Contrabang #33 Dark Charge

Output for this blog suffered as I got lazy over the holidays, but we're back with a fairly long 2-week version of Contrabang! and posts should return to the normal pace.

This Is How Eta Carinae Survived A Near-Supernova Eruption (link)

In all of astronomy, no stellar event releases more energy than a supernova. ... The most famous ‘supernova impostor’ of all could have died back in the 1840s. Here’s what we think kept it alive.

The hardest part of being a modern astronomer is explaining away all the evidence that doesn't fit. The standard model for supernovae is that they are sudden explosions caused by runaway nuclear fusion who power output temporarily matches that of entire galaxies. The star is destroyed in the process, with vast quantities of the outer shell scattered into the cosmos, and the heavier core collapses into a neutron star or black hole.

The Milky Way's Eta Carina system is puzzling because it exhibits the power of a supernovae - and many of their visual characteristics - but also violates a number of rules.

1. The power increased gradually over years
2. The event has occurred at least three times since the 19th century, with many small-scale variations within the larger cycle
3. The core star has not been destroyed

Scientists are at a loss to explain how a minor star can go through a supernova-like event and emerge as a much more powerful system.

In 2005, observations revealed that Eta Carinae isn’t a single star, but a binary system in a ~5.5 year mutual orbit.

These statements must be handled carefully, because it is natural to assume they mean that a binary companion was directly observed. Rather, a binary system has been assumed in response to some periodicity in the spectral signal, but no other star has actually been observed.

The 5.5 year binary orbit of the Eta Carinae system consists of a hydrogen-rich star of approximately 100 solar masses in orbit with a hydrogen-free star of 30 solar masses. This type of mass inversion, where the less massive star has lost its hydrogen, suggests a mass transfer that’s difficult to explain.

A 5.5 year periodicity in hydrogen emissions lines is what drove the hypothesis for two stars: one hydrogen-rich and the other hydrogen-depleted. However he admits that even the preferred hypothesis of a binary system is "difficult to explain." Which means they don't actually know and they are resulting to the normal trick of picking what is believed to be the least bad hypothesis and promoting that as scientific knowledge.

It’s possible that a specific cataclysm triggered this outburst: the devouring of a third star.

It's starting to become common to see unexpected celestial events explained by adding stars to systems and invoking complex gravitational scenarios. Eta Carinae had been observed for at least 150 years before the nova event, having been described by Edmond Halley in 1677. There was never any observation of a second or third star. It will be interesting to see what is proposed in response to any future eruptions.

NASA’s NICER Mission Reveals An Unexpected Neutron Star Surprise (link)

We discussed the NICER results in the very first installment of the NASA News segment. Now Ethan has something to say about it, although you already know what his position is.

The low-energy X-ray observatory measures timing signals down to 300 nanoseconds and at unprecedented sensitivities.

True.

NICER enables measurements of neutron stars’ sizes, masses, cooling times, stabilities, and internal structures.

False. Measurements implies a direct observation. NICER does not directly measure any of the attributes listed. Those numbers are coming from models, which can be just about anything.

For one pulsar in particular, J0030+0451, they determined its mass (1.35 Suns) and diameter (25.7 km) explicitly.

Not just false, but a lie. The mass and diameter were not determined explicitly, nor did the researchers convey it as such. The numbers come implicitly from a probabilistic model based on the pulse data and many assumptions about how pulsars work. If Ethan is indeed an expert in this field, then he is a liar.

For context, when I read the original article, it became immediately apparent what was going on when they described the diameter of a star a over a thousand light years in increments of tenths of a mile. We can't even resolve our own sun to that degree. Apparently, that was not obvious to Ethan, who thinks they actually measured the radius of an asteroid-sized star quadrillions of miles away to a resolution of hundreds of feet.

They detected “hot spots” on the surface and constructed the first-ever neutron star map.

Another lie. From the original paper.

In this paper we assume that there are two separate hot regions on the stellar surface; this choice was motivated by the presence of two distinct pulses in the observed (phase-folded) pulse-profile. However, we considered a number of different possible configurations for the shapes and temperature functions of the hot regions: circular spots, annuli (rings, both centered and off-centered), and crescents; with one or two temperature components. These choices were motivated by contemporary theories for pulsar surface heating distributions as a result of magnetospheric return currents.

It says it right there. They didn't detect hot spots. "In this paper we assume..." They were an assumption. This demonstrates a live example of my major beef with the mainstream astrophysics community in action: the promotion of assumptions to facts. Hot spots were not detected, at all. If there are hot spots, they could not possibly be resolved by NICER, a small instrument attached to the ISS. This should be obvious to a prominent blogger of astronomy with a PhD in astrophysics.

They concluded that pulsar magnetic fields are more complex than typical, naive two-pole models.

The answer is always to add more complexity to the models.

 What Is The Ultimate Fate Of The Loneliest Galaxy In The Universe? (link)

Just as stars are mostly found clustered in galaxies, galaxies themselves are organized into larger structures. However, one galaxy is notable for having no neighbors within 100 million light years. Ethan provides an analysis of the mechanics of the galaxy by on the standard assumption that there are only two forces of significance that act on celestial bodies - gravity and dark energy.

To understand what this galaxy is going to do, first we have to understand what it’s like from the inside out. When the Universe was much younger than it is today, it was almost perfectly uniform, with regions that are only slightly overdense or underdense compared to the large-scale average. The regions with more matter than average will self-gravitate, drawing in matter from the surrounding volumes of space and eventually leading to the formation of stars, galaxies, and groups and clusters of galaxies on even larger scales.

Regions that are underdense, however, tend to give up their matter to the surrounding overdense regions, leading to vast cosmic voids between the strands of the cosmic web. Contrary to popular belief, however, even the regions of below-average density still tend to hang on to some amount of matter — both normal and dark — and with enough time, that matter will collapse to form structures, too.

That's the theory. Out of nearly uniform initial soup, matter condensed into the cosmic web, driven by gravity alone.

He then offers a five-step understanding of extremely isolated galaxies.

1. The regions that fail to give up all of their matter to the filamentary network that comprises our large-scale structure will gravitate towards their mutual center-of-mass, determined by the presence of both dark matter and normal matter.

This is a confusing way to phrase it. All matter in a particular region should move in the direction of the net gravitational force.

2. The dark matter forms a large, diffuse halo of mass, while the normal matter sinks to the center, colliding with other normal matter particles and collapsing in the shortest dimension first.

The only force acting is gravity, and dark matter is said to exhibit the exact same gravitational mechanics as normal matter. There is no explanation given as to why dark matter would act differently and form a diffuse halo, rather than continuing towards the mutual center-of-mass as described in step 1. It is just magic that one must believe to be a proper academic these days. (The diffuse halo is required because dark matter was invented to explain the unpredicted rotational dynamics of galaxies.)

3. The normal matter “pancakes,” which is the scientific term for “goes splat,” and forms a disk that starts rotating.

More magic. Why does the 3D structure collapse into something that is nearly 2D? Why does nearly everything in the universe rotate? The gravitational collapse model does not explain why such polarity is ubiquitously observed throughout the cosmos, which is why he tries to gloss over the deep mystery with a single sentence.

4. Inside the disk, stars form, leading to the familiar spiral structure we recognize.

Even more magic. Claiming that stars forming leads to spiral arms is a non sequitur that intends to gloss over another mystery that goes unexplained by the standard model.

5. Dark matter gets dynamically heated, changing its density profile somewhat, while low-mass neutrinos eventually fall into the halo, adding to the mass.

If you can understand this you're doing better than me, but again it's vagueness hints that something is being covered up.

Looking past all the mysterious mechanics that are brushed under the rug in this explanation, the overall gist is...what? That some matter didn't get formed into the larger filamentary structures and became an isolated galaxy. But that's just re-stating what we already knew.

Not content with just an phenomenally terrible explanation of the past of the loneliest galaxy, he gives an explanation of the future as well, which is that it will get even lonelier as the universe expands.

For galaxies like our own, we’ll remain bound to our local group, including Andromeda, Triangulum, and about 60 additional galaxies, until they all merge together many billions of years in the future. Galaxies beyond our gravitationally bound group, like those in the Virgo cluster, will remain bound to their own parent groups, but will accelerate in their recession from our own.

While dark energy is said to be a fundamental aspect of all space, it somehow does not affect "gravitationally bound" systems - otherwise we'd detect its effect within our own solar system. He alleges that our local cluster is not gravitationally bound with the Virgo cluster, thus it is receding and that trend will only accelerate. How he came up with that example I do not know, but it seems to be ludicrous even by his standards, as it is directly contradicted by conventional astronomy. The local cluster is not being drifted away from Virgo by dark energy, but is moving towards it so swiftly that astronomers even have a name for it: Virgocentric flow.

The Virgocentric flow is the preferred movement of Local Group galaxies towards the Virgo cluster caused by its overwhelming gravity, which separates bound objects from the Hubble flow of cosmic expansion.

I believe he may be confused, because at the next level up - the Laniakea supercluster - astronomers believe that the system is not bound and will be pulled apart by dark energy.

The article then goes on for a number of paragraphs giving the normal doom-filled prophesies of the inevitable heat death of the universe.

The eventual fate of the last galaxies in the Universe will be a skeletal dark matter/neutrino halo, far outlasting anything else we’ve ever observed.

The Universe Really Is Fine-Tuned, And Our Existence Is The Proof (link)

Modern astronomers are always surprised when their exotic formulas are shown to reveal a universe that is tuned the way it would be if it was not exotic at all.

Somehow, the Universe began with just the right mix of cosmic ingredients to make life possible. It sure doesn’t seem likely.

Of all the things he's said that I do agree with, that one must be at the top of the list.

When you take stock of what’s in the Universe on the largest scales, only one force matters: gravitation.

That's their theory. The primary premise of the Electric Universe people is that this assumption is false, and accounts for the bulk of the current crisis in cosmology. The observe that the electric force is much stronger than gravity and ignoring it at cosmic scales is probably a mistake.

While the nuclear and electromagnetic forces that exist between particles are many, many orders of magnitude stronger than the gravitational force, they cannot compete on the largest cosmic scales. The Universe is electrically neutral, with one electron to cancel out the charge of every proton in the Universe, and the nuclear forces are extremely short-range, failing to extend beyond the scale of an atomic nucleus.

That the universe is electrically neutral is an assumption he is making because of the Big Bang Theory. That theory also predicts that equal amounts of matter and anti-matter should have been created, which hasn't been observed and is one of the big mysteries they've left unexplained. Thus, there's no reason to assume that prediction of equal numbers of electrons and protons is valid. But even if they were, it wouldn't matter. The earth is supposedly neutral and yet we have powerful charge differentials that discharge through the atmosphere as lightning bolts, into space as sprites, and are lately being shown to be related to weather and seismic patterns. The solar system is said to be electrically neutral and yet the sun sends streams of charged particles to the earth that power the aurora - basically neon lights in the sky - and powering aurorae on Jupiter so powerful that they emit X-rays. The galaxy is said to be electrically neutral yet astronomers have detected polar jets of charged particles that have even been shown to connect intergalactically. At what scale, we have to wonder, does the claim of an electrically neutral universe actually hold?

He then describes the universe as being in an unstable equilibrium, and that the probabilities required for it to randomly be so precisely tuned are impossible.

But if that’s the case, we’d hate to simply take that assumption at face value. In science, when faced with a coincidence that we cannot easily explain, the idea that we can blame it on the initial conditions of our physical system is akin to giving up on science. It’s far better, from a scientific point of view, to attempt to come up with a reason for why this coincidence might occur.

Exactly so. (Even though that's what they do with the Big Bang Theory, but no matter.)

One option — the worst option, if you ask me — is to claim that there are a near-infinite number of possible outcomes, and a near-infinite number of possible Universes that contain those outcomes. Only in those Universes where our existence is possible can we exist, and therefore it’s not surprising that we exist in a Universe that has the properties that we observe.

There are some scientists who entertain the perfect tuning of our universe as proof that there are infinite multiple universes out there which aren't so perfectly tuned. To his credit, Ethan dismisses such logic, showing that even his capacity for suspension of doubt has limits. (But if the Multiverse ever wins a Nobel Prize he'll suddenly be its biggest advocate.)

He then goes on to state that a good explanation is that cosmic inflation preceded cosmic expansion, thus the universe is flat. To me, that sounds like creating some hypothetical scenario to create the desired initial conditions to make the theory work, which he just said is bad.

What The 3 Biggest Physics Discoveries Of The Decade Mean For The Future Of Science (link)

The three biggest physics discovers of the decade about to end are given as

1. Discovery of the Higgs boson
2. Detection of gravitational waves
3. Observation of a black hole's event horizon

These are given in decreasing order of significance. I suspect the second two claims will ultimately be thrown out. They both suffer the same problem, which is a matter of tuning. The LIGO detector works by filtering a noisy signal and then comparing the results to a large catalog of theoretical signal patterns. Thus, the filtering is "tuned" whenever the output looks like one of the things on their list.

As similar thing happens for the infamous black hole picture. Using a vast amount of data and an algorithm of around a million lines of code, they came up with the picture they expected. Is anyone surprised? Now, I'm not a cosmology expert, but I did study artificial intelligence at the graduate-school level. Parameter tuning is something that must be done with care. When developing, say, a neural network to perform face recognition, developers must take to use separate sets of data for training and testing. It is fairly trivial to train an AI algorithm to respond as desired to a small training set - it is much harder to train it to respond to arbitrary data as desired. In the case of the black hole photo, there is no training set. There is no set at all, it's just one object. There is no way to independently verify the tuning, such as by resolving another object in the cosmos of known appearance. It's hard to know that they didn't just hard-tune the algorithm to the expected output, and would have seen the same image no matter what telescope data was provided.

Ask Ethan: Can Black Holes Ever Spit Anything Back Out? (link)

Watching the astrophysicists try to explain why black holes are frequently the opposite of black is always amusing. I'll leave this one as an exercise to the reader, except for one aspect which is worth pointing out again in light of some of the other claims made during the week.

The same physics is at play — charged object in motion create magnetic fields, and those fields accelerate particles along one particular axis — which is what creates the relativistic jets we observe from a distance.

The prevailing theory of black holes is that there is gas rotating around them which heats up from friction (somehow) and becomes so energized that it ionizes into hot plasma. Then, that rotating plasma generates an enormous magnetic field, which tends to propel the infalling charged particles along the axis of rotation. Before Ethan said the universe is electrically neutral. In this case he says it isn't, but according to his explanation it should be. If neutral atoms dissociate into equal amounts of ions and electrons that rotate, their effects should cancel and no magnetic field will be generated. So, in effect, Ethan claims the universe is electrically neutral where it's not, but then makes an exception for it when needed but isn't even logical. He has invented a Dark Charge where needed and hopes no one notices. (Or, more likely, doesn't even realize it himself.)

NASA News #2 An Evolving Mystery

It's a slow week for NASA news, but last week they ran an article on the space-based Spitzer infrared telescope, due to be retired next month. The article covered new observations made of a region of the Perseus Molecular Cloud. The following quotes come from a section titled An Evolving Mystery.

Other clusters of stars seen below NGC 1333 in this image have posed a fascinating mystery for astronomers: They appear to contain stellar infants, adolescents and adults. Such a closely packed mixture of ages is extremely odd, according to Luisa Rebull, an astrophysicist at NASA's Infrared Science Archive at Caltech-IPAC who has studied NGC 1333 and some of the clusters below it. Although many stellar siblings may form together in tight clusters, stars are always moving, and as they grow older they tend to move farther and farther apart.

Finding such a closely packed mixture of apparent ages doesn't fit with current ideas about how stars evolve. "This region is telling astronomers that there's something we don't understand about star formation," said Rebull. The puzzle presented by this region is one thing that keeps astronomers coming back to it.

The stellar model is based on some assumptions about stars that may be false. There is no direct evidence to confirm the model either, nor is it clear how we could verify processes that act over billions of years. It is entirely possible that the stellar model is making many mis-classifications for what are new versus old stars. The important aspect of all this is that, as usual, new observations have contradicted consensus opinions.

Since IRAS's early observations, the region has come into clearer focus, a process that is common in astronomy, said Rebull. New instruments bring more sensitivity and new techniques, and the story becomes clearer with each new generation of observatories.

Technology allowing clearer imagery has not resulted in a clearer story. More observations mean more contradictions, more complexity, and more hand-wavy hypotheticals. And that is when the new evidence is considered at all. It is routine for missions launched at great expense to produce unpredicted results, then the scientists act surprised, and then nothing changes. Next they advocate for funding more missions, whereupon they will act surprised again and the cycle renews. The need for continued institutional optimism in the face of relentless failures has led to a form of doublespeak from the publicly funded academics. The more our predictions fail, the clearer the story becomes. It is assumed that more evidence leads to a clearer understanding, but that is not what is happening.

London Bus Attack Culprits Sentenced To Diversity Lessons

In June we covered the London bus attack of a lesbian couple by a group of unidentified teenagers. From Lesbians Attacked by "British Men,"

A lesbian couple were hospitalised with facial injuries and left covered in blood after being attacked by a group of men after they kissed on a night bus in north London.

...

Ms Geymonat said she tried to calm the situation down by making jokes, while Chris pretended to be ill. She then describes how the attack escalated, with the gang of men punching them both in the face until they were covered in blood.

Sentencing has now been completed, with one boy receiving four months in custody for the battery, and the other two given referral orders, meaning they get diversity lessons.

The youth was given an eight-month youth referral order, extended from six due to the homophobic nature of the attack.

In other words, he would have received a more lenient sentence if he'd only had the decency to beat up a straight couple instead. In more primitive societies, punishments for crimes depended on the relative social castes of the victim and perpetrator. The same is true in England and most western countries. Because homosexuals are revered, assaulting them comes with harsher penalties. (Although in this case the penalty is still a wrist slap because the assailants are also of a preferred caste.)

District Judge Nicholas Rimmer said: "You need the close supervision of the youth offending service to think carefully about your behaviour. "This will include diversity sessions which will make you think about hate crime, the protected characteristics and minority groups."

That or he will go on a stabbing rampage at the rehabilitation facility.

The article includes an interview of the two victims.

They look awful. Six months later and they're still angry and emotional about their treatment. The reason for the trauma was the denial of expectations. They thought they were engaged in a lifestyle that would earn them praise and special treatment from society. They did not expect to be roughed up by foreigners on public transport, nor for the culprits to go nearly unpunished. The most telling aspect is the body posture of the two women: each leaned away from the other. One of them states that she is not afraid to be "visibly queer" - while wearing a fearful expression - and that the incident is empowering them to only increase their public displays of affection. Still, I would not be surprised to learn in the future that one or both of the women abandon the LGBT lifestyle altogether. Such pairings are not found in nature and require a society to grant them special considerations. Britain wants to be the most Globohomo self it can be, yet also doesn't want to have to answer the question of whether Islam is right about women. Words are cheap and we are saturated by endless platitudes, but the reality is plainly worn by these two.

Buttigieg: Reparations For Invasion

Buttigieg has a natural (or perhaps unnatural) advantage as a homosexual backwaters mayor over his competition - predominately married Washington careerists with white children. He enjoys an automatic status of piety from an establishment orthodoxy that treats homosexuality as a high virtue to be celebrated, and gets to claim a spot well up the victim hierarchy of the aggrieved left. His major advantage is the strategy potential that this opens up for him - if he is wise enough to exercise those options. For one, it gives him some space from having to constantly pander to victim groups. Just being a small-town gay "Christian" mayor from Mike Pence's home state is nearly enough. He can just drag his gay husband onto stage and all but state, "I too have been oppressed by our common enemy, those bigots."

He has recently decided to break from his well-crafted character to call for reparations for blacks and for families separated at the southern border after being detained trying to enter the country illegally. The Buttigieg handicap is that blacks and Latinos aren't as excited with LGBT as the white yuppies. It was not only personally embarrassing to be polling at 0% with blacks in South Carolina, but certainly alarming to his strategists. The response has been to go extra-large on white-to-brown welfare promises. Basically, he is offering the standard Democrat minority vote-buying scheme, but with backpay. It's normal for Democrats to engage in these Praetorian bidding wars, but for Buttigieg it works against his natural advantages. The sane candidate can't just start promising payouts to invaders because his polling numbers are off. His disadvantage with minorities is baked in to his character, so he's not going to win them over by engaging in the same pandering as the other candidates. They're all engaging in similar rhetoric, so he's trying to play a game he's rigged to lose. He's taken the status quo approach, but he's not the status quo candidate.

Instead of playing insider softball, he should take a queue from Trump and nuke his opponents while playing to his own advantages. I believe that Mayor Pete could derail both Biden and Warren while earning a ton of free publicity, if he'd only wipe off that dopey grin for a bit and play some hardball.

Right now is the perfect time to go after Biden for his Ukraine corruption. With impeachment voted on by the House, but Pelosi awkwardly hesitating to deliver the articles to the Senate, this is an excellent time for him to remark to the media that Biden needs to be held accountable too. The media certainly would like a distraction away from the impeachment hiccups. The only reason no one is calling out Biden now is that they're afraid of angering establishment Democrats. They're afraid of the likes of Nancy Pelosi. That's why he should simultaneously criticize her for not getting the articles of impeachment delivered. Put her on her heels, create a media storm about Biden, and show the pundit class that this outsider is to be taken seriously.

After that clears, go relentlessly after Elizabeth Warren for her racial appropriation. That's going to push the needle on black support more than the standard incremental pledges for welfare, which are monotonous. He could all but make Warren out as a plantation owner, enriching herself on the backs of minorities, stealing their entitlements, etc. If he plays his cards right, he can torch his opponents and win the nomination without having to lunge back to center after the nomination, and play the role of the reasonable guy versus wildcard Trump. In fact, any of the other candidates could do so. It probably plays best for Buttigieg as an outsider, but still the fruit is so low-hanging that all who resist it are fake candidates. Buttigieg may be playing for a Cabinet or VP slot, but that means he isn't really running for president. Bernie Sanders obviously isn't looking for VP because of his age. He only runs for the adulation he gets on the campaign trail. Tulsi Gabbard has already openly mocked Hillary Clinton... why doesn't she go after Biden or Warren? Are any of these Democrats playing to win?

Starliner Misses Space Station

Today was the debut launch of Starliner, a NASA-funded Boeing project to ferry astronauts between Earth and the International Space Station for the first time in nearly a decade. The last post from this blog stated,

I also note that Boeing is having trouble developing safe passenger airliners after embracing diversity as a core principle. I'd put their odds at less than 50%, and predict there will be problems either way.

Previously this blog has stated that the US is out of the manned space business for good. We will not be sending men to Mars, or the moon, or even out of low-Earth orbit. For the less ambitious goal of low-orbit launches, however, it is possible they will succeed, but there is reason to be much more pessimistic than the conventional sentiment. Most people can't fathom why an American venture to send astronauts to low-earth orbit would be anything by an easily obtained success.

We expect the reporting on the event to come through rose-tinted glasses. If the mission is a success, we will of course hear raving review. If the mission is a complete disaster, then they will have no choice but to admit so. The uncertainty is whether we'll hear honest reports about failures that wouldn't otherwise by apparent to the public.

NASA reports on the launch,

“Early this morning, NASA and Boeing successfully launched Starliner on the first human-rated United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 in Florida.

Ah, a success then! Perhaps I was overly pessimistic. Let's read the next paragraph of that report.

“The plan was for Starliner to rendezvous and dock with the International Space Station and return home safely to Earth. While a lot of things went right, the uncrewed spacecraft did not reach the planned orbit and will not dock to the International Space Station.

Well, that doesn't sound like a success. The rose-tinted reporting must be in effect. If the measure of success is that the rocket didn't explode on the launch pad, or fail to reach orbit, then it was a success. Does the success mean that the launch would not have killed human passengers?

From CNBC coverage, chosen only because it was the top hit in a news search,

Boeing said it has been able to at least partially correct Starliner’s trajectory in space, getting the vehicle to stable orbit around the Earth while engineers assess the options remaining for the mission. If astronauts had been on board, both NASA and Boeing believe they would be safe.

That's not very re-assuring. Believe they would be safe? Believe is frequently used as a cop-out word, such as when used by politicians. It sounds like there is a chance than astronauts would not have survived the launch. It also sounds like the controllers struggled to get the craft into orbit at all, rather than merely missing the desired orbit. A failed orbital injection would not necessarily be disastrous, but ballistic re-entry means means losing control of the splash-down zone.

“It appears as though the mission elapse timing system had an error in it,” Bridenstine said.

The mission elapse timing system is essentially Starliner’s internal clock. It is crucial to telling the spacecraft’s computers when and how to fire its rocket thrusters to reach the correct orbit.

“That anomaly resulted in the vehicle believing that the time was different than it actually was,” Bridenstine said. “Because that timing was a little bit off, what ended up happening is the spacecraft tried to maintain a very precise control that it normally wouldn’t have tried to maintain and it burned a lot of [propellant] in that part of the flight.”

This is actually a hint that they're being honest. Whatever is the highest criticality rating that Boeing assigns to software components, it surely applies to the system clock. This is a system that they would have developed to the highest level of confidence. It's not the kind of failure they'd like to admit to, if they could at all help it. It's a bit like the Martian lander than become a crater because of failed unit conversions between metric and standard.

Boeing’s human flight controllers tried to communicate with Starliner during the flight to correct the error. But the spacecraft was in a communication dead zone, a gap between two communication satellites.

“We couldn’t get the command signal to the spacecraft that it needed to do the orbital insertion burn soon enough,” Bridenstine said.

With no astronauts on board to take over manual control of the spacecraft, Bridenstine noted that part of the issue comes down to automation.

It is an understandable sequence of events. Normally, disasters don't arise from a single failure, but a series of them.

This represents a blow for NASA as well, likely further delaying the agency’s return to being able to fly its astronauts to the space station. Delays have plagued the commercial crew program, as NASA intended the first launches to happen as early as 2017.

The program was announced in 2010, with a goal of operation by 2015. The five-year plan was just two year's shy of the time between  Kennedy's announcement of a moon-landing deadline and the (supposed) completion of that mission. It has now been nine years to get to a failed unmanned space docking - a feat the Russians achieved in 1967.

With all that said, there's no reason to expect any test mission to be successful. If failures weren't expected, there'd be no need for test launches. Also, Space-X succeeded in a similar test earlier this year, so perhaps one of the programs will succeed. Still, the failure of the maiden voyage to due to a failure of critical software falls in line with our expectations of the Boeing manned-flight program.

NASA News #1

In the spirit of the Contrabang! series, let's take a look at headlines from NASA's own website in the past week. This won't become another weekly series...for now at least. However, Contrabang! will not likely continue indefinitely. That series is a good opportunity to critique a scientific narrative that is being promoted to the public, but Ethan is not himself a scientific authority; he merely finds whatever the scientific consensus happens to be and then promotes that with great pomp. At some point it becomes repetitious. On the other hand, NASA appears to be the single-largest promoter of these lies as a scientific authority that is held in high esteem by most of the public. Thus, we will start attempting to be more mature about these things, and focus on the players rather than the cheerleaders.

NASA’s NICER Delivers Best-ever Pulsar Measurements, 1st Surface Map (link)

Astrophysicists are redrawing the textbook image of pulsars, the dense, whirling remains of exploded stars, thanks to NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), an X-ray telescope aboard the International Space Station. Using NICER data, scientists have obtained the first precise and dependable measurements of both a pulsar’s size and its mass, as well as the first-ever map of hot spots on its surface. 

This is misleading enough to call it a lie. They do not have any of the implied measurements; they only have models. While the NASA homepage article is misleading, the journal summary they link to uses the correct language.

Notably, the inferences drawn from Bayesian modeling of the PSR J0030 NICER pulse-profile data set provide:

• the first precise (±10%, 1 sigma) mass and radius measurements for the same star;
• the first mass measurement for an isolated (i.e., non-binary) NS; and
• the first map—fully accounting for relativistic light deflection—of an NS’s surface “hot spots,” providing the locations, shapes, sizes, and temperatures of heated regions and serving as a guidepost to the star’s magnetic field configuration.

The so-called measurements are merely the results of Bayesian model, which is a graph of conditional probabilities. A conditional probability is the statement of the probability of X given that we know Y. What is the probability that they cancel school tomorrow? Low. What is the probability that they cancel school tomorrow given that we know it just snowed a foot? High. The probability of the thing we don't know is dependent on the facts we do know. In the case of pulsars, most of what is "known" is a false (and ludicrous) theory of dead rotating stars composed of theoretical neutronium. So the description of the results should read more like this: given the observed timings and spectral signature of the observed star - and that our pulsar models are not complete horse manure - then these are the most probable measurements of the star according to our calculations.

The pulsar in question, J0030+0451 (J0030 for short), lies in an isolated region of space 1,100 light-years away in the constellation Pisces. While measuring the pulsar's heft and proportions, NICER revealed that the shapes and locations of million-degree “hot spots” on the pulsar’s surface are much stranger than generally thought.

“From its perch on the space station, NICER is revolutionizing our understanding of pulsars,” said Paul Hertz, astrophysics division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Pulsars were discovered more than 50 years ago as beacons of stars that have collapsed into dense cores, behaving unlike anything we see on Earth. With NICER we can probe the nature of these dense remnants in ways that seemed impossible until now.”

We see the old familiar pattern emerging. Scientists make new observations and state that they are strange, impossible, revolutionizing, etc. What happens next?

For decades, scientists have been trying to figure out exactly how pulsars work. In the simplest model, a pulsar has a powerful magnetic field shaped much like a household bar magnet. The field is so strong it rips particles from the pulsar’s surface and accelerates them. Some particles follow the magnetic field and strike the opposite side, heating the surface and creating hot spots at the magnetic poles. The whole pulsar glows faintly in X-rays, but the hot spots are brighter. As the object spins, these spots sweep in and out of view like the beams of a lighthouse, producing extremely regular variations in the object’s X-ray brightness. But the new NICER studies of J0030 show pulsars aren’t so simple.

That's right, the response to unexpected observations is always to hold on to all the old assumptions and start adding complexity to the models.

Using NICER observations from July 2017 to December 2018, two groups of scientists mapped J0030’s hot spots using independent methods and converged on similar results for its mass and size. A team led by Thomas Riley, a doctoral student in computational astrophysics, and his supervisor Anna Watts, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam, determined the pulsar is around 1.3 times the Sun’s mass and 15.8 miles (25.4 kilometers) across. Cole Miller, an astronomy professor at the University of Maryland (UMD) who led the second team, found J0030 is about 1.4 times the Sun’s mass and slightly larger, about 16.2 miles (26 kilometers) wide.

The methods are not really independent, because they are both dependent on the same flawed model of neutron stars. If one of the groups had declared beforehand that the academic embrace of neutron stars is laughably absurd, they'd have been excluded and another group chosen. Thus, no independence.

“NICER’s unparalleled X-ray measurements allowed us to make the most precise and reliable calculations of a pulsar’s size to date, with an uncertainty of less than 10%,” Miller said.

The uncertainty of the size is less than 10% given that they are 100% certain in their model for pulsars.

“It’s remarkable, and also very reassuring, that the two teams achieved such similar sizes, masses and hot spot patterns for J0030 using different modeling approaches,” said Zaven Arzoumanian.

The same data, the same model for the stars, only different implementations of the Bayesian networks. It would only be amusing if they hadn't gotten similar results. But, garbage in, garbage out is the gold standard in the world of peer-review supremacy, just so long as your garbage looks consistent with theirs.

NASA's Juno Navigators Enable Jupiter Cyclone Discovery (link)

Juno makes a "fundamental discovery" at Jupiter's south polar region. Where there were five storms swirling around the pole in a pentagonal pattern, a sixth emerging storm has been photographed, with the new pattern hexagonal.

"These cyclones are new weather phenomena that have not been seen or predicted before," said Cheng Li, a Juno scientist from the University of California, Berkeley. "Nature is revealing new physics regarding fluid motions and how giant planet atmospheres work. We are beginning to grasp it through observations and computer simulations. Future Juno flybys will help us further refine our understanding by revealing how the cyclones evolve over time."

There is, of course, nothing in the standard models of planetary mechanics to explain pentagon and hexagon shaped storm formations at the poles of gas giants, and I doubt they'll be able to add any amount of complexity to their models to make it happen.

X Marks the Spot: NASA Selects Site for Asteroid Sample Collection (link)

After a year scoping out asteroid Bennu’s boulder-scattered surface, the team leading NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission has officially selected a sample collection site.

NASA has sent a probe to a near-Earth asteroid to collect samples to return the Earth. The USA has never executed a soil return mission. Allegedly the Apollo missions returned nearly half a ton of moon rocks, but those samples remain classified and locked away. The Russians also claimed to have returned soil from the moon in the 1970. Perhaps they did, but I retain skepticism, because the next attempt was not made until 2010 when the Japanese Hyabusa probe to a near-Earth asteroid was mostly a failure when only a minuscule amount of dust was returned. A second Hyabusa mission is underway and is expected to return samples a year from now. If it succeeds, then it may actually be the world's first successful mission to return a soil sample from another celestial body.

Boeing and NASA Approach Milestone Orbital Flight Test (link)

On Friday, NASA is planning on launching an unmanned mission of their new Boeing-built spacecraft intended to ultimately ferry astronauts to the International Space Station and end the embarrassment of having to pay Russia for rides. Previously, this blog said America was out of the manned-space business for good (or at least as long as the Woke Era prevails). I also note that Boeing is having trouble developing safe passenger airliners after embracing diversity as a core principle. I'd put their odds at less than 50%, and predict there will be problems either way.

NASA’s SDO Sees New Kind of Magnetic Explosion on Sun (link)

The mainstream scientific world is ever so slowly opening up to the electric reality of the universe. The rule is that they must refer to the observations as magnetic rather than electric. So here, they have invented the term "magnetic explosion" to explain electric arcing seen on the sun's surface. Magnetic fields are okay; electric fields are still verboten. In fact, it is preferable to make up magnetic phenomena rather than speak in electric terms. Thus, magnetic field lines - which are only an abstraction - are said to "recombine." The lines don't really exist - they were created by humans to help visualize the direction and strength of magnetic fields. Still, the move away from a strictly gravity dominated universe to one where magnetism play a major role is a good shift, since the magnetic universe is just a back door to the electric universe.

Contrabang! #32 Beyond The Superficial

Sorry Science Fans, Discovering A 70-Solar-Mass Black Hole Is Routine, Not Impossible (link)

Late last month, this blog ran the post Scientists Find "Impossible" Black Hole, which was based on this ScienceAlert article by a similar title. Now, Mr. Siegle has interjected to tell us all why we're actually wrong.

Did you hear that astronomers had recently discovered a stellar mass black hole that was so heavy, it shouldn’t exist? At 70 solar masses and closer to the galactic center than we are, it’s certainly an interesting system to discover, entirely worthy of its publication in Nature last week. It ranks, at the moment, as the heaviest stellar mass (as opposed to supermassive) black hole ever discovered through optical techniques.

But on the theory side, claiming that this object shouldn’t exist is not only foolish, it requires that you ignore a number of basic facts about astronomy and the Universe. We’ve already discovered a handful of comparably massed black holes through gravitational waves, and have a very good idea of how they form and why. Here’s the science of these heavy black holes that goes beyond the superficial.

His assertion that our analysis was superficial is not only smug, but it is extraordinarily ironic because his own arguments are demonstrably superficial. In his haste to prognosticate on his chosen savior of cosmology - LIGO - Ethan has completely missed the crux of the issue. He counters that black holes of such size from direct collapse are theoretically possible, and that while no stellar black holes of such mass have ever been observed before by conventional means, they have already been seen by LIGO as the result of black hole mergers.

As black holes orbit other black holes, they radiate energy away in the form of gravitational waves, causing the two masses to inspiral and merge. During the first two science runs of LIGO and Virgo, a total of 11 events were seen, with 10 of them resulting from black hole-black hole mergers.

In the study itself, the authors note that this 70 solar mass black hole was found because it’s in a binary orbit with another massive star: a B-class star, which is short-lived and massive itself, a candidate for going supernova and creating a black hole on its own. But this is exactly where you’d expect to find a 70 solar mass black hole! There’s one simple reason for this that most astronomers rarely reference: star systems don’t just come in singlets and binaries, but that three-or-more stars are often found in the same system, and could easily lead to massive black holes that merge together while still having remaining stellar companions.

The original article did not call the black hole find "impossible" and itself referenced the LIGO results. It stated,

The LIGO/Virgo experiments have revealed black holes with masses of several tens of solar masses17,18, much higher than previously known Galactic black holes. The discovery of a 70M☉ black hole in LB-1 would confirm their existence in our Milky Way.

Thus, Ethan's complaint is not with the study, but with the reporting. It is eminently clear that Ethan did not read those. From the science article in which we first saw this story.

The star, around 35 million years old and clocking in at around eight times the mass of the Sun, is orbiting the black hole every 79 days on what the researchers called a "surprisingly circular" orbit.

There has been another black hole of a similar mass range detected, clocking in at around 62 solar masses - it was created as a result of a collision between two black holes in a binary pair - GW150914, the first direct detection of gravitational waves ever made by humans. It's not in the Milky Way, but it does offer one way such a black hole can form.

But the newly discovered LB-1 still has its binary companion. One scenario could be that LB-1 formed from the collision of two black holes and then captured the star later - but the circular orbit of its companion causes a problem here. A capture would produce a highly eccentric, elliptical orbit. Time could smooth this orbit out, but it would take longer than the star's age.

One possibility, however, could be a fallback supernova, in which material ejected from the dying star falls immediately back into it, resulting in the direct formation of a black hole. This is theoretically possible under certain conditions, but no direct evidence for it currently exists.

The reporting also acknowledges the LIGO results, and that the most likely scenario for the observed black hole - if it really exists - is from black hole mergers in a multi-body system. It also acknowledges the theoretical possibility of direct collapse, but states that the evidences does not support that scenario. Oddly, the "superficial" reporting already contains all the analysis that Ethan made, but more. Their opposition to the merger scenario is that observed binary system is too circular. The initial capture would have had to have been on a highly elliptical orbit, and over time smoothed out by tidal forces. Thus, the observed orbit puts the capture so far back that there isn't enough time for a black-hole merger event to have preceded it. Ethan ignores this aspect of the argument entirely. No where does he mention the actual core argument being made. Superficial indeed.

As is typical, he ends his piece with an air of intellectual superiority.

Astronomers aren’t perplexed by this object (or similar ones to it) at all, but rather are fascinated with uncovering the details of how they formed and how common they truly are. The mystery isn’t why these objects exist at all, but rather how the Universe makes them in the abundances we observe. We don’t falsely generate excitement by spreading misinformation that diminishes our knowledge and ideas prior to this discovery.

Fortunately, he says, astronomers are't perplexed by the misinformation that diminishes our knowledge. Apparently the astronomers who made the discovery don't count as astronomers.

"Black holes of such mass should not even exist in our Galaxy, according to most of the current models of stellar evolution," said Prof. LIU. "We thought that very massive stars with the chemical composition typical of our Galaxy must shed most of their gas in powerful stellar winds, as they approach the end of their life. Therefore, they should not leave behind such a massive remnant. LB-1 is twice as massive as what we thought possible. Now theorists will have to take up the challenge of explaining its formation."

If they're non-astronomers, then why is Ethan linking to their paper at all? Other (non)astronomers  with rebuttals are here, here, and here. Don't let the titles of the authors fool you: they aren't really astronomers, because astronomers are not actually perplexed by such misinformation.

The icing on this irony cake is that Ethan has completely missed the arguments being made in his zeal to point to LIGO as the golden goose that solves all astronomical puzzles. His mistake is to assume that he is informed of the cutting edge research being performed there, and the rest of the world is slow in catching up. Thus, it is quite interesting to see the director of LIGO chime in on the matter.

"This discovery forces us to re-examine our models of how stellar-mass black holes form," said LIGO Director David Reitze of the University of Florida, who was not involved in the research.

"This remarkable result along with the LIGO-Virgo detections of binary black hole collisions during the past four years really points towards a renaissance in our understanding of black hole astrophysics."

Ethan says the findings are routine and points to LIGO as proof, yet the director of LIGO finds the results "remarkable" and contradictory to the current models. So either Ethan is right that the LIGO director is not an astronomer - thus invalidating his frequent invocations of LIGO results - or he is wrong on the subject and this article should be corrected or retracted entirely.

This Is Why Scientists Will Never Exactly Solve General Relativity (link)

It’s difficult to appreciate how revolutionary of a transformation it is to consider the Universe from Einstein’s, rather than Newton’s, point of view. According to Newtonian mechanics and Newtonian gravity, the Universe is a perfectly deterministic system. If you were to give a scientist who understood the masses, positions, and momenta of each and every particle in the Universe, they could determine for you where any particle would be and what it would be doing at any point in the future.

In theory, Einstein’s equations are deterministic as well, so you can imagine something similar would occur: if you could only know the mass, position, and momentum of each particle in the Universe, you could compute anything as far into the future as you were willing to look. But whereas you can write down the equations that would govern how these particles would behave in a Newtonian Universe, we can’t practically achieve even that step in a Universe governed by General Relativity. Here’s why.

There are two reasons why this isn't practically so, and they have to do with two of the biggest scientific advancements made in the last century.

First is quantum mechanics. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle states that we can never have complete knowledge of any real system, no matter how small. For instance, we can't know with perfect precision both the location and the velocity of any particle. Thus, the example given of knowing the exact state of the universe to calculate all future states is only a hypothetical. Such information can never be known.

Second is chaos theory. The gist of this article is that Newtonian dynamics are described in closed-form expressions, while general relativity is a set of differential equations. Ethan makes this out to be a profound difference, but most real-world systems are similar. A differential equation is any function that depends on a derivative of the variables. That is, the inputs are a function of the outputs. One example is the flight dynamics of an airplane. A stable airplane tend to return to level flight. Thus, a high angle of attack (AOA) will tend to cause the plane to have a highly negative rate of AOA change. An unstable airframe will tend to have a highly positive rate change for the same AOA. So the rate of AOA depends on the current value, and that value changes with the current rate. Each measure influences the other.

Because most differential equations don't have exact solutions, they are solved with approximate methods, thus the solutions are approximations. However, chaos theory showed that even linear systems are prone to chaotic behavior, because of slight nonlinearities of the real system that aren't reflected in the models. That is, the compact equations of Newton are themselves only approximations of reality.

You might notice that these solutions are also extraordinarily simple, and don’t include the most basic gravitational system we consider all the time: a Universe where two masses are gravitationally bound together. This problem — the two-body problem in General Relativity — cannot be solved exactly. There is no exact, analytical solution known for a spacetime with more than one mass in it, and it’s thought (but not, to my knowledge, proven) that no such solution is possible.

This is something I've wondered about the general relativity, where there is not an actual force of gravity. Instead, massive bodies distort spacetime, which the influences the motions of other bodies nearby. So what of a two-body system where both bodies are perfectly still? Intuition would tell us the two bodies should be gravitationally attracted and move towards each other, but if there is no initial motion, how would the theory of general relativity apply? From what I've seen, all examinations include initial movement, normally with the two bodies in binary orbits.

Ask Ethan: Do Ancient Galaxies Get Magnified By The Expanding Universe? (link)

If you want to know how large an object actually will appear in the expanding Universe, you need to know not only its physical size, but the physics of how the Universe expands over time. In the Universe we actually have — which is composed of 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter, 5% normal matter and about 0.01% radiation — you can determine that objects will appear smaller the farther away they get, but then the physics of the expanding Universe magnifies them once again the farther away you look.

It might surprise you to learn that the most distant galaxy we’ve ever observed, GN-z11, actually appears twice as large as a similarly sized galaxy that’s only half the distance away from us. The farther away we look, beyond a specific critical distance, objects actually appear larger the farther away they get. Even without gravitational lensing, the expanding Universe alone makes ultra-distant galaxies appear larger to our eyes.

This will become another magic bullet in the modern astronomy toolkit of contradiction avoidance. When galaxies appear too large and evolved for the Big Bang timeline. Anomalies will be explained away as an artifact of universal expansion, but when observations are as expected, then the expansion/enlargement effect will be ignored.

This Is How Quantum Physics Creates The Largest Cosmic Structures Of All (link)

Like so many aspects of astrophysics, quantum mechanics is on an à la carte menu: you take what you want whenever you need it. On its own, the Big Bang Theory offers nothing to explain the structure of the universe, which they openly admit.

If not for quantum physics, the Universe would have been born perfectly smooth, with every region of space having the exact same temperature and density as every other region.

The current reigning theory is that the cosmic web is a relic of quantum fluctuations that have been inflated to vast proportions by expansion, similar  to how lettering on a balloon grows when inflated, but on a scale of unimaginable proportions. They take some poetic joy in attributing the largest structure in the universe to the smallest, but that does little to inform us whether the theory is correct.

The problem is that the alleged quantum bubbles don't look like the observed universe, which is filamentary in appearance. Instead, he dwells on the clumpy CMB image, which looks more convincing. Thus, we must believe that the CMB captured a snapshot of the early universe, and the cosmic web has evolved from there. How the clumps with 1 part in 30,000 less matter opposed the unrelenting expansion of space to morph into huge abysses nearly devoid of any matter, and the clumps with 1 part in 30,000 more matter evolved into massive intergalactic filament networks reminiscent of neural maps, is left unanswered. While interjecting the CMB into the mix seems to offer a convenient transition point for the theorists, it amounts to one more assumption added to the stack. By my count, the major ones are:

1. That all redshifts are caused by relative motion
2. That Type 1A supernovae are standard candles (related to #1)
3. That redshifts imply a Big Bang event
4. That quantum fluctuations caused the slight variations seen in the CMB
5. That those slight variations evolved into the cosmic web over ~13 billion years

Adding to the Jenga tower of assumptions is a way to buy time, but brings with it increased likelihood of the whole thing toppling over in a glorious collapse.

The Noahic Covenant

From Sputnik News comes the headline, Earth Enters Unknown as Magnetic North Pole Continues Push Toward Russia, Crosses Greenwich Meridian.

The BGS and the US National Centers for Environmental Information has released a new update to the World Magnetic Model this week, confirming that the magnetic north pole, whose coordinates are crucial for the navigation systems used by governments, militaries and a slew of civilian applications, is continuing its push toward Siberia.

The data confirmed that this year, the magnetic north pole passed to within 390 km of the geographic North Pole, and crossed the Greenwich (prime) meridian. Compilers also confirmed that the Earth’s magnetic field is continuing to weaken, at a rate of about 5 percent every 100 years.

This is the second update to the official magnetic model this year, after February's emergency update - the first ever issued. The magnetic north pole - which has quietly ambled about the Canadian Arctic for as long as it's been tracked - is now decisively sprinting towards eastern Russia. Interestingly, the two poles are currently tracking towards each other. The southern pole is not moving as aggressively but has a headstart - already north of Antarctica and the Antarctic Circle.

Scientists have been unable to do little more than speculate at the cause of the magnetic phenomena, let alone make any useful predictions.

Magnetic north, the point on the planet’s surface toward which your conventional compass points, is created by the churning of molten metal in Earth’s core, which creates huge electrical currents to produce the magnetic field.

Dr. Phil Livermore of Leeds University’s Institute of Geophysics recently postulated that a ‘jet stream’ of liquid iron flowing in the planet’s core could help explain shifts in the position of magnetic north, but suggested tracking the flows of this liquid iron could be difficult, “because it lies beneath 3,000 kilometres of rock.”

The theory that magnetic fields are caused by deep, circulating currents of charged magma is another one of those assumptions of which there is no direct evidence - as is even admitted by the interviewed geophysicist. The fluid rotation is supposedly driven by planetary rotation - which is constant - but gives way to chaotic magnetic behavior, including complete reversals of polarity. The scientist here attempts to make an analog to the atmospheric jet stream, a chaotic, oscillating system driven by stable inputs, and yet we have no evidence of the jet stream ever completely reversing direction.

The "molten dynamo" theory of magnetic fields causes problems when applied to the rest of the observable celestial bodies. Of the rocky planets, only Earth has an appreciable magnetic field, and Mercury a small field. Mercury is so small that its core should no longer be hot enough for a molten core, yet Venus is very similar to Earth but much warmer and with evidence of recent volcanism but has no magnetic field at all. The moon has no magnetic field, thus no molten core, and yet the dark regions (the mares) are said to be caused by lunar volcanism, and the light cratering suggests they are relatively young. Similarly, some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn have strong magnetic fields, yet are so small they should have cooled off by now. Astrophysicists attribute the internal heating to tidal forces but, like dark matter, it's something they apply where needed when observations don't match expectations. All the gas giants have powerful magnetic fields, especially Jupiter. If humans were able to see magnetospheres directly, then Jupiter would appear much larger than the moon in the night sky. Scientists have to conjure up other theories to explain those magnetic fields, such as rotating clouds of metallic hydrogen. Suffice it to say, planetary magnetism remains a mystery to everyone. Even the electric universe people don't offer an explanation as to why Earth has a magnetic field but not Venus.

The erratic motions aren't just a curiosity, and the concern is not limited to just navigation interests.

Scientists have previously expressed concerns about the fluctuations in the magnetic north pole and its possible impact on the magnetic field protecting Earth. Without the field, Earth would be left vulnerable to solar flares, which could cause damage to everything from spacecraft to power grids. Even with the magnetic field intact, the planet remains vulnerable. In 2011, the US National Academy of Sciences calculated that a repeat of a solar storm like the one which hit the planet in 1859 could cause as much as $2 trillion in initial damage, and take a decade to repair.

Furthermore, a weakened magnetic field may lead to a potentially cataclysmic process scientists call a “geomagnetic reversal,” in which the Earth’s north and south poles effectively switch places. The last such flip is estimated to have taken place about 800,000 years ago, and some scientists believe that another may be due soon, even though such an event could take centuries to complete.

Reversals are actually more frequent than the 800,000-year cycle mentioned here, but those are unstable, whereas the decisive flips are more rare. A well-studied magnetic excursion from 41,000 years ago - the Laschamp event - featured a magnetic field only 5% as strong as our current magnetic field. Such a weak field would have offered little protection against space radiation and would have posed a threat to life even back then. Our technological society would be completely vulnerable in such a scenario. As the magnetic field weakens, the odds of a solar flare capable of destroying our electric grid increases.

The last known flip was 12,000 years ago. Ben Davidson of suspicious0bservers makes the case that there is a 12,000-year "disaster cycle" on Earth - and we are about due for another. Specifically, he alleges that magnetic flips cause the Earth's crust to disconnect from the mantle and slip a significant distance, causing unimaginable destruction and driving the oceans up onto the landmasses. It's a little out there, but there is at least as much evidence of the historical events as there is of the conventional theory of planetary magnetism. Davidson takes it seriously enough that he moved his family to the region of the US most likely to survive such a cataclysm.

Even if you choose not to indulge such predictions of doom, keep in mind that even a highly sober analysis leaves much room for concern. The DOD estimates that losing the power grid to an EMP blast would kill 90% of Americans within 18 months. So if Davidson's theory sounds outlandish, it doesn't greatly extend the potential death count over what is conventionally regarded as our risk to such events. Further, a tale of epic flooding around 12,000 years ago doesn't sound that outlandish, does it? Those of the Abrahamic religions (slightly over half the Earth) profess a belief that God unleashed a devastating global flood in response to widespread human wickedness. Scientists also point to evidence for flooding around that time (here, here, and here).

If you are part of the half of the world that believes God unleashed a devastating flood to punish humanity, you also may be re-assured, since He made a covenant to never again destroy the world by flood. However, recall the symbol that was given to us of that covenant.

Consider the Noahic covenant to be broken. Man the globe over has made it quite clear what it thinks about God and his symbols. Some say that the covenant is unconditional and can't be broken by man. Still, it may be time to consider making a move to higher ground, or perhaps building a very large wooden boat.

Comfortably Dumb

Earlier this year, Rock & Roll icon David Gilmour sold most of his guitars in what was the most expensive guitar collection ever sold at a charity auction, and also snagged the record for the most expensive single guitar sold at such an event. The proceeds of the sale went - painfully but predictably - to combatting climate change.

Gilmour donated all of the profits from the auction to ClientEarth, a charity made up of lawyers and environmental experts that use the law to combat climate change.

He took the $21+ million in proceeds and then handed it to an NGO of lawyers and climate swindlers. Neato. For that kind of scratch he could buy Al Gore could buy another mansion or Leonardo DiCaprio another Gulfstream. The point is, the money is going to fund the lifestyles of people who tend to have very high personal carbon footprints. As is normally the case, Gilmour's actions to save the planet from greenhouse heat doom will probably only serve to increase carbon emissions. It would have been more carbon-conscious to have had 21 million dollar bills printed and then burnt them, and would have set yet another world record - for largest cash-fueled bonfire. It would be fitting wouldn't it, considering his band was so cynical about money anyway? That's really the annoying aspect of all this. Pink Floyd's most famous song was a critique of the academy as a soul-crushing, mind-numbing machine. Now he sells his own legacy to hand millions to them. How did they flip him? I guess that what's four decades of persistent climate lies results in. It's the quintessential Boomer story arc. In youth, they said, "we must resist establishment brainwashing." In old age, all who resist establishment brainwashing are bigoted science deniers.

In the video below, Gilmour explains why he sold his guitars to support ClientEarth, saying: "The global climate crisis is the greatest challenge that humanity will ever face, and we are within a few years of the effects of global warming becoming irreversible."

Gilmour lives completely within the wall that was built for him by the academic elite and climate hustlers. He has done nothing to stop climate change (if it was even real) and now the guitars he made history on are mounted on the walls of billionaire collectors, as he trembles in fear of quickly approaching climate doom.

Rule Of Intent

For democracy to work, there must be rule of law. Whoever heard of a lawless democracy? It can't exist. Democracy itself is a contract of sorts. There are to be fair, orderly elections. The losers agree to allow the winners to take power. In return, the winners agree to limitations on their power, otherwise the losers would never agree. No losers will play their democratic role if they know that the winners will promptly begin executions. If it is well-known that the winners aren't going to play fair, then there will always be war.

Rule of law is essentially a set of limitations on whom the government can punish, and guidelines as to whom the government should punish. The winners aren't entitled to arbitrarily kill, imprison, or fine their political opponents. There are not supposed to be political prisoners in a Western democracy. Those who break the various contracts must be punished, otherwise contracts become meaningless and the democracy fails. Corruption can't be tolerated among those given great authority. If even the lawmakers can't obey the laws, then we're really in trouble.

An entire branch of government is dedicated to deciding who should be punished. For all the vast complexity of the various regulatory codes and the hordes of lawyers speaking legalese, the premise is simple: the government cannot punish when there is not sufficient evidence of a crime, and must punish when there is.

From this simple explanation of democracy, it is evident that two fundamental principles are broken. One is that the losers have stopped accepting defeat. The left has not physically declared war on the elected government, but have instead engaged in lawfare and subversion. Second, the legal system is no longer used primarily to make sober determinations of guilt and innocence, but as an organ to punish political opponents. A similar thing happened with the media. Supposedly the unofficial fourth branch of government because the voting public must be well-informed, it is now used primarily as an organ to punish political opponents. The legal system and media also serve to protect political allies from their deserved punishments.

Recent high-publicity events show that the legal insurrection has proceeded by replacing objective evidence with intent. Intent has become a useful tool to excuse allied criminals, while arbitrarily punishing opponents. James Comey infamously pardoned Hillary Clinton after outlining her crimes by citing a lack of intent, even though the relevant statute specifically criminalized gross negligence. The incident was so clear-cut as to unambiguously prove that the DOJ was using fake principles of intent to grant arbitrary pardons from justice. Similarly, the recent OIG report on the illegal spying against a presidential candidate has effectively amounted to a public pardoning à la Comey; reciting a condensed list of broken rules, but generally reassuring us that there was no intent so there is no need for punishment. Of course we all read the insider texts and we know damn well that the whole "investigation" was a political operation, but that doesn't matter. Rule of intent means that the people in charge decide what intent is.

Conversely, the media and justice system have spent the last four years mounting fraudulent investigations to find any evidence of a crime committed by the unauthorized president. Falling short, they always turn to intent. Supposedly, Donald Trump instructed Vladimir Putin to release Hillary Clinton's missing 30,000 emails (the ones she destroyed while under a preservation order) thus he is guilty of treason - even though the 30,000 emails have never seen the light of day. It doesn't matter that there is no evidence of a crime even occurring; all that matters is that the man has been found guilty by the court of imperial opinion. The rest is details. Similar claims were also made about Ukraine, despite Trump never receiving the concessions he supposedly demanded from a fellow head-of-state. If the gay anchors of CNN say there was intent, you must not acquit.

Today, the House has decided to draw up articles of impeachment based on obstruction of justice because the president chose to ignore the subpoenas of the perpetual investigation against him. Apparently, refusing to participate in your own phony impeachment is cause for impeachment. Ultimately there is no crime, and the weak charges show it all comes down to intent. Intent just means being on the wrong side. So on trial is not Trump, but the political system. Does our so-called democracy ignore rule of law and flagrantly punish political adversaries? Well, they're halfway there already. Once it passes the House, just a few turncoat Republican Senators are needed, and there are plenty of candidates.

If Trump is removed from office, there will be war. Don't imagine millions of armed patriots taking to the streets, but the public execution of the rule of law will lead to degeneration of the democratic order fairly quickly. The game will clearly be one of acquiring and holding power by any means necessary. There will be no benefit in acknowledging defeats or subjecting oneself to the rule of law. In fact, if Trump is impeached he'd be best off to retain the office by force if possible, but he's too isolated for that. What we have here is America's "Crossing the Rubicon" movement. However, it's not Caesar considering taking power from the Senate by force, but rather the Senate itself that may revolt against the rule of law and replace it with the rule of intent.

Too Swedish To Fail

Sweden has become a constant stream of Clown World headlines that truly leave one at a loss to establish a mental context in which to process them. For some aspects of the modern insanity, we can look back to historical precedents, or to thoughtful philosophers and writers. Nietzsche, for instance, foresaw that Europe's abandonment of God would lead to it being caught between the great grindwheels of ideology that rose to fill the vacuum. Orwell gave us predictions of mass in-home propaganda, political correctness, and the conditioned immunity to cognitive dissonance.

But what can be the proper context to headlines like these?

• Sweden: Muslim screams, “We Arabs are here to take over your country,” Swede who insults him gets fined
• 11-year-old girl gang raped in Sweden – Perpetrators walk free and laugh in her face
• Sweden: Elderly residents removed from Stockholm apartments to make room for asylum seekers

What context is there for foreigners to openly declare invasion of a country, and for that country's government to so brazenly side with the invaders? How do you make sense of a people who beg to be invaded and punish any of their fellow countryman who disagree? There is nothing from history. No dystopian author ever imagined such a scenario. The whole concept is beyond bewildering.

Even more stupefying is that Scandinavians are noted for their smugness. How are a people so self-assured of their cultural superiority also willing to let that culture go without a fight? (And that's not even accurate. They do fight - against all who seek to preserve the nation.) Styx talked about just that topic recently. His take is that they are actually so arrogant that they just assume that all who immigrate and are exposed to the superior Swedish way will throw away all their native barbarism and embrace Swedish social norms with full heart and soul. While they can't help but notice that the New Swedes are causing problems, they nevertheless remain baffled because they're already convinced that such an outcome is not possible and that those right-wingers who said otherwise are wrong and just being racist (the worst possible thing). 

The re-assuring aspect - if you're concerned about the self-righteous suicide of the West - is that they haven't lost the will to survive as a people so much as they've become pathologically naive that the glory of their sophisticated progressive society is pre-ordained; that they can behave and believe however they like and the results will be the same. Eventually that hubris will have to be smashed by reality, the urge to spread their culture will transform into a defensive mode, and compassion will be replaced by resentment. Is it racist to opine that Muslims should not move to Sweden? Will, if you had a Muslim friend looking to move there, would you recommend it? The Swedes may be the most invadable people on Earth today, but still they are Viking blood and are not that many generations removed from many centuries of relentless warriors. When the current order collapses, and the post-modern illusion dissipates, Sweden will not be a very happy place for anyone - especially for non-Swedes. It's likely that, eventually, those recently invited millions of foreigners will be evicted or eradicated. Even if they manage to amass enough numbers in time to take control from the native Swedes, they will quickly fall into perpetual internecine warfare between their various ethnic factions.

This may seem like an unlikely scenario given that Swedes today show no hint of backbone whatsoever, but remember that they are forced into silence by a government and media establishment that punish all dissent. The bulk of the people quietly align with the strong horse. Once that dynamic changes, things could shift surprisingly quickly.

Moon Myth: Artemis

We're going to the moon! Did you know about Artemis program? NASA plans to land the "first woman and next man" on the moon by 2024, and from there begin sending missions to Mars. It's an ambitious goal for an outfit that's been hitching rides with the Russians for almost a decade. Realistically, Artemis is not going to the moon in five years, or twenty-five. (I'll accept bets.) Artemis likely won't even put a woman into low-Earth orbit in five years. I've said that the US is out of the manned space business for good, and that hasn't changed. The only reason to re-evaluate that stance would be a united national push for a re-invigorated space program. Interestingly, that subject was recently in the news.

In a hearing on Wednesday, Rep. José Serrano (D-NY), chairman of the House subcommittee that appropriates funds for NASA, cited the potential astronomical cost of the space agency’s lunar program. He claimed that some experts have estimated that it could cost more than $25 billion over the next five years, and that money will be hard to justify, especially since many other government programs are in need of funds.

He also did not see the reason for accelerating the deadline for the landing, which NASA had originally slated for 2028. “Another concern that I have is a lack of a serious justification for such a cost since NASA has already programmed the lunar landing mission for 2028,” Serrano said in the hearing. “Why does it suddenly need to speed up the clock by four years — time that is needed to carry out a successful program from a science and safety perspective? To a lot of members, the motivation appears to be just a political one, giving President Trump a Moon landing in a possible second term, should he be reelected.”

Vice President Mike Pence challenged NASA in March to put humans back on the Moon within the next five years “by any means necessary.” As a result, NASA revamped its human lunar exploration plans to fit the more difficult deadline, and it named the initiative Artemis. Through the program, the space agency aims to put the first woman on the lunar surface to meet the 2024 deadline.

The Democrats who organized a March for Science to protest Trump's election now support defunding science initiatives to make Trump look bad. We expect nothing less from them, but the blatant display of hypocrisy is jarring nevertheless. It's the same pattern we see consistently.

1. Abandoning all stated principles to get Drumpf now
2. Get some things right inadvertently (the space plan is unrealistic)
3. Yet still blunder into the opposite of the intended effect

The Mike Pence 5-Year challenge will fail. So why do Democrats want to give him a perfectly valid excuse for it by obstructing the scientific funding they prattle on about? The smart play would be to fund it lavishly, then blame the inevitable failures on mismanagement by the administration. They could even leverage concessions out of the president and aerospace contractors for doing so. But they aren't very smart. And there's no where near the downside that they imagine. Even if Trump pulls some miracle and gets a racially diverse set of representatives from all 212 genders onto the lunar surface by re-election day, he will just come off looking like Boomer President Supreme, reliving the glory days of the late 1960s. No one actually cares. Had you heard of Project Artemis?? I didn't think so.

The country that's too woke to erect a pedestrian bridge, navigate warships through shipping lanes, or even keep the lights on is not going to start racking up space victories. The moon seems ambitious, so why don't they start with landing a woman on the ISS by 2024? Well, there was a program in place for just that called Constellation, and it was canceled by President Obama in 2010. We failed to put woman into low-Earth orbit, so we'll try for the moon instead. You have to hand it to Trump/Pence for bravado, but there's a big problem clouding their judgment, which will come to a head if America really decides to get serious about this moon business.

The dilemma that arises is, if America was able to put men on the moon in the 1960s, on short notice, with primitive electronics, and with no precedent to follow, surely we can repeat the process today and improve upon it. Well, there's a reason why it isn't so, and it's a bitter pill for most Americans to swallow - particularly those who were alive in the 1960s. Understand that we did not actually send men to the moon fifty years ago, and the current predicament starts to clear up. If you find that impossible to accept, then at least allow yourself to entertain the notion. The mission planners at NASA are certainly acting as if the space race never happened, and it seems to be an open secret in some segments of the space industry.

Artemis planners talk of problems to be solved before manned lunar missions can occur, such as the dangers of space radiation and high-speed re-entry. Don't they know that the Apollo 13 crewed survived the Van Allen belts while hunkered down in the LEM - basically just tin foil held together by scotch tape? Also of note is the staggered rollout of the new launch system, where the final phase is of less capacity than the Saturn V. Why not just start building Saturn rockets again? The normal response will be that they want a sustainable launch platform, yet the estimated launch cost of the new system is not that much lower that the inflation-adjusted cost of the Saturn and, considering that those kinds of predicted costs are always grossly underestimated, building Saturn rockets would likely be cheaper in operations, let alone R&D.

There are other delays that cannot be blamed on the lack of a heavy-duty rocket. Artemis I is a planned mission to take an unmanned Orion spacecraft out to lunar orbit and back. Originally scheduled for 2018, it was delayed to July 2019, and then been delayed again with an "aggressive" schedule for launch in November 2020. Delayed year after year for a mission that was not even deemed necessary by Apollo planners. It's curious how many decades NASA will spend re-inventing technology half a century old before the world starts to grow suspicious. While claims of a government lunar conspiracy may seem outrageous, they lead to some pretty straight-forward predictions. Test missions will reveal surprising dangers and difficulties that should have been encountered by Apollo. More likely than that, however, is that the programs will be continually delayed until eventually they are quietly terminated. A public failure of re-entry tests would be stunning. The national priority is in maintaining the Apollo myth at all costs, including the cost of the complete stagnation of human space travel. It is the reason that the world's only superpower is now in the embarrassing position of bumming rides from its adversary, and why all our ambitious projects fail - the common assumptions about our capabilities are invalid.

Muslims Kill Liberals pt 8

The father of one of the victims of the most recent London Bridge terror attack has penned a public letter, and it's everything you'd expect out of Clown World.

Jack devoted his energy to the purpose of Learning Together: a pioneering programme to bring students from university and prisons together to share their unique perspectives on justice. ... He would be seething at his death, and his life, being used to perpetuate an agenda of hate that he gave his everything fighting against. 

Jack would be seething at his death, because it has fueled a far-right reaction of perpetrator-blaming. One has to wonder if his last words - as he laid bleeding out on Britain's iconic landmark at the hand of one Usman Khan - was to apologize for his privilege.

The great irony here is that Jack's life work was prison reform. He wanted prisons to focus on rehabilitation rather than long-term incarceration. Well, his assailant had been released early for just those reasons. Previously convicted for terrorism related crimes for which the maximum penalty was a life sentence, Khan was sentenced to sixteen years and released after eight - apparently having been deemed rehabilitated by a parole judge. He then proceeded - less than a year after regaining his freedom - to attend one of Jack's Learning Together conferences.

He attended a “Learning Together” conference for ex-offenders, and used the event to launch a bloody attack, stabbing two people to death and wounding three others.

Sometimes reality truly is stranger than fiction.

Heavy.com reports on the elder Merritt's Twitter activity:

Merritt’s dad said his son wouldn’t want people to use his death to advance policies he was fighting against.

“My son, Jack, who was killed in this attack, would not wish his death to be used as the pretext for more draconian sentences or for detaining people unnecessarily,” Merritt’s dad, David Merritt, wrote on his Twitter page.

Merritt added: “Cambridge has lost a proud son and a champion for underdogs everywhere, but especially those dealt a losing hand by life, who ended up in the prison system.”

He called Jack a “beautiful spirit.

He was not a beautiful spirit. He was very naive, at best. He was an active cheerleader for the the destruction of British society, and the suicidal advocacy is now carried on in his name by his own father - who avows that the most tragic aspect of his son being murdered in the heart of a London by a convicted terrorist is that some people will have the gall to look negatively upon the ordeal. In some sense, we have to agree. Jack Merritt was directly punished for the same stupidity he was dedicating his life towards promoting.