Russian Propaganda  MEDIA Brags of Putin’s Military Blackmail  REDLINE Against the U.S.

Julia Davis
Tue, December 7, 2021

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Photos Getty

Before U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin sat down for a virtual summit on Tuesday morning, Russian state media broadcast its own predictions about the goals of the meeting—and the outcome of the talks.

The latest Russian media tirades have made one point very clear: that gone are the days when Putin’s Russia sought to be treated as an equal with the West. Today, the Kremlin strives to dictate its terms to the world’s leading superpower, using military blackmail to make a point.

The U.S. recently revealed its intelligence assessments that Russia could be planning to invade Ukraine as soon as early 2022. This data has been shared with EU and NATO allies, bringing them up-to-date on Moscow’s ongoing military scheme. On Sunday’s state TV show Vesti Nedeli, notorious propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov scoffed at Biden’s statement about not recognizing Russia’s “red lines” when it comes to Ukraine, and predicted that over the course of the summit, Putin will snap Biden “back to reality.”

Ukraine: America Dropped the Ball on Russia’s Invasion Threat

Kiselyov claimed that by signing the U.S.-Russia Presidential Joint Statement on Strategic Stability in June of this year, Biden essentially acknowledged that he “does not want the United States to be reduced to radioactive ash.” The statement read, in part: “Today, we reaffirm the principle that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

“Here it is: the red line for Biden, set by Putin,” Kiselyov exclaimed. He declared that Biden’s cooperation revealed “America’s fears” and the U.S.’s recognition of Russia’s nuclear “trump card.”

On the state TV show Sunday Evening with Vladimir Soloviev this weekend, the host and his panelists did their best to lower expectations for the meeting.

“This will be a difficult and strained summit,” Soloviev predicted. Andrey Sidorov, deputy dean of world politics at Moscow State University, concurred. “They [Biden and Putin] won’t be able to reach any agreements,” Sidorov said. “All of this is leading to the disintegration of Europe… the [U.S.] won’t be able to expand their military forces to Cold War levels, because they have to contain China.” He added: “Ukraine will be the main topic of conversation on December 7, and the main source of contention, because we can’t agree on anything.”

Sidorov went on to argue that nothing good can come out of the summit, since the United States and Russia don’t recognize each other’s red lines. Soloviev followed up: “What then, war?” Sidorov replied: “We’re already waging it. It’s ongoing.” He went on: “We should have taken all of Ukraine back in 2014. If there was no Ukraine, there would be no problem.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov contributed his own gloomy outlook in the run-up to the summit. On Monday, he told reporters that it was important not to anticipate any breakthroughs and cautioned the public against developing any “emotional” expectations. Peskov added that Putin isn’t planning to provide any public statements at the conclusion of his exchange with the U.S. president.

The attitude of belligerence and hostility permeated state media’s hot takes on the meeting. The head of the State Duma Committee on Defense, Andrei Kartapolov, mocked Biden’s dismissal of Putin’s red lines: “Let him try to cross them... The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation remain in a state of military readiness and are ready to carry out any orders of our commander-in-chief. Makes no difference to us how many of their [U.S.] advisers are there.” He compared the situation with Ukraine to Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008 and cautioned: “Don’t play with fire. Don’t mess with us.”

Appearing on the state TV show 60 Minutes on Monday, Igor Korotchenko, member of the Russian Defense Ministry’s Public Council and editor-in-chief of the National Defense magazine, nervously addressed the possibility that new U.S. sanctions against Russia might include disconnecting Russia from the SWIFT international payment system. Korotchenko threatened: “Disconnection of Russia from SWIFT, if that happens, I believe should be considered as a declaration of war against us—and acted upon accordingly. À la guerre comme à la guerre.”

The Russian Public Is Being Primed for Another of Putin’s Wars

Notorious nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia in the State Duma, was invited to participate in last Thursday’s broadcast of 60 Minutes. Known for his deliberately provocative statements, Zhirinovsky delivered another outrageous diatribe. “The smell of war is in the air,” he asserted, warning the West: “Stop yapping in the direction of Russia.” Zhirinovsky predicted: “We will meet the new year 2022 with a smile on our face, while NATO, Ukraine and others will be trembling in anticipation of war. If Ukrainians start it, we will destroy them.”

Host Olga Skabeeva expressed her hope that the escalating tensions wouldn’t ultimately lead to nuclear war, but quickly reiterated Putin’s earlier assertion that if that were to happen, the Russians “will go to heaven, as martyrs,” while the other side will simply die. Zhirinovsky retorted: “That’s exactly what is going to happen.” Grimacing, Skabeeva replied: “I hope not. I would like to live a while longer.”

Moon to align with 3 planets on Friday evening
By Brian Lada, Accuweather.com

Jupiter, Saturn and Venus have lined up in the evening sky and will continue to be prominent features throughout most of December, but this week, the trio will get a visitor.

The easy-to-find planets, paired with the approaching peak of the Geminid meteor shower, make December a great month for evening stargazing. The only caveat is that the weather can be fickle during the long December nights, often offering frosty conditions on nights that are not cloudy.

This week in particular will provide a good opportunity to view the planetary alignment as the crescent moon will join the show, eventually falling in line with Jupiter, Saturn and Venus.

The moon started off the week next to Venus, and as the week progresses, it will continue to move up the chain, passing by Saturn and Jupiter. These close encounters will be great opportunities for photographers and stargazers with a telescope hoping to see a planet and the moon in the same field of view.

By Friday evening, the moon will be at the top of the line, appearing in the southwestern sky shortly after nightfall.

This celestial alignment will be visible around the world and even from cities where light pollution washes out dimmer stars. The only thing that is needed to enjoy the show is cloud-free weather, but using a telescope or pair of binoculars can reveal some of the bigger moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

Unfortunately, clouds are a concern for large areas of the central and eastern United States on Friday evening due to a far-reaching storm that will extend from the Rockies to the Appalachians.

Folks stepping outside to see the celestial alignment should also keep their eyes peeled for a few shooting stars.

The Geminid meteor shower peaks on the night of Monday into Tuesday, but some meteors will streak through the sky in the nights leading up to the shower's culmination. It is also one of the only annual meteor showers that is active all night long with some meteors appearing as early as nightfall.

However, unlike the planetary alignment, the Geminids cannot be easily viewed in an area where there is human-created light pollution, so people are encouraged to take a trip to a darker area to enjoy the astronomical light show.''

1. Dark Sky Guide | Alberta Parks
   https://albertaparks.ca/albertaparksca/learning/parks-blog/dark-sky-guide

   2018-10-23 · Dark Sky Preserves are designated areas located all over the world where artificial lighting is reduced to a minimum and the reduction of light pollution is promoted and encouraged. Find out how light pollution affects wildlife and ecosystems, and lots …

Loud fireball streaks across central Alberta night sky

Karen Bartko and Phil Heidenreich 

© Courtesy: Kaitlyn Kostyniuk Image from a front-porch camera near Rocky Mountain House, Alta., on Dec. 7, 2021. A number of Albertans reported seeing a bright flash of light in the sky.

A fireball that lit up the night and emitted a loud boom heard by people across central Alberta was likely a meteor breaking up as it sped across the Tuesday night sky, according to at least one expert.

"What people got to see would have been a really bright meteor — something we call a fireball or a bolide," said Frank Florian, the Telus World of Science director of planetarium and space sciences.

A meteor is a piece of space dust or debris that burns up in the atmosphere and only becomes a meteorite once it hits the ground. A bolide is an exceptionally bright meteor that explodes. It can also be interchangeably called a fireball.

"This one here was quite spectacular, from what I understand, in terms of its brightness, as well as the booms that certain individuals in certain regions actually heard," Florian said.

Video: Bright meteor lights up the Alberta sky on Monday morning

The fireball created a stir on social media Tuesday night, with multiple people from Edmonton to Red Deer saying they heard a distinctive loud boom and saw a glow light up the sky.

Kaitlyn Kostyniuk, who lives about a 10-minute drive north of Rocky Mountain House, caught a glimpse of the flash on camera shortly before 9 p.m.

"I was getting ready for bed and my notification went off on my phone that there was a motion captured on our front-porch camera, which is weird because we're out in the middle of nowhere," she told Global News.

"I went to open up the video and check it out and I got a nice light show."

"To me at first it kind of looked like someone was holding a flashlight right outside my window because the light was just so bright and vivid. But then when I rewatched the video a few times, I could see that it was just something going through the sky."

Video: ‘My windows all shook’: Bright light streaks across Alberta night sky with loud boom

Read more:
Lighting up the sky: Canada’s history of meteorites

Florian said meteors can come from any direction.

"We get stuff falling on the Earth every single day — tons of it — but again, just being in the right place and right time to see something like this and getting these really large ones that create a very loud bang, you know, it's reminiscent of what happened to Chelyabinsk in Russia," he said.

That bright fireball on Feb. 15, 2013 lit up the morning sky, several times brighter than the sun, casting moving shadows as it crossed the sky.

Against the enormous stresses as it entered the atmosphere, the massive piece of rock began to break apart 30 kilometres above earth, sending out a sonic boom that shattered windows and injured nearly 1,000 people.

"This one here wasn't as powerful because it did rattle things, from what I understand," Florian said. "People further south of Edmonton did actually hear their windows rattling, their house kind of shake a bit."

Read more:
The Chelyabinsk meteor explosion, one year later

He did not hear or see it from his home on the northside, adding the reports he heard came from the southside and Leduc and Beaumont areas.

"I would kind of be leaning towards this thing coming down somewhere south or east of Leduc," he said, adding he watched the Rocky Mountain House doorbell camera and believes it was heading east from that community towards the Edmonton region.

Video: Loud fireball streaks across central Alberta night sky

Florian said the University of Alberta has cameras that can sometimes detect where space rocks fall, but they need a clear sky to operate properly and it was cloudy Tuesday night.

"We're really just going by what we see from doorbell cameras and, you know, eyewitness accounts of what they may have seen and if they actually heard anything from their location."

Read more:
Scientists hunting for meteorites after fireball reported in northern Alberta

Florian said because it gave off a loud boom, it most likely broke up into pieces.

"It's probably within a 60-kilometre radius from Leduc. There might be fragments on the ground and if people are out and about, they might see some little black rocks sitting on top of the snow."

Florian said there might be a couple of recoverable meteors that fall over Alberta each year.

"They're not totally rare — but they're rare enough that you have been right place, right time," he said, adding they also have to land in an open space to be easily found.

"These pieces have to land somewhere where you're not going to be going through, you know, dense bush and really rugged terrain.


"So the recovery of anything from these events is always a bit of a task."

Read more:
Dash-cam video shot in Edmonton area captures strange bright light falling from the sky

The American Meteor Society posted on its website that it had received a report "about a fireball seen over Alberta" from someone in Edmonton just after 9 p.m. The person reported that the light lasted about 7.5 seconds.

- with files from Nicole Mortillaro

WEATHER WARS
China successfully modified the weather to create clear skies, researchers say

Joshua Hawkins

© Provided by BGR weather modification

Researchers at a Beijing university say China’s weather authorities successfully used weather modification to ensure clear skies during a major celebration this year.

The Chinese Communist party celebrated its centenary on July 1 with a major celebration. The celebration took place in Tiananmen Square and included tens of thousands of attendees. According to a research paper from Tsinghua University, the Chinese weather authorities used weather modification to ensure the sky was clear and lower air pollution.

Chinese government used weather modification to lower air pollution

© Provided by BGR

What if you could summon rain to a location or clear out dark rain clouds by using technology and science? Weather modification isn’t a new idea. In fact, the Chinese government has reportedly been working on modifying the weather since 2008. That’s when it hosted the Olympic Games. Based on a new paper from Tsinghua University researchers, it has now managed to create artificial rain and bring down air pollution.

The paper was published on November 26, in a Chinese peer-reviewed journal called Environment Science (via South China Morning Post). The research shows that the Chinese government used cloud-seeding techniques to force rainfall the evening before the celebration event. This rainfall lowered the amount of PM2.5 pollution by more than two-thirds. That helped improve the air quality at the time from “moderate” to “good”, the South China Morning Post reports.

According to the paper, the event included tens of thousands of people packed into the square. Weather modification attempts began the evening before, and when the event began at 8 a.m. it included overcast conditions. Following the ceremony, a massive downpour settled over the square.
Using cloud seeding to force rainfall

Cloud seeding is a weather-modification technique that has been around for years. There are several different methods that can be used, including the use of salts, electric charges, and even infrared laser pulses. The researchers at Tsinghua University believe that the Chinese government used cloud seeding to try to lower the levels of pollution in the air.

In the months leading up to the event, air pollution in the Beijing area had increased. While many of the factories around the area had production halted, the air circulation in the region was slower than normal. This meant that a large amount of the pollution created by people and the factories began to stagnate around the region.

By forcing rainfall in the hours before the event, the Chinese government was able to lower the levels of pollution. Unfortunately, the Chinese government has not shared any details about what type of cloud seeding it used. Nor has it shared any future plans for weather modification at this time.

The post China successfully modified the weather to create clear skies, researchers say appeared first on BGR.

WOO HOO YAHOOS

GOP senate candidates allege Facebook's Zuckerberg spent millions to 'buy the presidency' for Biden — but there's not much backing up the claim

Jon Ward
·Chief National Correspondent
Wed, December 8, 2021

Blake Masters, Mark Zuckerberg and J.D. Vance. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Gage Skidmore/The Star News Network via Flickr, George Frey/Bloomberg via Getty Images, Jeff Dean/AP)

Two high-profile Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate, both of them close to tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, are supporting an effort to merge former President Donald Trump’s lies about a stolen 2020 election with accusations of meddling against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

In Arizona, Senate candidate Blake Masters said voters should “elect people who will tell you the truth.”

But Masters has made a falsehood part of his candidacy. “I think Trump won in 2020,” he said in a recent video.

Masters and J.D. Vance, a Republican running for Senate in Ohio, are seeking together to repackage Trump’s deception in a new narrative. Both are backed by $10 million from Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and data mining company Palantir Technologies.

Masters co-wrote a book with Thiel and is COO of Thiel’s investment firm. Vance worked for Thiel after publishing “Hillbilly Elegy,” his bestselling 2016 memoir, and raised money from Thiel to start a venture capital firm.

Masters at a “Rally to Protect Our Elections” in Phoenix on July 24. (Gage Skidmore/The Star News Network via Flickr)

Masters and Vance have jettisoned the wild and debunked allegations of outright fraud and moved on to a new conspiracy theory: that Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions to “buy the presidency for Joe Biden.”

It’s an allegation that has shown some purchase among the GOP’s pro-Trump grassroots. The Republican Party, which has historically been amenable to the interests of big business, is still in the throes of the former president’s trademark populism. And Trump still insists that the 2020 election was illegitimate, leading even his more sober-minded supporters to try and justify that thoroughly debunked idea.

Since the election, Trump and his allies have accused Big Tech — major Silicon Valley firms like Google, Twitter and Facebook — of intervening on Biden’s behalf. Conservatives have already alleged for years that these companies were actively trying to muzzle the right, and incidents like Twitter’s temporary blocking of a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop have served as a rallying cry for these complaints.

But there is little discussion on the right of how disinformation and lies — terms that are sometimes abused — are artificially amplified in ways that divide friends, neighbors and families, bringing fame and fortune to those willing to play the demagogue.

Yet were it not for an early investment from Thiel, the Facebook we know today might not even exist. In 2004 he became the company’s first outside investor, giving Zuckerberg’s nascent behemoth a much-needed dose of capital and credibility. Even as he propels the candidacies of Masters and Vance — who are both seeking to blame Facebook’s CEO for buying the election — Thiel still sits on Facebook’s board of directors.

Thiel’s support of Masters and Vance has created an unusual dynamic where two first-time candidates, campaigning for federal office at opposite ends of the country, appear to be something like running mates.

Entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. (John Lamparski/Getty Images)

“Tech billionaire Peter Thiel is going all-in to support two of his proteges’ campaigns for the US Senate — and his plan involves swanky California dinners with high-dollar donors,” read a New York Post story last month. “Rise of a megadonor: Thiel makes a play for the Senate,” blared a Politico headline in May.

Masters and Vance, for their part, don’t seem to mind being grouped together. In October, they outlined their allegations against Zuckerberg — and against Big Tech more broadly — in a New York Post article they authored together.

“Facebook — both the product and the wealth generated for its executives — was leveraged to elect a Democratic president,” Masters and Vance wrote. “At a minimum, the company’s leaders should be forced to answer for this before a congressional committee."

The pair essentially argued that Biden beat Trump in 2020 because Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated $400 million of their personal fortune to help localities run elections during the pandemic, and that money helped too many Democrats vote.

The complaint is not that votes were stolen or added illegally. It’s that there were too many legal votes cast in places that lean Democratic and that Zuckerberg and Chan’s money was in fact funneled to places where it would turn out more Democratic voters and help Biden.

Zuckerberg and Chan, who donated much of the money to a group called the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), deny the allegation. Ben Labolt, a spokesman for the couple, told Yahoo News that “nearly 2,500 election jurisdictions from 49 states applied for and received funds, including urban, suburban, rural, and exurban counties … and more Republican than Democratic jurisdictions applied for and received the funds.”

Election workers at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia process mail-in and absentee ballots on Nov. 3, 2020. (Matt Slocum/AP)

Unquestionably, examining the impact of so much money from a pair of individuals in any sphere related to the election is a legitimate endeavor. But so far, the conclusions about the impact of the Zuckerberg and Chan money go far beyond what any evidence shows, and are being dropped into an information environment already deeply poisoned by Trump’s relentless campaign of lies and baseless claims.

Neither the Masters nor the Vance campaign responded to a request for comment.

The anti-Zuckerberg message has been building for months on the right. Last year, the Capitol Research Center (CRC), a conservative nonprofit, began publishing a series of articles claiming that the money from Zuckerberg and Chan helped Biden win the election.

CTCL is a Chicago-based nonprofit founded in 2012 to advocate for election reform. Complaints about the Zuckerberg-Chan donations stem in part from the fact that top leaders at CTCL have worked for Democratic candidates or causes in the past, and that they have posted comments on social media indicating a dislike of Trump.

CRC, the conservative group, wrote that the money from CTCL “did not apparently violate any election laws” but that “many of its grants targeted key Democratic-leaning counties and cities in battleground states.”

“While CTCL sent grants to many counties that Republican incumbent Donald Trump won in these states, the largest grants went to Biden counties such as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the greater Atlanta metropolitan area,” CRC wrote.

In other words, the donation spent more money on highly populated urban areas that are essential to Democratic fortunes in swing states, but that also require far greater sums of money to conduct elections.

However, if the argument is that Philadelphia helped Biden win Pennsylvania, a close look at vote totals doesn’t support that argument.

Trump did better in Philadelphia in 2020 than he did in 2016, winning 18 percent of the vote last year compared with just 15 percent in 2016. In a state decided by only 80,000 votes, the vote totals in Philadelphia made it closer for Trump, rather than for Biden.

Then-President Donald Trump at a campaign rally at Erie International Airport in Pennsylvania on Oct. 20, 2020. (Evan Vucci/AP)

Biden won the state primarily because of his ability to do better than Hillary Clinton had four years prior in the suburban counties around Philadelphia.

Nonetheless, by this past summer, roughly a dozen Republican state legislatures had introduced or passed laws banning or restricting the ability of private money to flow into election administration. But CTCL has said that in many states there is a “systemic underfunding of elections” — a notion supported by nonpartisan election experts.

Meanwhile, it has become fashionable among Republicans to announce a ban on “Zuck Bucks” or “Zuckerbucks,” as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis did in October.

Zuckerberg and Chan donated the money in September and October 2020 after election administrators from around the country and from both parties said the strain of the COVID-19 pandemic was going to require a special infusion of money to pay for everything that was needed.

The federal government allocated about $400 million through emergency funding in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, a stimulus package signed into law by Trump in March 2020. But election administrators and outside experts said much more was needed.

Republicans in Congress blocked attempts to spend more money for election administration, and a few months later Zuckerberg and Chan donated their own personal funds. One investigation by American Public Media into the donations said the money was spent on “increased pay for poll workers, expanded early voting sites and extra equipment to more quickly process millions of mailed ballots.”

The Masters and Vance op-ed in the New York Post relies largely on accusations made by another researcher, a former economics professor at the University of Dallas named William Doyle. Doyle has alleged that Zuckerberg paid for a “takeover of government election operations” and that the tech CEO “bought” the 2020 election and “significantly increased Joe Biden’s vote margin in key swing states.”

Vance at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, in July. (Jeff Dean/AP)

Doyle is planning to publish more articles on the subject, and in late December or January he intends to issue his first actual report, J.P. Arlinghaus, a spokesman for Doyle, told Yahoo News. Arlinghaus and Doyle are part of the Caesar Rodney Institute for American Election Research, a nonprofit organization set up "specifically to study the 2020 election,” Arlinghaus said.

The one item Doyle has published so far claims that the 2020 election “wasn’t stolen — it was likely bought.” According to Arlinghaus, the semantic distinction distances his argument from those made by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, lawyer Sidney Powell or MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who have all made wild claims about supposed efforts to rig the vote total for Biden.

“Unlike some advocates whose claims seem made to attempt an overturning of the 2020 result but which have not yet had solidly sourced evidence, we are pursuing activities and spending that are publicly uncontested and known through public records,” Arlinghaus told Yahoo News.

Arlinghaus also said, “We aren’t making assertions we wish were true, but rather we are interested only in meticulous study of the evidence wherever it leads.”

Doyle’s op-ed complains that more of Zuckerberg and Chan’s money went to large cities than to rural areas, where Republicans tend to be much stronger.

But that’s not de facto evidence of partisan intent. Highly populated localities need more resources to run an election where there are far more voters.

A more substantive complaint is that in metro areas of swing states, more Democratic-leaning portions of those regions got Zuckerberg funding while more moderate metro areas, with higher numbers of Republican voters, did not. Doyle alleges this happened in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where of the four major counties, the two that Biden won — Dallas and Tarrant counties — got Zuckerberg grants through CTCL, and the two that Trump won — Denton and Collin counties — did not.

But CTCL has said it gave grants to any counties that requested them. And in addition, the two big Dallas-Fort Worth counties that Trump won — and that did not get Zuckerberg funding — nonetheless saw a bigger increase in voter turnout than the two counties that did get the money from Zuckerberg and Chan.

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg at the Breakthrough Prize Ceremony in 2019 in Mountain View, Calif. (Peter Barreras/Invision/AP)

Trump carried the state of Texas with nearly 5.9 million votes, a substantial increase over the 4.7 million votes he won there in 2016.

The right-wing narrative is that without groups like CTCL, and others like the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), which awarded about $65 million in grants — most of that from Zuckerberg and Chan — Democrats would have had less of a turnout boost while Republicans voted in higher numbers without any help.

“It is part of the overall election denial and the attempts to weaken American democracy by making just completely false claims about the election,” David Becker, CEIR’s executive director, said.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, said that “even in the most challenging of environments, 2020 was Ohio’s most successful election ever” and that Zuckerberg and Chan’s money — allocated through CEIR grants — was “vital to achieving that mission.” Trump won Ohio by some 500,000 votes in 2020, an improvement on his 2016 showing.

Doyle also argued that the people at CTCL overseeing the disbursement of hundreds of millions of dollars to local election offices were “nominally non-partisan — but demonstrably ideological.” There is an entire page at the Caesar Rodney Institute website showcasing social media posts from three CTCL members that indicate their political views lean left.

Doyle’s website declares, “The 2020 General Election is not over and done with.”

The notion that Big Tech is in cahoots with the Democratic Party is widespread on the right. And it’s promoted by authors like the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway, whose book “Rigged” provides much of the material for others in the right-wing media ecosphere.

In that book, Hemingway claims the Zuckerberg and Chan money had a partisan impact, but she also talks about mainstream media bias and decisions by social media companies like Facebook and Twitter to deplatform Trump and other Republicans. And she points to efforts to suppress the circulation of stories critical of Democrats, most notably the one involving Hunter Biden’s laptop.

But Hemingway, a former Trump critic turned stalwart defender, contends that what appeared to be nonpartisan efforts to help people vote during a pandemic were really a plot to defeat Trump.

The problem with this argument is that higher-turnout elections have not been shown to help either party, even as many partisans on both sides continue to insist that higher turnout helps Democrats.

In addition, apart from Trump, the GOP did exceptionally well in the 2020 election, which saw huge turnout among both Republicans and Democrats.

That dynamic continued in last month’s election in Virginia — where Republican Glenn Youngkin was elected governor with the most votes of any statewide official in the history of the commonwealth.

Pentagon UFO Rapid Response Teams Ordered Up by Congress



Travis Tritten
Tue, December 7, 2021, 

Teams of Pentagon and intelligence community experts would rapidly respond to military UFO sightings and conduct field investigations under newly unveiled defense legislation set to pass Congress.

Lawmakers also want scientific and technical experts to analyze data about the objects, or what the military calls unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, as well as any recovered materials or medical effects, according to the text of the annual defense authorization bill released Tuesday.

The bill requires all of the findings to be collected under a new joint UAP office and delivered to Congress in annual reports and biannual briefings to defense committees, marking the most significant UFO legislation ever passed in the U.S. following high-profile encounters with unknown objects reported by the Navy.


Read Next: The National Guard Is Stuck in the Middle of Political Infighting, and It's Getting Worse

"Protecting our national security interests means knowing who and what are flying in U.S. airspace," Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), a sponsor of the legislation, said in a statement to Military.com. "Right now, our system of tracking and identifying UAPs is scattered throughout the Department of Defense and other departments and agencies of the federal government."

The expansive measures come just two weeks after the Pentagon announced a new group aimed at collecting and analyzing UAP incidents, sending a clear message that Congress felt the department's response was inadequate.

The Navy confirmed the authenticity of three infra-red videos showing unknown objects recorded during training exercises off San Diego in 2004 and off the East Coast in 2015. Over the past four years, fighter jet pilots and crew members have publicly said they witnessed unexplainable maneuvering, including a "Tic Tac"-shaped object with no visible means of propulsion and a flying cube inside of a sphere.

Theories on UAP range from drones or unmanned aircraft built by China or Russia to extraterrestrial or interdimensional visitors.

The new legislation to collect and analyze data on such incidents was sponsored in separate bills by Gallego and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and was cosponsored by Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

In addition to the rapid response field investigators, Congress also wants the Pentagon and intelligence community to create a science plan to understand UAP that exceed the "known state of the art in science or technology."

The bill says the information could be used to justify requests for funding in the future to "replicate any such advanced characteristics and performance" -- or reverse-engineer the UAPs.

Incidents around nuclear facilities are also noted for special attention.

Congress has never before passed legislation on UFOs, and certainly nothing near the scope of the defense bill language, said Douglas Dean Johnson, a researcher who closely follows UAP-related developments in government, and who has reported extensively on the Gallego and Gillibrand proposals.

"I have looked, and I think you will not find anything. You will find cases where Congress engaged in discourse on the issue," Johnson said.

Famous UFO initiatives in the 1940s through the 1950s such as Project Blue Book, under the Air Force, and the Condon report, sparked during a congressional committee hearing, were done without any legislation.

Decades later, the military is set to embark on a new study of flying objects, but the defense bill makes clear it won't be on the Pentagon's own terms -- and that much of the findings will be shared with Congress.

In June, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks ordered the Pentagon to create its UAP group on the same day the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a long-awaited report about the military's encounters. That report found 80 incidents of unknown objects captured by multiple sensors and 18 sightings of objects that showed unusual flight characteristics.

The ODNI report concluded that UAP could pose a national security threat. "Additional rigorous analysis [sic] are necessary by multiple teams or groups of technical experts to determine the nature and validity of these data," the report said.

The Pentagon said its new monitoring and analysis group, called the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, or AOIMSG, would be a more organized way to collect and analyze the reports.

"We'll be as transparent as we can, but no, I don't want to leave you with the impression that there'll be sort of a regular drumbeat of, you know, of some kind of report that gets posted on a website, you know, every couple months," Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said when asked whether any UAP findings would be publicly released.

The group is run by Ronald Moultrie, the under secretary of defense for intelligence and security, and overseen by an executive council headed by Moultrie and Lt. Gen. James J. Mingus, director for operations for the Joint Staff.

-- Travis Tritten can be reached at travis.tritten@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Tritten.

Related: Air Force Veterans Who Are UFO True Believers Return to Newly Attentive Washington

 China's moon rover spots a mysterious cube-shaped object, and the internet is intrigued

Jordan Mendoza

Tue, December 7, 2021,

For the past two years, China's Yutu 2 rover has been roaming across the Von Karman crater on the far side of the moon. And on its journey, it spotted a mysterious cube-shaped object.

According to Space.com, the China National Space Administration keeps a log of each of the rover's lunar days, which is around 29 Earth days, according to NASA. On its 36th lunar day, the rover spotted a cube-shaped object on the horizon about 260 feet away. Andrew Jones, a Space.com reporter tracking China's space endeavors, said officials called it a "mystery house." Here is what the object looks like:

Photos of the object have gone viral on Twitter,

 and some users have come up with some interesting, 

and funny, theories on what it might be. 

On the other hand, some people were wondering

 if this cube-shaped object could mean something dangerous:

Though there is no actual answer for what the cube is,

 it probably isn't something that is going to destroy Earth. 

Jones said the most likely explanation is it's actually a large boulder 

that appeared after an impact event. 

But China officials are intrigued by the object, and Yutu 2 

will be traversing through the region and avoiding craters

 to get closer to it. It will take the rover two to three lunar days, 

or up to three months, to approach the object. Still, some are

 hoping for complete chaos.

Follow Jordan Mendoza on Twitter: @jordan_mendoza5.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:

 China's rover spots mysterious cube on moon

Electric Sky wins DARPA grant to work on focused power beaming system for drones


Alan Boyle
Tue, December 7, 2021,

Electric Sky will explore adapting its wireless charging architecture to power a swarm of drones. (U.S. Army CCDC Army Research Laboratory Illustration)

A startup called Electric Sky says it’s begun building its first Whisper Beam transmitter for providing tightly focused wireless power to drones in flight, thanks to a $225,000 award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Electric Sky will use the six-month Phase I award, granted through DARPA’s Small Business Innovation Research program, to explore ways to adapt its wireless architecture to power a swarm of drones.

The first phase of the project calls for building and testing a lab-bench demonstration system that would operate at short distances. Those experiments are expected to supply data that can be used to upgrade the system for higher power and longer distances.

Electric Sky has offices in the Seattle area as well as in Midland, Texas. Its CEO is Robert Millman, who previously served as general counsel for Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture. Former XCOR Aerospace CEO Jeff Greason is the company’s co-founder, chief technologist and the inventor of the Whisper Beam system.

The company’s mission is to pioneer novel electric power and propulsion technologies for aircraft and flight vehicles of all sizes.

Electric Sky isn’t the only venture focusing on wireless power for drones. Seattle-based PowerLight Technologies, for instance, is working on a laser-based system that could power up unpiloted aerial vehicles as well as 5G base stations. But Electric Sky’s proprietary technology takes a different approach.

Laser and microwave beams typically start out strong but get weaker as they travel outward. In contrast, Whisper Beam’s transmissions start out weak but get stronger near the receiver.

“Whisper Beam technology is the electromagnetic equivalent of a whispering gallery,” Millman said in a news release. “In a whispering gallery a single listener across the room can hear the speaker but no one else can, not even people standing directly between the speaker and listener. The sound is too weak for them to hear.”

The radio waves sent out by Electric Sky’s transmitter self-focus at the receiver, enabling the drone to draw kilowatts of power in any kind of weather.

“It’s a myth that long-distance power transmission is impossible,” Greason said. “It’s just never been economical. This new method reduces the cost of the ground transmitter and the size of the vehicle’s onboard receiver.”

Greason said the beaming system could be used with any type of electric aircraft.

“Whisper Beam technology is particularly helpful in the power-hungry phases of takeoff and climb, enabling vehicle designers to meet other requirements to extend range, enhance flight safety, reduce peak loads on batteries, and shorten ground turnaround times,” he said.

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Ursa Major raises $85M to disrupt the vertically integrated launch sector



Aria Alamalhodaei
Tue, December 7, 2021

The launch sector is getting crowded. Many of the biggest players are building their own rocket engines, but space startup Ursa Major is betting that many new launch providers would rather outsource the engine than build it in-house.

Six years after being founded by former SpaceX and Blue Origin propulsion engineer Joe Laurienti, the company is ready to scale up its ambitions, and it just closed its largest funding round to date to do so: an $85 million Series C led by funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, as well as participation from XN, Alsop Louie, Alpha Edison, Dolby Family Ventures, KCK, Space Capital, Explorer 1, Harpoon Ventures and others.

“A lot of what we're trying to bring to market is that next step,” Laurienti explained. “We want to evolve this industry into much faster life cycles.”

To get there, Ursa Major wants to rapidly manufacture engines -- as many as one per week in 2022, with two per week to follow. (Currently, it takes a single employee around five days to assemble an engine and up to a few weeks to get it ready to ship to customers.) The company has scored a handful of commercial customers, including Phantom Space and Stratolaunch, and R&D contracts with the government, though its engines have yet to see space.

“It made sense even six years ago that there was going to be a pretty complex ecosystem to launch because space was going to need so much accessibility,” Laurienti said. While the cost to launch has declined, the demand for space launch services is only expected to increase through the rest of the decade. Fortune Business Insights estimates that the global market size for launch will grow from $12.67 billion in 2019 to up to $26.16 billion by 2027.

But rocket engines are one of the most challenging pieces of equipment to develop; one only has to look to Blue Origin’s bumpy efforts to develop BE-4 engines for United Launch Alliance -- or Elon Musk’s letter to employees about a “Raptor production crisis” -- to see that engine development is no easy task.

The company has two products: the Hadley, a 5,000-pound thrust liquid oxygen and kerosene engine which is entering production now; and the Ripley, the next-gen engine that’s 10 times more powerful than Hadley with a 50,000-pound thrust. The company is booked to deliver more than 50 Hadley engines next year, with the Ripley coming into production in the next couple of years, Laurienti said.

He likened Ursa Major to a company like Intel, which is constantly innovating more powerful processors and outsourcing that expertise to brands like Dell and Lenovo. “We really like the notion that we are a technology development company, and the companies that are flying rockets today should not be flying the same engine that they architected for their rocket 10 years ago. That's the paradigm we see in vertical integration.”

The company has a facility in Colorado where it makes the engines, which are largely 3D-printed, and that’s collocated with the company’s three test stands where each engine is tested before it sees a customer. Ursa Major is planning on using the new capital to scale up its manufacturing operations and to begin development on additional engines.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
Why sand mafias are forming and what science has to say about it

Mike Szydlowski

Columbia Daily Tribune
Wed, December 8, 2021

Great Sand Dunes National Park is in Colorado.

Who doesn’t love a movie where the good guys take out some big organized crime or mafia ring?

Most often we associate organized crime with illegal drugs, weapons or money laundering. However, have you ever seen a movie that has a sand mafia in it?

To be clear, have you ever seen a movie where there is an organized crime ring full of corruption, theft and murders while the bad guys smuggle bags of sand?

Probably not — but believe it or not, it’s happening in real life. Yes, the world now has sand mafias with the same kind of high-stakes drama and crime that we have come to know in more traditional organized crime groups. Let’s take a look at why this is happening.
Where sand starts

The process of weathering creates sand. Rocks break apart and continue to break apart into smaller and smaller bits. Eventually the bits are small enough to be called sand.

Wind and water create most of the sand on Earth. There seems to be an unlimited amount of this stuff, which reminds us how old the Earth is.

Sand is made from whatever rock broke apart. Different parts of the world have different kinds of sand. The typical white sand we think of is made from tiny bits of weathered coral. There are several black beaches in the world, and that comes from eroded basalt from volcanoes.

Hawaii also has a green beach and that sand is weathered from green olivine rock. There is a pink beach in the Bahamas, and that comes from bits of weathered red shells mixed in with the white sand. There is a red beach in Canada that is made from weathered sandstone.

And there are even a few purple beaches that get their color from eroding manganese garnet rock.
Disappearing sand

Now that you know how sand is made, it’s time to talk about the problem. We make so many things from sand. Of all the many tons of things we mine from the Earth, sand makes up 85% of the mass of mined materials.

It goes to make roads, bricks, buildings, glass and new beaches. Wait — what? But sand comes from beaches, right?

Some beaches naturally have sand, but many coastlines don’t and that sand is trucked in for the enjoyment of visitors. When the next big storm comes in, the sand washes away and the beaches have to be remade with tons more sand.

Some island countries even use sand to increase the size of their country. That takes a lot of sand. And finally, some of the coastal or island countries are buying tons of sand to try and combat the rising sea level due to climate change.

The United States alone purchases $8.6 billion worth of sand a year for construction and beach repairs.

Countries are simply running out of sand and they need it badly. Because of this, organized crime groups in India, Italy and other countries are illegally trading sand and making huge profits. The operation consists of bribing politicians, violent conflicts and even murder. The countries of Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Cambodia are all getting into heated conflicts … over sand.

You may think about the deserts full of what seems to be limitless sand and wonder what the problem is. The problem is that desert sand is created by wind erosion. Wind-created sand is very round. It is so round that it cannot hold up in construction or beach applications. Therefore, desert sand is not a usable resource for the applications countries are begging for.

So what is the solution? Nobody really knows. Sand has always been thought of as such a limitless resource that nobody has really considered what to do when it runs out. People are now starting to think about it, but they are way behind as the problem is already here and will get worse over time.

Next time you need to fill that sandbox with sand, expect the price to cost a bit more over the next few years. At least in this country we don’t have to buy it from the mafia — yet.

Mike Szydlowski is science coordinator for Columbia Public Schools.