Off The Cuff

So...  who is this Volodymyr Zelenskyy dude anyway?  some sort of modern-day Churchill they say...  I saw and heard his speech this morning and I didn't think he was no Churchill...

But...  I also don't like the way he and his country are being treated by the damn Russians either...  I think we ought to go in there and kick some RUSKY ASS...

Then again...  maybe I'm just being mean...  like my ole man was...

Life is too short to have some sociopath from Russia try to take away our freedoms simply because he thinks that he can.  It kinda pisses me off that NATO and the UN are too chicken-shit to do anything about this...  and it also seems like our own Biden administration is a little chicken-shit as well...

I'm all for going green but not when it screws up our own economy and the hard-working men like myself or like I used to be, have to frigging pay twice what we used to pay for gasoline...  it also annoys the hell out of me that when my little honey goes to the market, the shelves are a little empty and she comes home a ballin' because she can't find what she needs to make what she promised me for dinner...

Well...  that shit kinda makes me mad and I end up drinking more than I should drink...  and then I got this frigging headache the next day that won't go away...

Life is just too sweet to have to live like this.

Congress needs to help out this little fellow from Ukraine and we need to show the rest of the world that we will defend any country...  any country in this world...  when another country tries to take away their freedoms...

That shit just ain't right no matter how the media tries to spin it...

Just a Few More Points

Do we really think that Russia wants to take the world into another world war?

Bullies are only bullies when the advantage is on their side...  and, right now Russia has the support of China which is great but I am not sure if China wants to face the economics of a world war.

Therefore, I think the EU and NATO (along with the USA and Canada) should call Putin's bluff and send MIGS, weapons, bullets, weapons, and whatever else Ukraine needs to push Russia back into their own country.

I also think that the USA should tell the Green People to temporarily kiss their asses and turn on every oil and natural gas faucet that we have and flood the market with supply to lower prices and let our economy rebuild itself.

Then, we can and should set up a plan that would gradually move us into a NO FOSSIL FUEL environment rather than trying to jump into as if we were smoking cigarettes and wanted to go COLD TURKEY.

My mother always used to say that you catch more flies with honey than with fly paper...

CPAC

 

Artistic Design

Quantum Mechanics and Free Will

Credit: francescoch/Getty Images

A conjecture called superdeterminism, outlined decades ago, is a response to several peculiarities of quantum mechanics: the apparent randomness of quantum events; their apparent dependence on human observation, or measurement; and the apparent ability of a measurement in one place to determine, instantly, the outcome of a measurement elsewhere, an effect called nonlocality.

Einstein, who derided nonlocality as “spooky action at a distance,” insisted that quantum mechanics must be incomplete; there must be hidden variables that the theory overlooks. Superdeterminism is a radical hidden-variables theory proposed by physicist John Bell. He is renowned for a 1964 theorem, now named after him, that dramatically exposes the nonlocality of quantum mechanics.

Bell said in a BBC interview in 1985 that the puzzle of nonlocality vanishes if you assume that “the world is superdeterministic, with not just inanimate nature running on behind-the-scenes clockwork, but with our behavior, including our belief that we are free to choose to do one experiment rather than another, absolutely predetermined.”

In a recent video, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, whose work I admire, notes that superdeterminism eliminates the apparent randomness of quantum mechanics. “In quantum mechanics,” she explains, “we can only predict probabilities for measurement outcomes, rather than the measurement outcomes themselves. The outcomes are not determined, so quantum mechanics is indeterministic. Superdeterminism returns us to determinism.”

“The reason we can’t predict the outcome of a quantum measurement,” she explains, “is that we are missing information,” that is, hidden variables. Superdeterminism, she notes, gets rid of the measurement problem and nonlocality as well as randomness. Hidden variables determine in advance how physicists carry out the experiments; physicists might think they are choosing one option over another, but they aren’t. Hossenfelder calls free will “logically incoherent nonsense.”

Hossenfelder predicts that physicists might be able to confirm superdeterminism experimentally. “At some point,” she says, “it’ll just become obvious that measurement outcomes are actually much more predictable than quantum mechanics says. Indeed, maybe someone already has the data, they just haven’t analyzed it the right way.” Hossenfelder defends superdeterminism in more detail in a technical paper written with physicist Tim Palmer.  

AUTHOR  -  John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology. His books include The End of Science, The End of War and Mind-Body Problems, available for free at mindbodyproblems.com. For many years he wrote the popular blog Cross Check for Scientific American.

TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Lion

 

The Structure of a Janus Kinase

When a cytokine (green) binds to receptors (teal), two parts of the Janus kinase protein (pink) come together, activating it to send signals inside a cell. In some cancers, mutations in the kinase lock it together, keeping it abnormally active. Credit: Eric Smith/Chris Garcia/Howard Hughes Medical Institute

The breakthrough came on molecular biologist Christopher Garcia’s birthday.

For more than 20 years, his team and others around the world had been chasing an elusive quarry – the 3D structure of a crucial signaling protein in cells. In late 2021, his electron microscope images of the molecule started to come into focus. On December 8, postdoc Naotaka Tsutsumi and graduate student Caleb Glassman sent him an email with a startlingly clear picture of the protein latched on to a key receptor. “I was sitting in a meeting, and I realized we had it,” recalls Garcia, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at Stanford University. “I immediately left the meeting and ran back to the lab.”

Glassman, who had just moved to Boston for a Harvard postdoc, canceled his planned backcountry trip, and rushed back to Stanford. “I wanted to finish what Naotaka and I had started,” he explains. Then the three researchers worked around the clock to nail the complete structure of the protein, known as a Janus kinase, and beat competing labs to the discovery. “It was a big horse race between many great groups worldwide, and we were sprinting towards the finish line,” Garcia says. On December 26, they rushed a manuscript to the journal Science, which published the work on March 10, 2022.


Garcia’s team has nabbed not just the full structure of a vitally important signaling molecule, but also the mechanism for how these kinases work, which had been “a fundamental question in biology,” says John O’Shea, an immunologist at the National Institutes of Health who helped to develop one of the first drugs to block Janus kinase function and was not involved with the new research. Because the proteins can go awry in disease, the results could lead to new and better drugs against certain cancers. “It’s amazing work,” O’Shea says.
Chipping away

Janus kinases are one of the communication whizzes of the animal kingdom. They take signals that come from outside cells and pass the info along to molecules inside. Scientists have known for years that malfunctioning Janus kinases can cause disease. Some mutations that impair Janus kinases can severely curtail the body’s ability to fight off infection, causing a condition virtually identical to “bubble boy disease.” And when genetic glitches and exaggerated signals rev up the kinases too much, the result can be blood cancers like leukemia, and allergic or autoimmune diseases.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Mountain Stream

 

Failures of the US Educational System

The world is in a constant state of change and those who fail to adjust fall behind. Unfortunately, the American public education system has not kept up with the times and is currently facing a number of serious problems. Keep reading to learn about the biggest failures affecting the modern U.S. public education system as well as some of the trends that could spark change.

Decades ago, the American formal education system was designed to meet the changing needs of the industrial revolution. What was once a time of growth has changed over the years and, with the current economic climate, that system is no longer able to meet modern needs. But what are the biggest failures of the American public education system, and how can they be remedied?

In this article, we’ll explore fifteen of the biggest failures affecting the American public education system today. We’ll also explore five of the biggest emerging trends in American education.

The Top 15 Failures in American Public Education
Policymakers are constantly fighting to make changes to the American public education system, and not all of them are beneficial. Over the years, there has been a great deal of back-and-forth that has left the public education system in shambles. Some of these problems are easy to identify and have been long-standing issues while others are new, brought about by advances in technology, changes in policy, and general change that happens with time.

Every story has two sides, and for every policy or program put into place there are going to be proponents and critics. Below you’ll find an overview of some of the biggest issues facing the American public system as well as arguments from people on both sides of the issue.

Here are the top 15 failures affecting the American public education system:

1. Deficits in government funding for schools

Funding is always an issue for schools and is, in fact, one of the biggest issues facing the American public education system today. For more than 90% of K-12 schools, funding comes from state and local governments, largely generated by sales and income taxes. Research shows, however, that funding has not increased with need – many states are still issuing funding that is lower than it was before the Great Recession. Lower funding means fewer teachers, fewer programs, and diminished resources.  

TO READ ABOUT THE 15 FAILURES, CLICK HERE...

Sweet

 

Health Concerns

Like this bear, my cancers and their treatments have a side effect of fatigue and I find myself needing a nap almost every afternoon.  This is difficult for someone who has always been active their entire life...  but, I suppose that once one enters their 70s that one's physical activities, in general, will decline.

Due to the consistent continuity of my diet, my blood work always shows that I am somewhat physically sound inside.  My glucose (sugar) levels have been steadily falling.  My bad cholesterol is 87 and my good cholesterol is 47 which my family physician that I just saw this week indicated that low good cholesterol is not necessarily a bad thing.

For the last 2-3 years, I have been counting my calorie intake on a daily basis and when I first started I was at 2500+ calories a day and have gotten down to between 1200 and 1800 calories a day but hardly ever over 2000 calories each day.

My daily diet is filled with low-fat food where my base was onions, bell peppers, mushrooms, tomatoes, broccoli, squash along with constant servings of beans, fish, and chicken and maybe 6 times a year red meat.  I have also eliminated sugars and fried foods, replacing them with air-fried food.

For your information - exercise does not cause weight to be lost...  the only thing that helps one lose weight is to eat less...  in fact, many recommend that you eat small meals every two to three hours...  I have tried that and it is not easy to maintain.

My goto fish is salmon and cod and chicken is chicken.  I eat Pita bread instead of white bread.  The Pita bread that I eat is only 60 calories each although some Pita can be as high as 140 calories.

My weakness is rice and since I know that then I take the time to wash out the starch and I only eat 1/4 to 1/3 cup of dried rice with one meal/day typically with beans and broccoli.

Can One Man Save the World - John Ondrasik

 

On Being White

 What am I trying to achieve here with the title of ON BEING WHITE...  well, it all started a couple of years ago when Black Lives Matter took off around the country and from that movement the DEFUND THE POLICE movement was spawned and cities around the country caved into BLM hoping that if they did this, it would appease the black community...  unfortunately, it did not work out as it was anticipated as crime in black communities increased rather than decreased.  These two initiatives spawned the movement of Critical Race Theory that is now taught in many of our public school systems in America...

Basically:

Critical race theory (CRT) is a cross-disciplinary intellectual and social movement of civil-rights scholars and activists who seek to examine the intersection of race and law in the United States and to challenge mainstream American liberal approaches to racial justice. For example, the CRT conceptual framework is one way to study how and why US courts give more lenient punishments to drug dealers from some races than to drug dealers of other races. The word critical in its name is an academic term that refers to critical thinking, critical theory, and scholarly criticism, rather than criticizing or blaming people.  It first arose in the 1970s, like other "critical" schools of thought, such as Critical Legal Studies, which examines how legal rules protect the status quo.

It is because of critical race theory that these postings were created by me so that they could be posted and people could read what a white person thinks about this movement and how a white person reacts to being categorized unfairly by the black community.

In 1865, the Civil War in the USA ended as did slavery...  that was 157 years ago.  A generation is typically considered to be 30 years... so, that was 5 generations ago... or:

1.  father

2. Grandfather

3. Great Grandfather

4. Great Great Grandfather

5. Great Great Great Grandfather

In other words, my great, great, great, grandfather MAY or MAY not have owned slaves...  I don't know and to tell you the truth, I don't really give a shit what he did or did not do...

I don't even care what my father did or did not do...  all I care about is what I did/do or did not do/did.

My concern is that BLM and CRT are focusing on WHITES as a whole race for being the problem when in reality their focus should be on WEALTHY WHITES...  it is these WEALTHY WHITES that control our societies, our businesses, our schools, our courts, our news cycles, our law enforcement, our technology, our healthcare, and our military...  and, I say military because WEALTHY WHITES don't serve in the military under any circumstances.

I am not a WEALTHY WHITE and I have never been a WEALTHY WHITE...  which means I resent being classified as one...  consequently, I want to write about being white in America...

Two For You

 

Build Back Better

Two Moving

Shape Shifting Enabled

Physicists have discovered a new way to coat soft robots in materials that allow them to move and function in a more purposeful way. The research, led by the University of Bath, is described in a paper published on March 11, 2022, in Science Advances.

Authors of the study believe their breakthrough modeling on ‘active matter’ could mark a turning point in the design of robots. With further development of the concept, it may be possible to determine the shape, movement, and behavior of a soft solid not by its natural elasticity but by human-controlled activity on its surface.

Wrapping an elastic ball (orange) in a layer of tiny 

robots (blue) allows researchers to program shape 

and behavior. Credit: Jack Binysh

The surface of an ordinary soft material always shrinks into a sphere. Think of the way water beads into droplets: the beading occurs because the surface of liquids and other soft material naturally contracts into the smallest surface area possible – i.e. a sphere. But active matter can be designed to work against this tendency. An example of this in action would be a rubber ball that’s wrapped in a layer of nano-robots, where the robots are programmed to work in unison to distort the ball into a new, pre-determined shape (say, a star).

It is hoped that active matter will lead to a new generation of machines whose function will come from the bottom up. So, instead of being governed by a central controller (the way today’s robotic arms are controlled in factories), these new machines would be made from many individual active units that cooperate to determine the machine’s movement and function. This is akin to the workings of our own biological tissues, such as the fibers in heart muscle.

Using this idea, scientists could design soft machines with arms made of flexible materials powered by robots embedded in their surface. They could also tailor the size and shape of drug delivery capsules, by coating the surface of nanoparticles in a responsive, active material.. This in turn could have a dramatic effect on how a drug interacts with cells in the body.

Work on active matter challenges the assumption that the energetic cost of the surface of a liquid or soft solid must always be positive, because a certain amount of energy is always necessary to create a surface.  READ MORE...

Creature

 

Influences from Neural Oscillations

A research group from the University of Bologna discovered the first causal evidence of the double dissociation between what we see and what we believe we see: these two different mechanisms derive from the frequency and amplitude of alpha oscillations.

“If I don’t see it, I don’t believe it”, people say when they want to be certain of something. But are what we see and what we believe we see the same thing?

A new study published in the journal Current Biology shows that this is not the case: despite their usual strong correlation, the perceptual accuracy of visual information and its subjective interpretation use separate neural mechanisms that can be manipulated independently of each other.

The study—led by researchers from the University of Bologna together with Bologna AUSL (Local Health Authority) and the University of Glasgow (UK) – showed for the first time that the two mechanisms involved are related on the one hand to the frequency of alpha oscillations and, on the other hand, to their amplitude.

Alpha oscillations are pervasive neural oscillations in the posterior visual cortex linked to attention and concentration. This is the first causal evidence of the double dissociation between what we see and what we believe we see. These findings may prove useful to develop new treatments for the neurological and psychiatric populations with altered cognitive experiences.  READ MORE...

Muscle Pull

 

Atom by Atom

Quantum computers could be constructed cheaply and reliably using a new technique perfected by a University of Melbourne-led team that embeds single atoms in silicon wafers, one-by-one, mirroring methods used to build conventional devices, in a process outlined in an Advanced Materials paper.

The new technique – developed by Professor David Jamieson and co-authors from UNSW Sydney, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), Leibniz Institute of Surface Engineering (IOM), and RMIT – can create large scale patterns of counted atoms that are controlled so their quantum states can be manipulated, coupled and read-out.

Lead author of the paper, Professor Jamieson said his team’s vision was to use this technique to build a very, very large-scale quantum device.

“We believe we ultimately could make large-scale machines based on single-atom quantum bits by using our method and taking advantage of the manufacturing techniques that the semiconductor industry has perfected,” Professor Jamieson said.

The technique takes advantage of the precision of the atomic force microscope, which has a sharp cantilever that “touches” the surface of a chip with a positioning accuracy of just half a nanometre, about the same as the spacing between atoms in a silicon crystal.

The team drilled a tiny hole in this cantilever, so that when it was showered with phosphorus atoms one would occasionally drop through the hole and embed in the silicon substrate.

The key was knowing precisely when one atom – and no more than one – had become embedded in the substrate. Then the cantilever could move to the next precise position on the array.

The team discovered that the kinetic energy of the atom as it plows into the silicon crystal and dissipates its energy by friction can be exploited to make a tiny electronic “click.”  READ MORE...

Shimmering Water

From the BackPorch

 East Tennessee is the home of NASCAR and moonshine and some of the best moonshine in the country is manufactured by country volunteers at the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains...  

But...  that is not what I like about East Tennessee...  what I like is the fact there are not many people that live here and if there are not many people, then those of us who live here and NOT CROWDED like living in some of our cities...  including cities in Tennessee like Knoxville, Bristol, Nashville, Chattanooga, and Memphis.

Both my wife and I are retired and have been retired since 2015 and while we were working, we probably spent $100 each week on gasoline.  That's $5,200 each year or about $$433 each month.  Retired, and before gas prices began increasing, we were spending about $133 each month...  So, even with these increases in gasoline prices, we have a long way to go before we get to the same level of expense when we were working...

Yes...  it is true that we don't have the same level of income these days...  but, fortunately, my wife and I decided to start saving money for retirement a long time ago...  which looking back was very smart.  We also decided to become debt free 15-20 years ago which was also a very smart thing to do as well...

So...  if there is any advice I can give, it is this:

1.  Become debt-free as quick as you can and stay that way...

2.  Start saving for your retirement based upon how much you think you will need each month when you are retired...   this will involve making a retirement plan which very few of us do...  this plan is flexible and will change over time...

3.  Establish a lifestyle with which you feel comfortable and then make sure you do not violate that lifestyle outside of an emergency...

4.  Look around your house and identify all the things you have purchased and how often you still use them...  we have a tendency to buy stuff that we use for a while and then get bored with them...  Those purchases should have never taken place...

Putin

 

Moving Cars

 

Conservative Philanthropy

Black cabinet member Mary McLeod Bethune and Eleanor Roosevelt at the opening of Midway Hall in May, 1943 [Courtesy of The National Archives and Records Administration, College Park. Still Picture Records Section, Special Media Archives Services Division]

While pundits and scholars continue to debate the extent to which Donald Trump’s time in office has eroded American democracy, what is clear is that the former president’s political rhetoric breached the boundaries of acceptable racial discourse in the United States.

Trump assailed Mexicans as criminals, called for a ban on Muslims, said African nations were “shithole countries”, and referred to white supremacists in Charlottesville as “very fine people”. In his final act as president, he showed no remorse for the deadly violence he instigated during the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots with his lies about a stolen election. In so doing, 

Trump mainstreamed white supremacy and a new, more aggressive racial discourse that encouraged his supporters to resist “cancel culture”, the “woke media”, and any semblance of liberal or progressive ideas around identity and race – including using violent resistance to “take back our country”.

Take, for instance, Trump’s executive order banning federal contractors from conducting racial sensitivity training which claimed that such training indoctrinated government workers with “divisive and harmful sex and race-based ideologies”. 

From banning diversity training to denouncing the New York Times’ 1619 Project on slavery in the US and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which offers an analysis of US history told from the perspective of the oppressed, Trump, his allies and supporters engaged in a full-scale culture war just as a “racial reckoning” was taking place at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The massive protests in the summer of 2020, which came about in response to the violent death of a Black man, George Floyd, at the hands of law enforcement, sparked a backlash from the political right which took advantage of white American fears – real or imagined – of becoming a majority-minority.  READ MORE...

Feeding Mom

 

Severe Racism at Tesla

California’s civil rights regulator said it’s suing Tesla Inc. for racial discrimination after finding widespread harassment of Black workers at the electric carmaker's factory near San Francisco.

The state’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing received complaints from hundreds of workers and “found evidence that Tesla’s Fremont factory is a racially segregated workplace where Black workers are subjected to racial slurs and discriminated against in job assignments, discipline, pay and promotion creating a hostile work environment,” Kevin Kish, the agency’s director, said in a statement late Wednesday.

The complaint in Alameda County Superior Court wasn’t immediately available on the court’s website.  Tesla said in a Feb. 8 blog post — before the suit was filed — that the company “will be asking the court to pause the case and take other steps to ensure that facts and evidence will be heard.”

The DFEH said one Black worker told of hearing racial slurs as often as 50 to 100 times a day. Some who complained about the offensive language said supervisors and managers were active participants in the abuse or witnesses to it. On a daily basis, Black workers saw racist graffiti on restroom walls, lockers, benches, work stations, lunch tables and the break room, according to the agency’s emailed statement, which provided a detailed summary of its findings.Am
The agency is the state-level equivalent of the better-known U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, with a mission to protect Californians from unlawful discrimination in employment, housing and accommodations. The DFEH informed Tesla on Jan. 3 that it had grounds to file a complaint. Tesla warned investors of the agency’s investigation in the annual report it filed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week.

The automaker’s shares fell 2% at 9:32 a.m. Thursday in New York.

Numerous Complaints
Tesla has more than 99,000 employees globally, and the factory in Fremont employs in excess of 10,000 people. The car company headed by billionaire Elon Musk moved its corporate headquarters from Palo Alto, California, to Austin, Texas, last year.  READ MORE...

Cat & Fish

 

Jailed For 150 Days

US actor Jussie Smollett was sentenced to almost five months in prison after being found guilty of falsely telling police he was the victim of a racist and homophobic hate crime in 2019 – an attack prosecutors said he himself staged.

The gay 39-year-old African American was found guilty in December of “planning” the fake assault by paying two Nigerian brothers $3,500, and of lying to police in his depositions.

“You really crave the attention and you wanted to get the attention,” Chicago Judge James Linn told the former “Empire” star as he read out the sentence late Thursday.  He said the actor had a streak that was “profoundly arrogant and selfish and narcissistic”.

“This was premeditated to the extreme… You’ve destroyed your life as you knew it,” Linn said, adding that “you did damage to real hate crimes victims.”  He said Smollett was “just a charlatan, pretending to be a victim of a hate crime”.

The sentence and Smollett’s ensuing outburst capped an hours-long hearing Thursday and more than three years of legal drama following Smollett’s claim that he had been the target of a racist and homophobic attack.

Smollett did not make a statement when offered the opportunity before the judge announced the sentence, saying he was listening to his attorneys’ advice. But after Linn issued his decision, Smollett removed the face mask he wore throughout the hearing to proclaim himself innocent.

“If I did this, then it means that I stuck my fist in the fears of Black Americans in this country for over 400 years and the fears of the LGBT community,” Smollett said, standing up at the defence table as his lawyers and sheriff’s deputies surrounded him.

“Your Honour, I respect you and I respect the jury but I did not do this. And I am not suicidal. And if anything happens to me when I go in there, I did not do it to myself. And you must all know that.”  As deputies led him from the courtroom, Smollett shouted out again.  “I am innocent,” he yelled, raising his fist. “I could have said I am guilty a long time ago.”  READ MORE...