This series of articles thus far could be summed up with two very simple questions:

• What research has Dr. Fauci Funded?
• Where was that research conducted?

It is indisputable that Dr. Fauci’s NIAID has funded gain-of-function research at the University of Wisconsin, The University of Tokyo, Erasmus University in the Netherlands, as well as other universities and labs across the country and around the world. As I have previously covered, there are two statements made by Dr. Fauci that either make him woefully misinformed about his own organization or a bald-faced liar.

• That the Dr. Ralph Baric did not conduct gain-of-function research.
• That if he did, that the research was within the bounds established by the HHS.

As covered in Part II, Baric and UNC were requested to cease gain-of-function research on the SARS virus as well as other Influenza and Ebola research, and the NIAID was ordered to cease funding gain-of-function research after the end of the “[then] current active budget period,” or, the annual period in which the funding was authorized. In the case of Dr. Baric’s research, that was May 31st, 2015, or just over seven months after the ordered gain-of-function research pause. When May 31st, 2015 rolled around, Baric’s research was reauthorized by the NIAID, the same in 2016. In 2017, the project was again reauthorized this time, including over $835,000 in funding. The HHS did not lift the NIAID ban on funding until December 2017. For Dr. Fauci to state that Baric didn’t perform gain-of-function research (he does) and that if he did it was within the bounds established by the HHS (it wasn’t), is flat-out untrue. The HHS would not have oversight of research conducted without their authorization or (presumably) their knowledge.

A Belarusian passenger plane flying from Minsk to Barcelona turned back on Wednesday, data from website Flightradar24 showed, after Poland said it may not be able to enter French airspace.

European Union leaders have directed officials to draw up new sanctions against Belarus and work out a way to ban Belarusian airlines from the bloc's skies after a Ryanair flight carrying a dissident journalist was forced to land in Minsk.

Cactus

12 Jun, 2020
The main problem with hydrogen is that it does not exist in an unbound, free form on Earth. It occurs combined with oxygen as water, or in hydrocarbons, like crude oil or natural gas. To make pure hydrogen it needs to be liberated from the compound it is in, and this takes energy. Hydrogen is not a source of energy. It is a means to store energy.

It will be easier for everyone to make synthetic hydrocarbons using renewable or nuclear power and use these synthetic hydrocarbons directly in currently exists turbine and piston engines. //

Pete
3.3K Points

12 Jun, 2020
Hydrogen is a pain to transport and store, increasing costs significantly.

As of right now, producing H2 for fuel cell ground vehicles involves cracking it from hydrocarbons, which is still a dirty process and only shifts the pollution elsewhere. Electrolysis is the end goal, but is extremely energy intensive. We'd need to build out a fair amount of renewable and nuclear power to fulfill that increased demand.

Thermoelectric (TE) conversion offers carbon-free power generation from geothermal, waste, body or solar heat, and shows promise to be the next-generation energy conversion technology. At the core of such TE conversion, there lies an all solid-state thermoelectric device which enables energy conversion without the emission of noise, vibrations, or pollutants. To this, a POSTECH research team proposed a way to design the next-generation thermoelectric device that exhibits remarkably simple manufacturing process and structure compared to the conventional ones, while displaying improved energy conversion efficiency using the spin Seebeck effect (SSE).

Lachlan Markay
@lachlan
New: 15 GOP state treasurers are threatening to pull state assets from any banks that accede to John Kerry-led admin efforts to discourage lending to/investment in fossil fuel companies
States threaten to pull assets from banks that drop coal
axios.com //

This is the right move. You are never going to convince a bunch of woke, left-leaning CEOs that they shouldn’t do something with faux appeals to principle. All they understand is financial pain, and every legal tool should be used to inflict it until they learn their lesson. //

Freedom does not become any less crushed if it’s private, big business doing the crushing. Trying to control people without their consent by using the power of large corporations is not capitalism. It’s cronyism. Republicans that recognize that will be equipped to fight the battles that are undeniably coming our way. Republicans that don’t should get out of the way because the rest of us aren’t content with being subjugated by the left under the guise of principle.

When have Democrats EVER given up something truly important to them in order to seal a compromise with their Republican political opponents? It simply never happens!

Compromise and fair dealings are possible between willing parties who share moral values and deal honestly with one another – at least in the non-political realm. For example, compromise on price in commercial transactions is legitimate. //

Whether through barter or monetary exchange, transactions are possible between all kinds of people regardless of “race, color, creed,” etc. The system works well for tangible commodities; compromise is the underlying concept that makes such transactions possible (at some point, both parties have to agree to the exchange). However, in matters of morality and truth, there can be no compromise.

The Left have hijacked the basic concept of compromise in the political realm by inserting the “free radical” (and malarkey) of “moral equivalence” into the equation. Moral equivalence is the Marxist claim that two radically different people/nations/political-ideological systems are taking the same actions and should be judged and treated the same way. The problem is that the concepts of good and evil are purposely not considered. Moral equivalence (also referred to as moral relativity) is a cancer on the body politic. //

Where do you compromise with the pro-abortion crowd in the Democrat Party? At the number of weeks at which a pregnancy can be legally terminated? On what the definition of “health of the mother” means in allowing an abortion? On whether parents have any say in their minor daughter’s decision? No moral equivalence exists in this situation, and those supporting abortion never discuss the moral dilemma involved in ending the life of a human being – mainly because they suppress what their consciences scream at them about the barbarism of abortion.

The bottom line is this: to suggest compromise with such people is to sanction abortion. There is no other way to put it. At what price do conservatives compromise their souls to agree with this evil and immoral practice? //

What’s the bipartisan compromise that enhances conservative principles and morals on any of those topics? We are not going to see anything from the Left other than a demand that we ignore our principles and concerns, and when we “compromise,” we inch American culture leftward just as the Left have planned and executed since the days of Woodrow Wilson and his “progressive amendments”.

Conservatives must remember that, at times, it is easy to believe that the item we think we desire (compromise and the elusive comity that we expect from the Left when we do compromise with them) is worth more than it actually is and underestimate the value of our own positions. //

“Compromise” has been a losing strategy for us for decades. Compromise with the Left has gotten us into the deep hole in which we find the nation today. It’s the reason we’ve been losing the culture war and why the Left have taken over most of our political and cultural institutions. We need to fight back and DEFEAT the Left politically at every turn – on every subject while defending our core moral principles – and forget about the fool’s gold that is “compromise.” It’s our only hope if we wish to preserve the Republic.

Fauci reversed course. Now we’ve gone from “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology” to “there’s no way of guaranteeing” that it happened, and what’s more, than we, the American people, paid for it.

Update, 3:30 pm EDT: Under bright blue skies, the Falcon 9 rocket took off from Florida on Wednesday afternoon and promptly delivered its Starlink payload into orbit. This booster has truly become the workhorse of the global launch industry:

After learning to crawl, walk and run, the Falcon 9 is now sprinting. Today:

• 100th consecutive, successful launch of a Falcon 9

• 16th launch of 2021, a cadence of one rocket every nine days

• 6th launch during the last 33 days, once every five days pic.twitter.com/kmuBJwA82i

— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) May 26, 2021

A company from Australia called Graphene Manufacturing Group (GMG) has announced some interesting test results from aluminum-ion battery testing. This new type of rechargeable battery can charge ten times faster than current lithium-ion units. While charging significantly faster, the new battery type also lasts longer and doesn’t require a cooling system to operate. //

The company has been testing coin cell prototypes of the aluminum-ion battery ahead of delivering them to manufacturing partners and has disclosed some performance figures. The battery offers a power density of around 7000 W/kg, which is a massive amount of power closing in on the power density provided by ultracapacitors capable of 12,000-14,000 W/kg.

The new type of battery has an energy density of 150-160 Wh/kg, which is about 60 percent of the energy per weight of the best lithium-ion batteries available today. That spec means these batteries aren’t well-suited to electric vehicles at first glance. //

The batteries can charge extremely fast, with GMG saying that a smartphone running an aluminum-ion battery could charge fully in one to five minutes. What that would mean if aluminum-ion batteries were used in an electric vehicle is that it would only drive about 60 percent the distance of a comparable vehicle with the lithium-ion battery, but its charge speed may be so fast less driving range wouldn’t matter.

Meet Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood as we all know, murders over 300,000 children in the womb every year.

Of those, the Family Research Council using CDC data reports, 36 percent are Black //

How did we get to this point? It starts with Margaret Sanger and her belief in — nay, active promotion of — eugenics. Her stated desire was the same as a certain well-known Austrian Corporal. According to a number of quotes laid out in, The Strange World of Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review: Part I.

Her aim was to prevent the procreation of those she deemed unfit “To Create a Race of Thoroughbreds.”

https://www.hli.org/resources/sangers-birth-control-review-part-i/#_edn4 //

audax
a year ago edited
Something I wrote a few years ago:

Someone asked me to "pass on" a meme about "Assisted Dying Laws" because "it is so easy"! Let's put the "people in pain" out of their misery!

It has ALL happened before! This Eugenics philosophy thing. It sounds so "gentle", this killing. I certainly hope I never become one of these "Lebensunwertes Leben". You don't remember the "Lebensunwertes Leben"? You don't remember the past? Well, you are on the road to repeat it. Because this ALL happened before, the old, the sick, those in "pain"...all became the "Lebensunwertes Leben"...."The Life Unworthy of Life".

The first of the "Lebensunwertes Leben" were the people in pain and the "erbkraken", those with congenital, cognitive, and physical disabilities like the feeble-minded, the epileptic, the schizophrenic, the manic-depressive, the cerebral palsied, those with muscular dystrophy, the deaf, the blind, the weak, and the insane.

Up next, were the degenerate's and the homosexuals.

After that, they came for the idle, the dissident's, and the prisoners.

Then the Roma (Gypsies), the Slavs, and the other peoples of color, had their turn....

....and finally, they came for the Jews.

Yes, all of the above started out as the "Lebensunwertes Leben"...."The Life Unworthy of Life"...who became the "Untermensch", the "Subhuman Creatures", the "Lesser Men", and it all started with the people in pain....so when you "pass this on" because "it's so easy" remember...it has all happened before! We didn't like how it turned out in the 1930's and '40's and we won't like what it turns into now - Gregory Wilson aka audax

Tom Cotton
@TomCottonAR
🚨 The Biden administration shut down the work to identify the origins of COVID.

If "quality of the evidence" was the problem, why hasn't the Biden Team launched their own investigation?
Pompeo-led effort to hunt down Covid lab theory shut down by Biden administration over concerns...
cnn.com //

But if “politicization” was the issue, why didn’t the Biden folks just launch their own investigation? The answer seems clear: They weren’t interested in the truth, despite the fact that they should have been looking into it. That’s concerning.

Earlier this week, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis published findings from a study indicating that people who experienced mild cases of COVID-19 may, in fact, have a long-term — perhaps lifelong — antibody protection against re-infection.

For a home or business, the economics of installing battery storage are often challenging. While falling costs are gradually improving one end of the equation, a new study led by Stefan Englberger at the Technical University of Munich highlights the other side of the balance—optimizing the financial benefits.

The claim that U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, are maintained on “hair-trigger alert” has persisted despite multiple senior military leaders having discredited that falsehood.

One such accusant is President Joe Biden’s nominee to be the Department of Defense’s assistant secretary for nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs, Deborah Rosenblum. She has stated that U.S. and Russian ICBMs are “in a hair-trigger mode, leaving no time for either president to make a considered decision, if he or she thought the nation was under attack: No time to gather data, no time to figure out if it’s a spoof, no time to discover mistakes.” //

An ICBM is not like a loaded gun lying on the table with the safety off and a finger on the trigger. Nor is there a “big red button” waiting to be pressed.

To use an analogy coined by Richard, by the logic of “hair trigger,” our cars are on hair-trigger alert, too, waiting in the driveway ready to go. But you don’t see cars driving around accidentally. And cars only require three steps to go—turning on the engine, putting it into drive, and hitting to gas.

Terracycle and Loop founder and CEO Tom Szaky says the economics of the recycling business are broken in key ways, but consumer and corporate interest in building a circular economy continues to grow.

Low oil prices, bans on imported recyclables in countries like China, and the latest trends in packaging design make it harder to recycle. //

Recycling may make you feel better in a very small way about your role in helping to avert a global apocalypse, but even in "friendly" places, from John Oliver to NPR podcasts, recycling, especially of plastics, is being given a hard look. More people are wondering: Does it work?

The debate is not new. For years the economics of plastic recycling have been questioned. But the problem is not going away. The globe is already producing two trillion tons of solid waste a year and is on pace to add more than a trillion more on an annual basis in the coming decades, according to World Bank data. A recent study found that the 20 top petrochemical companies in the world, among the group Exxon Mobil and Dow, are responsible for 55% of the world's single-use plastic waste, and in the U.S., specifically, we are generating about 50 kilograms of throwaway plastic a year, per person. //

Reusable versus recyclable

Economics are busted but the recycling mindset matters

RedState has been driving the news cycle surrounding Dr. Anthony Fauci’s connections to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and funding that went there for gain-of-function testing. The obvious indication here is that Fauci, via grants he did not exercise proper oversight of, actually played a role in COVID-19 being developed and released into the world.

Scott Hounsell has covered that topic extensively, recently noting that Fauci’s denials to Sen. Rand Paul appeared to be a lie (see Dr. Fauci’s Testimony to Rand Paul on ‘Gain-of-Function’ Research Certainly Seems Like It Was Untrue). His article is extremely thorough so make sure and go read it.

It looks like Scott’s painstaking research and highlighting of the issue has paid off because Fauci is now suddenly changing his tune. While speaking to Sen. John Kennedy, the supposed “top doctor” in regards to COVID began to hedge, now claiming that there’s “no way of guaranteeing” that the funding in question didn’t go toward gain-of-function research to produce COVID-19.

Despite the humor and hilarious candor, it looks like a pretty nice plane.

Ty Ferkin from Caldwell, Idaho, is selling his Piper PA-12 Super Cruiser. And it’s not just any Super Cruiser. To hear the owner’s view on it, he’s amazed it ever managed to get from Point A to Point B, at least with him as the pilot. But this plane will change your life, and he insists, “You’ll be the living embodiment of those bush pilots we see in the movies. Fearless, not even noticing that their bird hasn’t been washed in 8 years, or that not a single control surface is the same color.” And he further claims that this PA-12 is “Guaranteed to land and take off from any strip in the Idaho backcountry with the word ‘Creek’ in the name.”

MURFREESBORO, Ark. (KNWA/KFTA) — A man from Washington visiting Crater of Diamonds State Park found a two-carat diamond during his third day on the hunt at the iconic spot.

26-year-old Christian Liden, of Poulsbo, Wash., said he wanted to find the raw materials to make his own engagement ring. He started by panning for gold around his home state. After five years, he had accumulated enough for the ring. Up next, it was time for the diamond — which led him to Arkansas.

If you want answers as to where your taxpayer dollars are going and how they’re being used, the Drug Enforcement Administration doesn’t seem to want to tell you much as they refused entry to a Republican delegation that ventured down to a DEA border facility for some answers.

Today the US Supreme Court announced it would take up the issue of abortion in the upcoming fall term in a case that promises to be significant.

The case is called Jackson Women’s Health Organization vs. Dobbs. //

This could very well be the most important abortion decision of the past 10 or so years because even though Mississippi’s appeal included three questions:

(1) Whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional; (2) whether the validity of a pre-viability law that protects women’s health, the dignity of unborn children and the integrity of the medical profession and society should be analyzed under Planned Parenthood v. Casey‘s “undue burden” standard or Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt‘s balancing of benefits and burdens; and (3) whether abortion providers have third-party standing to invalidate a law that protects women’s health from the dangers of late-term abortions.

the Supreme Court is only going to hear arguments on issue #1. This is not an argument over procedure; it is a question that will frame the abortion debate in the future. If the Court agrees with Mississippi, then the door is open for those states that wish to regulate all abortions. If the abortion industry wins, then all “pre-viable” babies can be killed without mercy. As Jeanne Mancini of March for Life observes, “the United States is one of only seven countries – including China and North Korea – that allows abortions through all nine months of pregnancy. An overwhelming majority of Americans agree that this goes way too far, in fact 70% think abortion should be limited to – at most – the first three months of pregnancy.”

Ratings from Neilsen Media Research reported Tuesday indicated that CNN lost 67% of its total viewers since January, when Donald Trump left the White House.

During the primetime hours of 8:00 p.m. – 11:00 p.m. (EST), CNN lost around 65% of its total viewers since January. In the critical 25-54 age demographic, the network lost 71% of its viewers for both the day and primetime. //

All networks had a drop in viewership since January (Fox had a 12% drop overall) so there is some burnout naturally. Yet the massive loss over at CNN is something to behold and amazing to watch. Well, actually not watch, being a lot of you aren’t.

The Washington Post
@washingtonpost
Under new Biden administration rules curtailing immigration enforcement, ICE carried out fewer than 3,000 deportations last month, the lowest level on record
Biden administration reins in street-level enforcement by ICE as officials try to refocus agency...
washingtonpost.com //

To put that 3,000 deportations in perspective, CBP reported 178,622 encounters with illegal immigrants in April of 2021. With almost none of those people being deported, they are instead being let out into the interior, often without even a court date to report back for. There is no immigration system anymore. It’s just a chaotic mess where CBP and ICE agents are left with their hands tied behind their backs.

Meanwhile, real people are suffering, including women and children who are abused or killed at the hands of the cartels who are facilitating the illegal immigration surge at the southern border. Because a Democrat is in charge, though, there is now very little coverage of what’s going on. That includes the record numbers of migrant children being kept in captivity as well, something that Trump was constantly lambasted for despite having far fewer in custody at any point during his administration.

What is the end game here? To illegally import the entire population of Central America? Where are these people going to go? Where are they going to work? Where will they live? Who is going to support them when they are thrown in the street with nowhere to go by the Biden administration?

Yet the creativity that the city is famous for does not extend to the government. They favor the generic and boring, and refuse to see the advantages of having two airports.

Now that BER is online, Tegel could be updated and resized to its original hexagon of 14 gates and 16 check-in counters to serve select airlines, the government or private jets willing to pay for the close access to the city. But once they rip up the runway there will be no going back.

History gave unified Berlin three functioning airports. One by one they have disappeared. When Tegel is gone, the jet age will be over for Berlin. Its BER replacement is far away and no new airport will ever be built in the city.

For 46 years Tegel was an eccentric and exceptional addition to Berlin. May it remain in our memories forever as the airport built around the idea that form should follow function — the one international airport where travelers came first.

In the early part of 2003, doctors around the world became baffled by thousands of cases of people with flu-like symptoms and pneumonia. Originally beginning in the Hong Kong region and then spreading around the world, this mystery illness was killing people faster than they could be diagnosed.