The Silicon Valley Heavyweights Who Want to Settle the Moon
September 5th, 2019The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
Via: Bloomberg:
The moon is all the rage these days. China wants to send people there. So too does the United States and NASA. In fact, just about every country with a space program has some sort of lunar ambition that they hope will play out over the next few years.
Now, there’s a new entrant in this new space race, a nonprofit organization called the Open Lunar Foundation. Based in San Francisco, it’s a group made up of tech executives and engineers—many of them with former ties to NASA—who have serious ambitions to create a lunar settlement.
The driving ethos behind the foundation is to start a development that would not be beholden to a particular country or billionaire. Instead, as the group’s name suggests, Open Lunar wants to create technology for exploring and living on the moon as a type of collaborative effort.
Island of 50,000 People in the Bahamas Is 70% Under Water
September 5th, 2019Via: Bloomberg:
An island in the Bahamas that’s home to 50,000 people is 70% under water after Hurricane Dorian battered it with record force for two days, according to the government.
There are “still many outstanding rescue missions,” on the island of Grand Bahama, Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Kevin Peter Turnquest said, in reply to written questions. “It’s not looking good as we expect catastrophic damage.”
NASA Satellite Spots Mysterious Green Light That Quickly Disappeared
September 5th, 2019Via: Cnet:
NASA’s NuSTAR X-ray observatory has spotted something a little weird. While imaging the Fireworks galaxy, NuSTAR spotted several mysterious bright sources of X-ray light, appearing as green and blue spots. Within days, the blobs had disappeared.
Strange Things Are Happening on Epstein Island: Drone Footage
September 5th, 2019Via: Vigilant Citizen:
Considering the fact that Little Saint James was the site of heinous crimes involving powerful people, one would expect the island to be treated like a crime scene that is completely closed off to non-investigators. That is not what is happening.
“Fussy Eater” Goes Blind and Deaf After Years of Eating Only Junk Food
September 4th, 2019Via: Ars Technica:
A British teenager has permanent vision loss, hearing loss, and weak bones after years of eating only select types of junk food. The teen’s doctors eventually diagnosed him with a relatively newly defined eating disorder called avoidant-restrictive food in-take disorder (ARFID).
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The crack in the case came when he finally confessed that he had only eaten foods with certain textures since elementary school. His diet consisted of a daily order of fries from a local fish and chip shop, Pringles chips, white bread, processed ham slices, and sausages. The vitamin B12 shots he was prescribed at 14 had lapsed.
Metabolic testing showed he had low copper and selenium levels, a high zinc level, remarkably low vitamin D level, and low bone mineral density, the doctors reported.
His doctors finally diagnosed him with nutritional optic neuropathy, which is dysfunction of the optic nerve when nutrients essential for nerve fiber function are in short supply. It is an uncommon condition, particularly in developed countries, but sometimes found in people with alcohol dependence. The doctors also diagnosed the teen with ARFID.
Biden’s Left Eye Fills with Blood During CNN Town Hall
September 4th, 2019See: Subconjunctival Hemorrhage
Via: CNN Mirrored by Washington Free Beacon:
Grand Bahama and Abaco Islands After Hurricane Dorian: ‘Total Devastation. Apocalyptic.’
September 4th, 2019Via: USA Today:
The death toll from Hurricane Dorian reached seven and was expected to climb in the Bahamas on Wednesday as rescue teams raced the clock to provide food, water, medicine and shelter to thousands left homeless by the devastating storm.
The sun shone brightly over the beleaguered archipelago, revealing the overwhelming destruction across Grand Bahama and Abaco islands after the storm rolled in Sunday as a Category 5 hurricane and lingered for days.
Entire communities were flattened and roads washed out. Hospitals and airports were swamped by several feet of water. The government urged residents stuck in their homes to cut holes in the ceilings in case water rushed in and trapped families awaiting rescue.
Clarence Ingram, the Salvation Army’s division commander in the Bahamas, said relief efforts are hamstrung by flooded airports and swamped roads on the two most severely ravaged islands, home to about 70,000 Bahamians. About 60,000 of them need help immediately, he said.
“This is dire,” Ingram told USA TODAY. “And relief efforts providing for basic human needs such as food and water will probably go on for several months.”
Amazon Tests Whole Foods Payment System that Uses Hands as ID
September 4th, 2019Via: New York Post:
Forget the titanium Apple Card — Amazon’s latest payment method uses flesh and blood.
The e-tailing giant’s engineers are quietly testing scanners that can identify an individual human hand as a way to ring up a store purchase, with the goal of rolling them out at its Whole Foods supermarket chain in the coming months, The Post has learned.
America Needs a “Dead Hand”
September 4th, 2019Related: “There’s no way a human can keep up, so you’ve got to delegate to machines.”
Via: War on the Rocks:
America’s nuclear command, control, and communications (NC3) system comprises many component systems that were designed and fielded during the Cold War — a period when nuclear missiles were set to launch from deep within Soviet territory, giving the United States sufficient time to react. That era is over. Today, Russian and Chinese nuclear modernization is rapidly compressing the time U.S. leaders will have to detect a nuclear launch, decide on a course of action, and direct a response.
Technologies such as hypersonic weapons, stealthy nuclear-armed cruise missiles, and weaponized artificial intelligence mean America’s legacy NC3 system may be too slow for the president to make a considered decision and transmit orders. The challenges of attack-time compression present a destabilizing risk to America’s deterrence strategy. Any potential for failure in the detection or assessment of an attack, or any reduction of decision and response time, is inherently dangerous and destabilizing.
If the ultimate purpose of the NC3 system is to ensure America’s senior leadership has the information and time needed to command and control nuclear forces, then the penultimate purpose of a reliable NC3 system is to reinforce the desired deterrent effect. To maintain the deterrent value of America’s strategic forces, the United States may need to develop something that might seem unfathomable — an automated strategic response system based on artificial intelligence.
Admittedly, such a suggestion will generate comparisons to Dr. Strangelove’s doomsday machine, War Games’ War Operation Plan Response, and the Terminator’s Skynet, but the prophetic imagery of these science fiction films is quickly becoming reality. A rational look at the NC3 modernization problem finds that it is compounded by technical threats that are likely to impact strategic forces. Time compression has placed America’s senior leadership in a situation where the existing NC3 system may not act rapidly enough. Thus, it may be necessary to develop a system based on artificial intelligence, with predetermined response decisions, that detects, decides, and directs strategic forces with such speed that the attack-time compression challenge does not place the United States in an impossible position.
Fire Did Not Cause 3rd Tower’s Collapse on 9/11, New Study Finds
September 3rd, 2019Via: Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth:
On September 11, 2001, at 5:20 PM, the 47-story World Trade Center Building 7 collapsed into its footprint, falling more than 100 feet at the rate of gravity for 2.5 seconds of its seven-second destruction.
Despite calls for the evidence to be preserved, New York City officials had the building’s debris removed and destroyed in the ensuing weeks and months, preventing a proper forensic investigation from ever taking place. Seven years later, federal investigators concluded that WTC 7 was the first steel-framed high-rise ever to have collapsed solely as a result of normal office fires.
Today, we at Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth are pleased to partner with the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) in releasing the draft report of a four-year computer modeling study of WTC 7’s collapse conducted by researchers in the university’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The UAF WTC 7 report concludes that the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11 was caused not by fire but rather by the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.
