News Round up Jan 31 2020

[lazarus]

2020. This was supposed to be the year we made contact. Mighty nuclear exploration spacecraft slashing through the aether on clouds of insalubrious particles, flying cars, orbital Hilton's... Or was that supposed to be ten years ago. sigh


Some cool Space news: A paper published yesterday (subject to space-time distortions!) details observations of Pulsar-White Dwarf pair PSR J1141-6545, which is seen to be 'swirling' space-time in the region. 10-25 thousand light years distant in the Constellation Musca, the Neutron-Dwarf star pair are exhibiting a phenomena called 'Frame-Dragging', or Lense-Thirring effect, which has been explored in orbital Satellite-Earth interaction experiments. Distortion of space-time by massive rotating objects were predicted in General Relativity, so score another one for Einstein.

Just a few hours until BREXIT; the sky has not turned black as sack cloth, the moon is not blood red, and the sea has not swallowed Albion.

Confirmed Coronavirus cases have passed 10,000 cases. Some 50 million PRC citizens in the Wuhan area are locked down.

WHO has declared a 'Global Health Emergency', while 'praising the PRC's response to the crisis.'
Addendum: From the Black humour Department. Within the WHO news conference run time, 200 new cases were confirmed by health officials in the PRC.

Mongolia has closed land links to the PRC.

Somewhat alarmingly, confirmed cases of Coronavirus appearing in Germany have shown a very long incubation period before manifesting symptoms.
As more PRC diaspora is 'repatriated' to countries where they are nominally 'citizens', officials are bracing for the virus to spread, according to sources somewhat less than sanguine about the PRC's efforts to contain the outbreak, particularly in light of the long incubation period.
Related: PRC Authorities are employing Drones networked with China's formidable Social Credit System's advanced biometric panopticon to enforce quarantine and bilogical measures.

As of 06:53, some 274 'canadian passport holders' are still stranded in the PRC as Chinese officials refuse entry of charter aircraft.
Sources intimate this is in retaliation for the Huawei espionage trial under way in Vancouver.
Foreign Affairs Canada has evacuated Embassy personnel dependants and vulnerable(medical or other) staff.

Some 200 UK nationals have arrived at a UK MoD airfield on a chartered 747 from the PRC. The returnee's will be subject to a 2 week quarantine at the base.

The Republican controlled Senate will vote against calling further 'witnesses' in the Democrat led impeachment effort after Democrats failed to entice 4 Republican 'fence sitters' to the impeachment attempt. Senate majority leader McConnel(R) has called the vote today.
It is likely that the Impeachment trial will grind to a halt in real terms today, though the noise level from partisan media will surely rise to apocalyptic volume.

Palm Beach Sheriffs department has released a statement: A black SUV had blown through 2 security points at the Trump dacha in Mar-a-Lago, spurring security forces to take the vehicle under fire. 2 subjects were arrested at the scene, no injuries have been reported as of this time, the subjects condition or motivations are not reported at this time.

Melbourne has declared a state of emergency as fire conditions worsen, a number of fires in that complex have taken a run, exhibiting extreme and erratic fire behaviour. Update: fires in the Ballarat area have taken a run, with evacuations of several towns ordered.
Some twenty new fires were reported in Victoria tonight. Melbourne's power grid is also becoming heavily stressed, according to state officials. Related. Many major media outlets are a little foggy on Australian State and National Capitals.

Canada has become the latest country to ban single-use plastics. Though a positive step , commentators note that 90% of global oceanic garbage originates in the PRC, India, African countries, and Pakistan, who are reluctant to address the problem. Environmental pressure groups are strangely reticent to pressure these nations. Earth Resources satellites also continue to monitor a massive CFC emissions plume that originates at a petro-chemical complex in central China. This single plume accounts for some 99% of global ozone depleting CFC's.

In other environmental news, a climate icon's parents, both of whom have close ties to Tsoros-controlled EU banking conglomerates specializing in carbon taxation speculation, have doubled their already significant net worth.

Today in History: On this day in 1920, nothing of any significance occurred at Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump, Alberta.

Aggregated from API, Reuters, Haaretz, RT, 7News, UCRL, CBC.

[wombat666]

'Melbourne' is the capital city of the State of Victoria, and can not declare anything: that is the responsibility of the Victorian Government.

[SSI01]

Lazarus - the person of interest at Mar-a-Lago is a female opera singer who allegedly climbed out of her SUV and danced on the vehicle. it doesn't say whether this happened before, during, or after the gate-crashing incident. Her Facebook page identifies her as an ardent Sanders fan.

And - a question for you: I read recently that blades from wind farm turbines wear out after a certain number of hours of twisting in the wind, become brittle, crack, etc. and must be R&R'd. The story i read says there currently exists nowhere in Europe or the US any facility that can with any degree of economy recycle these blades and there are reportedly many, many hundreds of them - if not in the thousands - piling up at dump sites in both places while folks try to figure out what to do with them.

The story said the blades, while constructed of materials that are considered recyclable, are made to withstand a very, very considerable amount of stress and thus pose a challenge to currently existing machinery and processes for recycling such materials; only a few contractors in the world possess such machinery and it is at this time prohibitively expensive to recycle the blades. Hence, the backup. The scale of some of these things is truly awesome - some are 300 feet or more in length. It takes two separate trucks working in tandem to get just one blade around a 90-degree turn in a road.

I don't know what your take is on this stuff but the story is interesting on its own. what are we to do?

[lazarus]

'Melbourne' is the capital city of the State of Victoria, and can not declare anything: that is the responsibility of the Victorian Government.

As noted, many media outlets are having trouble with chain o' command and geography

[lazarus]

I thought it was just drunk-stupid tourista's. But it seems there is a flaky ideological angle.

Wind turbines. Right off the bat, these things are not eco-anything except catastrophic. The manufacture, installation, support, carbon footprint and supplementary generation requirements run an average 49% higher than just building a nuclear plant-which is the cleanest, safest,lowest foot-print energy generation scheme available, no contest.
God, I love all things nuclear!
Wind turbines also require thermal generation to cover the frequent vagrancies of the wind. For the Eu, coal or a lot of ru$$ian ga$.
As to the waste. All of that stuff is going to fatigue out, and faster than expected. Turns out low-frequency sound is hard on equipment, as well as people.
Thirty-five years ago at a symposium I had the pleasure of attending, Bruce Sterling coined the phrase 'Buckyjunk' to describe just emerging technologies hard to dispose of technological garbage. Durable materials, composites, alloys, new and exciting effluents of new and exciting processes. The phrase is a portmanteau derived from then very new Buckminsterfullerene class materials; carbon nano-fibres and nano-chains that are tough, but so tough that there is no economic way, or even a method at all, to dispose of them.
But, saint greta of sperg and her carbon-taxation profiteer-handlers have cried in public...incidentally, St.Spegberg's parents have applied for a copyright on dear potato's name and image...
So the bottom line on this kind of Buckyjunk-windfarm junk- is energy cycle. It will take more energy to dispose of this crap than it took to build it, and than it generates.
A similar eco-boondogle is being pedalled viz: EV's (electric vehicles) Tracking just carbon footprint, a single Tesla battery pack has a carbon footprint of 12 tons by the time it is placed on the shelf. Over the life cycle of the battery pack, the carbon footprint of a nominal Tesla is 1.58-1.89 grams of carbon per kilometre, and several are going to be consumed over the life cycle of the vehicle.
A stinky VW diesel, after you un-diddle the makers fibs about emissions, averages 1.26-1.44 g carbon/km/per vehicle service life. And, that can be run on waste veggie oil!
Let us also note that CO2 is a bogus measure, as all that green stuff- plants- live on Co2.
This is also ignoring the human and ecological rape of Africa for the rare-earth elements required in all of these PFM motors and modern batteries.
Battery re-cycling is also filthy and energy intensive. However, none of this will cause a re-think.

Twenty five years ago, Lehman bros, the Koch's, Tsoros, Bear-Stern, Citibank, HKB, Chase Manhattan, the European Development bank etal, identified exciting, new and lucrative profit sources ( their own words! )
That list: Carbon Taxation cap and trade, opiates, government contract services, prison services and quasi military contacting services.
Here we are.
Ford sells a 8000lb truck labelled 'eco-boost'. Subaru sells a 'PZEV'-partial Zero-emissions vehicle. Leo DiCapro has his private jet fly 12000 miles to pick up a pair of sun glasses. The mega-yacht industry is booming. Heroin pumps 5.5 billion into us bank and government coffers. The US war on drugs costs $6000 USD a minute. US Police forces average 1.5 billion a year profit on no-due process or warrant road-side asset seizure. 17 years on, NATO yet protects and controls the Afghan opium crop. Western countries are extorted into emasculating their economies on environmental grounds, yet they are not the polluters.
China, India and Pakistan are mega-sewers, yet are exempt from scrutiny or criticism. In fact, under the much-touted climate deal championed by the guy before his Trumpness, China was allowed to carry on full-blast until 2040 with no waste reduction requirements.
Under the same agreement, the US was expected to shed half of it's economic output. Thankfully, that deal went to the recyclers.
Bank profits are also gargantuan.
I dunno. You connect the dots.
Addendum: The buckyjunk stream from wind turbines is quite a small drop in the bucket. Aerospace has the same problem growing.
There are currently no recycling strategies or methods available for composite components and airframes. Once the goodstuff is stripped out, composite hulls are pushed out into the pasture, or buried. Fire damaged composites are particularly troublesome, as those can be quite toxic, and shed dangerous micro-particles. But, this is a tiny drop in the waste stream.
The big hazard right now is global oceanic garbage, specifically plastics. These don't compost away. They simply break down into nurdles (micro-plastic beads) which are then ingested by zooplankton, which then is unable to digest or pass the bead, and then starves.
Quite literally, it's kicking the bottom out of the food chain. While banning single-use plastics isn't a bad idea, the mega-polluters are exempt from public, geopolitical pressure and international efforts to combat the problem.
It's actually very difficult to be an industrial polluter in Western Civilization, these days, and American consumer trash is a tiny fraction of waste stream.