David Dobrodt

On Feb. 18, NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover, the largest rover ever sent to Mars, will land on the red planet to begin a new science mission that seeks to not only deepen human understanding of Martian geology and answer questions about whether or not life ever existed on Mars, but also act as a trailblazer for future missions to Mars. But before the science mission can begin, Perseverance has to get through the most difficult landing maneuver that the space agency has ever attempted.

The landing sequence will begin with a fiery entry into the planet’s atmosphere, then a parachute descent down towards its landing spot in the Jezero Crater. At about 2-3 miles above the Martian surface, the “sky crane” carrying the rover will separate from the parachute and make a powered descent to the surface. Once the rover touches down, the sky crane will separate and fly off. “I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that entry, descent and landing (EDL) is the most critical and most dangerous part of the mission,” Allen Chen, the EDL lead, said on Jan. 27 during a NASA JPL press conference. “Success is never assured, and that’s especially true when we’re trying to land the biggest, heaviest and most complicated rover we’ve ever built to the most dangerous site we’ve ever attempted to land on.” A spectacular animation video of the landing sequence can be seen in this video.

Jezero Crater was chosen as the landing site because it is thought to have once been the home of a river delta and lake filled with water. “Perseverance’s sophisticated science instruments will not only help in the hunt for fossilized microbial life, but also expand our knowledge of Martian geology and its past, present, and future,” said Ken Farley, project scientist for Mars 2020, from Caltech in Pasadena, California. “Our science team has been busy planning how best to work with what we anticipate will be a firehose of cutting-edge data. That’s the kind of ‘problem’ we are looking forward to.”

In addition to science instruments intended to explore the Martian surface, the mission also carries technologies more focused on future Mars exploration, reports a NASA press release. MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment), a car-battery-size device in the rover’s chassis, is designed to demonstrate that converting Martian carbon dioxide into oxygen is possible. Future applications of the technology could produce the vast quantities of oxygen that would be needed as a component of the rocket fuel and for breathing for astronauts.

The Perseverance mission, the NASA release notes, is part of a larger program that includes missions to the Moon as a way to prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. Charged with returning astronauts to the Moon by 2024, NASA will establish a sustained human presence on and around the Moon by 2028 through NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration plans.

In remarks on January 29, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases warned that clinical trial results from Johnson & Johnson showing that its vaccine is less effective against the South African variant of the coronavirus, were a “wake-up call.” J&J and other vaccine manufactures will have to be “nimble to be able to adjust readily” to produce modified vaccines, Fauci said. The new Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Rochelle Walensky stated at the same briefing that it is urgent to increase the level of sequencing nationwide, in order to catch new strains before they get completely out of control.

“We have scaled up surveillance dramatically just in the last 10 days, in fact. But our plans for scaling up surveillance are even more than what we’ve done so far,” Walensky said. The CDC has contracted with various universities and four private companies—Quest, Labcorp, Illumina and Helix—to conduct more sequencing. By mid-February, those contracts should hit full capacity, analyzing 6,000 samples per week, CDC officials said. But this is far less than what is required, according to various experts in the field, and even less than what many other countries are already doing.

“We are in a race against time because of these mutations. And in that race, we are falling behind,” said Mara G. Aspinall, a biomedical diagnostics professor at Arizona State University, in comments reported by the Washington Post. More equipment, staffing and funding are needed to increase sequencing,

“None of that exists right now. We’re incredibly behind compared to other countries,” said Janet Hamilton, executive director of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists. “We have no idea what is out there in our country. We don’t even know what we don’t know.”

Southern Illinois University RNA biochemist Keith Gagnon stated: “Genomic surveillance is probably the number-one thing, besides COVID-19 testing itself, that we can do to track the virus. Without it, we are flying blind.”

by Ramasimong Phillip Tsokolibane, Leader of LaRouche South Africa

Earlier this week, speaking on behalf of millions of starving Africans, I demanded a full global mobilization to save their lives and the lives of hundreds of millions of others around the globe who are also facing near-term death from starvation.

I urged Donald Trump, in his capacity as the most powerful person on the planet, by virtue of his office as President of the United States, to take up the responsibility demanded of him by the U.S. Constitution, and mobilize the full resources of his nation—including the food-producing power of the great farmers of America and the logistical capabilities of the U.S. military—to produce the food and get it to where it is needed.

I stated that he must be joined in this effort by the forces of the other great powers, including Russia and China, and I endorsed the call by the great lady, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the chairwoman of the Schiller Institute, for a summit to discuss the means to resolve the great crises facing humanity, including the global pandemic and this hunger and starvation crisis, which are related.

I want to restate my conviction, which I know to be shared by Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche: These crises require an extraordinary global response, in which our full resources, including those of the powerful militaries of great powers, are used, not to maim and kill people, but to save their lives. The time has come for such a radical reexamination and repurposing of the capabilities of the human race, if it is to survive this great crisis.

This is not a debatable point. People are dying by the millions, and many more millions will soon die, and we—all of us, our leaders, such as President Trump, and all our citizens—must make the decision to save them and take the steps, as nations and individuals, to save them.

I wish to underscore the warning of David Beasley of the UN World Food Program (WFP), that more than 300,000 people a day could die from starvation, unless immediate action is taken. I do not know David Beasley, but I believe he would agree with me that even the WFP, which currently has the best food distribution capacity in the world, cannot meet this crisis, even if all the monies he has requested were immediately forthcoming.

Decades of underdevelopment, enforced by the financial power of the British Empire and its globalist institutions, including the murderous International Monetary Fund, have left the world without even the basic infrastructure, such as roads, to get food to many rural areas where people are already starving.

Certainly the WFP must play a role in any solution, but the WFP is not the solution, nor has the WFP ever asked for the kind of mobilization I am calling for. That is because even well-meaning people have been trapped in a paradigm in which they have been forced by ‘circumstances’ to accept the death of many people, from causes such as starvation or disease, as painful but unavoidable. I for one, and Mrs. LaRouche for another, refuse to accept this flawed way of thinking.

We must mobilize from the standpoint that every human life matters, including millions upon millions of black lives in Africa, that each life is precious; that each must be cherished and nurtured. Those millions of souls cannot thrive and pursue the happiness that comes with productive lives, much less even exist, without the material, cultural, and spiritual support of a growing economy.

They must first have enough to eat. The right to eat must become generally understood as a basic human right, as is the right to adequate medical care. As citizens of our nations, but as members of the human race, we must fight to transform this moral understanding into public policy, holding our leaders responsible to the principle of the General Welfare, as enshrined in that glorious document, the U.S. Constitution, and in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as written by Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt in 1947.

I repeat my call to President Donald Trump, in response to the warning from his friend, David Beasley: Mobilize the full resources of your great American nation to save Africa from starvation and death. Give your American farmers the mission to feed the world. I am sure they will rise to the challenge. Order the American military, which has the greatest logistical capability of any nation or combination of nations in the world, to figure out how to get food from the producers to those who need it. I am sure that they can do this. Call on the rest of the world to join you in this moral endeavor. Mr. Trump, the times demand that you be the leader that we need. Do it now!

I also urge that these matters be brought up for discussion by the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites, recently established by Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche, especially to address issues such as these. I fully support her call for an extraordinary mobilization to create a system of global health security to meet the pandemic crisis. Africa needs the army of health volunteers that she has urged be created.

These things we must do. Save millions of lives, whose deaths can and must be prevented!

Friday Questions — Don’t believe everything you hear.  The cabal which ran Russiagate thinks it won, but it is a Pyrrhic victory, which will be overturned not by a secret plan organized by “good guys” in the military and intelligence, but by a mobilization of the American people. 

Questions include, Do you think Trump is still the President?  What do you make of the “democratization of Wall Street”, as in the manipulation against the hedge funds in the GameStop case (hint — the key is regulation, but not of the sort proposed by hedge funds to defend their speculative swindles!)?  How can you encourage children to “Think Like Beethoven”, without taking away their personal autonomy?

“There are no direct parallels in history” for the present time, said Russian President Vladimir Putin in his speech at the Davos Agenda forum. “However, some experts … compare the current situation to the 1930s…. As you are aware, the inability and unwillingness to find substantive solutions to problems like this in the 20th century led to the World War II catastrophe. Of course, such a heated global conflict is impossible in principle, I hope. That is what I am pinning my hopes on, because this would be the end of humanity. However, as I have said, the situation could take an unexpected and uncontrollable turn— unless we do something to prevent this. There is a chance that we will face a formidable break-down in global development, which will be fraught with a war of all against all and attempts to deal with contradictions through the appointment of internal and external enemies and the destruction of not only traditional values such as the family … but fundamental freedoms….

“We have a shared responsibility to prevent this scenario, which looks like a grim dystopia, and to ensure instead that our development takes a different trajectory— positive, harmonious and creative,” continued Putin, who then identified three great challenges confronting the international community:

First, while the past decades have brought great improvements in living standards overall, the gains have largely been concentrated in a small number of people. Using a $5.50 per day income figure, he boasted that China reduced from 1.1 billion to 300 million the number of people below that poverty line, Russia from 64 million to 5 million, while the U.S. number increased from 2000 to 2016 from 3.6 million to 5.6 million. “But … in terms of corporate profits, who got hold of the revenue? The answer is clear: 1% of the population.” He addressed the economic malaise that has struck the “developed” countries with the past decades’ shift to financialization and environmentalism: “In the past 30 years, in a number of developed countries, the real incomes of over half of the citizens have been stagnating, not growing. Meanwhile, the cost of education and healthcare services has gone up. Do you know by how much? Three times.” The source of this imbalance? They “are a direct result of the policy pursued in the 1980s … the Washington Consensus.”

The tools of some decades ago— stimulating consumption— can no longer work in a world where debt is double GDP globally and more than triple GDP in some countries, while interest rates are essentially zero and already at historic lows in many emerging market economies: “The so-called quantitative easing is only increasing the bubble of the value of financial assets and deepening the social divide.” The effect? “The rise of economic problems and inequality is splitting society, triggering social, racial and ethnic intolerance.”

Second, Putin took on the looming question of the tech giants. “In some areas, they are de facto competing with states,” he said. “Their audiences consist of billions of users that pass a considerable part of their lives in these ecosystems.”

“Society is wondering whether such monopolism meets public interests,” he asked, remarking that these tech giants should “replace legal democratic institutions and essentially usurp or restrict the natural right of people to decide for themselves how to live, what to choose, and what position to express freely…. I am confident that the overwhelming majority of people share this position.”

Third was the issue of international relations. Due to troubles at home, governments resort increasingly to enemy images, both domestically and abroad, with increasingly aggressive actions such as sanctions, trade wars, and restrictions. “Such a game with no rules critically increases the risk of unilateral use of military force.”

To resolve the reasons for unstable global growth, Putin warns “It is clear that the world cannot continue creating an economy that will only benefit a million people, or even the golden billion…. The recent developments, including migration crises, have reaffirmed this once again.”

“The reality is such that really different development centers with their distinctive models, political systems and public institutions have taken shape in the world. Today, it is very important to create mechanisms for harmonizing their interests to prevent … anarchy and a series of protracted conflicts,” Putin told his audience. Pointing to examples, he spoke of the Astana format of talks between Russia, Iran and Turkey to stabilize Syria; the end of bloodshed in Azerbaijan and Armenia with Russian intervention; and Russia-Saudi-U.S. cooperation on energy markets. Such cooperation is needed to support nations requiring help in achieving their testing and vaccination needs.

Putin gave short shrift— just a few sentences— to the green theme of the conference, a theme against whose implementation he had essentially spent his speech inveighing.

Responding to a question from forum organizer Klaus Schwab, Putin said that Europe and Russia, if they are able to rise above problems “inherited from past centuries” and look to the future, “we will certainly enjoy a positive stage in our relations.”

“We are ready for this, we want this, and we will strive to make it happen,” he concluded. “But love is impossible if it is declared only by one side. It must be mutual.”

The complete text of his speech is posted on the Kremlin website.

NASA and the European space agency signed an agreement committing their space agencies to building the Gateway together. A release from NASA.gov states, “The agreement signed Tuesday marks NASA’s first formal commitment to launch international crew members to the lunar vicinity as part of NASA’s Artemis Mission.” Under the agreement the European space agency will contribute habitation and refueling modules, along with enhanced lunar communications to the Gateway.

NASA’s Administrator Jim Bridenstine declared “This partnership leverages the outstanding cooperation established by the International Space Station as we push forward to the moon.” He continued, “Gateway will continue to expand NASA’s cooperation with international partners like ESA, ensuring the Artemis program results in the safe and sustainable exploration of the Moon after the initial human lunar landing and beyond.”

The European Space Agency’s contributions to the Gateway will consist of a refueling module, which will also include crew observation windows. The first two scientific investigations to fly aboard the Gateway were selected earlier this year. One will come from the ESA, known as, the European Radiation Sensors Array, (ERSA).  ERSA will monitor space radiation and will focus on astronaut protection. The other scientific investigation to fly aboard Gateway will come from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center called the Heliophysics Environmental and Radiation Measurement Experiment Suit, (HERMES), which will monitor low energies critical to scientific investigations of the sun. HERMES is also known for researching the dynamics of asteroid and planetary surfaces with no atmosphere.

Two of the leaders of the crash program to develop Covid-19 vaccines, General Gus Perna, Chief Operating Officer, and Dr. Matt Hepburn, head of Vaccine Development, provided their story, “The Fight to Get a COVID-19 Vaccine: The Inside Story of the Administration’s Operation Warp Speed,” on Tuesday.” The core point was the obvious: the crash program abandoned ‘cost-benefit’ and ‘just-in-time’ practices, and let reality determine what they had to do. So, they ran parallel development of six vaccine candidates, including the mass production of dosages prior to approval; and supply-chain items for ingredients of vaccines and delivery systems purchased in bulk to be on site early in the process. Also, there was early investment in new production facilities with new production techniques, and the mission-oriented environment helped the cooperation levels. Perna emphasized that “egos get checked at the door” because “lives are at stake.”

Perna, a military logistics specialist, was weeks away from retirement from a 39-year Army career, when he was called by Trump and asked to head the Operation Warp Speed logistics. He interrupted his retirement plans. On Monday, he was in Memphis, TN, visiting the new McKesson distribution warehouse which has built a massive capacity for refrigerated storage at -20 and -80 degrees — necessary for some of the vaccines. They are set to roll out tens of millions of vaccine doses before the end of the year, and hundreds of million from January to March, with 100% accountability as to where each dose is, and as to what person has gotten which vaccine and which dose. (Five of the six vaccines are double-dose vaccines, requiring the second dose 21 or 28 days later.)

Finally, the clinical trials were designed for massive testing in order to obtain more safety information more quickly. The various vaccines should show different profiles, e.g., some better for the elderly, and the clinical trials will help determine how the distribution occurs (e.g., to which populations). Dr. Hepburn was hopeful that this newly-revived capacity for accelerated product development in the US will not be dismantled, but will be the new normal. The states submitted their distribution plans last week, and the task force reviewed them over the last week, offering advice back to the states. The machinery is ready to roll, awaiting the FDA’s approval of vaccines.

While the utopian fascists of the globalist corporate elite have been planning to use the current Davos conference as the moment when they ram through their global banker’s dictatorship to impose a deadly Green New Deal, there are signs that an opposition is growing, centered around China and Russia, and including some elements in Europe. Describing the conference thus far as a “mixed bag”, Helga Zepp LaRouche said the oligarchs of high finance, who are promoting negative growth and population reduction, have run into the intention of leading nations which are not willing to surrender their sovereignty for the sake of “stakeholder capitalism.”

Both Presidents Xi and Putin called for cooperation and multilateral solutions, with Xi stating that the unipolar model, which depends on setting nations against each other, is outmoded. In what Zepp LaRouche called a “sign of the times,” Germany’s Chancellor Merkel supported Xi on multilateralism, which she said goes against the idea floated by Biden for a “democratic summit” of all nations against China and Russia.

While cautiously optimistic about the Biden-Putin agreement to ratify a NEW START agreement for five years, she said that Biden’s lecturing of Putin on the usual geopolitical issues shows that his backers are still committed to a strategic orientation which could lead to war. Further, the failure of the rich countries to provide aid to poorer countries to combat the COVID19 pandemic means that either we force a change in thinking, or the pandemic will not be defeated. The only solution to the problems raised by Xi and Putin in their addresses is the full implementation of Lyndon LaRouche’s plan for a Four Power agreement to establish a New Bretton Woods, and to implement on a global scale LaRouche’s Four Laws. She called on the viewers to join us in organizing for this, to realize the potential for a global system which will allow for the development of all nations.