Imagine my surprise when I saw the open letter published late Thursday in Science Magazine online, is titled, “Investigate the Origins of COVID-19.” As I reported earlier, it’s penned by renowned virological expert physicians from MIT, Harvard, Cal Tech, Yale, Cambridge, Berkeley, and Stanford – including the US researcher who worked directly with the Wuhan Institute of Virology performing gain-of-function research in coronaviruses – states that the “accidental release possibility remains viable,” meaning they believe there’s a viable possibility that this pandemic is the result of an accidental release from WIV. //

Does anyone else find it funny that the organization that funded the very type of research that may have led to the release of COVID-19 is suddenly defending the Chinese government’s lack of transparency (or cover-up, depending upon your choice of words)? Why are they all circling the wagons when it comes to research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

A Cornell University geneticist posits that life discovered on the red planet might have actually originated on earth in NASA labs, despite thorough on-site cleaning procedures and spacecraft assembly in specialized rooms. //

Amid the latest exploration and search for life on Mars, a Cornell scientist wonders what humans could have accidentally “carried into space and survived the trip to make its new home on Mars”

"Microbes have been on Earth for billions of years, and they are everywhere," Mason wrote.

“They are inside us, on our bodies, and all around us. Some can sneak through even the cleanest of clean rooms.” //

"It turns out that clean rooms might serve as an evolutionary selection process for the hardiest bugs that then may have a greater chance of surviving a journey to Mars," Mason wrote.

Researchers' findings, according to Mason, might cause what is called "forward contamination." Forward contamination is where travelers take something intentionally or unintentionally from one planet to another. Mason adds that new organisms "can wreak havoc" on a new ecosystem.

There are standard size capsules that are named by numerical values. They are numbered: 000, 00, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. These sizes are the same for all types of Gelatin, HPMC and Pullulan. The majority of capsule filling machinery are manufactured to be compatible with these standard sizes.

We have put together this guide to help you choose the best size for your needs.

Below is an interactive chart to help you choose the best fit. Click on each size to highlight the specifications of that size capsule.

Facebook is pushing a mysterious and aggressive ‘privacy update’ on WhatsApp users. Here’s why

Fri 14 May 2021 06.14 EDT //

Facebook, for its part, has spent the months since the announcement downplaying the significance of these privacy updates by arguing that its latest changes will only affect communication with business accounts (WhatsApp Business was launched in January 2018). In truth, the changes will allow Facebook to collect payment and transaction data from WhatsApp users, meaning Facebook will be able to gather even more data and target users with ever more personalized ads. WhatsApp has also removed a passage in its privacy policy about opting out of sharing data with Facebook. Facebook argues that this simply reflects what’s been in place since 2016. That is exactly the problem.

Today’s WhatsApp shares a great deal of information with Facebook it promised it wouldn’t, including account information, phone numbers, how often and how long people use WhatsApp, information about how they interact with other users, IP addresses, browser details, language, time zone, etc. This latest incursion has highlighted just how much data sharing has been going on for years without most users’ knowledge.

On May 26, 2020, Dr. Baker performed an autopsy on George Floyd’s body following his death. He is the only expert who testified at Chauvin’s trial who actually examined Floyd’s “injuries.”

On May 29, 2020, the Hennepin County Coroner’s Office issued a press release that reported the preliminary findings to the Hennepin County Prosecutor’s Office as stating that the autopsy “revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation.”

But on June 1, 2020 — three days later — the official Coroner’s Report described the cause of death: “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restrain, and neck compression.”

What happened during that three-day time frame is the subject of the new defense motion which, if true, could potentially help Chauvin along with the three remaining defendants.

The motion contends that after Dr. Baker’s preliminary findings were quoted in court documents, he received a telephone call from Dr. Roger Mitchell, the former Medical Examiner of Washington D.C.,

During this first conversation, Dr. Baker reaffirmed his conclusion from the observations during the autopsy that he did not believe the neck compression played any role in Floyd’s death.

After the call, Dr. Mitchell is said to have written an op-ed intended for publication in the Washington Post that was going to criticize Dr. Baker’s conclusions. Dr. Mitchell called Dr. Baker a second time to advise Dr. Baker of his intention to have the piece published. The motion filed by Thao’s attorney recounts part of that second conversation, and attributes to Dr. Mitchell the following comments:

[Y]ou don’t want to be the medical examiner who tells everyone they didn’t see what they saw. You don’t want to be the smartest person in the room and be wrong. Said there was a way to articulate the cause and manner of death that ensures you are telling the truth about what you are observing and via all of the investigation. Mitchell said neck compression has to be in the diagnosis.

The motion then notes that the final autopsy report has a reference to “neck compression” as having contributed to the cause of Floyd’s death, which was inconsistent with the Preliminary Report which triggered Dr. Mitchell to call. //

The motion contends the contents of both conversations, and Dr. Mitchell threatening to publish an Op-Ed in the Washington Post critical of Dr. Baker amounted to “coercion” under the law, and that the defense should have been provided with evidence of the contacts between Dr. Baker and Dr. Mitchell given Dr. Mitchell’s connection to the prosecution evidenced by the November 5 meeting with four members of the prosecution team.

What separates us from the Third World in our politics, he opined, are the twin concepts of peaceful transfer of power via the ballot box rather than by military intervention and the unwritten and unspoken principle that victors do not use the police power of the state to punish the vanquished. Without the second concept, no sane person will ever relinquish office if they run the risk of ending up imprisoned or on the gallows. Once politics become a blood sport, he said, there is no way to stop the slide into rule by people with guns. I’d never really looked at it that way and can’t, even today, disagree with him. If there is any debt owed to Gerald Ford, it is his preservation of the republic by pardoning Richard Nixon.

With that said, it seems as though the left, which has long detested America, is hellbent on crossing that redline and pushing this nation ever closer to one where the abuse of law and the use of the judicial apparatus as stormtroopers and enforcers rather than the rule of law and respect for tradition prevails. If Politico is to be believed, stay with me here, the left is anticipating that President Trump will soon be indicted on state felony charges in New York: POLITICO Playbook: How Palm Beach is preparing for a possible Trump indictment: //

We need to anticipate that President Trump will, indeed, be indicted by a New York grand jury. The New York attorney general and the Manhattan district attorney have too much political capital involved in their highly public investigation of President Trump to shrug and say, “nothing there, folks.” With the New York power structure in utter chaos thanks to Andrew Cuomo’s predatory behavior, casual cruelty, calculated evasion of the law, and superhuman hubris, there is literally no mechanism left within that state to prevent a revenge indictment that could very well propel the instigator to national prominence. They will give no thought to the long-term damage done to our political life or even the damage done to the Democrat party in 2022 and 2024. The lizard-brain urge to lash out at President Trump is simply too strong to be resisted. //

There won’t be any kind of a face-off between Ron DeSantis and Cyrus Vance over the corpus of Donald Trump. If he’s indicted, he will end up on trial. He will be convicted. He will spend the rest of his life in jail. The left will think they have taught us a lesson, and they will be right. The next Republican president will be under enormous pressure to take a similar Democrat scalp. To be on the safe side and make it hurt, he’ll probably have to take down several prominent Democrats. And the left will ‘wave the bloody shirt’ and demand retribution the next time they occupy the White House. The real question becomes why a Republican from a Blue or even a Purple state would even bother to run for the presidency and what he would do when leaving office meant either prison or financial ruin in defending himself? //

Laocoon • 12 hours ago

Outstanding post!

Take a look at the events that led up to the Spanish Civil War sometime. This criminalization of political opposition, anti-religious fanaticism, doctrinaire socialism/communism/anarchism, a willingness by the state to tolerate political violence from the forces of the left, the personal danger of opposing the favored factions of the Republic...all these combined to spark the Spanish Civil War. The persecution of any non-socialist political opposition to the Republic forced many of their victims to take up arms just to survive.

Increasingly the US is starting to resemble that awful conflict.

Usernotfound Laocoon • 12 hours ago

I’m afraid there is a line that shouldn’t be crossed and the left is desperately searching for it. //

uplateagain • 17 hours ago

The indictment of Trump could well be an historical turning point. A match to pooled gasoline. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The British march on Concord to confiscate weaponry. Anyone thinking such an act won't inevitably portend a lot of retribution at the least (actual physical retribution... not political) and quite possibly ultimately full scale civil war, has no concept of how abused and righteously indignant half or more of the country is already feeling about Democratic criminality, bullying, and their working attempt to establish a one-party system and eventual overthrow of Constitutional government and the free market system.

The symbolism of arresting Trump on trumped-up charges would be too great for way too many people to stomach.

Fyrch uplateagain • 2 hours ago

While I may agree with you in spirit, I don't believe the actual anti-fascists in America are cohesive enough to fight back.

The Progressive fascists yell about breaking the system & Whyte Soup/Remacy because they count on the citizenry to meekly bend the knee to outrageous demands simply in order to get on with their lives. It's not just this silliness with wearing masks; we were already letting high school dropouts sexually molest us simply to board a plane, and meekly allowing those in power to get away with the most egregious abuses of law because some paid to watch big men chasing little balls while the rest of us paid to applaud (quoting Michael Crichton).

America's Republic was already sliding into the abyss, not because of a fake insurrection but because people were watching a horde of hOOrs called the Kardashians. //

clconnett • 2 days ago
If the Democrats go down this road there are two options: they stop with one scalp, and we don't retaliate, or we retaliate and they do the same. The problem is that we can't not retaliate. Once they use the state to arrest and detain the politico opposition, there's no closing that door. Either we concede the nation, or violence reigns.

This is not something we should cheer for, but a result we should mourn. //

metalman304 • 2 days ago

Nice theory but think about this....Cy Vance was and is, bossom buddies with Hillary Cankles Clinton. There is no way in blue hell he would retire before taking the first chair on the prosecution of the 45th President and Hillaryś arch enemy. His retirement is more like a signal that a ham sandwhich will be easier to indict than DJT. //

clconnett • 2 days ago

No. It's stupid to wish for further deterioration of our political discourse. This isn't something we callously invite, it's a reality we face with stoicism.

Think about it: Where does something like this end? They take Trump, so we arrest, try and imprison Pelosi, Schumer, and Nadler. So they come for Cruz, DeSantis, Noem, Hawley, etc. The heat is always ratcheted up until... what? What's the final outcome?

I get the attitude of, "We'll let them have it!" Okay. And how many will you, personally, visit in prison, in the hospital, or at their wake? The violence of policing will lead to violence in the streets. And we're all losers then. //

hawkeye1903 • 2 days ago

Yes, stupid to wish for. However - it's very much like the situation facing Israel. We would live in peace with democrats if they would as well, but the democrats have zero intention of letting us live in peace or "otherwise live" if we don't succumb to their boot on our neck. I already know where the democrats intend "it" to end.... we can mourn it, and face it, and prepare for it at the same time.

The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) has been the keeper of U.S. wildfire data for decades, tracking both the number of wildfires and acreage burned all the way back to 1926. After making the entire dataset public for decades, in a blatant act of cherry-picking, NIFC “disappeared” a vast portion of it. Now, NIFC only shows wildfire data from 1983.

Fortunately, the internet never forgets, which means the entire dataset is preserved on the world wide web. Data prior to 1983 show U.S. wildfires were far worse 100 years ago, both in frequency and total acreage burned, than they are today.

By disappearing all data prior to 1983, which just happens to be the lowest point in the dataset for the number of fires, NIFC data now show a positive slope of worsening wildfire aligning with increased global temperatures. This truncated dataset is convenient for claiming “climate change is making wildfires worse,” but flawed because it lacks the context of the full dataset.

In June 2011 when this data was first made publicly available by NIFC, the agency said, “Figures prior to 1983 may be revised as NIFC verifies historical data.”

In December 2017, I published an article titled “Is climate change REALLY the culprit causing California’s wildfires?” pointing out the federal government’s own data showed wildfires had declined significantly since the early 1900s. Of course, that undermined claims made by the media that climate change was making wildfires more frequent and severe. Curiously, sometime between January 14 and March 7, 2018, shortly after that article appeared, NIFC added a new caveat on its data page.

According to NIFC, “NIFC compiles annual wildland fire statistics for federal and state agencies. This information is provided through Situation Reports, which have been in use for several decades. Prior to 1983, sources of these figures are not known, or cannot be confirmed, and were not derived from the current situation reporting process. As a result, the figures prior to 1983 should not be compared to later data.”

With the Biden administration now in control of NIFC, the agency now says, “Prior to 1983, the federal wildland fire agencies did not track official wildfire data using current reporting processes. As a result, there is no official data prior to 1983 posted on this site.” //

The NIFC decision to declare data prior to 1983 “unreliable” and remove it is not just hiding important wildfire history, but cherry-picking a dataset starting point that is the lowest in the entire record to ensure that an upward trend exists from that point. //

It seems NIFC has caved to political pressure to disappear inconvenient wildfire data. This action is unscientific, dishonest, manipulative, and possibly fraudulent. With this action, NIFC is no longer trustworthy as a source of reliable information on wildfires.

Anthony Watts (awatts@heartland.org) is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute.

No injuries were reported in a midair collision involving a Key Lime Air SW4 Metroliner and a Cirrus SR-22 over Colorado’s Cherry Creek State Park on Wednesday. According to the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office, there were two people onboard the Cirrus and the aircraft’s CAPS whole-airframe parachute was deployed. The only person onboard the Metroliner was the pilot, who was able to land the aircraft at Centennial Airport (KAPA) following the accident with near catastrophic damage to the aircraft’s rear fuselage section.