This is Toby Sumpter with your CrossPolitic Daily News Brief for Friday, December 11, 2020.
Today you will hear about the SCOTUS decision on the Texas election lawsuit, how to make breathable air on Mars, scholars complaining about white people, and getting creative with COVID Sharia law.
If you have a news story you think we might need to cover, please send articles and links to news at crosspolitic dot com.
Supreme Court Denies Texas Suit
Read decision: https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/121120zr_p860.pdf
Ben Sasse issued this statement: https://twitter.com/SenSasse/status/1337548874207154177?s=20
How To Make Breathable Air on Mars
Colonizing Mars comes with a lot of challenges and quandaries. One major resource issue is how to provide enough oxygen for a Mars-base crew to breathe. Mars has only a thin atmosphere, with a surface pressure less than a hundredth of the Earth’s. Even worse, it is 96% carbon dioxide with only about 0.1% oxygen. Earth’s atmosphere is 21% oxygen.
NASA’s Mars2020 rover, Perseverance, which is already on its way to Mars, carries an experiment called MOXIE, a name imaginatively contrived from Mars OXygen In situ Experiment.
MOXIE’s purpose is to demonstrate that oxygen can be made from the carbon dioxide in Mars’s atmosphere by using electricity to split it into a mixture of oxygen and carbon monoxide, via a process called electrolysis. If this works as expected, the oxygen could be collected and used to give colonists something to breathe or as a component in fuel. The carbon monoxide would be unwanted, and would be vented back into the martian atmosphere.
In the new study, a team from Washington University in the US, demonstrate how electrolysis can be used efficiently to produce oxygen and hydrogen simultaneously from brine. It turns out that when you start from a concentrated solution of magnesium perchlorate, it is relatively easy to split the water component of the brine into oxygen and hydrogen using electrolysis.
Magnesium perchlorate is what the briny water at and near the surface of Mars appears to consist of, as seen for example when liquid droplets appeared on the legs of NASA’s Phoenix lander, which touched down in Mars’s far north in 2008. The Curiosity rover has also found evidence of calcium perchlorate brine just south of the martian equator.
If you land where there is brine available, the new study argues, you could make as much oxygen as you like – provided you have unlimited brine and power.
Join the Fight Laugh Feast Club
If all of this sounds strange and exotic, you clearly missed Rod Martin’s talk at this last year’s Fight Laugh Feast Conference, entitled To the Moon and Back – Why Christians need to be leading the world in the exploration of the world, including outer space. If you’re already a Fight Laugh Feast Club Member, you have access to all of the talks from the conference, and if you’re not a member yet, what’s wrong with you. Support Rowdy Christian Media as we building a Christian media Network and encourage Christians to take the Lordship of Jesus to every corner of the universe. Become a fight laugh feast club member today. Go to Fightlaughfeast.com.
In a Recent “Scholarly” Article, Robin DiAngelo and Cheryl Matias bemoan the overwhelming, draining, and incomprehensible nature of interacting with White people.
https://twitter.com/WokeTemple/status/1337544511199842306?s=20
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Also, if you want to rock your Fight Laugh Feast bona fides visit rowdychristian.com for shirts, hats, hoodies, postmill coffee, etc. Also: did you hear we started a new magazine? Four issues a year for forty bucks. https://flfnetwork.com/product/fight-laugh-feast-magazine/
Getting Creative with COVID Sharia Law
Here in Moscow, we had a little kerfluffle this last Thursday in our attempt to bless a local business we were led to believe was trying to stay politically neutral on all the mask mandates.
A little postcard went out from our local Chamber of Commerce to the community that said “Buy Local or Bye Local” scolding us for not buying from local stores when it is our city council and mayor that have mandated masks and scared many of our local businesses into requiring them. Excuse us, if many of us would rather make our purchases from Amazon than be required to wear Woke Burkas in local stores.
But there are some stores that have either left the matter entirely up to their customers and others that have posted signs requiring masks but have made it clear they have no intention of enforcing the rules.
So on Thursday we got wind that one store in town was trying to respecting customers’ freedom and stay politically neutral. So our pastor sent out a note and suggested that if folks were out Christmas shopping stop by and give them some business. The idea was to encourage them and bless them and wish them a merry Christmas. Well, it was all going well for a few minutes until some disgruntled Woke Islamist went off at the story managers and the regional managers got called and then the whole store got closed down and all the mask free Christians were asked to leave, taking thousands of dollars of business with them.
Anyway, it didn’t go down like we hoped, but Christians really do need to be thinking creatively about how to bless the businesses that are trying to take a stand for freedom and common sense. Wherever you are, if there are businesses that respecting customer freedom, tell your friends, give them extra business, thank them, and of course wish them a Merry Christmas.
Another example comes from a listener in Pennsylvania, who suggests that since Governor Tom wolfs new edict says that bars, restaurants, and gyms and theatres are closed to indoor services but religious services are exempt, churches could ask business owners if they could hold evangelistic outreaches at these local businesses and they can stay open. If there was a choir singing Christmas carols every few minutes and a periodic gospel presentation, people could go about their business eating, drinking, and working out and hear good brothers or pastors share the good news of Christ.
A friend who owns a basketball gym and has been hosting out of state basketball tournaments in a small town started getting some pressure from the city about his basketball tournaments, and he was thinking about doing something similar, saying a prayer at the beginning of the game and having a short gospel presentation at half time and calling it a religious ceremony.
Ok. Let us know what you’re doing in your community to stand for freedom, share the joy of Christ, and encourage struggling businesses. We’d love to keep sharing ideas.
This is Toby Sumpter with Crosspolitic News. You can find this and all of our shows at Crosspolitic.com or on our app, which you can download at your favorite app store, just search “Fight Laugh Feast”. Support Rowdy Christian media, and become a Fight Laugh Feast Club Member and get your very own Fight Laugh Feast t-shirt and access to all the talks at our first annual Fight Laugh Feast Conference as well as many exclusive behind the scenes interviews with Voddie Bachaum, Tom Ascol, Erick Erickson, Sho Baraka, Douglas Wilson, David French, Gary Demar, Tom Ascol, Maj Toure as well as our very own Worldview Shotgun Series. Go to fightlaughfeast.com.