the rocket LOX tank.

The same question could well be asked of the LM's descent engine and the main engine on the Apollo service module, however, which did both need to fire in free-fall. In those cases, the smaller RCS thrusters on the LM or CSM were fired first, to "settle" the tankage and separate the fuel from the helium. In the LM case, this "ullage burn" was about 7.5 seconds. The first couple of service module burns -- typically for mid-course correction while en route to the moon -- generally didn't need an ullage burn prior, as the tanks would be full of propellant with little or no volume of helium. SPS burns later in the mission did require ullage burns. The RCS thrusters produced about 100 lbs of thrust each, and four would be used for the ullage burn, yielding roughly 1/200 g acceleration.

The same RCS ullage burn technique would also apply to a situation where the descent engine failed and the ascent engine needed to be used for abort from free-fall, or in flight testing of the ascent engine.

That, in turn, raises the question of how helium ingestion was avoided in the RCS thrusters, since they were also helium pressurized. In those cases, the helium was separated from the propellants by a teflon bladder, so the helium didn't mix with the propellants. This was more practical to do on the smaller scale of the RCS propellant tanks than it would have been for the larger engines.

NASA's Space Transportation System (STS) vehicle, better known as the Space Shuttle, used two single engine Solid Rocket Boosters (SRB) as Stage 0, an engineless external tank providing propellant for the three Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSME) on the orbiter as stage 1, and additional two Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS) hypergolic liquid-propellant rocket engines on the Space Shuttle orbiter as stage 2.

The two solid rocket boosters used roughly 500,000 kg (1.1 Mlb) of a 11-star perforated solid propellant cake of Ammonium Perchlorate Composite Propellant (APCP - a mixture of of ammonium perchlorate, aluminium, iron oxide, PBAN or HTPB polymers, and an epoxy curing agent) each, that provided 124 seconds of burn time with a specific impulse (Isp) of 269 s that provided 12.5 MN of thrust per SRB and the external tank that came in three different configurations (mostly progressively reducing tank's own weight) capacity was 629,340 kg (1,387,457 lb) of cryogenic liquid oxygen (LOX) as the oxidizer and 106,261 kg (234,265 lb) of cryogenic liquid hydrogen (LH2) as the fuel components of the bipropellant LOX/LH2 that provided 480 seconds of burn time with specific impulse of 455 seconds, resulting in 5.45 MN of thrust at sea-level (for the Super Lightweight Tank or SLWT, the last and most advanced of the three versions used with STS).

So to answer your question directly, not counting the OMS propellant as per the specifics of your question, the total mass of all propellants of the SRBs (stage 0) and the external tank (stage 1) was at launch of the STS 1,735,601 kg (3,821,722 lb). The solid rocket boosters provided roughly 83% of liftoff thrust for the Space Shuttle and were the largest, most powerful solid-propellant motors flown to date.

One might imagine that 60+ years of development must have produced large gains, but chemical rocket performance is fundamentally limited by the amount of energy in the chemical fuels, and the 1960s engines were already getting at least 2/3 of the maximum theoretically possible performance (see comparison table below). //

The usual primary metric is specific impulse.

But specific impulse is a somewhat unintuitive quantity to understand, so let's start with effective exhaust velocity, which is the average speed of an exhaust particle (in the backward direction). For example, the Rocketdyne F-1 engines used in the first stage of the Saturn V (the Apollo rocket) have an effective exhaust velocity of 2.58 km/s at sea level.

What does 2.58 km/s mean in terms of rocket performance? It means if you build a rocket whose weight is about 63% fuel, and you fire the engine in deep space until the fuel runs out, the rocket will now be going 2.58 km/s faster in whatever direction it was pointing: //

So, what is change in velocity, Δv, good for? In the solar system there are two main uses for Δv: launching from the surface to achieve orbit, and transferring from one orbit to another. The article Delta-v budget has some examples, but the most relevant to Apollo is the Δv to get into low Earth orbit from a sea level launch, which is (very roughly) around 10 km/s. That breaks down as about 8 km/s of required velocity to stay in orbit (any slower and you'll come back down) and 2 km/s spent lifting the rocket against gravity and pushing through the air on the way up. //

So let's take a quick comparison of ve for the F-1 and the SpaceX Merlin engine. This is a relatively fair comparison because both burn RP-1 (refined kerosene) and liquid oxygen in a gas-generator cycle. These characteristics are good for a first stage due to high energy density per unit volume and high thrust, although other fuels have better ve

F-1 2.58 km/s (sea level)
Merlin 2.77 km/s (sea level)
F-1 2.98 km/s (vacuum) 65% of max
Merlin 3.05 km/s (vacuum) 66% of max
Theoretical max 4.61 km/s (vacuum)

The theoretical maximum is based on the total chemical energy in the fuel. //

Finally then, what is specific impulse? It's obtained from ve

by dividing by the gravitational acceleration on Earth:

Isp=veg

where g is usually standard gravity, or about 9.81ms2. The resulting quantity has units of seconds. For example, for the F-1 at sea level, Isp=263s

What is the physical significance of Isp?

Well, consider our rocket from before with 63% fuel by mass. Suppose we start the rocket while it is sitting on the pad, let it just barely lift off, then hover just off the pad until it runs out of fuel (this assumes we can arbitrarily throttle the engine without affecting its performance, which is not realistic, but ignore that). Isp is how long it will hover. That is because, for every second of hovering, we consume 9.81 m/s of Δv in order to overcome gravitational acceleration accumulated during that second. After Isp seconds, all of our Δv is gone.

Thirty years ago, Pan Am ceased operations. The US airline put its stamp on civil aviation like no other and will always be remembered, especially by people in Berlin.
It's been three decades since Pan Am closed up shop. Its last flight, PA436, from Bridgetown, Barbados to Miami took place on December 4, 1991, ending the global aviation icon's 64-year saga.

It's a saga that is still remembered today all over the world, but especially in the once-divided city of Berlin, where the blue Pan Am globe on the tail of the airline's Clipper aircraft was always seen as a symbol of hope and freedom during the Cold War.

"No other airline has influenced aviation nearly as much, and no other carrier understood it so well the importance of letting the public participate in these achievements," said Berlin-based real estate developer Matthias Hühne, Pan Am expert and author of an extensive homage to the airline. "That's how a myth formed: the freedom to be transported to almost any place on Earth within just a few hours."

Thanks to its huge network reaching even remote corners of the globe, Pan Am was able to do just that; no other airline had the same reach.

The Large Scale Systems Museum (“LSSM”) is a public museum in New Kensington, PA (just outside Pittsburgh) that showcases the history of computing and information processing technology. “Large Scale” means our primary focus is on minicomputers, mainframes, and supercomputers, but we have broad coverage of nearly all areas of computing, large and small, dating back to the 1950s.

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LSSM is a real physical museum that you can visit, not an “online” or “virtual” museum. We are a living museum, with computer systems restored, configured, and operable for demonstrations, education, research, or “re-living the old days”. Our staff of volunteers comprises a number of experienced engineers and technicians who are highly experienced with these systems, painstakingly restoring them and maintaining them in like-new condition.

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If this sounds odd to you, think of an antique car collector with an old Corvette or a Model-T Ford. But cars only revolutionized transportation, while computers have revolutionized everything, including cars! Every aspect of our lives involves computers in some way.

Even in our ubiquitous mobile phones, from the latest smartphones to the humble flip-phone. There's at least one computer inside each one, making everything work. Every aspect of its operation, from recognizing button presses to identifying itself to cell towers, is controlled by a computer.

ibm-as400-s34-crop.jpg

Our bank accounts, our car maintenance, our baby pictures, all handled by computers to make our day to day lives easier. Are you old enough to remember when it took days or weeks for one doctor to receive your medical records from another? Now it takes seconds. Remember when we had to take checks to the bank to deposit them? Not anymore, and all of this great functionality that depend upon came from somewhere.

tour-1.jpg

The history of computing is rich and full of great stories, breakthroughs, successes, failures, and strong personalities, all culminating in the device that you're reading this website on right now. Everything we have today came from somewhere, and we teach that history here at LSSM. From aesthetics to internals to real-world uses and operation, we preserve it all.

In telecommunications circles there is a truism that is so constant it’s a reality in it’s own right,

“Standards are like toothbrushes. Every one agrees that you should have one and everyone agrees you should use it religiously. But even when they don’t have one of their own nobody else ever wants to use yours.”

United States Army » Rank Structure & Insignia

Army Information Army Ranks • Army Pay • Enlisted Ranks • Enlisted Pay • Officer Ranks • Officer Pay • MOS Job • Army Medal List
List of Military Ranks United States Army Ranks (Ordered By Seniority)

Shively
6 hours ago
How about both? Be better, set a good example, yes, but still fight for what you believe in. I think readers who criticized this story were reminded of RINOs who back down on important fights, who think they’re better than everyone else and who criticized Trump for being crass. He’s the one who got into the trenches and fought back. AOC isn’t backing down or sitting on the sidelines. Someone has to set her straight and line by line rebuttals aren’t going to change her mind. //

Chuck M Lowe
6 hours ago
This well written and thoughtful article is the soul of compos mentis and was the bible for so many Republicans for so many years. Some of those Republicans, no more than figure heads, "Fisher Kings" who could do no harm to the real power of the bureaucratic monolith that, at that time, ruled over us all from behind the media's curtain, were at least honest and thought they were addressing the needs of the electorate. The RINOs now in, or formally in place, like Paul Ryan, Lindsey Graham, the Bush family et al, are Quisling traitors who align themselves with the New World Order Branch Covidians that seek One Ring To Rule Them All.

Those Republican/Quislings of the knickerbocker strain, engaged in rhetoric and promises unfulfilled that we bought into like a new Tulip Mania.

No more.

That you would fail to see, right in front of your face, the tectonic shifts that have taken place over the last 25 years and especially since the Event Horizon election of Don Trump which tore the curtain away from the malevolent, scrofulous, Fascist forces that are fully engaged in the annihilation of American freedoms, liberty and the very Constitution that support those freedoms is disappointing.

There is yet time, for YOU to fall off of your horse outside the walls of Damascus and realize that the forces we Americans face, the absolute declaration of war on us from the entirety of the Federal Government is a real war and a war to the death.

Ashley Babbit is dead. Their are actual political prisoners, held without bail in Washington D.C. who are innocent of ANY crime while the evidence of their innocence is held in abeyance by the Fascist Feds.

This, is the FBI, the number one so called "Law Enforcement Agency" in America.

The FBI is a renegade, out of control, criminal organization no different than the Mafia, except it has more power. Your average FBI Agent gets up everyday, suborns perjury, alters official documents (302's), destroys evidence under subpoena, withholds exculpatory evidence, hides Brady Material, lies under oath to the court, lies under oath to Congress, ignores the 4th amendment and supplies ex nihilo, out of whole cloth, phony evidence then initiates with no predicate, investigations into perceived enemies of the D卐M☭CRAT party, conduct pre-dawn raids on "dangerous" septuagenarians, illegally leaks classified material to sympathetic press pack dogs who work in support of the D卐M☭CRAT Imperium, slow rolls subpoenas for FOIA information and lies about the need to classify ever more evidence that the American public should be able to see and that is before 9 o'clock. They ARE, absolutely, the American Gestapo.

But you think Harsh and Intemperate language is a problem?

These wheels are turning, these bells are tolling, these armies, will collide and we all hope, that you can find it within yourself, to look at the facts and tell the truth.

MGT has more testosterone in her little finger than most of the so called "Republicans" in Washington D.C.

God bless her. //

leesell
6 hours ago
As Solzhenitsyn said when they were in the gulag, “We didn’t love freedom enough”, sadly that’s the regret once you’ve blown the chance to stop evil and insanity. Evil doesn’t reason and play nice. I’m all for using knowledge and intellect also but when your in a fight for your life you can’t wait for the enemy to hear your great argument.

The number one reason cited by singles for not getting married was what they perceived to be the difficulty in finding the right person to marry. //

Unfortunately, with the societal breakdown of the family and the lack of marital and parental role models available to young people today, many singles are finding potential spouses with these traits harder to find.

These role models are found in churches, strong families, and community organizations. Without these institutions, which provide the nurturing environment that produces healthy, responsible, and stable adults, young men and women are finding it more difficult to find a suitable lifelong mate.

Without strong families, it is difficult to find strong and secure adults. It is these institutions that promote the common good and personal responsibility – the very traits that most singles say they are looking for in a spouse. //

The delay in getting married, or not getting married at all, also has profound consequences for our society. The longer marriage is delayed, the less likely couples are to have multiple children, or any children at all. The result will be an increasingly aging society that does not have enough young taxpayers to support the entitlements of a rapidly growing older population. This is a scenario for economic disaster for all.

Finally, marriage is a stabilizing force for men, women, and children. As the survey points found, the number one trait people look for in a spouse is responsibility. When two people get married, their focus, hopefully, becomes on one another and the children they produce, rather than on themselves. Self-gratification fades away as one sees beyond their wants and instead concentrates on the needs of others.

For these reasons, it is essential that we encourage and strengthen the very institutions – families, churches, and community associations – that will produce healthy young adults who will become responsible spouses and parents.

But the popularity of the love locking trend only really took off after the release of the Italian movie “Ho Voglia di Te” (I want you) in 2007. It was inspired by the like-named novel, from the hand of Italian author Federico Moccia, which was published a year before. One scene features the protagonists locking their love by attaching a padlock to a lamppost at thePonte Milvo in Rome and throwing the key into the Tiber river. //

It didn’t take long for young European fans to pick up on this hype. In 2008, the first padlocks of love appeared in the City of Love. Because of its convenient steel frame and romantic location, the Pont des Arts soon became the Love Lock Bridge in Paris. //

In 2014, the Paris Love Lock bridge literally succumbed to the weight of all that love. The grilles of the Pont des Arts were not strong enough to carry hundreds of kilos in padlocks. With over 700,000 locks in total, weighing 45 tonnes or the equivalent of 20 elephants, and the prospect of another 7,500 locks added each year, an intervention was needed to guarantee the public safety and save this iconic Parisian brige.

In August 2014, the Paris Mayor’s Office launched the campaign “Love without Locks” in which they tried to convince tourists to find other ways to celebrate their love on the padlocks bridge. But no picnic or selfie could convince lovers to refrain from hanging even more tokens of everlasting love. The City of Paris had no other option but to remove the padlocks. On June 1 2015, the grilles were removed and eventually replaced with glass panels to prevent history from repeating itself.

The same was done at other Paris bridges, ones that also suffered from the love lock craze: The Pont de l’Archevêché at the southern tip of the Île de la Cité and the Passerelle Léopold-Sédar-Senghor that connects the Orsay Museum to the Tuileries Garden.

Tandem_fusion Francisco Machado
10 hours ago
Actually expanding the Federal government's power to mandate laws that the states can or cannot legislate is the very clear purpose of the second sentence of the 14th amendment: "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Thus no state may make a law that infringes on a right that one has with respect to the Federal government. So, for example, prior to the 14th amendment, the 5th amendment Eminent domain clause ("nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.") did not apply to states: they were free to take property without compensation. IT was a right that existed only vis a vis the Federal government. Subsequent to the passage of the 14th, the Federal government was able to mandate that state laws which allowed uncompensated taking were voided.

The Federal government has no power to require that a state MUST pass a given law, but it does have the power, via the court, to prohibit it from having certain laws.

Francisco Machado Tandem_fusion
9 hours ago
"it does have the power, via the court, to prohibit it from having certain laws" - That power is bounded by two principles: If the state law infringes upon powers delegated by the Constitution to the federal government or that law is in violation of the Constitution. "deprive any person of life..." may depend upon the interpretation of what constitutes a "person." Clearly the phoetus is alive (I think there's no question there) and isn't a citizen since the constitution specifically says "born" - but I suspect it would require an act of Congress to define at what stage it is Constitutionally protected as a person. For precedent: A felon who kills the mother, causing the death of a phoetus, can be charged with two counts of murder.

Tandem_fusion Francisco Machado
5 hours ago
As to your first point: obviously.

As to your second, you're little out in left field. The due process clause acts only upon the state. the STATE may not deprive a person of life, etc. That has nothing to do with abortion, but rather with the taking of life by the government.

To the matter of defining so-called "personhood", it is nothing more than a distraction, It is not necessary to determine, nor is possible to determine empirically if there is a actual distinction between a live human and a person, as opposed too a mere semantic distinction. .The Federal government can define all it wishes, but it cannot mandate that a state use that definition to nay purpose at all. Absent a Federal nexus —and there is essentially none in abortion— congress has no power to mandate anything.

Tot the matte of fetal homicide laws you're assuming a bit much. Not all states have fetal homicide law. 38 states have fetal homicide laws; 29 from the earliest state of development. It is inaccurate to say that " a felon who kills the mother" etc., etc., since fetal homicide laws vary widely among the 38 states, but in general terms they do not require that the mother be killed, only that the fetus be killed. And related to the other matter of defining persons, those laws are dependent not on semantics but rather on the desire and intent of the legislature. They are not bound by the questions of whether the fetus is a person

SchroedingersDog Tandem_fusion
7 hours ago
"they were free to take property without compensation."

They could do it without running afoul of the specific words in the Constitution, but they could not do it would breaking the underlying code of the USA. That is, citizens have natural rights. Rights are not granted by the State, the State has no natural rights. Instead, The People grant limited authority to the government which they may revoke after a process.

That's the theory. Eventually, people fall to their usual vices and they bid the Government to enact their passions, such as to rule over others. The Republic was designed to frustrate those impulses, but as predicted it has slid towards Democracy, the system where the passions of the mob (oft directed by a few) become rule.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Tandem_fusion SchroedingersDog
5 hours ago
Read Barron v. Baltimore, 32 U.S. 243. It is the leading case on the matter of Federalism, which is what we are actually discussing here, and dealt specifically with 5th amendment takings clause. If you do so carefully you will come to an understanding that the Federal government had no role in preventing states from engaging in behavior which the Federal government could not engage in. State sovereignty was not just a vague concept, it was the operative force in the relationship between the Federal government, the states and the people.

The contrived and partisan battles that transpire in the Judiciary Committee do little to inform us as to what type of justice the nominee to the bench might be and instead serve as grotesque works of performance art for the individual senators who are merely auditioning for their eventual presidential campaign.

Hearing the nine justices actually quizzing the attorneys charged with arguing the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization enlightened us profoundly on their intellect, empathy, and abilities to carry out the critical job they've been given for the rest of their lives.

In some cases, the level of banal and insulting queries mixed with political pontifications left quite a bit to be desired (looking at you, wise Latina). However, some of the justices rose to the occasion of the historic day this may very well turn out to be.

Toward the very end of the arguments, Justice Brett Kavanaugh succinctly articulated exactly what today's discussion is really all about:

SCOTUSblog
@SCOTUSblog
·
Dec 1, 2021
Replying to @SCOTUSblog
Kavanaugh presses Prelogar about the argument that the Roe/Casey framework accommodates both the interests of pregnant people and the interests in protecting fetal life. Kavanaugh is openly skeptical that it's possible to balance both interests.

Kavanaugh: “You can’t accommodate both interests. You have to pick. That’s the fundamental problem. And one interest has to prevail over the other at any given point in time. And that’s why this is so challenging.” //

Hugh Hewitt
@hughhewitt
Justice Kavanaugh (doing great work for public and media here) reviews the interests of the fetal life. “You have to pick. one interest has to prevail over the other at a point in time. And the question becomes: What does the Constitution say about that. Why should Ct decide?” 👏
11:49 AM · Dec 1, 2021 //

There's no way to know how the Court will decide, and we will probably have to wait six excruciating months to learn of the decision. What we do know is this all boils down to the fundamental conundrum Kavanaugh articulated:

You have to pick one interest over the other; they can't both prevail. So... what does the Constitution say?

If they truly rule based on that simple question, they must come down on the side of life.

Levied on wealthy Americans with phones in 1898 to help fund Spanish-American War, tax was discontinued Tuesday.

Aug. 2, 2006 6:01 a.m. PT

The Spanish-American War has been over for more than 100 years, and now so is the tax imposed in 1898 to help fund it.

As of Tuesday, all phone companies selling long-distance phone service are legally required to eliminate the 3 percent federal excise tax on long-distance service, which had been established in 1898 as a luxury tax on wealthy Americans who owned telephones.

If not for international tennis stars and the World Tennis Association’s courage, we probably would never see Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai again. //

The [World Tennis Association's] CEO and stars have taught us several valuable lessons. First, China doesn’t have all the leverage, as some think. Too often, businesses, organizations, and well-known individuals in the west are unwilling to stand up to China because they believe nothing will happen because China has all the leverage. But the west has many things that China wants: western markets, financial systems, natural resources, and technology.

Like all dictatorial regimes, the CCP wants to be both “loved” and “feared.” It has invested millions of dollars in shaping global public opinion to “tell China’s story right” from the regime’s point of view, albeit unsuccessfully. It desperately needs foreign organizations’ participation in events hosted by Beijing to legitimize the regime and raise the party’s international profile in front of an increasingly sophisticated domestic audience. It will be a massive embarrassment for the CCP if a well-known organization such as the WTA pulls out of China right before the nation is ready to show off its power and prestige at the Olympics.

International businesses and organizations should recognize both the leverage they possess and the CCP’s limits. Suppose more organizations and corporations stand up to the CCP? Although the CCP would not give up oppressing the Chinese people altogether, it may not go as far as it wants.

One of the CCP’s most potent weapons is economic coercion. The party often uses market access to China to pressure international businesses and organizations to silence their criticisms and do whatever China demands. The WTA has shown that when an organization is ready and willing to bear the cost of standing up to the CCP, such an organization frees itself from the CCP’s coercion and puts itself in a powerful position. More often than not, the CCP will be more willing to compromise.

Last but not least, it’s time to realize that every interaction with China, be it a sporting event, a commercial transaction, or a cultural exchange, can quickly become a test of an organization’s morality. The CCP has taken on a “whole of society” approach and compelled all of society to follow the party’s orders. Sooner or later, all involved must choose whether to side with human rights and human dignity or an oppressive authoritarian regime.

Enes Kanter Freedom, center for the Boston Celtics and an outspoken human rights activist, wrote that freedom “must be defended at all costs.” We must “wake up and speak up. Change is coming, and no one can stop it. They can’t silence us all.” The WTA and its star athletes have shown us the way.

If someone tests negative, logically, they do not need to stay locked in a room for a week. Further, they would have tested negative prior to the flight as well, which means people would be quarantined after not one, but two negative tests. And for what, exactly?

That’s really the cardinal question here. Is the idea that such measures are going to put even the slightest dent in the community spread of current and future variants? Because if that’s the assumption, it’s a really bad one with no evidentiary backing. If we’ve learned anything over the last year, it’s that stopping the spread of COVID-19 is essentially impossible.

For example, Florida and Michigan have had wildly different COVID mitigation measures in place, yet both states saw big Delta variant spikes based on what is clearly a seasonal pattern. You certainly aren’t going to reduce spread by making the lives of international travelers, including US citizens, absolute hell for no reason. That’s especially true given spread on airliners continues to be largely non-existent due to the filtration systems in place.

Another source of Worobey’s origins “investigation?” The WHO report. Yes, that WHO report that only briefly examined the potential of a lab leak. Yes, that same WHO report that contained only information provided by the Chinese Government, absent any independent investigation or acquiring of evidence. Yes, that WHO report which was partially written by Peter Daszak, funder of some of the gain-of-function research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And Yes, that same WHO report that even the WHO has labeled as unreliable. It is so bad that the WHO has scrapped that whole report in favor of conducting an entirely new investigation. This was known before Worobey even published this piece, yet Worobey included the report as a source to back up his findings. Nowhere in the study does he even acknowledge the WHO’s concerns with the veracity of the report, nor the acknowledged conflicts of interests for the data contained therein, including those of Peter Daszak. //

Worobey presents information as if it is the totality of possibility in these cases, thus eliminating other equally likely potentials in the process. If this market vendor isn’t the first case, which it appears it is not, then the wet market theory ends. There are no other cases known to have originated at the market before then. Ignoring the potential that the wet market was not the origination point, but was simply a super spreading event, denies the factual potential of other origins. This paper is simply a regurgitation of other previous information, just organized in a different way. Think, reorganizing deck chairs on the Titanic. Sure, the presentation is different, but it in no way changes the fact that the ship is going down.

I reached out to Worobey to ask additional questions about his study, but at the time of writing this, nearly a week and a half after my attempted contact, he did not respond to me. While it really shouldn’t matter though, I think everyone should also be aware of who funds Dr. Worobey’s research.

Worobey Acknowledgements, SOURCE: Science Magazine
Yes, that Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The same one that was funding viral research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Imagine being able to disconnect or redirect Internet traffic destined for some of the world’s biggest companies — just by spoofing an email. This is the nature of a threat vector recently removed by a Fortune 500 firm that operates one of the largest Internet backbones. //

For a long time, any changes to an organization’s routing information with an IRR could be processed via email as long as one of the following authentication methods was successfully used:

• A password is added to the text of an email to the IRR
• The requestor signs the email containing the update with an encryption key
• The requestor sends the record changes in an email to the IRR, and the authentication is based solely on the “From:” header of the email.

Of these, MAIL-FROM has long been considered insecure, for the simple reason that it’s not difficult to spoof the return address of an email. And virtually all IRRs have disallowed its use since at least 2012, said Adam Korab, a network engineer and security researcher based in Houston.

All except Level 3 Communications, a major Internet backbone provider acquired by Lumen/CenturyLink.

“LEVEL 3 is the last IRR operator which allows the use of this method, although they have discouraged its use since at least 2012,” Korab told KrebsOnSecurity. “Other IRR operators have fully deprecated MAIL-FROM.”

Importantly, the name and email address of each Autonomous System’s official contact for making updates with the IRRs is public information. //

Lumen told KrebsOnSecurity that it continued offering MAIL-FROM: authentication because many of its customers still relied on it due to legacy systems. Nevertheless, after receiving Korab’s report the company decided the wisest course of action was to disable MAIL-FROM: authentication altogether. //

While it’s nice that Lumen is no longer the weakest link in the IRR chain, the remaining authentication mechanisms aren’t great. Claffy said after years of debate over approaches to improving routing security, the operator community deployed an alternative known as the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI).

“The RPKI includes cryptographic attestation of records, including expiration dates, with each Regional Internet Registry (RIR) operating as a ‘root’ of trust,” wrote Claffy and two other UC San Diego researchers in a paper that is still undergoing peer review. “Similar to the IRR, operators can use the RPKI to discard routing messages that do not pass origin validation checks.”

However, the additional integrity RPKI brings also comes with a fair amount of added complexity and cost, the researchers found. //

Dave
November 26, 2021

The problem with RPKI as a security mechanism is that they handed the problem of securing BGP over to a bunch of X.509 fanboys, and so the result was something that looked suspiciously like X.509…. no, I stand corrected, it is X.509. It’s an attempt to use an X.509 certificate in a way that was never designed for, combined with the mass of other problems that make X.509 such a joy to use.