inkbluesky

I had a long introduction to this about fears, hate and science and suddenly fell into a minimalist mood. As some people contemplate the possible end of this era of human civilization, now would might be a good time to wonder about the serendipitous events that created existence itself, Matter-Antimatter Split Hints at Physics Breakdown - What’s the matter with antimatter? New data may hold the answer

Antimatter is well-known to science fiction fans as the stuff that explodes on contact with regular particles such as protons and electrons, which have the same mass as their antiparticles but the opposite charge. The hot, early universe contained equal parts matter and antimatter. Yet somehow, as the cosmos cooled, matter was not completely annihilated.

[ ]…The amount of CP violation observed in experiments (and enshrined in the standard model), however, is far too little to explain why matter should have prevailed in its ancient war with antimatter. To get a clean look at CP symmetry, DZero and its sibling detector, CDF, focus on the BS, which consists of a bottom quark and a strange antiquark. (Quarks are components of protons and neutrons.) Working independently, the two detectors both found an extra dose of CP violation beyond what the standard model predicts.

BS- subatomic particle (pronounced “B-sub-S”). They are able to flip from their anti-matter state back to their matter state. They typically do this 3 trillion times a second. This flipping is the CP violation.

digital innertube

In case you didn’t know one Michael Mukasey is the Attorney General of the U.S. A position that has been called the nation’s highest law enforcement office. The nation’s sheriff if you will. The Law Encyclopedia defines Mike’s job as,

The attorney general is head of the U.S. Department of Justice and chief law officer of the federal government. He or she represents the United States in legal matters generally, and gives advice and opinions to the president and to other heads of executive departments as requested.

Sounds like an important job that requires an honorable and certainly mentally competent person, Why doesn’t the 9/11 Commission know about Mukasey’s 9/11 story?

Last week, during a question-and-answer session following a speech he delivered in San Francisco, Attorney General Michael Mukasey revealed a startling and extremely newsworthy fact. As I wrote last Saturday, Mukasey claimed that, prior to 9/11, the Bush administration was aware of a telephone call being made by an Al Qaeda Terrorist from what he called a “safe house in Afghanistan” into the U.S., but failed to eavesdrop on that call. Some help is needed from readers here to generate the attention for this story that it requires.

In that speech, Mukasey blamed FISA’s warrant requirement for the failure to eavesdrop on that call — an assertion which is, for multiple reasons that I detailed in that post, completely false. He then tearfully claimed that FISA therefore caused the deaths of “three thousand people who went to work that day.” For obvious reasons, the Attorney General’s FISA falsehoods themselves are extremely newsworthy, but it is the story he told about the pre-9/11-planning call from Afghanistan itself that is truly new, and truly extraordinary.

Critically, the 9/11 Commission Report — intended to be a comprehensive account of all relevant pre-9/11 activities — makes no mention whatsoever of the episode Mukasey described. What has been long publicly reported in great detail are multiple calls that were made between a global communications hub in Yemen and the U.S. — calls which the NSA did intercept without warrants (because, contrary to Mukasey’s lie, FISA does not and never did require a warrant for eavesdropping on foreign targets) but which, for some unknown reason, the NSA failed to share with the FBI and other agencies. But the critical pre-9/11 episode Mukasey described last week is nowhere to be found in the 9/11 Report or anywhere else. It just does not exist.

So we either have an AG that enjoys spinning reprehensible fabulist yearns or one that is due for check-in at the Hotel California.