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Science and Technology
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Ike smiles
On January 17, 1961, President Eisenhower delivered his farewell address to our nation, in which he issued a couple of prescient warnings. One, regarding the dangers of the then-already burgeoning “military-industrial complex,” is well known. The other, barely. Here it is (bolding mine):
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
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Willful Blindness to Wuhan Coronavirus
When I first heard about the coronavirus outbreak, the fact that it emerged in a city with a controversial virology institute was beyond suspicious. My initial mental model for the incident was Chernobyl — a catastrophe caused by brutal totalitarian rule. Yet there was a massive crackdown on any mention of a laboratory incident. Seeing that Fauci was directly linked to the crackdown, while also having pushed forward gain-of-function research via EcoHealth Alliance in an end run around the carefully written regulations and review process, disgusted me.
As if this were not bad enough, it turns out the intelligence agencies were directly involved in this cover-up/disinformation operation (hat tip to Ed Morrissey at HotAir). The intelligence community ignored their own experts in the National Center for Medical Intelligence, who concluded it was man-made and pushed aside the FBI for coming to a similar conclusion.
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Vanguard TV-3 Blew Up 67 Years Ago
As many of you know, my father co-wrote the 1955 proposal for Project Vanguard. After it won, he designed the space tracking system Minitrack and the small test vehicle satellites.
In September 1957, the head of Vanguard, Dr John Hagen, discussed the schedule of the test vehicle satellites.
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Cognitive Dissonance in the Medical Field
Marty Makary, M.D. has written a fascinating and frightening book about the Blind Spots that people in the medical field are subject to—the kinds we saw especially play out during Covid 19. But the reason for the lies and deceptions run much deeper than experts running amok and exerting excessive power. Dr. Makary has done the research—that’s right—real scientific research—to explain the crippling effect that cognitive dissonance has on medical and research professionals. I plan to review the book fully when I finish it, but I couldn’t resist explaining the impact of cognitive dissonance. What is cognitive dissonance?
Cognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by inconsistency which most of us are then motivated to try to reduce. In particular, it can be a feeling of hypocrisy or a realization of having made a mistake, and it’s unpleasant. Or it’s supposed to be unpleasant.
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“Attempt no landing there.”
Space and/or movie nerds will know that the one body in the solar system that we have been specifically instructed not to visit is the destination of the largest deep-space probe ever launched. Last week NASA, with the assistance of the now indispensable SpaceX, sent the eponymously named Europa Clipper spacecraft on its way to Jupiter. The six-ton wonder of astrophysical engineering will first visit Mars to steal a little energy from the red planet, then return to Earth for another theft of delta-V before making its long voyage out to Jupiter, where it’s expected to arrive in 2030.
The spacecraft was originally planned to be flown on NASA’s absurdly expensive Space Launch System (SLS), but delays in that program prompted NASA to come to its senses and contract with SpaceX to perform the launch. Launching on the increasingly irrelevant SLS platform would have cost something north of $2 billion, whereas SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, the world’s most powerful operational rocket, did the job for less than a tenth of that.
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Important For Those Following COVID-19 Pathology (and perhaps Vaccine side effects)
This past week saw a paper published in Nature that sheds light on how the virus causing COVID-19 does damage to the body, and which aligns with much empirical evidence on symptoms. (Link to a plain English summary.)
The authors at UCSF have found that the C19 spike protein, while its primary purpose is to penetrate cell walls, has a secondary effect in binding to a protein called fibrinogen, which is an essential precursor to… blood clots. There’s an affinity between parts of the spike protein and sites along the amino acid chain in fibrinogen – an accidental bonding that’s apparently triggering the clot formation cascade just as bodily damage will do normally. The authors provide evidence for this, as well as secondary effects on inflammation and lung and brain damage. They also perform an experiment in mice using a monoclonal antibody that ameliorates these effects. This seems to be a substantial advance by a credible team, and is likely to trigger plenty of attempts to verify and advance the work.
Breakthrough Against Malpractice of Gender Affirming Care
After years of the American medical community insisting that gender-affirming care is appropriate, in spite of the reversals in European countries on this opinion, one prestigious American medical organization is taking a stand against the treatment:
The American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) is now stating that there is ‘considerable uncertainty as to the long-term efficacy for the use of chest and genital surgical interventions’ in minors and ‘the existing evidence base is viewed as low quality/low certainty,’ according to a piece this week by the Manhattan Institute’s Leor Sapir.
A New York Yankee in Fred Hoyle’s Court
I suspect many people are unaware that there is a sequel, of sorts, to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, Jules Verne’s classic 1870 work of science fiction. Five years after that work was published, Verne wrote The Mysterious Island, an account of a group of Yankee soldiers who escape Confederate captivity during the American Civil War only to find themselves stranded on an uncharted island in the South Pacific.
The Mysterious Island appealed to the geeky science nerd in me, filled as it was with descriptions of ad hoc engineering, home-made explosives, volcanos, and other fantastic details calculated to capture the imagination of young readers like me.
The First ELINT Satellite GRAB was Launched on 6/22/1960
The photo-reconnaissance satellites such as Corona are much better known than the early ELINT satellites which detected Soviet radars. Gary Powers had been shot down less than two months prior to the launch of GRAB, and President Eisenhower had to specifically approve each time it was turned on looking into Soviet territory. I talk regularly with Pete Wilhelm who worked on it. It had a declassified component SOLRAD and the secret GRAB in the same satellite.