Cat Attacks Birds

 

Reshaping The Global Order

At the BRICS Summit in Johannesburg on August 24, 2023, the bloc’s five members — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — announced the invitation of six new countries — Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Effective January 1, 2024, BRICS countries will represent almost half the world’s population.

While BRICS has struggled to make concrete achievements, the momentum may now be shifting. This expansion would have the BRICS overtake the G7 in total gross domestic product, with BRICS economies growing at higher demographic and economic rates than G7 members.

The BRICS expansion could help reduce tensions among the BRICS’s Middle Eastern countries, but could also provoke the United States and NATO, given the admission of Iran and the current membership of Russia and China.

A growing number of countries have expressed interest in joining the BRICS group. Yet there are internal disagreements about how the group should move forward. China and Russia have pushed for a quick expansion of BRICS to strengthen their geopolitical influence, while India has expressed concern about admitting many new members too quickly.

India’s concern has much to do with its historic, bitter border disputes with China, as well as the current strength of India’s bilateral relationship with the United States. India’s contribution in keeping BRICS from becoming outwardly anti-Western only strengthens the country’s geopolitical importance for the United States – US President Joe Biden quite literally pulled out the red carpet for India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his June 2023 visit to the White House.  READ MORE...

China's Undersea Tunnel

 

Bye Bye to EVs

 

New Section of Universe Discovered

Astronomers may have detected a dozen large objects lurking beyond the Kuiper Belt at the edge of our solar system, suggesting there could be another equally massive, "second Kuiper Belt" hiding beyond the orbit of Pluto.

Researchers may have detected a dozen new, large objects beyond the Kuiper Belt, which suggests that there is lots more stuff in the solar system than we realized. It could even hint that there is a "second Kuiper Belt" further out toward the edge of our stellar neighborhood, Science.org reported.

The sun's influence reaches much further out into space than the eight planets that orbit around it. Beyond Neptune, the solar system stretches out to around 100 astronomical units (AU), which is 100 times the distance between Earth and the sun. For context, the most distant planet from the sun, Neptune, is roughly 30 AU from our home star.

Beyond the edge of the solar system, or heliopause, lies the Oort Cloud — a reservoir of comets and asteroids that are loosely contained by the sun's gravity — that stretches to at least 1,000 AU from the sun, and likely even further.

But a majority of the largest known asteroids, comets and other large objects that lie beyond Neptune's orbit are contained within the Kuiper Belt, which stretches between 30 and 50 AU from the sun. 

Famous residents of the Kuiper Belt include the dwarf planet Pluto and the double-lobed object Arrokoth — the most distant object visited by a spacecraft. Planet Nine, if it exists, would also lurk somewhere within the Kuiper Belt. 

Until now, very few massive objects in the solar system have been found beyond the Kuiper Belt.  READ MORE...

Beware...

 

Friday the 13th

Origin story. It's hard to know exactly when Friday the 13th became thought of as unlucky, but it likely comes from the Christian religion. For example, in the Bible, Judas—a person who is said to have betrayed Jesus—was the 13th guest at the Last Supper. Also in the Bible, many unfortunate things happened on Fridays.

Bad luck surrounding Friday the 13th is believed to come from Friday being the day of Jesus Christ's crucifixion.


On their own, both the day and the number have been considered unlucky throughout history.


It is said never to begin trips by boat on Fridays, or the weekday of Christ's death, and some say never to begin any trip on the day. Winston Churchill despised traveling on Fridays, and if he did, he carried a lucky walking stick. The poet George Gordon Byron believed Fridays unlucky, but once chose to travel on a Friday anyway. He died soon after … on a Friday.

For me, Friday the 13th has always been just another day in the life, not particularly good and not particularly bad.  But what really amazes me most of all is the fact that so many people are superstitious.

The concept of superstition began as the Greek word deisidaimonia (δεισιδαιμνοία), which in the 4th century bce had the positive meaning 'scrupulous in religious matters'; but a century later it had acquired a more negative meaning, inching it closer to our modern understanding of superstition.


SUPERSTITION Definition -  excessively credulous belief in and reverence for supernatural beings. a widely held but unjustified belief in supernatural causation leading to certain consequences of an action or event, or a practice based on such a belief

Now all of a sudden, we are looking at the supernatural...  ghosts, goblins, spirits, etc.  Who in their right mind would ever believe in the supernatural...?

On the other hand, isn't God perceived as some sort of supernatural being the created everything.   I mean, to create the world in which we live, that person has got to be some sort of a superhuman person, if in fact, God is human at all.  It is said that he made man in his image...  but that is not evidence that he himself is human.  How would such a human get such an ability?

When Jesus arose from the dead, he was in a spirit form...  which relates back to the supernatural and the definition of superstition.

IS ALL OF THIS A COINCIDENCE?

Owl

 

CERN's New Particle Collider

Preparations for a massive new particle smasher near Geneva are picking up speed. But the European-led project, which hopes to answer some of the biggest questions in physics, faces many obstacles, including competition from China.

In 2012 scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) achieved a key breakthrough when they detected the elusive Higgs boson, an elementary particle that gives mass to all the others. This followed decades of work using accelerators such as the famed Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle collider located north of Geneva.

Yet many fundamental questions about the universe remain unanswered: What constitutes dark matter? Why is our universe filled with matter and not antimatter? Or why do the masses of elementary particles differ so much?

The search for answers to these and other big physics questions requires another “leap to higher energies and intensities”, says CERN. The organisation wants to build a more powerful and precise successor to the LHC, which was conceived in the early 1980s and will complete its mission in 2040.

“We build these machines to explore the nature of the universe. It’s about going out into the unknown and exploring further,” says Mike Lamont, CERN’s director of accelerators and technology.

And so, following requests by the global physics community, plans for the so-called Future Circular Collider (FCC) have been taking shape over the past ten years.  READ MORE...

Modern Construction

 

Focus on Yourself

 

Humanoid Robots in Warehouses

Humanoid robots are on their way to warehouses as companies start to move beyond the disembodied arms, moving trays and other machines aimed at speeding up logistics operations.


Agility Robotics, Figure AI and Boston Dynamics are among companies designing robots more closely modeled on human beings for use in distribution centers. The new machines are being engineered with the ability to walk around warehouses, reach items high on shelves, crouch to put things down and pick up and move boxes, defying some of the physical limits on automation in the industrial world.

The robot developers say their devices will help warehouse operators mitigate labor shortfalls and eliminate the need to redesign warehouses to match the capabilities of machines.

Logistics operators have been adding automation to their warehouses for years to speed up the stacking and retrieving of goods and to take some of the most burdensome, repetitive tasks off workers. Many of the devices are designed to work in concert with employees by taking on tasks such as hauling heavy goods or bringing totes of items directly to workers.  READ MORE...

Somewhat Political

 

Interesting Development

Our current demographics:

Whites            60%

Blacks             12%

Hispanics        19%

Asian                6%

Other                3%

Hispanics basically include all Spanish speaking peoples

The Blacks currently have it out for the whites as a result of slavery and consider all whites because of their 60% demographic to be WHITE SUPREMACISTS...

While many white argue against that generalize description, there are many others that want to bend over backwards to appease the black population in the USA...

I cannot say if that is right or wrong, justified or not justified because I personally had nothing to do with slavery and I resent being pulled into that kind of debate simply because I am white.

HOWEVER,

Blacks are now facing a more serious problem and that is all the brown people that are illegally crossing the border.

These brown people are taking over the towns and cities that the blacks used to control.  They are getting housing or being put up in hotels to get them off the streets.

Currently, Hispanics outnumber the blacks by only 6%...  but, as their numbers continue to increase, this percentage could increase to as high as a 10% discrepancy.

With these numbers the brown with overcome the blacks by sheer numbers...

If there are browns that enter illegally with ties to the Mexican Drug Cartel, they will begin to take control of drug sales away from the blacks.

Those browns who are not associated with the Cartels, are coming here to work and will be taking jobs away from the blacks because they will be willing to work for less money.

Also, all the so-called white supremacists will have no choice but to cater to the browns because of their numbers, further pissing off the blacks...

The Democrats opened the borders to gain extra votes from the Republicans and did not count on nor did they expect that this outcome would result.  White Supremacy will be saved by illegal browns entering the country...

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT???

 

Cats on Wall

 

FOUR-THOUSAND-Year-Old Mummy

The false door to Ptahshepses’s tomb was removed by a French archaeologist in the 19th century. Now, 160 years later, researchers have rediscovered it and found the mummy of its occupant. Image courtesy of © Archive of the Czech Institute of Egyptology, Faculty of Arts, Charles UniversityThe false door to Ptahshepses’s tomb was removed by a French archaeologist in the 19th century. Now, 160 years later, researchers have rediscovered it and found the mummy of its occupant.




A team of Czech archaeologists have rediscovered a lost tomb that belonged to an ancient Egyptian official called Ptahshepses, who lived around 4,400 years ago (during the 24th and 25th centuries BCE). The discovery even contained the mummified remains of this significant individual.

According to a statement released by the Czech Institute of Egyptology on Facebook, the lost tomb was discovered in the zone between the pyramid fields of Abusir and Saqqara, Egypt.

"It was a difficult search lasting several years,” Miroslav Barta, head of research at Abusir, explained in the statement. “Detailed satellite imagery of the area and the study of old maps led to the rediscovery of the tomb of Ptahshepses in 2022.”

Around 160 years ago, a French scholar named Auguste Mariette found this site and partially “excavated” it. Mariette extracted Ptahshepses’s false door, a symbolic doorway the Egyptians believed the deceased could use to enter and exit the tomb, and a lintel originally placed above the cult chapel. However, the tomb disappeared under the sand and was lost until now.

The artifacts recovered by Mariette are currently on display at the British Museum. The door itself provides an extensive and unique account of Ptahshepses’s career. It explains how he was educated at the court of the last Giza ruler – Menkaure (Greek "Mykerinos") – and how he later married the daughter of pharaoh Userkaf. Userkaf himself was an important figure who founded the Fifth Dynasty of Sun Kings.

“This reference itself indicates that Ptahshepses is the first known official of non-royal descent in Egyptian history who was given the privilege of marrying a royal daughter,” the Institute explained.  READ MORE...

Image courtesy of © Archive of the Czech Institute of Egyptology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University

Truth Matters

 

Vietnam Combat Footage

 

World Demand of Crude Oil

The International Energy Agency predicted that peak oil demand would be reached by 2030 and hailed the decline of crude as a “welcome sight.”

OPEC leaders reacted harshly, accusing the agency of fear-mongering and risking the destabilization of the world economy.
Oil producers have been accused of dialing back their climate pledges in recent months following record annual profits.


It’s been a war of words and numbers between two major players in the energy industry – the International Energy Agency and OPEC – as they spar over the future of something crucial to crude producers’ survival: peak oil demand.


Peak oil demand refers to the point in time when the highest level of global crude demand is reached, which will be immediately followed by a permanent decline. This would theoretically decrease the need for investments in crude oil projects and make them less economical as other energy sources take over.

For oil producing countries and companies, it’s existential.

That’s why when the chief of the IEA, an intergovernmental organization that advocates for oil-consuming countries, predicted that peak oil demand would be reached by 2030 and hailed the decline of crude as a “welcome sight,” OPEC was furious.

“Such narratives only set the global energy system up to fail spectacularly,” OPEC Secretary-General Haitham al-Ghais said in a Sept. 14 statement. “It would lead to energy chaos on a potentially unprecedented scale, with dire consequences for economies and billions of people across the world.” He accused the agency of fearmongering and risking the destabilization of the global economy.

More broadly, the spat reflects the ongoing clash between climate change concerns and the need for energy security. That juxtaposition was on full display at ADIPEC – the annual gathering whose name stood for Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition Conference until this year, when it was quietly changed to Abu Dhabi International Progressive Energy Conference.  READ MORE...

Rain