I get viciously attacked everyday....

Muellers three sealed warrants....

An amateur astronomer caught a supernova explosion on camera

An amateur astronomer caught a supernova on camera during the explosion’s earliest moments, giving physicists a glimpse of a long-sought phase of stellar death.

Víctor Buso spotted the supernova from his rooftop observatory in Rosario, Argentina, on September 20, 2016, when he aimed his telescope straight overhead at spiral galaxy NGC 613 to test a new camera. To avoid letting in too much light from the city sky — Rosario is a city of about 1.2 million people — he took a series of about 100 images that were each exposed for 20 seconds, spanning about an hour and a half.

Over the last half-hour of Buso’s observations, the supernova appeared and then doubled in brightness. In 2013, astronomers spotted a supernova within hours of its explosion (SN Online: 2/13/17), but this is one of the first to be spotted before it exploded.

Because there is no way to predict when and where a supernova will go off, this sort of observation is extremely rare, says astrophysicist Melina Bersten of the National University of La Plata in Argentina, who reports details of the supernova in the Feb. 22 Nature.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/supernova-amateur-astronomer-camera

United States of Corporate America

Be it guns or global warming, a fascinating trend is unfolding in the Trump era: Corporations, under intense social pressure, are filling a void left by governmental gridlock or avoidance.

In most cases, this phenomenon is inspired not by the pure benevolence of corporations. Instead, it’s intense pressure from social media mobs and idealistic millennials in the companies’ workforces, who expect their employers to take stands.

https://www.axios.com/united-states-of-corporate-america-1519568415-7abd95d5-ab22-43c1-a9f6-a5151c83b4fa.html

Remember when BiBi tried to start a war over a downed jet...

Snake Oil Salesman....

Sometimes...definitely

The Nunes Conspiracy....

Why is it so hard to persuade people with facts?

An effective way to correct people’s falsely held beliefs is to address them directly with evidence. However, such rebuttals can sometimes backfire, leading people to double-down on their original position. A new paper published in Discourse Processes suggests why: when people read information that undermines their identity, this triggers feelings of anger and dismay that make it difficult for them to take the new facts on board.

Past research had suggested that one reason changing minds is so challenging is that exposing someone to a new perspective on an issue inevitably arouses in their minds the network of information justifying their current perspective. An arms race ensues: when the new complex of information overwhelms the old, often by integrating some of the existing information (yes, yoghurt contains bacteria, but bacteria can be helpful), persuasion is possible. If not, the attempt fails, or even backfires, as the old perspective is now burning even more fiercely in the person’s consciousness.

However, the new research led by Gregory Trevors was motivated by the idea that the backfire effect may not be about which side is winning that mental arms race at all. Instead, these researchers believe the problem occurs when new information threatens the recipient’s sense of identity. This triggers negative emotions, which are known to impair the understanding and digestion of written information.

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2016/02/23/why-is-it-so-hard-to-persuade-people-with-facts/amp/

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I think that religious people are more susceptible to myths than facts...there has to be a study on that thought.

Confused About the Trump-Russia Probe? Read This Memo

If you feel lost amid the various smokescreens and conspiracy theories surrounding Robert Mueller’s investigation of President Donald Trump, his presidential campaign, his advisers and his family, then the memo the House Intelligence Committee minority released late Saturday afternoon may help clarify your thinking.

A refresher on the history of the memo: It’s a rebuttal by the committee’s Democrats, led by California Representative Adam Schiff, to a memo that the Republican staff of the committee’s chairman, Devin Nunes, drafted and released to the public earlier this month.

The Schiff memo has some jarring facts in it, including revelations that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had reason to believe that a Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page, was acting as an agent of the Russian government, and that Russian agents told Page and another Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos, that the Kremlin wanted to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential campaign.

https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/view/articles/2018-02-25/schiff-memo-offers-welcome-clarity-on-trump-russia-probe