Photo, above: Rosetta is a robotic space probe built and launched by the European Space Agency to perform a detailed study of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.  On 6 August 2014 it approached the comet to a distance of about 100 km (62 mi) and reduced its relative velocity to 1 m/s (3.3 ft/s), thus becoming the first spacecraft to rendezvous with a comet with the intent to orbit (previous missions had conducted successful flybys of seven other comets).[6] Following further manoeuvres, it entered orbit after approaching to 30 km (19 mi) five weeks later. It is part of the ESA Horizon 2000 cornerstone missions and is the first mission designed to both orbit and land on a comet. It has been estimated that in the decade preceding 2014, some 2,000 people had assisted in the mission in some capacity.

Rosetta was launched on 2 March 2004 on an Ariane 5 rocket and reached the comet on 6 August 2014. The spacecraft consists of two main elements: the Rosetta space probe orbiter, which features 12 instruments, and the Philae robotic lander, with an additional nine instruments.[13] The Rosetta mission will orbit 67P/C-G for 17 months and is designed to complete the most detailed study of a comet ever attempted. The mission is controlled from the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC), in Darmstadt, Germany. 

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW

Hour One

Wednesday  1 October  2014 / Hour 1, Block A: Michael Davis, University of Hong Kong Law School, in re:  Occupy Central demonstrators were teargassed, unprepared, and so held up umbrellas to protect themselves. Police then strove to block Admiralty. Had the unintended consequence of moving the protest into the middle of a major thoroughfare, which is now still being blocked.  The main group of Occupy Central is determinedly nonviolent.  Beijing intransigence is not encouraging.  It lost Round One by gassing people, so thousands more poured into the streets.  If it turns violent, protestors could lose a great deal of public support.  Benny Tai would do it differently: organize sit-ins at planned times.  Rumors spreading that Beijing has signaled to HK govt to let the protesters just sit there; however, Beijing also announced that continued protests would have "unimaginable consequences" – exactly what it said before Tien An Men.

GlobalSolidarityHK

Wednesday  1 October  2014 / Hour 1, Block B: Scott Harold, political scientist, Rand Corporation, in re:  Modi's visit to Washington.  At the moment of massive demonstrations in Honk Kong where tens of thousands of young people are taking to the streets their disappointment at betrayal of democracy, the Chinese Foreign Minister and Defense Minister happened to be in Washington today being feted by the US Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State.  China portrays the US as having fomented the Hong Kong demos!  CCP didn’t hang on to power for 65 years by being kind; have been violent. Seek to magnify influence by dissuading people from dissent. Beijing has no effective endgame by using military force to kill people, it’ll suffer major economic.

Wednesday  1 October  2014 / Hour 1, Block C: Alan Stern, Uwingu, in re:  You can name a Martian crater (593,000 craters on Mars) for a modest donation to Uwingu, which is embarked on a major project.  Comet 67 P: made up of proto-Solar System material .  Rosetta, the mother ship , 100 feet across w solar arrays.  NASA mission. First one to orbit a comet. Philae will detach and make the first such landing.  We can scoop up internal material for analysis – first ever in the history of space exploration. New Horizons. Two main classes of comets: short-period from Kuiper Belt.Long-peri0sd comment come from the Ort Cloud.  We want to determine the amt of organics  the raw materials that may have seeded the Earth, put the bldg blocks of life on Earth's surface.  The landing is risky – the lander is about the size of a small filing cabinet; its first goal is to land and survive for at least a few hours.   We have no idea how hard the surface is – there's less than i/10,000 of Earth's gravity on the comet.

Wednesday  1 October  2014 / Hour 1, Block D:  Christian Whiton, author, Smart Power, in re: XI Jinping, leading a cult  of personality rather like Mao's, uses modern weapons and brutality.  Simultaneous demos in cities all over the world. The Chinese Foreign Minister and Defense Minister happened to be in Washington today being feted by the US Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State; does Washington – sitting on its hands - understand what's going on?  Wimpy govtl statements; Kerry tweets abt everything but Hong Kong.  "Universal suffrage" is not what the protests are about; rather, it’s the nominating process, which Beijing wants to arrogate.  The State Dept and White House seems radically to have misunderstood the entire situation in Hong Kong; DC won't let new information challenge old assumptions. Twenty percent of HK's populati0n is in the street: they want freedom and accountable democracy.  This could make the world safer for the US.  this is not a republican matter; it's entirely bipartisan, it’s about basic liberty. Having more democracies makes the world safer.  Why is China picking fights with its neighbors? Because it's an illegitimate regime.    When young people decide to overturn the old order, they can actually wait out the fossils, youth will take over the world.  In China: Instagram shut down; even the peace pigeons to be released were searched for dangerous materiel. About Kerry: "It's almost as though he wants the Chinese to believe we don't even care what happens in Hong Kong."

Hour Two

Wednesday  1 October  2014 / Hour 2, Block A: Bob Collins, former senior Pentagon analyst now based in South Korea, in re: DPRK brings in foreign doctors because the top doctors there are afraid to tell Kim that he has to lay off the beef and booze.  The handlers have to mold opinion and Kim Jung-eun at the same time.

Wednesday  1 October  2014 / Hour 2, Block B: Charles Ortel, managing director of Newport Value Partners, in re: Markets are wobbly. Could be October, historically the worst month; or ebola, or Honk Kong.

Wednesday  1 October  2014 / Hour 2, Block C:  Alyssa Ayres, CFR, in re:  Modi and India.    . . .  China's endless misbehavior.  Exactly as Xi was strolling along the riverside speaking amiably with Modi in the latter's hometown in Gujarat, Chinese troops were crossing a disputed border between China and India in a remote region.  Was this an expression of contempt by Xi?  Not clear. 

Wednesday  1 October  2014 / Hour 2, Block D:  Jacob Ward, Al Jazeera America, in re: When you use a cell phone, all traffic is routed through a central box. If anyone wants to shut off your access, he just shuts off the box  In a mesh network, a sort of private network is created; takes root in protest movements. It’s more insidious than a tech arms race between the citizen and the government; rather, the two are evenly matched leading to a frightening situation where Chinese authorities are creating false apps and claiming to be protestors.  A false app would say "Use his for protest" – and it's being run by the Beijing tyrants to get people's locations and contact lists.  For the moment it’s a sort of stalemate, but in the fight against repression that fuel burns very hot.  Anent the demos: if they can stay for a few more weeks they’ll attract most of the Hong Kong population, which will pose an insurmountable problem for the unelected tyrants of Beijing.  On Sunday, Beijjng swore to send troops across the border if Hong Kong authorities couldn’t keep public tranquility    Note sympathetic rallies around the world, including in Macau; that the protests in Hong Kong creep toward the border, and there was another in downtown Shanghai.  We're in the lunar year at the ninth day of the ninth month, which is known for its danger. 

Hour Three

Wednesday  1 October  2014 / Hour 3, Block A: Monica Crowley, Fox, & Washington Times Online opinion editor; in re:  The appalling Secret Service errors.  This Administration's fumbling of decisions and announcements   The best thing the Republicans have going for them these days is the (embarrassingly bumbling) Democrats.   . . .  (The reverse is also true.)    (1 of 2)

Wednesday  1 October  2014 / Hour 3, Block B: Monica Crowley, Fox, & Washington Times Online opinion editor; in re:   Once again the GOP is the Stupid Party. We could be free of dependency on Middle Eastern oil if we built the Keystone Pipeline, but the Republicans will not embrace it. Won’t take positions on core issues that are winning issues.   In Obamacare, more Dems favor repeal.  Enormous crossover appeal; but the cowardice of so many candidates.   Are these the self-destructive [characters] of 2012?  Seinfeld was the show about nothing the GOP is the party about nothing.  . . .  (2 of 2)

Wednesday  1 October  2014 / Hour 3, Block C: Bret Stephens, WSJ, in re:

Obama Needs to Call Bush  Talk to your predecessor. It will show contrition, humility and real bipartisanship—things you could use to salvage your presidency.

Wednesday  1 October  2014 / Hour 3, Block D: David P Goldman ("Spengler"), Asia Tims, in re: Sherman's 300,000 and the Caliphate's 3 million General William Tecumseh Sherman burned the city of Atlanta in 1864. He warned: "I fear the world will jump to the wrong conclusion that because I am in Atlanta the work is done. Far from it. We must kill three hundred thousand I have told you of so often, and the further they run the harder for us to get them." Add a zero to calibrate the problem in the Levant today. War in the Middle East is less a strategic than a demographic . . .  [more]

Hour Four

Wednesday  1 October  2014 / Hour 4, Block A: John Avlon, author, Wingnuts: Extremism in the Age of Obama  (1 of 2)

Wednesday  1 October  2014 / Hour 4, Block B: John Avlon, author, Wingnuts: Extremism in the Age of Obama  (2 of 2)

Wednesday  1 October  2014 / Hour 4, Block C:  Jacob Siegel, Daily Beast, in re:  A Double Agent App Targets Hong Kong A mobile app marketed as a tool for activists is actually a spying program, protesters have discovered. Tear gas and government warnings haven’t stopped the protesters demanding democratic elections in Hong Kong. But a bit of spyware injected into the activist movement may have been sent to do the trick.  A mobile app marketed as a tool to help activists organize is actually a spying program, protesters have discovered.  Two weeks ago, spam text messages started pinging the mobile phones of Hong Kong residents associated with . . .

Wednesday  1 October  2014 / Hour 4, Block D:  Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: Something keeps coming and going in a sea on Titan  Cassini images taken in 2007, 2013, and 2014 of one of Titan’s largest hydrocarbon seas find that a mysterious feature there keeps appearing and disappearing.  The mysterious feature, which appears bright in radar images against the dark background of the liquid sea, was first spotted during Cassini’s July 2013 Titan flyby. Previous observations showed no sign of bright features in that part of Ligeia Mare. Scientists were perplexed to find the feature had vanished when they looked again, over several months, with low-resolution radar and Cassini’s infrared imager. This led some team members to suggest it might have been a transient feature. But during Cassini’s flyby on August 21, 2014, the feature was again visible, and its appearance had changed during the 11 months since it was last seen.

Scientists on the radar team are confident that the feature is not an artifact, or flaw, in their data, which would have been one of the simplest explanations. They also do not see evidence that its appearance results from evaporation in the sea, as the overall shoreline of Ligeia Mare has not changed noticeably. The team has suggested the feature could be surface waves, rising bubbles, floating solids, solids suspended just below the surface, or perhaps something more exotic. The fact that the seasons are slowly changing on Titan is probably contributing to the transient nature of this feature.

Australia’s climate agency admits to fudging climate data  The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (ABM) has finally admitted that it alters the temperatures recorded at almost all the official weather stations in Australia.  They claim that these adjustments are necessary to make the readings more accurate.

Using a process it calls homogenization, ABM has replaced actual temperature measurements with massaged numbers. ABM claims anomalies have arisen in both the historical data and current measurements due to a wide variety of factors unrelated to climate, such as differing types of instruments used, choices of calibration or enclosure and where it was located, and the closure of some stations and opening of others. The ABM argues such factors justify homogenization of the numbers.

Yet somehow, all the adjustments make the present readings hotter and the past readings colder, thus accentuating the illusion of global warming. Nor is this surprising, as the head of ABM has publicly stated his firm belief in global warming, as noted in the article above.  So, shut up and trust their judgment! When they tell you to give up your cars and nicely heated homes, it's just because they want to save the planet.

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