Volume 23, Number 19 - 10/1/20 | Arlington Institute

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Volume 23, Number 19 – 10/1/20

FUTURE FACTS – FROM THINK LINKS

DID YOU KNOW THAT–

In the complete absence of oxygen, trapping light and arsenic was once a viable mode of photosynthesis in the Precambrian period.
Researchers at the University of Queensland have determined mathematically that a time traveler could make changes, but the original outcome would still find a way to happen — maybe not the same way it happened in the first timeline but close enough that no significant outcome would be altered.
The Body Shop will buy 600 tons of waste plastic next year.
A jet suit for paramedics which would see people who have accidents in wooded areas reached in minutes has been tested in the UK.

Our Mysterious Human Origins:
Regina Meredith in Berkeley Springs, October 17th

Always riveting, Regina’s talk brings an alternative view of human origin that touches upon the polarized nature of being Human.

Regina Meredith will discuss an alternative view of human origin that touches upon the polarized nature of being Human. We will explore the subject from a pre-historic vantage point, from the point where highly aware and creative non-physical beings blended with the best version of animal man on the earth in an unintended experiment.

There are hints of Edgar Cayce’s transmissions in this story but it is further fleshed out. This will lead into the implications of how our multi-dimensional mind functions within the 3D context and explains how Humans can be so easily influenced mentally and emotionally.

I spoke with Regina the other day about what she’s been up to and what she will be discussing with us in Berkeley Springs. Click below to watch.

If you can’t make it in person you may enjoy the livestream option. You will also have access to a replay that will be available for two weeks following the event! Click below for full information.

TRANSITION TALKS MAGAZINE

THINK LINKS

Magically Morphing Masks – (Real Climate Science – September 18, 2020)
This video clip presents evidence for the uselessness of face masks, at best, and quotes Dr. Fauci and a statement from the CDC (in May, 2020) and the World Health Organization (in March, 2020) to support its points. Contrary to US practice, Sweden achieved herd immunity without mandating masks and without lock downs. And having younger people get the virus is “a very good thing” since they represent a low risk community and this would speed the country reaching herd immunity.

Covid-19: Do Many People Have Pre-existing Immunity?- (BMJ/British Medical Journal – September 17, 2020)
With public health responses around the world predicated on the assumption that the virus entered the human population with no pre-existing immunity before the pandemic, serosurvey data are leading many to conclude that the virus has, as Mike Ryan, WHO’s head of emergencies, put it, “a long way to burn.” Yet a stream of studies that have documented SARS-CoV-2 reactive T cells in people without exposure to the virus are raising questions about just how new the pandemic virus really is, with many implications. At least six studies have reported T cell reactivity against SARS-CoV-2 in 20% to 50% of people with no known exposure to the virus. In a study of donor blood specimens obtained in the US between 2015 and 2018, 50% displayed various forms of T cell reactivity to SARS-CoV-2. A similar study that used specimens from the Netherlands reported T cell reactivity in two of 10 people who had not been exposed to the virus. In Germany reactive T cells were detected in a third of SARS-CoV-2 seronegative healthy donors (23 of 68). In Singapore a team analyzed specimens taken from people with no contact or personal history of SARS or covid-19; 12 of 26 specimens taken before July 2019 showed reactivity to SARS-CoV-2, as did seven of 11 from people who were seronegative against the virus. Reactivity was also discovered in the UK and Sweden. Though these studies are small and do not yet provide precise estimates of pre-existing immunological responses to SARS-CoV-2, they are hard to dismiss, with several being published in Cell and Nature. Researchers are also confident that they have made solid inroads into ascertaining the origins of the immune responses. “Our hypothesis, of course, was that it’s so called ‘common cold’ coronaviruses, because they’re closely related,” said Daniela Weiskopf, senior author of a paper in Science that confirmed this hypothesis. “We have really shown that this is a true immune memory and it is derived in part from common cold viruses.” This growing body of research documenting pre-existing immunological responses to SARS-CoV-2 may force pandemic planners to revisit some of their foundational assumptions about how to measure population susceptibility and monitor the extent of epidemic spread.

Battle Rages Inside US Hospitals over How Covid-19 Strikes and Kills – (Guardian – September 23, 2020)
If you have been wondering why there was so much flap over the CDC announcement – and then very rapid retraction – about Covid-19 aerosol spread when most people have been pretty much assuming it for some time, here finally is the answer: money. Frontline healthcare workers are locked in a heated dispute with many infection control specialists and hospital administrators over how the novel coronavirus is spread – and therefore, what level of protective gear is appropriate. At issue is the degree to which the virus is airborne – capable of spreading through tiny particles lingering in the air – or primarily transmitted through large, faster-falling droplets from, say, a sneeze or cough. This wonky, seemingly semantic debate has a real-world impact on what sort of protective measures healthcare companies need to take to protect patients and their workers. The topic has been deeply divisive within hospitals, largely because the question of whether an illness spreads by droplets or aerosols drives two conflicting sets of protective practices, touching on everything from airflow within hospital wards to patient isolation to choices of protective gear. Enhanced protections would be expensive and disruptive to a number of industries, but particularly to hospitals, which have fought to keep lower-level “droplet” protections in place. Occupational safety experts, aerosol scientists, frontline healthcare workers and their unions argue that the science suggests that high-quality, and costlier, N95 respirators should be required for routine Covid-19 patient care. “Bottom line is, there’s much more aerosol [transmission] than we thought,” Fauci said. But both sides can point to plenty of research supporting their positions. (Editor’s note: Also possibly figuring into this discussion is the fact that there is a still a shortage of N95 masks in the US and, therefore, those that are available are even more than usually expensive.)

Algorithm Spots COVID-19 Cases from Eye Images – (The Scientist – September 21, 2020)
Scientists have devised a potential screening method for COVID-19 based on eye images analyzed by artificial intelligence. Scanning a set of images from several hundred individuals with and without COVID-19, the tool accurately diagnosed coronavirus infections more than 90% of the time, the developers reported in a preprint posted to medRxiv. “Our model is quite fast,” said Yanwei Fu, a computer scientist at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, who led the study. “In less than a second it can check results.” But the investigation by Fu’s team is preliminary and both ophthalmologists and AI specialists say they’d want to see much more information on the technique—and its performance—before being convinced it could work. Daniel Ting, ophthalmologist at the Singapore National Eye Center, cautions that the sample size of 303 patients and 136 healthy individuals in the Shanghai study is too small to draw strong conclusions. “To develop a good deep learning system to automatically detect some unique features from any medical imaging requires more patients,” he says. “In order to increase the reliability of this study, the same size would need to be multiplied by at least ten times, so, thousands of patients.” Fu has started down this road, increasing the number of participants and broadening the types of subjects. Ophthalmologist Alastair Denniston, the director of the Health Data Research Hub for Eye Health in Birmingham, UK, recently reviewed more than 20,000 AI studies on detecting disease from medical imaging, but found that less than 1% were sufficiently robust in their design and reporting that independent reviewers had high confidence in their claims. This led him to convene a group of experts to define the international standards for the design and reporting of clinical trials of AI systems.

Internet Search Results Predict US COVID-19 Hotspots Weeks Later, Study Reveals – (Science Alert – September 14, 2020)
In a recent study, researchers measured the popularity of medical symptom searches on Google and discovered that the volume of such searches can subsequently help predict the incidence of COVID-19 cases arising weeks later in the area. While the most common symptoms associated with coronavirus might be things like cough, fever, and difficulty breathing, in this case, researchers wanted to examine whether there was correlation between COVID-19 cases and surges in searches for a more distinct subset of gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms caused by the disease, such as abdominal pain and diarrhea. While this is an important and potentially helpful insight, it’s not an entirely surprising link. For several years, it’s been well known that search engine queries can help alert us to things like influenza outbreaks. So the main takeaway here is that the same technique can also help inform us on the spread of COVID-19, potentially signaling which suburbs might be about to become hotspots. The hope is that, with elevated access to search interest and trends for more than 400 medical symptoms, signs, and conditions, it will be easier for health professionals to visualize and forecast ahead of time likely areas of coronavirus impact in the US.

New Mathematical Model Proves Time Travel Could Happen Without Paradox – (Science Times – September 28, 2020)
Countless science fiction tales have explored the paradox of what would happen if you went back in time and did something in the past that endangered the future. One variation of this is known as the “grandfather paradox” — in which a time traveler kills their own grandfather, in the process preventing the time traveler’s birth. The logical paradox has given researchers a headache, in part because according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, “closed timelike curves” are possible, theoretically allowing an observer to travel back in time and interact with their past self — potentially endangering their own existence. But according to Germain Tobar and Fabio Costa, researchers at the University of Queensland, non-random deterministic processes can influence an arbitrary number of areas in the spacetime continuum. Moreover, closed time-like curves in Einstein’s theory of general relativity could fit in with the rules of free will. The researchers combined Kurt Godel’s theory of closed time-like curves, Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and their mathematical model to prove that time travel will happen without any inconsistencies. In their paper, they explained that combining quantum physics and general relativity could lead spacetime to lose its classical properties, which leads to indefinite causal structures, and spacetime will adjust itself. “Say you traveled in time in an attempt to stop COVID-19’s patient zero from being exposed to the virus,” Costa said. “You might try and stop patient zero from becoming infected, but in doing so, you would catch the virus and become patient zero, or someone else would,” co-author Germain Tobar said. In other words, a time traveler could make changes, but the original outcome would still find a way to happen — maybe not the same way it happened in the first timeline but close enough so that the time traveler would still exist and would still be motivated to go back in time. “No matter what you did, the salient events would just recalibrate around you.” The paper, “Reversible dynamics with closed time-like curves and freedom of choice,” was published in the peer-reviewed journal Classical and Quantum Gravity. The findings seem consistent with another time travel study published this summer in the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review Letters. That study found that changes made in the past won’t drastically alter the future.

Discovery of a New Mass Extinction – (PhysOrg – September 16, 2020)
An international team has identified a major extinction of life 233 million years ago that triggered the dinosaur takeover of the world. The crisis has been called the Carnian Pluvial Episode. The team of 17 researchers, led by Jacopo Dal Corso of the China University of Geosciences at Wuhan and Mike Benton of the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, reviewed all the geological and palaeontological evidence and determined what had happened. The cause was most likely massive volcanic eruptions in the Wrangellia Province of western Canada, where huge volumes of volcanic basalt was poured out and forms much of the western coast of North America. The eruptions were so huge, they pumped vast amounts of greenhouse gases and there were spikes of global warming”. The warming was associated with increased rainfall, and this had been detected back in the 1980s by geologists Mike Simms and Alastair Ruffell as a humid episode lasting about 1 million years in all. The climate change caused major biodiversity loss in the ocean and on land, but just after the extinction event new groups took over, forming more modern-like ecosystems. The shifts in climate encouraged growth of plant life, and the expansion of modern conifer forests. “The new floras probably provided slim pickings for the surviving herbivorous reptiles,” said Professor Mike Benton. “I had noted a floral switch and ecological catastrophe among the herbivores back in 1983 when I completed my Ph.D. We now know that dinosaurs originated some 20 million years before this event, but they remained quite rare and unimportant until the Carnian Pluvial Episode hit. It was the sudden arid conditions after the humid episode that gave dinosaurs their chance.” It wasn’t just dinosaurs, but also many modern groups of plants and animals also appeared at this time, including some of the first turtles, crocodiles, lizards, and the first mammals.

120,000-year-old Footprints Mark Oldest Evidence of Humans in Arabia – (New Atlas – September 23, 2020)
Archeologists have discovered fossilized human footprints in Saudi Arabia that help fill in the story of the early migration of our species. Dating back 120,000 years, the tracks are the oldest evidence of the presence of modern humans on the Arabian Peninsula. The footprints were discovered in the south-western region of the Nefud Desert, on the site of what was once semi-arid grasslands dotted with lakes. The team identified 376 prints made by an assortment of creatures, including humans. “Of those, elephants and camels were the most abundant, yet there was also buffalo and horses in the area at that time,” says Julien Louys, an author of the study. “It was only the presence of freshwater lakes in the region that made the area so habitable for such a diverse community of elephants, camels, oryx, horses, buffaloes and humans.” The team was even able to pinpoint that the human prints were made by two or three individuals walking together. They seemed to have been following the footprints of the other animals, and their visit appeared to be transient – they were likely stopping by the area to drink and forage before moving on. To figure out how old the prints were, the researchers used a dating technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL). Quartz grains were extracted from within the sample, then hit with light. The specific way they glow can be measured and interpreted to determine when the grains were last exposed to sunlight.

We May Finally Know What Life on Earth Breathed Before There Was Oxygen – (LiveScience – September 27, 2020)
Billions of years ago, long before oxygen was readily available, the notorious poison arsenic could have been the compound that breathed new life into our planet. In Chile’s Atacama Desert, in a place called Laguna La Brava, scientists have been studying a purple ribbon of photosynthetic microbes living in a hypersaline lake that’s permanently free of oxygen. “I have been working with microbial mats for about 35 years or so,” says geoscientist Pieter Visscher from the University of Connecticut. Microbial mats, which fossilize into stromatolites, have been abundant on Earth for at least 3.5 billion years, and yet for the first billion years of their existence, there was no oxygen for photosynthesis. How these life forms survived in such extreme conditions is still unknown, but examining stromatolites and extremophiles living today, researchers have figured out a handful of possibilities. While iron, sulphur, and hydrogen have long been proposed as possible replacements for oxygen, it wasn’t until the discovery of ‘arsenotrophy’ in California’s hypersaline Searles Lake and Mono Lake that arsenic also became a contender. Since then, stromatolites from the Tumbiana Formation in Western Australia have revealed that trapping light and arsenic was once a valid mode of photosynthesis in the Precambrian. The same couldn’t be said of iron or sulphur. Just last year, researchers discovered an abundant life form in the Pacific Ocean that also breathes arsenic. If the team is right, then we might need to expand our search for life forms elsewhere.

Gene-edited Livestock ‘Surrogate Sires’ Successfully Made Fertile – (PhysOrg – September 14, 2020)
Scientists have been searching for a way to create surrogate sires for decades to overcome the limitations of selective breeding and artificial insemination, tools which require either animal proximity or strict control of their movement—and in many cases, both. Artificial insemination is common in dairy cattle who are often confined so their reproductive behavior is relatively easy to control, but the procedure is rarely used with beef cattle who need to roam freely to feed. For pigs, the procedure still requires the animals be nearby as pig sperm does not survive freezing well. In goats, artificial insemination is quite challenging and could require a surgical procedure. The surrogate sire technology could solve those problems since the surrogates deliver the donor genetic material through normal reproduction. This enables ranchers and herders to let their animals interact normally on the range or field. Donors and surrogates do not need to be near each other since either frozen donor sperm or the surrogate animal itself can be shipped to different places. A research team led by Jon Oatley, a reproductive biologist with WSU’s College of Veterinary Medicine, used the gene-editing tool, CRISPR-Cas9, to knock out a gene specific to male fertility in the animal embryos that would be raised to become surrogate sires. The male animals were then born sterile but began producing sperm after researchers transplanted stem cells from donor animals into their testes. The sperm the surrogate sires produced held only the genetic material of the selected donor animals.

Is Aging a Disease You Can Reverse? A Look at the Science Behind the Longevity Movement – (Vogue – September 22, 2020)
Research shows that most people are ill with disease for five to eight years before they die. Must they be? A wave of scientists are saying no. They maintain that aging is a disease—one that can be targeted, treated, and perhaps even reversed. When it comes to health span, Nir Barzilai, M.D., founding director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, says genetics account for only some 20%. The rest is environment and lifestyle. Barzilai does a 16-hour life-lengthening daily fast. Along with his fasts and exercise, Barzilai takes a daily dose of metformin. An inexpensive diabetes medication that’s been around since the 1950s, metformin is thought to mimic the calorie restriction of fasting by limiting the amount of sugar the body absorbs (side effects are generally mild, among them abdominal pain, nausea, and loss of appetite). A 2017 study of more than 41,000 male metformin users found that it reduced—by a significant amount—the likelihood of dementia, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. A growing number of doctors are prescribing it off-¬label, but Barzilai wants the medication to be FDA-sanctioned for every elder adult. He’s also about to undertake a six-year national trial (called TAME, for “Targeting Aging With Metformin”), partially and anonymously funded by a noted tech billionaire. If fasting is not exactly your speed, diet is still tremendously important. As for what you should eat, the gold standard remains the Mediterranean diet.

Life as One of the Last Fire Lookouts – (Outside – September 23, 2020)
In the early 1900s, more than 9,000 fire lookouts spanned the US. Today, only 60 remain staffed. From director Lindsey Hegan and cinematographer Chris Naum, Ode to Desolation (13 minute film, link embedded in article) introduces Jim Henterly, a naturalist, illustrator, and fire lookout. In an effort to preserve the human narrative, Henterly is dedicated to holding his post as the eyes and ears of Washington’s historic Desolation Peak Fire Lookout, while contemplating the dwindling days of fire lookouts in North America, as the influence of technology and artificial intelligence threatens to make the role obsolete. Give yourself a treat: watch this short film and remember (or discover) the vistas of wilderness. Those vistas are treasures that we need to keep safe.

“Out of the Blue” – Evidence That Sea Ice Triggered the Little Ice Age – (SciTech Daily – September 20, 2020)
A new study finds a trigger for the Little Ice Age that cooled Europe from the 1300s through mid-1800s, and supports surprising model results suggesting that under the right conditions sudden climate changes can occur spontaneously, without external forcing. The study, published in Science Advances, reports a comprehensive reconstruction of sea ice transported from the Arctic Ocean through the Fram Strait, by Greenland, and into the North Atlantic Ocean over the last 1400 years. The reconstruction suggests that the Little Ice Age—which was not a true ice age but a regional cooling centered on Europe—was triggered by an exceptionally large outflow of sea ice from the Arctic Ocean into the North Atlantic in the 1300s. While previous experiments using numerical climate models showed that increased sea ice was necessary to explain long-lasting climate anomalies like the Little Ice Age, physical evidence was missing. This study digs into the geological record for confirmation of model results.

Plastic Pollution: Washed Clothing’s Synthetic Mountain of ‘Fluff’ – (BBC News – September 16, 2020)
About 14% of all plastic is used to make synthetic fibers, principally for clothing. When those garments are washed, they will shed tiny strands that are much thinner than a human hair. When you add it up, the total amount of synthetic microfibers going into the wider environment as we wash our clothes is an astonishing number. US scientists estimate it to be 5.6 million tonnes (6.17 million tons) since we first started wearing those polyester and nylon garments in a big way in the 1950s. Just over half this mass – 2.9 million tonnes (3.2 million tons) – has likely ended up in our rivers and seas. That’s the equivalent of seven billion fleece jackets, the researchers say. But while we fret about water pollution, and rightly so, increasingly this synthetic “fluff” issue is one that affects the land. The University of California, Santa Barbara, team which did the calculations found that emission to the terrestrial environment has now overtaken that to water bodies – some 176,500 tonnes a year versus 167,000 tonnes. The reason? Wastewater treatment works have become very good at catching the fibers lost from washing machines. What’s happening is those captured fibers, along with biosolid sludge, are then being applied to cropland or simply buried in landfills. “I hear people say that the synthetic microfiber problem from apparel washing will take care of itself as wastewater treatment works become more widespread around the world and more efficient. But really what we’re doing is just moving the problem from one environmental compartment to another,” Roland Geyer, from UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, told BBC News.

The Body Shop Will Buy 600 Tons of Waste Plastic Next Year, and Wants Competitors to Follow – (CNBC – September 24, 2020)
Plastic pollution is a massive problem: more than a billion tons of plastic waste will end up in oceans or in landfill by 2040. The beauty industry is one of many contributors to plastic waste, but it’s a complex issue that doesn’t have a simple solution. One option is to treat plastic trash as a raw material, explains Mark Davis, who runs the Community Fair Trade program at beauty company The Body Shop. The program is an ethical sourcing initiative that was founded in 1987 and now makes up around 25% of the company’s ingredients budget, where the company procures ingredients like shea butter from Ghana and items such as paper gift boxes from Nepal. The program has now started to source waste plastic from Bangalore, India, to use in its packaging. Waste-pickers in some developing countries make a living by trading trash in an informal industry that can be dangerous and dirty. The Body Shop is working with sourcing company Plastics For Change to help it procure plastic, while providing better conditions for workers. Sourcing plastic like this is an initiative that has taken a while to come to fruition: it took five years to build the supply chain and get to the point where the raw material met The Body Shop’s needs, before it could be turned into plastic granules and made into packaging. ″(Waste pickers) needed to have lots of support around business training. So how do you then build a scaled-up business? How do you manage the cash flow through it? They had to have support around … environmental and social certifications (and make sure) they had decent working conditions,” Davis said.

Microsoft’s Underwater Data Center Rises From the Seafloor a Grimy Success – (GizModo – September 14, 2020)
Microsoft’s underwater Northern Isles data center has risen again from the ocean depth and it is remarkably intact other than being covered in sea scum. The data center—which Microsoft sunk under 117 feet of water off the coast of Scotland’s Orkney Islands in 2018—resembles a large, airtight fuel tank. After two years on the seafloor, it is now blanketed in algae, barnacles, and cantaloupe-sized sea anemones. But Microsoft Special Projects researcher Spencer Fowers said in the announcement the company was “pretty impressed” at the lack of “hardened marine growth.” Inside, 864 servers with a collective 27.6 petabytes of storage and cooling infrastructure braved the elements in an atmosphere of inert gas—Microsoft noted that conditions at the European Marine Energy Centre test site can include nine mile per hour tidal currents and 60-foot waves during storms. In fact, Microsoft claimed the equipment fared better than land-based systems. Project Natick leader Ben Cutler said in the blog post that Northern Isles experienced failure rates just one-eighth what would have been expected in a traditional data center and that it ran “really well” on the region’s energy grid, which is 100% wind and solar. That vindicates the hypothesis the seafloor is preferable for server farms to topside environments where gear can be damaged by corrosion from oxygen and humidity, constant temperature changes, and physical movement during maintenance. Putting data centers underwater may also enable closer placement to customers and obviously makes cooling far easier, and Microsoft has previously suggested they could be powered by tidal generators. The units are also portable and could be easily scaled into larger operations.

Nestbox Is a Modular Trunk Extension That Turns SUVs into Campers – (Dezeen – August 4, 2020)
Czech firm Studio 519 has designed a plywood module called Nestbox, which fits neatly into the trunk of an SUV and can be expanded into a double bed and fully fitted kitchen for camping. The unit, created for local company Egoé, comes in four sizes to suit a range of cars and can be customised with modules such as a cooker, mini-fridge, sink and camping shower attachment. During transport these different elements are neatly compacted into a steel-backed mainframe which, at its largest, measures just over one meter long and half a meter wide and tall. But on arrival, a system of integrated, space-saving drawers and fold-away attachments allow the Nestbox to be turned into a complete sleeping and cooking set-up in a matter of minutes.

The Age of Electric Cars Is Dawning Ahead of Schedule – (New York Times – September 20, 2020)
As car sales collapsed in Europe because of the pandemic, one category grew rapidly: electric vehicles. One reason is that purchase prices in Europe are coming tantalizingly close to the prices for cars with gasoline or diesel engines. At the moment this near parity is possible only with government subsidies that, depending on the country, can cut more than $10,000 from the final price. Electric vehicles are not yet as popular in the United States, largely because government incentives are less generous. As electric cars become more mainstream, the automobile industry is rapidly approaching the tipping point when, even without subsidies, it will be as cheap, and maybe cheaper, to own a plug-in vehicle than one that burns fossil fuels. The carmaker that reaches price parity first may be positioned to dominate the segment. A few years ago, industry experts expected 2025 would be the turning point. But technology is advancing faster than expected, and could be poised for a quantum leap. The balance of power in the auto industry may depend on which carmaker, electronics company or start-up succeeds in squeezing the most power per pound into a battery, what’s known as energy density. A battery with high energy density is inherently cheaper because it requires fewer raw materials and less weight to deliver the same range. This transition will probably arrive at different times for different segments of the market. High-end electric vehicles are pretty close to parity already. The Tesla Model 3 and the gas-powered BMW 3 Series both sell for about $41,000 in the United States. The holy grail in the electric vehicle industry has been to push the cost of battery packs — the rechargeable system that stores energy — below $100 per kilowatt-hour, the standard measure of battery power. That is the point, more or less, at which propelling a vehicle with electricity will be as cheap as it is with gasoline.

Engineers Test Jetliner Where You Ride in the Wings – (Futurism – September 4, 2020)
For the first time, a scale model of the Flying-V, an experimental jetliner that seats passengers inside its wings, took flight during an uncrewed test. The scale model weighs 22.5kg, has a wing span of 3.06m and a length of 2.76m. It was controlled via radio link, with TU Delft PhD candidate Nando van Arnhem as the drone pilot. The results of a Flying-V test have been long awaited. The plane’s unusual design makes it 20 percent more fuel efficient than the most advanced planes on the market. But, as with any unusual experimental design, it remains unclear how well it would actually work in practice. In its fully realized form, the Flying V aircraft would feature a cabin, cargo hold and fuel tanks integrated into its V-shaped wing structure, which would have a wingspan equal to that of an Airbus A350. This would enable the Flying V to take off and land using existing airport infrastructure, with enough space on board for the same amount of cargo and human passengers, with 314 seats in the standard configuration. See this article for the best photo of this every unusually shaped aircraft and some additional details.

A 12-storey Pig Farm: Has China Found the Way to Tackle Animal Disease? – (Guardian – September 18, 2020)
The buildings are huge grey concrete blocks, many stories high, which stand side by side in the middle of what might look like a quarry, a “hole” of red earth dug in the heart of a mountain. This is the tallest pig farm in the world; units up to nine stories high housing thousands of pigs, with construction of a 12-story pig unit under way. “On each floor we can breed 1,270 pigs,” says Yuanfei Gao, vice-president of Yangxiang, the company that built the farm. “But in the future with the design of the new buildings we plan to have 1,300 pigs per floor.” Yangxiang is one of the Chinese giants of the pork industry, producing about 2 million pigs a year in a dozen farms throughout China. The Yaji mountain site is its largest and most advanced multistory farming system, and will have the capacity to produce around 840,000 pigs a year when construction is finished. Over the past two years African swine fever (ASF) has led to as many as 200 million pig deaths in a year; and a highly pathogenic foot-and-mouth disease, also in pigs, that vets now say is endemic. Over the past two years Chinese farmers and consumers have been rocked by pandemic after pandemic. Covid-19; an H1N1 swine flu that is now slowly spreading to farm workers; African swine fever (ASF), which has led to as many as 200 million pig deaths in a year; and a highly pathogenic foot-and-mouth disease, also in pigs, that vets now say is endemic. China is not the only country facing challenges from emerging zoonotic diseases, but it has become clear that the country faces bureaucratic, societal and ecological factors that magnify them into global threats. Peter Daszak, a zoologist and president of EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit focused on global health issues, notes, “You’ve got this incredible population density, which is expanding, and you’ve got incredible encroachment into wild areas.” But here are sky-high standards of biosecurity and sophisticated cleaning and disposal systems. Is this, some hope, the answer?

The CIA’s Assassination of Rene Schneider – (Future of Freedom Foundation – September 18, 2020)
It is commonly believed by many Americans that the CIA would never forcibly remove an American president from office even if he posed a grave threat to national security. But one thing is undeniable: the CIA would not hesitate to remove a foreign leader from office if he posed a threat to U.S. national security. Ever since the CIA was established in 1947, it has wielded the ultimate power to kill people with impunity, making a mockery, of course, of the notion that the U.S. government is a “limited” government. Rene Schneider was the commanding general of Chile’s armed forces under Salvador Allende, the socialist who was democratically elected president of Chile 50 years ago. The CIA and President Richard Nixon concluded that Allende posed a grave threat to U.S. “national security” and decided to remove him from office. Instead of assassination, the CIA chose to initiate a domestic military coup against Allende, one that would violently remove him from office and replace him with a conservative unelected military general. There was one big problem, however, with the U.S. coup scheme. That was Rene Schneider, as overall commander of Chile’s armed forces, stood firmly against the U.S. plans for a coup. He said that the Chilean constitution did not call for a coup as a way for removing a democratically elected president of the country. It only permitted impeachment or the next election to accomplish that. Obviously, a coup without the support of the overall commander of the Chilean armed forces was a problem. Solution: remove Schneider from office in order to remove Allende from office. When the CIA’s conspiracy to kidnap and murder Schneider came to light, there was never a U.S. criminal prosecution against the CIA or the actual CIA officials who were engaged in the kidnapping conspiracy. It became understood, especially after the Kennedy assassination, that the CIA wielded omnipotent power to assassinate anyone, including Americans, so long as it was done to protect “national security.” Today, fifty years after the Schneider assassination and some 55 years after the Kennedy assassination and other assassination plots on the part of the CIA (e.g., Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, etc.), the CIA has become a permanent part of America’s governmental structure. Moreover, its power of assassination is no longer concealed. It’s out in the open, despite the fact that nothing in the Constitution authorizes the federal government to assassinate people.

Flynn Case Agent: Mueller Used Prosecution as Means to ‘Get Trump’ – (Epoch Times – September 27, 2020)
An FBI agent assigned to the investigation of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn wanted to be taken off the case, he recently told FBI investigators, saying the prosecution of Flynn was being used as a means to “get Trump.” FBI agent William Barnett was assigned to the Flynn case shortly after it was opened in August 2016, as part of the FBI’s probe into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, which was dubbed “Crossfire Hurricane.” But the case was “opaque,” lacking much detail of specific evidence of any crimes, Barnett told FBI and DOJ investigators. The case theory was “supposition on supposition,” he said. After Trump won the election, Barnett discussed with others on the case what the “end game” was and proposed an interview with Flynn under the pretext of a standard procedure before Flynn assumed the role of national security adviser. The request was denied. Barnett said the Mueller lawyers, most of them Democrats, approached the probe with the conviction that there was “something criminal there” and competed to uncover it because they wanted to be part of something “big.” It seems like there was always someone claiming to have a lead that would prove collusion only for it to be a dead end, he said. He and some others even quipped the probe could be turned into a “Collusion Clue” game. (Editor’s note: This article follows many of the twists and turns of this very much inside-the-beltway case. If you’re up for those details, check it out.)

British Ambassador Craig Murray Exposes the Corrupt and Censored Assange Extradition Hearing – (Paul Craig Roberts – September 25, 2020)
Ambassador Murray is upfront: “I strongly expect the final decision was made in this case even before opening arguments were received.” Although the hearing is being conducted in a British court, the US government has controlled the hearing and has determined what evidence could be presented: “The plan of the US Government throughout has been to limit the information available to the public and limit the effective access to a wider public of what information is available. Thus we have seen the extreme restrictions on both physical and video access. A complicit mainstream media has ensured that those of us who know what is happening are very few in the wider population.” Even Ambassador Murray’s reports on the hearing are censored by social media: “Even my blog has never been so systematically subject to shadowbanning from Twitter and Facebook as now. Normally about 50% of my blog readers arrive from Twitter and 40% from Facebook. During the trial it has been 3% from Twitter and 9% from Facebook.” Ambassador Murray believes that the misconduct of the judge and prosecution, serving as Washington’s agents, has destroyed the legal principles on which British justice rests: “I fear that all over London a very hard rain is now falling on those who for a lifetime have worked within institutions of liberal democracy that at least broadly and usually used to operate within the governance of their own professed principles. . . . I have again and again reported to you that, where rulings have to be made, she [Judge Baraitser] has brought them into court pre-written, before hearing the arguments before her.” In Stalin’s show trials all rulings were pre-written before arguments in court were heard. It is obvious from the behavior of the British court that the extradition hearing is orchestrated to set Assange up as guilty of whatever false charges Washington wishes to make. See also: The US is using the Guardian to justify jailing Assange for life. Why is the paper so silent?

Her Husband Abused Her. But Getting a Divorce Was an Ordeal. – (New York Times – September 16, 2020)
Ms. Liu’s case (described in detail in the article) has set off a nationwide debate about two of the biggest issues facing women in China: the prevalence of domestic violence and the difficulties of getting justice in a legal system stacked against them. A survey conducted by the All-China Women’s Federation in 2011 showed that about one in four women had suffered physical or verbal abuse, or had their freedoms restricted by their partners. But activists, citing interviews with abused women, estimate the numbers are far higher, especially after millions were placed under lockdown during the pandemic. Though China introduced an anti-domestic violence law in 2016, penalties are minimal. Marital rape is still legal, and women say restraining orders are rarely enforced. Even divorce is becoming harder, with the government imposing a 30-day “cooling off period” on couples seeking to separate starting next year. Legislators alarmed by China’s rising divorce rate argue the new law will prevent couples from splitting up rashly, but women’s rights advocates say it will keep people trapped in abusive marriages for a longer time. It was only in recent years that domestic violence came to be seen as a significant problem in China, where laws are largely made and enforced by men, and families are discouraged from airing their problems in public. Several high-profile cases have drawn attention to the issue, and one city in eastern China recently began allowing people to check if their partners have a history of abuse before marrying them. But victims often meet resistance in the legal system, which can discourage them from seeking help. Though China’s marriage law specifies that domestic violence is sufficient grounds for divorce, many courts encourage couples to try reconciling in the name of social and family harmony. From March 2016, when the law took effect, to December 2018, Chinese courts received only 5,860 applications for restraining orders and approved fewer than two-thirds of them, according to Equality, a women’s rights organization in Beijing. At the root of the problem, according to activists, is a notion among police officers and the courts that divorce is bad and that marriage is the bedrock of society.

World’s First Reality Show in Space Plans to Send One Winner on a 10-day Trip to the Space Station, Filming the Whole Time – (Business Insider –September 19, 2020)
Space Hero Inc., a US-based media production company, is developing a TV series that could be the first filmed in space. The show, also called “Space Hero,” would send the winner of a worldwide contest on a trip to the International Space Station. The production company’s plan is to first pick a group of space-loving individuals from around the world. The show would follow them as they go through grueling astronaut training, and the competition would culminate in a live episode in which viewers could vote on their favorite contestant. Once the show declares a winner, that contestant would launch on a 10-day trip to the ISS alongside NASA astronauts; the show would chronicle that person’s journey from liftoff to landing. The “Space Hero” producers have already secured a seat on an actual mission to the space station. The winning contestant is slated to fly to space on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft in 2023. To book that seat and plan the mission, Space Hero Inc. is working with Axiom Space, a private space company led by a former ISS program manager. Axiom is also helping the production company nail down other logistics, like training the would-be space travelers. Separately, Axiom is also building its own module for private space travelers, which it plans to attach to the ISS in 2024. It hopes to send its first paying customers to space next year via SpaceX. (Editor’s note: A seat on a craft that will take you to the ISS is estimated to cost between $50 million and $90 million depending on which vehicle you opt for. We assume that Space Hero, Inc. had to book 2 or even 3 seats – winner plus camera crew. Maybe they got a multi-person booking discount.)

We Finally Know How Much Radiation There Is on the Moon, and It’s Not Great News – (Science Alert – September 26, 2020)
As the US prepares to return humans to the Moon this decade, one of the biggest dangers future astronauts will face is space radiation that can cause lasting health effects, from cataracts to cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. Though the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s proved it was safe for people to spend a few days on the lunar surface, NASA did not take daily radiation measurements that would help scientists quantify just how long crews could stay. This question was resolved Friday after a Chinese-German team published in the journal Science Advances the results of an experiment carried out by China’s Chang’E 4 lander in 2019. “The radiation of the Moon is between two and three times higher than what you have on the ISS (International Space Station),” co-author Robert Wimmer-Schweingruber, an astrophysicist at the University of Kiel told AFP. “So that limits your stay to approximately two months on the surface of the Moon,” he added, once the radiation exposure from the roughly week-long journey there, and week back, is taken into account. “The radiation levels we measured on the Moon are about 200 times higher than on the surface of the Earth and five to 10 times higher than on a flight from New York to Frankfurt,” added Wimmer-Schweingruber.”

Three-quarters of Americans Know Only a Few People Who Support the Candidate They Themselves Oppose – (Washington Post – September 18, 2020)
Here’s new data from Pew Research Center. The pollsters asked Americans who they supported in the 2020 contest, Trump or former vice president Joe Biden, and then how many of their friends supported either the same candidate or the other. Nearly 9-in-10 Trump and Biden supporters said that a lot or some of their friends supported the same candidate as they did. About three-quarters said that they knew at most a few people who supported the candidate that they didn’t — and about 40% of each group knew no one at all who supported the other candidate. (Editor’s note: Don’t these people have extended families? Every family we know of has a few outliers.) After the 2016 election, The Washington Post and its partners at the Schar School asked voters how many people in their social circles voted for the presidential candidate they themselves had opposed. Seven-in-10 supporters of both Trump and Hillary Clinton said that a lot of their friends voted for the same candidate. Three-in-10 Clinton voters and a quarter of Trump voters said they knew no one who’d supported the other candidate. What was particularly interesting in the wake of the 2016 election was to look at how people actually voted. Precinct-level data showed that, on average, a quarter of voters in each state lived in a precinct where one candidate or the other won by 50 percentage points, in other words, the voting public was very nearly equal on their preferences. But in most places, a substantial portion of the electorate lived in broadly homogenous political bubbles. Why? In part because of the tension partisanship introduces. More than 9-in-10 respondents in another Pew poll identified the conflict between the two parties as strong or very strong — more than any other demographic divide in American culture. It makes that 10-plus percent of Trump and Biden supporters in Pew’s new poll whose friends mostly support the other candidate all the more remarkable.

New Brain-Computer Interface Transforms Thoughts to Images – (Psychology Today – September 27, 2020)
Achieving the next level of brain-computer interface (BCI) advancement, researchers at the University of Helsinki used artificial intelligence (AI) to create a system that uses signals from the brain to generate novel images of what the user is thinking. The University of Helsinki researchers used a combination of a generative neural network with neuroadaptive brain interfacing to create a new BCI paradigm. Neuroadaptive generative modeling is the estimation of a person’s intentions via adapting a generative model to neural activity. To expand capabilities and not be limited to pre-defined categories, the researchers based the solution on a generative adversarial network (GAN) to generate novel information from a latent representation of an input space. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to use neural activity to adapt a generative computer model and produce new information matching a human operator’s intention,” wrote the Finnish team of researchers.

Jet Suit Paramedic Could Save Lives – (BBC News – September 29, 2020)
A jet suit for paramedics which would see patients reached in minutes by a “flying” medic has been tested by the Great North Air Ambulance Service (GNAAS) in the UK. Andy Mawson, director of operations at GNAAS, came up with the idea and described seeing it as “awesome”. He said it meant a paramedic could “fly” to a hill top in 90 seconds rather than taking 30 minutes on foot. Mr Mawson said the exercise had demonstrated the huge potential of using jet suits to deliver critical care services. The test flight was carried out by Richard Browning, founder of Gravity Industries and maker of the equipment. He said the suits had two mini engines on each arm and one on the back allowing the paramedic to control their movement just by moving their hands. Mr Mawson said, “If the idea takes off, the flying paramedic will be armed with a medical kit, with strong pain relief for walkers who may have suffered fractures, and a defibrillator for those who may have suffered a heart attack.”

Billionaire Investor Ray Dalio on Capitalism’s Crisis: The World Is Going to Change ‘In Shocking Ways’ In the Next Five Years – (Market Watch – September 18, 2020)
Dalio is the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge-fund firm, which has made him a billionaire. So it’s not surprising that he champions capitalism as a proven way to expand economic growth and living standards. But capitalists don’t divide the economic pie very well, he says, and so today the capitalist system, the foundation of the U.S. economy, is not working efficiently and effectively enough for all. Dalio has written and spoken about three big domestic and international problems facing the U.S. over the next five to 10 years and how a failure to address these challenges could threaten America’s standing in the world. He adds that the three problems are coming together, so it’s important to understand them individually and how they collectively make a bigger problem. They are: a money and credit cycle problem, a wealth and values gap problem, and an emerging great power challenging the existing dominant power problem. What’s going on is an economic downturn together with a large wealth gap and the rising power of China challenging the existing power of the United States. The United States is a 75-year-old empire and it is exhibiting signs of decline. If you want to extend your life, there are clear things you can do, but it means doing things that you don’t want to do. (Editor’s note: We recommend this article for its clear-eyed truth telling.)

Over 60% of Businesses that Closed Will not Reopen – (Armstrong Economics – September 17, 2020)
I seriously doubt that people realize the extent of the economic damage caused by this HOAX instigated but a group of Oligarchs & Academics drunk on their own power and ignorance of how the real world even functions. When I met Kalus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, my impression was clearly one of academic arrogance. The people behind this bold attempt to alter the world economy do not fraternize with the little people they consider the great unwashed. CNN notes that “[a]bout 60% of businesses that have closed during the coronavirus pandemic will never reopen, and restaurants have suffered the most, according to new data from Yelp.” In the meantime, we have a similar arrogance among market pundits who think a vaccine will save the economy and everything will recover as if nothing ever took place. What has been unleashed with masks and social distancing will leave a stain in the minds of so many who will forever look at others as a threat to their life transporting some disease. Civilizations collapse when they (1) turn against their people, and (2) allow one class to oppress another. This is why Marxism is so dangerous. The more we move toward a socialist state means the state must suppress those that produce. Civilization no longer provides equal protection and thus it has lost its benefit for all.

Are Humans Still Evolving? Scientists Weigh In – (Science Alert – September 20, 2020)
We asked 12 experts whether humans are still evolving. The expert consensus is unanimously ‘yes’, however scientists say we might have the wrong idea of what evolution actually is. Evolution is often used interchangeable with the phrases ‘survival of the fittest’ or ‘natural selection’. Actually, these are not quite the same thing. ‘Evolution’ simply means the gradual change of a population over time. ‘Natural selection’ is a mechanism by which evolution can occur. Our Stone Age ancestors who were faster runners avoided being trampled by mammoths and were more likely to have children. That is ‘natural selection’. Overtime, the human population became faster at running. That’s evolution. But even without selection pressures, experts say evolution still occurs by other mechanisms. Dr. Alywyn Scally, an expert in evolution and genetics from the University of Cambridge, explains: “As long as human reproduction involves randomness and genetic mutation (and the laws of the Universe pretty much guarantee that this will always be the case at some level), there will continue to be differences from one generation to the next, meaning that the process of evolution can never be truly halted.”

Amharic, Uighur, Catalan, Guyanese Creole, Twi, and English – (A Counting – no date)
Those are some of the 600-800 languages spoken in NYC alone; there are at least 1,300 in the US. Ekene Ijeoma, the founder of Poetic Justice at MIT’s Media Lab, has launched an intriguing “voice portrait of America” called A Counting. People call in and count to 100 in their native tongue. Software mixes their voices in an ever-changing blend, from 1 on up. A single loop from 1-100 takes 3 1/2 minutes. Listening to every iteration for New York? 34 days, 5 hours. There are variations for Houston and Omaha, as well.

Foul-Mouthed Parrots Removed from Wildlife Park for Swearing at Visitors – (Newsweek – September 29, 2020)
A group of parrots had to be removed from an English wildlife park for swearing at the guests. The five parrots were adopted and brought to the Lincolnshire Wildlife Park on August 15 and had quarantined together in the same room, where they had apparently taught each other curse words. Steve Nichols, the park’s chief executive, said: “Every now and then you’ll get one that swears and it’s always funny.” But it became an issue, he said, once the parrots learned to laugh and encouraged each other to swear as a result. The parrots had to be put on a time out away from the park’s guests, but within 20 minutes of being back on display, the parrots had sworn at a guest and had directed obscene language at a group of people.

Mailing Letters Under the Sea, to the Highest Post Office in the World – (YouTube – August 13, 2020)
“Great Big Story” is a CNN offshoot that creates micro-documentaries, in this recent case about letters – that people write by hand. It includes a man in the Netherlands who collects letters in bottles –who knew people were tossing so many in the sea? Then there’s the Japanese postmaster who created the world’s first underwater letter box and the women in Verona who handle letters to Juliet. And in Hikkim, India, you can meet the postmaster of the world’s highest post office.

If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.
― Lyndon B. Johnson, US president

A special thanks to: Chas Freeman, Ursula Freer, Diane Petersen Gary Sycalik, Steve Ujvarosy and all of you who have sent us interesting links in the past. If you see something we should know about, do send it along – thanks.

johnp@arlingtoninstitute.org

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Edited by John L. Petersen
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