He was not pulled over for an air freshener as the family claimed, but rather, the registration of the vehicle was expired. Upon learning who the driver was, police were made aware that an outstanding warrant existed for Wright’s arrest. //

Wright was accused of aggravated robbery stemming from a 2019 incident in which he allegedly choked a woman and held her at gunpoint in an attempt to steal $820 dollars. After being released on bail, the warrant was issued and his bail revoked because Wright was in possession of an illegal gun.

The individual Chinese man, woman, and child of the more than 1 billion people in China are mere cogs in the CCP machine, easily silenced or dispensed with if they harm the party. That is why the Chinese government has been lying about the origins of the COVID-19 virus even as it infected millions, and perhaps more importantly, why they behaved at the onset of the pandemic as though they did not mind the virus spreading outside their borders. It’s why the CCP is engaged in genocide of the Uighur Muslims, and it’s why the CCP forces companies to comply with their authoritarian policies and guidelines.

In stark contrast, Taiwan is a flourishing liberal democracy of 24 million people, advocating dignity for each individual man, woman, and child. It has embraced pluralism and transparency, as well as religious, political, and academic freedom. The very existence of a free and successful Taiwan rebukes Xi’s vision and his insistence that Chinese Communism is a superior system of government to liberal democracy, and that ethnic Chinese are the ones to prove it. //

Should the PRC conquer Taiwan, China scholar Michael Mazza articulates the stakes:

The PLA would for the first time have unimpeded access to the Pacific Ocean, allowing it more easily to threaten Guam, Hawaii, and the continental United States. PLA ballistic missile submarines might ply the waters of the Western Pacific, allowing China to pose a more potent nuclear weapons threat to the United States. //

We also have an interest in trading and traveling safely in a region that will generate two-thirds of the global economy in the next ten years and want to do so as Americans, not as essentially Chinese serfs who need the CCP to grant us permission. If China can cut us off from the region, it would also seriously impede the United States from providing security assurances to allies like Japan and the Philippines.

If Japan loses confidence in America’s willingness and ability to come to their defense if China or North Korea attacks them with a nuclear weapon, we can be sure Japan will get their own nuclear weapons, which would kick off a domino effect of nuclear proliferation. The importance of the credibility of nuclear assurances made from the United States to our allies cannot be overstated. //

To state the obvious: the Chinese appear to not be intimidated by President Joe Biden. Chinese diplomats did not publicly preverbally slap around the United States’ most senior diplomats during the Trump administration the way they did of Biden officials in Alaska. //

Third, we must put a premium on better fortifying Guam to defend against an attack by the PRC. Any American fight with the PRC will rely on our ability to operate from Guam.

Fourth, the United States should quickly produce and work with allies to deploy “long-range fires,” ground-launched cruise missiles able to successfully hit targets as required on a challenging battlefield. President Trump withdrew the United States from the Cold War Treaty — the INF Treaty — because Russia was cheating on it. Now we can, and must, produce those missiles even as we work with allies on potential hosting agreements. //

Finally, we should emphasize close and very visible cooperation and solidarity with our regional allies and partners. China seeks vassal states. The United States has and respects sovereign allies that are indispensable for deterring China and winning if deterrence fails. The Trump administration did excellent work with the “Quad” and the Biden administration is continuing such efforts.

The CCP is determined to replace the United States and thinks it sees an opening now to make its move by swallowing up Taiwan. We must do everything we can now to convince the CCP that such an opening does not exist.

SMS Messages not imported after enabling from Signal app #10618 //

greyson-signal commented 2 days ago
I'll reiterate that we cannot just 'turn the old thing back on'. It was very bad for multiple reasons, and we'd probably just have to re-do it from the ground-up and do a bunch of testing on it. That takes a lot of time, and it's hard to justify putting a lot of time into features to support non-encrypted messaging. Not saying we won't ever come back to it, but we need to schedule time for it, and there's no time in the near future.

Japan’s government has backed a plan to dilute the processed water and release it into the sea.

The government says the process meets international standards, and it has been endorsed by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“Releasing into the ocean is done elsewhere,” IAEA’s director general, Rafael Mariano Grossi, has said. “It’s not something new. There is no scandal here.”

The release is not likely to begin for at least two years and will take decades.

A government spokesman, Katsunobo Kato, said the dilution would reduce tritium levels to well below standards set domestically and by the World Health Organization for drinking water, with IAEA supervision. //

Environmental groups like Greenpeace, which opposes nuclear power, say radioactive materials like carbon-14 that remain in the water can “be easily concentrated in the food chain”.

They allege that accumulated doses over time could damage DNA, and want to see the water stored until technology is developed to improve filtration. //

But “there is consensus among scientists that the impact on health is minuscule”, he told AFP.

Still, “it can’t be said the risk is zero, which is what causes controversy”.

Geraldine Thomas, chair of molecular pathology at Imperial College London and an expert on radiation, said tritium “does not pose a health risk at all – and particularly so when you factor in the dilution factor of the Pacific Ocean”.

She said carbon-14 was also not a health risk, arguing that chemical contaminants in seawater like mercury should concern consumers more “than anything that comes from the Fukushima site”.

On eating Fukushima seafood, “I would have no hesitation whatsoever,” she added.

Covering 14 million square kilometres Antarctica is nearly twice the size of Australia and accounts for 90 per cent of the world’s fresh water in the form of ice. This ice covers more than 99 per cent of the continent with an average thickness of 2,000 metres and only the coastal rocky outcrops and rising mountain peaks escape the ice sheet. Its average elevation of 2,300 metres makes it the highest continent on earth, the coldest with a recorded temperature of -89.6C and the windiest, with gravity-assisted katabatic winds hurtling down the slopes at up to 320 km/h. The minimal amount of moisture received by the polar plateau compares to the driest deserts on earth.

Antarctica is a unique place and while its mystery and majesty draws scientists and tourists, it also calls for a range of additional considerations for aircraft venturing into the region. //

The nature of the environment is unlike any other into which the airline operates. There are peaks reaching 16,000 feet, although the highest mountain in the potential area of operations is Mount Minto which towers at 13,600 feet. Consequently, the Lowest Safe Altitude (LSALT) for operations is a significant consideration. Additionally, altimetry in the region is based on the United States transition level of Flight Level 180 and given the extremes of temperature, cold temperature corrections are applied to the QNH.

Furthermore, just as altimetry requires special attention, so does navigation which normally uses magnetic North as its reference. Throughout the flight GPS allows a precise track to be flown, however, the heading reference of the aircraft is switched from magnetic to true as the 747 passes 60 degrees South. Less technical, but equally vital, are a series of topographical ‘strip maps’ which add to the overall situational awareness of the crew.

Communications are primarily through (Controller Pilot Data Link Communications) CPDLC and Australian, New Zealand and United States airspace all come into play. Additionally, contact is made with McMurdo station approaching the scenic viewing area and Traffic Information Broadcasts by Aircraft (TIBA) are made on schedule over Antarctica.

As safety is the prime consideration in all flight operations, the importance of a positive handover-takeover procedure between pilots is reinforced to ensure that one pilot is always maintaining a positive watch over the aircraft. And while this may seem self-evident, such amazing scenery as the pilots will witness requires positive cockpit discipline to avoid any lapse in monitoring the aircraft’s flightpath with reference to the instruments.

Last week, Google pulled a video of DeSantis on March 18 discussing COVID-19 with medical scientists Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Dr. Scott Atlas, who all hail from elite institutions — Stanford University, Harvard University, and Oxford University. All but Gupta, who is based in the United Kingdom, also joined DeSantis’s April 12 press conference to respond to Google’s ban.

“For science to work, you have to have an open exchange of ideas,” Bhattacharya said Monday. “If you’re going to make an argument that something is misinformation, you should provide an actual argument. You can’t just take it down and say, ‘Oh, it’s misinformation’ without actually giving a reason. And saying, ‘Look it disagrees with the CDC’ is not enough of a reason. Let’s hear the argument, let’s see the evidence that YouTube used to decide it was misinformation. Let’s have a debate. Science works best when we have an open debate.”

“I’m very worried about the future of science because science is dependent on free exchange of ideas and it has been for 300 years now. So if this continues, this kind of attitude, the censoring of scientific views, then I think we have reached the end of 200 years of Enlightenment,” Kulldorff said Monday. //

“The lockdowns are the single biggest public health mistake in history,” Bhattacharya said on the banned March 18 panel. He said lockdowns are psychologically compelling to rich societies terrified of death, but are not only ineffective at stopping disease and death, they also make both worse. He noted a few minutes later:

The international evidence and the American evidence is clear: The lockdowns have not stopped the spread of the disease in any measurable way. The disease spreads on aerosol by droplets, it’s a respiratory disease. It’s very difficult to stop. The idea of the lockdown is incredibly beguiling… but humans are not like that. What’s happened instead, we’ve exposed working class, we’ve exposed poor people at higher rates. We’ve created this illusion that we can control disease spread when in fact we cannot. //

Lockdowns Are Bad for People, But Good for Google
Keeping people at home indefinitely has also drastically increased people’s screen time, which provides Google more ad revenue and influence over how people think and the information they receive. Screen use is correlated with obesity, and obesity puts people at a dramatically higher risk from COVID-19.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, 78 percent of those hospitalized with COVID were obese, and lockdowns have directly contributed to a huge increase in First World obesity, especially among children. Among people who have died while COVID-positive, according to the CDC, 94 percent had other significant medical conditions, including diseases exacerbated by obesity: diabetes, cardiac arrest, and heart failure.

“The laptop class, they have protected themselves through the lockdowns while we have thrown the working class under the bus,” Kulldorff said during the panel discussion Google banned. //

On Monday, DeSantis noted the irony of Google banning professional discussion from doctors whose scientific research has been cited by Google Scholar more than 10,000 times, more than 17,000 times, and more than 25,000 times, respectively. //

Three of the four doctors on the March 18 panel authored the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement now signed by nearly 14,000 medical scientists and more than 42,000 health practitioners, as well as nearly 800,000 “concerned citizens,” that promotes based on the scientific evidence the policy of focused protection in response to COVID, instead of ineffective mass lockdowns.

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Volunteer Moderator
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Another comment by greyson-signal on #10618 3:

I’ll reiterate that we cannot just ‘turn the old thing back on’. It was very bad for multiple reasons, and we’d probably just have to re-do it from the ground-up and do a bunch of testing on it. That takes a lot of time, and it’s hard to justify putting a lot of time into features to support non-encrypted messaging. Not saying we won’t ever come back to it, but we need to schedule time for it, and there’s no time in the near future.