Daily Shaarli
April 30, 2021
A-CAES uses surplus electricity from the grid or renewable sources to run an air compressor. The compressed air is then stored in a big underground tank until energy is needed, at which point it’s released through a turbine to generate electricity that’s fed back into the grid.
Rather than vent the heat generated as the air is compressed, Hydrostor’s system captures that heat and stores it in a separate thermal storage tank, then uses it to reheat the air as it's fed in to the turbine stage, which increases the efficiency of the system. This could prove to be key; compressed air storage systems have typically offered round-trip efficiencies between 40-52 percent, and Quartz is reporting more like 60 percent for this system. //
Hydrostor’s A-CAES also makes use of a closed-loop reservoir to maintain the system at a constant pressure during operation. The storage cavern is partially filled with water and as the compressed air is piped in, the water is forced into a separate compensation reservoir. Later, when the air is needed, the water is pumped back into the air storage cavern, pushing the air out towards the turbine.
Open your profile folder and see if you have a file named abook.mab.bak and another named history.mab.bak. Those are backups of your Personal and Collected addressbooks in the old .mab addressbook format (v78 does not use the mab format, but v68 does. This is one of the major changes introduced in v78). To restore those backups, simply rename them to their original name, e.g abook.mab and history.mab and restart Thunderbird.
You can run Thunderbird v68 with the --allow-downgrade commandline switch to downgrade your v78 profile for use with v68.
In recognition of the 50th anniversary of the Tet Offensive—which took place on January 30, 1968—Director of National Intelligence Daniel R. Coats directed intelligence agencies to review their holdings to reveal previously classified details to the public.
This page displays selected documents from the declassified volume as well as other contextual images, videos, and quotes which will be updated on a periodic basis. To view all declassified documents that have been released to date please click on the 'view documents' link. Additional items of interest can be found in the menu to provide greater context and insight into the Tet Offensive declassification effort.
Intel.gov will serve as the hub for the release of Tet offensive declassified documents. However, some agencies have dedicated locations for their corresponding documents:
Remember when Dr. Fauci emphatically told Americans not to wear facemasks when the coronavirus pandemic hit our shores more than one year ago?
If you don’t recall, allow me to jog your memory. During a “60 Minutes” interview on March 8, 2020, Dr. Fauci said, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.”
In the same interview, Fauci also said:
“While masks may block some droplets, they do not provide the level of protection people think they do. Wearing a mask may also have unintended consequences: People who wear masks tend to touch their face more often to adjust them, which can spread germs from their hands.”
Fauci was far from the only government official downplaying masks once upon a time.
On February 27, during a congressional hearing, Dr. Robert Redfield, then-director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention responded, “No,” when asked if Americans should wear facemasks to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Two days later, then-U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams tweeted, “They [facemasks] are NOT effective in preventing [the] general public from catching coronavirus.”
That was then. This is now.
So, what happened? Somehow, almost every infectious disease expert did an abrupt 180 and got fully on board the facemask bandwagon. By late spring 2020, in the blink of an eye, wearing a facemask became a requirement to participate in society.
However, the question remains: Do facemasks actually prevent the spread of COVID-19?
According to a recent study by Stanford University, “Facemasks in the COVID-19 era: A health hypothesis,” the answer remains, “No.” //
“Clinical scientific evidence challenges further the efficacy of facemasks to block human-to-human transmission or infectivity. A randomized controlled trial (RCT) of 246 participants [123 (50%) symptomatic)] who were allocated to either wearing or not wearing surgical facemask, assessing viruses transmission including coronavirus. The results of this study showed that among symptomatic individuals (those with fever, cough, sore throat, runny nose etc…) there was no difference between wearing and not wearing facemask for coronavirus droplets transmission of particles of >5 µm. Among asymptomatic individuals, there was no droplets or aerosols coronavirus detected from any participant with or without the mask, suggesting that asymptomatic individuals do not transmit or infect other people.”
What was supposed to be a luxurious urban development for wealthy foreigners has become an eerie half-finished ghost town in Turkey
Imagine a rolling landscape of towering, pristine castles almost as far as your eyes can see. It sounds breathtaking — and it is — just probably not in the way you'd think. These Disney-esque villas are in a Turkish housing development called Burj al Babas, and it's completely abandoned.
As Biden finished his remarks and tried to exit the stage, he couldn’t find his mask. Now remember that he’s outdoors and just told everyone earlier this week how you didn’t have to be masked outdoors with vaccinated people. So why was he looking for it to begin with? But he still wasn’t able to keep track of it.
Then he stepped in it again, saying he would be “in trouble.”
Biden wasn’t able to find it, so someone finally come up behind him to slip him a mask, just as Biden finds it, finally, in his pocket all along. This is the guy with the nuclear codes.
So once again, as we asked earlier in the week when he said if he took a question from the press that he was “going to be in trouble,” isn’t this guy supposed to be the most powerful man in the world? With whom is he going to be “in trouble?” Who exactly is pulling his strings?
The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) is hosting dinners to express appreciation for the brave men and women in law enforcement. Yet after the BGEA’s president, Franklin Graham, invited police in Seattle, Wash., to attend one of the free dinners at a four-star hotel, the Seattle Police Department (SPD) issued a condemnation of Graham and his organization due to their support for biblical Christianity. Leftists and antifa in Seattle have demonized police, but it seems evangelical Christians are the lowest of the low — even the police want nothing to do with them.
Earlier this month, SPD Chief Adrian Diaz revoked a department-wide email invitation to the BGEA’s Seattle-area law enforcement appreciation dinner on May 11, citing concerns about alienating “our community’s LGBTQ members.”
“An internal email was shared this week informing SPD employees of a free appreciation dinner hosted by the Rev. Franklin Graham. Based on Graham’s history and affiliations, the email has raised concerns that the SPD may not be committed to the equity of our community’s LGBTQ members,” Diaz shared in a message on the police blotter. //
As Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, put it, “You cancel a dinner by one of the most famous Christian organizations in all of American history in the name of diversity and inclusivity. That only works by the way if you take the definition of those words and turn those definitions on their head.”
People in left-leaning cities like Seattle may regard police as the dregs of society, a systemically racist institution. Yet even the police are too good for those horrific evangelical Christians.
Beginning in July 2018, the Intelligence Community will begin its release of declassified documents related to the Tet offensive. These documents will be released in three installments over a period of 15 months. Below is a list of each document added. As documents are released we will include additional features and information to improve functionality and discovery. Please check back regularly for ongoing updates.
Before the likes of the cancel culture rewrite the history of the Vietnam War, it is important to remember that US and South Vietnamese forces won virtually every major battle during the war, including the 1968 Tet Offensive, which wiped out the Viet Cong as an effective fighting force, but which the pro-Communist Walter Cronkite (and others) spun as a “strategic American defeat” to American television audiences. An excellent discussion of how Tet was falsely spun by the North Vietnamese Communists and their sycophants in the American media and anti-war movement (which was possibly the most successful information operation in history) can be found here entitled “Tet Declassified.” That Communist info op convinced Americans that the war was lost, which led to the “Vietnamization” of the war effort, to the Paris Peace Accords, to the American withdrawal from Vietnam, and ultimately to Operation Frequent Wind.
Why was the war lost? A tragedy of bad decisions and strategic errors. That the US evolved ridiculous Rules of Engagement but no mission success criteria doomed the American effort to failure. Body counts, aircraft sorties and bombs dropped, artillery rounds fired, etc. The US “counterinsurgency strategy” was completely wrong, given the overwhelming military superiority of the US versus the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. And LBJ’s management of the war effort from the Oval Office severely constrained commanders in the field. Allowing unfettered access by the American news media to unit-level operations was a strategic mistake, which led to the likes of Cronkite falsely spinning the reality on the ground to Americans watching the “television war.”
By 1971 or 1972, the war was essentially won in South Vietnam, and after the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in December of 1972, North Vietnam’s will to continue had been broken. However, it was the Democrat majority in the US Congress who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, and who deliberately forfeited the war after all US forces were withdrawn for US political reasons, as well as suspended military aid to the South Vietnamese. That latter perfidious act was the coup de grâce. Funny how nobody mentions that these days as the DC Democrats push their Communist agenda down our throats. Some things never change. //
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/tet-offensive-halted
https://www.aim.org/aim-column/the-terrible-truth-about-walter-cronkite/
And while those fears are certainly founded — Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mile all spent a significant amount of time in the news — they can also illustrate how safe the power source is. While Chernobyl had and still has a massive effect on the terrain and a reported fatality count of 40 people, almost all of the damage was due to a denial of the problem and a lack of accountability. This is proven by the Fukushima Daichii disaster — a disaster on par with Chernobyl — that was handled as it should be. As a result, there were no deaths or increase in miscarriages, stillbirths or physical and mental disorders in babies born after the accident according to the World Health Organization. The Three Mile Incident serves to further solidify this point — a total nuclear disaster occurred with no deaths, no increase in miscarriages, stillbirths or physical and mental disorders in babies, and a relatively short clean-up time. As a point of fact, nuclear energy has the lowest number of deaths per terawatt hour of energy production at 0.01 due to accidents.
Nuclear power is the one of only two renewable energy sources capable of matching the energy demand created by the industrial civilizations of today. To match the energy output of a single modern reactor, it would take approximately 400 miles of the most modern wind turbines — nearly the distance from Chicago to Pittsburgh. That’s not to say that wind, solar, and biofuels power will have no place in the future — the technology behind those sources of energy is constantly evolving. However, they simply cannot shoulder our current energy burden. On the other hand, nuclear energy is already shouldering one-fifth of the total energy burden in the United States and nearly 11% of world electricity according to the World Nuclear Association. The only renewable energy source to provide more is hydroelectric energy — whose dams can cause ecosystem flooding and affect the reproduction of endangered species.
We must start relying on nuclear energy now — it is our only way to safely and effectively handle the climate crisis with the time we have left. //
Nielsen now reports that an estimated 26.9 million people tuned in to watch President Biden’s inaugural address to a Joint Session of Congress. //
By comparison, Trump’s first address to Congress brought in 47.7 million viewers. Even his final State of the Union hit 37 million viewers. Biden trailed those totals greatly, bringing in a heavily partisan audience to boot (MSNBC was the top cable news network for ratings). //
laraffinee
2 hours ago
Yes, the reality is laughable. Just like the so called "80 million" that "voted" for him. Pathetic sock puppet. //
tomferal
2 hours ago edited
Biden has an IQ (est. 72) half of Trump's (est. 144), so if he got half the audience Trump did, that seems pretty copacetic to me. The Ying and the Yang of the Universe remain in balance.
It is the intent of the legislature that administrators, faculty members, other employees, and students at public schools, including public charter schools and institutions of higher education, respect the dignity of others, acknowledge the right of others to express differing opinions, and foster and defend intellectual honesty, freedom of inquiry and instruction, and freedom of speech and association.
The Idaho legislature finds that tenets outlined in subsection (3)(a) of this section, often found in “critical race theory,” undermine the objectives outlined in subsection (1) of this section and exacerbate and inflame divisions on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin, or other criteria in ways contrary to the unity of the nation and the well-being of the state of Idaho and its citizens.
Paragraph A
No public institution of higher education, school district, or public school, including a public charter school, shall direct or otherwise compel students to personally affirm, adopt, or adhere to any of the following tenets:
- That any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin is inherently superior or inferior
- That individuals should be adversely treated on the basis of their sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin
- That individuals, by virtue of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin, are inherently responsible for actions committed in the past by other members of the same sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin
No distinction or classification of students shall be made on account of race or color.
No course of instruction or unit of study directing or otherwise compelling students to personally affirm, adopt, or adhere to any of the tenets identified in paragraph (a) of this subsection shall be used or introduced in any institution of higher education, any school district, or any public school, including a public charter school.
*Nothing in this section should be construed to prohibit the required collection or reporting of demographic data by public schools public institutions of higher education.
Med Hypotheses. 2021 Jan; 146: 110411.
Published online 2020 Nov 22. doi: 10.1016/j.mehy.2020.110411
PMCID: PMC7680614
PMID: 33303303
Facemasks in the COVID-19 era: A health hypothesis
Baruch Vainshelboim⁎
Abstract
Many countries across the globe utilized medical and non-medical facemasks as non-pharmaceutical intervention for reducing the transmission and infectivity of coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19). Although, scientific evidence supporting facemasks’ efficacy is lacking, adverse physiological, psychological and health effects are established. Is has been hypothesized that facemasks have compromised safety and efficacy profile and should be avoided from use. The current article comprehensively summarizes scientific evidences with respect to wearing facemasks in the COVID-19 era, providing prosper information for public health and decisions making.
In granting certiorari earlier this week, the Supreme Court will finally address the constitutionality of New York’s law. However, in granting review of the case, the Supreme Court narrowed the issue for review to “whether the State’s denial of petitioners’ applications for concealed-carry licenses for self-defense violated the Second Amendment.” This question differed from that which the petitioners had sought review, namely “whether the Second Amendment allows the government to prohibit ordinary law-abiding citizens from carrying handguns outside the home for self-defense.”
Both framings of the issue, however, squarely present the Supreme Court with the question of whether Heller and McDonald’s guarantee of an individual right to keep and bear arms is limited to the home. While several circuit courts have read Heller and McDonald as limited to the possession of guns within a home, Justice Thomas’ recent dissent (joined by Justice Kavanaugh) from the denial of certiorari in a gun case exposed the folly of such a view:
As this Court explained in Heller, at the time of the founding, as now, to bear meant to carry. When used with arms, . . . the term has a meaning that refers to carrying for a particular purpose—confrontation. Thus, the right to bear arms refers to the right to wear, bear, or carry upon the person or in the clothing or in a pocket, for the purpose of being armed and ready for offensive or defensive action in a case of conflict with another person. The most natural reading of this definition encompasses public carry. Confrontations, of course, often occur outside the home. See, e.g., Moore, supra, at 937 (noting that ‘most murders occur outside the home’ in Chicago). Thus, the right to carry arms for self-defense inherently includes the right to carry in public.
This conclusion not only flows from the definition of bear Arms but also from the natural use of the language in the text. As I have stated before, it is extremely improbable that the Framers understood the Second Amendment to protect little more than carrying a gun from the bedroom to the kitchen. The meaning of the term bear Arms is even more evident when read in the context of the phrase “right . . . to keep and bear Arms. To speak of bearing arms solely within one’s home . . . would conflate bearing with keeping, in derogation of [Heller’s] holding that the verbs codified distinct rights. In short, it would take serious linguistic gymnastics—and a repudiation of this Court’s decision in Heller—to claim bear Arms does not extend the Second Amendment beyond the home.
Justice Thomas added to the above reasoning an analysis of “cases and treatises from England, the founding era, and the antebellum period,” all of which “confirm that the right to bear arms includes the right to carry in public.”
Of course, several justices are nonetheless likely to resort to linguistic gymnastics to avoid what they perceive as bad (or unpopular) policy. But will five justices stand firm? We will know next year.
For starters, Sen. Scott did something that most on the left would not expect from a black conservative: He acknowledged the existence of racism and even discussed his experiences. Moreover, he did so without pretending that Neo-Nazis are systematically murdering scores of unsuspecting black men every single day. //
Secondly, Sen. Scott gave them an argument that he knew they could not adequately debunk. If they disagree with the senator about the prevalence of racism in America, they have to prove that it is an overall racist nation in 2021. This is quite a gargantuan task, given that the vast majority of all Americans are not racist. For this reason, the so-called progressive crowd is lying about his remarks – they are unable to counter his assertion.