Between 2007 and 2011 the European Space Agency worked with Russia to simulate the conditions of a trip to Mars, particularly as a psychological isolation experiment. Called Mars500, the longest part of this study ran between 2010 and 2011, and revealed a significant degradation of the simulacral explorers’ sleep patterns. While on wide-body airliners a business class cocoon seat can deliver comfort (and even luxury) during an overnight flight, such ergonomic palliatives won’t be as easy for a year-long journey. Space travel to Mars is supposed to be a bold and daring adventure. But what if it ends up feeling more like a super long red-eye flight? //

If the dream of space travel involves new horizons and feelings of unbound freedom—to explore, to discover, to spread humanity—a nightmare lurks just around the corner of consciousness. There will be no real “arrival” on this fantasy trip: It’s enclosures and pressurized chambers all the way down. When it comes to human space travel, the destination really is the journey. And the journey will be long, and claustrophobic. As far as “quarantine” goes, spacefaring may feel familiar to those who lived through the COVID pandemic—and certain survival tactics may crossover. //

The wish image of habitations on other planets is for simulated environments that feel as good as—if not better than—our home planet. The reality is bound to be precarious and highly contingent—no matter how awesome and intact space settlements might appear in artistic renderings. The motivation for spacefaring is, at least for Musk, premised on a desire to escape a planet in limbo; but the alternative is hardly a safe haven. This is the paradox of spacefaring: it’s a lose-lose proposition.

As anthropologist Lisa Messeri has found in her research on planetary scientists, ideas about inhabiting outer space can tend to revert back to making sense of our place on Earth. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; in fact, one of the arguments for space exploration is to improve life back home.

During Monday’s press conference, Psaki was asked about the mass shootings that have occurred over the past year with 4,000 people shot and killed by a gun. The journalist asked if there was a “crime problem” in the U.S., setting up an almost too perfect alley-oop for Psaki to talk about Biden’s continued action on gun control.

“Well, I would say certainly there is a gun problem,” said Psaki. //

Psaki continued to discuss the “hundreds, thousands of people who lose their lives” via gun violence, and that Biden is working with the Senate to push universal background checks and working with states with the “greatest level of activism.” //

Dana Loesch
@DLoesch
We have record gun sales and new gun owners but not the crime to match. What we have is a judicial problem, lowered deterrents for repeat offenders via her party's policies, reduced police morale, and criminals emboldened by "defund cops" talk from her party. //

the presence of a gun doesn’t result in the elevation of violence either. An armed community is oftentimes a safer one as various studies have found time and again. For instance, 98 percent of mass shootings that occurred since the 1950s happened in gun-free zones? Did you know that over a million people in Texas are licensed to carry a firearm and that 0.4 per 100,000 have committed a homicide? Compare that to the .99 per 100,000 homicide rate in jolly ol’ Britain where guns are banned. //

Biden’s pandering to those shouting “defund the police” and his party’s subsequent obedience to these radicals is also a massive contributor to the rise in crime. As Fox News pointed out, major cities that leaned into the narrative that funds should be allocated away from their respective police departments are experiencing crime surges.

The police officers that do remain no longer feel safe doing their jobs and become less likely to do the necessary proactive policing that stops so many crimes before they happen. A study by Harvard Professor Roland Fryer found that proactive policing is necessary for the safety of any community, but that when the public turns on the police, crime goes up. //

"A free people ought not only be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from all who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government."

• George Washington //

edintexas
9 hours ago
The Socialist/Communists can't explain why they are so adamant that semi-automatic rifles which may look somewhat like military weapons are high on their list of firearms they want to eliminate from public possession. They aren't challenged on this by the MSM (no surprise) and yet the Bureau's annual Homicide statistics by type of weapon consistently show the number of homicides in the category "Personal Weapons (hands, feet, elbows, etc.) exceed the number of homicides by rifle (any type of rifle, not just those they claim would reduce crime if banned). For that matter most, if not all, years both rifles and shotguns total fewer homicides than Personal Weapons.

Common Oxygen Cylinder / Tank Size Chart:

LITERS  PSI HT  DIAM    LBS.

H (K) 7842 2000 55.0 9.0 120

Five months before DarkSide attacked the Colonial pipeline, two researchers discovered a way to rescue its ransomware victims. Then an antivirus company’s announcement alerted the hackers. //

On January 11, antivirus company Bitdefender said it was “happy to announce” a startling breakthrough. It had found a flaw in the ransomware that a gang known as DarkSide was using to freeze computer networks of dozens of businesses in the US and Europe. Companies facing demands from DarkSide could download a free tool from Bitdefender and avoid paying millions of dollars in ransom to the hackers.

But Bitdefender wasn’t the first to identify this flaw. Two other researchers, Fabian Wosar and Michael Gillespie, had noticed it the month before and had begun discreetly looking for victims to help. By publicizing its tool, Bitdefender alerted DarkSide to the lapse, which involved reusing the same digital keys to lock and unlock multiple victims. The next day, DarkSide declared that it had repaired the problem, and that “new companies have nothing to hope for.”

“Special thanks to BitDefender for helping fix our issues,” DarkSide said. “This will make us even better.” //

It wasn’t the first time Bitdefender trumpeted a solution that Wosar or Gillespie had beaten it to. Gillespie had broken the code of a ransomware strain called GoGoogle, and was helping victims without any fanfare, when Bitdefender released a decryption tool in May 2020. Other companies have also announced breakthroughs publicly, Wosar and Gillespie said.

“People are desperate for a news mention, and big security companies don’t care about victims,” Wosar said.

Pilot Margrit Waltz successfully completed her 900th ferry flight last week, taking a TBM 940 turboprop from Daher’s production site in Tarbes, France, to Delaware County Airport (KMIE) near Muncie, Indiana. The trip took three days, 15 hours and 38 minutes of which were in the air, with stopovers in Wick, Scotland; Keflavik, Iceland; Canada’s Goose Bay; Bangor, Maine; and Scranton, Pennsylvania. Waltz, who was one of the first pilots to ferry a TBM across the Atlantic Ocean in 1991, has delivered more than 200 TBMs to North America.

Ever since Kentucky Senator Rand Paul grilled NIH head, Dr. Anthony Fauci, on his department granting the CCP funds to perform gain-of-function research on coronaviruses (or, in other words, genetically engineer coronaviruses) at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the entire political world has begun focusing on what could be one of the biggest scandals the world has ever seen.

If it’s true, then then it proves two things. Firstly, that the virus was engineered by the Chinese in a lab and, either through neglect or intent, released the virus into the world – which is something that even Fauci now admits could have been the case. Secondly, it proves that U.S. bureaucrats helped them do it by providing research funding.

Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton also has Fauci in his figurative crosshairs, but he’s hinting that he’s not stopping at Fauci. Cotton seems to be suspicious of the entire network of public health bureaucrats. //

“So, the money that the NIH gave went to an American organization, which turned around and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to these Wuhan labs to investigate coronaviruses and, yes, to find ways to make them more contagious and more dangerous,” Cotton added. “And we asked Francis Collins, who’s Dr. Fauci’s boss, to come clean, to tell us exactly what was happening, why this research was being funded, as you point out, Maria, during a time in which the Obama administration had explicitly banned this kind of gain-of-function research, research into making some of the world’s deadliest pathogens even more dangerous.”

This matches up with other stories that have come out recently. One Planned Parenthood insider revealed that the abortion giant has begun shifting toward transition therapy and that they’re pushing it on teen girls. As I wrote in February, teen girls would come into the clinic for hormone surgery in the same way they’d go to the mall to get an ear piercing. Hardly any questions were asked, and those that were were somewhat leading:

The “health assistant” told Shrier that each day, teen girls would come to the clinic, sometimes with a parent or with groups of girlfriends all claiming that they have the trendy new mental illness of “gender dysphoria.”

“I think they were telling what they perceived to be their authentic history to them at the time. Like, I was a 13-year-old girl, you know. Everything is very dire, everything needs to be remedied immediately,” she said.

The woman was presented with a script to read to the kids, but it didn’t put too much emphasis on the patient’s history of evaluation.

“The questions that we asked were like, very closed-ended…It would be, ‘you know, at what age did this start’? Boom — that is it. ‘What kinds of dysphoria do you feel’? Boom — that’s it, you know? ‘What do you want out of your transition’? ‘Do you want top surgery?’ ‘Do you want bottom surgery’?”

Often the pattern held that these girls who came in for transition drugs were all suffering from some form of high anxiety or depression. Some came in with self-abuse scars on their arms, but Planned Parenthood staff were instructed not to address them at all.

This means that places like Planned Parenthood, and likely activists in the medical and psychological fields, are preying on depressed or anxiety-ridden people in order to push these therapies and surgeries on them, likely for profit.

There’s no way this was a coincidence, right down to all of them making sure to put “antisemitic” first in the list before shifting to claims of bigotry against Muslims. This equivocation is just disgusting and it’s obviously purposeful. Jews are being beaten in the streets from New York to Berlin. I haven’t seen a single case of a pro-Palestinian protester being physically harmed, at least not in a fight they didn’t themselves start.

Where is this vast rise of Islamaphobia being cited by these Democrats? It simply doesn’t exist, but because people like Ayanna Pressley and Cori Bush see Jews as oppressors and Muslims as victims, their intersectional dogma demands they couch their criticism of antisemitism with false claims of Islamophobia. It’s a cynical game that should be called what it is, which is antisemitism in and of itself. //

Now, these same people are trying to pretend that the recent, massive spike in antisemitism is somehow correlated with a rise in Islamophobia. It’s absolute nonsense, and it’s simply another attempt to marginalize the real victims that we are seeing in the streets. This stuff is not just politically gross, it’s also morally gross.

Lastly, this shows the true rot of the social justice movement. Because its adherents are so invested in faux hierarchies of power, they can’t even be counted on to call out blatant antisemitism without having to include their other pet concerns. To just call out antisemitism would enrage their base, and they can’t have that. Thus, you get this disgusting display.

Some legal commentators, including myself, questioned the process of “counting” electoral votes on January 6.

The meeting of Congress on January 6 is required by statute — 3 U.S.C. Sec 15, referred to as the “Electoral Count Act.” Pursuant to that statute, the President of the Senate — the Vice President — shall open and announce the vote of each state’s electors of the Electoral College. It also establishes a mechanism for the filing of “objections” by Members of the House and Senate to the counting of any state’s electors as announced.

But the statute alters the process adopted in the 12th Amendment to the Constitution — something a statute cannot do. The 12th Amendment only provides that the President of the Senate shall open the certificates and the votes shall be counted. It confers no power on Congress to adjust or reject the vote count as cast by the electors. Thus, the opening of the certificates and counting of votes is merely a ministerial act, not a substantive one. The outcome of the election will be the same whether the ceremonial opening of the certificates takes place or not.

If Congress is meeting for purely ceremonial purposes, a question arises as to whether the January 6 protesters were disrupting any actual “government business or official function” as contemplated by the statute. //

peregry • 4 hours ago

You're assuming that the government wanted to get big sentences for these people.

They don't.

Rather, they WANT the outrage when all these "insurrectionists" either walk or get minimal sentences. The media and administration will spin it as the courts favoring these people and/or letting them off easy because they're "white" and will wink and nod and talk about how if these defendants were minorities the book would have been thrown at them.

The entire point is to create MORE outrage at Trump and those who were at the capital on Jan. 7, and against the right in general, by creating impossible expectations among their base and then when the results of the legal system do not match the expected outcome, to call it injustice... //

skeptic62 peregry • 3 hours ago

These “trials” have more to do with November 2022 than they do with January 2021. Our justice system has been weaponized by the Left. //

Mudboy skeptic62 • 2 hours ago

They are following Lenin's successful formula to overthrow a country, by legitimizing criminal anarchy and co-opting the justice system.

Iran’s hard-line parliament in December approved a bill that would suspend part of UN inspections of its nuclear facilities if European signatories did not provide relief from oil and banking sanctions by February.

The IAEA struck a three-month deal with Iran to have it hold the surveillance images, with Tehran threatening to delete them afterward if no deal had been reached.

It’s not clear now if they’ve deleted those three months’ worth of images. But, it means the IAEA has no ability to assess what Iran has been doing. Imagine the temerity to play around IAEA like this.

So, the normal reaction one should have to this is that they’ve been playing these games, one should not bend over for them — because they haven’t acted in accordance with the deal, to begin with.

Iran has already shot far past the maximum allowable uranium enrichment levels defined in the Obama-era deal. They’re now up in the range of 63 percent enrichment using their new IR-4 centrifuges and have announced that they will soon be installing their IR-9 centrifuges which are allegedly far faster and more efficient. This puts them only a few steps away from being able to make a bomb.

Why would you continue to lift sanctions, given these games? But, unfortunately, that’s exactly what Biden is doing.

On Friday, a Georgia State Court Judge ruled that approximately 145,000 absentee ballots cast and counted in Fulton County, Georgia, must be copied and turned over for inspection to Plaintiffs in lawsuits brought in the aftermath of the outcome of the November 2020 presidential election contest in Georgia.

Friday’s decision came in a lawsuit filed by nine plaintiffs, including Garland Favorito, a Fulton resident and self-styled election watchdog. It’s one of more than 30 Georgia lawsuits stemming from the November presidential election and the January runoff for the U.S. Senate. Some of the lawsuits are still winding their way through the courts.

Back on December 5 of last year, I wrote about a lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign in Georgia state court challenging the outcome of the Presidential election contest in Georgia (see Trump Campaign Files Georgia Election Contest in Fulton County Court).

This lawsuit was separate from the ones filed in federal court by Lin Wood and Sydney Powell. The Campaign’s lawsuit being focused on allegations that tens of thousands of invalid votes had been unlawfully counted in favor of Joe Biden. //

What actually happened in the lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign was exactly as predicted in my two articles — no judge was assigned in a timely manner, the Campaign was never given access to the evidence in the hands of the state election officials, and the Electoral College met and cast its votes while the lawsuit was pending. There could have been 2 million, illegally-cast ballots in Georgia, but if the state courts and election officials simply stalled the process for an election contest lawsuit to proceed, nothing was going to happen.

Judge Amero has ordered that high-resolution copies be made of the 145,000 absentee ballots, while the originals will remain in the custody of election officials. But the copies should allow the plaintiffs to look for certain kinds of possible irregularities such as whether any ballots were machine marked and then copied in large numbers. Mailed-in absentee ballots should all be hand-marked by the voter. //

Raffensperger adopted this conciliatory tone, only after his office opposed the effort by the Plaintiffs to gain access to the mail-in ballots counted in Fulton County.

It is worth noting that the infamous telephone call between President Trump and Raffensperger was part of a “confidential settlement discussion” over the state court lawsuit brought by the Campaign that I referenced above. Raffensperger now applauds the effort to examine the vote-counting in Fulton County, based on a “longstanding history of election mismanagement”, but had no interest in doing so during the call with President Trump, wherein he denied there was any reason for such an examination or investigation.

The media and Democrats claimed that in this call, Pres. Trump was urging Raffensperger to “find” more Trump votes to overcome the 11,000 vote deficit that decided the election.

That was false.

What Pres. Trump was urging Raffensperger to do was to “find” 11,000 invalid votes that had been included in Biden’s vote total in the state — his margin of victory. The lawsuit alleged such invalid votes were cast and counted, and that an investigation by Raffensperger — part of the mandate of his office — would reveal that to be true. Pres. Trump was calling on Raffensperger to conduct that investigation.

So, yet again, America, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. has once again saved us from ourselves. I mean, one look at the declared purpose of the 1776 undertaking by commissioners tells you all you need to know about these very dangerous people:

“The declared purpose of the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission is to ‘enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776 and to strive to form a more perfect Union.

“This requires a restoration of American education, which can only be grounded on a history of those principles that is ‘accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling.

“And a rediscovery of our shared identity rooted in our founding principles is the path to a renewed American unity and a confident American future.” //

As reported by The Washington Examiner on Friday, the education advisory commission will resume operations, despite being disbanded by Biden — with the added objective of undermining the insanity of critical race theory now metastasizing in schools across America.

The 1776 Commission is scheduled to convene on Monday in Washington on the annex campus of Hillsdale College to plot its next steps. An agenda for the private meeting, which is closed to the media, was not available.

But in an interview with the Washington Examiner, Matthew Spalding, the 1776 Commission’s executive director, said the group sees a major role for itself in the explosive debate over the teaching of the history of the United States in public and private schools.

The battle lines are clearly drawn.

On one side, “traditionalists,” as described by the Examiner, who believe in de-emphasizing race and ethnicity. Spalding told the Examiner the commission doesn’t intend to “whitewash” America’s history slavery and racism, but wants to promote a curriculum that defines “racial equality” as an American “tenet”: — “the founding creed of the Declaration of Independence: all men are created equal” — and Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of a colorblind nation.

On the other side, critical race theory — the “decades-old academic study of U.S. history, more prevalent recently,” argues that racism remains deeply embedded in all aspects of American life. According to CRT, the only way to “unravel this systemic racism and bring about a just society” is for institutions, public and private, to place race and ethnicity at the center of policymaking, hiring, and how people are treated generally. //

Spalding then pointed to the obvious, unintentionally — meaning he precisely described the objective as an intended part of his comment.

“Current arguments about identity politics and critical race theory that … present themselves as merely responding to perceptions of their current assessment of American society, but do so by introducing as their principle that we should look at people based on the color of their skin, strikes us as a fundamental denial of the idea that all men are created equal.

“And that’s a problem for politics. That’s a problem intellectually and historically.”

CRT “teaches” — indoctrinates — that all “men” are not created equal. On the contrary, CRT contends that “white people” are born “racist,” and there is nothing “white people” can do about it, other than spend the entirety of their lives atoning for their “whiteness” and apologizing to “black people” for being “racist.” //

Martin • 3 hours ago • edited

Critical Race Theory is evil. The people who came up with it, are evil. The people who teach it, are evil. The people who believe in it or practice it, are evil. The people who enable it or defend it in any way, shape or form, are evil.

There should be no compromise with these people. You should call them evil to their faces with zero hesitation.

Again, they're not wrong; they are evil.

the carriers could offer their own “number parking” service for customers who know they will not require phone service for an extended period of time, or for those who just aren’t sure what they want to do with a number. Such services are already offered by companies like NumberBarn and Park My Phone, and they generally cost between $2-5 per month.

The Princeton study recommends consumers who are considering a number change instead either store the digits at an existing number parking service, or “port” the number to something like Google Voice. For a one-time $20 fee, Google Voice will let you port the number, and then you can continue to receive texts and calls to that number via Google Voice, or you can forward them to another number.

https://www.numberbarn.com/

https://parkmyphone.com/

The world is moving away from fossil fuels, towards large-scale adoption of clean energy technologies.

Building these technologies is a mineral-intensive process. From aluminum and chromium to rare earths and cobalt, the energy transition is creating massive demand for a range of minerals.

Copper is one such mineral, which stands out due to its critical role in building both the technologies as well as the infrastructure that allows us to harness their power. //

Relative to 2020 levels, annual copper demand from solar PV installations could more than double by 2030, and almost triple by 2050. The largest percentage increase in copper requirements comes from offshore wind farms. IRENA’s REmap scenario requires 45,000 MW of annual offshore wind installations in 2050, which translates into 432,000 tonnes of copper—a 648% increase from 2020 levels. //

According to Citigroup, the global copper market is expected to be in a 521,000 tonne deficit in 2021—and the transition to renewables is still in its early stages.

While the demand for copper comes from a range of industries, the majority of its supply comes from a few regions, making the supply chain susceptible to disruptions. Mine shutdowns in 2020 exemplified this, as copper production fell by around 500,000 tonnes.

Additionally, average ore grades in Chile, the largest producer of copper, have fallen by 30% over the last 15 years, making it more difficult to mine copper

BUTLER — If last month’s monster truck parade is any indication, a big crowd is anticipated for Saturday’s grand opening of the International Monster Truck Museum at its new home, 541 W. Main St.

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The environmental battle has always been a game of political ping pong. Republicans take office and open up the energy sector. Democrats take office and restrict it. Back and forth, election after election. The battle has always been painted as “socialist hippies” versus “greedy capitalist pigs” and even though the subject is much more nuanced, our media knows nothing of nuance these days. //

The truth is that the best compromise for meeting our energy and environmental needs is nuclear energy. It is clean, efficient, and extraordinarily safe in its most modern iterations. France has learned the value of nuclear energy and leads the way in clean energy production. It seems unthinkable that America is still arguing about solar panels when we have access to an energy source that could meet the demands of both those dirty hippies and capitalist pigs.

Biden and the “Party of Women’s Rights” enthusiastically support biological males kicking the hell out of biological females in women’s sports. In effect, it’s a perfect “Animal Farm” parallel: “All females are equal. But some ‘females’ are more equal than others.”

The fact remains, women of American, your rights as a biological female have been usurped — with the blessing of Biden and the Democrats. Your former number-one place in line has been handed by so-called “progressives” to biological males. //

Of course, Biden’s directive forced religious institutions to violate not only their views but a core tenet of their faith, as well. Does this remind anyone of anything?

Remember when a 2015 Supreme Court ruling made same-sex marriage the law of the land? Remember also how same-sex couples promptly rushed to Christian churches and demanded to be married?

In contrast, remember how same-sex couples did not rush to Muslim mosques or Buddhist temples and demand to be married in either of those “houses of worship,” as well? //

Alliance Defending Freedom is representing College of the Ozarks in its legal fight. Senior counsel Julie Marie Blake said in a statement:

“The government cannot and should not force schools to open girls’ dorms to males based on its politically motivated and inappropriate redefinition of ‘sex.’

“Women shouldn’t be forced to share private spaces — including showers and dorm rooms — with males, and religious schools shouldn’t be punished simply because of their beliefs about marriage and biological sex.

Government overreach by the Biden administration continues to victimize women, girls, and people of faith by gutting their legal protections, and it must be stopped.”

The results are in from last night’s referendum on Gov. Tom Wolf’s tyrannical COVID orders. In both cases on the ballot the votes to limit the power of future “emergency orders” passed, putting a constitutional barrier between petty Democrats who seek to weaponize “the science” instead of doing what’s legal and logical.