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Super controversial Brilliant light Power aka blacklight power claims to be generating bursts of megawatt power and claim independent validation

Wikipedia article.

Juno Makes It to Jupiter Orbit (submitted to Breaking News)

"Welcome to Jupiter!" a mission commentator announced just after the burn ended, eliciting a second round of cheers and then, a few moments later, a standing ovation.

      "It feels great -- this is phenomenal!" Geoff Yoder, acting Associate Administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said when the celebration died down.

      Space.com reports that:

NASA's robotic Juno probe began circling the solar system's largest planet tonight (July 4), ending a nearly five-year journey through deep space and becoming the first spacecraft to enter Jupiter orbit since NASA's Galileo mission did so in 1995.

      The milestone came late tonight, as Juno fired its main engine in a crucial 35-minute burn that slowed the probe down enough to be captured by Jupiter's powerful gravity. That burn started at 11:18 p.m. EDT (0318 GMT Tuesday) and ended on schedule at 11:53 p.m. [Photos: NASA's Juno Mission to Jupiter]

Former E.U. science adviser Anne Glover on U.K. research after Brexit (Submitted June 29, rejected July 10)

      Anne Glover, is a Scottish biologist and academic. She was Professor of Molecular biology and Cell biology at the University of Aberdeen before being named Vice Principal for External Affairs and Dean for Europe. She also served as Chief Scientific Adviser to the President of the European Commission from 2012 to 2014 [Wikipedia].

      So, she knows her way around science and EU...and the politics of the EU. (With a tiny budget and an ill-defined mandate while she was the Chief Scientific Advisor, she was often frustrated in her attempts to get politicians to acknowledge scientific evidence when it went against positions they held.)

      In an earlier SN article about science in the UK after Brexit, she was quoted: "Our success in research and resulting impact relies heavily on our ability to be a full part of European Union science arrangements and it is hard to see how they can be maintained upon a Brexit."

      Science has published a Q&A with Anne Glover about UK research after Brexit in which she expands upon that thought. Some quotes from that article

It's very early days, I know, but it's hard for me to see under the current climate, whatever government there will be in the U.K., that they would be able to make up that shortfall [in lost EU research funding]. It's not my natural state, but I'm very pessimistic about how we will maintain scientific excellence. Just even getting the best minds from around the world to work with us, whether that's by attracting them to come here or the ability for us to go elsewhere and to work in partnership with people. There will be barriers to this.

      [...]

        I think it is very likely that Scotland will have a second vote on independence. By staying in the U.K. we are now being pulled out of the E.U. against our will. The impact of the research we do in Scotland relative to our [gross domestic product] is No. 1 in the world. So we are a science nation and we rely on the best in the world coming to work here and our ability to go elsewhere. I hope that we can have a vote on independence before there is a Brexit agreement, so that we can somehow remain an E.U. member and don't have to reapply. I feel it would be better to be part of the E.U. than to be part of what in my mind seems like a little England.

The Troubles and Brexit

      The Troubles...not a rock group from the 60s, but darn close. Depending on your age group, you may not even have heard of the Troubles. Some of us remember that time well. Bombings, murders, political/ethnic/sectarian conflict, really good protest songs. Children being shipped to the US so that they could experience something relatively like peace..

      Wikipedia quotes Brendan O'Leary and John McGarry, "...nearly two per cent of the population of Northern Ireland have been killed or injured through political violence [...] If the equivalent ratio of victims to population had been produced in Great Britain in the same period some 100,000 people would have died, and if a similar level of political violence had taken place, the number of fatalities in the USA would have been over 500,000."

Vox picks up the story:

Those tensions settled down after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, and the border is now porous again. Today, people travel freely between Ireland and Northern Ireland, signage is scarce, and it's often tough to tell where the border even sits. The open border is a tangible sign of the end of the Troubles, and it's a way for northern Catholics to maintain ties to the country they identify with.

      So now comes Brexit. One of the main arguments for leaving the EU was that Britain should be able to control its own borders. Under EU law, the UK currently has to allow unlimited migration from France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, or any other EU member. During the eurozone crisis, Britain has seen a sharp rise in immigration from less affluent countries. Lots of British people don't like this.

      By leaving, the UK could legally restrict those flows. But, of course, any migrants in the EU could all travel freely to Ireland and hop over to the UK via Northern Ireland if they wanted. So if Britain really wants control of its borders, it will have to tighten up the Irish border.

      The catch is that no one knows what this would entail. Peter Moloney, a visiting assistant professor of history at Boston College who studies EU governance, explains that the details will have to be negotiated between the EU and UK. But as an example, other borders between the EU and non-EU countries involve checkpoints, traffic stops, fences, and so on.

      Practically speaking, that could prove difficult in Northern Ireland. The 310-mile border with the Republic of Ireland is poorly marked and often crosses existing farms and properties. Plus, there are tons of small country roads and byways throughout the region. Do they all get checkpoints? On top of that, many people live and work on both sides of the border. A recent tweetstorm by Seamas O'Reilly illustrated this well:

9. A border is bad for practical reasons; people like my sister live in Donegal and work in Derry, and thousands more vice versa...
        - Shocko (@shockproofbeats) June 27, 2016

      Politically, things get even dicier. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement created a delicate power-sharing structure within Northern Ireland that was marked by compromise and ambiguity. The Protestants implicitly conceded that it was reasonable for Catholics to pursue closer ties with Ireland, while the Catholics implicitly conceded that formal unification with Ireland was unlikely. The free flow of people and trade enabled by the EU allowed Catholics to pursue those ties without requiring actual unification.

      Creating a hard border could reignite those tensions. "If you're setting up a border again, it brings back that 'us-versus-them' mentality and the echoes of confrontation, which has been broken down a lot in the past generation," says Moloney.

      Even more concretely: Under the Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland can technically hold a referendum on whether to gain independence from the UK and unite with Ireland. So long as an open border existed, this was never a real issue; polling last year suggested that only 14 percent of Northern Irish people wanted to unify with the Republic of Ireland, with even Catholics preferring to stay in the UK.

      But now? "The whole thing is uncertain," Moloney adds. "And it's a totally self-inflicted wound."

      Fintan O'Toole put it much more bluntly in the Irish Times: "English nationalists have placed a bomb under peace process." And here's Pauline McCallion in Vox: "I live in Northern Ireland, and I'm scared Brexit will bring back the chaos of my childhood."

New version of Ipe, the extensible drawing editor

      If you use LaTeX, you may be one of us who rely on Otfried Cheong's Ipe drawing tool to create figures for documents. Last week, Otfried released Ipe version 7.2.4 which adds several new features and fixes many bugs.

      Looking through the change-log since the version currently in heavy use on my machines (7.1.6) there are many additions/changes/fixes. Time to upgrade!

Mississippi Burning

      If you're involved in, or at least aware of, the politics of race in the US, the last few months have been kind of a headbutt. (Jamar Clark's death in Minneapolis, Freddie Gray's death in Baltimore, to name a few such situations.)

      During the focused news coverage about the Freddie Gray case this week, another important case was semi-quietly pushed out the door.

            In 1963, Bob Moses and others conceived of the idea of recruiting hundreds of students to join the civil rights movement in Mississippi in hopes of breaking down barriers that kept African Americans from voting and getting the education they needed.

            Some movement leaders opposed the idea, but when Louis Allen -- a witness to a civil rights worker's killing -- was gunned down on Jan. 31, 1964, Moses pushed the point and won the day.

            The first day of that Freedom Summer began with the disappearances of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andy Goodman and Michael Schwerner. (From a 2014 article by the Clarion Register)
     

      Wikipedia continues the story:

            The three young men were chased in their car, abducted, shot at close range, and buried in an earthen dam by members of the local White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Neshoba County Sheriff's Office, and the Philadelphia, Mississippi Police Department.

            Initially classed and investigated as a missing persons case, the civil rights workers' car was not found until three days after their disappearance,[1] and their bodies discovered 44 days after their abduction and murder. The disappearance and feared murders of these activists sparked national outrage and a massive federal investigation led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and filed as Mississippi Burning (MIBURN), which was used as the name of a 1988 film loosely based on the FBI investigation. After the state government refused to prosecute, the United States federal government charged 18 individuals with civil rights violations in 1967. Seven were convicted and received relatively minor sentences for their actions.

            41 years after the murders took place, one perpetrator, Edgar Ray Killen, was charged by the state of Mississippi for his part in the crimes. He was convicted of three counts of manslaughter in 2005 and is serving a 60 year sentence.
     

      This past Monday (June 20), after 52 years of what many consider to be lukewarm effort, the case was officially closed. From the LA Times article:

            The killings are one of 113 pre-1970 cold cases of racially motivated murders the FBI doubled down on since the passage of a 2008 unsolved crimes law named after teenage lynching victim Emmett Till. According to a 2015 Justice Department report, 105 of such cases have been closed, with "very few" prosecutions.

            Yet "this is one of the biggest cases of [the] century," and among those cold cases, said Cliff Johnson, director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi School of Law. In a time when minority voting rights are again being fiercely debated among activists and lawmakers, the Mississippi Burning killings are all the more relevant, he said.

            "You'll find two groups of people in Mississippi. There are those who were alive at the time and have acute knowledge of these horrific acts. People that recognize that justice was never done," Johnson said. "Then you have a second group of people from whom this is something from a history book."
     

      David Goodman, brother of the slain Andy Goodman, concludes the LA Times article by saying:

"My brother wasn't murdered because he was white or because he was an activist. He was murdered because, to the people that murdered him, black lives didn't matter. To a lot of people, they still don't matter," he said. The case is "an opportunity for us to recognize history in the context of the present moment. Nothing is closed about racism in America."

      Googling around, it appears that Minnesota Public Radio didn't let this slip away unnoticed. Their rebroadcast of the compelling documentary "O Freedom Over Me" is an appropriate reminder that even the darkest clouds have a hint of silver somewhere inside them.

The bald eagle's the national bird in the US. Here's a good 4th of July eagle story. From nbc4i.com:

RUSH CITY, MN (WCMH) -- A sharp shooting Army veteran saved the life a juvenile bald eagle by shooting it down from a tree. Jason Galvin said he saw the bird dangling upside down at the end of a tree branch about 75 feet in the air. The bird's foot was caught in a rope. Jason and his wife Jackie initially called multiple agencies for help, but say they were told that no one could help the eagle, and that it was most likely dead. Jackie knew that just wasn't true.

"I told them they were wrong and it was very much alive and somebody needed to help it immediately! They all said sorry but there was nothing they could do. I told Jason he had to shoot it free! He was nervous as he didn't want to get in trouble for shooting at an eagle but I know with his sharp shooter skills that if anyone would save this eagle it was him!"

Jason borrowed a .22 rifle from a neighbor, and began shooting at the rope which was only a few inches long. After about an hour and a half and 150 shots the bird was free, fell into the woods. Jason and Jackie retrieved the eagle, and placed it in a dog carrier. A state conservation officer took the bird to The Raptor Center for treatment. Jackie said amazingly no bullets hit the eagle, and it is expected to make a full recovery.

http://www.vice.com/read/oakland-underage-sex-work-scandal

Not so long ago it was possible to point to Oakland as a police reform success story. In the last decade, the cops have gone from conducting an average of 3,000 searches without probable cause every year to 280 in 2015. Officers are now required to wear body cameras. After decades of abuse, violence, and corruption, the police department seemed to finally be changing.

In the last few weeks, though, a scandal has emerged that threatens to tear the department apart. In brief, 14 Oakland police officers are currently under investigation for sleeping with an 18-year-old sex worker—three of them when she was 17, thus allegedly committing rape and sex trafficking under California law. The woman, using the alias Celeste Guap, told the East Bay Express earlier this month that she was having sex with the cops for money and protection; she had been given a friend's arrest history and information about undercover prostitution stings.

Hints of the scandal surfaced last year, after a suicide note written one of the officers involved, Brendan O'Brien, mentioned Guap, prompting an investigation. But the higher-ups allegedly dragged their feet, and the supposed cover-up has only widened the sordid scandal has since expanded. (According to Guap's later comments to the media, she's actually had sex with "more than 30 officers" from multiple agencies around the Bay Area.)

The shocking and salacious events were the catalyst to Oakland appointing four police chiefs in two weeks. Initially, Sean Whent, who was promoted to top cop at the end of a similarly messy 2013 shuffle that saw three new police chiefs in three days, got canned because he allegedly knew about Guap sleeping with Oakland cops but didn't press for a speedy and public investigation.

To make matters worse for Hillary, it recently emerged that at least one of the emails she handed over to investigators under subpoena in fact did contain classified information that was marked as such. The April 2012 email chain discusses an impending phone call with Malawi’s new president. The important part is an email from Monica Hanley, an aide, to Clinton, including the “call sheet” for the secretary. In layman’s terms, this was a note for Secretary Clinton telling her what she needed to discuss during her scheduled phone conversation with a foreign head of state.

We don’t know what that was, however, since most of that email has been redacted as classified at the Confidential level, the lowest classification level in the U.S. Government. The smoking gun here is that the call sheet begins with the line: “(C) Purpose of Call: To offer condolences on the passing pf President Mutharika and congratulate President Banda on her recent swearing in.”

Everything after that has been redacted. But that “(C)” is what is termed a “portion marking,” a tip-off to the reader that the paragraph following is classified. (For how this all works in practice, see this explainer.) In other words, Hanley knew she was sending classified information in an unclassified email to Hillary Clinton’s personal email account, an unambiguous violation of Federal law.

and

Last week the Associated Press broke a big story about how Clinton’s “unclassified” emails included the true names of CIA personnel serving overseas under cover. This was hardly news, in fact I broke the same story four months ago in this column. However, the AP account adds detail to what Clinton and her staff did, actions that placed the lives of CIA clandestine personnel at risk. It also may be a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, a 1982 law that featured prominently in the mid-aughts scandal surrounding CIA officer Valerie Plame, which so captivated the mainstream media. More recently, former CIA officer John Kiriakou spent two years in Federal prison for violating this law.

To make matters worse for Team Clinton, last week it emerged that several of the classified emails under investigation involved discussions of impending CIA drone strikes in Pakistan. Clinton aides were careful to avoid hot-button words like “CIA” and “drone” in these “unclassified” emails, engaging in a practice that spies term “talking around” an issue.

However, the salient fact is that the CIA—which has the say here—considers this information to be Top Secret, as well as enormously sensitive. It had no business being in anybody’s unclassified emails. As the secretary of state, Ms. Clinton and her top staff had access to classified communications systems 24 hours a day. They chose not to use them here—a choice that clearly violated Federal law. Moreover, this new report demonstrates that a previous Clintonian EmailGate talking point, that discussions of drones in emails were no more than pasting press pieces, and therefore innocuous, was yet another bald-faced lie.

You can read the original article to view embedded links in the quotes above.

It makes little sense, except perhaps to further some false flag operation, to continue to make the argument that Clinton didn't break serious laws here.

Aristarchus was right. Angry and stupid won the world.

Oh, and before I go any further, if you want any citations you can use google.

Society has become a reflection of the worst features of Internet social media. Memes, sloganeering, doublespeak, the willful and proud ignorance of facts, bigotry, hatred, irrationality, and general meanness have become the order of the day.

The latest manifestation of this is the recent UK referendum on whether the UK should leave the European Union, i.e. the "Brexit."

As you know, the Leave side won by a narrow margin. The campaign on one side (Vote Leave) was worthy of an Eastern Bloc dictatorship or a banana republic while the Remain campaign was half-hearted.

The UK is a union of four countries (plus various other bits and pieces), but most significantly England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. We have lived in relative peace and harmony for a few hundred years.

A global financial meltdown and years of right-wing austerity government with no credible alternative have left the UK (as many other modern countries) in a miserable state. Along comes Nigel Farage, a far-right nationalist, who got himself elected to the European Parliament, who openly denigrates foreigners in the course of his official duties (those he's supposed to be working with in order to represent the UK's interests and to get deals done) and offers the disengaged populace that age-old chestnut of being able to blame foreigners for all of their problems.

The right-wing of the Tory Party (the natural party of government in the whole of the UK, pretty right-wing itself) defects in part to Farage's party, UKIP ("the Kippers") and all the slimy bigotry oozes out of the woodwork. The best one was blaming gay marriage for the 2014 floods.

Next thing you know, we're having a referendum (free public vote on a single issue) on the UKs continued membership of the EU.

Farage's henchmen in all this, the official Vote Leave campaigners (even Farage was too extreme to be allowed on the official team) are Iain Duncan Smith, presider over some of the most draconian cuts and changes to the benefits system (for the disabled, sick, old, unemployed, homeless etc.) ever and Michael Gove who was Education Secretary and harboured some paranoid delusional fantasy that professional English state education teachers were Marxists out to deliberately brainwash and ruin the education of the young.

So the gist of their argument was as follows: "This is Great Britain. We are admired the world over. Everyone loves us and wants to do business with us. Only, we have to leave the EU first. The EU will still want to do business with us because we are so great. By the way, if we leave the EU we can keep foreigners out. Foreigners keep taking your jobs. We can also have a bonfire of red tape. The EU gives us lots of red tape. We can get rid of inconvenient laws that make things expensive but limit pollution and protect workers. And we can get rid of Human Rights legislation. You're British, we invented Human Rights, so we don't need them written down."

There was no plan. Just platitudes, slogans, repeated inverted logic worthy of Goebbels, national pride, "Take Back Control" (we already had control), "Take our country back" (we already had it).

The public lapped this up, or at least the more motivated ones did. The Internet is still alight with it. (Hi guys! Keep at it, providing your "balance." Beat those green blood-drinking lizards with your super powers of logic and reason.)

Michael Gove got tired of struggling to answer questions and declared that he was "sick of experts." The experts warned of the great economic dangers that lay ahead. This was hand-waved away as a conspiracy, of the Elite and the Establishment protecting themselves: Project Fear.

The official Vote Leave election literature (flyers, leaflets, posters) contained outright lies. In fact some companies who warned of the dangers to their on-going UK business due to the uncertainty caused by a Brexit decision were mis-quoted. There was also a very dubious claim about £350M per week that we give to the EU that "could be used to fund the NHS - a new hospital a week."

So along comes the referendum which, incidentally, is not legally binding. Members of Parliament must vote laws through. The results of a referendum may be used to influence their decision. More of that in a minute.

So Vote Leave won 52% to 48%. Gibraltar voted by about 94% to remain. 95% of Gibraltarians work in Spain. Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain. Two years ago Scotland had a referendum on independence from the UK and voted to remain by 60% to 40% on the premise that it would have to remain in the UK to be in the EU. Wales and England voted to leave the EU.

Since the result (which is not legally binding) the value of Sterling has fallen to its lowest in 31 years. Billions (trillions?) have been wiped off of stock markets. Large numbers of workers in the City of London are facing redundancy or being relocated to the continent (i.e. EU countries) to continue their business.

Very worryingly, racism is now overt on the streets of England. The first targets are the Polish, who came over in large numbers to work in the last 20 or so years, and, of course, everyone's favourite ne'er-do-well, the Muslim. Poles have had "Polish Vermin Go Home" cards put through their letter boxes. People have been verbally abused and threatened in the street, even by sweet little old ladies as well as skinheads with swastika tatoos and St George's Cross flags and T-shirs. There are "immigrants out" banners in the streets.

You see, many of the salt-of-the-earth Vote Leave people thought they were voting to kick out the foreigners, and straight away.

Other people from the other nations in the UK are no longer welcome in England by some, it would seem. They want "their" country back. The problem is, this is still the UK. The referendum wasn't about English independence, it was about the UK leaving the EU.

If you listen to the Kippers and Brexiters, the financial downturn is a conspiracy by the Elite and the Establishment to punish the common man for daring to vote. It's not due to uncertainty. Oh no, that would be too simple. It's another manifestation of the Project Fear conspiracy.

England has shot itself firmly in the foot here. Now Scotland is demanding a second independence referendum as soon as possible, because Scotland doesn't want to leave the EU.

Northern Ireland wants to remain in the EU as well and has a number of options, one of which is reunification with Eire. It is very important for the Peace Process (before the Muslim bogeyman we had Irish Republican Terrorism here) for there to be an open border between the two countries. It could choose independence within the EU or maybe an alliance with Scotland.

Vote Leave are currently being sued by some of the companies whose views on the Brexit they misrepresented (they said the opposite, essentially).

The £350M for the NHS was just pure fiction.

Remember that the turmoil in the financial markets is just a conspiracy by the Elite to keep the common man down.

The UK is highly likely to disintegrate. England and Wales (and many of the "take our country back" people don't want Wales) will be on their own.

Meanwhile, millions of EU citizens living and working in the (soon to disintegrate UK) don't know if and when they're going to have to leave and find new jobs etc. Millions of UK citizens who work in the EU are in the same situation, including many retirees who settled in sunny climes such as Spain.

Farage, Gove and Duncan Smith were cock-sure that the EU would be desperate to trade with us if we left, but the EU has basically returned Nigel Farages compliments by saying "No, get lost. If that's what you think of us, we'll manage fine without you." There is a possibility that they'll let us trade with them under similar terms as today (i.e, with all that pesky commie red-tape and free movement of goods, capital and labour) but without any democratic representation, i.e. no Members of the European Parliament.

You know, what? This time I'm in favour of Scottish independence and we'll move there in a year or two and laugh as the Little Englanders spend the next two or three decades clearing up the mess that they made for themselves.

Sick of experts, indeed. "Take back control" "Take our country back."

So, in summary, the UK will disintegrate, England has made enemies of its trading partners, the Weimar Republic has come to town and it looks like they're going to end up still over-run with filthy foreigners from the EU and elsewhere but with no say in how the EU is run!

"That's democracy!!!" Well, if you say so.

Nice one England! Own goal!

PS That nice Mr Putin is a great friend of Nigel Farage (and Marine Le Pen, of France) and has donated money to UKIP (and the Front National). Just so you know.

[Updated to fix some typos.]