Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Charles “Chuck” Yeager, the World War II fighter pilot ace and quintessential test pilot who showed he had the “right stuff” when in 1947 he became the first person to fly faster than sound, has died. He was 97.
Yeager died Monday, his wife, Victoria Yeager, said on his Twitter account. “It is w/ profound sorrow, I must tell you that my life love General Chuck Yeager passed just before 9pm ET. An incredible life well lived, America’s greatest Pilot, & a legacy of strength, adventure, & patriotism will be remembered forever.”
Yeager’s death is “a tremendous loss to our nation,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement.
The Biden-Harris administration will confront “a pandemic, an economic crisis, calls for racial justice and climate change. The team being assembled will meet these challenges on Day One.”
So declares the transition team of Joe Biden, to echo what he’s defined as the lead items on his presidential agenda. And if this is his agenda, then how our presumed 46th president will proceed suggests itself.
The COVID-19 pandemic is now close to its apex, with a million new cases and a death toll in excess of 10,000 each week. We appear to be near the crest of the “second wave.”
We already knew that this was going to be the worst winter for the U.S. economy since the Great Depression of the 1930s, but now a new round of lockdowns threatens to rip the guts out of hundreds of thousands of small businesses all around the country. As I write this article, 33 million people are under “stay-at-home orders” in California alone. With each passing day, state governments are implementing even more new restrictions, and those new restrictions are going to increasingly choke the life out of economic activity in this nation.
The good news is that most of the corporate giants have enough resources to weather another round of lockdowns, but countless small businesses do not.
In San Francisco, some small businesses that have served the city for generations now find themselves on the edge of extinction…
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is signed into law by President Bill Clinton. Clinton said he hoped the agreement would encourage other nations to work toward a broader world-trade pact.
“As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.”
Andrew Carnegie
“If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?”
You can’t turn on your TV, flip open your tablet, or scroll your social media feed today without being bombarded by horrifying stories of over-worked nurses and doctors and throat-grabbing headlines about COVID-driven hospitalizations amid the casedemic.
If you are over the age of forty, you have been hearing, in one form or another, the argument that you must vote Republican to keep the Left from turning America into a socialist country. The pitch gets punched up with promises on certain issues, depending upon the audience, but the basic argument has never changed. The reason to vote for the Republicans is to prevent the Left from doing socialisms. About half the time, this is enough to win elections and keep the parties equal.
One of the most common pro-mask arguments I’ve heard over the course of the past year, both from “public health experts” and your average citizen, sounds similar to the following statement:
“If only everyone would just wear a mask, we would be able to crush the virus and end the pandemic.”
This line of reasoning is frequently espoused by lockdown governors and “public health experts.” You see, the problem isn’t them, it’s you, the citizen, we’re told. Wear a mask, peasant. You’re the problem! You’re the reason why the pandemic is still a problem in this country.
Deaths up? Why aren’t you wearing a mask. Cases up? Wear a mask. Hospitals crowded? The problem is that not enough people are wearing masks, they claim.
If there were a Mount Rushmore to memorialize the greatest scientists in US history, Richard Feynman’s face would almost certainly be on the monument.
He was only 24 years of age when he was recruited into a secret research group that eventually became part of the Manhattan Project, joining some of the other most prominent scientists of his age, like Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi.
Feynman went on to make unparalleled advances in the fields of particle physics and quantum mechanics. He conceived of nanotechnology as early as the 1950s, and quantum computing as early as 1982.
Feynman also won the Nobel Prize, plus countless other awards and medals; and he was ranked by leading scientists as one of the greatest physicists of all time– alongside Einstein, Isaac Newton, and Galileo.
If you’re worried about the capability of government to conduct surveillance of citizens engaged in political assembly and protest, or even just personal activity, then you should be aware the technological capability of government surveillance is about to expand exponentially.
The US Air Force’s Research Lab (yes, it has its own lab) has recently signed a contract to test new software of a company called SignalFrame, a Washington DC wireless tech company. The company’s new software is able to access smartphones, and from your phone jump off to access any other wireless or bluetooth device in the near vicinity. To quote from the article today in the Wall St. Journal, the smartphone is used “as a window onto usage of hundreds of millions of computers,s routers, fitness trackers, modern automobiles and other networked devices, known collectively as the ‘Internet of Things’.”
Your smartphone in effect becomes a government listening device that detects and accesses all nearby wireless or bluetooth devices, or anything that has a MAC address for that matter. How ‘near’ is nearby is not revealed by the company, or the Air Force, both of which refused to comment on the Wall St. Journal story. But with the expansion of 5G wireless, it should be assumed it’s more than just a couple steps from your smartphone.
In one corner, President Trump and his allies claim massive fraud cost him the 2020 election.
In the other, Democrats and sympathetic media allies argue that the vote was free and fair and that the charges of fraud amount to sour-grapes conspiracy mongering.
President Trump and first lady Melania Trump at a weekend rally in Valdosta, Ga., in advance of Georgia’s U.S. Senate runoffs on Jan. 5. (AP Photo/Ben Gray)
Many allegations advanced by the president, his surrogates and supporters have been challenged and some have been dismissed by courts or debunked.
Still, in numerous instances, media fact checkers have not been diligent. They have simply run the allegations past state authorities and other officials who would have orchestrated the alleged fraud or had an interest in minimizing irregularities.
NORTH POLE—Santa Claus’s nice list is said to be run on trustworthy software, safe and secure on an unhackable server under his workshop.
But some are questioning the legitimacy of the nice list after the tally suddenly spiked in the middle of the night, adding over 138,000 kids to the good side of the list.
