Visitors to the Crater of Diamonds can find much more than diamonds here. One of the most common rocks found at the park is also one of the rarest to find beyond the borders of the crater. Lamproite is the volcanic material that erupted from the park’s diamond-bearing pipe around 100 million years ago. Four types of lamproite can be found at the park today, but not all are diamond-bearing. Knowing where each type of lamproite is found can provide insight into the park’s fascinating geological history.

If you have a mental illness and know you are barred from buying a gun but have sufficient wits to circumvent a background check, adding yourself on a list to keep someone from selling you a gun when you are actively evading the process designed to keep you from buying a gun makes no sense. //

My concern is that this is a backdoor for getting doctors more involved in gun ownership than they should be (they shouldn’t be at all) and builds on the CDC attempting to frame gun ownership as a public health issue.

Currently, GPS satellites use atomic clocks as part of navigation systems, but there are limits to the approach. They rely on atoms confined by a gas cell to serve as a meter for the clock, but the long-term stability of gas-cell clocks can suffer when the atoms collide with the "walls" of the cell, causing drift. GPS systems get signals from earthbound atomic clocks to correct the instability. But that gets trickier the deeper you go into space.

Trapped-ion atomic clocks, in which charged atoms are prevented from colliding with walls by an electromagnetic cage, have been around since the early 2000s and are more accurate than earlier approaches to atomic time-keeping, which have been around since the 1950s. NASA's Deep Space Atomic Clock loses one second every 10 million years, as proven in controlled tests on Earth.

Our Republic is on the line. But it’s not because of election security laws from the Republicans, but from efforts to suborn the Constitution from the Democrats.

When FDR sent thousands of Americans to internment camps because their ancestors were Japanese, that was an ugly stain on America. Japanese Americans who suffered that fate deserved every cent of reparation, and frankly more for Roosevelt’s illegal and unconstitutional order. They were direct victims. Many are still alive today. They suffered the injury. Their great-grandchildren are not demanding their own reparations. Calling for reparations for Americans who are, in many cases, four or five or six generations removed from ancestors who were held in bondage is impractical, at best. Even its proponents like Ta-Nehisi Coates have admitted as much. I am all in for reparation for anyone held as a slave. None exist. //

I’m all in for Blacks who suffered a direct injury during Jim Crow suing for damages and bankrupting those responsible. Direct injury. Direct reparations.

Blaming all living Americans (with a large percentage having no antebellum connection to America) for the sins of long-dead ancestors makes no more sense than me demanding payment for Robert Thompson’s multiple years of torture at the hands of Confederates. The confederates who ruined his body are long since dust in the wind. I never met Robert Thompson. His bones are dust as well. My only “memory” of him is preserved in a shadow box. The box contains the flag cord he carried through Andersonville, his photo later in life, and the envelope on which he penned what happened 159 years ago.

Attorney General Robert Jackson, later a Supreme Court justice and Nuremberg prosecutor, warned against “picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him,” in which case “the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.”

But that’s what’s been going on. Whether you like or you hate Trump, you should condemn it. Not just because it’s wrong on its face and against our Constitutional order, but also because if it can happen to Trump even when he was the President of the United States, it can happen to anyone if you land on the wrong side of the powers that be. That’s exactly what happens in banana republics.

Facebook has given no indication as to why they only have one side of the ideological spectrum on the “hate” flags.

Just as the national Democrat Party is chasing the imaginary pot of gold at the end of the green energy rainbow, so too are Oregon’s Democrats, and they are all-in on wind, solar, and hydroelectric power as the ONLY sources powering Oregon’s electric grid. //

The bill requires PGE and Pacific Power to submit plans to reduce emissions by 80% from a baseline amount by 2030, 90% by 2035, and completely eliminate emissions by 2040.