At least three studies have found that people infected with omicron still have virus levels high enough to be contagious more than five days after their symptoms began.

In February of 2011 we started posting free nonfiction we at Baen thought might be of interest to our readers. The first article was "The Size of it All" by Les Johnson, a Baen author and space scientist. As new nonfiction is made available, it will be posted on the main page, then added to this book (to save the Baen Barflies the trouble of doing it themselves). This is our compilation of nonfiction for 2020.

As is usual with such copyrighted material from Baen, the contents may be copied and shared but NOT sold. All commercial rights are reserved to Baen Books.

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The Goon Show
Radio 4 Extra
Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers star in BBC radio's groundbreaking classic comedy.

EPISODES (104 AVAILABLE)

The war on history has come for Thomas Jefferson.

On Monday, the New York City Council unanimously voted to remove a Jefferson statue from New York City Hall, though it hasn’t yet decided where to put it. The statue has been there for nearly a century and was originally created to celebrate religious liberty.

The effort to remove it met no resistance from Mayor Bill de Blasio. In fact, the whole thing was driven by the historical art commission he launched in 2017.

To get an idea of what this commission was about, the tomb of Ulysses S. Grant was under consideration for being labeled a “hate symbol.” //

Jefferson, whatever his personal foibles, was the author of the greatest anti-slavery document in modern history. The Declaration of Independence, which contains the famous line, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal,” not only became a rallying cry to abolish slavery in America. It was an inspiration to anti-slavery movements around the globe.

Today, the institution of slavery has disappeared nearly everywhere, despite being with almost every human civilization through all human history.

Thank you, Mr. Jefferson. //

However, as much as has been purged, the entire movement is an indictment on the mob, the New York City Council, and the country’s ruling cultural elite, not Jefferson and the great men and ideas of our history.

It’s an indictment of the small-minded fanatics who’ve built and accomplished nothing other than tearing down the symbols of greater men, whose accomplishments were profound and transformative. //

We have to protect and build on our history. When a statue is torn down, build another one in another city in defiance. The only way the war on history ends is when Americans begin to put their foot down and say “no” to the absurd demands.

We need to go out and explain to our friends and neighbors why the ideas and people who built this country were great and worth defending, and why we should look to build on what they accomplished rather than reducing everything to rubble and hoping something good can emerge from the ashes.

The New York City Council may be tearing down statues. It’s our job to now start building more up and furthering the profound and true ideas that Jefferson stood for.

Republicans must be wary of Democratic efforts to fortify elections in 2023 and beyond. While some congressional Republicans might think the post-2020 election integrity fight is over, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Democrats have a massive ground game advantage over Republicans already, and if they pass these policy proposals — under the insufferable label of “voting rights” — in key swing states, that advantage will only grow to an insurmountable one. Republicans must realize election integrity is not a seasonal push nor a battle isolated to 2020. Rather, they must be on offense for years to come.

If leftists can rig elections, they certainly can rig a constitutional convention. That would be a major disaster. //

Article V says Congress shall call a convention requested by two-thirds of the states. It’s unclear what the role of all 50 states would be, but they are of course blue as well as red. This means that liberal activists will have full access to any constitutional convention.

So if the Con-Con process started tomorrow, who would Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer select as delegates? Pelosi could exclude Republican choices, as with her January 6 committee, or trade her speaker’s gavel for the Con-Con chairmanship.

Conservative Con-Con promoters will not control who attends, what issues are discussed, or what constitutional amendments ultimately are approved. The convention will make all decisions and conservatives will not be able to guarantee the outcome. //

Conservatives who blithely assume that only conservatives would be empowered to participate in a Con-Con, and that ratification procedures would block unwanted results, should read Mollie Hemingway’s book, “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.” //

Most leaders of the Article V Con-Con movement have no personal experience with the dynamics of political conventions, much less contested conventions. Key decisions are made months before a national convention begins, and decisive motions often are passed without warning with a gavel crack on a voice vote.

As reported in “Rigged,” courts are useless when fast-moving political events override internal organizational rules and even established law. Several book chapters end with regret, with statements like, “Republicans later learned…” and “The court ruled in Trump’s favor, but it was too late.” //

Federal spending is unrestrained, but our Constitution is not the problem. It would make more sense for state lawmakers to return federal subsidies to the U.S. Treasury than to bet the Constitution in a reckless gamble they are likely to lose. ///

Article V Convention is the "get rich quick" scheme of lazy conservatives who don't want too do the hard work or wait for the results of hard work of transforming the culture.

• Winter Storm Elliott has highlighted the vulnerabilities of U.S. energy systems, with energy providers having to resort to rotating outages.
• Natural gas production plunged during the storm, sending lower volumes to power generation units and causing gas prices to spike.
• The Texas power grid managed to avoid the catastrophic failures it experienced in 2021, but energy systems remain vulnerable.

There are some filmmakers who would rather leave the meaning of their films up to the audience to interpret than explain what the filmmaker is trying to say. Stanley Kubrick was one of the directors, opting to challenge audiences at every level.

He didn’t subscribe to one single interpretation of his work, telling Playboy magazine in 1968, “You’re free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film—and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deeper level—but I don’t want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue." //

Kubrick responded to Yao’s question regarding the final scene in 2001, where the protagonist Dave Bowman lies in bed, saying, “I tried to avoid doing this ever since the picture came out because when you just say the ideas they sound foolish, whereas if they’re dramatized one feels it.”

The director continues, adding, “The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by god-like entities, creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form and they put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him, and his whole life passes from that point on in that room and he has no sense of time, it just seems to happen as it does in the film.”

To elaborate on this concept, Kubrick notes that the room was a very deliberately inaccurate replica of French architecture to show that the entities had some idea of what Dave would find comforting and familiar like humans do to animals in zoos.

Concluding his comments about the film’s ending, Kubrick says, "When they get finished with him, as happens in so many myths of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some know of superbeing and sent back to Earth. It is the pattern of a great deal of mythology, that was what we were trying to suggest.”

Christopher Ingraham @_cingraham
·
The latest data on happiness from the General Social Survey is truly something else. Nothing remotely like it in the past five decades of polling. https://thewhyaxis.substack.com/p/new-data-shows-americans-more-miserable
11:05 AM · Jan 28, 2022

Americans are also having fewer children than ever before, with the nation’s birth rate falling for the sixth consecutive year in 2020 to its lowest ever. Just 3.6 million babies were born, according to CDC statistics, down from 3.7 million the year before.

There are a lot of reasons why Americans aren’t having more children. Marriage is declining so rapidly that married people will soon be the minority. Faith, the bedrock of a moral society that incentivizes children (and empirically raises levels of happiness) has deteriorated so much that church membership has already dropped below 50 percent, according to Gallup. Americans aren’t even having as much sex, or even engaging in masturbation which signals a lack of interest. //

A happy population is one that flourishes with procreation, so enamored by its miracle that it chooses to pay it forward with pride so that future generations may experience the same gift. That no matter its trials, life is worth living, and it’s worth bestowing onto others.

Instead, life’s rejection of the unborn out of spite for an allegedly evil and crumbling civilization is a signal of deep-seated anguish on the rise today.

Sec. 5604 of the James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023 specifically addresses the issue:

"A flight instructor, registered owner, lessor, or lessee of an aircraft shall not be required to obtain a letter of deviation authority from the [FAA administrator] to allow, conduct, or receive flight training, checking and testing in an experimental aircraft if 1) the flight instructor is not providing both the training and the aircraft; 2) no person advertises or broadly offers the aircraft as available for flighty training, checking, or testing; and 3) no person receives compensation for use of the aircraft for a specific flight during which flight training, checking, or testing was received, other than expenses for owning, operating, and maintaining the aircraft."

With the president's signature, experimental aircraft owners may resume receiving instruction in their aircraft without having to jump through this frustrating hoop.

The cold blast this holiday weekend across the eastern half of the US exposed the fragility of power grids as soaring heating demand spiked peak total loads to record high in many areas while supplies were tight. Grid operators and utilities told tens of millions of Americans to conserve power -- some conservation efforts are still ongoing Christmas morning. Christmas Eve was a mess for many customers in the Southeast states, including North Carolina and Tennessee, as utilities implemented rolling blackouts.

Fossil fuels and nuclear power generation mix across the eastern US saved grids from collapse. Unreliable renewables, such as solar and wind, were just a tiny fraction of the power mix.

What's idiotic is the decarbonization campaign to decommission nuclear and fossil fuel generators for renewables. This weekend's grid chaos is a wake-up call. America has a severe grid problem sparked by the 'green' movement. Thank the climate alarmist, woke corporations, and progressive politicians for ushering in so-called green reforms that have transformed once-stable grids into a third-world country prone to rolling blackouts anytime temperatures fall below freezing.

Readers have been well informed of our view that advanced nuclear reactors will play a critical role in decarbonizing electricity in the US by providing carbon-free energy, and it is a much better form than solar and wind assets.