Soft Landing

What Happened to the Service Station?

The only actual service stations that I’m aware of are located along drug trafficking corridors and they inform law enforcement of suspicious vehicles and people. They’re rewarded financially when the police/DEA makes a successful snag based on their tip.  HIDTA funds for this purpose are extracted from cash seizures. As a result, they check your oil and tire pressure when you stop. They engage you in friendly conversation, and so forth with an ulterior motive. I’ve mainly encountered this in Utah and New Mexico but they exist elsewhere.

There are only 145 shopping days until Halloween

Pay the Weather Tax or Die!

If it all sounds slightly familiar, consider this news story from 1972:

“We have ten years to stop the catastrophe,” said the UN’s environmental protection boss. That’s one of the headlines collected by Bjorn Lomberg, author of “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”

Bullet Points:

** From EdB – The dynafin. Is it the latest development in submarine propulsion? I’d like to know what Chief-of-the-Boat (ret) Bonderenka thinks.

** (Attkisson) Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is questioning “serious conflict of interest” among advisers on the government’s newest Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee named to serve from 2025-2030. The panel is responsible for making dietary policy recommendations. Like many government advisory panels, it is staffed with members connected to industries who could benefit from the recommendations. Though some advocates say people connected to the industries impacted should be barred from serving as advisers, the government allows the conflicts, as long as they are disclosed.

Grassley is questioning current disclosures, which fail to connect each reported financial conflict of interest to the specific member it pertains to.

Grassley cites previous concerns about the makeup of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. They surround Dr. Fatima Stanford, “who has made tens of thousands of dollars for her promotion of weight loss and obesity drugs.”

** The schools need to refocus their efforts on teaching the basics of reading and math. The assessments in these areas show that many schools, many entire school districts are failing miserably at these basic tasks. If they can’t be successful doing that first and foremost then nothing else matters. Obviously whatever they are doing isn’t working and changes need to be made. We need to return to what worked in the past or find better techniques and restored priorities. Failure cannot be accepted or excused. If we expect the children of today and tomorrow to be educated in a manner that allows them to flourish and be productive in the world, we need to improve education and our failing education systems, especially for those students who are struggling and falling behind.

** Meanwhile, the people who warned us about “the population bomb,” nuclear winter, mass starvation, running out of energy, global cooling and a future so polluted that everyone would have to wear gas masks in cities, are telling us to just trust them as they are busy at work erecting a multitrillion-dollar climate change industrial complex that revolves around our planetary savior — the windmill.

** How DHS went from targeting al Qaeda to focusing on your Tweets. Only by grasping that story can we begin to understand what must be done to restore integrity.

** Bus all illegal aliens to Minnesota (and build a wall around the state)

USS America (LHA-6)

Movie Review:

(from a friend) I took my children to see the computer-animated SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE this week, and a fine time was had by all. In sum, there were no liberal sucker punches, no subversive messages, and little or no wokeness.

The Princess was an all-American girl, an adventuring, platform-jumping tomboy, forthright and folksy. She was perfectly sweet but as unalike a princess as possible, so the film was not perfect.

The plot could have been tweaked and tightened up in a place or two — but these are minor complaints against an overall enjoyable and professional product, with a well-chosen soundtrack, expertly voice-acted, charming, funny, and, at times, moving.

Meanwhile, in the Earth-realm, two Italian brothers who have recently opened their own plumbing business, dream of saving Brooklyn from leaks and overflows. Their ex-boss, their family, and the mean dog they shoved into the shower have grave doubts about the brothers’ eventual success. They have thick Italian accents only for the duration of the television commercial, on which they spent their last dime. Their first job ends in a comical disaster. Prospects look dim. But then Brooklyn is flooded by a broken street main, and the brothers race to the aid of the borough, monkey wrenches at the ready.

They find themselves sucked into a polychromatic interdimensional plumbing pipe, and promise each other that, as long as they are together, they are invincible. Whereupon they are separated, one falling into the dark and dismal flame-turtle kingdom and the other into the candy-colored mushroom kingdom. Mario, the elder, spends the remainder of the film trying to rescue his brother Luigi, the younger.

Things Nautical

A necklace carrying the tooth of a prehistoric shark known as a megalodon has been discovered in the wreckage of the Titanic during a digital scan of the sunken ship.

For more than 100 years, the necklace has sat at the bottom of the ocean following the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, according to Magellan, a deep water investigation company that carried out the scan.

Images from the scan show a gold necklace with a tooth of a megalodon, scientifically known as Otodus megalodon, a prehistoric shark that lived more than 23 million years ago.

Megalodons were faster than any sharks alive today and big enough to eat an orca in just five bites.

The necklace was discovered by Magellan during a project to produce a full-size digital scan of the Titanic, which the company says is the largest underwater scanning project in history.

The megalodon tooth necklace is pictured in the center of this image.

Magellan/Youtube

Richard Parkinson, CEO of Magellan, said the find was “astonishing, beautiful and breathtaking.”

“What is not widely understood is that the Titanic is in two parts and there’s a three-square-mile debris field between the bow and the stern,” Parkinson told ITV last week. “The team mapped the field in such detail that we could pick out those details.”

Earlier this month, details were released about the project. Magellan and filmmakers Atlantic Productions said at the time that a team of scientists used deep-sea mapping to create “an exact ‘Digital Twin’ of the Titanic wreck for the first time.”