Bill Nelson - Going Where No Previous NASA Administrator Has Gone Before

medium |  “I’ve seen the classified report,” Nelson told CNN’s Pamela Brown in an interview shortly before the June 25th “Preliminary Report on UAP” came out. “It says basically what we thought. We don’t know the answer to what those Navy pilots saw.”

“Now, they know that they saw something. They tracked it. They locked their radar onto it. They followed it. It would suddenly move quickly from one location to another. And what the report does tell us that is public is that there have been over 140 of these sightings, So, naturally, what I ask our scientists to do is to see if there’s any kind of explanation from a scientific point of view and I’m awaiting their report.”

This summer NASA press secretary Jackie McGuinness confirmed her new boss Nelson had directed researchers to move forward with exploring any lines of questioning around the topic as they see fit.

“There’s not really a lot of data and scientists should be free to follow these leads, and it shouldn’t be stigmatized,” McGuinness said, acknowledging that UFO research can be negatively associated with unfounded conspiracy theories. “This is a really interesting phenomenon and Americans are clearly interested in it so if the scientists want to investigate, they should.”

This is great news for large numbers of scientists who have been frustrated about attempts to get research started because of the stigma the topic generates. The idea that NASA itself is willing to authorize, support and coordinate such work is revolutionary.

What Questions Did He Ask Again?

Now you read it in the earlier breakout quote in this article, but in one of his responses Nelson asked a series of questions. Let’s give them a little more breathing space as we wrap up here:

• What, who is out there?
• Who are we?
• How did we get here?
• How did we become as we are?
• How did we develop?
• How did we civilize?

It’s worth considering that these are not the first things a public official is likely to say when questioned about the June 25 Preliminary Assessement: Undentified Aerial Phenomena, is it? On the other hand, we know he has had the Full Monty of the classified briefing, and probably others. We also know that if Joe Biden wants to know what the hell is going on, he’s apt to call up Bill Nelson.

Still, it sure sounds like Nelson seems to be saying something with a little more complexity than the version of human development we get taught in high school and college. He’s asking questions that make it seem like we had help.

Why Is He Talking Like This?

It seems the main reason is that he believes it. That, of course, would be refreshing and illuminating and, from what I’ve read, seen and heard, it appears to be the truth.

But it may also be that his age has something to do with it. Nelson turned 79 this year. He was born in World War II, fought in Vietnam, had a lifetime of experiences that many of us will never have. He knows in his heart that something strange is going on now, and has been for the entire time he’s been on this Earth.

He seems ready to play his part now by saying the quiet part out loud.

Keep it coming, Bill. Turn your teams loose on this. Tell them they can speak truth to power. Find out some answers. Confirm what you can and offer the best theories and interpretations that can be made about the explanations. We’ve all been waiting a long time, too.

Is The Pentagon Withholding Full-Spectrum UAP Data?

medium |  After Congress was briefed on the classified portion of the Pentagon’s UAP report in June, D.C. power player and scientist Robert McGwier participated in a panel discussion on the Canadian UFO and paranormal radio program Spaced Out Radio and said he’d heard from an acquaintance in the closed-door session.

The briefing, he said, included the National Security Council and members of Congress — just how many of the latter, it wasn’t clear from McGwier’s off-air remarks during one of the show’s breaks, which are live-streamed on YouTube while radio listeners hear commercials. This elite audience of Washington power brokers was privy to information that has not been publicly released.

“Seventy pages and 14 videos,” he said. “They got to see the good stuff.” Later in the program, he added a caveat: “I want to make very, very clear: I heard no classified information whatsoever.”

McGwier, affectionately known as “Bob the Science Guy,” is an academic and active member of the ufology community.

An expert in radio technology with a Ph.D in applied mathematics from Brown University, he joined the Institute for Defense Analyses Center for Communications Research, a non-profit think tank in Princeton, N.J. in 1986. When he was hired in 2011 to head a research center at Virginia Tech, the school noted that McGwier’s work with the U.S. government had earned him the intelligence community’s “highest honor” in 2002. His job at Virginia Tech, according to the school, was to “develop strategic research relationships within the industry and government working in the national security sector.”

Put another way, he has connections in Washington D.C. McGwier continued:

“I know several people who were in the National Security Council meeting,” he said. “The best comment I heard was, ‘What we had was 40 minutes of science fiction movies. We were all gobsmacked.’

Which is to say, 40 minutes of video of UAPs doing their thing out over the ocean, running circles around U.S. Navy aircraft carriers and fighter pilots, whatever it is they do out there. Not fiction, but actual reality.

Imagine video, then, that gives you the palpable feeling of shit getting unnervingly real, of the world shifting beneath your feet. It’s what the American philosopher and physicist Thomas Kuhn called in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions a “paradigm shift,” or what philosophy and religious studies professor Jeffrey Kripal calls “the flip.” Out with the old, in with the new — and the woo.

Make no mistake: The videos we’ve already seen, acquired and published by the New York Times (and those reportedly leaked and subsequently dribbled out by ufologist and filmmaker Jeremy Corbell) are extraordinary, game-changing documents. They are, at this point, probably the most famous “authentic” UFO videos ever seen by the public. Future books on the topic will probably feature images from these videos the way UFO books published during the 1970s and ’80s included the famous Trent photos from McMinnville.

Thing is though, they’re not enough.

 

Delleschau Breakaway Can't Be Manipulated Or Bought By Killer-Apes Chucking Bones Into Space...,

the-sun |  AMAZON billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space mission was met with ridicule yesterday — because people think his rocket is shaped like a giant todger.

Online jokers poked fun at the Blue Origin New Shepard craft, which will shoot him 60 miles above the Earth.

One said: “That rocket looks like a big willy.”

Another said: “Is it me, or does Jeff Bezos’ rocket look like a giant penis?”

And one quipped: “It’s basically a giant flaming space dildo.”

Bezos, 57 — worth £186billion — and his brother Mark, 53, will be on the rocket’s first crewed flight on July 20, 15 days after he steps down as Amazon boss.

The 11-minute mission will see the six-seater capsule soar above the Earth.

One seat is being auctioned, with bidding topping £2million.

"It's People" Who Can't Release This Knowledge And Technology Into The World...,

medium  |  Anyhow, I got a call from one of the Directors who said, “I happen to be out here for something — you’re not going home yet, you’re going to meet me at the Air Force station tomorrow for lunch over by the Aerospace Corporation on Sepulveda. Maybe you’ll make it home by Monday — we’ll see.”

So I show up for lunch over at the Air Force station, and Harold Ostroff was sitting down at this table with a big group of military & civilian guys in business suits, and as I walked up to the table, he turns to the other guys sitting there and says, “I’d like to introduce you all to the new head of McDonnell’s Advanced Aerospace Program.” Anyhow, I didn’t know anything about this beforehand, and when he said it I looked around a bit for the person he was talking about — and after a second I guess that it finally sunk in that he was talking about me.

So that was how I found out about it — I had a deputy program manager from Huntington Beach, and there was a group there from Aerojet — Don Kissinger, Mike Hamel, and Ron Samborski — that were there to talk about the air-turbo ramjet work that they’d patented back in 1946.

I went out to Aerojet the next couple of days for briefings on their engine designs, and when I came back home, we did a proposal for the Air Force TAV program, but the main thrust was a proposal that we put together with the people from Huntington Beach on a 2-stage to orbit vehicle. The first stage would fly with air-turbo ramjets to about Mach 6 or 7, and then it would stage with a scramjet vehicle a rocket that would deploy up into orbit.

We had several different concepts for this, depending on how soon we wanted we wanted the thing to fly. One of the people out at Huntington Beach named Joe Shergi had a concept for what he called a “toss-back booster”, that looked like an Apollo capsule with engines mounted in what looked like the heat-shield. After you separated the upper-stage, this thing would turn around and retrofire to toss back to the launch site, making everything recoverable.

We had 2 or 3 concepts that we were briefing as 2-stage to orbit vehicles. The first one that we could build quickly, based on all the hardware that was available, was a hypersonic FDL-7C glider on top of a toss-back booster. Then we went to an air-turbo ramjet first stage which went to about Mach 7 to 8, and later we went to a scramjet first stage that went to about Mach 12.

We hired a guy named Larry Fogel from the Titan Corporation, and he actually toured all of the SAC bases that had operational B-52 squadrons and asked them what they would do if they had one of these NASP vehicles — how they use it, maintain it, and stuff like that. We built an entire database on what the Strategic Air Command estimated these vehicles would cost to operate. We’d given them all the numbers that we had at the outset — how much thrust we had, how much propellant we needed, how many times the engines could be re-used, etc — and they gave us back operational cost estimates compared to a traditional B-52 squadron. It was quite interesting…

We took this information and used it for briefings in Washington DC, which is where I met Scotty Crossfield, who was working with Dan Glickman — and what we ended up with was the first stage vehicle, which was a large, Mach-6 vehicle. This led to the development of a prototype that we created as a demonstrator to validate the technology.

So the prototype was built to show how the NASP vehicle could fulfill 3 primary mission roles. The first was simply as a Mach-6 transport for passengers, the second was a Mach-8 strategic strike-aircraft for the Air Force, and the third involved combining the vehicle with an upper-stage rocket to go into Low-Earth Orbit.

It sounds like this technology really blurs the line between an aircraft and the Space-Shuttle or maybe even a true spacecraft…

Well the shuttle’s not an aircraft — it’s an abortion trying to figure out how to fly. You never want to build a vehicle that looks like that. The best vehicles ever designed came out of the Air Force Flight-Dynamics Lab, and Draper made one huge effort to try and get NASA to listen, and they absolutely refused to take his advice.

From the beginning, NASA had their own ideas about bluntness and all sorts of crazy design ideas that ended up in the Shuttle. The real hypersonic vehicles that were inherently stable — from Mach 22 all the way down to zero, and had thermal protection systems already worked out — were simply discarded.

These weren’t new ideas, even when the Shuttle was being designed. The Department of Defense was involved with this between ’58 and ’68, and they were discarded because the President at that time decided that no military systems would enter orbit. The administration was deathly afraid back then of militarizing space, which meant that everything going into space had to be civilian, so NASA took over everything.

The Air Force has something called the XLR-129 — it’s in a book that one of the Pratt & Whitney guys wrote that you can buy from the Society of Automotive Engineers library. The XLR-129 had about 580,000 pounds of thrust from a LOX-hydrogen engine and 3,500 psi chamber pressure.

It was fired 40 times without any overhaul, and it was brought up to full-power in about 3.5 months — whereas the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) took about 38 months to come up to full-power.

This very same XLR-129 engine was donated to NASA when the Air Force got out of the space-race. The plans, the engine, and everything related to it were destroyed, and the last sentence in that chapter in Pratt’s book says, “NASA destroyed all of this because they didn’t want to embarrass their present engine contractor.”

Given the issues that NASA’s having with the Shuttle Program at the moment, do you think that they may someday return to this type of hardware for a next-generation Shuttle design?

One of Reagan’s assistant secretaries of commerce — for innovation, technology, and productivity — was named D. Bruce Merrifield, and he was very Russian in his thinking. The Russians have prototype factories that take laboratory ideas, and translate them into something that can be used in a functional, operational piece of hardware.

Merrifield’s concept was that the deficiency in the United States is that it uses projects to prepare technologies for application, which doesn’t give the new technologies adequate time to properly mature. He always advocated that just like with baseball players, technology needs a “farm team” to develop it so that it can later be used functionally. The Japanese do this, the Russians used to do this, and they do it because it produces great results.

What we were doing when I was at McDonnell-Douglas — because “Old-Man Mac” was a hardware guy — was looking at how you could take these big ideas and build samples & prototypes out of them, to see if we could come out of this with an operational concept.

When we designed a Mach-6 aircraft, we didn’t follow NASA’s strategy of building a research and develop vehicle that could only be flown 3 times a year. What we developed were vehicles that were operationally functional as much as a B-52 is.

Our resupply vehicle in 1964 for the manned orbiting laboratory had 11 operational vehicles and 3 spares — and those 11 vehicles flew 100 times a year for 15 years. That’s 1964 industrial capability — no magic at all. I don’t need magic. Now compare that to the Shuttle.

 

Poor Caitlin Johnstone - All The Physicists Were Human - And One Of Them DID Have A Secret

caitlinjohnstone  |  In the summer of 1950, four nuclear physicists were walking to lunch from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Their names were Emil Konopinski, Herbert York, Edward Teller, and Enrico Fermi.

One of them was not human.

On the walk the four discussed science, because science is what they always discussed. It's what they lived, it's what they thought about, it's what they ate, slept and breathed. On this particular occasion they discussed the recent spate of reports about flying saucers, and whether or not an alien civilization could hypothetically have discovered how to travel faster than the speed of light.

Once they arrived at the Fuller Lodge for their meal their intense conversation was interrupted by the mundane activities of finding seats and ordering their food. After a brief pause, Fermi's thick Italian accent broke the silence with a question that would later become famous.

"But where is everybody?" he asked loudly.

The way he phrased it caused the other three to burst out laughing; they immediately understood that he was asking, in his own inimitable way, why no signs of extraterrestrial life had been discovered.

They listened with rapt attention as Fermi's luminous mind rapidly dissected the sheer mathematical improbability of humanity being the only intelligent life in this galaxy, let alone the entire universe, given the sheer number of stars and the likelihood that at least a small percentage of them would have habitable planets capable of giving rise to life. This question, and the peculiar exclamation with which it was first expressed, would go on to be known as the Fermi paradox.

The scientists joyfully batted around ideas with the Italian "pope of physics", then finished their meal, returned to the laboratory, and they each went their separate ways.

Fermi worked late, as such rare geniuses often do. Out there in the world with small talk, politics, family and teenaged children, it was difficult to really feel at ease. But in the world of scientific adventure, discoveries and breakthroughs, he always felt in command.

The sunlight had long gone and the lab had gone still, and Fermi was scribbling away in his office, when there was a knock at the door. It gave Fermi a start; nobody ever interrupted him at this hour, that's what he liked about it.

"What is it?" he asked in irritation.

The door opened. It was York.

"Hi," York said.

"York," Fermi replied.

"Can I come in?"

"Yes, yes come in."

York closed the door.

"So," he said. "Do you want to know?"

"Want to know what?"

"Do you want an answer to the question you asked at lunch?"

Fermi just stared.

There Is Nothing Like Spending A Ton On Wunderwaffen

The Research and Technology Protection Program wants everyone to know that aliens ARE real. The UFO’s on FLIR are totally NOT a subsurface maritime-launched UAV. The US DOESN'T have those, but if they did, the Navy might want to introduce them without breaking the law on special access programs. Hypothetically, such limited hangouts could force adversaries to re-think their combat doctrine, potentially delaying future offensives in the South China Sea.  There is nothing like spending a ton on wunderwaffen to plant a kernel of doubt in your adversaries, and convince yourself that conflict is anything but a crapshoot.

This Is A Fool's Errand - But That's Not Going To Stop Them From Trying

robbreport |  It might be an exaggeration to say BioViva CEO Liz Parrish believes death is optional, but for her, Asprey’s goal of living to 180 shows a distinct lack of ambition. “If you can reach homeostasis in the body,” Parrish says, “where it’s regenerating itself just a little bit faster than it’s degrading, then what do you die of? An accident or natural disaster, probably. There’s no expiration date at 90 or 100 years old.”

Tall, blond and fit, Parrish cuts a strikingly youthful figure at 49—one that might convince you to order whatever she’s having. But, like Asprey, she has received criticism from the longevity research community for becoming “patient zero” in her own experimental drug trial, aimed at halting aging at the cellular level. In 2015, Parrish underwent telomerase and follistatin gene therapies in Bogotá, Colombia. The procedures involved receiving around a hundred injections of a cocktail of genes and a virus modified to deliver those new genes into her body’s cells. The objective was to prevent age-related muscle loss and lengthen her telomeres: the “caps” at the end of our chromosomes. Scientists have identified their unraveling as not only a marker of aging but also a potential cause of age-related decline.

Parrish told the media about her clandestine experiment and has published periodic updates on her condition in the five years since, and she reports that she has indeed increased her muscle mass and lengthened her telomeres. Parrish’s punk-rock approach stems from her conviction that the medical-research community—both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and researchers who aren’t business-minded—is moving too slowly, with too much red tape, when it comes to advancing aging therapeutics. But gene therapy is a relatively new area of medicine that brings with it a host of new risks, including cancer, severe immune reactions and infections caused by the viral vector used to deliver the drug.

Parrish downplays such worries. “There may be risks,” she tells Robb Report. “But the known risk is that you’re 100 percent likely to die. So you have to decide for yourself if the potential benefit outweighs that.”

Humans have always aspired to find the fountain of youth, so people might be skeptical about the fact that anti-aging technologies are working now,” says British investor and businessman Jim Mellon. “But the fact is that this is finally happening, and we need to seize the moment.” Mellon cofounded Juvenescence, a three-year-old pharmaceutical company that’s investing in multiple technologies simultaneously to increase the odds of bringing winning products to market.

Mellon, 63, has made his fortune betting on well-timed investment opportunities, and he predicts that a new “stock-market mania” for life extension is just around the corner. “This is like the internet dial-up phase of longevity biotech,” he enthuses. “If you’d invested in the internet in the very early days, you’d be one of the richest people on the planet. We’re at that stage now, so the opportunity for investors is huge.” According to a report by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, he’s not wrong: The market for technologies to increase human life span is projected to grow sixfold to $610 billion in just the next five years.

 

Tissue Rejuvenation Via Plasma Dilution

lifespan  |  Back in 2005, Drs. Irina and Michael Conboy showed that joining the circulatory systems of young and old mice together in a procedure called parabiosis could rejuvenate aged tissues and reverse some aspects of aging in old mice.

Following this discovery, many researchers concluded that there must be something special in young blood that was able to spur rejuvenation in aged animals, and various companies have been trying to find out what. Indeed, we recently reported that researchers were apparently successful in halving the epigenetic age of old rats by treating them with Elixir, a proprietary mix of pro-youthful factors normally found in young blood.

However, a question still remains: was the rejuvenation the result of there being something beneficial in the young blood, or is it more a case of dilution of the harmful factors present in old blood?

Today, we want to spotlight a new study by Drs. Irina and Michael Conboy, which again lends more weight to the idea that the rejuvenation is most likely due to a dilution of pro-aging factors in old blood rather than there being any special sauce in young blood [1].

During the study, the research team discovered that by replacing half of the blood plasma in old mice with a saline and albumin mixture, the albumin replacing the lost protein that was removed when the original old blood plasma was taken, they could achieve a similar or even greater rejuvenation effect in brain, liver, and muscle tissues as joining two mice together through parabiosis or giving old mice young blood.

We had the opportunity to interview Drs. Irina and Michael Conboy about this new discovery and to see if we could get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding aged blood rejuvenation.

Steve: This recent paper builds on the 2015 paper of TGF beta, but it goes even further back to the days when you guys had a lab next door to Amy Wagers and Tony Wyss-Coray and you all shared the techniques, including the parabiosis technique.

Irina: Yes. Actually, I would like also to thank you, Elena, and the whole organization for highlighting our work and giving us an opportunity to speak in interviews.

Steve: You are very welcome. So, is this dilution? Is it what you put in that’s more important, is it what you take out, or is it both? I personally think that the evidence strongly suggests that it’s more what you take out, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there isn’t good stuff in young blood.

Irina: Since our 2005 heterochronic parabiosis paper, many people jumped into this boat of young blood, thinking that the reason for rejuvenation is that there are less young factors in an old animal and we provided them. Meanwhile, all our work even leading to that paper suggested the opposite outcome: that there are excessive factors in old blood that are actually good proteins; for example, TGF beta. You cannot live without TGF beta. But, when people age, the levels of this protein become elevated, and they start doing counterproductive things for tissue repair, induce inflammation, increase fibrosis, and prevent proliferation of tissue stem cells. That was our point of view for the past 15 years, and every single paper that we published since was putting forward the general idea that it is not the young blood, it is the old blood that needs thought and attention.

Pfizer And Moderna Looking To Get PAID For Their mRNA Therapeutics...,

theintercept  |  Pfizer, Moderna, and other coronavirus vaccine makers have said repeatedly that they intend to hike prices on vaccines as early as this year, as the potential need for additional booster shots and future demand could lead to an unprecedented financial windfall.

One estimate projects that if Pfizer raised the price of its coronavirus vaccine from $19.50 to $175 per dose, as one Pfizer executive recently suggested, and if every adult American were to take it, the cost would be $44.7 billion — nearly 10 percent of all U.S. drug spending.

But the federal government, which funded crucial biomedical research to develop the patented messenger RNA technology behind the leading Covid-19 vaccines, is on the verge of eliminating a legal mechanism to control the prices of key medical products, including vaccines. 

Next week, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, will wrap up a comment period to modify the rules governing the Bayh-Dole Act, a law that regulates the transfer of federally funded inventions into commercial property. Under the current interpretation of the law, the government may “march in” and suspend the use of patents developed via government-funded inventions if it determines that the products are excessively priced.

The rulemaking is the latest flashpoint in a decades long battle to control drug prices. The drug industry has fought successfully to prevent “march-in” rights in the past; the government has never managed to exercise them. But over the last year, a growing number of Republicans and Democrats, including newly appointed Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Beccera, have called for the use of march-in rights to rein in drug prices.

This supposed leverage to control prices — on coronavirus medications and dozens of other drugs whose development relied heavily on government-backed research — would be gone if the rule-change proceeds.

 

A Nation Of Sheep Ruled By Wolves Owned By Pigs..,

theburningplatform |  What appears to be happening is the last dying gasps of an empire of debt as it thrashes about using un-Constitutional means to control its subjects, while injecting trillions of fiat dollars as an adrenaline treatment for a terminal cancer diagnosis. As a last resort, initiating a global war with Russia and China would certainly distract the masses and keep them from realizing the true enemy within. Turning Washington DC into an armed encampment is not to protect the government from white supremacists. It is to protect the traitorous creatures in Congress and the White House from the citizens when this diabolical plan blows up in our faces.

Inflation is already raging, but the government and Fed tell you it is 1.5%. There are 261 million working age Americans and only 127 million are employed full-time, but the government tells you the unemployment rate is 6.2%, when more than 50% of those capable of working are not. The government will tell you GDP soared in the first quarter at 6%, when we are in the midst of a government created Depression, and the GDP calculation is nothing more than the government borrowing trillions from future generations and giving a minuscule portion to current generations, with the vast majority going into the pockets of billionaire oligarchs, Wall Street, and mega-corporations. The “economic recovery” narrative is entirely false, but the jar shakers know the plebs do not understand math.

The plumbing of our astonishingly crooked financial system began to fail in September 2019, with overnight Repo rates soaring to 10%. The Fed immediately leapt into action by restarting QE (aka No Banker Left Behind) to keep the depth of our debt predicament hidden from the public. A flu released from a Chinese bio-lab, which is highly non-lethal to anyone under 80 years old, has been utilized by the jar shakers to unleash a tsunami of digital fiat (aka debt) to prop up a system being smothered by too much debt.

Since March of 2020, our beloved legislators have added $4.5 trillion to the national debt, a 20% increase in one year. The Fed has done their part by jolting their balance sheet up by $3.5 trillion, an 85% increase in one year. The current administration is saying hold my beer, as they are busy adding another $4 trillion in the next year and the Fed will add another $2 trillion or so to their balance sheet. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of small businesses have been permanently destroyed, while Bezos and the rest of his billionaire buddies have increased their net worth by tens of billions. At least your grandma is earning .015% in her savings account, while her living expenses rise by 10%. Do you get it yet?

200 Conscious People ARE Transforming Life On Earth (But Not For You...,)

caitlinjohnstone |  I write about humanity’s problems as a species in all sorts of ways in this space, but really if you want to get straightforward about things all we’re ever actually talking about here is a lack of awareness of what’s true and the need to eliminate that lack.

A lack of awareness is the source of all our major problems, whether we’re talking about war, poverty, ecocide, corruption, exploitation, authoritarianism, prejudice, or even much smaller-scale problems like abusive family dynamics or the psychological suffering of the individual.

If there were sufficiently widespread and penetrating awareness of the contributing factors in any of these problems, these problems would cease to exist. All you’d have left would be the odd natural disaster and the inevitability of sickness and death, which would also become far less problematic with the introduction of more awareness.

Yes, from a certain point of view it is true and accurate to say that many of our large-scale problems are due to the fact that humans whose brains lack functioning empathy centers are most well-equipped to manipulate their way into positions of power and influence, and that the amoral nature of capitalism ensures that it will be dominated by those willing to do whatever it takes to climb to the top. From a certain point of view it is true and accurate to say that our problems are caused by the fact that things like war, oppression, ecocide and exploitation will necessarily continue as long as our world is dominated by a system where those things are profitable and human behavior is driven by profit.

But it is also true that underlying every single part of the dynamics I just listed is a fundamental lack of human awareness.

6.5 Billion Of Y'all Gotta Go Gotta Go Gotta Go!!!!

scheerpost |  What is taking place is not neglect. It is not ineptitude. It is not policyfailure. It is murder. It is murder because it is premeditated. It is murder because a conscious choice was made by the global ruling classes to extinguish life rather than protect it. It is murder because profit, despite the hard statistics, the growing climate disruptions and the scientific modeling, is deemed more important than human life and human survival. 

The elites thrive in this system, as long as they serve the dictates of what Lewis Mumford called the “megamachine,” the convergence of science, economy, technics and political power unified into an integrated, bureaucratic structure whose sole goal is to perpetuate itself. This structure, Mumford noted, is antithetical to “life-enhancing values.” But to challenge the megamachine, to name and condemn its death wish, is to be expelled from its inner sanctum. There are, no doubt, some within the megamachine who fear the future, who are perhaps even appalled by the social murder, but they do not want to lose their jobs and their social status to become pariahs.  

The massive resources allocated to the military, which when the costs of the Veterans Administration are added to the Department of Defense budget come to $826 billion a year, are the most glaring example of our suicidal folly, symptomatic of all decaying civilizations that squander diminishing resources in institutions and projects that accelerate their decline.  

The American military — which accounts for 38 percent of military spending worldwide — is incapable of combating the real existential crisis.  The fighter jets, satellites, aircraft carriers, fleets of warships, nuclear submarines, missiles, tanks and vast arsenals of weaponry are useless against pandemics and the climate crisis. The war machine does nothing to mitigate the human suffering caused by degraded environments that sicken and poison populations or make life unsustainable.  Air pollution already kills an estimated 200,000 Americans a year while children in decayed cities such as Flint, Michigan are damaged for life with lead contamination from drinking water. 

The prosecution of endless and futile wars, costing anywhere from $5 to $7 trillion, the maintenance of some 800 military bases in over 70 countries, along with the endemic fraud, waste and mismanagement by the Pentagon at a time when the survival of the species is at stake is self-destructive.  The Pentagon has spent more than $67 billion alone on a ballistic missile defense system that few believe will actually work and billions more on a series of dud weapons systems, including the $22 billion Zumwalt destroyer. And, on top of all this, the U.S. military emitted 1.2 billion metric tons of carbon emissions between 2001 and 2017, twice the annual output of the nation’s passenger vehicles.

A decade from now we will look back at the current global ruling class as the most criminal in human history, willfully dooming millions upon millions of people to die, including those from this pandemic, which dwarf the murderous excesses of the killers of the past including the Europeans that carried out the genocide of the indigenous peoples in the Americas, the Nazis that exterminated some 12 million people, the Stalinists or Mao’s Cultural Revolution. This is the largest crime against humanity ever committed. It is being committed in front of us. And, with few exceptions, we are willfully being herded like sheep to the slaughter.

It is not that most people have faith in the ruling elites. They know they are being betrayed. They feel vulnerable and afraid. They understand that their misery is unacknowledged and unimportant to the global elites, who have concentrated staggering amounts of wealth and power into the hands of a tiny cabal of rapacious oligarchs.

The Pais Effect

vice |  Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais is the man behind the patents and The War Zone has proven the man exists, at least on paper. Pais has worked for a number of different departments in the Navy, including the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAVAIR/NAWCAD) and the Strategic Systems Programs. (SSP) The SSP mission, according to its website, is to “provide credible and affordable strategic solutions to the warfighter.” It’s responsible for developing the technology behind the Trident class nuclear missiles launched from Submarines.

The patents all build on each other, but at their core is something Pais called the “Pais Effect.” This is the idea that, “controlled motion of electrically charged matter via accelerated vibration and/or accelerated spin subjected to smooth yet rapid acceleration transients, in order to generate extremely high energy/high intensity electromagnetic fields.” 

Essentially, Pais is claiming to use properly spun electromagnetic fields to contain a fusion reaction. That plasma fusion reaction he claims to have invented will revolutionize power consumption. Experts theorize that a functioning fusion reactor would lead to cheap and ubiquitous energy.

One of Pais and the Navy’s patents described what the propulsion system and fusion drive would be used for—a “hybrid aerospace-underwater craft.” According to the patent, the craft could travel land, sea, and outer space at incredible speeds. Other patents invented by Pais and filed by the Navy include a “high temperature superconductor,” a “electromagnetic field generator,” and a “high frequency gravitational wave generator.”

It all sounds like science fiction, and the Navy has been skeptical too. Navy authorities called bullshit on Pais’ inventions and his patents went through a lengthy internal review at NAVAIR. The War Zone obtained emails about the bureaucratic fight between Pais and the Navy through a Freedom of Information Act Request and revealed that the mad scientist won. According to the patents, some of the technology is “operable.” That means the Navy is claiming some of Pais’ wild tech works and has been demonstrated to Navy officials.

The physics of what Pais is claiming are beyond theoretical and beyond the ken of the layman or lowly science reporter. But a paper about his compaction fusion reactor was accepted by the peer reviewed Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Transactions on Plasma Science and published in its November 2019 issue. “The fact that my work on the design of a Compact Fusion Reactor was accepted for publication in such a prestigious journal as IEEE TPS, should speak volumes as to its importance and credibility - and should eliminate (or at least alleviate) all misconceptions you (or any other person) may have in regard to the veracity (or possibility) of my advanced physics concepts,” Pais told The War Zone in an email.

Pais continued to toot his own plasma horn. “Do realize that my work culminates in the enablement of the Pais Effect (original physical concept),” he said. “Such high energy [electromagnetic] radiation can locally interact with the Vacuum Energy State (VES) - the VES being the Fifth State of Matter (Fifth Essence - Quintessence), in other words the fundamental structure (foundational framework), from which Everything else (Spacetime included) in our Quantum Reality, emerges. The Engineering of the Pais Effect can give rise to the Enablement of Macroscopic Quantum Coherence, which if you have closely been following my work, you understand the importance of.”

Field Resonance "Propulsion" Concept Redux (First Posted 3/15/12)

NASA | ABSTRACT - A new propulsion concept has been developed based on a proposed resonance between coherent, pulsed electromagnetic wave forms and gravitational wave forms (or space-time metrics). Using this concept, a spacecraft "propulsion" system potentially capable of galactic and inter-galactic travel without prohibitive "travel times" has been designed. The "propulsion" system utilizes recent research associated with magnetic field line merging, hydromagnetic wave effects, free-electron lasers, laser generation of megagauss fields, and special structural and containment metals. Research required to determine potential, field resonance characteristics and to evaluate various aspects of the spacecraft "propulsion" design is described.

ASSUMPTIONS
The field resonance "propulsion" concept has been developed utilizing recent research into causes of solar flares, magnetic substorms, black holes, quasars, and UFOs.
The concept is based on two assumptions:

(1) Space-time is a "projection" of a higher dimensional space in much the same way that a hologram is a projection or a subset of our space-time reality,
(2) A relationship exists between electromagnetic / hydromagnetic fields and gravitational fields - that is, Einstein's long sought for unified field theory can be developed. Mathematical relationships have been developed and theoretical concepts have been proposed to describe the causes and effects associated with the assumptions, but experimental data is required to develop the correct theoretical basis for the assumptions (Rachman and Dutheil, 1979). Specific research in a number of areas is needed and will be described later.

ASTROPHYSICAL RESEARCH
There does exist, however, some astrophysical data which tends to support these assumptions.

For example, astronomers have speculated that a relationship may exist between black holes and quasars (white holes). The energy and matter which leaves space-time in a black hole may reappear at a white hole at some distant space-time point.
For this transfer of energy from one space-time point to another to occur, some type of hyperspace or higher dimensional space (4th & 5th) is required. Assumption 2 may be the cause of the large amount of energy released in solar flairs.
In sunspot regions where solar flairs occur, the 2-3 thousand gauss magnetic fields are configured such that the positive and negative polarities are in close proximity with each other. Where the positive and negative magnetic field lines are nearly anti-parallel a process called magnetic field line merging can take place.

In this process the oppositely directed field lines break and re-connect expelling fields and plasma out from the sides. As a result magnetic energy is converted into kinetic energy.

The magnetic field line merging process has been proposed as the most likely explanation for solar flare eruptions. However, some flares can release energy which equals 10% of the suns' total output in a second. This large amount of energy is difficult to achieve with the magnetic field line merging concept.

Thus it may be that the configuration of the magnetic fields and associated hydromagnetic waves (oscillation of field lines) may induce a "resonance" with gravitational fields resulting in a release of gravitational as well as magnetic energy.

It is well known that the geometrical relationships of the magnetic fields (and thus the field gradients) are more important to the production of solar flairs than the magnitude of the field strength.

A strongly convoluted boundary between magnetic polarities results in a high probability for large and frequent flares. Another fact of interest is that hydromagnetic waves generated by solar flare have been observed to propagate across the chromospheric surface and trigger flares in other sun spot regions.

Alfven waves, which appear to be the dominant wave form involved, change only the geometry of the field lines. This effect also indicates that the initiation of solar flares definitely depends on geometrical relationships as do the properties of space-time and gravitational fields.

Magnetic field line merging has also been used to explain the interaction of the solar wind (and associated fields) with the Earth's magnetic fields at the magnetopause and the generation of magnetic substorms which often are triggered by solar flairs.

The magnetic fields line merging process is also an essential part of the field resonance "propulsion" concept.

 

 

Red And Black Ants: Americans Will Be "Investigating" Americans

summit |  An academic study carried out by researchers in the US and Germany has concluded that big-tech elites are completely different to all other people on the planet, and can be placed in their own class.

“Our research contributes to closing a research gap in societies with rising inequalities,” note the authors of the study from two German universities and the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies in New York. 

The research centres around analysing language used in close to 50,000 tweets and other online statements by 100 of the richest tech-elites as listed by Forbes.

The researchers conclude that big-tech elites such as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates display a ‘meritocratic’ worldview, meaning they do not see wealth as a source of their influence or success, but rather believe their innate abilities and more altruistic beliefs have enabled them to achieve power.

“We find that the 100 richest members of the tech world reveal distinctive attitudes that set them apart both from the general population and from other wealthy elites,” the study states.

The researchers noted that the study had limitations, ironically owing to the fact that they were not able to access language used by all the top 100 tech-elites because Twitter is banned in China.

The Twitter accounts they were able to access could also be managed by PR professionals and are obviously public projections of how the tech elites want to be thought of by the public at large, therefore the language used may be ‘strategic’.

Nevertheless, the findings go some way to explaining why big-tech elites are so inclined to censor and de-platform those who hold world views at odds with their own.

Abstract

The emergence of a new tech elite in Silicon Valley and beyond raises questions about the economic reach, political influence, and social importance of this group. How do these inordinately influential people think about the world and about our common future? In this paper, we test a) whether members of the tech elite share a common, meritocratic view of the world, b) whether they have a “mission” for the future, and c) how they view democracy as a political system. Our data set consists of information about the 100 richest people in the tech world, according to Forbes, and rests on their published pronouncements on Twitter, as well as on their statements on the websites of their philanthropic endeavors. Automated “bag-of-words” text and sentiment analyses reveal that the tech elite has a more meritocratic view of the world than the general US Twitter-using population. The tech elite also frequently promise to “make the world a better place,” but they do not differ from other extremely wealthy people in this respect. However, their relationship to democracy is contradictory. Based on these results, we conclude that the tech elite may be thought of as a “class for itself” in Marx’s sense—a social group that shares particular views of the world, which in this case means meritocratic, missionary, and inconsistent democratic ideology.

What Happens When Someone Drops A Rock From Space On You?

tomluongo |  I feel a lot like Amos right now finally realizing I’m walking through a post-civilizational landscape where everything looks normal but it isn’t. In his case violent Communists from the fringe of the solar system dropped asteroids on Earth.

For him this was a step-function change. But for many in our world the changes happening aren’t quite so profound yet. The lights are still on, there’s still food in a lot of our fridges.

It looks from where I’m sitting, the markets haven’t woken up to these changes yet. Because of the size and scope of the changes, and just how much of their valuation is a reflection of the false information being fed into them by stupid AI algorithms, the speed at which this realization is happening is far slower than we want to admit.

Normalcy bias is real. Markets never want to believe that cooler heads won’t prevail, because they always have before. But what happens when someone drops a rock from space on us, metaphorically? 

If you’re a fan of The Expanse (and if you aren’t you should be) you’ll be familiar with the term The Churn. The Churn is the controlling idea for Amos Burton, whose only defining ethos is survival.

Simply put, The Churn is that moment when, “the rules of the game change.” Which game?

Amos: The only game. Survival. When the jungle tears itself down and builds itself into something new. Guys like you and me, we end up dead. Doesn’t really mean anything. Or, if we happen to live through it, well that doesn’t mean anything either.

Embedded in Amos’ idea of The Churn, however, is that while the rules change society itself keeps on keeping on. So many people right now are trying to analyze the political situation in terms of The Churn, the normal ebb and flow of who has the upper hand in the power struggle.

 

1% Replacement Negroe Immigrants Made The Native 1% Elites EVEN MORE Medieval...,

voxeu |  It is a well-documented fact that top-income growth has been particularly stark in English-speaking countries, with incomes of the top 1% and 0.1% rising sharply over recent decades (Atkinson et al. 2011, Blanchet et al. 2019). Some scholars have argued that the shared economic and political institutions of these countries, such as lower top marginal tax rates and light touch regulation, have incentivised rent-seeking behaviour among their top earners (Piketty et al. 2011, Bivens and Mishel 2013). In addition, technical changes may have created ‘winner-takes-all’ markets where a few workers earn most of the returns. Recent technological innovations may thus have contributed to the rise of top incomes (Rosen 1981, Kaplan and Rauh 2013, Koenig 2020).

Another characteristic feature of Anglo-Saxon countries is their popularity as a destination for high-skilled migrants, particularly the cities that serve as global services hubs such as London and New York (Kerr et al. 2016, Kerr and Kerr 2018, Roarch et al. 2019). Anecdotal evidence suggests that the rich and famous are internationally mobile and favour these destinations, but this evidence is based on a few highly visible cases. So far, we know little about the magnitude of these effects and the extent to which migration-induced selection effects could drive different trends in income inequality across countries and periods.

In a new paper (Advani et al. 2020), we combine top-income records from UK tax records with new information about migrant status to analyse the link. Tax records have been instrumental in recent research on top incomes. These data provide improved coverage of the highest incomes (reviewed in Atkinson et al. 2011); however, the data include minimal information on demographic characteristics. As a result, it has been difficult for researchers to distinguish native workers from migrant workers at the top of the income distribution, or to assess the impact of migration between countries on income dynamics. We derive information on migrant status from the structure of Social Security numbers assigned to migrant workers on arrival.

Our findings suggest that migrants are highly represented at the top of the income distribution. The public debate primarily focuses on low-income migrants; however, migrants make up a higher proportion of earners at the very top of the income distribution. Among low-income groups, about one in six people are immigrants. In contrast, among the top percentile of the income distribution, one in four people are immigrants and at higher fractiles, every third person is an immigrant. A lack of data has created a perception that migration is mainly a low-income phenomenon, but these new data show that the economy relies most heavily on immigrants for extremely highly paid positions.

The inflow of high-income migrants can also help in understanding recent trends in top incomes. In the UK, an inflow of high-income finance workers can account for much of the observed rise in top-income shares over the past two decades. Immigrants make up more than a quarter of the top percentiles’ income share, up from 18% in 1997. Over these two decades, the importance of migrants thus increased by 50%, which accounts for about 85% of the rise in top income over this period (Figure 1a). 

The impact of migration is even starker at higher income levels. Among the top 0.1% and 0.01% top, migrants make up roughly a third of UK top incomes (Figure 1a). This pattern aligns closely with the observed expansion of the wage distribution at the top. Incomes in the very top fractiles of the income distribution have grown the fastest in recent decades, pulling away even from the rapidly growing incomes in the lower end of the top 1%. The data suggest that differential migration rates can rationalise this ‘fractal inequality’. The inflow of migrants into the top 0.01% was nearly twice as large as the comparable inflow into the top 1% over the past two decades. Hence, differential migration rates may have increased the gap between the incomes of the top 1% and the top 0.1% (Figure 1b).

An Intriguing Fourth Theory Of Everything

futurism  |  It’s not every day that we come across a paper that attempts to redefine reality.

But in a provocative preprint uploaded to arXiv this summer, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth named Vitaly Vanchurin attempts to reframe reality in a particularly eye-opening way — suggesting that we’re living inside a massive neural network that governs everything around us. In other words, he wrote in the paper, it’s a “possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network.”

For years, physicists have attempted to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. The first posits that time is universal and absolute, while the latter argues that time is relative, linked to the fabric of space-time.

In his paper, Vanchurin argues that artificial neural networks can “exhibit approximate behaviors” of both universal theories. Since quantum mechanics “is a remarkably successful paradigm for modeling physical phenomena on a wide range of scales,” he writes, “it is widely believed that on the most fundamental level the entire universe is governed by the rules of quantum mechanics and even gravity should somehow emerge from it.”

“We are not just saying that the artificial neural networks can be useful for analyzing physical systems or for discovering physical laws, we are saying that this is how the world around us actually works,” reads the paper’s discussion. “With this respect it could be considered as a proposal for the theory of everything, and as such it should be easy to prove it wrong.”

The concept is so bold that most physicists and machine learning experts we reached out to declined to comment on the record, citing skepticism about the paper’s conclusions. But in a Q&A with Futurism, Vanchurin leaned into the controversy — and told us more about his idea.

Futurism: Your paper argues that the universe might fundamentally be a neural network. How would you explain your reasoning to someone who didn’t know very much about neural networks or physics?

Vitaly Vanchurin: There are two ways to answer your question.

The first way is to start with a precise model of neural networks and then to study the behavior of the network in the limit of a large number of neurons. What I have shown is that equations of quantum mechanics describe pretty well the behavior of the system near equilibrium and equations of classical mechanics describes pretty well how the system further away from the equilibrium. Coincidence? May be, but as far as we know quantum and classical mechanics is exactly how the physical world works.

The second way is to start from physics. We know that quantum mechanics works pretty well on small scales and general relativity works pretty well on large scales, but so far we were not able to reconcile the two theories in a unified framework. This is known as the problem of quantum gravity. Clearly, we are missing something big, but to make matters worse we do not even know how to handle observers. This is known as the measurement problem in context of quantum mechanics and the measure problem in context of cosmology.

Then one might argue that there are not two, but three phenomena that need to be unified: quantum mechanics, general relativity and observers. 99% of physicists would tell you that quantum mechanics is the main one and everything else should somehow emerge from it, but nobody knows exactly how that can be done. In this paper I consider another possibility that a microscopic neural network is the fundamental structure and everything else, i.e. quantum mechanics, general relativity and macroscopic observers, emerges from it.

Who Believes The Lava Tubes In Question Haven't Already Been Extensively Prospected?

CNN | The study published this month in the journal Earth-Science Reviews.

The lava tubes beneath the surface of the moon have also remained largely intact due to low gravity. Any collapsed lava tubes on the moon are likely due to asteroid impacts, the researchers said. And those skylights could actually provide access to the tubes. 

These lava tubes could help shelter astronauts, as well as provide new information about the moon and Mars. 

"The existence of stable huge voids below the Moon subsurface, potentially accessible through skylights, could change the paradigm on how we approach planetary exploration in terms of mission design, planetary human outposts and scientific research," said Pozzobon and Franceso Sauro, study author and professor in the department of biological, geological and environmental sciences at the University of Bologna. 

"Accessing these caves and (analyzing) this type of subsurface environment will present new technological challenges but also could provide unexpected scientific discoveries."

For astronauts exploring the harsh environments and fluctuating temperatures of the moon and Mars, the lava tubes could provide natural shelter from radiation, impacts by micrometeorites and unstable temperatures.  

Micrometeorites pose a danger not only to astronauts, but the habitats and life support equipment they'll need on the moon and Mars. The caves could be used to live in and store equipment. 

It's even possible that the tubes could provide access to water ice reservoirs, the researchers said.

"But the challenges in order to access these caves and sustain human activity are nonetheless massive," the researchers said.

About These Lava Tubes....,

Forbes |  Lava tubes on the moon and Mars may be large enough to fit city center-sized groups of astronauts living on these other worlds, a new study finds.

Lava tubes are an underground tunnel that happens due to the flow of molten rock during a volcanic explosion. We get lava tubes on Earth as well, but the ones on the moon and Mars are likely much larger — allowing huge communities of people to work, live and explore on other worlds.

A typical tube on Earth will be roughly 30 feet to 100 feet (10 to 30 meters) in diameter. But one on Mars could be the height of the Empire State Building, with a diameter 10 times that of Earth. If that sounds big, consider the moon, where its even lower gravity produces a tube up to 1000 times larger than Earth’s — much taller than the massive Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai.

It’s an exciting find because these small, cramped spaces on Earth would instead open up into vast caverns of space on other worlds. Rather than imagining future astronauts working shoulder to shoulder all the time, these space explorers could easily stroll through otherworldly boulevards, all sheltered from deadly outside radiation (and in the case of Mars, fierce dust storms).

 "These [lava tubes] represent ideal gateways or windows for subsurface exploration,” said study lead author Francesco Sauro in a statement. While we’ve known about these lava tubes for a while, the new study shows just how large they are — able to contain the same space as the city center of Padua, Italy in at least one case, Sauro said.