Volume 24, Number 3 - 2/1/21 | Arlington Institute

Volume 24, Number 3 – 2/1/21

FUTURE FACTS – FROM THINK LINKS

DID YOU KNOW THAT–

The Arctic is pervasively polluted by microplastic fibers that most likely come from the washing of synthetic clothes by people in Europe and North America.
Saudi Arabia plans to build a 100 mile long, car-free mega-city entirely powered by renewable energy consisting of connected communities – which it calls “city modules”.
Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer, NIO, will sell its cars with an option to lease the battery for a monthly fee – with replacements at no additional charge.
The UN now believes that we will see an end to population growth within decades – before the slide begins in earnest.

PUNCTUATIONS
by John L. Petersen

Hello Friends,

I recently chatted with Joni Patry, who will be joining us here in Berkeley Springs, WV, on Februrary 13th. You can watch that in this short video below:

What Does Vedic Astrology Say
About the Next Five Years

The next five years will be transformative. As our global world becomes smaller are we willing to accept the radical forces of change? Many will refuse and believe what they want to believe instead of the overwhelming truth. The old paradigms are changing and a new awakening is imminent.

Joni will give her insights into the cycles of change through her understanding of the planetary energies and how it will affect our world and consciousness. 2020 is the true beginning for these radical shifts! We will discuss our purpose being a part of this incredible age and time, and what we can do to assist and prepare for this awakening.

Livestream and In Person

Saturday February 13, 1-4 pm

Berkeley Springs, WV

We hope you will join us at Coolfont Resort in Berkeley Springs, but if you can’t make it to Berkeley Springs, you can still watch the whole presentation by livestream … as many times as you like, for two weeks thereafter. Space is limited for the in-person event, so register early.

CLICK ABOVE TO READ TRANSITION TALKS MAGAZINE

THINK LINKS

Have 400,000 Americans Died of Covid-19? – (UncoverDC – January 25, 2021)
Now there is proof: The Covid-19 death count is a fabrication. However, the story is much bigger than number manipulation within our government. It’s a story told best with an introduction. PSYOPS, or “Influence Operations,” don’t have to correlate with reality because they create a new hyper-reality, seen only through specific virtual reality goggles. Right now, we are all being clobbered hard by the number 400,000—but none so viciously as former President Donald Trump. The 400,000 PSYOP was timed to coincide with the days before, during, and after Joe Biden’s inauguration. Thus, Donald Trump was accused of essentially killing all “400,000,” as the Empire State Building lit up in red. For those who may be impatient, scroll down to the section titled “The Natural Enemy of the PSYOP is the True Scientist” and read from there. Otherwise, learn what they have done and will continue to do.

There are Many Reports from Around the World of People Becoming Seriously Ill After the Vaccine – (Armstrong Economics – January 25, 2021)
There are way too many people suffering from serious side-effects from these vaccines. There is a lot of information coming out about these vaccines, which have been pushed out without proper testing because this was a manufactured political emergency. Thirty people died after being vaccinated in Norway, prompting international concern outside the USA of course. Meanwhile, a study in Italy showed that tumor patients had already developed antibodies to COVID-19 back in September 2019 showing that it was around before it is generally believed to have begun in China. You cannot give these vaccines to the frail elderly. The real crisis we have is that this virus has been usurped politically to create political change. The restrictions on the global economy are ensuring that we are looking at a broader economic depression. The lockdowns have not been effective and have resulted in many deaths of those who could not get other treatments. there are some reports that after vaccination if you come into contact with one of the new strains which have appeared in the UK, Africa, and now California, you may have a worse experience. The entire problem has been that COVID has been used for political purposes of shutting down the economy to reduce CO2, and yes, to get rid of Trump.

How to Get a Free Bag of Marijuana with the COVID-19 Vaccine – (New York Post – January 18, 2021)
Cannabis activist group DC Marijuana Justice plans to offer weed gift bags to those who get the COVID-19 vaccine in the nation’s capital, the organization has announced. “We are looking for ways to safely celebrate the end of the pandemic and we know nothing brings people together like cannabis,” wrote DCMJ co-founder Nikoas Schiller in a press release for the initiative, dubbed “Joints for Jabs.” The group plans to hand out free ganja baggies at Washington, DC, vaccination sites, both to commemorate what is hopefully the beginning of the end of the coronavirus pandemic and as advocacy for both reefer and getting vaccinated. DC’s Department of Health has not yet named the public vaccination sites, but DCMJ says they will release further details once those addresses and hours of operation have been made public. In the meantime, local growers have already pledged three pounds of cannabis for the giveaway, and DCMJ hopes to have a total of five pounds by the time they begin offering them to freshly vaccinated members of the public, DCist reported. The organizers plan to distribute loose cannabis. Handing out free joints, they learned after doing as much during President Trump’s 2017 inauguration, leads to people smoking them on site and violating city law, in addition to being problematic to pandemic health protocol.

WHO: You Do NOT Need to Wear a Mask – (Principia Scientific Intl. – January 25, 2021)
The World Health Organization (WHO) admits there is no scientific medical reason for any healthy person to wear a mask outside of a hospital. Sadly, our corrupt politicians and mainstream media only relate the bad news. If you do not have any respiratory symptoms, such as fever, cough, or runny nose, you do not need to wear a medical mask. When used alone, masks can give you a false feeling of protection and can even be a source of infection when not used correctly. In December, 2020, WHO issued the following advice that masks are only of some benefit if used in conjunction with a range of other measures and of limited value. “…the use of a mask alone, even when correctly used, is insufficient to provide an adequate level of protection for an uninfected individual or prevent onward transmission from an infected individual.” As Dr. Joseph Mercola, who analyzed the WHO advice, pointed out “….the literature rather strongly suggests the usefulness of masks depends on a significant number of factors — type, fit, length of use, purpose and circumstances — which are effectively impossible to account for in public universal-masking policies. The science, contrary to the ignorant platitudes we are bombarded with, has NOT proven that universal masking is effective for viral containment, and has instead provided substantial grounds for skepticism of such a policy.”

Ivy League Experts Warn Lockdowns to Cause 1+ Million ‘Excess Deaths’ – (Principia Scientific – January 28, 2021)
Academics from Harvard, Duke, and Johns Hopkins universities have released a paper in which they claim COVID lockdowns will result in one million excess deaths in the United States over the next decade-and-a-half due to a spike of health-related issues caused by unemployment. “For the overall population, the increase in the death rate following the COVID-19 pandemic implies a staggering 0.89 and 1.37 million excess deaths over the next 15 and 20 years, respectively,” stated the authors of the December 2020 working paper titled “The Long-Term Impact of the COVID-19 Unemployment Shock on Life Expectancy and Mortality Rates.” The non-peer-reviewed paper, authored by Dongho Song, an assistant professor of finance at Johns Hopkins; Giada Bianchi, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School; and Francesco Bianchi, an economist at Duke University, was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The academics make the case that deaths caused by the lockdowns in the long range may “far exceed” those “immediately related to the acute COVID-19 critical illness.” The authors estimated the size of the COVID-19-related unemployment shock to be between 2 and 5 times larger than the typical unemployment shock, depending on race and gender, resulting in a significant increase in mortality rates and drop in life expectancy. They also predicted that the shock will disproportionately affect African-Americans and women, over a short horizon, while the effects for white men will unfold over longer horizons. These figures translate to more than 0.8 million additional deaths over the next 15 years. “Based on our findings, large, sustained and swift government maneuvers to support the currently unemployed labor force and to abate unemployment will be as equally important as the massive efforts focused on limiting and eventually eradicating transmission of SARS-CoV-2 with effective vaccination strategies that are finally put into place,” they concluded.

‘Dumb Money’ Is on GameStop, and It’s Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game – (New York Times – January 27, 2021)
Millions of amateur traders collectively taking on some of Wall Street’s most sophisticated investors — and, for the moment at least, winning. Propelled by a mix of greed and boredom, gleefully determined to teach Wall Street a lesson, and turbocharged by an endless flow of get-rich-quick hype and ideas delivered via social media, these investors have piled into trades around several companies, pushing their stock prices to stratospheric levels. Some of the names are from an earlier business era. BlackBerry’s shares are up nearly 280% this year. Stock in AMC, the movie theater chain, has surged nearly 840%. But the trade that captures the David-versus-Goliath nature of the moment involves GameStop, the troubled video game retailer that was once a fixture in suburban malls. On Wall Street, individual investors are often derided as “dumb money,” destined to lose against the highly compensated analysts and traders who buy and sell stocks for a living. But in recent days, individual investors — many of them followers of a popular, juvenile, foul-mouthed Reddit page called Wall Street Bets — have upended that narrative by banding together to put the squeeze on at least two hedge funds that had bet that GameStop’s shares would fall. (Editor’s note: This has never been done before; the collective action by small traders is only possible because they can communicate through online chat rooms. It allows them, a group, to amass the same “weight” as billion dollar hedge funds and go up against them. Also note that three independent elements enabled this: the economic destruction of Covid-19, zero commission trading platforms such as Robinhood, and social media.)

The Atlantic Ocean Is Widening. Here’s Why. – (Live Science – January 28, 2021)
The Atlantic Ocean is getting wider, shoving the Americas to one side and Europe and Africa to the other. But it’s not known exactly how. A new study suggests that deep beneath the Earth’s crust, in a layer called the mantle, sizzling-hot rocks are rising up and pushing on tectonic plates that meet beneath the Atlantic. Previously, scientists thought that the continents were mostly being pulled apart as the plates beneath the ocean moved in opposite directions and crashed into other plates, folding under the force of gravity. But the new study suggests that’s not the whole picture. The research began in 2016, when a group of researchers set sail on a research vessel to the widest part of the Atlantic Ocean between South America and Africa; in other words, to “the middle of nowhere,” said lead author Matthew Agius, who was a postdoctoral researcher with the University of Southampton in the U.K. at the time, but is now at the Roma Tre University in Italy. But this vast, empty stretch of ocean rests upon an incredibly important geological spot: the mid-Atlantic ridge, the planet’s largest tectonic boundary that extends 10,000 miles (16,093 kilometers) from the Arctic Ocean to the southern tip of Africa. This is the spot where the South American and the North American Plates move apart from the Eurasian and African plates, at a speed of about 1.6 inches (4 centimeters) a year, extending the Atlantic Ocean. Agius and his team spent five weeks sailing across a small portion of the ridge — about 621 miles (1,000 km) — dropping seismometers (instruments that detect seismic waves or vibrations such as those from earthquakes) onto the seafloor. A year later, the researchers collected the seismometers. Until now, “we never had good images of what’s happening beneath the ocean,” Agius said. While the team’s original goal was to learn about how the plates were born and how they aged, and they really intended to study shallower depths of the Earth, the researchers found evidence of a deeper phenomenon at play. They found that in that area within the ridge, the mantle transition zone — a higher-density region that serves as a gatekeeper between the upper and lower layers of the mantle — was thinner than average which likely means it was hotter than normal. The hotter temperatures of the transition zone likely facilitated an “upwelling” of hot rock from Earth’s lower mantle to its upper mantle that actively pushed the plates apart, Agius said.

Puzzling Six-exoplanet System with Rhythmic Movement Challenges Theories of How Planets Form – (PhysOrg – January 25, 2021)
Using a combination of telescopes, astronomers have revealed a system consisting six exoplanets, five of which are locked in a rare rhythm around their central star. This means that there are patterns that repeat themselves as the planets go around the star, with some planets aligning every few orbits. A similar resonance is observed in the orbits of three of Jupiter’s moons: Io, Europa and Ganymede. Io, the closest of the three to Jupiter, completes four full orbits around Jupiter for every orbit that Ganymede, the furthest away, makes, and two full orbits for every orbit Europa makes. The five outer planets in the TOI-178 system follow a 18:9:6:4:3 chain. While the second planet from the star (the first in the resonance chain) completes 18 orbits, the third planet from the star (second in the chain) completes 9 orbits, and so on. But even if the arrangement of the orbits is neat and well-ordered, the densities of the planets “are much more disorderly,” says Nathan Hara from the Université de Genève, Switzerland, who was involved in the study. “It appears there is a planet as dense as the Earth right next to a very fluffy planet with half the density of Neptune, followed by a planet with the density of Neptune.” In our Solar System, for example, the planets are neatly arranged, with the rocky, denser planets closer to the central star and the fluffy, low-density gas planets farther out. “This contrast between the rhythmic harmony of the orbital motion and the disorderly densities certainly challenges our understanding of the formation and evolution of planetary systems,” says Adrien Leleu from the Université de Genève and the University of Bern, Switzerland, who led a new study of the system published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

‘Super-Puff’ Planet Like No Other – As Big as Jupiter But 10 Times Lighter – (SciTech Daily – January 18, 2021)
The core mass of the giant exoplanet WASP-107b is much lower than what was thought necessary to build up the immense gas envelope surrounding giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn, astronomers at Université de Montréal have found. This intriguing discovery by Ph.D. student Caroline Piaulet of UdeM’s Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) suggests that gas-giant planets form a lot more easily than previously believed. “This work addresses the very foundations of how giant planets can form and grow,” said UdeM astrophysics professor Björn Benneke. “It provides concrete proof that massive accretion of a gas envelope can be triggered for cores that are much less massive than previously thought.” WASP-107b was first detected in 2017 around WASP-107, a star about 212 light years from Earth in the Virgo constellation. The planet is very close to its star — over 16 times closer than the Earth is to the Sun. As big as Jupiter but 10 times lighter, WASP-107b is one of the least dense exoplanets known: a type that astrophysicists have dubbed “super-puff” or “cotton-candy” planets. The mass of WASP-107b is about one tenth that of Jupiter, or about 30 times that of Earth. The team then did an analysis to determine the planet’s most likely internal structure. They came to a surprising conclusion: with such a low density, the planet must have a solid core of no more than four times the mass of the Earth. This means that more than 85% of its mass is included in the thick layer of gas that surrounds this core. By comparison, Neptune, which has a similar mass to WASP-107b, only has 5 – 15% of its total mass in its gas layer.

Researchers Say They’ve Found the Ancient Dens of Giant Carnivorous Worms – (Gizmodo – January 21, 2021)
Twenty million years ago, the shores of northern Taiwan were sandstone sediments at the bottom of the sea, where 6-foot-long worms lurked in their burrows, waiting for unsuspecting prey to pass overhead. Now, a team of geoscientists have chronicled 319 trace fossils of those carnivorous marine worms, whose dens fossilized in the Miocene muck. “In the beginning, we were firmly convinced it was a very fancy shrimp burrow,” Ludvig Löwemark, a sedimentologist at National Taiwan University, said in a video call. “And then, after talking to some other experts, we were leaning towards this bivalve hypothesis. But in the end, we became more and more convinced that it’s actually a bobbit worm that made this trace.” Trace fossils are vestiges of the creatures who made them—footprints and other hardened remnants of the animals’ movements in life, rather than the fossil remains of the critters themselves. The worms the researchers suggest once inhabited these burrows are long gone, presumably being composed of soft tissues that deteriorated shortly after death. Löwemark’s team, led by Yu-Yen Pan at the National Taiwan University, discovered hundreds of pockmarks peppering Taiwan’s rocky shoreline. They found the holes veered horizontally as they went deeper, forming a boomerang-shaped burrow about 1 inch wide and 6 feet deep. The tapering bend of the burrow suggested to the team that the earth beneath the creature either became harder to dig through at a certain depth or became more anoxic. (Worms breathe through their skin, so if the soil they’re immersed in doesn’t have enough oxygen, it can be deadly). Where the burrows opened onto the then-seafloor, there was a “feathering” pattern the team identified, which suggested that the silty sea bottom had collapsed around the structure in a funnel shape, indicative of a vacuum left by a creature yanking itself back into its lair. Article included embedded video clip of somewhat similar ocean bottom dwelling worm that can grow up to 10 feet long snatching prey by predatory ambush.

Not Just MagSafe: Apple Reminds Users Not to Hold iPhones Near Pacemakers – (Ars Technica – January 25, 2021)
MagSafe is a feature in new iPhones that among other things allows the devices to attach magnetically to a small Qi wireless charging pad. This magnetic alignment allows for more optimal charging speeds than in previous iPhone models. Apple has published clarifications to its support documents to address consumer concern that, because of the presence of the MagSafe magnet system in new iPhones, the iPhone 12 and its 2020 peers are particularly unsafe to hold in close proximity to an Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator (ICD) or pacemaker. Keeping any iPhone within six inches of an ICD or pacemaker (or within 15 inches, while charging wirelessly) is unsafe. The warning also claims the iPhone 12 is not specifically more dangerous than other models. Several weeks back, Heart Rhythm Journal published results of a test wherein it repeatedly found that moving an iPhone 12 with MagSafe close to a patient’s ICD interfered with the functioning of that lifesaving device. After that report, tech enthusiasts visited forums, Twitter, and Reddit to spread speculation that the iPhone 12 was particularly dangerous to people with pacemakers because of the introduction of MagSafe. However, the journal didn’t mention that modern smartphones already contained magnets and emit signals that necessitate that users with ICDs or pacemakers keep them several inches away from those medical devices, even before the introduction of MagSafe to the iPhone line in 2020. In other words, it is indeed unsafe to hold the iPhone 12 close to these medical devices—but it was also unsafe to do so with the iPhone 11, iPhone X, or any number of competing smartphones.

Breakthrough Study Finds Age-related Cognitive Decline May Be Reversible – (New Atlas – January 20, 2021)
A breakthrough study from a team of neurologists at Stanford University claims to have discovered one way immune cells become dysfunctional as we age, leading to the inflammatory hyperdrive that plays a role in most age-related disease from cancer to cognitive decline. Preliminary study suggests this immune dysfunction can be reversed, pointing to compelling future anti-aging therapies. The specific focus of the new study was a hormone called prostaglandin E2 (PGE2). Levels of this particular hormone have previously been found to rise with aging. PGE2 is also known to promote inflammatory activity in immune cells. The first part of the research unpacked exactly how PGE2 initiates inflammatory activity in macrophages, a fundamental immune white blood cell. Across animal experiments and in vitro human cell tests the researchers uncovered a comprehensive chain of events showing how PGE2 directly triggers dysfunctional inflammatory activity in macrophages. The final part of the research explored what happens when you inhibit this PGE2-EP2 mechanism. Initial in vitro experiments revealed old macrophage cells transforming when this mechanism was disrupted. Inflammatory characteristics disappeared and the old cells were effectively rejuvenated. Inhibiting this mechanism in aged mouse models of cognitive decline resulted in even more impressive results. The old mice, receiving an experimental drug that blocks PGE2-EP2 binding, displayed a reversal of cognitive decline, ultimately performing as well as young mice across a series of cognitive tests. However, a long research path that lies ahead. The experimental drugs used in the study to block PGE2-EP2 binding, for example, are not at all ready for human clinical use. In fact, they may not even be safe for humans, suggests Katrin Andreasson, senior author on the new study.

Clothes Washing Linked to Pervasive Plastic Pollution in the Arctic – (Guardian – January 12, 2021)
The Arctic is pervasively polluted by microplastic fibers that most likely come from the washing of synthetic clothes by people in Europe and North America, research has found. The most comprehensive study to date found the microplastics in 96 of 97 sea water samples taken from across the polar region. More than 92% of the microplastics were fibers, and 73% of these were made of polyester and were the same width and colors as those used in clothes. Most of the samples were taken from 3-8 meters below the surface, where much marine life feeds. Other recent analysis estimated that 3,500tn plastic microfibers from clothes washing in the US and Canada ended up in the sea each year, while modeling suggested plastic dumped in the seas around the UK was carried to the Arctic within two years. The researchers found plastic fibers at the north pole. With plastic recently discovered at the deepest point on Earth, the Mariana Trench, and the peak of Mount Everest, it is clear humanity’s litter has polluted the entire planet. It is known to injure wildlife that mistake it for food. People also consume microplastics via food and water, and breathe them in, although the health impact is not yet known. Much more water flows into the Arctic from the Atlantic than the Pacific, and the new research found higher concentrations of the microplastic fibers nearer the Atlantic, as well as longer and less degraded fibers. “We’re looking at a dominance of Atlantic inputs, which means sources of textile fibres in the North Atlantic from Europe and North America are likely to be driving the contamination in the Arctic Ocean,” said Peter Ross, at Ocean Wise Conservation Association in Canada, who led the study. “With these polyester fibers, we’ve essentially created a cloud throughout the world’s oceans.”

Covid-19 Kept Tourists Away. Why Did These Seabirds Miss Them? – (New York Times – January 22, 2021)
When tourists come to Stora Karlso, a limestone-ledged nature reserve off the coast of Sweden, they keep a respectful distance from the many seabirds that call the island home. Like most visitors to wild places, they aim to leave only footprints and take only photos — to slip between the strands of the web of life they’ve come to see. No such luck. In a paper published in Biological Conservation, researchers detail how the sudden absence of tourists on Stora Karlso during the pandemic set off a surprising chain reaction that wreaked havoc on the island’s colony of common murres, diminishing its population of newborn birds. Jonas Hentati-Sundberg, a researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and the lead author of the new paper, has been studying the colony for 19 years. When he and his team started planning the 2020 research season, they expected the pandemic would present logistical hurdles: Without visitors, fewer boats would be operating, and the island’s restaurant would be closed. However, from their first trips of the year, in late April, they noticed that the murres “were flying off all the time,” with individuals sometimes disappearing for days. That was a change in behavior, he said, and a sign that something was making the birds more nervous than usual. The island’s white-tailed eagles also changed their behavior. Normally, seven or eight eagles will spend the winter there, and then head out as visiting season picks up in the spring, Dr. Hentati-Sundberg said. But without the influx of tourists, they stuck around, and more eagles joined them — sometimes dozens at a time. Further observation clarified the new dynamics: The eagles, freed from the bothersome presence of humans, were themselves bothering the murres. Although eagles rarely prey on murres, the seabirds fear them, and scatter at the slightest flyby. The murre colony lost eggs, kicking them off ridges during panicked takeoffs, or leaving them vulnerable to hungry gulls and crows. Twenty-six percent fewer eggs hatched in 2020 than was typical for the rest of the decade. Researchers across the world have taken advantage of pandemic-related travel restrictions to study the effects of sudden human absence on the natural world, an event some have called the “anthropause.” A finding like this, where a tourism stoppage has a domino-style effect on multiple species, is “fascinating,” said Nicola Koper, a professor of ecology at the University of Manitoba who was not involved in the research. “This shows just how impactful our changes in travel have been on entire ecosystems.”

The Ongoing Collapse of the World’s Aquifers – (National Observer – January 21, 2021)
As California’s economy skyrocketed during the 20th century, its land headed in the opposite direction. A booming agricultural industry in the state’s San Joaquin Valley, combined with punishing droughts, led to the over-extraction of water from aquifers. Like huge, empty water bottles, the aquifers crumpled, a phenomenon geologists call subsidence. By 1970, the land had sunk as much as 28 feet in the valley, with less-than-ideal consequences for the humans and infrastructure above the aquifers. The plight of the San Joaquin Valley is not unique. All over the world — from the Netherlands to Indonesia to Mexico City — more punishing droughts mean the increased draining of aquifers, and rising seas make sinking land all the more vulnerable to flooding. According to a recent study published in the journal Science, in the next two decades, 1.6 billion people could be affected by subsidence, with potential losses in the trillions of dollars. For subsidence to become a problem, you need two things: The right kind of land, and an over-exploited aquifer. Aquifers hold water in between bits of sand, gravel, or clay. When the amount of clay in an aquifer is particularly high, the grains arrange themselves like plates thrown haphazardly in a sink — they’ve basically got random orientations, and the water fills in the spaces between the grains. But if you start extracting water from an aquifer, those spaces collapse and the grains draw closer together. “Those plates rearrange themselves into more like a stack of dinner plates that you put in your cupboard,” says Sneed. “It takes a lot less space, obviously, to stack the plates that way. And so that’s the compaction of the aquifer system that then results in land subsidence at the surface.” But wouldn’t pumping more water back into the aquifer force the clay plates back to their random, spacey orientations? Unfortunately, no. “It’ll press those grains apart a little bit — you’ll get a little bit of expansion in the aquifer system represented as uplift on the land surface. But it’s a tiny amount,” says Michelle Sneed, a land subsidence specialist at the U.S. Geological Survey. “They’re still stacked like the plates in your cupboard,” she continues. So at this point you’ve got a double-barreled problem: The land has sunk and it won’t reinflate, and the aquifers won’t hold as much water as they once did because they’ve compressed. “Aquifers will be depleted, one way or another,” says Arizona State University geophysicist Manoochehr Shirzaei. “It’s not possible to ask people who are in need of fresh water to stop using groundwater because it causes subsidence. So the bigger picture is: What are the adaptation strategies?” That could mean elevating buildings on lands that are subsiding and flooding. It could mean relying more on desalinating seawater, though that remains highly energy intensive, and therefore expensive. Or cities might follow in the footsteps of Los Angeles, which is modifying its streets to collect precious rainwater.

How Amazon Sidewalk Works—and Why You May Want to Turn It Off – (Wired – January 13, 2021)
If you have Amazon devices as part of your smart home, there’s a new service on the block you should be aware of—and as usual, there are both potential benefits and potential privacy implications to think about as you consider whether you want to be a part of it. Amazon Sidewalk uses Amazon smart-home gear to create a series of mini mesh networks, meaning your devices can stay connected further away from your router, and even stay online when your Wi-Fi goes down. This is made possible through Bluetooth and unused slices of the wireless spectrum, with Ring cameras and Echo speakers acting as the main bridges (actually called Sidewalk Bridges) to keep everything hooked up. The potential range of the network is decent—up to half a mile depending on the setup—and Sidewalk is free for Amazon customers to use once they’ve bought the hardware. The more controversial part of Amazon Sidewalk is the way it shares some of your internet bandwidth with your neighbors (and gets some back in return), creating a much wider network of devices that can operate independently. If your internet goes down, your Ring camera can connect to the internet next door to keep sending you alerts, assuming both of you are set up with Sidewalk. Likewise, if your neighbor’s internet goes down, their smart devices can temporarily connect to your router and the Sidewalk network you’ve created. Amazon has taken various steps to make this as private and secure as possible, including a variety of cryptographic algorithms and three levels of encryption. It shouldn’t be possible for other people to spy on your network or suddenly gain access to your smart thermostat. All that said, it really comes down to how much you trust Amazon—the company that seems keen to collect as much data as possible about you, shares Ring camera information with law enforcement agencies, and which hasn’t always protected sensitive user data quite as robustly as it might have done. The company has also said it might share Sidewalk data with third-party developers further down the line, and you know where that kind of data sharing tends to lead. If you end up deciding that Amazon Sidewalk isn’t for you, you need to take action: It’s on by default, once the software update has hit your devices.

Stop Being Naive When It Comes to Things Like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, etc. – (PocketNow – January 17, 2021)
The trend today has been to stop using WhatsApp ever since the policy was updated to allow sharing your personal information with Facebook. Some are recommending switching to other centralized messaging systems like Signal or Telegram, but there’s a problem with that too. To what degree is the messaging app is out to profit off of and control you versus enabling better communications between people? In terms of WhatsApp, it has been apparent for some time that something like this would happen eventually. The clues are pretty obvious; it’s a closed system, every app has to connect to the same centralized servers, it requires your phone number… it was clearly designed from the beginning to: generate a large user base over some number of years; sell out and/or change policies in order to take advantage of the user base; and profit. Switching to another messaging service might seem like the solution to Facebook’s monetization of your privacy, but be careful as you’re probably just trading one dictatorship for another dictatorship. Article goes on to name other messaging systems and give the history on what has become of them. And then offers alternatives and explains how you might use them.

I Looked at All the Ways Microsoft Teams Tracks Users and My Head Is Spinning – (ZD Net – January 17, 2021)
As far back as June, Microsoft explained in somewhat legalistic terms that it’s happily recording so much Teams activity for the benefit of employers and it’s up to them what they do with it. From what I could see, Teams hoovers up all your chats, voicemails, shared meetings, files, transcriptions, your profile details including your email address and phone number. Cut to September and Microsoft offered a little more about the Teams Activity Report (since updated). Here’s a sentence that’s unsurprising but still a touch uncomfortable: “The table gives you a breakdown of usage by user.” Everything from how many meetings that user organized to how many urgent messages they sent is recorded. Separate numbers are given for scheduled meetings and those that were ad hoc. Even individuals’ screen-share time is there. In October, then, Redmond offered “a new analytics and reporting experience for Microsoft Teams.” Now Microsoft is measuring privacy settings, device types, time stamps, reasons why someone may have been blocked, and “the number of messages a user posted in a private chat.” I know you’ll tell me this is all normal. This is entirely what’s to be expected in today’s techno-marvelous world. Yet, as far as I could tell, employees don’t have too much say in all this. They’re forced onto a particular platform without much control over what that platform may record about them personally, with their employer being the potential beneficiary. I wonder how many employees — and how many companies — currently know just how much information is now housed in Microsoft Teams. Some might also wonder whether Microsoft’s customers are actually begging for this sort of information or whether this is Redmond’s way of, as they say on marketing department Zoom calls, adding value and creating a competitive advantage. Or have the companies already invested in some of the fine employee surveillance software that’s now available?

How to Make Data Privacy Real – (New York Times – January 19, 2021)
The U.S. government recently settled with an app that lets women track their periods over claims that it shared its users’ health information with Google and Facebook. A photo-storage app also settled claims that it used people’s images to build a facial recognition system. These app makers got in trouble not because what they did seemed creepy — but because they weren’t upfront about it. In the United States, as long as companies don’t mislead their customers, there aren’t many legal limits on what they can do with our private information. That’s not great, is it? But California has a relatively new data privacy law that — while awkward and flawed — is starting to show intriguing ways to empower Americans to limit how our data can be used. As a side note: The proposed federal settlement with Flo prohibits the app’s developer, Flo Health, from misleading users about its data-handling practices. It also requires Flo to obtain users’ consent before sharing their health details and to obtain an independent review of its privacy practices. In settling the case, Flo did not admit to any wrongdoing. In a statement, the company said it does not share information about users’ health without their permission. “We are committed to ensuring that the privacy of our users’ personal health data is absolutely paramount,” the statement added. (Editor’s note: We suspect that if data sharing settlements required some measure of compensation to the customers whose privacy was treated with complete disregard, meaningful change would occur fairly quickly. Short of that, it may not happen.)

Saudi Arabia Announces Plans for a 100-Mile, Car-free Linear City Called The Line – (Dezeen – January 13, 2021)
Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, has unveiled plans for a 100-mile belt of zero-energy walkable communities for a million people. The linear city will have no cars or streets, with all residents living within a five-minute walk of essential facilities. Bin Salman announced plans for The Line in a video where he described it as a “civilizational revolution that puts humans first.” The 100-mile-long mega-city will consist of connected communities – which it calls “city modules” – and link the Red Sea coast with the north-west of Saudi Arabia. It will be a part of Neom, Saudi Arabia’s fully automated $500 billion region that will span Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt and be entirely powered by renewable energy. According to Bin Salman, who is also the chairman of the Neom company board of directors, construction of The Line will start in the first quarter of 2021. (View video clip “full screen”, to be able to read the subtitles during the first section in which Bin Salman is speaking.)

The FAA Just Greenlit This Drone to Fly Autonomously without a Human Nearby – (The Verge – January 15, 2021)
In October, the FAA took a major stride towards letting increasingly smart drones fly themselves, letting Skydio’s self-flying drones inspect any bridge in North Carolina for four years, as long as humans first verified those bridges were clear. Now, the US airspace regulator is taking an even bigger step: American Robotics says it’s become the first company allowed to operate drones without needing a human pilot or an observer anywhere near the aircraft. It’s not quite as big a deal as you’d expect from the company’s press release or The Wall Street Journal’s headline “FAA Approves First Fully Automated Commercial Drone Flights,” because humans still need to be part of the equation: FAA documents show that American Robotics will still need to assign a human to each and every flight, who’ll run through a safety checklist before takeoff and inspect the aircraft with remote tools. They’re not fully automated yet. The FAA’s also only approving this waiver for a handful of specific locations in Kansas, Massachusetts and Nevada that are owned by the company or its customers, so it’s not like they’ll be flying over people unawares, either. As you can see in the company’s video embedded in the article, it’s targeting this tech at companies that want push-button aerial inspections of their own property — not exactly drone deliveries. For that, the FAA has a separate kind of certification. But the FAA does seem interested in what it can learn from letting American Robotics fly without humans physically nearby.

More Than Just an Electric Vehicle Maker, NIO Launches Battery as a Service Subscription Model – (Motley Fool – August 20, 2020)
Well-known for its leading position in the Chinese electric vehicle (EV) market, NIO has announced the launch of its Battery as a Service (BaaS) subscription. Customers who participate in the BaaS program will receive a deduction on the vehicle’s purchase price of 70,000 renminbi, or approximately $10,120, and pay a monthly subscription fee of 980 renminbi, or about $142. In addition, customers will still be able to receive tax incentives and government subsidies for EVs. Speaking to the advantages of the BaaS subscription, William Bin Li, founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of NIO, said, “The successful launch of the BaaS model will enable NIO users to benefit from the lower initial purchase prices of our products, flexible battery upgrade options and assurance of battery performance.” According to Li, NIO has already “deployed 143 battery swap stations across 64 cities in China, and completed over 800,000 battery swaps for our users.” (Editor’s note: We see this a leading edge example of the idea that ownership is outdated and that almost everything in the future can be conceived of as a “service” – meaning that you won’t own the things, you will simply pay on a regular basis to use them and, when necessary, have them replaced as part of the service agreement. The benefit to consumers is a lower up-front cost; the downside is that you never stop paying.)

Google Warns of Novel Social Engineering Method Used to Hack Security Researchers – (The Verge – January 25, 2021)
Government-backed hackers based in North Korea are targeting individual security researchers through a number of means including a “novel social engineering method,” Google’s Threat Analysis Group is reporting. The campaign has reportedly been ongoing for several months, and worryingly appears to exploit unpatched Windows 10 and Chrome vulnerabilities. Although Google doesn’t say exactly what the aim of the hacking campaign is, it notes that the targets are working on “vulnerability research and development.” This suggests the attackers may be trying to learn more about non-public vulnerabilities that they can use in future state-sponsored attacks. According to Google, the hackers set up a cybersecurity blog and series of Twitter accounts in an apparent attempt to build and amplify credibility while interacting with potential targets. The blog focused on writing up vulnerabilities that were already public. Meanwhile, the Twitter accounts posted links to the blog, as well as other alleged exploits. At least one of the purported exploits was faked, according to Google. The search giant cites several cases of researchers’ machines having been infected simply by visiting the hackers’ blog, even when running the latest versions of Windows 10 and Chrome. The social engineering method outlined by Google involved contacting security researchers, and asking them to collaborate on their work. However, once they agreed, the hackers would send over a Visual Studio Project containing malware, which would infect the target’s computer and start contacting the attackers’ server.

If You Use WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram, You Need to Change These Security Settings – (Entrepreneur – January 24, 2021)
After WhatsApp announced the update of its policies to share data with Facebook, millions of users migrated to other messaging apps . The two favorites have been Telegram and Signal, apparently for offering greater privacy. However, none of the three is completely reliable, unless you change certain security settings to better protect your information. Cybersecurity expert Zak Doffman claims that Telegram and Signal promise more privacy than traditional platforms. However, like WhatsApp, they have important settings that are not predetermined and that must be modified from now on. In this article, the specialist shares his recommendations to configure the devices so that your data is less accessible. Doffman also explained that although WhatsApp collects much more data than Telegram or iMessage, they are few compared to other apps, such as Facebook, Messenger, Google, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok. “So unless you avoid those others, WhatsApp is not your biggest problem,” he added.

Establishment War against “We the People” – (USAWatchdog – January 25, 2021)
Former Assistant Treasury Secretary Dr. Paul Craig Roberts (PCR) says the country has changed dramatically since the massively fraudulent and rigged 2020 Election that put Joe Biden in the White House. Dr. PCR says, “First, consider there is now an organized war by the establishment against anyone who takes exception to their explanation of the election. We see, for example, free speech is now dead. Many of the institutions in the United States no longer believe in it. You can’t protest what you perceive as a stolen election without being called an enemy of democracy. Well, someone who is protesting what they perceive as a stolen election is defending democracy. Now, that means they are an enemy because the narrative can’t be challenged. You can’t say anything is wrong with the 2020 Election even if you have enormous evidence. So, you don’t have free speech. Also, a lot of people who attended the Trump rally (in Washington D.C. 1/6/21) have been fired simply for attending the rally. So, you don’t have freedom of association. You cannot do anything that is seen as opposition to the establishment. Biden was demanding personal allegiance from the troops who defended the inauguration. So, it looks more and more like a dictatorship.” Dr. PCR goes on to say, “The evidence is overwhelming that the election was stolen. There is no doubt about it. Let’s assume we don’t really know if the election was stolen. We do know everybody who voted for Trump believes it was stolen. We also know from the polls that 30% of Democrats believe it was stolen. So, if that many people believe it was stolen, the government has an obligation to investigate and tell the people we looked at the evidence… and say it was or was not stolen, but they refuse to look at the evidence. They had the explanation ready, and the explanation was ‘there’s no evidence.’

As Birth Rates Fall, Animals Prowl in Our Abandoned ‘Ghost Villages’ – (Guardian – January 24, 2021)
For many years it seemed that overpopulation was the looming crisis of our age. Back in 1968, the Stanford biologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich infamously predicted that millions would soon starve to death in their bestselling, doom-saying book The Population Bomb. At the time the Ehrlichs were publishing their dark prophecies, the world was at its peak of population growth, which at that point was increasing at a rate of 2.1% a year. Since then, the global population has ballooned from 3.5 billion to 7.67 billion. But growth has slowed – and considerably. Falling fertility rates have been a problem in the world’s wealthiest nations – notably in Japan and Germany – for some time. In South Korea last year, birthrates fell to 0.84 per woman, a record low despite extensive government efforts to promote childbearing. The fertility rate is also falling dramatically in England and Wales – from 1.9 children per woman in 2012 to just 1.65 in 2019. Increasingly this is also the case in middle-income countries too, including Thailand and Brazil. In Iran, a birthrate of 1.7 children per woman has alarmed the government. Thanks to this worldwide pattern of falling fertility levels, the UN now believes that we will see an end to population growth within decades – before the slide begins in earnest. But what does population decline look like on the ground? The experience of Japan, a country that has been showing this trend for more than a decade, might offer some insight. Already there are too few people to fill all its houses – one in every eight homes now lies empty. In Japan, they call such vacant buildings akiya – ghost homes. (Editor’s note: We recommend this article for its reporting on reforestation and the reemergence of wild animals that accompanies rural abandonment.)

Mass Civil Disobedience is Spreading – (BitChute – January 20, 2021)
The spirit of rebelliousness isn’t just alive in the US. In Italy, over 50,000 restaurants opened in defiance of Italy’s draconian lockdown measures. Article goes on to discuss situation in Ireland where generous government subsidies are keeping people complacent and current lockdown rules in Germany. See also: Covid: Dutch curfew riots rage for third night. and Here’s why rioters say they’re gathering in Portland.

Mars Digger Bites the Dust after 2 Years on Red Planet – (NBC – January 15, 2021)
NASA has declared the Mars digger dead after failing to burrow deep into the red planet to take its temperature. Scientists in Germany spent two years trying to get their heat probe, dubbed the mole, to drill into the Martian crust. But the 16-inch-long device that is part of NASA’s InSight lander couldn’t gain enough friction in the red dirt. It was supposed to bury 16 feet into Mars, but only drilled down a couple of feet. Following one last unsuccessful attempt to hammer itself down over the weekend with 500 strokes, the team called it quits. The mole’s design was based on Martian soil examined by previous spacecraft. That turned out nothing like the clumpy dirt encountered this time. InSight’s French seismometer, meanwhile, has recorded nearly 500 Marsquakes, while the lander’s weather station is providing daily reports. On one day recently, the high was 17 degrees Fahrenheit and the low was minus 56 degrees Fahrenheit at Mars’ Elysium Planitia, an equatorial plain.

Missing: One Black Hole with 10 Billion Solar Masses – (New York Times – January 19, 2021)
Astronomers are searching the cosmic lost-and-found for one of the biggest, baddest black holes thought to exist. So far they haven’t found it. In the past few decades, it has become part of astronomical lore, if not quite a law, that at the center of every luminous city of light, called a galaxy, lurks something like a hungry Beelzebub, a giant black hole into which the equivalent of millions or even billions of suns have disappeared. The bigger the galaxy, the more massive the black hole at its center. So it was a surprise a decade ago when Marc Postman, of the Space Telescope Science Institute, using the Hubble Space Telescope to survey clusters of galaxies, found a supergiant galaxy with no sign of a black hole in its center. Normally, the galaxy’s core would have a kink of extra light in its center, a kind of sparkling cloak, produced by stars that had been gathered there by the gravity of a giant black hole. On the contrary, at the exact center of the galaxy’s wide core, where a slight bump in starlight should have been, there was a slight dip. Moreover, the entire core, a cloud of stars some 20,000 light years across, was not even centered on the exact middle of the galaxy. So where has nature stashed the equivalent of 10 billion suns? One possibility is that the black hole is there but has gone silent, having temporarily run out of anything to eat. But another provocative possibility, Tod Lauer, an expert on galactic nuclei at the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory in Tucson, Ariz. and his colleagues say, is that the black hole was thrown out of the galaxy altogether.

Scientists Produce Metals Four Times Harder than Naturally Occurring Structures – (Interesting Engineering – January 24, 2021)
When it comes to metallurgy, it is common knowledge that smaller grains make for harder metals. But how exactly do you achieve these grains? A group of Brown University researchers has found a method for smashing individual metal nanoclusters that leads to metals that are up to four times harder than naturally occurring structures. This new method is quite different from conventional hardening techniques. “Hammering and other hardening methods are all top-down ways of altering grain structure, and it’s very hard to control the grain size you end up with,” said Ou Chen, an assistant professor of chemistry at Brown and corresponding author of the new research. “What we’ve done is create nanoparticle building blocks that fuse together when you squeeze them. This way we can have uniform grain sizes that can be precisely tuned for enhanced properties.” For this research, the team used nanoparticles of gold, silver, palladium, and other metals and chemically stripped them of the organic molecules called ligands, which generally prevent the formation of metal-metal bonds between particles. The clusters were then able to fuse together with just a bit of pressure.

Insanely Humanlike Androids Have Entered the Workplace and Soon May Take Your Job – (CNBC – October 31, 2019)
Russian start-up Promobot has unveiled what it calls the world’s first autonomous android. It closely resembles a real person and can serve in a business capacity. Robo-C can be made to look like anyone, so it’s like an android clone. It comes with an artificial intelligence system that has more than 100,000 speech modules, according to the company. It can operate at home, acting as a companion robot and reading out the news or managing smart appliances — basically, an anthropomorphic smart speaker. It can also perform workplace tasks such as answering customer questions in places like offices, airports, banks and museums, while accepting payments and performing other functions. While it can’t walk around, Robo-C has 18 moving parts in its face, giving it 36 degrees of freedom. The company says it has over 600 micro facial expressions, the most on the market. It also has three degrees of freedom in its neck and torso, offering limited movement. Still, Promobot says it can be useful in homes and workplaces. The price of the robot is $20,000 to $50,000 depending on options and customized appearance. The company says it’s building four Robo-Cs: one for a government service center, where the machine will scan passports and perform other functions, one that will look like Einstein and be part of a robot exhibition, and two for a family in the Middle East that wants to have android versions of its father and his wife to greet guests. Here is a link to a 5 minute news clip interviewing the CEO of Promobot. This link will take you to a Youtube clip in which Stephen Colbert, with his accustomed charm and style, discusses the Robo-C. (Editor’s note: Although the company says that Robo-C can be made to look like anyone, we suspect you might have trouble getting one that looks like Vladimir Putin.)

Got a Package You Didn’t Order? It Could Be Part of a Scam – (CNN – January 23, 2021)
Some people are getting deliveries of weird stuff like hair clippers, face creams and sunglasses they never even ordered at all. These deliveries can be part of something known as “brushing” scams. Here’s how these scams work: Third-party sellers on Amazon, eBay and other online marketplaces pay people to write fake, positive reviews about their products, or do it themselves. To be able to post the reviews, these so-called “brushers” need to trick the site into making it appear that a legitimate transaction took place. So they’ll use a fake account to place gift orders and address them to a random person whose name and address they find online. Then, instead of actually mailing the item for which they want to post a review, the brushers will send a cheap, often lightweight item that costs less to ship. Sending an item (even the wrong one) creates a tracking number, and when the package is delivered, it enables brushers to write a verified review. If you’re on the receiving end, you aren’t charged for the purchase and your real account isn’t hacked — but you are left in the dark as to who is sending the mystery packages. In many cases, there’s no return address. You don’t need to worry that anything bad has happened to you or will happen to you if you get a package that might be part of a brushing scam, experts say. But we all need to be aware that the scams may be affecting reviews we rely on when buying products.

Virtu Moving Workers to Florida as Pandemic Reshapes Wall Street – (Bloomberg – January 4, 2021)
Virtu Financial Inc., a provider of financial services, trading products and market making services, is heading to Florida, adding to the wave of financial firms setting up bases outside Manhattan as the pandemic transforms how and where people work. Virtu joins companies including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Paul Singer’s Elliott Management Corp. and Ken Griffin’s Citadel in setting their sights on the Sunshine State. After operating with social distance for most of the pandemic year, financial firms are concluding they can cut back on ultra-pricey Manhattan office space without sacrificing revenue or productivity. The changes have been driven by employees who are accustomed to remote working, want more living space and are sick of long commutes, said Chief Executive Officer Doug Cifu. Virtu’s Palm Beach Gardens office won’t be a satellite, Cifu said, but rather a full-fledged base for executives, salespeople, traders and technology staff who volunteered to relocate after being given the option during a company meeting last year. Those transferring will retain their current salaries, effectively giving most an 11% pay bump because Florida has no income tax, he said.

The Future & What is Really Going On – (Armstrong Economics – January 18, 2021)
QUESTION: This civil war you talk about. Is it Republican v Democrat? Is this because your precious Trump lost? ANSWER: I (Martin Armstrong) have been stressing that this was NEVER an election about Trump v Biden. This is an international coup. This is the DELIBERATE destruction of the world economy and you better get your head out of the sand. There is no return to normal. The hospitality industry has been destroyed and the auto industry is starting to shut down for, with lockdowns extended into next June, who needs cars? Tourism is gone as is normal commuting by car. Destroying these businesses is an intentional plot for the Great Reset and it is a very well organized intended takeover of the world economy. We have never come as dangerously close to changing everything about society as we are right now. They think they can speed-up this Fourth Industrial Revolution to shape it the way they desire. If you cannot see what they are doing, then perhaps you deserve to be turned into a worker-ant. I suggest you make some popcorn and watch this video (link embedded in article).

Can Robert Bigelow (and the Rest of Us) Survive Death? – (New York Times – January 21, 2021)
What’s across the River Styx? Robert Thomas Bigelow would like to know. Wouldn’t anyone, especially now? But Mr. Bigelow is not just anyone, or any 75-year-old mourning a wife and confronting his own mortality. He’s a maverick Las Vegas real estate and aerospace mogul with billionaire allure and the resources to fund his restless curiosity embracing outer and inner space, U.F.O.s and the spirit realm. Now he’s offering nearly $1 million in prizes for the best evidence for “the survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death.” A daunting quest, perhaps fringe to some, but the shaggy-maned and mustached entrepreneur, the sole owner of Bigelow Aerospace and Budget Suites of America, amassed a fortune to pursue his interests, including the designing and building of inflatable astronaut habitats for NASA, like his soft-sided expandable activity module called BEAM attached to the International Space Station. His aerospace ventures have been financed by his Budget Suites business, one of the first extended-stay rental chains, now housing some 15,000 people in three states. The profits have enabled him, he says, to sink more than $350 million into Bigelow Aerospace, “my own real black hole,” as he put it. Last June, four months after bone marrow disease and leukemia claimed the life of his wife of 55 years, Diane Mona Bigelow, at 72, Mr. Bigelow quietly founded the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies to support research into what happens after death. It set the stage for his new afterlife contest, seeking the best available evidence of survival of consciousness, with prizes of $500,000, $300,000 and $150,000 for first, second and third place. The winners will be announced on Nov. 1.

The Japanese Artist Who Sends His Work to Space – (New Yorker – September 30, 2020)
This 28 minute documentary features Azuma Makoto, who uses plants to create stunning sculptures that connect humanity and nature. Words really fall short here; we recommend that you watch this interview and meet Makoto, who is both an artist who expresses himself through the medium of flowers and an entrepreneur running a very successful haute couture flower shop.

What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.
― Jeff Bezos

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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