Let's Make It Three Liz Warren Pieces in a Row

First it was about her childish view of wealth, then about her wealth penalty/tax, so tonight will be about the costs of her other plan; "medicare for all".  Kudos to Guy Benson at Townhall for the story.

One of the things that has been going on in the clown car show of the Democratic primaries is how Liz Warren can tell you to the digit how many selfies she has had taken with people while campaigning, but won't tell you within the nearest trillion dollars how much her medicare program will cost.  Other candidates have questioned her about it, but all she'll say is that peoples' total expenses will go down.  Since she often says that when questioned whether taxes might go up, I have to assume taxes will be going up but her advisors say the medical premiums and out of pocket cost reductions will offset that.  That sounds to me like, "if you like your plan you can keep your plan", or "the typical family's premium will go down by $2500 a year," both famous Obama lies.

The cost of her plans has been looked at by independent groups, but the first time there was a link to the Koch brothers so it was dismissed out of hand. 

...the Mercatus Center at George Mason University published a rigorous analysis performed by a former Social Security and Medicare trustee that pegged the price tag of this left-wing dream at $32.6 trillion over ten years.  (Measuring sticks: The US federal government spent $4 trillion total in 2017, and the entire US economy was a bit shy of $19 trillion in 2016).

Let's assume it adds $3.26 trillion per year, when the current total expenditures are $4 trillion (with revenues $1.0 to $1.2 trillion less than that).  As reported in The Atlantic and excerpted at Townhall.com:

The Urban Institute, a center-left think tank highly respected among Democrats, is projecting that a plan similar to what Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders are pushing would require $34 trillion in additional federal spending over its first decade in operation. That’s more than the federal government’s total cost over the coming decade for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid combined, according to the most recent Congressional Budget Office projections...In recent history, only during the height of World War II has the federal government tried to increase taxes, as a share of the economy, as fast as would be required to offset the cost of a single-payer plan, federal figures show. There are “no analogous peacetime tax increases,” says Leonard Burman, a public-administration professor at Syracuse University and a former top tax official in both the Bill Clinton administration and at the CBO. Raising that much more tax revenue “is plausible in the sense that it is theoretically possible,” Burman told me. “But the revolution that would come along with it would get in the way.”  [Emphasis in the original - SiG]

Since the Urban Institute is a leftish think tank, this one hasn't been ridiculed and dismissed just yet. It's just a little (4%) bigger than the Mercatus estimate dismissed for being too linked to conservatives.  Instead of attacking this report, the pro-Warren media is saying anyone who wants to know how much this plan will cost are just shills looking for Republican talking points.  Thou shalt not ask potentially embarrassing questions of Lizzie Warren.

It's hard to sum up all the economic damage Warren wants to do to America.  Ignoring the wealth tax that's likely to crash world stock markets, retirement plans and other savings vehicles, here alone she wants to outlaw private health insurance, kill off the industry and make every aspect of it government. That industry alone is about $1 Trillion/year in revenue and 621,000 people's careers.  All of those jobs will be lost.  It's conceivable that because of their experience and knowledge, some will essentially change employers, leaving their job in the private sector Friday and starting as a Government employee on Monday.  It's very likely some percentage will not do that and will join the unemployed or find other employment.

If Medicare for All is like every government health care system I've ever heard of, there will be long waits for most procedures.  Those long wait times and government rationing could also lead to an outcry in favor of supplementary plans, which would raise people's costs even further.  

There's no reason to take the word of a big gubmint weenie like Princess Lieawatha.  She was, after all, part of the administration that said the typical insurance premiums would go down $2500 per year, when they went up by more than $2500.

“In 2013, the average annual cost of a premium for an individual health care plan was $2,784. By 2017, the average annual cost for a premium for an individual health care plan on HealthCare.gov was $5,712. Thirty-nine states use HealthCare.gov.

The average of $2,784 doubled was $5,568, or $144 less than that $5,712 by 2017.  In 24 states, premiums doubled, and three states had premiums triple over four years.  I'd expect nothing less under Warren's (or Bernie's, or any of their) Medicare for All.

Somehow, this seemed to go here...  If I had graphic editing skills, I'd make AOC into Warren and see what else I could make out of it.

Elizabeth Warren's Bad, Stupid, Unconstitutional, Idea

It's no secret that Elizabeth Warren has been proposing a Wealth Penalty, um, Success Penalty, OK: Wealth Tax.  No surprise from the twit who told a group of factory owners "you didn't build that" years ago while working for Obama.  She's resurrected that argument during this campaign.  Like all good communists, she wants to punish anyone who has been successful and redistribute the money she takes.  I'm sure that's after skimming some off.

Warren proposes to tax the wealth of people over $50 Million at 2%, increasing that to 3% for wealth over $1 Billion.  There's a very important word in there: wealth.  This isn't an income tax for people who get paid over $50 M/year or $1B, this is a tax on whatever they own.  Say they own a nice house, a couple of cars, some nice jewelry or a boat or RV or all of the above.  The value of their properties will assessed and they'll be taxed.  We're not necessarily talking about just money in a bank or investment vehicle, or a mansions, we're talking about anything that a deeply envious legislature would consider material wealth: which would be everything.   

Thinking farther down this road, those assets were bought with money that has already been taxed.  The items themselves probably were subject to sales taxes as well as an array of other taxes, state and federal.  They've probably been taxed more than one time.  She proposes to tax them forever.  2% this year, 2% next year, 2% the year after that and so on, in perpetuity. 

Warren's plan has been written by ... (wait for it) ... a couple of economics professors from the University of California at Berkeley.  (Who else but professors?  From where else but the People's Republic of Berkeley?)  They have said the wealth penalty will raise $2.75 Trillion over its first 10 years.  You probably know I hate guesses like that.  Are they assuming linear distribution at $275 Billion/year, or some growth in revenue so little collected now and more collected every year to year 10?  Could they be considering a decrease in collections over the decade so less is collected over the years, which seems likely to me since the wealth will be bled off by this tax - which is the purpose of the tax, after all.  Personally, I don't believe any of it.  Predictions about revenues from tax increases are virtually always wrong.

The first problem is that this unconstitutional.  Unless it says so in the constitution, they can't just tax whatever they want.  We have private property in this country.  The founders considered and rejected the idea of an income tax; you'll recall it took constitutional amendment (the 16th in 1913) to get an income tax allowed.  This is like an ex post facto income tax.  A tax on income you earned and have been taxed on several times already.  Certainly changing the laws about taxing property one owns after they acquired things is an ex post facto law.

As I talked about in my piece on The Dems Childish View of Wealth yesterday, it will also affect the market values of everything that's considered an asset.  If a billionaire fund manager like Warren Buffet has to sell off part of his Berkshire Hathaway holdings to pay his taxes, that could substantially lower the cost of the shares, hurting everyone who holds shares.  It could cause or exacerbate a market correction, affecting everyone who's not a millionaire or billionaire but simply trying to save money and get some earnings on it, unlike having it in a bank. 

You know that one of the hallmarks of new taxes is that those getting taxed adjust their lives to pay less tax.  Which is why you also know that incomes from taxes never quite agree with predictions (particularly from the Congressional Budget Office - who has said nothing about this one).  If a billionaire can reduce his tax burden by transferring assets to their favorite charity, look for lots of that to happen.  It's hard to imagine people preferring to pay tax than to pay money to their favorite charities.  At least, I've never met anyone who'd rather pay taxes. 

Look for a lot of confusion and hassle about valuations of these estates.  That's a glaring hole in the narrative.  If you think that everyone will agree on valuations, you've never been to an auction - or watched an episode of PBS' Antiques Roadshow.  Expect large numbers of lawsuits over this. It seems to me, and I've never seen this detail, that if one is being taxed on the value of their property that the value shouldn't be expected to remain the same and could go up or down.  Annual appraisals for things that aren't publicly traded, like their houses, cars, and so on? 

This is a really bad idea, poorly studied, virtually certainly unconstitutional.  As always, it will hurt people other than the rich that Warren wants to hurt.  Its only selling point is it appeals to the deeply envious primary voters she's selling it to.  

The Dems Childish View of Wealth

For the longest time, I've had this vision in my mind about how AOC, Liz Warren and the rest of the Evil Party view wealth.  Their mental image of a rich person is from Scrooge McDuck cartoons, swimming and playing in vast piles of gold coins and other material wealth.

Their reaction to the fact that billionaires exist and are a positive thing in society are just so stuck at this four-year-old mental image.  This Twit's Tweet is a perfect example (name redacted to protect the moron), from an article at FEE (the Foundation for Economic Education).

No, Twit, people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and the other billionaires aren't human incarnations of Scrooge McDuck; nor are they Smaug the Dragon from The Hobbit.  Smaug didn't play and swim in his gold coins, but he immersed himself in them and slept on them. 

The FEE article is a good starting place, asking the question, "Is Jeff Bezos Smaug the Dragon?"  It's a easy question to dismiss.  With a publicly stated net worth of $108 Billion and the richest man in the world, he doesn't live in a double wide off a dirt road in Arkansas, or a 3BR/2BA ranch house off a two lane road outside Seattle.  He definitely has "creature comforts", five mansions and a private jet, but the nice thing about being a billionaire is that those comforts don't soak up much of your net worth.  More than 95% of his net worth is in the market value of the portion of Amazon and other businesses that he owns.

And what is Amazon made of? Again, we’re not just talking about piles of money and luxury goods here. We’re talking about a business. For example, there’s the massive operation that takes the Amazon.com orders you and I make: warehouses full of computers processing oodles of data every day. Then there’s all it takes to fulfill those orders: facilities that cover acres, 100,000 electric delivery trucks, etc.

Those are the kinds of things that make up most of Bezos’s treasure: not stuff for personal use, but stuff that is made to make other stuff. Economists call such stuff “capital goods.”

Note that Bezos' treasure isn't gold coins or jewelry or things like that.  The capital goods that are the vast majority of his wealth are only worth something if they're being used to make things for other people.  They're not something everyone in the general population would likely want.  

The distinction is vital because of the plans that Liz Warren, Bernie, and all the other communists Democratic Socialists have to "tax the wealthy".  What happens to that wealth if Jeff has to sell some of Amazon to pay his wealth tax?  A sudden mass of Amazon stock on the market, especially if the fund managers and other professionals know he has to sell it, will drive the price down on markets.  The same thing would happen to every other company that another billionaire owns part of when that billionaire needs to pay their wealth tax. 

Maybe the DemSocs don't care: they still get their 2% of all wealth over $50 million and it doesn't bother them at all if Bezos has to sell more shares of stock, driving the price farther down. 

The first major side effect of that, though, is that they lower the net worth of everyone that's invested in those billionaire's companies, from major market movers to working people trying to save for retirement.  That lowers the government's revenues.  Who's to say that with a credible threat to require assets be sold to pay taxes, that all of the world's stock markets won't collapse?  I think Liz Warren would view that as a feature not a bug.

The second major side effect is that Amazon, like most retail companies, isn't a high margin company guaranteed to be around for a long time.  Big, successful companies go out of business all the time.  Just enter “Sears” in your favorite search engine, perhaps with the word bankruptcy. 

In the bad old days the DemSocs seem to long for, there was a two class system: the feudal lords and the peasants.  As long as they have the power and are on top, that's all they care about. 

Does The Recent Roh Court Case Destroy Existing Laws on AR-15s?

Background: a few days ago, McThag posted a link to a CNN story about a case that I hadn't heard of against a guy from Southern Californina for manufacturing firearms by completing 80% lowers.  For the benefit of the few who are new and don't know the situation with 80% lowers, they are legally considered "not a gun."  Many writers call them a paperweight, but even that's too specific; they're just a hunk of metal.  BATFE rulings on the subject are that in the case of an AR-15, the lower receiver is the gun, and the act of machining one enough to complete the gun is manufacturing a firearm.  You can make some for yourself.  You can even sell ones you don't care about anymore, but if you do that a few times, they can and will charge you with manufacturing firearms without your FFL. 

Joseph Roh had a small shop and would, at first, finish 80% lowers for people who were willing to pay about $1000 for the service.  Presumably, people who'd pay $1000 for these lowers were people who couldn't pass the background checks to buy new guns from a shop.  Roh eventually automated the process so anyone could complete the the lower receiver's machining by pressing a "GO" button - after they paid $25 to join his gun club so that he could say he wasn't selling to the general public.

Roh's shop - CNN photo. The green button is on the box on the upper right, at the top of column of buttons next to the light colored area.

Seems like an open and shut case.  To the best of my knowledge, I can make a gun for myself, but if I do it for anyone else, that's manufacturing and I need a manufacturer's FFL.  That's where a big turn in the story takes place.

The judge in the case had issued a tentative order that, in the eyes of prosecutors, threatened to upend the decades-old Gun Control Act and "seriously undermine the ATF's ability to trace and regulate firearms nationwide."

A case once touted by prosecutors as a crackdown on an illicit firearms factory was suddenly seen as having the potential to pave the way to unfettered access to one of the most demonized guns in America.

Federal authorities preferred to let Roh go free rather than have the ruling become final and potentially create case law that could have a crippling effect on the enforcement of gun laws, several sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

The problem is that the BATFE's classification doesn't agree with Federal law on exactly what a receiver is, because the design of the AR splits those things between the upper and the lower receivers.

Under the US Code of Federal Regulations, a firearm frame or receiver is defined as: "That part of a firearm which provides housing for the hammer, bolt or breechblock, and firing mechanism, and which is usually threaded at its forward portion to receive the barrel."

The lower houses the hammer, and "firing mechanism" (the fire control group), but the bolt is located in the upper receiver.   The lower doesn't have a breechblock. 

US District Court Judge James V. Selna heard the case, after four years of wait, and deliberated on it for a year.  Last April, he issued his ruling stating that Roh was not manufacturing guns because completing the lower receiver doesn't turn it into a gun.

Selna added that the combination of the federal law and regulation governing the manufacturing of receivers is "unconstitutionally vague" as applied in the case against Roh.

"No reasonable person would understand that a part constitutes a receiver where it lacks the components specified in the regulation," Selna wrote.

Therefore, the judge determined, "Roh did not violate the law by manufacturing receivers."

The judge's tentative order also found that the ATF's in-house classification process failed to comply with federal rule-making procedures.

Cam Edwards at Bearing Arms adds that this is the second time Federal prosecutors have dropped charges against people over the definition of a receiver and the second time a Federal judge has essentially nullified the law.  In a word, the BATFE is terrified that they created a situation with no definition for which part of the AR-15 is the gun.

The first case was back in 2016, and involved a convicted felon named Alejandro Jimenez who bought a lower receiver in an ATF sting operation. After a judge ruled that the receiver wasn’t an actual firearm under federal law, the case against Jimenez was dropped.

Judge Selna did, however, find Roh guilty of selling firearms without a license, which carries a prison sentence.  The prosecutors and defense worked out a bargain; Roh would not go to prison "as long as he keeps his mouth shut" about the BATFE's receiver rules being wrong.  No, I made that part up.   

Sources familiar with the agreement said prosecutors wanted to strike a deal in order to prevent Selna’s order from becoming permanent, drawing publicity, and creating case law that could hamper ATF enforcement efforts.

Roh accepted the deal to avoid a permanent conviction — and possible prison time — for dealing firearms without a license.

So where does that leave the 80% lower world?   For that matter, where does that leave the law?  Hell if I know. 

What the rulings seem to be saying is that the AR platform with its regulated lower and unregulated upper is inconsistent with Federal law.  Since it's impossible to redesign the platform with millions of them already in peoples' hands, the solution is for congress to come up with a definition for the lower receiver that's workable.  That's going to be a giant ball of fail; congress never writes laws that require technical details because none of them are qualified.  On the other hand, if someone was to do things that the BATFE frowned on with some lower receivers, we have two cases that say they're going to quit before they get ruled against for all the marbles.  In the words of Dirty Harry, "do you feel lucky?"

80% lowers and 0% forgings posed in my shop. 

After a Break to Change Some Design Details, Boeing Back at Work on SLS

Eric Berger at ArsTechnica has the story this week, that after about a month of inactivity on mating the main engines into the SLS booster, Boeing resumed work.

Nearly a month ago, NASA announced that Boeing had assembled the core stage structure that forms the backbone of its Space Launch System rocket. This meant that all technicians needed to do to complete the full core stage was bolt on four space shuttle main engines and connect their plumbing.

Completing the core stage at NASA's rocket factory, the Michoud Assembly Facility in Southern Louisiana, would represent a significant milestone for the program. However, after assembling the core stage structure in September, two sources familiar with Boeing's work at the factory said the company had to "stand down" operations due to some issues.

Now, NASA officials have provided a little information about the causes of the delay. In a statement, the space agency's headquarters told Ars that "NASA initiated a forward looking corrective action request focused on improving the production system in preparation for Core Stage 2 and beyond." As a result of this corrective action, which was not specified, "Boeing chose to stand down in some areas and ensure the whole production team was aware of the intent behind the corrective action request."

Within the last two weeks, the local paper was buzzing that the SLS pathfinder had arrived at the KSC by barge.  (It might surprise people who aren't familiar with this kind of hardware that it's regularly shipped here from another part of the country by barge.)  The pathfinder just underscores how far Boeing has to go before they're launching the SLS.  The pathfinder is just a full scale mockup of the SLS core stage to ensure all the hardware work among separate facilities is progressing as intended.  Things like crane lifting hardware working with the designed lifting points and that everything needed for the ground work to take place was anticipated and designed for. 

It is not clear what triggered the need for a corrective action, but one source suggested to Ars that Boeing technicians are having difficulty attaching the large rocket engines in a horizontal configuration rather than a vertical position. NASA and Boeing made a late change to the final assembly process, deciding to mate pieces of the core stage horizontally rather than vertically to save time. However, this source said horizontal mating of the engines has created problems.

That said, they seem to have recovered and on Saturday Tracy McMahan, a spokesperson for Marshall Space Flight Center, said,  "NASA and Boeing are expected to have the first engine soft mated to the core stage next week."  McMahan went on to say, "however, there are many steps in engine installation that have to occur before the installation is complete."

Still to come, NASA and Boeing hope to have the core booster completed soon.  That will allow the rocket to be moved by barge from Louisiana to a large test stand at nearby Stennis Space Center in southern Mississippi.  There, at some point in 2020, the space agency plans to conduct a full-duration test firing known as a "Green Run" test to ensure the rocket is safe to launch.

The SLS program was nine years old last month, and its first flight was supposed to have been in 2016.  This core stage is expected to fly the Artemis 1 mission for NASA some time in 2021 - launch date not scheduled yet.  If you're counting, that's at least five years over schedule and so far about $20 billion dollars spent on it.  As I've pointed out several times, Alabama Senator Richard Shelby (R), whose state includes the Marshall Space Flight center where the SLS design is coordinated, has demanded that NASA use the SLS rocket to launch humans to the Moon, despite the availability of the Falcon Heavy, which costs significantly less and has already flown three times.

Workers prepare the forward (mounting) areas of one of the SLS core engines.  These are the old Space Shuttle Main Engines.

First Signs of Life

Last week, while troubleshooting the power supply in my amplifier, I discovered there were blown out diodes in two places.  The board I was working on contained two power supplies and both of them had their bridge rectifiers blown out.  Getting replacements required an order from one of the parts suppliers who will sell small quantities (Mouser, in this case) and getting a few of each part (two is one...). The parts came Friday and I spent some time checking out everything else on the circuit board to check if it looked like it wouldn't blow out the diodes again. 

After getting the nerve to solder down parts and try it, my amplifier powered on today.  This marks the first time it has successfully turned on since the lightning strike August 1st.  The last time I'm sure it was on would have been early to mid-July.  See those green LEDs on the top box?  That's the first sign of life. 

Posing on the top of the replacement antenna rotator controller.  The replacement rotator went up two weeks ago (end of September). 

I rush to add that I'm not out of the woods.  I'm not even sure I can see the end of the woods from here - but I'm not entirely sure of anything in this box.  The power supply board I fixed contains two low voltage supplies.  One of those is converted to 45 Volts for the power amplifier.  Assuming the 45V is supposed to be on whenever the amplifier is enabled (bottom left switch on the black triangular box on top), something in that chain is dead.  I get no voltage on the 45V output terminals.

Getting this to turn on is a positive first step, but only a first step.  Still, it's the most encouraging thing in the fight with this damaged amplifier so far, so I'm stoked about it.

I Guess I'm In Another One of Those Awkward Phases

This one has to do with hamfests, which are usually annual events in any given city where hams get together to socialize, sell extra gear, buy extra gear, attend talks and more.  By "annual in any given city," I mean that in many places in the country a local ham club usually hosts one annually, but that within a couple of hours of driving there might be a few in a year.  If you're into taking longer trips there's one going on every weekend for various driving distances.

Here in the Silicon Swamp, the annual fest is held by the biggest club in the county, the Platinum Coast Amateur Radio Society.  I know I've mentioned going to it pretty much annually and while we've gone to the granddaddy hamfest in Dayton, Ohio, including the last one actually in Dayton (they had to move to Xenia, OH) we pretty much go to only two every year: Melbourne and Orlando (which is now one of the biggest in the nation).

What I should have done was rented a table to sell off some of my extra gear.  But with the lightning strike and the uncertainties that came with that, I didn't get a table.  The only thing I looked for was a couple of adapters for connecting coaxial cables,  since I had to put one into place when I fixed my antennas.  I found them; paid a little more than I would have preferred, but I got the two I was looking for. If you include the cost of two tickets ($20) and a couple of diet cokes for both of us ($8), the coax adapters were extremely overpriced.

For several years, I've been happy with my radio situation and not really added much to my station since 2011.  Two exceptions come to mind.  I stumbled across a good SHTF ham transceiver at this hamfest five years ago, and bought an unusual general coverage receiver three years ago, but that was it.  I don't buy and sell radios all the time.  We're at the point in our lives when we think more about getting rid of clutter than adding things.  We got to chatting with several friends I used to work with and we're all in the de-cluttering mode.  Confidential to Gen X, and younger - there's going to be a lot of excess gear available as the population bubble ages out of various hobbies.  It's a buyer's market on some things already.

This is rambling (who? me? rambling?) but in all of our hamfest trips in the last 9-1/2 years life of this blog, we've bought next to nothing.  They're a combination of "social trips" and "because we always do."  Orlando is to far and too inconvenient to get a table and try to sell things, so it's either going to be online sales or save it to try to sell next year.

Maybe by then I'll have the amplifier fixed.  Or at least know if it's worth fixing. 

VDH - Is America Entering a Dark Age?

Very few commentators rise to the level of Victor Davis Hanson, Stanford University Professor, classicist and historian - simply known to fans and foes as VDH.  He puts out the premise that America is entering a Dark Age and gives some arguments to back his claim at PJ Media.  As always, I'll drop a few quotes here and encourage you to go read.

VDH opens with a perspective from his life as historian and classicist.  The Dark Age Greeks, he notes, realized they were surrounded by ruins of spectacular buildings they couldn't hope to duplicate.  Largely illiterate, they'd occasionally plow up a piece of fired clay with symbols on it they couldn't understand, and wondered what those meant.  Were they connected to those buildings?

We of the 21st century are beginning to look back at our own lost epic times and wonder about these now-nameless giants who left behind monuments that we cannot replicate, but instead merely use or even mock.

Does anyone believe that contemporary Americans could build another transcontinental railroad in six years?

Californians tried to build a high-speed rail line. But after more than a decade of government incompetence, lawsuits, cost overruns and constant bureaucratic squabbling, they have all but given up. The result is a half-built overpass over the skyline of Fresno -- and not yet a foot of track laid.
...
America went to the moon in 1969 with supposedly primitive computers and backward engineering. Does anyone believe we could launch a similar moonshot today? No American has set foot on the moon in the last 47 years, and it may not happen in the next 50 years.

Hollywood once gave us blockbuster epics, brilliant Westerns, great film noirs, and classic comedies. ...

Our writers, directors and actors have lost the skills of their ancestors. But they are also cowardly, and in regimented fashion they simply parrot boring race, class and gender bromides that are neither interesting nor funny. Does anyone believe that the Oscar ceremonies are more engaging and dignified than in the past?
...
As we walk amid the refuse, needles and excrement of the sidewalks of our fetid cities; as we sit motionless on our jammed ancient freeways; and as we pout on Twitter and electronically whine in the porticos of our Ivy League campuses, will we ask: "Who were these people who left these strange monuments that we use but can neither emulate nor understand?"

In comparison to us, they now seem like gods.

Anecdotally, we read reports like modern law school students being unable to understand writings from 1800s leaders, such as Fredrick Douglas.  We read about a widespread drop in IQ scores in the Western world and other stories showing a falling off in academic prowess over the last century.  These stories add to VDH's arguments.

Over the years, I've said (and more often hinted) that what I see in the future is not just the chance of an economic collapse due to the world's unsustainable debt levels.  I see a real chance for another Dark Ages.  The main driving force there is the Postmodernists in academia pushing the idea of "my truth and your truth"; the idea that there isn't anything other than our perceptions of things.  That works fine for simple questions like, "what's your favorite color?" but is completely wrong for "what's the speed of light?", "will this virus survive in air?" or any interactions with the real world.  VDH follows those trends to the conclusion a Dark Age may already be starting. 

The completion of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah, 1869. 

The Star Trek Future Will Most Likely Never Happen

Hat tip to Don Sensing at Sense of Events again, for "Fermi's paradox busted" and its link to Business Insider.  Another scientist has come to the realization that we will never have the future in which humans zip around the galaxy at high "warp speed" and spread out across the galaxy.  Space is just too damned big.  As Douglas Adams put it in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

You should visit Business Insider if for no other reason than to see the animations he released on Twitter recently.

But a new animation by the planetary and space scientist James O'Donoghue, who used to work at NASA and is now employed by JAXA (Japan's national space agency), grounds the warp drives of those fictional spaceships in reality. He says the work gives him "a sense of despair" about traveling through space, even at superluminal speeds.

O'Donoghue previously animated the speed of light within the solar system, and the results were depressing. After receiving widespread attention for those animations, he began wondering what going faster might look like in reality.

So O'Donoghue took the Federation starship USS Enterprise, commanded by Captain Jean-Luc Picard (played by Patrick Stewart) in "Star Trek: The Next Generation," and sent it flying from the sun to Pluto at varying warp-speed velocities.

While there is some theoretical work saying that a space warp drive might be possible, it remains out of reach.  There really is no fixed set of speeds that has applied throughout the Star Trek universe, given the number of years the several series are spread over, but there are some generally agreed upon values.

• Warp 1 is the speed of light, usually just called c.  At 186,000 miles/second, that's the fastest known speed anything travels.  Only light can travel at that speed in real world physics.  Even at the tiny distance of Earth to Moon, c is limiting.  It takes a radio wave 1.255 seconds (which varies as the Earth/moon distance varies) so real time control of systems is tricky.  Remember, at this speed, the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) is still 4.3 years away.  Pluto is 5-1/2 hours away.  No spacecraft mankind has built has exceeded 0.1% of c.
• Warp 5 is 213 times faster than c.  Sounds good, right?  A sun to Pluto trip drops to a pretty fast minute and a half.  All well and good.  The trip to Proxima Centauri still takes a week and a half.  Too long for an hour Trek episode, but it dramatically increases the sphere we could visit in a human lifetime.  
• Warp 9.9 is 2,083 times faster than light.  The sun to Pluto trip is only 9.5 seconds, and Proxima Centauri is 18 hours away.  Even at this speed, to go to the far side of our galaxy would take more than an average human's adult lifetime. 

None of these speeds are going to happen without entirely new physics being discovered.

Let's make a few big assumptions and believe we could accelerate a probe to a high fraction of the speed of light, like 0.9 or 0.95c.  That acceleration and the deceleration at the other end of the trip will take time.  A reasonable estimate (I've seen it a couple of times) is one year accelerating and one year decelerating, both at 1G so a human would be comfortable.  That makes the 4.3 year trip to Proxima Centauri take 6.3 years - actually longer from not doing c, but rather a fraction of it.  Nothing we can do to its radio signals can make them exceed c, so if the probe makes it there and starts studying the star system, the data it finds will take 4.3 years to get here.  We don't know that such a mission could be done, but at least it doesn't violate any known physics. 

Star Trek invented a wonderful system called subspace communication, a form of radio that allows instant communication from far flung missions back to earth or other Federation outposts.  Simply, there is no known physics that can allow that.  It's a plot device. 

While I love the idea, seen in many space operas and not just Star Trek, that one day we'll buzz around the galaxy at speeds like this, it just doesn't appear to be possible.  Unlike Dr. O'Donahue, I came to that realization years ago.

It's Dead Che Day

I always forget that October 9th is Dead Che Day, and should be celebrated to make up for all the millions upon millions of twits that wear Che tee shirts.  While I've mentioned Che on occasion, I've never done a Dead Che Day post in commemoration.

I grew up in Miami, mostly the northwestern part of the county Miami is located in, Dade county.  My big brother had a close friend whose father had come over in the late 50s, abandoning everything to get out of Cuba and start over in America.  I don't remember the friend extremely clearly, but I recall him having no touch of a Cuban accent while his parents (of course) did.  The father was an architect and I heard he found work in the US fairly easily.

I had many friends who were Cubans and gotten off the island even after Castro and gang came to power.  They were as anti-communist as you can imagine, and I don't remember any exceptions to that.  Cuban refugees were a normal part of life growing up.  The emigration started before I started first grade and was a constant all my life.  Cuban or American never entered discussion as kids.  We played together, went to parties together, dated across nationalities; we just grew up together.  As a rule, kids didn't talk deeply about politics so I didn't really hear about Che and his brutal history until years later.

Aesop over at Raconteur Report used this:

On the other hand, while I detest that murdering pig (Che) as much as anyone, I prefer ridicule, and there's no better place than The People's Cube, with a graphic I used back in 2013.

Remember: don't miss the world's greatest Tee shirt salesman at Che Mart!   And...
you can't spell douche without Che.

The Crisis in Nutritional Science

I've mentioned John P.A. Ioannidis on my pages many times before (the first, I think).  He's the author of what’s widely quoted as one of the most downloaded papers in history, “Why Most Published Research Findings are False 2”, in which he presents data that as much as 70% of published science is wrong.

Last year, he extended his purview to probably the richest source of bad science, nutritional epidemiology, in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association.  Bottom line, this field has got to be fixed because it is just so far from good science that it’s dangerous. Not only is it endangering peoples’ health, it’s ruining confidence in science as a way of finding out how the world works. You can read and download the paper (2 page pdf) here.  The unusual part of getting to this article is that I bounced there from Watts Up With That, a post by frequent guest author Kip Hansen, "Epidemiology, Diet Soda, and Climate Science".  You should RTWT. 

As I always do, some quotes to get you to read it.

In recent updated meta-analyses of prospective cohort studies, almost all foods revealed statistically significant associations with mortality risk.  Substantial deficiencies of key nutrients (e.g., vitamins), extreme over consumption of food, and obesity from excessive calories may indeed increase mortality risk.  However, can small intake differences of specific nutrients, foods, or diet patterns with similar calories causally, markedly, and almost ubiquitously affect survival?

Ioannidis' clear thinking comes across very clearly here.  He's saying that when they looked at epidemiological nutrition studies, almost every food item looked at had “statistically significant associations with mortality risk” or in other words, everything we eat is killing us faster and sooner, or making us live longer, and he asks if that's even possible.  Everything?  Nothing is neutral or has no effect?

Perhaps my favorite paragraph from the whole article (emphasis added):

Assuming the meta-analyzed evidence from cohort studies represents life span–long causal associations, for a baseline life expectancy of 80 years, eating 12 hazelnuts daily (1 oz) would prolong life by 12 years (i.e., 1 year per hazelnut), drinking 3 cups of coffee daily would achieve a similar gain of 12 extra years, and eating a single mandarin orange daily (80 g) would add 5 years of life.  Conversely, consuming 1 egg daily would reduce life expectancy by 6 years, and eating 2 slices of bacon (30 g) daily would shorten life by a decade, an effect worse than smoking.  Could these results possibly be true?

Before you order your yearly 23 pounds of hazelnuts, hold on a minute.  It stretches credulity to think all of those could be true.  One year of extra life for every hazelnut eaten daily?  Or 6 years less life for one egg eaten daily? What happens if you have one hazelnut and and one egg daily?  Do the effects cancel?  Does only one year cancel, so you only die 5 years sooner?  These answer are the result of the way these meta-analyses work; they find spurious correlations.  You might recall an article I did on the King of Junk Food Science (where the adjective "junk" modifies science, not food) and a link to a FiveThirtyEight column where they post funny spurious correlations they found.  In these nutritional studies, they frequently study "all-cause mortality", but the top causes of mortality include accidents (#3) and medical mistakes (usually left out of the rankings, but numerically could be more than accidents, taking #3).  How could they be improving mortality dramatically without affecting those to some degree? 

Individuals consume thousands of chemicals in millions of possible daily combinations. For instance, there are more than 250 000 different foods and even more potentially edible items, with 300 000 edible plants alone. Seemingly similar foods vary in exact chemical signatures (e.g., more than 500 different polyphenols). Much of the literature silently assumes disease risk is modulated by the most abundant substances; for example, carbohydrates or fats. However, relatively uncommon chemicals within food, circumstantial contaminants, serendipitous toxicants, or components that appear only under specific conditions or food preparation methods (e.g., red meat cooking)may be influential. Risk-conferring nutritional combinations may vary by an individual’s genetic background, metabolic profile, age, or environmental exposures. Disentangling the potential influence on health outcomes of a single dietary component from these other variables is challenging, if not impossible.

Dr. Ioannidis concludes nutritional epidemiology is intrinsically unreliable.  It produces results that cannot be considered causal.  I hope/trust that's enough to get you interested in reading the article because I can't do it much justice without well exceeding the limits of TL:DR.  I recommend the version on WUWT rather than the original JAMA paper, if you're only going to read one.  Author Kip Hansen shows the mess that is nutritional epidemiology and then compares the field to climate science, another field with an incredible number of variables that may or may not interact with each other.

Similarly, for climate science, the object of study, the Earth’s climate system is not only exceptionally complex, but also chaotic.  First, we have to understand that, as we see in nutrition science, climate is comprised of hundreds of interacting components, each changing on time scales ranging from seconds to centuries, each being integral influencing and causal factors for the others — all correlated in ways we often (almost always) do not fully understand.  And, as in nutrition science, almost all climate variables are correlated with one another; thus, if one variable is found to be correlated to some weather/climate  outcome, many other variables will also yield significant associations in the huge present-time and historical data sets relating to Earth’s weather and climate.

Thus we find the situation, unacknowledged by most of the climate science field, that [paraphrasing Ioannidis] “Disentangling the potential influence on medium to long range climate outcomes of a single climatic factor, such as atmospheric GHG concentrations,  from these myriad other variables is challenging, if not impossible” based simply on the complexity of the climate itself.

John Ioannidis - Stanford University photo

The Awful Human Toll of Puberty-Blocking Drugs

Today I tip my hat to FreePressers for an article on the awful death toll of the puberty-blocking drugs being prescribed more often over the last few years for children with gender dysphoria.

Let's get right to the numbers:

The FDA between 2013 and June 2019 reported 41,213 adverse events, including 6,379 deaths and 25,645 “serious” reactions in patients who took Leuprolide Acetate, the hormone blocker known as Lupron.

Lupron is being used — without formal FDA approval — as a puberty blocker on an increasing number of children and adolescents who say their gender identity is not consistent with their biological sex, Breitbart News noted in an Oct. 2 report.

That's 6,379 deaths in about six years or well over 1,000 per year (1063).  The wording says that there were 34,837 adverse events with 25,645 of them being classified as “serious.”  I rush to point out that this is considered "off label" use for the drug; which means it's not formally approved to block puberty in children.  Lupron, is clinically approved for treatment of prostate cancer in men, endometriosis in women, and, for a short period of time, “precocious puberty” — a condition in which children begin puberty at a significantly younger age than is considered normal.  Because the approved uses are in much older patients, the data don't tell us how many of those deaths and side effects are in children. 

Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, told Breitbart News that Lupron “is off-label for lack of long-term studies,” adding it “undoubtedly causes irreversible loss of fertility and many other adverse effects that are potentially lethal. It does not turn a male child into a female child, only into a eunuch who will lose his full potential for growth and strength. Children have no capacity to comprehend these long-term consequences, so the use of this drug in gender-confused children constitutes unethical experimentation; informed consent is not possible.”

Dr. Orient hits an important point.  We're giving these children these powerful endocrine disruptor drugs at the time in their lives when they're building their bones and bodies for the rest of their lives.  Are we going to ruin their health as adults?  California-based endocrinologist and specialist on childhood gender dysphoria Dr. Michael Laidlaw spoke out about the use of Lupron.

Laidlaw said in an interview with the Christian Post that Lupron may be therapeutic for men coping with prostate cancer, but that “gender dysphoria is not an endocrine condition, but is a psychological one and should, therefore, be treated with proper psychological care.”

Laidlaw warned that once puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are injected into children, an “endocrine condition” in these children will develop.

Complications related to the use of Lupron include cancers, cardiovascular events such as heart attacks and blood clots, suicidal behavior and other psychological disorders, brittle bones and painful joints, and sterility.  Unless we're abandoning these young people, essentially saying that because they feel this dysphoria now we're going to conduct medical experiments on them with care if they live or die, the use of this drug needs to be stopped.  In children, five year tests for adverse effects are inadequate.  We'd like perhaps as much as 15 or 20 year tests for long term lack of side effects.  St. Louis-based pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Paul Hruz said

“It’s often claimed that medical blockade of puberty allows a child more time to sort out issues of their gender identity, that it alleviates dysphoria in affected children, and that it makes it easier if and when they choose to go on and get other treatments, namely [sex change] surgery,” Hruz said. “It’s also claimed that it’s completely safe and reversible.” [but],

“The reality is that there is no long-term data about treating children, and the only data that we have in adults indicates that medical interventions to align the appearance of the body to a transgendered identity does not fix the problem,” Hruz said.

I feel tremendously sorry for people with real gender dysphoria, and the numbers they face for a long term prognosis make many cancers look positively benign.  I know since this fuss over gender reassignment started reaching Category 5 storm levels, I've heard several people say they've gone through the treatments, had the surgery, and they still don't feel what they think is right - just as Dr. Hruz says.  Medicine needs to find a way to treat these people. 

On the other hand, when the whole “let's redefine words again” way of pushing for privileges came to gender a little while ago and we started suddenly hearing that a condition, formerly referred to as being rare, less than 1/2% of the population, was everywhere, I could see a problem coming.  We began hearing of parents apparently pushing their children into these sorts of treatments, more than I'd think seemed to be justified by that half percent.  I've run across people in my life who seem to live vicariously through their children.  If you couple that desire to live through their children with the desire to be victims, I can imagine some making their children the victims of gender dysphoria so they have the socially cool condition.  Dr. Laidlaw mentions the concept of treating a child with Lupron from the age of 5.  Five!!  Without some really strong backing, I'm not going to believe that's anything but the parents pushing this. 

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Last words to Dr. Laidlaw:

“I think it’s very obvious that the Surgeon General needs to step in and become seriously involved in an investigation as to why drugs like Lupron, which are obviously extraordinarily risky, are being used off label to arrest the normal development of thousands of healthy adolescent bodies,” Laidlaw told Breitbart News.

“If this were any other (non-politicized) situation and this sort of harm was occurring, the doctors and pharmaceutical manufacturers behind it would be investigated immediately, and it would be all over the press,” Laidlaw said.

Quick Space News Roundup

Two items in the news caught my eye over the last few days.  The last scheduled flight of a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket, the only currently flying orbital-insertion vehicle dropped from an airplane, is currently scheduled for this Wednesday, Oct. 9.  The rocket, carried by its Lockheed L1011 delivery vehicle, arrived at the Cape Tuesday, Oct. 1.  Current weather forecasts for Wednesday aren't looking good to me, but I don't know exactly what sort of conditions those missions need.  The mission is to place NASA's ICON, the Ionospheric Connection Explorer satellite, into orbit.

According to Spaceflight Now, the original launch date was June of 2017:

ICON’s ride into space has been delayed more than two years by concerns related to its Pegasus rocket.

The mission was originally supposed to launch over the Pacific Ocean near Kwajalein Atoll, the home of a remote U.S. military test site in the Marshall Islands. Engineers wanted more time to inspect the Pegasus rocket motors after they were mishandled during shipment to Vandenberg. That pushed the launch back from June to December 2017, the next availability in the military-run range at Kwajalein.

Northrup Grumman photo of a previous mission's landing (not last week's).

The launch or drop time is set for 9:30 PM on Wednesday night, which is 0130 UTC on October 10th.  This is the last-known mission on the Pegasus manifest, and it could well be the last flight a Pegasus rocket will ever make.

---

SpaceX transported the next Crew Dragon to the Cape last week as well.  This is the capsule that's destined for their in-flight abort test later this year.

The in-flight abort test will verify the Crew Dragon’s SuperDraco thrusters are capable of pushing the spacecraft away from a Falcon 9 rocket after liftoff. The safety system would allow astronauts to escape a catastrophic launch failure.

This represents a shuffling of several different Crew Dragon capsules originally set for different missions before the on-pad explosion of the first Crew Dragon scrambled their plans.  Now that the investigation has been completed and they're cleared to work again, the remaining Crew Dragon capsules are being shuffled in their missions to ensure one is available for all the scheduled missions.

The in-flight abort test plan calls for the rocket to take off from launch pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center and arc over the Atlantic Ocean, firing its nine main engines more than a minute, as it would during a typical launch. SpaceX will pre-program the Falcon 9’s nine Merlin booster engines to switch off after surpassing the speed of sound, according to an environmental assessment for the test flight released by the Federal Aviation Administration.

A computer on the Crew Dragon spacecraft will detect the loss of thrust and trigger an abort between 83 and 100 seconds after liftoff. The SuperDraco escape engines will ignite almost instantaneously to push the craft away from the Falcon 9 launcher at an altitude between 48,000 feet and 91,000 feet (14.6 to 27.8 kilometers), officials wrote in the FAA environmental assessment.

SpaceX is not planning to recover this booster.  They will allow the first and second stages to break-up as they monitor, while the Crew Dragon will deploy parachutes to splash down in the Atlantic, where teams will recover the capsule.

The article includes this as the only hint about the schedule:

A regulatory filing with the Federal Communications Commission last month suggested the in-flight abort test was scheduled for no earlier than November.

The Crew Dragon with a scaffolding in place around the top for the workers to get access.  SpaceX photo.

I Need to Work on Visualizations

The numbers in this graphic showing just how important it is for cities in the US to be banning straws seem to line up with numbers I used in article on the subject back in July of '18, but I'm sure the graphics will be more useful to more people than just numbers.  The vivid visualization or the right visual meme has a bigger impact than plain numbers do.

The bottom line is that straws from the US constitute 0.004% of 0.9% of the world's plastic pollution.  Which is only 360 parts per billion, and this fact is easier to see in those pictures than  just by using words. 

The problem is how many significant figures are really there.  I bet the only remotely accurate part of that data is the figures associated with the US and Europe (under "other",  I assume).  The amount of straws in the waste stream is highly suspicious.  That number appears to come down to one science project done by a 10 year old kid in 2011.  The kid called a straw manufacturer (or a couple) and came up with the quote “500 million straws used daily … many end up in oceans,” which is used by everyone as if it were known as precisely as a physical constant like the speed of light.  I'd be surprised if those percentages of plastic contribution by continent was accurate to three decimal places.  Which is saying any changes to the world totals from a US ban aren't even a rounding error. 

I believe I found the graphic on the Daily Timewaster at some point this week.

Happy Deficit Day

Every year, the Tax Foundation calculates Tax Freedom Day, the hypothetical day on which the average American citizen is done paying taxes for the year. The idea is that they pretend everything you earn is going to the government - they mean on all levels of government - until they've accounted for all your taxes.  When you've earned all the taxes you'll have to pay for the year, after that you're free to keep your earnings, from which they get the name Tax Freedom Day.  This year, Tax Freedom Day fell on April 16.  That has to be some sort of population average income and everyone's personal Tax Freedom Day will depend on what they earn and where they live.

Similarly, it's possible to compute a Deficit Day; that day when the tax revenues would run out if the rate of expenditure was constant and all the taxes that would collected in the year were already in an account on January 1st.

In 2019, Washington will spend a total of $4.5 trillion, or $12.4 billion per day. At that rate, the government will blow through its $3.4 trillion in tax revenues in 277 days, or by October 3. From 12:01 a.m. on October 4 until the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, every dollar the federal government spends it must borrow.

To save you the time looking it up, there are 88 days until the end of 2019.  That's including weekends and holidays.  At $12.4 billion per day, that's $517 million - just over half a billion dollars - per hour, $8.6 million per minute or $143,500 per second. 

The worst part is that isn't unusual. 

In modern times, the earliest Deficit Day has fallen was April 20, 1943—at the height of World War II—and the only years not to see a Deficit Day were 1956 and 1957, due to surpluses during the Eisenhower administration. Since then, the latest it has fallen was December 26, 2000.

Since Nixon took the US off the gold standard, leading to the stagflation of the 1970s, and then the radically high interest rates of the Paul Volcker Federal Reserve, the deficit has been growing.  Even after adjusting for inflation, the federal debt has grown almost 700 percent since 1981. 

Of course, federal tax receipts have grown over this period, as well. But comparing the debt to tax receipts reveals something more disturbing. 

Federal Debt as a percentage of tax revenues bottomed out at around the same year that's referenced for growth of the debt, 1981. 

At the close of World War II, the federal debt was just shy of seven times annual federal tax receipts. From then until 1981, annual tax receipts grew faster than the debt so that by 1981, the debt was only 1.7 times annual receipts.

Today, the number has ballooned back up to the same levels as the end of World War II, and there's no evidence that growth is going to decline any time soon.  Without a war and the massive mobilization to support two enormous efforts on opposite sides of the globe.

And what plans do our politicians have for dealing with this problem? Apparently, none whatsoever. President Trump has stopped talking about the debt in public. And over the course of twelve hours of debates, not one of the 20-plus Democratic candidates for the presidency once mentioned the debt, the deficit, or even the Social Security Board of Trustees’ warning that Social Security will be insolvent within 16 years. Trouble is brewing, and no one seems all that concerned with what’s coming.

If there has ever been a graph that filled me with despair it's that plot just above.  Several years ago, Captain Capitalism (Aaron Clarey) released a book called "Enjoy the Decline", subtitled, "Accepting and Living With the Death of the United States."  That graph makes me think maybe he's right and the end is inevitable.  Maybe there really is nothing we can do except make the best of the bad situation and enjoy the liberties as they die away.  To borrow a closing quote from the source article:

The ideal time to address this problem was a half-century ago. We could still address it now, but it would be both difficult and painful, which is precisely how we know it will not happen. So Happy Deficit Day to the United States of America for the 60th-plus year running.

It was nice while it lasted.  

Startup Relativity Space Secures $140 Million Funding

Innovative startup Relativity Space now seems to be ready to join the crowded small satellite launch service provider market after getting another round of venture capital to continue their development work.

Amid this market, however, Relativity Space announced Tuesday that it has closed a $140 million Series C funding round led by Bond and Tribe Capital. With this funding, Relativity Chief Executive Tim Ellis tells Ars the company is fully funded to complete development of its Terran 1 rocket and reach orbit.

"Fundraising is always a process," Ellis said, noting the participation of new investors Lee Fixel, Michael Ovitz, Spencer Rascoff, Republic Labs, and Jared Leto, along with participation from current investors Playground Global, Y Combinator, Social Capital, and Mark Cuban. It speaks to the quality of Relativity's plans, he said, that such a diverse group investors are backing the ambitious firm. "These investors are very sophisticated when it comes to the financial business case," Ellis told Ars in an interview.

Relativity Space seems to be betting that their proprietary use of 3D metal printing will get their costs down enough to become the most attractive player in the market. 

Ellis told FLORIDA TODAY that printing parts has several advantages compared to traditional methods, including faster turnaround, lower costs, less tooling, and more automation, to name a few. He said his company can build a rocket from 95% 3D printed parts in about 20 days, which is significantly faster than traditional spaceflight methods.

The company had been announcing that the first flight of their Terran rocket would be next year, but part of this announcement of venture capital was that the first flight slips out into 2021.  Part of the reason for this delay is that they will increase the size of the payload fairing on the Terran's upper stage from two to three meters diameter as part of a plan to double the available volume.

The company has been filling in the bubbles on the checklist of what they'll need to fly.  They've contracted with NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi to test fire engines, completing 200 tests to date, and signed a contract to lease a large (220,000 sq. ft.) building on the Stennis Space Center to build their vehicles.  Finally, they've signed a contract to use Launch Complex 16 on Cape Canaveral for launches.

The main question, then, is whether Relativity can ultimately make 3D printed technology work on a large scale. By announcing a new round of funding, key investors certainly believe in their path forward. But by also announcing a schedule slip, the company has raised a few concerns about the technology leap needed to entirely automate the fabrication of a large rocket capable of lifting 1.25 tons to low-Earth orbit.

Relativity co-founders Tim Ellis, left, and Jordan Noone pose with a 3D printed second stage of the Terran 1 rocket.  Relativity Space photo. 

Changing of the Seasons

This pondering was prompted by Irish's post, "How I Would Rather Spend My Monday" and the gorgeous photos of fall colors exploding on some back roads up his way. 

Long term readers will probably have noticed that a couple of running jokes of mine are to refer to August as Crematoria and to refer to dates in early to mid-September as still being August; for example referring to September 9th as August 40th.  With the peak of hurricane season on August 41st, that means when the northern reaches of the country are getting some hints of color we're virtually always keeping an eye on some big storm, often more than one.  It's hard to think of that as the seasons turning - unless you mean a turn for the worse.  I'm pretty sure I've counted up to August 50th before, if not to August 60th. 

This year was unusual.  The weekend before the equinox (Friday the 20th), we started getting strong NE winds (around 20mph), a typical sign of the weather starting to change.  On the 24th, the morning low was 68; decidedly below the 20th's morning low of 74 but by no means threatening the record (63).  The weeks since then have kept up stronger than summer winds from the easterly quadrant - the direction our prevailing winds come from.  The cool temperatures haven't returned, but humidity is down a bit and it's not bad outside.  The air conditioning is cycling off more and holding temperatures better.  It's definitely not August. 

I'm unabashedly a fan of air conditioning.

In a few weeks it will be Halloween; a few more and the triumvirate of year end holidays will be upon us.  I'd honestly pay to see them do this:  

Everyone - Left, Right, Up, Down - Should Be a "Climate Skeptic"

I've been meaning to post this for the last week, after seeing a link from Sense of Events about a long interview with Dr. Judith Curry in City Journal.  The author starts with the things everyone has heard of, from the religious zealot-like warnings of floods that are on fire, to the general distrust of those reports, and some even-handed approaches that "everyone declares a scary apocalypse to make money off it."

City Journal author Guy Sorman briefly summarizes the arguments and then begins:

Not being a climatologist myself, I’ve always had trouble deciding between these arguments. And then I met Judith Curry at her home in Reno, Nevada. Curry is a true climatologist. She once headed the department of earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, until she gave up on the academy so that she could express herself independently. “Independence of mind and climatology have become incompatible,” she says. Do you mean that global warming isn’t real? I ask. “There is warming, but we don’t really understand its causes,” she says. “The human factor and carbon dioxide, in particular, contribute to warming, but how much is the subject of intense scientific debate.”

As you might expect of someone with her background (or might hope to find in someone of her background), she comes across as a voice of reason.  She understands the subject on a very deep level, and has tremendous depth of knowledge at recall.

This brings us to why Curry left the world of the academy and government-funded research. “Climatology has become a political party with totalitarian tendencies,” she charges. “If you don’t support the UN consensus on human-caused global warming, if you express the slightest skepticism, you are a ‘climate-change denier,’ a stooge of Donald Trump, a quasi-fascist who must be banned from the scientific community.” These days, the climatology mainstream accepts only data that reinforce its hypothesis that humanity is behind global warming. Those daring to take an interest in possible natural causes of climactic variation—such as solar shifts or the earth’s oscillations—aren’t well regarded in the scientific community, to put it mildly. The rhetoric of the alarmists, it’s worth noting, has increasingly moved from “global warming” to “climate change,” which can mean anything. That shift got its start back in 1992, when the UN widened its range of environmental concern to include every change that human activities might be causing in nature, casting a net so wide that few human actions could escape it.

Scientific research should be based on skepticism, on the constant reconsideration of accepted ideas: at least, this is what I learned from my mentor, the ultimate scientific philosopher of our time, Karl Popper. What could lead climate scientists to betray the very essence of their calling? The answer, Curry contends: “politics, money, and fame.” Scientists are human beings, with human motives; nowadays, public funding, scientific awards, and academic promotions go to the environmentally correct. Among climatologists, Curry explains, “a person must not like capitalism or industrial development too much and should favor world government, rather than nations”; think differently, and you’ll find yourself ostracized. “Climatology is becoming an increasingly dubious science, serving a political project,” she complains. In other words, “the policy cart is leading the scientific horse.”

In an environment like Curry describes, real science is impossible. There will be no progress on the actual important questions about how the climate systems work without real science, just dogma will prevail.  The real systems are extremely complex and the models are simple linear systems.  The data fed into those models has been adjusted until it bears little resemblance to reality.  This mess won't be fixed with the current approaches.

Far from undernourished, this fat polar bear has been eating enough seals to have his gut almost touching the ice.  From Polar Bear Science, the web presence of polar bear expert Dr. Susan Crockford. 

The article and interview with Dr. Curry isn't long and well worth the time to read.