Tuesday, July 27
Monday, July 26
Durham Report
Durham is investigating the department’s counterintelligence operation against the 2016 Trump campaign and associates, which was riddled with errors and malfeasance.
The timeline for the probe to wrap up is unclear, but then-Attorney General William Barr indicated last year that the final report should be made public.
Noting that a confidential report on what the investigation found will be produced as required by law, Durham “to the maximum extent possible and consistent with the law and policies and practices of the Department of Justice, shall submit to the Attorney General a final report, and such interim reports as he deems appropriate, in a form that will permit public dissemination,” Barr wrote in an October 2020 order.
Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) pressed the DOJ in a recent letter over the hiring of Susan Hennessey, who has described the Durham probe as “partisan silliness,” to work in the National Security Division. They asked if she was involved at all with the Durham probe and asked when the investigation will be completed and whether the current administration agrees with Barr’s order on public dissemination.
In response, Joe Gaeta, deputy assistant attorney general, defended the hiring of Hennessey and said she’s not involved with the probe, given that Durham is utilizing his own staff. READ MORE
Clevenland Indians
Sockalexis, a great baseball name if there ever was one (later announcers would have loved to report about how he “socked” one into the stands), is largely forgotten today, although he has made a few headlines in the last few days because the Cleveland Indians, a team that bore that name in his honor, has now dishonored him by changing its nickname, so as not to insult Indians. Yes, friends, it’s a topsy-turvy world, and it isn’t getting any saner.
Have you heard of Louis Sockalexis? Some of our great-grandfathers marveled at his feats. He was a Penobscot Indian from Maine who became a major league player in 1897, hitting .338 in 66 games for the old National League Cleveland Spiders. He generated a great deal of fan enthusiasm, but indifferent to or unable to overcome stereotypes, he succumbed to alcoholism and had washed out of the major leagues by 1899.
Have you heard of Louis Sockalexis? Some of our great-grandfathers marveled at his feats. He was a Penobscot Indian from Maine who became a major league player in 1897, hitting .338 in 66 games for the old National League Cleveland Spiders. He generated a great deal of fan enthusiasm, but indifferent to or unable to overcome stereotypes, he succumbed to alcoholism and had washed out of the major leagues by 1899.
The Spiders amassed the eye-watering record of twenty wins and 134 losses that year, and went out of business right after the season’s end, opening up an opportunity in 1901 for the new American League. It was not until 1915, however, that Cleveland’s American League team began calling itself the Indians in honor of Sockalexis. He hadn’t played in the major leagues in a decade and a half, but was newly recalled to fans when he died an untimely death from tuberculosis in 1913.
Objectivity in New Rporting
The core values statement, installed two years ago, touts objectivity, impartiality, integrity and truth-seeking, and after their session that statement was reportedly scrapped from the school’s website, the News & Observer reports.
In 2019, Walter Hussman, a UNC alumnus and owner of a media conglomerate of newspapers and other media outlets, donated $25 million to the UNC journalism school. Part of the donation contract installed those values into the school’s wall and mission, according to UNC’s website.
But Hussman had expressed concerns over the hiring of Nikole Hannah-Jones, the architect of the New York Times 1619 Project, and she cited the journalism magnate as one reason she rejected the UNC job.
“Faculty say the display gives the impression those statements are values of the school and its faculty, and in a draft of a statement … faculty wrote it should be removed or given more context. The draft also said Hussman’s actions had been harmful to the school’s reputation,” the News & Observer reported. READ MORE
Looking Inside Mars
The solar system’s god of war has a bigger heart than expected: Using humankind’s first seismometer on another planet, researchers have analyzed the interior structure of Mars for the first time, including its oversize liquid core.
The findings, published on July 22 across three studies in the journal Science, mark the latest scientific triumph for NASA’s InSight lander, which arrived at the flat equatorial plain known as Elysium Planitia in November 2018. The stationary spacecraft has measured faint “marsquakes” rumbling through the planet since early 2019.
On Earth, seismic waves can reveal our planet’s inner structure by revealing boundaries deep underground where the waves’ speeds and directions change. InSight’s similar measurements of Martian temblors have let scientists detect distinct layers within the red planet, including the boundary of its roughly 2,300-mile-wide core.
“As a seismologist, you probably have one chance in your life to find a core for a planet,” says InSight team member Simon Stähler, a planetary seismologist at the research university ETH Zurich in Switzerland, interviewed by video call.
Mars is just the third celestial body to have its core directly measured with seismic data, following Earth in the early 1900s and the moon in 2011. When combined with InSight’s first measurements of Mars’s mantle and crust structure, the core size will refine models for how Mars formed and changed over the past 4.5 billion years, from a possibly habitable world with liquid water and a planet-wide magnetic field to the hostile, rusty desert it is today. (Read more about humankind’s long-lasting obsession with Mars in National Geographic magazine.) READ MORE
The findings, published on July 22 across three studies in the journal Science, mark the latest scientific triumph for NASA’s InSight lander, which arrived at the flat equatorial plain known as Elysium Planitia in November 2018. The stationary spacecraft has measured faint “marsquakes” rumbling through the planet since early 2019.
On Earth, seismic waves can reveal our planet’s inner structure by revealing boundaries deep underground where the waves’ speeds and directions change. InSight’s similar measurements of Martian temblors have let scientists detect distinct layers within the red planet, including the boundary of its roughly 2,300-mile-wide core.
“As a seismologist, you probably have one chance in your life to find a core for a planet,” says InSight team member Simon Stähler, a planetary seismologist at the research university ETH Zurich in Switzerland, interviewed by video call.
Mars is just the third celestial body to have its core directly measured with seismic data, following Earth in the early 1900s and the moon in 2011. When combined with InSight’s first measurements of Mars’s mantle and crust structure, the core size will refine models for how Mars formed and changed over the past 4.5 billion years, from a possibly habitable world with liquid water and a planet-wide magnetic field to the hostile, rusty desert it is today. (Read more about humankind’s long-lasting obsession with Mars in National Geographic magazine.) READ MORE
Consciousness and Quantum Physics
They claimed that the brain's neuronal system forms an intricate network and that the consciousness this produces should obey the rules of quantum mechanics – the theory that determines how tiny particles like electrons move around. This, they argue, could explain the mysterious complexity of human consciousness.
Penrose and Hameroff were met with incredulity. Quantum mechanical laws are usually only found to apply at very low temperatures. Quantum computers, for example, currently operate at around -272°C. At higher temperatures, classical mechanics takes over.
Since our body works at room temperature, you would expect it to be governed by the classical laws of physics. For this reason, the quantum consciousness theory has been dismissed outright by many scientists – though others are persuaded supporters. READ MORE
Sunday, July 25
Vaccination Passports
They are protesting this direction because they believe that it is an invasion of privacy and an intrusion into an individual's medical history...
Personally,
I don't really care and have no problems showing to whoever wants to see that i have had both my COVID shots...
HOWEVER...
I do think it is inappropriate for GOVERNMENTS to mandate something like this... that, in and of itself, gives GOVERNMENTS more control over the people than they should have...
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