TYB
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
Apr 18 2023
Map of Total Solar Eclipse Path in 2024 April
Would you like to see a total eclipse of the Sun? If so, do any friends or relatives live near the path of next April's eclipse? If yes again, then you might want to arrange a well-timed visit. Next April 8, the path of a total solar eclipse will cross North America from western Mexico to eastern Canada, entering the USA in southern Texas and exiting in northern Maine. All of North America will experience the least a partial solar eclipse. Featured here is a map of the path of totality. Many people who have seen a total solar eclipse tell stories about it for the rest of their lives. As a warmup, an annular solar eclipse will be visible later this year – in mid-October.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html?
Bald Eagle Lands at Kennedy Space Center
Apr 17, 2023
An American bald eagle swoops down to land on a pole at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on April 10, 2023. The eagle is part of a mated pair that takes up residence at the Florida spaceport during nesting season. This year, the pair is raising a lone baby eagle in the nest, located in a tree near Kennedy Parkway, about two miles from the Vehicle Assembly Building. Kennedy currently is home to approximately 20 nesting pairs of bald eagles.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/bald-eagle-lands-at-kennedy-space-center
Help Discover the Sounds of Space Played by NASA’s HARP
Apr 17, 2023
Earth’s magnetic environment is filled with a symphony of sound that we cannot hear. All around our planet, ultralow-frequency waves compose a cacophonous operetta portraying the dramatic relationship between Earth and the Sun.
Now, a new NASA-funded citizen science project called HARP – or Heliophysics Audified: Resonances in Plasmas – has turned those once-unheard waves into audible whistles, crunches, and whooshes. Early tests have already made surprising finds, and citizen scientists can join the journey of sonic space exploration to decipher the cosmic vibrations that help sing the song of the Sun and Earth.
“What excites me most about the HARP project is the ability for citizen scientists to make new discoveries in heliophysics research through audio analysis,” said the project’s principal investigator, Michael Hartinger, a heliophysicist at the Space Science Institute in Colorado. “We need their help to understand complex patterns in the near-Earth space environment.”
Between Earth and the Sun, space is not truly empty but is filled with a soup of charged particles called plasma. This plasma comes from the Sun, pumped out in a steady stream called the solar wind and sporadically blasted away in explosive solar eruptions. When this solar plasma strikes Earth, it causes the magnetic field lines and plasma around Earth to vibrate like the plucked strings of a harp, producing ultralow-frequency waves.
In 2007, NASA launched five satellites to fly through Earth’s magnetic “harp” – its magnetosphere – as part of the THEMIS mission (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms). Since then, THEMIS has been gathering a bounty of information about plasma waves across Earth’s magnetosphere.
“THEMIS can sample the whole harp,” Hartinger said, “and it’s been out there a long time, so it has collected a lot of data.”
The frequencies of the waves THEMIS measures are too low for our ears to hear, however. So the HARP team sped them up to convert them to sound waves. By using an interactive tool developed by the team, you can listen to these waves and pick out interesting features you hear in the sounds.
“The process of identifying new features through deep listening feels a bit like treasure hunting,” said Robert Alexander, a HARP team member from Auralab Technologies in Michigan. “I’m excited for individuals around the world to get a taste of this experience through the HARP project.”
According to the team, humans are often better at picking out interesting wave patterns by ear than by eye – and can even do better than computers at identifying complex patterns that emerge during extreme solar events.
“The human sense of hearing is an amazing tool,” said HARP team member Martin Archer of Imperial College London. “We’re essentially trained from birth to recognize patterns and pick out different sound sources. We can innately do some pretty crazy analysis that outperforms even some of our most advanced computer algorithms.”
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HARP was inspired by an earlier sonification project led by Archer called MUSICS (Magnetospheric Undulations Sonified Incorporating Citizen Scientists). When Archer asked high school students in London to listen to sonified data (measurements converted into sound) from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) satellites, they identified a new plasma wave pattern related to solar storms.
“London high school students were able to pick out a complex but repeatable pattern in the sound that the automated methods missed,” Hartinger said. “HARP is going to take this to a new level working with a much larger dataset from NASA’s THEMIS mission and with a much larger online audience.”
There’s an advantage to having a wide and diverse group of people listen to the sounds, the team says.
“Everyone hears the world differently,” explained Emmanuel Masongsong of the University of California, Los Angeles, who is a HARP team member and a member of NASA’s THEMIS mission. “Every participant will react uniquely to the vibrations in space. What one person ignores, another may be drawn to immediately. We want people to discover things that we never considered, or that computer algorithms would not be able to detect. That's how discoveries are made!”
Preliminary investigations with HARP have already started revealing unexpected features, such as what the team calls a “reverse harp” – frequencies changing in the opposite way than what scientists anticipated.
“HARP has the potential to find things that we weren’t expecting, which is really exciting,” Archer stated.
HARP could also provide insights about phenomena that other NASA citizen scientists have encountered, such as sounds heard by amateur radio operators participating in the HamSCI project, or wave-like auroras examined through the Aurorasaurus project.
“Data sonification provides human beings with an opportunity to appreciate the naturally occurring music of the cosmos,” said Alexander. “We're hearing sounds that are literally out of this world, and for me that's the next best thing to floating in a spacesuit.”
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/sun/help-discover-the-sounds-of-space-played-by-nasa-s-harp
https://listen.spacescience.org/
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The Great America Show with Lou Dobbs
KASH PATEL SAYS FBI TRIED TO EMBED SOURCES IN CHURCHES TO TARGET WORSHIPERS FOR WHAT THE FBI TERMED EXTREMIST LANGUAGE
Apr 18, 2023
As former Deputy DNI, Patel says the 21 year old who leaked Pentagon secrets had help, someone who wanted those secrets made public. Some of it Mossad Intelligence, Ukraine military deployments, the most sensitive secrets at DOD, reserved for the very top Defense officials. Seven years ago Americans wouldn’t have believed the FBI would partner with Democrats to lie to federal judges, to wiretap a Presidential candidate and President, and withhold evidence of innocence but that’s exactly what happened. Patel says we should turn the FBI building into a Deep State Museum where Americans can see for free what kind of corruption happens when police powers are granted without limit and politically targeted operations are permitted. Patel wants every federal law enforcement agency severely trimmed.
https://truthsocial.com/@loudobbs/posts/110219916515890175
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/kash-patel-says-fbi-tried-to-embed-sources-in-churches/id1594728054
The Brief: Bragg’s Obsession To Pin A Crime On Trump Deserves Disbarment And More
Apr, 18 2023
Gregg is joined by Alina Habba, legal counsel for former President Trump
The consensus —even among Democrats who despise Donald Trump— is that Alvin Bragg has made a colossal mess of things.
Recently, the Manhattan District Attorney compounded one legal blunder with another. This should surprise no one. Bragg is the kind of guy who could screw up a free lunch. Incompetence is his métier.
In his brief tenure as DA, he has managed to increase the number of criminals terrorizing the streets of New York City by refusing to prosecute many of them or dropping serious felonies to petty misdemeanors. Innocent victims of the rampant crime fume and rage against Bragg, while prosecutors in his charge have abandoned ship.
Like the crazed captain in Moby Dick, Bragg is obsessed with harpooning Trump, his white whale. In the DA’s twisted mind, all evil in the world is personified by the former president. You can almost hear Bragg channeling Ahab’s words, “They think me mad, but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened!”
Instead of getting a mental health check-up, Bragg chose to indict the former president based on a transparently invented crime that is wholly unsupported by the law and contradicted by the facts.
His warped theory goes something like this: Trump supposedly violated campaign finance laws by paying money to a lying accuser in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement, which is legal. Forget that the transaction itself does not count as a campaign contribution. The federal prosecutors determined it doesn’t. So did the Federal Election Commission. Both reviewed the matter and concluded that no laws were broken.
But there’s more. In his convoluted indictment, Bragg cites as unlawful a series of reimbursements made by Trump in the year 2017. You’ll note that this was well after the 2016 election. Under the relevant statutes, it is impossible to have intended to feloniously influence an election retroactively. It makes no sense and is contrary to the established law.
Never mind that the statute of limitations long ago expired. Bragg thinks they should be held in suspended animation just for him. They cannot be. There are limits imposed by law, and the DA has no credible argument that he is entitled to a special exception.
A surprising number of Democrats and lefty legal analysts are trashing Bragg’s indictment as legal garbage. With few defenders, a congressional committee is now demanding answers. Like Ahab, the crew has turned against him. So, what did Bragg do? The possessed DA followed the Moby Dick narrative by doubling down on his mania. He sued the committee.
You don’t have to re-read Herman Melville to know how this will turn out.
Bragg’s torturous lawsuit against the House Judiciary Committee is deserving of ridicule not because it is, on its face, specious…but because it is a desperate bid to hide his own unethical conduct. The district attorney has mangled the duty of a prosecutor to be fair and equitable. In the process, he obliterated Trump’s presumption of innocence, not to mention the defendant’s Sixth Amendment rights and due process guarantees.
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Bragg ran on the campaign promise to prosecute and incarcerate Trump. This was before he had access to any of the germane evidence. By prejudging a case and preordaining an outcome to further his career ambitions, the DA has violated the cannons of ethics that govern prosecutors to see that justice is done, not merely to gain a conviction.
Bragg is afraid of being forced to explain himself in front of congress because his aberrant actions are inexplicable. So, he sprinted to the nearest federal judge begging her to intervene by issuing a temporary restraining order (TRO) that would allow him to coverup his Machiavellian machinations.
Oblivious to the irony, Bragg accuses committee chairman Jim Jordan of an “unconstitutional attack” on the DA’s unconstitutional indictment. The opposite is true. Jordan’s probe is constitutionally justified, but Bragg’s charging document is constitutionally defective because it fails to inform the defendant of what underlying crimes he has allegedly committed.
For even more comedy, turn to the page in the requested TRO where Bragg claims that any Capitol Hill inquiry will expose “highly sensitive and confidential local prosecutorial information.” Hilarity aside, the DA’s own assistant, Mark Pomerantz, already breached every confidence in the investigation by writing a venomous 300 page book disclosing nearly every detail in the Trump witch hunt.
The committee has properly subpoenaed Pomerantz to testify this week, but Bragg wants to put a sock in his ex-aide’s mouth. Why? Because the author openly confesses that Trump was targeted for purely political reasons, not because he violated any laws. Pomerantz single-handedly makes the case that the former president is the victim of selective prosecution. Writing the book was idiotic, to be sure. But it underscores the low level of intellect and high level of malevolence among Bragg’s slimy confederates.
The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently ruled that Congress has broad oversight authority involving federal matters. Here, there are three. First, Bragg admits he used federal taxpayer funds to target Trump. Second, by referring to federal campaign laws as the basis for his indictment, the local DA is clearly usurping federal authority. Finally, the aforementioned evidence of political targeting demonstrates that Bragg’s indictment is a blatant attempt to interfere in the upcoming presidential election by knocking out his own party’s leading opponent with a meritless criminal case.
As I have argued before, Bragg’s reprehensible conduct is deserving of disbarment. And more. The DA himself should be in the dock, not Trump, for his brazen abuse of the legal process. While it may not rise to the level of obstruction of justice, he could —and should— be held in criminal contempt of court for engineering a patently false case in what amounts to malicious prosecution.
I am reminded of the district attorney, Michael Nifong, in the phony Duke lacrosse case who conspired to withhold exculpatory evidence that showed the defendants’ complete innocence. The disgraced DA was disbarred and briefly jailed for contempt of court. According to a key witness in the Trump grand jury proceedings, Bragg pulled a similar maneuver by withholding exculpatory evidence.
Conjuring up a crime that doesn’t exist to pin on a political nemesis is unconscionable, if not criminal. It is the same obsessive and compulsive mania that led to Ahab’s demise. Bragg has entangled his foot in the whale’s rope and should be dragged to the depths.
https://truthsocial.com/@DevinNunes/posts/110220452937034613
https://thegreggjarrett.com/the-brief-braggs-obsession-to-pin-a-crime-on-trump-deserves-disarmament-and-more/
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Pinto beans and a nice boxed wine