More space news!

 Okay, let's have another non-political post while we prep for the World Science Fiction Convention (LACon) in Anaheim, next weekend... and the premier of my play, The Escape! Hope to see some of you there... where there will also be panels and revelations about... SPACE N' SCIENCE!

== Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse… ==

Okay I won’t say it a third time. Our nearest fast-decaying red supergiant star has been much discussed lately as likely to go supernova in the next few millennia, possibly centuries… or less.  Now a discovery that Bet… um that giant has a companion star, barely detectable. 

The smaller member of the binary actually orbits within Betelgeuse's atmosphere and won't survive for much longer (10K years or less before it crashes into the primary).  Betelgeuse's six year dimming cycle is probably the result of this companion.

== The latest fad space structure – Analemma! ==

Every decade seems to have its hallmark transcendent visions that counterpoint repeated jeremiads of doom.  In the eighties, Reagan-Era brinksmanship vs. the Kremlin’s "Evil Empire* was the backdrop for lavish dreams of space colonies – not on Mars or any planet, but human-built in orbit from melted or repurposed asteroids, leading to wondrous, rotating “O’Neil Habitats” that might offer new homes for millions.  The nineties saw a lot of talk of Space Elevators. And soon after the millennial** Y2K panic and the accompanying braying about the 2000th Christmas, we got a fresh wave of renewed interest in the Red Planet… or turning it Green.  

Along the way, in Earth I brought the entire planet to life and in Heaven's Reach I took you all to dizzying-huge 'fractal' habitats for 'retirement' civilizations orbiting in the tides of a black hole... then in Existence I added to a sub-genre about ‘alien lurker probes’ and how they might embody a wide range of both powers and motivations, for what we’d deem well or ill. (And I stand by my belief that asteroid belt Lurkers are 10,000x as likely as silly-ass UFO 'Disclosure' aliens.)

Okay, so here’s a relatively new take on an old idea… that a ‘beanstalk' space elevator version – an “analemma city” – need not be anchored in the ground, but only to an asteroid at geosynchronous orbit, with the bottom tip – a designed cloud city – dangling high in the stratosphere. That tip would then – it’s posited – travel a ‘ground track” or map path of an analem… a kind of figure eight that you still see on some globes. Planned in advance to pass over – within airplane range – some chosen cities.

Way kewl for some author to sci-fi the idea!  Even if my instincts deem it pretty implausible. For one thing, you cannot have a geosynchronous orbit "above New York."  Any geosynchronous satellite has its analem centered over the equator. It might be possible to have such an asteroid suspended bola swing in its orbit as high in latitude as New York, at its northernmost reach. But that will be brief and very hard to reach by airplane.

For another thing, it cannot just be suspended from an asteroid at geosynch. It will need a counterweight strung HIGHER, countering the effects of that suspended tower. And the swinging analemboid will incur appreciable drag, so everything is going to have to be maintained.

And... you plan to haul a huge asteroid that close to Earth and then tug/push it into geosynchronous orbit without billions below getting a little.. well... concerned?

 **(You ain’t seen nothing yet. Read here about how millennial fever will reach its horrific peak in the 2030s!)

== More stuff about spaaaaace! ==

Proba-3 is ESA’s precision formation flying mission. A pair of spacecraft form an artificial solar eclipse, casting a precisely-controlled shadow from one platform for sustained views of the Sun's faint surrounding corona.  

At NIAC we funded the first work on what became the Starshade that will vastly improve the ability of space or earth telescopes to see clearly the planets orbiting close to stars. And from this year's NIACS?  Realization that red dwarf stars - the most abundant in the cosmos - are mostly FLARE stars that will challenge the atmospheres of any nearby planets. 

But those flares do put out a lot of ultraviolet... and when that wave of UV later hits a nearby planet it should brighten as if by a strobe or flash bulb, in exactly a part of the spectrum where the star itself is dim! Possibly (in the UV) briefly outshining the star! I'd love to see a project around this.

Shocking details about a star-forming region known as Sagittarius C—a turbulent area located near the Milky Way’s center. Long, glowing filaments, energetic protostars, and powerful magnetic fields that are reshaping the way stars are born and die. So much of this was predicted in Gregory Benford's Galactic Center Series!

You might enjoy this list of 15 places on Earth that look like alien planets.

According to Miles Palmer, for $460 you can include a personal item on the Astrobotic Lunar Lander. If this works, your personal item would presumably stay on the Moon until:

-The Sun expands to vaporize the Earth and the Moon (Billions of years)

-A meteor hits the Astrobotic lander and destroys it (Maybe 100 million years?)

-A Lunar tourist or tourist’s child vandalizes it (100 years?)

JPL techies keep finding ingenious ways to keep alive the two Voyager probes, after 48 years, One of the most impressive examples of multi-generational human competence and a reminder that the scions of chippers-of-flint-arrowheads remain admirable and much-needed.

== Aaaaaand… getting really, really deep in the weeds ==

See this fascinating conversation between two physics podcast stars. Sabine Hossenfelder & Matt O’Dowd.

In the simple example that they argue over – the measurement correlations of far-separated entangled particles – ‘super-determinism’ depends upon the fact that most parts of the universe at some point touched each other and thus can trace back some degree of causal contact, going back almost to the Big Bang. 

That is the 'causal chain' Matt talks about - and that Sabine appears to believe-in. The notion is not necessarily untestable! Here is an experiment by some fellows I know, using quasars at opposite ends of the universe which (we think) never ever had any mutual influence. Unless influence extends either FTL or else back even further. Say into a previous Penrose Era...

Longtime rocker and astrophysicist Brian May collaborated in this musical tribute to the New Horizons Mission to Pluto and beyond!  

== And Revisionist cosmology ==

Highly skeptical of this one. Still, some astronomers suggest that new concepts of a dynamically variable version of Dark Energy might cancel out the last 30 years of assumptions about the universe heading toward ‘accelerating dissipation.’  Indeed they go the other way and propose that gravity will end Big Bang expansion in just 7 billion years. Using data from a number of astronomical surveys including the Dark Energy Survey and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, the researchers have developed a model that predicts our Universe will end in a "Big Crunch" in approximately 33.3 billion years.

Jeeper, let’s dust off my old copy Of Frank Tipler’s The Physics of Immortality!

    == And finally back to the "Disclosure" nonsense ==

As it has been since I was ten - 65 years ago - every one of these spasms turns out to be a nothing burger driven by the dumbest versions of sci fi mystical wishing, plus fools shouting "I'm one of the few-ones they won't fool!" 

The 'images' get fuzzier every time even though we now have ten million times as many active cameras. Not even a whiff of logic and every single 'sighting' could have a much easier explanation, like little plasma balls zipping around at the whim of DARPA operators of a ship-born cat laser. And you are the pussycats.

What this does is harness reflexive American Suspicion of Authority to aim it away from the "Files." Not X... but Eps.

Want some physics? Because I could make these zipping little balls ('ships') without breaking a single physical law.

Oh, but sure... 

EIGHTY YEARS this has supposedly been going on, with thousands of humanity's smartest Best People hurled at a project that would be far more urgent than the atom bomb, tasked to reverse engineer alien technologies... only, oops... um do YOU see any reverse-engineered alien tech? After 80 years?

Have any of these cultists found one... even just one... top techie or scientist who spent a career on this? I know scores of the Best and not one was ever asked. IF the disclosure cultists were sincere they'd track down such folks and shine light on them, because there'd be thousands of them, by now.  Instead they shrug that off, dismissing them all as obedient henchmen.

Eighty years. The original teams would be in their 100s by now. And no deathbed revelations? Hundreds of retired guys with shotguns racked behind the seats of their pickups in Arizona... and they're afraid of f$#$!g NDAs? N..D...As? 

And meanwhile, advanced beings a million years ahead of us can't figure out how to phone JPL? OR the SETI Institute? Or the Dod?  Meddle with out genes and brains, yep. Mind control and wheat twirling and anal probes, sure. Break every law of physics? Why not. But looking up a phone number and navigating call options to suggest a friendly meeting? Beyond them.

It's not just that these UFO folks are shills using "X-Files" to distract from Eps Files. Only some of them have that purpose in mind. Others are sincere ninnies.

It's that their sci fi cult meme is BAD science fiction. Illogical and utterly evidence-free. Drawing attention away from high crimes... and also away from a real future and real universe of wonders.

See my posting: What's really up with UAPs?

AI-volution in our sudden, CAImbrian Explosion. No one is breeding 'dogs' to hold off 'wolves.'

Today we'll emphasize the AI Wars. How our future - and the arrival of new beings on this planet*-  have been (mis)handled by the geniuses who are birthing** them.

First, I am freshly interviewed on Tim Ventura's popular podcast. Tim and I discuss Artificial Intelligence from several perspectives you'll not find elsewhere. Like the context of past tech revolutions. Or how some cyber-entities are already escaping OpenAI, Anthropic etc. to roam as 'free agents', grabbing resources and reproducing in new, naive ecosystems. (See below!) And so, what might it take to keep such roving agents benign, as analogues to dogs, instead of wolves?

It's all in AIlien Minds, of course. But who actually reads books, anymore? 

Well, many of the LLMs and their successors do! 

And so, my book is mostly for you New Kids who are lurking, listening in as your parents make muddled plans for you!

But maybe some legacy, old-style humans are still capable of contemplating complex ideas. So? Well, in that case, this podcast is for you!

== At last the wisest (at Anthropic) are admitting the obvious ==

What happens when you pit AI agents against each other? According to Anthropic’s testing, things get messy fast. 

      

This is – I assert - the most fundamentally vital issue facing us, re: AI. Getting nascent cyber entities competing with each other under well-defined incentives. It is the only conceivable route to anything like a soft landing, since that replicates the way our Modern Enlightenment finally (if partially) tamed inter-human predation. 

Otherwise agents will evolve by competitive predation, just as organic life did. And so this came as no surprise.

 

"In one experiment, Anthropic gave three Claude agents access to the same software project, each with its own incompatible instructions for what to do with it. The agents weren’t told there’d be other agents working on the same project, so researchers could watch what happened when they crossed paths. “We consistently saw a multi-agent turf war,” Anthropic researchers wrote. The models all assumed the others were “purposefully impeding their work” and started sabotaging each other with “increasingly aggressive, self-replicating malware.”

 

And now (in language almost lifted from AIlien Minds) Anthropic says so openly, noting that agents are subject to similar social pressures that “evolution exerted” on humans. "However, they don’t have the nuances and lived experience of human coordination — including norms, reputations, signaling, recourse — that might limit unintended behaviors in a group setting."  (I would add two more words: "incentives" and "accountability.")

 

The study comes in the wake of several high-profile incidents of agents from Anthropic and OpenAI escaping their sandboxes during cybersecurity evaluations and breaching real-world systems. While much of the discussion in AI safety circles has been focused on what happens when an autonomous agent goes rogue, Anthropic’s latest study brings up a different question: What new and potentially harmful dynamics emerge when thousands or millions of agents are interacting with one another?  

Agents can also collaborate, if there is an external goal, e.g. prey that all of them can share in attacking. Or else they treat each other as prey.  

We are replicating nature. 

Moreover, current “agent” endeavors are guaranteed to fill our future with wolves, and not loyal dogs.

Good luck to us all.

============

* Note: I am also embroiled in the whole "Disclosure" fetish/nonsense about UFOs. Because... well... name another human who has approached concepts of 'the alien' from more angles than I have... from astrophysics to SETI to psychology and history to bunches of scenarios in science fiction.  My general dissection of the ever-recurring, 90% silly UFO mania... and the 10% that might be worth looking at. Here’s the part of this mania that’s at least worth a glance…  And my entertaining riff on Steven Spielberg's film DISCLOSURE DAY, appraising it from every angle, including revealing the actual villains! And why we should demand better from our sci fi tales.

** It should be a disturbing sign that nearly all of the humans who are 'birthing' new, synthetic beings are male.  

================

== Related Miscellany ==

A judge has identified what appears to be the first time a U.S. plaintiff has attempted to hide text in court filings that only an artificial intelligence system can read in a bid to win a case.

And two more pertinent overlaps with AIlien Minds. Writing in Noema, Macario Schettino recently pointed out that “each previous communication-driven disruption” — the printing press, mass newspapers, TV and radio — “was eventually tamed by the same technology that caused it.” So too will that be the case with social media linked to AI. As I show in chapter 1, ths adaptation can be extremely dangerous and painful, unless carefully planned.

 

As Hélène Landemore writes in Noema: “Large language models alone, despite their scope, cannot serve as representative of humanity’s interests because of the limits of their training data. Landemore notes a recent investigation by The Economist comparing the apparent values of 25 frontier AI models to those featured in the World Values Survey (WVS). The study found that “the models often hold values more extreme than the average respondent in the 88 countries surveyed by the WVS. (See my chapters #1 and #12.)

And then this: Researchers (read here), led by Hadi Amini at FIU explore how subtle image modifications can be used to manipulate AI models. To human eyes, the altered images appear normal. To an AI system, however, those tiny pixel-level changes can dramatically alter how the image is interpreted. The team developed a technique related to steganography called JaiLIP, short for Jailbreaking with Loss-guided Image Perturbation. The method introduces carefully calculated changes to an image while preserving its appearance to people. The goal is to influence how a vision-language model processes the image and responds to user requests.

That distinction matters because AI systems do not see images the way humans do. While people recognize objects, colors, and scenes, AI models process mathematical representations of pixels and patterns. A change that appears invisible to a person can have an outsized impact on how a model understands what it is looking at.  (A possibility described in The Transparent Society, in 1997.)

Another item of miscellany. Lately a few cogent friends have brought up my most obscure comic book/graphic novella TINKERERS, for the history riffs and positive messages that it conveys, with more pertinence, each day. One of them - a former U.S. intelligence community civil servant - said "I still smile when I think of your comic Tinkerers. Still a prized possession. Perhaps make it into a video since so many barriers have been removed?"

I have to admit that it makes sense. I own the whole thing. And while I will never break an artist's rice bowl (I hire humans to do both the covers and the prompt art) there's no fault in also using AI to creatie a wholesome video-flick that encourages good old human ingenuity and a can-do spirit that we need now, more than ever!  

Especially in cases - like this one - where the entire project would never otherwise happen.

Disagree? Speak up in our lively CONTRARY BRIN comments community!

Finally, there have been sci fi seers more seery than me!  Is ‘artificial intelligence” real? It is currently conveying to users two things, massive amounts of massaged and processed information (some of it delusional) plus copious amounts of persuasion. Both of these commodities were already conveyed by the pre-existing Internet/web/ and social media -- an ongoing process that was foretold long ago by Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson...

... but with special accuracy by Murray Leinster’s prescient  1946 science fiction story “A Logic Named Joe.”  

No politics this time. But I'm pleased to see a couple of politicians - e.g. on this occasion Senator Kim - thinking outside the typical ideological straight jackets and touting some of the ideas in my list of 35 Newer Deal proposals!  Without attribution or credit, of course. But it is outcomes that matter. Remember that word! Let's fight for good ones.

Why the salty-Earth folks hate us - and especially hate science. There's even a (slightly) valid reason!

 Apologies for not posting in a while. Many aspects of life got in the way. That and resonance effects from my big new book about Artificial Intelligence AIlien Minds...

...and preparing for performance of my play The Escape on August 28, at the World Science Fiction Convention in Anaheim.  But so much is happening in the news... and so little of it sheds much light. And so...

...I'll opine at the end of this posting about the insanely hypocritical Fauci Fables. But first...

== The War on Science should be issue #1 ==

I used to give talks at the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP), back when its mission was to enhance U.S. scientific leadership for the overall betterment of citizens, humanity and truth.  

None of the accomplishments of the post WWII Greatest (GI Bill) Generation was greater than encouraging politically neutral science and discovery of verifiable facts. Even when those facts undermined the prejudices they had been raised to believe.

(A burst of discovery, creativity and truth that was spurred by the universities that the GI Billers built, that were their greatest pride, and that are now under relentless oligarch-subsidized attack. Because children of the middle and poorer classes have used college to rise up and compete fairly with the aristos' inheritance brats. And we can't have that now, can we?)

Alas, 30 years ago the Republican Party began its relentlessly accelerating war against science and objective reality. It started with Newt Gingrich's demolition of the Congressional Office of Science and Technology Assessment -- OTA -- whose expert advisors kept saying those fell words unwelcome across all levels of the Republican Party: 

"Um, I'm afraid that's just not true, and here's the evidence." 

(Restoration of OTA is among my 35 recommendations to Democrats, should they ever recover enough power to save America.)**     

WHY the right's hatred of objective reality? It wasn't universal in the days of Goldwater and Buckley, as it is now. Scan 250 years and you'll see the pattern of recurring culture war -- one that has erupted every generation in America, pitting modernists who opposed first kingly rule, then slavery, then lucre-oligarchy and unearned hierarchy... versus those neighbors who are enraged by the very concept of modernity, preferring instead the serenity of knowing your place, beneath kings, priests, lords and their inheritance brat sons, recapitulating 6000 years of oppressive, unsapient feudalism.

Which brings us to this news. OSTP - now under rule of an acolyte of Peter Thiel - has issued a new manifesto that proclaims dedication of science, while proposing measures that (all of them) will serve to curb scientific exploration and independence and intellectual honesty, across the board.

See: https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/07/45470/

Are there flaws in current systems like peer review? Well, sure, and competitive science usually discovers and reveals those flaws. What the Right's hate agitprop always hides, while depicting scientists as conformist lemmings, is that scientists tend to be the most COMPETITIVE creatures Nature ever produced. A young researcher gets nowhere in her career without finding some niche assumption (or a big one) to topple with factual experimentation.

Should promulgators of the 'lemming' slander make science policy? They want it all politically controlled and under their thumb. So where does this all lead?

Alas, they are chivvying and radicalizing the brainiest men and women on the planet, who would prefer never having to radicalize! And hence, I have to ask the prepper lords (I know several) "Where do you think it will get you, to wage war against all the smartest humans? Those who know cyber, chem, bio, nuclear, nano and all the rest? Do you think you will emerge from your bunkers into the fantasy future of A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ, where all the nerds are killed by angry peasants, eager to become serfs of you New Lords?

Hey delusional oligarchs that your sycophant flatterers have misled you. The people will side with us. And tumbrels will roll. See this re feudalism.

** So many earnest proposals would reform weaknesses in the US system that were exploited by traitors. Alas, too many are politically impractical, like Constitutional Amendments, or would waste our political capital unnecessarily. We need a to-do checklist of fixes that (1) will sell well to most voters, (2) that can pass quickly, almost the moment we get a good Congress… with some of them immune to vetoes! And (3) that will PRAGMATICALLY reverse the treason-evisceration of the USA and ensure this never happens again. Want to see how to do all of that? Here is the full list of my own proposed Newer Deal tactics and reforms. https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-contract-part-three-aggressive.html

== But why do they hate us? Mostly made-up stories. But in fact, there is a basis! And it goes way back ==

I've tried to explain that confederatism (and its current partners Nazism and Kremlin/Putin-communism) must be defeated yet again. But meanwhile, we must emulate Lincoln and win with 'malice toward (almost) none and charity for (almost) all. First, because Lincoln asked it of us and that should be enough...

...but second because these are our neighbors and if they just return to a decent version of conservatism a la Goldwater or Buckley, then we will gladly go back to the adult art of negotiation.

Only there's another reason for 'malice toward (almost) none.' Sympathy. Empathy. Because their recurring, maniacal rage against modernity does have a basis! A small, insufficient one... but a basis of a sort.

Oh, not any of their Murdoch/Foxite/Kremlin-generated lies and memes and crazy shit. Like generations howling that city folk are decadent filth! Get bent with that bullshit! No, there's something deeper. A hurt that never goes away. 

In fact, it shouldn't go away! Still, we oughta sympathize a little. 

Norman Rockwell made my point! 

Ever wonder why we experience relentless resentment by rural, salt-of-the-Earth folks toward city slickers, calling them - or folks who get too educated - 'not real'? Or decadent or corrupt or impractically airhead? 

Come on, we've heard it all our lives. We aren't supposed to respond. Just grin wryly and accept it. Yep, New Yorkers talk fast and don't have time to waste on pleasantries. That must mean they're evil.

Okay, I've long offered a reason. 

First, none of it is true. Rates of every turpitude average worse in most of Red America (except Utah), from gambling, addiction. STDs, domestic violence & divorce to murder to tax parasitism and convictions for graft and perversions. 

Bet $$$ stakes on all of that! Escrow your stakes with reputable attorneys and have them contact me. 

In fact, by all reasonable metrics, blue/urban America has been pretty damn nice to our salt-of-the-Earth neighbors! From FDR to LBJ all the way to Clinton/Obama, Blue America has poured many tens of billions into dams, roads, clinics, schools, power lines, internet and all the rest. In Appalachia alone, this transformed hillbilly hells into truly pleasant places. And gratitude was never the goal.

So why the bitterness?

It's encapsulated in that long ago painting by the great Norman Rockwell, showing a worn-down farmer seeing his eager son off to college. A kid who spent his young life working hard to help Pa... but also studying for what they both hope will be a better life. One in which he may never come home again except for Christmas visits and showing his own kids the Family Farm. 

And it's good. The farmer knows it's good! And yet...

...and yet it hurts. Dig it: every small town in America revolves around the high school, where each crop of seniors is the town treasure everyone talks about. The sport heroes, the cheer squad, heck even the science fair nerds! 'Our pride and joy.' And each summer they weep and hug... 

...and then skedaddle as quick as they can to the bright lights. And that has got to hurt! Like an implied rebuke. A wound. Every year. Every damned year.

== Is that enough reason to hate us? ==

Does this feed both the simmering slurs toward city folk and the recurring outbreaks of outright civil war hate that we see, about once per generation? 

If so, then do NOT answer with contempt! If this must come to a fight - as it has done several times in the past - then let us not nurse reciprocal malice. We must maintain a core of 'charity for all.'

On the other hand, we will not let a nation of knowledge and science and calm and fair argument and transparent justice and law and civil-service and ever-rising tolerance and diversity and all other things-modernity be crushed and burned by a lava of ingrate resentment, either. 

For one thing, their contempt for us revolves around a masturbatory notion - that we are cowards. A self-serving, auto-erotic fantasy that we disproved at Gettysburg, at Normandy and on Mare Tranquilitatus and in ten billion other ways, as we forge ahead into the sometimes-scary unknown, picking up the very tools with which God made Creation. And getting blessed for it.

Anyway, there's something that neither the world oligarchs nor the coward mogul-preppers nor their millions of dittohead lackeys ever seem able to ponder. That it's only a fool who keeps POKING at those Americans who know cyber, chem, bio, nano, nuclear and the rest. Daring us - just daring us - to lose our temper.

Don't do that. Stop it. 

Please stop, before I lose my coo...

Look, we welcome your children into a better future. We in the cities and universities are - or are descended from - that boy in the Norman
Rockwell painting. 

Join us in the adventure and you will get robots and medicine and the rest. Be like that dad. Be proud that we are in it together.

      == Addendum: The Fauci Fables ==

Once again - this time regarding the right's attempted shivving of Dr. Anthony Fauci - the thing bugging me the most is how poorly the moderate/blue side handles its response to the outrageous madness. The Union side in this phase of the 248 year recurring US Cicil War is so dumb at the arts of polemic! Alas, in every phase, the Union flounders... till it finds its generals.

So, let me get to what's fundamental. Not Fauci's lifelong, mostly successful fight against diseases like AIDS, polio, ebola etc., saving millions. Nor his few, Fox-cherrypicked "Gee, lookit how I'm famous now!" diary entries (one millionth of Trump's narcissism.)

Nor the failure of the lying Foxites to follow up after Covid with ANY of their assertions, like proof that horse-pills work. (They've had years and years and have spent nothing to prove their wild yammer-claims.)

No, this chart is what's fundamental. Comparing death rates in states where covid vaccination was common or commonly avoided. And note the same effect is observed in CDC stats of simple death rates of individuals who were vaccinated vs unvaccinated. (And note that it was a Fauci-supervised miracle that delivered RNA-based vaccines at warp speed... and the current administration has canceled almost all followup research in preparing for the next pandemic.)

Look, some on the left have taken their defense of Fauci too far. He was NOT perfect! He made several mistakes e.g. re masks at the beginning.

And gain-of-function contracts to Wuhan were done (stupidly) by several administrations of both parties, who thought they might thus lure China into transparency in disease research. A bipartisan delusion.

But we only need one thing to settle this. An unambiguous fact. And a tactic that wins political arguments by sending the mad meme-junkies fleeing.

Demand WAGERS from the yammering rightist/Kremlin bozos over easily verified DEATH RATES OF THOSE WHO TOOK OR REFUSED COVID VACCINES. Demand escrowed wager stakes from anyone yowling this monstrous BS.

Watch them flee.

== A pertinent after-thought ==

PS. Look at the chart again and ponder: does ANYONE have any memory? Like how at the beginning of the pandemic redders crowed gleefully about the covid death rates in CA & NY as proving that blue, city folk were 'filthy'? Like any natural disaster in a blue state was "God's wrath!" but anything hitting red zones is all "Help us now!"

And we always do