Traces of rare forms of iron and plutonium have been found at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, after some kind of cataclysm in outer space created this radioactive stuff and sent it raining down on our planet.

The extraterrestrial debris arrived on Earth within the last 10 million years, according to a report in the journal Science. Once it hit the Pacific Ocean and settled to the bottom, nearly a mile down, the material got incorporated into layers of a rock that was later hauled up by a Japanese oil exploration company and donated to researchers. //

In his view, the new findings add to other evidence that the heaviest elements, such as plutonium, can't be generated by just regular old supernovas. "It must be some rare event, something else," says Schatz. "There are a lot of pieces of evidence that point to multiple sources. Neutron star mergers are probably one of the more important sources, but at this point it doesn't look like they can explain all the observations."

The cycle of painful updates begins anew

A Houston woman wants to know why the fine folks in Granger just won't leave her alone

Republican California Rep. Darrell Issa asked Kerry a very direct question about pipeline transportation.

“Isn’t it true the pipelines are more carbon-delivery efficient than trains or trucks or other forms of delivery? If you could answer just that limited question,” asked Issa.

“Yeah, that is true,” Kerry said. “I, I think that is true, but it doesn’t mean necessarily you want to be adding another line when there are other alternatives.”

“But is it better than train, and better than that, yes it is,” he added.

That pipelines were better for the environment was already documented even before the Biden administration killed the pipeline’s construction, but getting this admission from the Biden administration itself cements two things. One, that the Biden administration went against the science, and two, that they knew they were going against the science and didn’t care.

This puts the thousands of jobs killed by the Biden administration into a much darker perspective, knowing that it killed these jobs under false pretenses. It’s made even worse by the fact that the Biden administration would say little to nothing about it with Biden himself literally walking away in silence when asked about the sacrifices he forced Americans to make with the cancelation of the pipeline.

Matt Bruenig
@MattBruenig
More important insights from today's Catalist data release. Trump increased his margins with all race+gender groups except white men. Women of color were the most swayed by Trump's style of governing. //

According to the data, Trump gained across all demographics, all racial and gender groups, except white men where he lost only a percentage point. The share of Trump voters who were women or people of color in 2020 was 57.2%, up from 54.8% in 2016, with a 7-point gain among nonwhite women, a 4-point gain with nonwhite men, a 1-point gain with white women. While Democrats still won the majority of the Hispanic vote, Trump got a big increase of eight points in the share that swung to him. In 2020, Trump pulled in 11% of the black vote, again an increase of 3% over 2016.

In 2013 NIH awarded Dr. Baric a $10 million grant to study “the pathogenic activity of viruses including severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), Ebola, highly pathogenic influenza and herpesvirus HHV8.” Dr. Baric put that money to work and in 2015, it was announced that his research had led to the development of “SARS 2.0.”

Since Dr. Baric is affiliated with UNC-Chapel Hill, yes, his research is done in North Carolina. However, as Sen. Paul asserted, Baric has partnered with Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (yes, that’s in China) to conduct NIH-funded gain-of-function research on SARS and MERS viruses.

In June 2015 Baric and Shi published results of NIH-funded research into the mutations necessary for the bat-to-human transmission of MERS coronavirus. They found that when viral protein spikes mutated, humans could become infected with MERS-CoV. In other words, this is the exact research that would be necessary for a lab to synthesize a virus that would infect humans.

A few months later, in November 2015, the duo published the results of separate NIH-funded research which led to the discovery of a new SARS coronavirus, a chimera, they used gain-of-function techniques to create. That research was allowed to go forward even though the US government had issued a moratorium on gain-of-function research on the viruses that cause influenza, SARS, and MERS in October 2014. According to a VICE article on the research (emphasis added):

“The strain grew equally well to SARS in human cells,” Dr. Ralph Baric, a professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the lead author of the study, told Motherboard. “It resisted all vaccines and immunotherapy, too.” //

The US Department of Health and Human Services has a board that must review the authorization of funding for “research that could make dangerous pathogens more contagious.” According to the Daily Caller, the NIH and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (the agency headed by Dr. Fauci) “systematically thwarted” the funding review process for the grant awarded to EcoHealth Alliance. Even more specifically, and much more damning for Fauci, is that according to gain-of-function research regulations, Fauci himself should have flagged the grant for review by the HHS Board, and he did not. Fauci also missed or ignored the part of HHS’s guidelines which state:

“[T]he research will be supported through funding mechanisms that allow for appropriate management of risks and ongoing Federal and institutional oversight of all aspects of the research throughout the course of the research.”

Call me crazy, but it might be a bit hard to accomplish that in a secretive lab in China.

Furthermore, Politico reported that US diplomats in China had been sending warnings to State Department bureaucrats in Washington DC regarding the WIV as far back as December 2017, specifically stating that the lab had “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.” There was no action taken, and the NIH continued to fund the research conducted there. //

As an aside, NIH announced in December 2017 that it was lifting the moratorium on gain-of-function research. It has been reported that Fauci ordered the resumption of funding without consulting the White House or, by extension, the HHS, which is required under the gain-of-function research guidelines. //

clconnett
20 minutes ago
This is a prime example of the "two realities" we now live in. Those on the Right, Conservatives, Libertarians, even Centrists, all read this and think, "Yes, this is public information. We're aware that Fauci intentionally couched his words so as to obfuscate in his answers to Rand Paul. He avoided perjury, perhaps, but created a misleading view by what he said."

The Left, however, read this and say, "Fauci had to correct Rand Paul because Paul is an ignorant man who wants to push conspiracies instead of face science. Paul is being needlessly antagonistic and should be thankful we have a man like Fauci, committed to science and saving lives, in his position."

The media, being primarily leftists, puts out the view of the Left. Social Media mocks the view of the Right, and the ability to engage in reasonable discussion at the popular level is destroyed. Perhaps you can reason on a one-to-one basis with your friends, but, if they are on the Left, as soon as they are around others with their views, the group insulation tends to bring them back into the groupthink of those around turn. Effectively, culture has become merely cult. //

clconnett VL
14 minutes ago
Hi, my name is Post, Post-modern in full. I like to go by nicknames like, "open minded" and "affirming" when I'm around my friends.

"Oh, you want to know what I look like under this face mask? That changes. It just depends on what you need me to look like. After all, appearances are merely the construct we place upon the locations we choose to focus. Because I have no present meaning, the past is also fluid. After all, meaning comes from you."

A Realistic Plan for World Peace
a.k.a
Nuke the Moon
by Frank J. (originally written August 15th, 2002)
View blog reactions
"Gotta nuke something."
-20th century philosopher Nelson Muntz

World peace cannot be achieved by sitting around on our duffs singing hippy songs to the moon. Peace can only be achieved through excessive acts of seemingly mindless violence. Who do bullies pick on in the playground? The giant, crazy looking guy who looks ready to snap and kill the person nearest or some harmless looking weenie who appears to do anything to avoid conflict? People pick on the weenie because people like to start fights they think they can win. In the same way, people will continue to attack America and our interests when they get the idea that they can piss off America without us immediately eradicating them and everyone around them in the most painful way possible. //

Now the world will be pretty convinced that America is frick'n nuts and just looking for a fight, but we need to really ingrain it into everyone's conscious so that no one will ever even contemplate crossing us. This requires making good use of our nukes. I know, nukes can kill millions of people, but they sure aren't doing anyone any good just sitting around. I mean, how many years has it been since we last dropped a bomb on someone? No one even thinks we'll actually use one now. Of course, using nukes shouldn't be done haphazardly; all uses have to be well planned out because the explosions are so cool looking that we'll want to give the press plenty of notice so they can get pictures of the mushroom cloud from all sorts of different angles. But what to nuke? Well, usually the idea is populated cities, but, by the beliefs of my morally superior religion, killing is wrong. So why can't we be more creative than nuking people. My idea is to nuke the moon; just say we thought we saw moon people or something. There is no one actually there to kill (unless we time it poorly) and everyone in the world could see the results. And all the other countries would exclaim, "Holy @$#%! They are nuking the moon! America has gone insane! I better go eat at McDonald's before they think I don't like them." //

So there you have it, a real peace plan that could actually work. Warmongering pacifists want us to act all nice such that countries think we're rational and won't kill everyone with a blind fury, thus making it possible they might actually attack us and draw us into a war. But, if America follows my idea and lashes out at the slightest provocation with unmeasured vengeance, there can be peace. So there's the choice: either be a homicidal maniac thus ensuring peace and love in the world, or be some pacifist hippy while the streets flow with the blood of the innocent.

ALBERTA—In response to a national sauce shortage brought on by supply chain issues, Chick-Fil-A has purchased the Keystone XL Pipeline and will repurpose it to carry millions of gallons of glorious Chick-Fil-A sauce to desperate Americans.

"This was a no-brainer," said CEO Dan Cathy. "Americans consume 32 billion gallons of Chick-Fil-A sauce every day. This pipeline was just sitting there collecting dust, and we've given it a second chance at life!"

Environmentalists planned to protest the pipeline and its potential impact on wildlife, but then Dan Cathy gave them a bite of delicious chicken dipped in golden sauce and they instantly became evangelical conservative capitalists.

The new pipeline project is expected to create 25,000 new jobs and deplete the world's reserves of natural smoke flavor, caramel color, and xanthan gum.

Ford Fischer
@FordFischer
·
May 11, 2021
Today at the #FreePalestine rally in front of the State Department, @RashidaTlaib spoke.

She described struggling to discuss this issue with colleagues.

"The ethnic cleansing continues now," she said of Israel's actions.

"We all deserve to live freely and with human dignity."

Ford Fischer
@FordFischer
"What they are doing to the Palestinians is what they are doing to our Black brothers and sisters here," @RashidaTlaib told the crowd.

"As you all are marching for freedom of Palestine, please know that you must be marching for everybody's freedom."

"It's all interconnected."

Nicole Pinkston🇺🇸
@MRSpinkston85
She just ALL lives mattered Black lives matter. Where are the Black liberals to stop her?
Where are they to tell her that her fight is her fight.?

Literally, every reason the left and the media used to convince Americans to support their geriatric prop of a candidate has completely disintegrated. The entirety of the lies, the hatred, the vitriol was to defeat Trump simply because they didn’t like him. They destroyed our prosperity, our success, and our nation’s greatness, just to defeat Trump. I wonder how many of them are starting to miss him.

I ask the left this:

Was It worth it? Are you happy and satisfied with what you’ve done?

Are we done being glad that Trump isn’t President anymore?

Bill Melugin
@BillFOXLA
BREAKING: .@FoxNews has confirmed via the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that construction on a 13.4 mile stretch of border wall in the Rio Grande Valley will RESUME after pressure from local residents & politicians.
The Biden admin previously halted all wall construction in Jan.
6:43 PM · May 12, 2021

A senior lawmaker proposed a controversial piece of legislation on Wednesday that directs NASA to pick a second company to build the agency’s next Moon landers — in addition to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which was awarded a $2.9 billion NASA contract to build a lander earlier this year. The bill hasn’t passed the full Senate yet, but it marks a new front in an ongoing effort to overturn or rejig NASA’s decision. It also sets up the first political challenge for NASA’s new administrator, former Sen. Bill Nelson. //

Jeff Bezos’ space firm Blue Origin and Dynetics. Those companies lodged formal protests against NASA’s decision, triggering a procedural pause on SpaceX’s new contract. Among other things, the protests maintain that NASA should have picked two firms instead of one.

Amid a lobbying effort from Blue Origin, those calls have found their way into a NASA authorization bill, proposed as an amendment to the Endless Frontier Act by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee overseeing NASA. Cantwell represents Blue Origin’s home state of Washington. Under Cantwell’s language, NASA would be required to reopen the competition within 30 days and allow it to use $10 billion of its budget to pick a second lunar lander provider.

Before choosing SpaceX, NASA had been expected to pick two companies, a strategy that guaranteed a backup in case one lander fell behind. But the agency went only with SpaceX — its bid was half of Blue Origin’s — after funding shortfalls from Congress. “It was in NASA’s best interest, along with the budget that was there, for us to award to one,” NASA’s human spaceflight chief, Kathy Lueders, who led the decision to pick SpaceX, said last month.

Carter inherited the inflation from Gerald Ford. He made it worse because he had no idea what he was doing, but he didn’t create it.

Biden was stuck with the pandemic, but the underlying economy prior to the pandemic was a terrific economy, the border was in check, Israel was largely peaceful, gasoline was plentiful and cheap. He’s managed to screw up everything that Trump had left in relatively good order in the span of four months. That takes real talent for incompetence.

We are in trouble. This man is not up to the job, and that has never been more clear after the events of the last week. Biden has taken a recovery that was on cruise control and run it into a tree. Inflation is killing the middle class, job growth is stagnating, and we’ve lost the gains we made against Iran, the Palestinians, China, and Russia. None of this is going to work out well

The government report on inflation has been released, and it’s not good. Inflation hit 4.2% in April, a crushing blow to the poor and middle class especially. This followed on the heels of stagnating hiring shown by last week’s jobs report (see New Jobs Report Is the Worst Miss in History as Biden Administration Failures Mount). //

Remember, the consumer price index doesn’t even include things like lumber so this number is likely lower than reality despite still showing an out-of-control rise. That rise is directly timed with Biden passing his COVID “relief” act that printed trillions of largely unnecessary dollars. //

This is the result of Democrat economic policies. We tried to warn the cocktail-sipping establishment class that thought Trump was too icky. Policies have consequences, and they matter a lot more than mean tweets and disagreements about rhetoric. Real people are now getting smoked while Joe Biden is nowhere to be found (see We Don’t Have a President).

Of course, you can expect the media to spin this.

Paul Krugman
@paulkrugman
So, the inflation report wasn't a nothingburger, but it was sort of a White Castle slider — not a very big deal. //

These people live in a bubble, and they aren’t going to leave it. They truly believe you don’t matter. Vote accordingly.

The Microsoft co-founder’s wild lifestyle was well known among his inner circle — but newspapers like the New York Times hid the unflattering reports to continue getting “spoon-fed stories,” James Wallace wrote in the 1997 biography, “Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace.”

Proxmox Virtual Environment is an open source server virtualization management solution based on QEMU/KVM and LXC. You can manage virtual machines, containers, highly available clusters, storage and networks with an integrated, easy-to-use web interface or via CLI. Proxmox VE code is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3. The project is developed and maintained by Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH.

For an overview of the Proxmox VE key features see the Proxmox website.

Why is the world still being hit by wave after wave of Covid when we know how to stop it?
Helen Clark and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Leaders failed to act fast enough when Covid-19 appeared. They must not keep making the same mistakes

Covid pandemic was preventable, says WHO-commissioned report

Here are some CDC graphics that won’t be shown or discussed on CNN or MSNBC any time soon. The first is a graph showing new virus cases in the US over the 7-day period ending 7 May: //

Virus deaths nationwide have been trending downward since January, too:

While the graphical representation is illuminating, the CDC’s commentary is even better:

The current 7-day moving average of daily new cases (45,817) decreased 13.2% compared with the previous 7-day moving average (52,772). Compared with the highest peak on January 8, 2021 (249,672), the current 7-day average decreased 81.6%.