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Christopher Columbus, the most famous explorer in history, was once a celebrated hero. Now, many consider him a villain, a despoiler of paradise. So which version of Columbus is true? Michael Knowles answers this question and offers some much-needed historical perspective.
Or maybe at least a "Rock Star"! Amazing article from Hot Air detailing how Elon Musk is making life better for millions of people - and revolutionizing industries.
AP Photo/Alex Brandon
Elon Musk is a once-in-a-generation--or perhaps century--genius. He has pushed humanity forward more than any person in two generations.
He is an extraordinary entrepreneur, engineer, and leader of passionate people. He has built a successful car company using a technology that nobody had ever made practical. He bet it all to create SpaceX, which may be the most important company in the world. He has built a satellite internet company that is saving lives right now in North Carolina and other hurricane-stricken regions and brought the internet to isolated tribes in Africa and the Amazon rainforest. And he has broken the establishment's stranglehold on speech and lost billions of dollars to do so.
Tesla is expanding into the business of making humanoid robots, and within a few years, they will be ready to become assistants to millions of people. And while his "Full Self Driving" software always seems to be a year away from autonomy, it is remarkably good and saves lives daily. Teslas are the safest cars in the world.
SpaceX makes the impossible come true every day. In rough terms the company puts about 9 times as much mass into space than every other country combined, and the lead keeps growing.
Yesterday, SpaceX executed a nearly flawless test of its Starship--the fifth test out of many. It could have executed the test months ago, but the government bureaucrats are working hard to slow his progress because, well, he is a Republican now. Since his purchase of Twitter, the Biden administration has put obstacle after obstacle in his way, threatening his company, asking our allies to throttle his speech using their less stringent speech protection laws, and Democrats in California are denying the Air Force the right to allow SpaceX to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, citing Elon's political opinions.
They care more about harming Elon Musk than national security. Both NASA and the Air and Space Forces are at odds with the rest of the administration because, well, they can't do their jobs without SpaceX. They need to launch on Falcon 9, NASA can't launch or retrieve their astronauts without the company, and the military needs Starlink for reliable and fast communications. No doubt the Starlink satellite constellation has capabilities that help the military about which there is no public information.
Starlink could provide broadband access to millions more people under the Biden administration's broadband program, but the administration kicked SpaceX out of the program after Musk came out for Ron DeSantis and bought Twitter. It was a blatantly political move, and they have tried to justify the decision by claiming that the company couldn't provide reliable service. Of course, Starlink is the only reliable service available and costs much less than the alternatives. As a consequence, NOT ONE house has been plugged into broadband after three years.
Starlink is invaluable to hurricane survivors and rescuers, and Elon Musk is providing the service and even the equipment for free. He has even turned on a direct phone to satellite service for hurricane-hit regions despite the service still being in beta testing.
Still, Democrats have put a target on Musk's back, doing everything they can to put stumbling blocks in his way because he says things they don't like. They hate Elon Musk.
The hatred runs so deep that the Democrats are including Musk in anti-Trump advertisements, generating hate against him as they have done with Donald Trump. Both have been effective critics of the Democrats, and they cannot abide that no matter how much good Musk does.
John Fetterman, proving that sometimes a stroke isn't such a bad thing, thinks this is idiotic. He is right. Ambitious young Americans see an America that works and one that doesn't and know which one they want to be a part of.
Whether you agree with his politics, Musk is a giant of our times. He has revolutionized industry after industry, and he is nowhere near done. He may land on Mars one day. Personally, I mean. I have no doubt his company will, and soon.
The left prefers a world where Boeing controls our access to space, cable companies our access to the internet, and censored social media companies are the filter through which censored information reaches us.
Musk is a figure out of a Heinlein novel, or yes, a true-to-life Tony Stark. In fact, Robert Downey Jr. used Musk as a model for his engineering genius character.
Musk may not exactly be a character out of Marvel, but frankly, that is good.
OK Republicans - start flying those American Flags if you want to win!! (and spread the word)
Interesting that the mere sight of the American Flag helps tilt people to voting Republican. And that the effect can last up to eight months!
As a visitor to the USA, one sometimes gets the feeling that it’s hard to move or look around without seeing a flag. They are seemingly everywhere, an omnipresent reminder of national identity. But the star-spangled banner is more than a symbol; it can also influence minds in unexpected ways. Travis Carter from the University of Chicago has found that when people think about voting decisions, the mere sight of the American flag can subtly shift their political views... towards Republicanism. It’s an effect that holds in both Democrats and Republicans, it affects actual votes, and it lasts for at least 8 months. In the run-up to the 2008 US presidential election, Carter recruited a group of around 200 volunteers and asked them about their political views. A month or so later, he split them into two groups that were comparable in terms of their political beliefs, voting intentions and other variables. Both groups rated how likely they were to vote for either the Democrat Barack Obama or the Republican John McCain on an online questionnaire. The questionnaires were identical except for one small detail – in the top left corner of the screen, one group saw a small American flag and the other saw nothing. That tiny difference was enough to swing their voting preferences. Carter found that the volunteers who saw the tiny flag became more likely to vote for McCain than Obama (relative to their answers at the start of the experiment). They claimed to feel more positive towards the Republicans and even when Carter tested their unconscious attitudes, a small Republican bias still came through. After the election, Carter contacted the volunteers again and asked them who they actually voted for. He found that those who saw the flag were less likely to have voted for Obama than those who didn’t (73% versus 84%). They were also more likely to think that the media were unduly harsh in their treatment of McCain. Remember that there were no differences in the political leanings of the two groups before one of them saw the flag-bearing questionnaire. Finally, in July 2009, Carter caught up with his volunteers one last time. Even though eight months had passed since half of them saw the tiny flags on-screen, these recruits still showed some Republican bias. They were less happy about Obama’s job performance than their peers, less warm about other liberal leaders, and even held slightly more conservative views. (Bear in mind that in this final round, only a third of the original sample answered Carter’s call; however, both the flag and no-flag groups were equally represented).
The effect of Carter’s simple questionnaire is stark in both its size and duration He writes, “A single exposure to an unobtrusive American flag shifted participants’ voting intentions, voting behaviour, attitudes, and beliefs toward the Republican end of the ideological spectrum.“ This was true whether the volunteers identified as liberal or conservative – people from both ends of the spectrum shifted towards Republicanism. This isn’t the first time that a national flag has provoked such a striking effect in a psychological study. In 2007, Ran Hassin (who led Carter’s study) found that the sight of an Israeli flag could affect the attitudes of people involved in the Israeli-Palestine conflict. The flag appeared too briefly to be consciously seen, but still it drove the volunteers towards a more moderate stance in the political centre. And the brief flash of flag even shifted the volunteers’ votes. But there is one important difference between the two studies: the Israeli flag pushed people towards the political centre, but the US one shifted people to the right. Why? Perhaps the volunteers moved towards the dominant party at the time? Carter thinks not. In the spring of 2010, with Obama a year in power, Carter recruited 70 people and asked them to look at four photographs. Half the people saw buildings with flags in front of them; the others saw photos where the flags had been digitally removed. Even though the two groups had the same spectrum of political beliefs beforehand, the flag group shifted towards a Republican worldview after seeing the photos. It doesn’t seem to matter who is sitting in the White House at the time. Instead, Carter suggests three alternative explanations. First, it’s possible that the flag does shift people to a more moderate position. Carter’s recruits tended to be more liberal than conservative, so if they all moved towards the political centre, that would come across as a shift to the Republican end. The fact that conservative volunteers shifted further to the right argues against this, but it would be simple enough to test by repeating the study with a group of predominantly Republican volunteers. Second, people might associate the American flag with Republicans more than Democrats. Carter demonstrated as much in a small pilot study of 50 people – they associated brandishing the flag with Republicans more than Democrats. And indeed, previous studies have found that conservative Americans are more like to own or display a flag than liberals are. Carter writes, “The American flag conjures up Republican beliefs and attitudes, and these primes collectively push people in the Republican direction.” Third, people might simply believe that the average American is more conservative than they are. Carter argues that people associate national flags with the archetypal citizen, and if they see a flag, they might shift their attitudes towards that imaginary every-American. All three possibilities can be tested in future studies. For now, one thing is clear: these results come as a shock to most people. Indeed, Carter found that 90% of people believe that the presence of a flag wouldn’t affect their voting behaviour. We like to think that their political beliefs and choices are the result of thoughtful consideration and objective analysis. In truth, several studies have now shown that voting simply isn’t that rational. Our choices are affected by unconscious preferences, our reflexes, and even local sports results. We are so predictable that people can guess the victors of elections with a surprising degree of accuracy based only on fleeting glances. In this context, the idea that a powerful national symbol like a flag could affect political preferences is not unreasonable. It does, however, seem unbelievable that one exposure to an innocuous flag could have such broad effects, especially since the recruits will have seen hundreds of flags in their daily lives. Carter acknowledges this incredulity. “Considering how often Americans are exposed to their flag, why would this one exposure have any impact at all?” he writes. He thinks that the answer lies in the context of the experiment. During his study, people saw the flag while explicitly declaring their voting intentions. That’s a very powerful act, and not one that people do very regularly. Carter says, “For some participants, explicitly declaring voting intentions may have been a rare event that further crystallized their stated intentions and attitudes, incorporating any bias introduced by the presence of the flag at that critical moment.” Reference: Carter, Ferguson & Hassin. 2011. A Single Exposure to the American Flag Shifts Support Toward Republicanism up to 8 Months Later. Psychological Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797611414726
Host Steve Harvey (Kenan Thompson) welcomes key players in the 2024 election, like Kamala Harris (Maya Rudolph), Doug Emhoff (Andy Samberg), Tim Walz (Jim Gaffigan) and Joe Biden (Dana Carvey), to face off against Donald Trump (James Austin Johnson), Donald Trump Jr. (Mikey Day) and JD Vance (Bowen Yang) in a game of Family Feud.
A possible third assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump was reportedly thwarted near his rally in Coachella Valley, California Saturday. Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco said that 49-year-old Vem Miller of Las Vegas intended to kill Trump. "We probably stopped another assassination attempt,'' Bianco told Southern California News Group. More details will be revealed at a press conference scheduled for 3 p.m. According to the sheriff's department, Miller was driving a black SUV at a checkpoint at the intersection of Avenue 52 and Celebration Drive around 5 p.m. when he was contacted by deputies.
BREAKING: Third possible Trump assassination attempt thwarted, CA sheriff says - Video
