If you haven’t checked the weather recently in Washington DC, the nation’s capital is currently getting a healthy dose of snow. Some places have already gotten 6 inches, and there’s more coming as the day drags on. //
It’s very likely the federal government will shut down for the rest of the week.
So why do I care so much about the weather in DC? Because this snowfall could throw a big wrench into the Democrat plan to “commemorate” January 6th at the Capitol Building. As RedState has reported, multiple events are planned with CNN hosting. Those include a speech by the President of the United States.
Will all that happen if no one can drive to get to the Capitol? No doubt, CNN will do in-studio coverage regardless, but some of the politicians who were set to speak could be stuck doing Zoom hits instead of getting their visual on the Capitol steps. Further, it won’t be much of a commemoration if no one else can even show up for the live event. Lastly, if the next bout of snow arrives even a few hours earlier on Thursday than expected (currently forecast for the afternoon), it could disrupt things even more.
I know others think January 6th was like 9/11 on steroids, but I find this entire thing incredibly humorous. The first major snowfall of the year just so happens to cause major headaches for Democrats as they hope to make political hay? You love to see it.
The musical instrument Celesta (also called “celeste”), which was invented in 1886 in Paris by Charles-Victor Mustel, has delighted the world of music for over 130 years with its unique sound, and inspires people over and over again. The Celesta became world famous for its part in the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from the Nutcracker Suite by P.I. Tchaikovsky, who got to know the instrument in 1891 during his stay in Paris and immediately fell in love with its magical sound.
The extraordinary sound generation with felt hammers, steel sound plates and wooden resonators is still unique today and Schiedmayer Celesta GmbH is the only company in the world that manufactures the Celesta.
In the mid-1700s, Benjamin Franklin served as a delegate for colonial America and spent a great deal of time traveling to London and Paris. During this period, it was quite popular and entertaining for amateur musicians to perform on sets of "singing" or musical glasses. Franklin attended one of these concerts and was intrigued by the beauty of the sound. Almost immediately, he set to work applying the principles of wet fingers on glass to his own musical creation.
Ben Franklin completed his glass armonica in 1761. (Its name is derived from the Italian word for harmony.) He didn't simply refine the idea of musical glasses, which were played much like children at the dinner table play them today, with notes being determined by the amount of water in the glass. Rather, Franklin made chords and lively melodies possible on his new instrumental invention. //
At the time of his death in 1790, when more than 5,000 of them had been built, Ben Franklin had collected no money from his glass armonica. He refused to patent any of his inventions, saying:
"As we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously."
La conjugaison va vous aider à conjuguer correctement plus de 9 000 verbes de la langue française. En plus d'un conjugueur de verbes, vous allez également y trouver un dictionnaire avec les définitions et synonymes de plus de 150 000 mots, des exercices, des traductions et les principales règles de grammaire du verbe et de la langue française. Pour accéder rapidement au verbe recherché (quel que soit son groupe, son temps, son mode), utilisez notre moteur de recherche, en tapant directement le verbe à l'infinitif ou à sa forme conjuguée.
Which if my understanding of French pronunciation is correct, sounds a little teeny bit like “say your lines”, albeit with a strange accent, and is therefore an excellent pun and I am hilarious. Except that I had to explain it so it isn’t. //
OK so I’ve mentioned before that Seyès ruling, or French ruling if you prefer (and want to be WRONG about it), is the One True Ruling. One Rule To Rule that this Rule Rules them all? Tolkien missed a trick there. It is just BETTER than the others, because it will improve your handwriting. Seyès ruling includes three additional faint horizontal lines for every strong one, and vertical lines as well. The secret to beautiful handwriting is not, as many people think, a load of swirly weirdness. I include the swirly weirdness because it’s fun. But the secret to beautiful handwriting is consistency: however you form each letter, if you form it exactly the same way each time, and if the tops and bottoms of your letters match up with others in all the places they should, your handwriting will be lovely. This is why Seyès is the best: it trains you to line letters up not just at the top and bottom but also in three other places.
I was looking in their stationary isle and saw a distinct lack of the ruled paper that I’m used to. Instead was book after book after book of this strange looking paper that they called Séyès ruling / French ruled paper. There were so many lines on each page I didn’t know what to do with them!
On Dec 21, a U.S.-bound Emirates flight came within 175 feet of impacting a neighborhood in Dubai.
In ‘Sleeper Agent: The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away,’ former Wall Street Journal reporter Ann Hagedorn provides a captivating account George Koval, who was born in Iowa and died a Soviet hero.
Malcolm Nance, the onetime National Security Agency cryptographer and current Brookings Scholar, once observed, “nothing in the world happens by coincidence.”
But when it came to George Koval, the Soviet sleeper spy carefully embedded into the Manhattan Project who, with his all-American background and scientific training, revealed key American nuclear secrets to his Moscow patrons, the U.S. national security establishment seemed all too willing to overlook as mere coincidences the unlikely concatenation of events leading to Koval’s betrayal.
That’s right, it’s been a banner year for speaking truth to power, preventing democracy from dying in darkness, and sexual healing.
The corporate media continues to hit home run after home run, elevating the discourse, and making sure we all know that no matter what our lying eyes tell us, we’re getting a happy ending.
As such, it’s difficult to drill down to the most heroic of the heroes 2021 has delivered, but as I’m also something of a hero, I did the work. In doing so, I distilled the heroic number of heroes down to five, though I also encourage you to do the work. We’re all in this together. //
Chris Cuomo: Bravery in Covering for Your Brother, Whose Deviant Proclivities You Share
Jake Tapper: Bravery in Being More Partisan Than the Elected Democrats You Interview
Chris Wallace: Bravery in Admitting You’re Not So Objective After All
CNN announced Tuesday that it would pull the plug on its long-running Airport Network, causing jubilation among many of the network's critics on social media.
Network President Jeff Zucker announced the CNN Airport Network will officially end on March 31, citing a "deep decline in airport traffic because of COVID-19, coupled with all the new ways that people are consuming content on their personal devices." //
CNN Airport does not use the exact same feed as the standard CNN, as additional sports and weather segments are added while some graphic video is removed. CNN Airport also goes out of its way not to air any coverage of plane crashes or other disasters that could spook passengers.
As part of the deal, CNN paid airports to leave the network on, and many travel hubs even have agreements in which CNN pays for their TVs and infrastructure. The Philadelphia Inquirer previously reported that airports also receive "up to six minutes each hour to promote the airport or local attractions" as part of the deal. //
For years, the agreements had blurred the lines between news and advertising as the network blurred the lines between news and political activism.
REPORTER: "Should members of congress and their spouses be banned from trading individual stocks while serving in congress?"
PELOSI: "No…We are a free market economy. They should be able to participate in that." pic.twitter.com/2SNqSCwFEU
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) December 15, 2021
Turns out that within a few days of that, Pelosi and her husband Paul bought millions in call options for Google, Salesforce, Roblox, and Disney stocks.
The Pelosi family’s trades this month include Google and Salesforce call options worth between $500,000 and $1 million each, as well as Roblox call options valued at between $100,000 and $250,000. The duo also bought up between $250,000 and $500,000 in calls for chipmaker Micron Technology and between $100,000 and $250,000 of Disney call options in disclosures that were earlier reported by Congresstrading.com.
Paul Pelosi runs Financial Leasing Services, a real estate and venture capital investment and consulting firm. In recent years he’s made big-money bets on companies his wife is supposed to regulate, including Amazon, Apple, and Google.
1965 Jaguar E-Type in How to Steal a Million, Movie, 1966 IMDB
This time, a US freight forwarding company is swinging into action and using three Boeing 747s to fly potatoes into Japan amid a critical shortage of french fries in Japanese McDonald’s outlets. //
Normally, McDonald’s brings its potatoes in via ship from Vancouver. But flood damage and the impact of coronavirus on global supply networks have caused delays there.
“The fries shortage is primarily due to the supply side of McDonald’s global supply chain,” Hiroshi Ohashi, an economics professor from the University of Tokyo, told NBC. “They procure potatoes from the US, where port shipping has been a bottleneck.”
Step in Ryan Petersen, Chief Executive Officer at Flexport, a US-based freight forwarder company. On Wednesday, he confirmed via Twitter the company had contracted to fly three planeloads of potatoes to Japan to alleviate the french fries shortage.
When news of the potato shortage broke in Japan, there was a scramble to get the last serves lest a person be forced to live without french fries for a week or two. This only caused a further shortage. //
How many potatoes can a 747 freighter fly? One person online did the maths. A Boeing 747 freighter can fly about 112,760 kilograms of freight. A large serve of McDonald’s french fries weighs about 154 grams. That’s about 2.2 million large serves of french fries per plane.
This seems like a lot, but one person pointed out there are 2,975 McDonald’s outlets in Japan. McDonald’s 34,000 worldwide stores go through just over four million kilograms of potatoes per day. On a pro-rata basis, Japanese McDonald’s customers eat 375,000 kilograms of french fries a day. On these numbers, Ryan Petersen might have to back up for some further flying.
The RedLine information-stealing malware targets popular web browsers such as Chrome, Edge, and Opera, demonstrating why storing your passwords in browsers is a bad idea.
This malware is a commodity information-stealer that can be purchased for roughly $200 on cyber-crime forums and be deployed without requiring much knowledge or effort. //
While browser password stores are encrypted, such as those used by Chromium-based browsers, information-stealing malware can programatically decrypt the store as long as they are logged in as the same user. As RedLine runs as the user who was infected, it will be able to extract the passwords from their browser profile.
The Kyoto University in Japan has lost about 77TB of research data due to an error in the backup system of its Hewlett-Packard supercomputer.
The incident occurred between December 14 and 16, 2021, and resulted in 34 million files from 14 research groups being wiped from the system and the backup file. //
At the moment, the backup process has been stopped. To prevent data loss from happening again, the university has scraped the backup system and plans to apply improvements and re-introduce it in January 2022.
The plan is to also keep incremental backups - which cover files that have been changed since the last backup happened - in addition to full backup mirrors.
Jennifer Rubin, honorary Assistant Press Secretary to the Biden Administration, recently decided that we shouldn’t be focused on the case numbers for COVID-19 anymore and, instead, we need to focus on hospitalizations and deaths. This was reflected in Joe Biden’s admission of defeat again the virus, where he said there is no longer a “federal solution” to the pandemic.
Several folks in the media are slowly making this shift as they have realized that the omicron variant does not appear to discriminate between vaccinated and unvaccinated when it comes to infecting someone. The severity of the cases seems largely dependent on vaccination status, but in all likelihood, we’re going to see omicron become the dominant strain in the U.S. fairly quickly (if it isn’t already).
While the case rate is going up pretty dramatically in a lot of areas around the country, the hospitalization and death rates are not moving up at the same rate, which reinforces the idea that this surge is led by a strain that is not as severe as prior strains. //
case numbers are high in Florida, so while high case numbers aren’t a bad thing for Joe Biden, they apparently are for Republican governors.
Because science, I suppose.
All of the people who are going after Republican governors like DeSantis are doing so largely because they are still caught in the grip of fear over the virus, despite the evidence that the worst of it has passed. We’re at the point now where the virus is probably going to be around forever (like the flu), will have yearly vaccines available to fight it (like the flu), and isn’t a death sentence (like the flu).
Florida’s surgeon general has accused the Biden administration of “actively preventing” the distribution of monoclonal antibody treatments for COVID-19, causing an “immediate and life-threatening shortage of treatment options.”
In a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra on Tuesday, Dr. Joseph Ladapo alleged that HHS had reduced the number of antibodies allocated to the Sunshine State earlier this year “without any advanced notice.” //
Another monoclonal antibody, GlaxoSmithKline’s Sotrovimab, appears to be more effective against Omicron and continues to be distributed by the federal government. But according to Ladapo, none has been allocated from the federal government to Florida, forcing the DeSantis administration to purchase a supply on its own.
Scott Gottlieb, MD
@ScottGottliebMD
Setting aside the question of how the initial estimate was so inaccurate, if CDC’s new estimate of #Omicron prevalence is precise then it suggests that a good portion of the current hospitalizations we’re seeing from Covid may still be driven by Delta infections.
David Lim
@davidalim
CDC's estimate for the prevalence of Omicron last week dropped significantly from 73.2% w/ a 95% prediction interval of 34-94.9% down to 22.5% w/ a 95% prediction interval of 15.4-31.5%.
12/25 estimate is 58.6% with a 95% prediction interval of 41.5-74%. https://twitter.com/ozair_naqvi/status/1473464231190315008
10:17 AM · Dec 28, 2021
Despite what we might think of them as public figures, they were spouses, fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and they should be mourned. It does not diminish any other argument to bring gravity to the grief experienced and wish those experiencing that grief comfort.
But just as grief is complicated, so are these particular lives. For their sake and the sake of their causes, along with changing the world “for good,” they managed to unleash significant evil. Archbishop Tutu, Reid, and Sarah Weddington changed the trajectory of life and politics for this nation, and the world, so viewing their legacy through a more critical lens should be standard operating procedure.
Instead, what you see are the fulsome, glowing tributes on their accomplishments and how they changed the world for the better. What you rarely see is the post mortem on how those same accomplishments helped to further evil attitudes, evil intentions, divisiveness, and a culture of death.
Then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid eroded a once august body of governance with his decision to nuke the filibuster regarding judicial appointments. The Left is now paying for this — in spades. Then-Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned them they would. When McConnell became Majority Leader after 2010, he used it to his advantage, most infamously blocking the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.
Reid also helped tank Senator Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential aspirations with unfounded lies about Romney not paying his taxes for 10 years. In a CNN interview, Reid was unapologetic about his comments which Republicans compared to McCarthyism:
“They can call it whatever they want. Romney didn’t win did he?” Reid said.
Archbishop Tutu championed Anti-Semitism in his cause to destroy the cultural racism of apartheid. Even after apartheid was overthrown in South Africa, Archbishop Tutu had nothing good to say about Israel or the Jewish people.
British writer Melanie Phillips observed:
There was, however, another side to Tutu — a shocking side. And just as one should respect the dead and pay tribute to their achievements, it is also incumbent upon us to tell the truth about that person if that truth is important enough, however distasteful this may be. And it undoubtedly is that important.
It’s not merely that Tutu demonised Israel with libellous falsehoods. Worse still, he explicitly and repeatedly demonised the Jewish people. His occasional claims that he identified with the Jews and his acknowledgement that they had been allies in the great fight against South African apartheid generally morphed into his grotesque and incomprehensible accusation that the Jews of Israel had done to the Palestinian Arabs what the apartheid regime had done to the black population of South Africa. //
Alpha Kitty @AlphaKitty
Sarah Weddington, American Lawyer of the Roe v. Wade Case, Dies at 76 | She argued the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that legalized abortion in her first appearance before the high court at age 26 https://texastribune.org/2021/12/26/sarah-weddington-texas-roe-v-wade/
#womenshistory #womenrights #law
Image
11:58 AM · Dec 29, 2021 //
Thanks to Weddington and her work, the nation has experienced the almost 50-year stain that Roe and its subsequent culture of death have ingrained into the fabric of our country. From euthanasia to elder abuse and murder; youth murders, young people perpetrating mass shootings; to suicides and child trafficking: once you open the door to devaluing life at its most fecund point, that devaluation flows downstream. Pregnancy is a burden? Well, so is a special needs newborn, a troubled child, sick parents, and on it goes.
We are at the bottom of that slope and have been wallowing in the mud for quite some time. Everyone is filthy and smelly as a result of the decision 49 years ago to make life… expendable.
We will see how SCOTUS might rule on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and see if the whirlwind that Sarah Weddington unleashed with her ambition and her righteous cause will die along with her.
Abby Johnson @AbbyJohnson
Sarah Weddington has died. I have many, many feelings about this. I knew Sarah. For many years, I held her in high esteem. Spent time with her. Respected her. Later, I came to see her as someone who was a master manipulator. I can only pray that she sought The Lord before death.
1:12 PM · Dec 27, 2021