Things really started to go downhill, when they cut back the compulsory draft from 2 years to 1 year. This interview from a former officer is mind-boggling. Download this PDF file to read it.
Examples of artwork on a variety of subjects and in a variety of styles by Francis Elizabeth Wynne from a sketchbook (ca. 420 drawings): mixed media, including watercolour, wash and, pen and ink.
Pain-killers, anti-inflammatory drugs, cocaine and cobra venom — whatever it takes to keep the race going, keep the money coming. Splayed bone shards, shattered ankles, lungs full of blood — we rip them limb-from-limb. While some novel element of tragedy may yet be discovered in the particulars of the 12 dead at Churchill Downs, there’s no mystery in the near-identical deaths that have marred American race tracks for years.
There’s no more need to ask why. Whatever killed those 12 racehorses, it’s the same cause of death it’s always been. It’s us.
OPINION THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL Stunning UFO crash retrieval allegations deemed ‘credible,’ ‘urgent’ BY MARIK VON RENNENKAMPFF, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR – 06/09/23 7:00 AM ET
Share Tweet … More According to explosive reporting, the powerful internal investigative body that oversees the nation’s intelligence agencies found a whistleblower’s claims of an illegal government UFO crash retrieval and exploitation effort to be “credible and urgent.” To eliminate potential ambiguity regarding such an extraordinary development, a knowledgeable source confirmed to me that the intelligence community inspector general found “allegations that there is a [UFO crash retrieval] program [to be] urgent and credible.”
Beyond this stunning revelation, the whistleblower — a former high-level intelligence official — is represented by a lawyer who served previously as the intelligence community’s first inspector general, a Senate-confirmed position. The managing partner of the law firm representing the whistleblower reportedly co-signed the complaint submitted to the current Intelligence Community inspector general. As noted in a legal analysis, no lawyer, let alone two high-caliber attorneys, would sign such an extraordinary document without “very credible source material.”
European countries that have 12-week limits on “elective” abortions still make it fairly easy for women to get abortions later on, with relatively broad exceptions for mental health or socioeconomic circumstances. Republicans have aggressively fought against similar exceptions, and in particular have worked to bar consideration of mental health risk — even the risk of suicide if a pregnancy continues — as a factor.
And in other ways, European countries make it easier to get an abortion than in even relatively permissive jurisdictions in the United States.Across Europe, abortion services are coveredunder national health insurance, meaning the cost of accessing care is a far lower barrier for pregnant people facing time constraints.By contrast, in the US, cost is one of the biggest hurdles to ending a pregnancy. Even though more than90 percent of abortions occur within the first 13 weeks, roughly 75 percent of all US abortion patients are low-incomeaccording to 2014 numbers, and researchers find Americans needing care in the second trimester tend to be those with less education, Black women, and women who have experienced “multiple disruptive events” in the past year, such as losing a job.
A friend of mine, Tom Homberger, who coaches a youth Sailing Team gave this analysis:
OK – I’ll take a shot. All sailing downwind.
GBR on Starboard tack has ROW over FRA & KIWI who are on Port tack (rule for vessels on opposite tacks).
FRA & KIWI???
Between these 2, FRA might be considered leeward vessel and have ROW over KIWI (rule for vessels of same tack). KIWI would need to give way by heading up.
Or – hard to tell but if FRA is overtaking KIWI boat from behind then KIWI is ‘boat ahead’ or ‘overtaken boat’ and would have ROW and FRA would need to give way (rule for same tack overtaking).
Generally ROW rules work well for keel boats, skiffs & dinghies. Not so much when zipping along at 45kts on a short ‘made for media’ course.
I remember the windsurf slalom racing in late 80’s/90’s basically threw out the rule book and it was every sailor for themselves. The tribe would settle disagreements in the parking lot afterwards. Kinda worked!
You’re never ready for the unexpected. But you can try to be prepared.
After water, food , shelter in that order, comes electricity. Having lived through a number of hurricane outages, we have installed a generator that runs on natural gas. As backup, we have a solar panel rechargeable battery system. We keep a Starlink around for an internet connection. There is a rain barrel connected to a gutter from the roof. It’s like insurance. You hope you’ll never need it, but you can sleep at night. If you realize how vulnerable is the Grid that we depend on, then you should get prepared now. Maybe you will after reading this article.
“If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.” – Doug Larson
At the outset of 1998, a series of devastating ice storms blanketed much of lower Quebec and parts of neighboring provinces with a previously unfathomable deluge of freezing rain. While mere millimeters of solid ice can be enough to disrupt road travel and collapse trees, vast swaths of the region experienced several inches of the stuff in five compounding waves. For Hydro-Québec, the province’s power producer, the storms resulted in countless transformer explosions, “400 damaged transmission towers, 24,000 power poles to be replaced, 120,000 km of downed power lines and roughly1.4 million customers in the dark for almost a month.” The devastation was most acute just east of Montreal inside the triangle formed by the cities of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Granby, and Saint-Hyacinthe—a zone dubbed the Le “Triangle Noir” as the catastrophe dragged on. Frozen hell | Hydro-Québec
Although the brunt of the event was felt in Canada, parts of New England were also severely impacted. In Maine, some 700,000 of the state’s 1.2 million residents lost electricity, necessitating the activation of the Maine National Guard. It took 23 days and the assistance of hundreds of crews from around the country to fully restore power. Devastation in Maine | AP As disastrous as the Great Ice Storm of 1998
was for local utilities and the populations they served, one shudders to ponder the consequences should a similar event unfold in a high-population area of the US today. Take the I-95 corridor—sometimes called the Northeast megalopolis—which stretches from Washington, DC to Boston and experiences its fair share of freak winter storms. While its 50 million residents undoubtedly pride themselves on their ability to power through whatever Mother Nature throws at them, no grid could withstand the relentless onslaught of ice like what occurred 25 years ago. To a rough approximation, the area encompassed by the Le “Triangle Noir” alone would cover all five boroughs of the city of New York. Imagine the Big Apple without power for a month in the dead of winter. Now consider that a month might be wildly optimistic. For years, a burgeoning supply chain crisis has been plaguing the US power industry, straining grid reliability just as the pursuit of the Green Energy Utopia™ is stretching this hallmark of the developed world to a breaking point. A chronic shortage of transformers can no longer be ignored, and in a letter to federal lawmakers in November, the electric utility sector bluntly sounded the alarm (emphasis added throughout): “Throughout 2022, the electric sector and representatives from residential and commercial building sectors have been calling attention to the unprecedented supply chain challenges both industries have been facing in procuring equipment used to maintain and grow the electric grid.Specifically, electric utilities continue to have significant problems in procuring basic equipment – particularly distribution transformers – needed to operate the grid, provide reliable electric service, and restore power following severe storms and natural disasters. In housing construction, this is further exacerbating their ability to address the housing affordability crisis facing our nation…. Between 2020 and 2022, average lead times to procure distribution transformers across all segments of the electric industry and voltage classes rose 443 percent. The same orders that previously took two to four months to fill are now taking on average over a year. This is a serious threat to reliability.” Transformers play an essential role in enabling our modern standard of living. To transport electricity over vast distances at reasonable efficiency, stations must generate power at extremely high voltages. Before such electricity can be safely used in the home, it needs to be stepped down—transformed—to the standard 240 volts around which the US economy is designed. (This is further split at a home’s main circuit breaker panel into two 120-volt halves, called phases.) Distribution transformers—the equipment in short supply that most concerns the utility sector—provide the final voltage transformation in the electric power distribution system, connecting homes to the juice that powers everything. Unsung heroes to our way of life | Getty
The letter’s signatories request a $1 billion appropriation towards transformer production via the Defense Production Act (DPA) to accelerate supply. Despite the industry’s urgent call for resources, the Department of Energy is making decisions that will only accelerate the crisis. Let’s dig into the industry’s claims, the administration’s exacerbating policy decisions, and most importantly, the preparatory measures homeowners can take ahead of a major disruption.
A new study uncovers how the interplay between Sargassum spp., plastic marine debris and Vibrio bacteria creates the perfect “pathogen” storm that has implications for both marine life and public health. Vibrio bacteria are found in waters around the world and are the dominant cause of death in humans from the marine environment. For example, Vibrio vulnificus, sometimes referred to as flesh-eating bacteria, can cause life-threatening foodborne illnesses from seafood consumption as well as disease and death from open wound infections.
Since 2011, Sargassum, free-living populations of brown macroalga, have been rapidly expanding in the Sargasso Sea and other parts of the open ocean such as the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, including frequent and unprecedented seaweed accumulation events on beaches. Plastic marine debris, first found in surface waters of the Sargasso Sea, has become a worldwide concern, and is known to persist decades longer than natural substrates in the marine environment.
Currently, little is known about the ecological relationship of vibrios with Sargassum. Moreover, genomic and metagenomic evidence has been lacking as to whether vibrios colonizing plastic marine debris and Sargassum could potentially infect humans. As summer kicks into high gear and efforts are underway to find innovative solutions to repurpose Sargassum, could these substrates pose a triple threat to public health?
A friend from Tanzania had this response to this outrage…
Started Last year, they started moving villages out of the reserve when they have been living for 100’s of years, some refused and had to be moved by force. Very Sad story, and not the first time. They even had big middle east military plane suspected to be loaded with wildlife for Zoos in Emirates.
T.I.A (That Is Africa)
Critics have argued that the Tanzanian government doesn’t want Maasai herding cattle where safari-goers expect to see giraffes and elephants.
As noted in this Bloomberg article
Scientists insist proper land use planning could have helped avoid today’s conflicts, and conservationists say photographic tourism concessions would bring far more money into the state budget than hunting, leading to suspicions that the corruption uncovered in 1996 and 2017 persists.
One Masai, who has an Economics degree pointed out that…
Uneducated Maasai women have few options beyond marriage, and in polygamist societies, that often means as a second or third wife. Since women in such situations compete for status by having more children, “if you want to depopulate this area, just educate every Maasai girl to university level,” he says. “It’ll be solved in 15 years.”
More Than Meets the Eye DOOMBERG 
Frozen hell | Hydro-Québec 
Devastation in Maine | AP As disastrous as the Great Ice Storm of 1998
Unsung heroes to our way of life | Getty 
