SeniorJunior

Staggering Budgets for ICE or Stuff you maybe missed in the "Big Beautiful Bill"  This year the budget for ICE Recruitment, Operations and personnel is THREE TIMES the highest it ever was in the Biden Administration. The budget for building new holding and detention centers is MORE than three times bigger. These mega-budgets go on, slightly diminishing, for three more years. The 2006 ICE budget is about the size of the total military spending for each of: Italy, South Korea, and Australia. That includes all their ships, planes, tanks and missiles. It's not overstatement when, as many worried citizens are saying, President Trump is building a "personal army," or a national police force funded approximately three time more than the FBI.  Oh, and he cut the FBI's budget this year by $500 million. Just sayin'. Check this out.  Just the shorter bars buy more "beds" than the entire federal prison system.  Giant cages, converted warehouses and tent ci...

  This Seems Relatively (!) Important In all the coverage of the upcoming NASA SLS slingshot around the moon coverage, it seems to me that direct comparisons between our two moon-bound rockets are missing. Maybe I'm just not watching the right media? I'm a big fan of both NASA and SpaceX, and they have different objectives in our return to Luna. Still, comparisons are enlightening.  This occurred to me watching the SLS creep toward the launchpad on the same huge, tracked crawler that moved the Saturn stacks. Space X is a whole new generation, including how it gets to its launchpad.  And Starship is a LOT bigger! Want to drag race? BIG DIFFS ALL AROUND like how they get to their launchpads. NASA SLS Transport MethodUses the Crawler-Transporter 2 (CT-2), a massive tracked vehicle (world's largest self-propelled) that carries the entire stacked rocket on a Mobile Launcher Platform (MLP). The crawler has laser guidance for leveling and precision docking. SpaceX Starship Stage...

  So much talk of AI agents, super chatbot spinoffs that can actually do things for you, pay your bills, grocery shop, run your research project, scratch your back. AI mavens are  inventing and hawking them like crazy.  I'm ready to go. I've been thinking what kind of help I need here around the farm. I just have to think about where I could use a little help.   The agents I want: Agent 1: Teenager . A full service phone and app consultant that doesn’t think old people suck.   Agent 2: MIT Masters degree computer scientist with powerful layman communications skills and endless patience. It can get me out of any computer pickle, spitspot. It assumes administrator/owner powers and fixes problems that confound me. Agent 3 : MBA accountant .   Reads all letters and documents from our investments. Makes suggestions. Keeps all our financial records. Files our taxes. Agent 4: Newsy. Stays up to the minute on agents and AI in general. And on science broadly....

Compared to how things could be --  might be -- in a better 2026.... ...There are too many senseless wars being fought, too many divorces, too many children being abused, too much crime, too little justice, too little compassion, too much poverty, too many illnesses that go untreated, too many do-nothing and know-nothing politicians being elected, too little civility and too little truth spoken, too much sadness and too much isolation, too few folks that really listen and too few people that really care about their neighbors. There is too much unbridled power, too much oppression, too many addicts, too many pushers, too few powerful people that believe in God and too many of the rest of us that take His name in vain. There are too many orphans and too many trees cut down, too little concern for our environment, too little trust and too little loyalty. Add to that, there is too much deception, avarice and greed. There are too few role models and too many people that don't even know ...

  And I Thought Those Way-too-Early  Galaxies Were the Story...  HA! So far, only SIX of these have been found. [1] THE REAL STORY So far, 341 "Little red dots" have been found by the mighty JWST space telescope. [2] The best hypothesis about these (so far) is that they are Black Hole Stars,   a completely new kind of celestial body ! (The last such newbie is from 1992, the magnetar.) I'm BIG, say 260 light years across. Think about it. NOT SUCH A "LITTLE" RED DOT These things -- astronomers are calling them "rubies" -- are beyond huge for something called a  'star."  If one was in the milky way, say 1000 light years from us, It would look gigantic -- biggest thing in the sky by a lot, nearly 30 times the diameter of the moon! Almost as big as the Orion constellation. As in huge .  My Hypothesis Still Works!  (Cheering is heard off camera.)  In a nutshell: Scooter Duff's  (updated) Theory of Cosmology 1. Dark matter was a first product o...