CNN: ‘Disaster Could Put Obama Cabinet Member in Oval Office’
January 19th, 201720th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Section 3:
If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President elect shall have died, the Vice President elect shall become President. If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.
So…
Via: CNN:
Elite at Davos Freak Out Over Populism
January 18th, 2017Via: Bloomberg:
On the second day of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in the Swiss Alps, delegates disagreed on how best to address the upending of the western political order, a debate made doubly urgent by the string of elections in Europe this year where anti-establishment parties could gain more ground.
While International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde urged a list of policies from programs to retrain workers to more social spending, others fretted that the turbulence is only starting. Hedge Fund billionaire Ray Dalio warned on a panel chaired by Bloomberg Television’s Francine Lacqua that “we may be at a point where globalization is ending, and provincialization and nationalization is taking hold.”
That leaves technocrats trying to patch together potentially expensive remedies to make the current system of global trade, banking and business links that the Davos club represents acceptable to the public at a time when newcomers like U.S. president elect Donald Trump threaten to dismantle it by scrapping trade deals and introducing tariffs.
13 Million Pages of Declassified CIA Documents Just Posted Online
January 18th, 2017Via: Vice:
A nonprofit organization, a persistent rabble-rouser, and their pro-bono attorney have succeeded in getting the Central Intelligence Agency to post the full contents of its declassified records database online, meaning it’s now possible to access roughly 13 million pages of CIA documents dating back to the beginnings of the Cold War.
F-16 and SU-27P in Mock Dogfight Over Area 51
January 17th, 2017The idiotic Daily Mail is trying to make a mountain out of a molehill.
In fact, there is nothing unusual about what was photographed.
Assessing foreign military hardware is one of the normal things that happens at Area 51, and is nothing new.
See, Foreign Technology Evaluation:
During the Cold War, one of the missions carried out by the United States was the test and evaluation of captured Soviet fighter aircraft. Beginning in the late 1960s, and for several decades, Area 51 played host to an assortment of Soviet-built aircraft. Under the HAVE DOUGHNUT, HAVE DRILL and HAVE FERRY programs, the first MiGs flown in the United States were used to evaluate the aircraft in performance, technical, and operational capabilities, pitting the types against U.S. fighters.[32]
This was not a new mission, as testing of foreign technology by the USAF began during World War II. After the war, testing of acquired foreign technology was performed by the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC, which became very influential during the Korean War), under the direct command of the Air Materiel Control Department. In 1961 ATIC became the Foreign Technology Division (FTD), and was reassigned to Air Force Systems Command. ATIC personnel were sent anywhere where foreign aircraft could be found.
A better source for this SU-27 story is below.
Via: The Aviationist:
The photographs in this post were taken from Tikaboo Valley, near Groom Lake, Nevada, by Phil Drake, who was lucky enough to observe a Su-27P Flanker-B dogfighting with an F-16, presumably one of the four Groom Lake based -D models in the skies of the famous Area 51.
Although the quality of the pictures is low (the aircraft were flying between 20K and 30K feet) they are extremely interesting since Flankers operating from Groom are not a secret (they have been documented in 2003 – 2004 and more recently between 2012 and 2014) but have rarely been photographed.
‘Liberal Preppers Stock Up On Guns, Food As Trumpocalypse Looms’
January 17th, 2017Via: Vocativ:
Colin Waugh bought a shotgun four weeks before November’s election.
An unapologetic liberal, he was no fan of firearms. He had never owned one before. But Waugh, a 31-year-old from Independence, Missouri, couldn’t shake his fears of a Donald Trump presidency — and all of the chaos it could bring. He imagined hate crimes and violence waged by extremists emboldened by the Republican nominee’s brash, divisive rhetoric. He pictured state-sanctioned roundups of Muslims, gays, and outspoken critics.
“I kept asking myself, ‘Do I want to live under tyranny?’” said Waugh, who supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary and later backed Hillary Clinton. “The answer was absolutely not.”
With Trump now days away from assuming the White House, Waugh’s preparing for the worst. He’s made “bug-out bags” stuffed with ammo, energy bars, and assorted survival gear for his wife and their three cats. He’s begun stowing water and browsing real estate listings in Gunnison County, Colorado, which he’s determined to be a “liberal safe-haven.” Last month, Waugh added a 9mm handgun to his arsenal.
His advice to others on the left fearful of the next four years? “Get ready. Pay attention. Keep your wits about you.”
Obama Commutes Bulk of Chelsea Manning’s Sentence
January 17th, 2017Via: New York Times:
President Obama on Tuesday largely commuted the remaining prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, the army intelligence analyst convicted of an enormous 2010 leak that revealed American military and diplomatic activities across the world, disrupted the administration and made WikiLeaks, the recipient of those disclosures, famous.
The decision by Mr. Obama rescued Ms. Manning, who twice tried to kill herself last year, from an uncertain future as a transgender woman incarcerated at the men’s military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. She has been jailed for nearly seven years, and her 35-year sentence was by far the longest punishment ever imposed in the United States for a leak conviction.
The act of clemency could be seen as a reversal, at least in part, of the Obama administration’s unprecedented criminal crackdown on leaking: The administration has brought charges in about nine cases, about twice as many as under all previous presidents combined.
Tesla to Power Gigafactory with World’s Largest Solar Rooftop Installation
January 17th, 2017Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand.
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Via: Inhabitat:
Just last week Tesla announced battery production had started at their Nevada Gigafactory, but didn’t mention one thrilling detail in their January 4 announcement: the Gigafactory could be powered by the world’s largest solar rooftop installation. An investor handout revealed a 70-megawatt (MW) solar array along with ground solar panels could enable the massive factory to operate entirely on clean energy.
The 70 MW solar array would be around seven times larger than any rooftop arrays currently installed, according to Tesla’s exciting handout released by Electrek and confirmed as genuine by The Verge. The rooftop array currently boasting the title of world’s largest is a 11.5 MW installation in India. The United States’ biggest rooftop array is a 10 MW array atop a California Whirlpool distribution center.
Robot Cars Can Learn to Drive without Leaving the Garage
January 17th, 2017Via: MIT Technology Review:
The computers that control self-driving cars are gaining valuable knowledge about the real world in some surprising ways—including browsing online maps and playing video games.
Researchers at Princeton University recently developed a computer vision and mapping system that gathered useful information about the physical properties of roads by studying Google Street View and comparing the scenes to the information provided in open-source mapping data. This allowed it to, for example, learn where the edges of an intersection should be based on images captured by Google’s mapping cars.
In separate work revealed Wednesday, researchers at OpenAI, a nonprofit focused on fundamental AI research, created a way to have software agents learn driving strategy by experimenting in the video game Grand Theft Auto V, through a platform known as Universe. Some video games are now so visually realistic that they can let a computer vision learn about the real world.
Airbus CEO Sees ‘Flying Car’ Prototype Ready by End of Year
January 17th, 2017Via: Reuters:
Airbus Group plans to test a prototype for a self-piloted flying car as a way of avoiding gridlock on city roads by the end of the year, the aerospace group’s chief executive said on Monday.
Airbus last year formed a division called Urban Air Mobility that is exploring concepts such as a vehicle to transport individuals or a helicopter-style vehicle that can carry multiple riders. The aim would be for people to book the vehicle using an app, similar to car-sharing schemes.
“One hundred years ago, urban transport went underground, now we have the technological wherewithal to go above ground,” Airbus CEO Tom Enders told the DLD digital tech conference in Munich, adding he hoped the Airbus could fly a demonstration vehicle for single-person transport by the end of the year.
Air Force Tests IBM’s Brain-Inspired Chip as an Aerial Tank Spotter
January 17th, 2017Nope, there aren’t any SkyNet jokes in the article.
Via: MIT Technology Review:
Satellites, aircraft, and growing numbers of drones—the U.S. Air Force has a lot of electronic eyes in the sky. Now it’s exploring whether brain-inspired computer chips could give those systems the smarts to do things like automatically identify vehicles such as tanks or anti-aircraft systems.
The Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) reports good results from using a “neuromorphic” chip made by IBM to identify military and civilian vehicles in radar-generated aerial imagery. The unconventional chip got the job done about as accurately as a regular high-powered computer, using less than a 20th of the energy.
The AFRL awarded IBM a contract worth $550,000 in 2014 to become the first paying customer of its brain-inspired TrueNorth chip. It processes data using a network of one million elements designed to mimic the neurons of a mammalian brain, connected by 256 million “synapses.”
