Majorities of whites (74%), blacks (73%), and other minorities (82%) say voters should be required to show photo identification before being allowed to vote. SOURCE: Rasmussen

87% of black people have some form of confirmed photo ID. SOURCE: ProjectVote (pg. 3)

90% of Latin Americans have a form of confirmed photo ID. SOURCE: ProjectVote (pg. 3)

Percentage of Americans who have ID vs. percentage who vote. SOURCE: CNN

87% of black people have ID, only 13% voted in the 2020 Election.
90% of Latin Americans have ID, only 13% voted in the 2020 Elections.
95% of white people have ID, only 67% voted in 2020 Elections.
97% of registered voters in Georgia have a valid ID. SOURCE: AJC

Voter ID laws have been shown to actually INCREASE turnout in states that recommend them, such as Georgia and Indiana. SOURCES: Heritage, Heritage

Mitti Hicks
@MittiMegan
Just an update on this, protestors said later they're heading back to Brooklyn Center because they need more information about what happened in Burnsville first. //

First problem? The suspect was white, like most of the people who are shot by the police. So, pretty hard to argue the narrative.

Second problem? Not only did the guy fire at the police, a lot, he also carjacked a woman and took off in her vehicle. The police chased him, he shot at them and then abandoned the vehicle. He then pointed a gun at another motorist and then tried to carjack another car.

Young continued, "The thing that randos who have never had to actually work with rms don't understand is that MANY people who deeply respected him tried to help him learn to not objectify women, shout over others at Libreplanet as if it was his birthday party, stop sh*t like 'emacs virgins.'

Instead, "That energy, utterly wasted, could've been spent advocating for free software and building the inclusive, impractical community so many people WANT. Spent, instead, on a man's ego, over and over."

Matthew Garrett, a well-known Linux kernel developer and former FSF board member, tweeted, "The idea that someone who does enough "good work" earns a pass for inappropriate behavior is pervasive, and fosters environments where abusers can prosper. People who hold this belief shouldn't be involved in running organizations."

Glenn Kessler
@GlennKesslerWP
The trial memo of the Trump impeachment managers has a sentence that did not age well.

“The insurrectionists killed a Capitol Police officer by striking him in the head with a fire extinguisher.”

Glenn Kessler
@GlennKesslerWP
Replying to @GlennKesslerWP
That sentence was sourced to a Jan. 8 NYT report with the headline, "Capitol Police Officer Dies From Injuries in Pro-Trump Rampage." But the story was updated after information emerged that cast doubt on that narrative. //

President Donald Trump was impeached in the House on Jan. 13 and the trial was between Feb. 9-13. So they had every reason to know prior to the trial, even from the CNN report on Feb. 2, that this claim of death from being struck with a fire extinguisher by insurrectionists was false. Indeed they should have known since the ABC report and my report on Jan. 10, that there wasn’t any evidence for the fire extinguisher story; they should not have claimed that without evidence. But they made the claim anyway. Indeed by Feb. 2, it was clear even to CNN that Sicknick had no blunt trauma injuries indicating he was ever physically hit by anything.

Had the medical examiner’s report come in before the impeachment trial, saying that Sicknick died due to two strokes, that probably would have heavily impacted what they were trying to sell to people at the impeachment trial between February 9-13. The medical examiner’s report just came out today, April 19, after waiting since January 7. The length of time it took to get the report is troubling, to say the least.

It depends which party t are from whether or not they are approved

“As we saw last summer, some of the local governments are actually telling, not necessarily in Florida but throughout the country, basically telling these folks to stand down, telling police to stand down while cities burnt, while businesses were burnt, while people were being harmed,” the governor said. “That’s a dereliction of duty.”

He continued:

What our bill says, and what I’ll sign into law today, is that if you’re derelict in your duty as a local government, if you tell law enforcement to stand down, then you’re responsible for the damage that ensues. And if someone’s been harmed, or their property has been destroyed, then they can sue you for compensation.

The measure defines a riot as a violent demonstration involving three or more individuals engaging in activity that causes injury to others, damage to property, or threat of both. According to Newsmax, “the law also created a new second-degree felony called an ‘aggravated riot,’ when the riot has more than 25 participants, causes great bodily harm or more than $5,000 in property damage, uses or threatens to use a deadly weapon, or blocks roadways by force or threat of force.”

The line our society must draw is at protecting citizens from medical coercion in order to conduct business. Some might worry this would constitute a mandate on businesses, but it isn’t. Mandates compel action.

States and private firms that demand vaccination are the ones leveling mandates: businesses like a lobbying firm in DC that has informed a mother who intends to have more children soon that she must get a new, emergency vaccine with unknown affects on fertility and pregnancy if she would like to travel — and thereby succeed — at the company. //

On the other hand, denying activity that strips choice and dehumanizes citizens and families fits neatly into traditional conservative governance. “You may not compel abortion,” “you may not marry a child,” “you may not have multiple spouses” — these are bans based on traditional values we can confidently defend. “You may not mandate a novel injection for customers to engage in commerce” fits cleanly into this tradition. //

Government-corporate databases are both a dream for hackers and a quick path to a social credit system, and the only way to retard that kind of power is to make medical mandates a terrible burden to the states and businesses that demand them. The way to do this is a patchwork of states that resist by banning them. Do corporations want to do business in states like Texas, Florida, and Montana? Do airlines want to maintain hubs in states that say no? Are companies willing to write off that much market share?

This patchwork of resistance will also bring on reluctant allies who otherwise would happily join the new regime. //

“I don’t care if Google is a private company because it has too much power,” J.D. Vance, bestselling author of “Hillbilly Elegy” and a possible 2022 Ohio candidate for senator, told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson on his podcast. “And if you want to have a country where people can live their lives freely you have to be concerned about power, whether it’s concentrated in the government or concentrated in big corporations.”

Vance is right. While the past year has revealed that a depressing number of Americans will yield to arbitrary power wielded in the name of COVID-19, and will surely submit to both novel medical procedures and invasive private databases just for a chance to return to normalcy, moral governance ought to protect them from being coerced into that choice at all — and should protect those who still refuse from being treated as second-class citizens. //

To stop COVID vaccine passports, legislators concerned must target the databases. The databases are going to have to be digital to make sense, for speed, for efficiency, and because people will otherwise forge paperwork. The only effective way to go after them will be to prohibit any sort of digital database that collects or distributes personal medical data, and to make it a crime for organizations not covered by HIPAA to make services conditional on a customer granting access to medical data.

Organizations that are covered by HIPAA include doctors, clinics, pharmacies, nursing homes, and health-care plans, among others. If a business is not among those then it is not allowed to ask for access to your medical records. This will both protect privacy and prevent medical coercion, and when added to executive orders like those in Florida and Texas, will deal a death blow to the plan to force the COVID regime of the past year onto American citizens for years and decades to come.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is hard to overlook the importance of local general aviation airports as commercial airlines cut back on service, flights and personnel. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, there are approximately 5,100 public use airports in the nation that are accessed by general aviation aircraft, compared to approximately 500 that offer commercial airline service. This means that business aviation reaches 10 times the number of U.S. airports than do the airlines. //

According to the National Business Aviation Association, business aviation contributes $150 billion to U.S. economic output and employs more than 1.2 million people. In addition, general aviation activities reap substantial financial benefits for every state in the nation. Only about three percent of the approximately 15,000 business aircraft registered in the U.S. are flown by Fortune 500 companies, while the remaining 97 percent are operated by a broad cross-section of organizations, including governments, universities, charitable organizations and businesses.

Starship SN15 is expected to undergo a Static Fire test as early as Tuesday to clear the path for a test flight no earlier than Wednesday as SpaceX’s rapidly reusable interplanetary launch and landing system gained a massive sign of NASA approval – and a ton of government cash to boot.

SpaceX was the sole winner of NASA’s initial Human Landing System (HLS) award worth in total more than $2.9 billion, meaning the human return to the Moon’s surface will be via Starship.

This per the Washington Examiner.

Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, whose death was initially believed to be caused by rioters during the Jan. 6 insurrection, succumbed to natural causes stemming from a stroke the day after the violence, according to the top medical examiner in the nation’s capital.

Francisco J. Diaz, the chief medical examiner for Washington, D.C., told the Washington Post that Sicknick died on Jan. 7 after suffering two strokes and he did not suffer an allergic reaction to any chemical irritants.

Grounding and bonding serve different functions, use different methods, and have different requirements.

Separately derived systems have special grounding and bonding requirements.

This article is the fourth in a 12-part series on the differences between grounding and bonding.

Where more than one alternating-current system connects to a grounding electrode at a building, the same grounding electrode must be used for all systems [Sec. 250.58] (Fig. 1 below).

A TBM Avenger from the Valiant Air Command performing at the Cocoa Beach Air Show in Florida put on a show for some people on the beach on Saturday when the pilot set it down in the surf for a textbook ditching. Audio in the accompanying video features the staccato notes of a dying radial engine as the big single-engine attack aircraft settles softly into the chop in front of astonished beachgoers.

Boeing’s 747 assembly line is winding down. The aircraft manufacturer only has 12 orders left to fill. When the last jumbo rolls off the assembly line, it will mark the end of an era for an aircraft that’s spanned fifty-plus years. Production of the plane is expected to wrap up next year.

Boeing’s list of unfilled orders, current at March 31, confirms the 12 unfilled deliveries. According to Boeing, four Boeing 747-8Fs are going to Atlas Air, seven Boeing 747-8Fs are going to UPS, and a single 747-8 is going to an unidentified customer. //

So what do we know? Those four 747 freighters going to Atlas Air were only locked in three months ago. The New York-based global freight business already operates 53 Boeing 747s and will now take the final four Boeing builds. John Dietrich, President and CEO of Atlas Air, called the 747-8F the best and most versatile widebody freighter in the world. Mr Dietrich also thinks there will be demand for the big planes to fly freight for some time. //

Highspeeddirt
14 Apr

To paraphrase Lindbergh, four engines means twice as much to go wrong. You lose an engine on a three- or four-engine jet you still have to divert. I did an article for Av Week back in the day that revealed ETOPS twins had fewer turn backs and diversions than quads and tri-engine jetliners, backed by statistics. //

Hank
Dazza367
14 Apr

Sadly, Boeing isn't capable of developing anything anymore...at least not to a competitive cost and schedule.

There was a good article published by The Atlantic called “The Long Forgotten Flight that Sent Boeing Off Course” that explains this very well. There was a good article published by Forbes called "Boeing Will Pay High Price For McNerney's Mistake Of Treating Aviation Like It Was Any Other Industry" that explains this very well. There is also the famous 2009 "Bob Bogash Not Acceptable” discussion amongst Boeing retirees, including Program General Managers and VPs, that explains this very well.

Fourth, Chauvin’s attorney was able to mention a couple of times on the record something that I hoped he would be able to get into evidence — that being the fact that information about expert opinions and other evidence in the case was continually being provided to him while the trial was underway, long after it was supposed to be delivered to him by the prosecution. //

He needs to take some time to show the jury that the entire process has been unfair and unethical. The prosecution has helped in this regard by using multiple prosecutors to examine witnesses. There was no need for that. The operative facts, in this case, covered a grand total of about 18-20 minutes — from Chauvin’s first contact with Floyd up through Floyd being loaded in the ambulance and being driven away. There is nothing about this case — with only 12 days of witness testimony in the prosecution’s case — that required more than one prosecutor. //

But he should criticize the government for its approach to the case and ask the jury why all these resources are necessary when the case is not very complicated. Could it be that the prosecution recognizes the weakness of their case, and they are trying to mask that by overwhelming the single solitary defense attorney battling back against them? With so many attorneys working on the case, why did materials related to witness testimony reach him so late so often? //

he needs to mock the dismissal by the prosecution’s experts of the impact of the Fentanyl in Floyd’s system. The Medical Examiner paid by the taxpayers of Hennepin County told the police that if Floyd had died alone at home, he would have ruled it an accidental overdose based on the lethal level of Fentanyl in his blood. //

The key to this point is that Dr. Tobin was never made aware by the prosecutors of the Fentanyl tablets found in the rear of the police car. The DNA testing proving they had been in Floyd’s mouth was done in February, but in the 60 days thereafter Dr. Tobin was not given that information. I would ask the jury to consider why that was held back by the prosecutors? Was it because they knew it would alter Dr. Tobin’s opinion about the mechanism of Floyd’s death? The defense asked that the patrol car be searched and that the tablets be tested — not the prosecution. If it hadn’t been for the defense, that evidence would have never been part of the case.

But the prosecution controlled what information was given to the prosecution’s experts, and on this one key piece of evidence that would impact Dr. Tobin’s opinion, the prosecutors chose to not give that information to him. Why?

This is the kind of survey liberals loathe. Not that the rest of us don’t already know they’re the most miserable people on the face of the Earth, of course, but when the survey is the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, an ongoing survey of Americans conducted since 1972, which The New York Times describes as a “widely used resource” and “the scholarly gold standard for understanding social phenomena,” that’s gotta leave a mark. //

Yep, conservative white women are the happiest people in America.

And the unhappiest people in America? Drum roll, please… the survey says… white liberal men. My initial reaction was: of course, they are; I assume the majority of them are either married to or in relationships with white liberal women. I mean, this is not a giddy crowd. //

I’M A WALKER
@HourTommy
Replying to @Timcast
Aren’t liberals upset being called men and women? //

Jim
@Jim_Bachelor
Replying to @Timcast
It’s because they are in a abusive relationship with politics where they are told 100% of the time they are the bad guy that causes so much pain for women and minorities.

The Malaysia 17 story has been told. But beneath the knotted narratives of the accepted version of events, well woven in the three years since the Boeing was brought into an afternoon cornfield in Ukraine, lies a simpler, darker truth. //

As industry experts, we’ve comforted ourselves knowing that “Nobody considered that civil aircraft, at cruising altitude, were at risk” (Dutch Safety Board report). When fingers were pointed at Malaysia Airlines for overflying a war zone, we were quick to tell the public “Not fair. Everybody else did as well”. We were all apparently operating under the same misguided reassurance that this was a war going on underneath the airways, and that cruising at 33,000 over the top of it would be just fine. As an airline pilot at the time, I did the same as everyone else using the eastern Ukraine routes, and monitored the conflict beneath us with interest on each flight, but without concern.

But what if we could have known — what if the risk information was actually there, but for some reason we weren’t seeing it?

Well, it was. //

On a routine post-Soviet eastern block overflight, I will see tens, maybe hundred of Tempo Restricted Areas in my 20, 30, maybe 50 page NOTAM Briefing. Russia is very fond of them, as are many Eastern European countries. I don’t plot the coordinates of them, and I trust that Air Traffic Control will keep me out of anywhere I shouldn’t be.

I would discard it with a glance and move to the next one.

But wait.
_
This notice was on board MH17. This was the warning from the Ukraine Authorities that something was going on that the MH17 crew should know about. It was published on the Monday, three days before MH17 was shot down, and it was published only because on that Monday at 9am, an aircraft at FL210 (21,000 feet) had been shot down.

To the pilot, to the dispatcher, and to the crew of MH17 it’s indecipherable. It looks the same as every other routine TRA.

What if, instead, the Authorities had simply written what they meant? //

The core problem of the Notam system is not language. The core problem is that we rely on a single source for critical flight information and analysis. The State.
So, can the state be relied upon to provide that information? Can the state be trusted? In the case of Malaysian 17, it seems not. The vague language may or may not have been deliberate, but there was nobody else to provide the check and balance.
In many cases, states flagrantly disregard the basic principle of the Notam system. A Notam is clearly defined as “information concerning the establishment, condition or change in any aeronautical facility, service, procedure or hazard, the timely knowledge of which is essential”.
Almost all states are guilty of ignoring the word essential. The vast majority of Notams now in the system are anything but. Many are completely unreadable by humans. Some of the garbage in the system has to be seen to be believed. //

Worse still, states routinely omit information, or hijack the system. Greece and Turkey use the Notam system to score political points, endlessly discussing boundary disputes. Deeply troubled states like Libya, Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Yemen cannot be trusted to provide essential information. For others, like Egypt, protecting tourism is consistently higher priority than publishing safety of flight information.

The NOTAM problem is clear. We have an antiquated, cumbersome, ineffective, frustrating, dangerous system. Pilots are missing the essential few pieces of information, unable to hear the call of criticality in a cacophony of irrelevant noise. //

Never before have we had this energy. Not in 1964, when we were first promised a better system, not in 2014, when the MH17 crew were cruelly handed a set of unusable coordinates and cryptic text to warn them of the risk in eastern Ukraine, not in 2017 when I wrote that Notam article, nor a few months later when the Air Canada crew became victim to the same problem. Nor in 2018, when we ran the Notam Goat Show in Geneva, and first published our Field Guide to Notams. //

In a Summit, there’s a clear attachment to an outcome – getting something done. Its dictionary definition says it’s a top-level meeting of minds, and those minds were here. //

The presentations came thick and fast. We watched, we listened. A steady stream of people showcasing how they manage the problem – how they are parsing the current format of Notams. Flight Briefings from Leido. Fancy graphics from Foreflight. DoD flight planning interfaces. Notam Search from the FAA. A multitude of front-ends that attach to a gremlin-laden back end with all the structure of a chronic hoarders hallway.

And now, an outsider: Drew Zachary from the US Census Bureau. But wait, can aviation learn from not-aviation? Surely we have all the answers here already? What could we learn from someone outside our field? As it turned out, everything. Of all the morning presentations, this one would set the scene for a change in the weather. Turns out, it’s not an aviation problem, it’s a data problem. And Drew showed us some novel things: How to build an API. How to listen to customers. How to structure large chunks of source data. How to make data available in a form that allows the customer to use it effectively.

Wow.

But dreams were quickly crushed. We were told by the next speaker that building fancy API’s were for the Stripes and Slacks of this world, and not for the FAA. Granted, Stripe (payments) and Slack (messaging) have a combined valuation of $48 billion and lead the way for API design and documentation, //

Enter Abby Smith, FAA.

Just behind those aircraft-at-peace lies the White House, where Ronald Reagan famously said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”

There’s a strong urge in our ops community to lay the responsibility for the Notam problem at the door of Government. After all, in each country around the world, it’s the CAA, CASA, the DGCA, the FAA – the agency, the administration, the authority, the directorate: all of which are the Government, that is responsible for the steady stream of Notams. Can they truly take responsibility for fixing them, too? Or do they just want to look like they are?

I like to believe there are no coincidences. After lunch, the sun comes out. That ominous, nebulous overcast is steadily replaced with warming rays of November sunshine. Abby is that light. She is, unquestionably, truly here to help.

Abby Smith’s title is FAA Executive Champion of NOTAM Modernization. Back to the dictionary. “Key agent of change … the Executive Champion must gather resources, create a strategy, and keep the process moving. They must manage points of contention and chart the course to full acceptance.”

The title is telling, and shows that the vision is real. The FAA really wants to see Notams fixed.

The vice chairman of the US National Transportation Safety Board, Bruce Landsberg, has published a commentary on the NTSB’s blog on the human factors and systemic failures which led to the near-miss collision on 7 July 2017 between an Air Canada A320, inbound from Toronto, and four other aircraft awaiting takeoff at San Francisco International Airport.

Landsberg suggests that the events, which occurred near midnight, had the potential to be twice as deadly as the 27 March 1977 collision between two Boeing 747s on the runway in Tenerife; an incident which killed 583 people and remains the deadliest crash in aviation history.

In the Air Canada incident, disaster was averted by 13 feet, when pilots realized their error and aborted landing, but it was a very close call. //

The problem was that the Air Canada pilots did not realize the parallel runway (28 Left) was closed, and lined up for landing on a nearby taxiway instead of their assigned runway. //

The NTSB investigation was hampered somewhat by what happened next. The captain, exhausted, did not notify the Air Canada dispatcher of the incident before going to bed. At that point, he had been awake for 19 hours.

“The captain was not technically ‘on duty’ that whole time, and, under Canadian regulations for reserve crew members, he still could have been available for duty for another 9 hours,” Landsberg says. “If we expect solid human performance where lives are at stake, fatigue rules need to be based on human factors science. The NTSB has recommended that Canada’s fatigue regulations be modified.”

When the captain filed his report 16 hours later, the aircraft had already taken off on a morning flight. The 2-hours of cockpit voice recorder (CVR) data was overwritten.

Recommendations from the NTSB report are based on what investigators could deduce from the evidence available.

One is that the FAA revise the format of NOTAMs (Notices to Airmen), something which the agency was originally tasked with doing in 2012.

“NOTAMs contain dozens of notices of varying importance, such as closed taxiways, wet runways, and small, unlit towers miles from the airport. Information about closed runways, however, is critical,” Landsberg states. “From a human factors perspective, we found that the presentation of information in the NOTAM the crew received did not effectively convey the information about the runway closure.