Gpscruise

Representative Adam Kinzinger mocked fellow Republican Josh Hawley on Wednesday by speculating what went through the Missouri senator's mind before declaring his intention to challenge the 2020 election results in Congress, Mediaite reported.Hawley stated that he will...

Young people, who in some cases are thousands of miles away from Georgia, are working to get out the vote as the two Jan. 5 Senate runoffs in the state approach. CNN reported that groups made up of students, along with social media influencers, are working to push voter...

Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., has blasted his colleagues in Congress who are planning on objecting to the certification of the Electoral College vote in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. "The president and his allies are playing with fire," Sasse...

The early voting numbers in the Georgia Senate runoffs have put Republicans on edge, according to The New York Times. While polls suggest a close race between Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., and Democrat Jon Ossoff...

President Donald Trump raged about renovations first lady Melania Trump made to the couple's living quarters at Mar-a-Lago and went so far to have some of the fresh decor removed.

If there were ever a time to "question authority," as the old counterculture slogan of the 1960s urged, the authoritarian age of COVID-19 is that time. 2020 will go down in American history as the year that public health "experts" got everything wrong. It's not just that their judgment was faulty. It's that time and again, the professional elites deceived the citizenry, derided other academics and medical professionals who challenged them and de-platformed outspoken dissidents who refused to obey them. These pathological liars are the true public health threat. Exhibit A: Anthony Fauci. The...

The US House of Representatives voted on December 28 to override Trump's veto of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act. The vote now goes to the Senate and could push through regardless of Trump's move. Also, GOP lawmakers including Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) filed a lawsuit against Vice President Mike Pence in a bid to overturn the presidential election results, asking a court to give Pence “exclusive authority” to decide which Electoral College votes should be counted. In this live Q&A with Crossroads host Joshua Philipp we'll be discussing these stories and others, and answering questions from the audience. These stories and more in this episode of Crossroads. Crossroads is an Epoch Times show available on Facebook and YouTube. Join Patreon to Support Crossroads: https://www.patreon.com/Crossroads_Josh

"White privilege" means having your life derailed for singing the lyrics to a rap song on Snapchat to a friend when you were 15 years old. ...

Commentary Late last month, I wrote on these pages that “the Founding Fathers made a wise and prescient choice in setting up the Electoral College and vesting the state legislatures with exclusive authority to decide upon a state’s presidential electors. The multifaceted fraud issues that infect national elections (especially this one) aren’t easily and timely raised within the tight contours of a judicial ‘case or controversy.’” Later, I wrote that lawmakers in the six swing states still in dispute—Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada—should adopt “reclamation resolutions” reclaiming their exclusive constitutional power under the Electors’ Clause (Article II, Section 1) to decide the “manner” by which their states choose presidential electors. I argued that, absent such formal resolutions putting the two sets of “dueling electors” on equal footing—each of the six swing states and New Mexico saw Biden and Trump electors cast votes at the Electoral College—“objections” to the ...

Despite the justices’ oath to uphold the Constitution, the Supreme Court is hiding from the most important constitutional issue in America -- and that spells danger.

Edward Snowden caused grave damage to U.S. national security. If he truly believes what he did was right, he should return to America and stand trial.

I just found another copy after youtube deleted the original   This viral video was retweeted by President Trump…         Here’s a copy from Rumble    

A top court backs privacy campaigners and calls for an immediate halt to drone surveillance in Paris.

Transportation-related emissions are increasing globally. Currently, light-duty vehicles — namely passenger cars, such as sedans, SUVs, or minivans — contribute about 20 percent of the net greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. But studies have shown that switching out your conventional gas-guzzling car for a vehicle powered by electricity can make a significant dent in reducing these emissions.

A recent study published in Environmental Science and Technology takes this a step further by examining how to reduce the emissions associated with the electricity source used to charge an electric vehicle (EV). Taking into account regional charging patterns and the effect of ambient temperature on car fuel economy, researchers at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) find that the time of day when an EV is charged significantly impacts the vehicle’s emissions.

“If you facilitate charging at particular times, you can really boost the emissions reductions that result from growth in renewables and EVs,” says Ian Miller, the lead author of the study and a research associate at MITEI. “So how do we do this? Time-of-use electricity rates are spreading, and can dramatically shift the time of day when EV drivers charge. If we inform policymakers of these large time-of-charging impacts, they can then design electricity rates to discount charging when our power grids are renewable-heavy. In solar-heavy regions, that’s midday. In wind-heavy regions, like the Midwest, it’s overnight.”

According to their research, in solar-heavy California, charging an electric vehicle overnight produces 70 percent more emissions than if it were charged midday (when more solar energy powers the grid). Meanwhile, in New York, where nuclear and hydro power constitute a larger share of the electricity mix during the night, the best charging time is the opposite. In this region, charging a vehicle overnight actually reduces emissions by 20 percent relative to daytime charging.

“Charging infrastructure is another big determinant when it comes to facilitating charging at specific times — during the day especially,” adds Emre Gençer, co-author and a research scientist at MITEI. “If you need to charge your EV midday, then you need to have enough charging stations at your workplace. Today, most people charge their vehicles in their garages overnight, which is going to produce higher emissions in places where it is best to charge during the day.”

In the study, Miller, Gençer, and Maryam Arbabzadeh, a postdoc at MITEI, make these observations in part by calculating the percentage of error in two common EV emission modeling approaches, which ignore hourly variation in the grid and temperature-driven variation in fuel economy. Their results find that the combined error from these standard methods exceeds 10 percent in 30 percent of the cases, and reaches 50 percent in California, which is home to half of the EVs in the United States.

“If you don’t model time of charging, and instead assume charging with annual average power, you can mis-estimate EV emissions,” says Arbabzadeh. “To be sure, it’s great to get more solar on the grid and more electric vehicles using that grid. No matter when you charge your EV in the U.S., its emissions will be lower than a similar gasoline-powered car; but if EV charging occurs mainly when the sun is down, you won’t get as much benefit when it comes to reducing emissions as you think when using an annual average.”

Seeking to lessen this margin of error, the researchers use hourly grid data from 2018 and 2019 — along with hourly charging, driving, and temperature data — to estimate emissions from EV use in 60 cases across the United States. They then introduce and validate a novel method (with less than 1 percent margin of error) to accurately estimate EV emissions. They call it the “average day” method.

“We found that you can ignore seasonality in grid emissions and fuel economy, and still accurately estimate yearly EV emissions and charging-time impacts,” says Miller. “This was a pleasant surprise. In Kansas last year, daily grid emissions rose about 80 percent between seasons, while EV power demand rose about 50 percent due to temperature changes. Previous studies speculated that ignoring such seasonal swings would hurt accuracy in EV emissions estimates, but never actually quantified the error. We did — across diverse grid mixes and climates — and found the error to be negligible.”

This finding has useful implications for modeling future EV emissions scenarios. “You can get accuracy without computational complexity,” says Arbabzadeh. “With the average-day method, you can accurately estimate EV emissions and charging impacts in a future year without needing to simulate 8,760 values of grid emissions for each hour of the year. All you need is one average-day profile, which means only 24 hourly values, for grid emissions and other key variables. You don’t need to know seasonal variance from those average-day profiles.”

The researchers demonstrate the utility of the average-day method by conducting a case study in the southeastern United States from 2018 to 2032 to examine how renewable growth in this region may impact future EV emissions. Assuming a conservative grid projection from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the results show that EV emissions decline only 16 percent if charging occurs overnight, but more than 50 percent if charging occurs midday. In 2032, compared to a similar hybrid car, EV emissions per mile are 30 percent lower if charged overnight, and 65 percent lower if charged midday.

The model used in this study is one module in a larger modeling program called the Sustainable Energy Systems Analysis Modeling Environment (SESAME). This tool, developed at MITEI, takes a systems-level approach to assess the complete carbon footprint of today’s evolving global energy system.

“The idea behind SESAME is to make better decisions for decarbonization and to understand the energy transition from a systems perspective,” says Gençer. “One of the key elements of SESAME is how you can connect different sectors together — ‘sector coupling’ — and in this study, we are seeing a very interesting example from the transportation and electric power sectors. Right now, as we’ve been claiming, it’s impossible to treat these two sector systems independently, and this is a clear demonstration of why MITEI’s new modeling approach is really important, as well as how we can tackle some of these impending issues.”

In ongoing and future research, the team is expanding their charging analysis from individual vehicles to whole fleets of passenger cars in order to develop fleet-level decarbonization strategies. Their work seeks to answer questions such as how California’s proposed ban of gasoline car sales in 2035 would impact transportation emissions. They are also exploring what fleet electrification could mean — not only for greenhouse gases, but also the demand for natural resources such as cobalt — and whether EV batteries could provide significant grid energy storage.

“To mitigate climate change, we need to decarbonize both the transportation and electric power sectors,” says Gençer. “We can electrify transportation, and it will significantly reduce emissions, but what this paper shows is how you can do it more effectively.”

This research was sponsored by ExxonMobil Research and Engineering through the MIT Energy Initiative Low-Carbon Energy Centers.

    WE HAVE JUST BEGUN TO FIGHT!!! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 12, 2020   WASHINGTON – Dec. 11, 2020 – Public interest law professor John Banzhaf, who has won several cases virtually all experts considered impossible, and helped establish a novel precedent regarding legal standing, says Trump still has options.   The […]

There can be little doubt left that Chinese influences corrupted the 2020 elections, interfering on behalf of Joe Biden.

A demonstrated lack of fortitude.

STRIKE A POSE, THERE’S NOTHING TO IT:

Natalie Wayne, a worker with the North Carolina GOP, said: "There's so much corruption within our political system. As far as voter fraud, it's all over, it's rampant. I actually work specifically with the North Carolina GOP. And we are now actively taking votes that were supposedly validated and we're finding that those votes became uncounted. So it's not just, it's not just one state, its many states." "And that's why we have Dr. Shiva, coming today at this stage to speak with us about what's going on with the voter fraud, not only in the United States, but guys, this is a global epidemic. This has been going on for many years. This has not just started in 2016. But this has been going on for many, many years. They've got to be revalidated. I mean, we just had a [case] shot down yesterday by the Supreme Court. But what ...

  LONDON (AP) — A retired British shop clerk received the first shot in the country’s COVID-19 vaccination program Tuesday, the start of an unprecedented global immunization effort intended to offer a route out of a pandemic that has killed 1.5 million.   Margaret Keenan, who turns 91 next week, got the shot at 6:31 […]

• New York's Northwell Health system recently received a $1.4 million grant for a new study on gun violence prevention.
• The study tasks doctors with asking all patients about their access and exposure to guns, and recommending interventions and safety tips as needed.
• The goal is to destigmatize doctor-patient conversations about guns, and reframe gun violence as a public health issue.

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Doctors often ask patients about the health risks in their daily lives, such as sugar intake or tobacco use. After all, doctors can use that information to design better treatments. And on a larger scale, health professionals can use anonymized medical data on substances like sugar and tobacco to learn more about diseases like diabetes and lung cancer.

So, what if doctors began asking similar questions about guns, which are involved in more than 100 deaths in the U.S. every day? Could patients and researchers benefit in similar ways?

A new study from Northwell Health, the largest health system in New York State, aims to find out. In the "We Ask Everyone. Firearm Safety is a Health Issue" study, which began in September, doctors will ask every patient who visits an emergency department at three Northwell Health facilities about their access and exposure to firearms, with questions like:

• Do you have a gun at home?
  
• Do you have access to guns outside your home?
• Have you had a gun pulled on you over the last six months?

The answers will become part of a large, anonymized data pool that will help researchers better understand the underlying factors behind gun violence. Northwell Health will also offer interventions to at-risk patients.

"This will be the first research study to universally screen all patients who come into the emergency department for firearm access, and gun violence risk, and then intervene as needed, with gun safety counseling, gun locks, community resources, and medical referrals," said Dr. Chethan Sathya, director of Northwell's Center for Gun Violence Prevention. "If you look at any other public health issue, it starts with this universal type of approach."

In the study, all conversations about firearm access and exposure will be confidential. The goal is to encourage firearm safety, educate at-risk patients on violence-prevention resources, and normalize doctor-patient conversations about guns—not stigmatize gun ownership or infringe upon individual rights.

The collected data will help health professionals develop better models for predicting who's most at risk of gun violence. Northwell Health isn't quite sure what that data will reveal. That's why universal screening is the first step.

"The bottom line is, we don't know the answers yet," said Dr. Sathya. "So, how can we target screening if we don't even know the basic elements of a public health approach?"

When we reframe [gun violence] as a public health issue, then we're able to use the same strategies that we've used to decrease car-crash deaths, decrease infections and deaths from HIV, and reduce injuries and deaths from a host of other problems.

Reframing conversations on gun violence

One major goal of the study is to reframe how health professionals and patients discuss gun violence—an issue that's often couched only in political terms.

"Our big push is to consider gun violence as a public health issue," said Dr. Sathya. "For decades, we've tried to get doctors to try to ask [patients about firearms access and exposure]. They won't, because it's not considered part of the usual care."

Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician and Chief Research Officer for the American Foundation for Firearm Injury Reduction in Medicine, said talking about guns from a different angle can lead to meaningful reductions in injuries and deaths.

"When we reframe [gun violence] as a public health issue, then we're able to use the same strategies that we've used to decrease car-crash deaths, decrease infections and deaths from HIV, and reduce injuries and deaths from a host of other problems," said Dr. Ranney. "We don't waste our time arguing while death rates go up. Instead, we actually do something that we as individual Americans can take on."

Moving forward on gun violence research

Over the past couple of decades, researchers have conducted many studies on gun violence. But hardly any received federal funding. To put it in perspective, a 2017 study found that the federal government spends about $63 on firearms research for every life lost to gun violence in the U.S. Compare that to $182,668 in funding for every life lost to HIV.

The funding freeze stems largely from the Dickey Amendment, which Congress passed in 1996 to ensure that "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control."

"It comes from a perception that research was done with an agenda of legislative change, which it isn't," said Dr. Ranney. "Research is done in order to advance health, and it ideally happens from a perspective that is independent of personal belief."

Focused on public health instead of politics, the new study aims to broaden the scope of firearms research.

"The studies that have been conducted with respect to firearms have been so limited," said Dr. Sathya, noting as an example how doctors might ask about firearms only if a patient is suicidal. "Because there has been no funding, we're starting from scratch in many ways."

Hospitals and gun violence prevention

One reason health professionals are uniquely suited to play a lead role in preventing gun violence is that they're often the first point of institutional contact for at-risk people. By normalizing doctor-patient conversations about guns, health professionals would be able to intervene early.

For example, they could connect at-risk patients with violence-prevention resources like the New York City Mayor's Office to Prevent Gun Violence, which curbs gun violence through strategies like "violence interrupters," liaisons between communities and public officials, and funding for community-based activities to make neighborhoods safer.

Northwell Health president and CEO Michael Dowling also noted that about 40,000 people die from guns every year in the U.S., while thousands more are injured. For the health professionals that treat the victims, these statistics aren't abstract.

"Gun violence is a public health problem, period," said Dowling. "As guardians of public health, it is our responsibility to address this scourge on our communities, and the clinicians who are knee-deep in the carnage."

In 2021, Northwell Health plans to begin sharing and discussing the results of its multi-year study with other health systems as part of its Gun Violence Prevention Learning Collaborative.

"We hope that it serves as a blueprint for other hospitals and health systems as to how to institute this universal approach so that doctors can start asking the question more and more, and so it isn't an awkward topic to talk about," said Dr. Sathya.

The latest coronavirus news updated every day including coronavirus cases, the latest news, features and interviews from New Scientist and essential information about the covid-19 pandemic

The European Space Agency finalized a contract to begin removing space debris in 2025.

ClearSpace was awarded a $105 million contract to use its space claw to extract space junk.

There are currently 129 million pieces of debris orbiting Earth.

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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a vortex of trash located between America's West Coast and Japan. In fact, it's not only one patch—there's a western patch closer to Japan and an eastern patch bobbing around southern California. While the surface debris is bad enough, it turns out that 70 percent of the garbage sinks to the ocean's bottom.

Waterways are not the only places we dump trash. While environmentalists finally forced change on Staten Island's Fresh Kills Landfill, the world's largest garbage dump was the subject of notoriety for being visible from space. Speaking of space, humans have also left plenty of trash floating in the ether. As of 2019, an estimated 129 million pieces of space debris orbit our atmosphere.

While most of the debris is tiny, roughly 34,000 objects measure over 10 centimeters in length. This includes dead spacecraft like the U.S. ship Vanguard I which first launched in 1958, and a camera lost by American astronaut Ed White on the first-ever space-walk. While most debris will incinerate upon entering Earth's atmosphere, many problems exist due to all that trash, such as interfering with newer missions.

"Out of sight, out of mind" is not an appropriate mantra if we want to continue space exploration. Last week, the European Space Agency (ESA) took the proactive step of finalizing a contract to begin space clean-up. Beginning in 2025, the ClearSpace-1 mission will remove a washing machine-sized piece of junk—a payload adapter—with a four-armed claw spacecraft. After plucking it from space, the claw will force it downward until incinerated.

Over 23,000 objects have been discarded in 5,500 launches over the last 60 years. Space junk can float around for thousands of years. This is not a benign occurrence. In 2009, a communications satellite collided with a dead Russian military satellite, resulting in thousands of pieces of new debris.

Cleaning up small junk is quite difficult—there's nothing akin to a pool skimmer in space yet—so ClearSpace, the company behind this project, will begin by grabbing a 112-kilogram payload adapter that was originally launched in 2013. The team is using a claw due to its mechanical flexibility; they tried a net as well, but given that you have to get it right on the first attempt, they wanted a bit of breathing room.

ClearSpace-1: Earth’s First Space Debris Removal Mission

The ESA signed a $105 million contract with ClearSpace for this project. ClearSpace CEO Luc Piguet says there's a lot of work in outer space:

"The way space has been used until now has led to a situation where over 5,000 satellites and out-of-control rocket stages are in orbit compared to only 2,700 working satellites. In-orbit services are not only a natural part of future space operations, they will also ensure the development of a thriving space economy."

ClearSpace isn't the only company leaving Earth's atmosphere. In October, the Japanese company, Astroscale, announced that it raised $191 million to clean up space debris. This is part of a broader movement by the U.K. Space Agency, which has awarded seven companies with £1m to clean up space. Graham Turnock, chief executive of the agency, says space will become an economic powerhouse in the coming years.

"People probably do not realise just how cluttered space is. You would never let a car drive down a motorway full of broken glass and wreckages, and yet this is what satellites and the space station have to navigate every day in their orbital lanes… This funding will help us grasp this opportunity and in doing so create sought after expertise and new high skill jobs across the country."

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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His new book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."

Which major platform has a news feed, disappearing posts, private messaging, and a live broadcasting feature? That would be … all of them.

Dilbert readers - Please visit Dilbert.com to read this feature. Due to changes with our feeds, we are now making this RSS feed a link to Dilbert.com.

Salesforce announced Tuesday that it will acquire the professional communications platform Slack in a $27.7 billion cash-and-share deal.

THE EXODUS IS HERE: Tech giant Hewlett Packard Enterprise moving headquarters from California to Spring, Texas, near Houston.

GOP governors better get cracking on Glenn’s Welcome Wagon kits ASAP, if they want to keep their states in the red column. Otherwise, as a — [cough] — longtime resident of Texas, I’m all in favor of this proposal by America’s Newspaper of Record: Texas Passes Law Banning Californians From Voting After They Move There.

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