January 2020 Archives

Congratulations to our brothers and sisters in the UK.

"We love Europe, we just hate the European Union."

After 25 years of fighting for independence, this is my final contribution in the European Parliament.

We were told to leave with our British flags, and that's exactly what we did. pic.twitter.com/cBfycWfsN7

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) January 29, 2020

Not surprising that the GOP has already cut an ad from this cringeworthy CNN segment.

I personally think it would be great if both sides showed some respect for each other. The Left's disdain for Trump voters/sympathizers will be its undoing.

I thought the Babylon Bee was supposed to be satire? "Increasingly Secular Nation Replaces Outdated Religious Ideas With End Times Prophecies, Moral Judgments":

U.S.--The increasingly secular nation has replaced its outdated religious ideas with more advanced, enlightened ideas, like telling you what behavior is immoral and predicting when the world is going to end.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has just predicted that the world will end in 12 years if you do not give the government more power over your life. Leftists across the country agreed this is a big improvement on outlandish religious claims that the world will end and you will be judged for your sin one day soon.

I thought the Babylon Bee was supposed to be satire? "Increasingly Secular Nation Replaces Outdated Religious Ideas With End Times Prophecies, Moral Judgments":

U.S.--The increasingly secular nation has replaced its outdated religious ideas with more advanced, enlightened ideas, like telling you what behavior is immoral and predicting when the world is going to end.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has just predicted that the world will end in 12 years if you do not give the government more power over your life. Leftists across the country agreed this is a big improvement on outlandish religious claims that the world will end and you will be judged for your sin one day soon.

Despite claims that the money the Obama Administration gave to Iran already belonged to Iran, this isn't true. The Iranian money previously seized by the Unites States had already been paid out as compensation to the victims of Iranian terror.

The most infamous payoff was the $1.7 billion in cash the administration shipped off to the IRGC on wooden pallets in exchange for U.S. citizens held hostage by the regime. The White House said that there was no "quid pro quo," that it was Iran's money to begin with--$400 million the pre-revolutionary government had deposited in 1979 to buy U.S. arms, plus interest. But the U.S. had already used the $400 million to compensate terror victims of the Islamic Republic. That was Iran's money. The $400 million the Obama administration used to "pay back" the Iranians belonged to the U.S. taxpayer.

The administration argued that the U.S. had to pay the ransom in cash because Tehran had been cut off from the financial system and there was no other way to transfer the funds. That was not true. The Obama administration had wired payments to Iran before and after the wooden pallets episode. The Iranians wanted cash so it would be harder to track their terror financing.

Of course everyone is wondering if Iran accidentally shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, but it's too early to say anything definitive. However, internet speculation is running rampant. Check out this snap from 0:24 in this video of the wreckage.

The speculation is that the dark spots you can see there on the fuselage are holes that were caused by fragmentation from an anti-air missile. Time will tell.

Update:

Here's a higher-resolution image of the first fuselage section shown above. It looks like the "holes" may actually be rocks.

The VASCO team ("Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations") is investigating 150,000 candidate objects that have appeared or disappeared from the sky since the 1950s.

A project lead by an international team of researchers use publicly available data with images of the sky dating as far back as the 1950s to try to detect and analyse objects that have disappeared over time. In the project "Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations" (VASCO), they have particularly looked for objects that may have existed in old military sky catalogues from the 1950s, not to be found again in modern sky surveys. Among the physical indicators that they are looking for are stars that have vanished in the Milky Way.

"Finding an actually vanishing star--or a star that appears out of nowhere-- would be a precious discovery and certainly would include new astrophysics beyond the one we know of today," says project leader Beatriz Villarroel, Stockholm University and Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Spain.

When a star dies it either undergoes very slow changes and becomes a white dwarf or it dies with a sudden bright explosion i.e. supernova. A vanishing star can be an example of an "impossible phenomenon" that could be attributed either to new astrophysical phenomena or to extra-terrestrial activity. Indeed, the only non-ETI (extra-terrestrial intelligence) explanation for a vanishing star would be exceedingly rare events called "failed supernovae." A failed supernovae is theoretically predicted to occur when a very massive star collapses into a black hole without any visible explosion. Other physical indicators of ETI activity that the authors are looking for are signs of red interstellar communication lasers and Dyson spheres. A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical giant structure surrounding a star to harness its energy.

To be honest, it would be a lot more interesting if there were only a handful of examples -- 150,000 disappearing objects makes me think that it isn't aliens.