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GOOD: Back from the brink of extinction, blue whales return to South Georgia.

SHOCKER: Opioid deaths in young Americans often involve other drugs.

I MENTIONED ELON MUSK’S ANNOUNCEMENT OF A HIGH ALTITUDE STARSHIP TEST, but I want to particularly break out this bit:

Elon Musk said in a follow-up tweet on Wednesday that lots could go wrong in this first high-altitude test. “Lot of things need to go right,” the billionaire said. When asked on Twitter what he thought the odds were of Starship landing in one piece, he answered “1-in-3.”

He’s willing to learn through iterative failure. NASA is not, which is why he’s progressing so much faster.

UPDATE: My friend Dale Amon comments on Facebook:

Just got around to watching the Nov 24 launch. 7th landing for that particular Falcon 9. They are building experience. I wonder what the life span is going to turn out to be?

I’m quite sure that is a question that many folk are looking forward to finding out. You can design your arse off, but it doesn’t matter a whit until you actually do the testing.

I’ve been smiling for quite some time about how Elon has solved the problem which everyone has been complaining about for decades. Flight rate. How do you get enough business? The answer is to start another business that makes a lot of money and is a regular customer. The beauty of Starlink isn’t just that it is a money maker. It is also that it is going to require a continuous high rate of satellite replacement since these things are all in LEO and not intended for 20 year runs like the billion dollar GEO sats.

More importantly, with the rate of technology progression still accelerating (hey, that singularity ain’t so far off any more!) you actually want assets that are upgradeable or replaceable, because otherwise you are stuck with last week’s tech and losing market to the guy who launched this week’s tech.

Watch for Starlink service to improve at a jaw dropping rate.

Excellent point.

ANOTHER UPDATE (Charlie): Here’s a tease from my upcoming Stack Overflow blog article:

This is the world of the SpaceX Starlink program. According to SpaceX, the Starlink program has two purposes:
* To provide fast, reliable Internet connectivity to the billions of people who don’t have it now,
* and to use the revenues to make life interplanetary.
Stop and contemplate that for a moment: world-wide Internet to provide the revenue needed to colonize the planets. Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, along with Tesla, the Boring Company, and many others, is not a man who sets easy goals.

NOT ONLY IS 2020 STRANGER THAN WE IMAGINED, IT IS STRANGER THAN WE CAN IMAGINE: South Africa considers ‘dimming’ the sun to avoid running out of water.

It sounds like a plot lifted from a science fiction flick, but scientists have suggested permanently dimming the sun to save South Africa from deadly dry spells.

The hairbrained scheme would involve pumping vast quantities of gas into the atmosphere above Cape Town to preserve local water supplies.

It evokes the plot of 2007 sci-fi movie sunshine, in which scientists head off on a daring mission to reignite the dying sun with a nuclear bomb in 2057.

Put forward by experts at the University of Cape Town, it’s hoped the plan would dramatically reduce the chances of a water crisis engulfing the city.

Fears over a “Day Zero” drought – the point at which there’s not enough water for everyone – hitting the region have been brewing for years.

With the climate crisis tightening its grip on our planet, the chances of such a dry spell hitting Cape Town will triple by 2100, according to research.

In a study published last week in the journal Environmental Research Letters, scientists outlined one bonkers way to avoid such a catastrophe.

The plan is controversial, South African newspaper The Mail and Guardian reports, both due to its climate impacts and geopolitical implications.

In their paper, the researchers suggest injecting particles of sulfur dioxide gas into Earth’s upper atmosphere above Cape Town.

The gas would form a huge cloud above the city that reflects sunlight, dimming the environment on the ground below.

According to researchers, the sci-fi tactic could reduce the chances of a Day Zero drought hitting Cape Town by 2100 by up to 90 percent.

Former Obama “Science” “Czar” Robert Holdren, your time to shine (or in this case, reduce it) has come at last!

NOT ONLY IS 2020 STRANGER THAN WE IMAGINED, IT IS STRANGER THAN WE CAN IMAGINE: Deer steals hunter’s gun, probably gearing up for the Apocalypse.

HOW THE COVID NUMBERS WORK:

The U.S. counts coronavirus deaths differently from other countries. Indeed, we are counting deaths differently than we have for any other disease.

“The case definition is very simplistic,” Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of Illinois Department of Public Health, explains. “It means, at the time of death, it was a COVID positive diagnosis. That means, that if you were in hospice and had already been given a few weeks to live, and then you also were found to have COVID, that would be counted as a COVID death. It means, technically even if you died of [a] clear alternative cause, but you had COVID at the same time, it’s still listed as a COVID death.” . . . Beyond including people with the virus who clearly didn’t die from it, the numbers are inflated by counting people who weren’t even infected. New York has classified many cases as coronavirus deaths even when postmortem tests have been negative. The diagnosis can be based on symptoms, which are often similar to those of the seasonal flu.

Just a reminder.

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THE TAWK OF THE TOWN:

This book takes in a lot of territory, all solidly researched and footnoted. But dry? Fuhgeddaboutit. White is particularly entertaining when she discusses underworld slang from the city’s ‘sensitive lines of business’ and she’s also good on song lyrics, from Tin Pan Alley days to hip-hop. She dwells lovingly on the ‘sharp, smart, swift, and sure’ lyrics of the golden age of American popular music – roughly, the first half of the 20th century. It was a time when New York lyricists, nearly all of them Jewish, preserved in the American Songbook not only the vernacular of the Lower East Side but also the colloquialisms of Harlem and the snappy patois of advertising.

You Talkin’ to Me? is engrossing and often funny. In dissecting the exaggerated New York accents of Bugs Bunny and Groucho Marx, White observes that ‘Bugs even wielded his carrot like Groucho’s cigar’. And she says that the word ‘fuck’ is so ubiquitous in Gotham that it has lost its edge, so a New Yorker in need of a blistering insult must look elsewhere. ‘There may be some truth to the old joke that in Los Angeles, people say “Have a nice day” and mean “Fuck off,” while in New York, people say “Fuck off” and mean “Have a nice day.”’

Norman Gorman called and said, “Read the whole thing, already!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bJk83OM3zQ

IF THIS IS TRUE, THEN THE FATALITY RATE IS AWFULLY LOW: Government Model Suggests U.S. COVID-19 Cases Could Be Approaching 100 Million. “The model, created by scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, calculated that the true number of infections is about eight times the reported number, which includes only the cases confirmed by a laboratory test.”

IT SEEMS AS IF TRUMP’S THE ONLY ONE NOT GUILTY OF RUSSIAN COLLUSION: MIT accepted over $51 million from Russian foundation later deemed security risk by U.S. government.

ROBERT FISK, FABRICATOR AND FRAUDSTER:

Fisk’s reputation among scholars and journalists in the Middle East was destroyed by years of distortions of the truth in his work on Syria. But even before he started embracing pro-Assad conspiracy theories, Fisk’s relationship with the truth was widely scrutinised. It is a monumental absurdity that we have a word, “Fisking”, in the Cambridge English Dictionary derived from his surname, without any mention of him.

The dictionary defines it as “the act of making an argument seem wrong or stupid by showing the mistakes in each of its points, or an instance of doing this.” The frequency with which falsehoods can be found in Fisk’s work wasn’t so much an open secret as a widely shared joke understood by all who worked in the industry.

Fisk got away with it because he always got away with it. The falsehoods he published were often tolerated, excused or dismissed because people agreed with the stories he was telling. But our job as journalists, especially in the Middle East, isn’t to tell stories — it’s to tell the truth.

Following Fisk’s passing, away from the newspaper obituaries, an entirely different narrative was expressed by those who saw him up close. Syrian journalist Asser Khatab wrote an excoriating article for the online platform Raseef22, sharing his experiences of working alongside him in Homs, including his lack of Arabic and his reliance on a translator connected with the Syrian mukhabarat (secret police).

Of course, Fisk’s greatest online moment will always be his column from December of 2001: My Beating is a Symbol of this Filthy War.

NO: UVA prof calls for ‘Secretary of Equity.’

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I MENTIONED THIS STORY EARLIER, BUT TYLER O’NEIL HAS MORE: Justice Is Coming: Carter Page Takes Comey, McCabe, Strzok to Court in $75M Obamagate Lawsuit.

WELL: Pennsylvania State Judge Upholds Halt To Certification, Finds Likelihood Mail-In Balloting Procedures Violate PA Constitution. “A Pennsylvania state court Judge has issued a preliminary injunction preventing Pennsylvania from taking any further steps to perfect its certification of the election, including but not limited to appointment of electors and transmission of necessary paperwork to the Electoral College, pending further court hearings and rulings. The ruling upholds an injunction from earlier in the week, and is significant because of the findings made in the Opinion released tonight. The case has been somewhat under the radar, because it doesn’t involve claims of fraud. It appears to be a pretty straight legal argument. This is not the federal court case that has received a lot of press attention and in which the Third Circuit Court of Appeals denied relief.”

Full opinion here.

WHERE DO I GET ONE OF THESE? Seen on Facebook:

WHEN FRENCH INTELLECTUALS THINK THE AMERICAN LEFT HAS GOTTEN TOO CRAZY… France: Prominent Academics and Macron Administration Attack American Anti-Racist Ideology as “Anti-White.”

JORDAN PETERSON: HOW THE LEFT MANUFACTURED A FOLK DEVIL.

Over the past few days, Jordan Peterson’s critics have been doing their utmost to publicise his forthcoming book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. The famous clinical psychologist announced the publication on his YouTube channel on Monday, and within hours the book was being widely denounced on social media for its hateful content. This is quite a feat of the collective imagination, given that nobody has read it yet.

Much of the furore has come about because employees at the Canadian branch of the publisher, Penguin Random House, have called for the book to be cancelled. After multiple complaints were filed, they confronted their management at a meeting in which some burst into tears and shared their stories of how the evil Professor Peterson had caused such emotional havoc in their lives due to his ‘problematic’ opinions. According to a report in Vice, ‘one co-worker discussed how Peterson had radicalised their father and another talked about how publishing the book will negatively affect their non-binary friend’.

This is just the latest example of a new trend of activist employees threatening to strike for ideological reasons. At the audio-streaming company Spotify, workers recently demanded editorial control of Joe Rogan’s newly acquired podcast series, after they had successfully removed a number of episodes deemed to be controversial. At publishing giant Hachette, employees threatened to walk out after JK Rowling’s children’s book, The Ickabog, was announced. All these internal revolts have failed, presumably because figures such as Rowling, Rogan and Peterson are too popular to cancel. One wonders how a less lucrative artist would fare under such circumstances.

As Ray Bradbury predicted in Fahrenheit 451, books will be burned to protect everyone’s feelings as much as to block the content within them. But I’m not sure if even he would have predicted that it would be the publishers’ staffers who would be manning the flamethrowers. Of course, in Penguin’s case, their bosses are partially to blame as well:

On Wednesday, America’s Newspaper of Record had a simple cure: Staffers Crying Over Jordan Peterson Book Cured By Forcing Them To Read Jordan Peterson Book. Those who manage such a crybully workforce would benefit from reading Peterson as well.

OF COURSE THEY DO: Democratic Senators Announce National Face Mask Legislation.

THE PRESS KEEPS TELLING US THIS IS A FRINGE VIEW, BUT IT’S NOT: Most back election recounts, GOP wants Trump to run again. “New polling shows that a sizable majority of all voters back the president’s demands for recounts in states where the final count was razor thin. . . . In a poll from McLaughlin & Associates for Newsmax TV, 67% of all voters said it is fair for Trump to ask for recounts where the final margin was 1% or closer.”

THIS IS WHY UNITED IS HAPPY TO PROVIDE CHARTER FLIGHTS FOR PFIZER’S VACCINE: