Sun rise was providing just enough light to see you golf ball when struck. We had teed off around 06:30 so I would guess it was close to 07:00.

My Caddie always brings snacks and sometimes pork strips or Chicken to snack on.

We were in the golf cart when she pulled out a small 6 by 9 inch clear package that looked like it had little brown pork strips about 1 to two inches in length. She had eaten a few strips and held one next to my lips so I bit. Instead of port the meat was soft and tasted like a mushy pecan. I grabbed the package and started to try and identify what the meat was. The bodies had several circles going around the bodies and when I asked her what to hell was I eating ??? She laughed and let me know they were boiled and fried Grub worms, " They are very good don't you think?"

If something will not kill you Asians will eat it. 

At least who ever prepared the Worms had removed the heads.

Psychologically even though the worm was not to bad I am not a bird or a Lizard people so I do not plan on eating another Grub !!... Also I do not trust my long time caddie at that particular golf course like I used to. She is a devious little bugger !

https://tuckercarlson.com/the-vladimir-putin-interview/

As usual skip to the 3:55 mark to skip the Ad which seems to be getting longer and longer. This is a subject I did not think I would be interested in but I hung in there and actually was surprised at some of the things AJ brought up for consideration.

Quote:Knights Templar | Forbidden History and their Secret Quest for Atlantis The accepted narrative describes the Knights Templar as humble warrior monks protecting Christians on the road to Jerusalem. The Knights were later betrayed and, ultimately, destroyed. But there is another story within that story. It's a legend filled with murder, mystery, and buried treasure. And it involves a secret powerful enough to rewrite history and change the world. Yes, the Templars were in Jerusalem protecting Christians. But that was their cover story. The real reason they were there was: they were looking for something. Ancient technology. So as soon as the Knights Templar arrived in the Holy Land, they started digging. And then--

You may hate Russian Geo-politics and/or their military or whatever, but Cheap Russian energy: whether oil, gas, or enriched uranium, fuels the hyper-financialized economies of the US and EU and is not an arrangement easily broken.

Quote:In a cavernous, Pentagon-sized facility nestled in an Appalachian valley, thousands upon thousands of empty holes line the bare concrete floor.

A mere 16 of them house the spindly, 30-foot-tall centrifuges that enrich uranium, converting it into the key ingredient that fuels nuclear power plants. And for now, they are dormant.

But if each hole housed a working centrifuge, the facility could get the United States out of a predicament that has implications for both the war in Ukraine and for America’s transition away from burning fossil fuels. Today, American companies are paying around $1 billion a year to Russia’s state-owned nuclear agency to buy the fuel that generates more than half of the United States’ emissions-free energy.

It is one of the most significant remaining flows of money from the United States to Russia, and it continues despite strenuous efforts among U.S. allies to sever economic ties with Moscow. The enriched uranium payments are made to subsidiaries of Rosatom, which in turn is closely intertwined with Russia’s military apparatus.

The United States’ reliance on nuclear power is primed to grow as the country aims to decrease reliance on fossil fuels. But no American-owned company enriches uranium. The United States once dominated the market, until a swirl of historical factors, including an enriched-uranium-buying deal between Russia and the United States designed to promote Russia’s peaceful nuclear program after the Soviet Union’s collapse, enabled Russia to corner half the global market. The United States ceased enriching uranium entirely.

The United States and Europe have largely stopped buying Russian fossil fuels as punishment for the Ukraine invasion. But building a new enriched uranium supply chain will take years — and significantly more government funding than currently allocated.

That the vast facility in Piketon, Ohio, stands nearly empty more than a year into Russia’s war in Ukraine is a testament to the difficulty.

Roughly a third of enriched uranium used in the United States is now imported from Russia, the world’s cheapest producer. Most of the rest is imported from Europe. A final, smaller portion is produced by a British-Dutch-German consortium operating in the United States. Nearly a dozen countries around the world depend on Russia for more than half their enriched uranium.

The company that operates the Ohio plant says it could take more than a decade for it to produce quantities that rivaled Rosatom. The Russian nuclear agency, which produces both low-enriched and weapons-grade fuel for Russia’s civilian and military purposes, is also responsible in Ukraine for commandeering the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s biggest, sparking fears that a battle over it could cause leaks of radioactive material or even a larger meltdown.

“We cannot be held hostage by nations that don’t have our values, but that’s what has happened,” said Senator Joe Manchin III, the West Virginia Democrat who leads the Senate’s energy committee. Mr. Manchin is the sponsor of a bill to rebuild American enrichment capacity that would promote federal subsidies for an industry the United States privatized in the late 1990s.

Nuclear-power vulnerability

The reliance also leaves current and future nuclear plants in the United States vulnerable to a Russian shutdown of enriched uranium sales, which analysts say is a conceivable strategy for President Vladimir V. Putin, who often wields energy as a geopolitical tool.

Yet with the war well into its second year and no end in sight, the U.S. government has shown little alacrity in kick-starting domestic enrichment. Billions of dollars in potential federal funding remain stuck in bureaucratic processes.

“It’s inexplicable that over a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Biden administration does not appear to have a plan to end this dependence,” said James Krellenstein, the director of GHS Climate, a clean energy consulting firm that recently issued a white paper on the subject. “We could eliminate almost all of America’s dependence on Russian enrichment by finishing the centrifuge plant in Ohio.”

One American company, TerraPower, which was founded by Bill Gates, has had to delay the opening of what could be the United States’ first new-age nuclear plant by at least two years in part because it has pledged to not use Russian enriched uranium.

TerraPower’s facility will be built on the site of a coal-burning plant in remote Kemmerer, Wyo., to be decommissioned in 2025. TerraPower has promised jobs and retraining for all the coal plant’s workers. But the delays have left some in Kemmerer with doubts.

All of this makes for an unlikely linking of Piketon and Kemmerer, towns of 2,400 people apiece nestled in American coal country, both hoping that the crisis facing the U.S. government will translate into a boon for their economies. “Some of the biggest national security questions facing the country run through Piketon and Kemmerer,” said Jeff Navin, TerraPower’s director of external relations.

A Post-Soviet deal

American reliance on foreign enriched uranium echoes its competitive disadvantages on microchips and the critical minerals used to make electric batteries — two essential components of the global energy transition.
But in the case of uranium enrichment, the United States once had an advantage and chose to give it up.

In the 1950s, as the nuclear era began in earnest, Piketon became the site of one of two enormous enrichment facilities in the Ohio River Valley region, where a process called gaseous diffusion was used.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union developed centrifuges in a secret program, relying on a team of German physicists and engineers captured toward the end of World War II. Its centrifuges proved to be 20 times as energy efficient as gaseous diffusion. By the end of the Cold War, the United States and Russia had roughly equal enrichment capacities, but huge differences in the cost of production.

In 1993, Washington and Moscow signed an agreement, dubbed Megatons to Megawatts, in which the United States purchased and imported much of Russia’s enormous glut of weapons-grade uranium, which it then downgraded to use in power plants. This provided the U.S. with cheap fuel and Moscow with cash, and was seen as a de-escalatory gesture.

**********

[The Megatons to Megawatts™ Program was a unique, commercially financed government-industry partnership in which bomb-grade uranium from dismantled Russian nuclear warheads was recycled into low enriched uranium used to produce fuel for American nuclear power plants.

In February 1993, the Russian Federation and the United States signed a 20-year, government-to-government agreement for the conversion of 500 metric tons of Russian highly enriched uranium from nuclear warheads to low-enriched uranium to fuel U.S. nuclear reactors. The agreement became known as the Megatons to Megawatts™ program. Over the life of the Megatons to Megawatts program, the low-enriched uranium produced under the agreement provided about one-third of the enrichment services needed to fabricate fuel for U.S. nuclear reactors. The program will end in December 2013.
Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration ]

**********

But it also destroyed the profitability of America’s inefficient enrichment facilities, which were eventually shuttered. Then, instead of investing in upgraded centrifuges in the United States, successive administrations kept buying from Russia.

The centrifuge plant in Piketon, operated by Centrus Energy, occupies a corner of the site of the old gaseous diffusion facility. Building it to its full potential would create thousands of jobs, according to Centrus. And it could produce the kinds of enriched uranium needed in both current and new-age nuclear plants.

Lacking Piketon’s output, plants like TerraPower’s would have to look to foreign producers, like France, that might be a more politically acceptable and reliable supplier than Russia, but would also be more expensive.

TerraPower sees itself as integral to phasing out climate-warming fossil fuels in electricity. Its reactor would include a sodium-based battery that would allow the plant to ramp up electricity production on demand, offsetting fluctuations in wind or solar production elsewhere.

It is part of the energy transition that coal-country senators like Mr. Manchin and John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, are keen to fix as they eye nuclear replacements for lost coal jobs and revenue. While Mr. Manchin in particular has complicated the Biden administration’s efforts to quicken the transition away from fossil fuels, he also pushed back against colleagues, mostly Democrats, who are skeptical of nuclear power’s role in that transition, partly because of the radioactive waste it creates.

“We have emissions targets we’re trying to meet,” said Mr. Manchin, “and the people who are talking about taking nuclear out of the mix, well, they’re living in an unrealistic bubble.”

For its part, the Department of Energy estimates that achieving U.S. emissions-reduction pledges will require more than doubling nuclear power capacity.

Without U.S. competition in enrichment and next-generation reactors, officials at TerraPower and Centrus say the gap between Washington and its rivals will only widen as Russia and China in particular race ahead and win long-term nuclear contracts with countries the United States also seeks to court.

“The administration talks a really good game about using U.S. technology to help further its geopolitical goals, and also about the speed at which it’s necessary to move to solve climate change,” said Mr. Navin. “But their inability to move this very basic process forward over this long of a time frame is perplexing.”

This week, the department issued a long-awaited draft of a request for proposals to scale up domestic enrichment, particularly for plants like TerraPower’s. Kathryn Huff, the department’s assistant secretary for nuclear energy, said the draft was an “important step” in stopping American “reliance on Russia.”

A lifeline in coal country

In Piketon and Kemmerer, the stakes are more personal.

Once the 1,800 workers finish dismantling the old gaseous diffusion facility outside Piketon, there will be even fewer good-paying jobs and reasons to stay, said Billy Spencer, who has been the town’s mayor for 20 years and worked as a security guard at the plant for 38 years before that.

Mr. Spencer recently raised the town’s flat-rate monthly charge for water by $15 to help pay off a 40-year loan on a new water treatment plant. Even that small bump will cause people to leave, he fears. “We don’t get the kind of government help we need,” he said.

In Kemmerer, there’s still hope that the hundreds of coal workers who will lose their jobs when the local plant shuts down will find work, but the delays are causing jitters. Bill Thek, the mayor, said he was still hopeful the town could grow enough such that it could attract not just nuclear jobs, but a plumber, for instance, a service Kemmerer now lacks.

“All we can do is hope that they find a way to come together to solve this,” Mr. Thek said.

Quote:In 2023, the United States purchased uranium from Russia for a record $ 1.2 billion

At the end of 2023, the United States bought $ 1.2 billion worth of uranium from Russia, which was a record level in the history of statistics. This is reported by RIA Novosti with reference to the American statistical Service.

In December 2023, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to ban the purchase of low-enriched uranium of Russian origin, which will be in effect until 2040. The bill proposes to limit the import of low-enriched uranium produced in Russia or by one of the enterprises registered in Russia. The initiative authorizes the U.S. Secretary of Energy, after consultations with the Secretary of State and the head of the Department of Commerce, to lift this ban if other sources of uranium supplies are unavailable or if the import of Russian fuel meets the national interests of the country of America.

In this regard, in the last month of last year, the Americans sharply increased purchases of uranium - immediately doubled, to the maximum since March last year of $ 193.2 million.

As a result, the cost of supplies increased by 43% over the year and reached a record $ 1.2 billion. The previous maximum was recorded in 2010 at $1.05 billion. At the same time, in absolute terms, Russia supplied 702 tons of uranium against 588 tons a year earlier. This is the highest figure since 2013, when shipments totaled 982 tons.

This allowed Russia to retain the first place in terms of the cost of uranium supplies to the United States and even increase the share of imports to 27% from 26% a year earlier.

Quote:Europe is still quietly importing Russian nuclear energy

Despite eight rounds of sanctions, targeted measures against energy exports and calls from Ukraine to impose a full embargo on nuclear trade, shipments of nuclear fuel to EU member states continue to make their way from Russia.

Ariadna Rodrigo, EU sustainable finance manager at environmental group Greenpeace, told CNBC via telephone that it is “absolute madness” for the bloc to continue bankrolling the Kremlin by ignoring Russia’s nuclear fuel trade.

“If EU governments are serious about stopping war, they need to cut the European nuclear industry’s umbilical cord to the Kremlin and focus instead on accelerating energy savings and renewables,” Rodrigo said.

Hungary and Bulgaria were the most vocal in opposing sanctions on Russian uranium and other nuclear tech last week, according to Rodrigo.

“Russian nuclear terror requires a stronger response from the international community - sanctions on the Russian nuclear industry and nuclear fuel,” Zelenskyy said via Twitter at the time.

More recently, a top economic advisor to Zelenskky doubled down on this message, saying it was “extremely important to impose sanctions, not only on Russian oil.”

“Oil, gas, uranium and coal, all this should be banned. Because they are using this money in order to finance this war,” Oleg Ustenko said in late September, according to The Associated Press.

In April, a European Parliament resolution called for an “immediate” embargo on Russian imports of nuclear fuel and urged member states to stop working with Russia’s state-run nuclear giant Rosatom on existing and new projects.

But Russia is a dominant player in the global nuclear fuel market and any move to break the EU’s reliance on its services would likely be far from pain-free, particularly with Rosatom at the heart of Europe’s dependency.

There are 18 Russian nuclear reactors in Europe, in countries including Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic. All of these reactors rely on Rosatom for the supply of nuclear fuel and other services.

Moscow accounted for almost one-fifth (19.7%) of the EU’s uranium imports last year, according to the latest available data from the Euratom Supply Agency. Only Niger (24.3%) and former Soviet republic Kazakhstan (23%) were bigger suppliers of uranium to the bloc.

The EU paid around 210 million euros ($203.7 million) to import raw uranium from Russia last year, according to estimates reported by Investigate Europe, and another 245 million euros was paid to import uranium from Kazakhstan, where mining of the nuclear fuel is controlled by Rosatom.

“We are talking about a serious amount of money here,” Greenpeace’s Rodrigo told CNBC, noting that these estimates only accounted for uranium imports and the EU’s dependency covers services across the supply chain.

Asked to what extent Europe’s uranium imports from Russia undermines its efforts to encourage others to stop importing Russian energy, Rodrigo replied: “The fact that we are not discussing this properly just shows the double standards of the EU.”

US Treasury Dept had banks target and monitor certain transactions.

Financial institutions were told to look for transactions with terms including "Trump" and "MAGA," as well as "Biden," "Kamala," "Antifa," "White Power," "Camp Auschwitz," "Proud B," "Storm, the," "Capitol," "Groyper Army," "Threepers," "boogaloo," "civil war," "last sons," "kill," "shoot," "gun," "death," "murder," "Pelosi," "Schumer" and "Pence."

FinCEN also provided banks with suggested terms and Merchant Category Codes for the firearms industry, including GOA partners like AR15.com, LLC; Browning Arms Company; Glock, Inc.; Sig Sauer, Inc.; Sturm, Ruger & Company, Inc.; and others. 



very unfortunate.  politicizing financial transactions.
I hope they're paying equal attention to (illegal) drug transactions.

source: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gun-rig...ansactions

I've been following the UFO topic for a long time, relative to how long I've been alive.  I grew up with the X-Files, and some of those ideas really stuck with me, even today.

That being said, somehow I missed this event between Admiral Tom Wilson and aerospace contractor Eric Davis.  Admiral Wilson was the head of the DIA, which is supposed to have oversight of all black budget and special access programs(SAPs).

Admiral Wilson was trying to get access to this particular company associated with Eric Davis, because he'd learned this company was in possession of a retrieved UFO.  He was stonewalled by Davis, and not allowed admittance.  He was told, as we've heard before, that he didn't have a "need to know."

These notes are from Davis, who apparently met with Wilson at the building, but outside, in a car.  Interestingly, the notes mention Greer, when I've been increasingly leaning towards Greer being a charlatan.  Now I'm not so sure.

Also of note, these notes were entered into congress.gov by a senator, which one it was I can't recall.  You can find the actual notes if you Google "Admiral Wilson Eric Davis meeting" and you'll see a link at congress.gov.  I'd link it here, but they're all PDF files, and I don't know how to share them here.

At this link, scroll down just a bit until you reach the Admiral Wilson/Davis meeting, it's summarized there better than I could do.

https://interestingengineering.com/cultu...ut-area-51


Also Richard Dolan, one of the only, if not THE only, widely respected Ufologists seems to believe the notes are real.  He does a deep dive into it in this video, which be warned, is 5 hours long.  I haven't even watched the first 2 hours yet.

Quote:In the world of American legal scholarship, Seth Barrett Tillman is an outsider in more ways than one. An associate professor at a university in Ireland, he has put forward unusual interpretations of the meaning of the U.S. Constitution that for years have largely gone ignored — if not outright dismissed as crackpot.

But at 60, Professor Tillman is enjoying some level of vindication. When the U.S. Supreme Court considers on Thursday whether former President Donald J. Trump is barred from Colorado’s primary ballot, a seemingly counterintuitive theory that Professor Tillman has championed for more than 15 years will take center stage and could shape the presidential election.

The Constitution uses various terms to refer to government officers or offices. The conventional view is that they all share the same meaning. But by his account, each is distinct — and that, crucially for the case before the court, the particular phrase “officer of the United States” refers only to appointed positions, not the presidency.

If a majority of the court accepts Professor Tillman’s rationale, then Mr. Trump would be allowed to appear on the ballot. At issue is the meaning of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, which bars people from holding office if they participated in an insurrection after having sworn to uphold the Constitution as an “officer of the United States.”

Professor Tillman, heavily bearded with black-rimmed glasses and a bookish demeanor, is flying to the United States this week to watch the arguments. With Josh Blackman, who teaches at South Texas College of Law Houston, Professor Tillman submitted a friend-of-the-court brief and asked to participate in arguments, but the court declined.

Still, his hobbyhorse will be on the Supreme Court’s agenda, and it has drawn as much zealous backing as it has ferocious pushback.

Mr. Trump’s legal team led with the idea in its brief to the court, and many supporters of overturning Colorado’s disqualification of Mr. Trump have invoked it — including three former Republican attorneys general, Edwin R. Meese III, Michael Mukasey and William P. Barr.

But the conservative former judge J. Michael Luttig, in a withering series of posts on X, mocked Mr. Trump and his supporters for having “put all of their eggs in Blackman’s and Tillman’s tattered basket of constitutional interpretation.” He cited a recent Lawfare article that called attention to a letter Justice Antonin Scalia sent Professor Tillman in 2014 rejecting his theory. (Professors Tillman and Blackman published it in an article last year.)

During a video interview from his book-cluttered living room in Dublin, Professor Tillman gave a rueful chuckle and gestured toward his outsider status — and location — as he said that critics were objecting “in the most meanspirited and personal way, without any attempt to grapple with the ideas.”

“It’s very dispiriting,” he added. “But fortunately, I’m here. I’m in a position where I can walk away from such things.”

Akhil Reed Amar, a Yale Law School professor who submitted a brief siding with Colorado’s top court, portrayed Professor Tillman’s theory as a “gimmick” that relied on tracing words in “all these interesting little ways that makes no sense of the thing as a whole.” He predicted it would get at most three votes on the nine-member court.

At the same time, Professor Amar described Professor Tillman as a “brilliant” person who was at last gaining mainstream recognition.

“Tillman is one of the genuinely interesting people in our world, and the world hasn’t rewarded him very much,” he said. “Think about the strength of character that is required to keep plodding away for 30 years on some of these things, when no one seems to be paying any attention to you.”

Professor Tillman declined to predict how the Supreme Court would rule but said that even one vote based on his position would lend it credence as a “serious or reasonable point of view.” But asked whether he would feel vindicated if a majority of justices were to endorse it, he struck a tone of resignation.

In one sense, yes, he said. “But in the sense of would there be any vindication in the largest element of American legal academia? I think the answer is no. I think they would still say what the largest numbers have already said, which is that the particular view I put forward is wrong and if the Supreme Court adopted it, they did it for pragmatic reasons they don’t wish to acknowledge.”

The Supreme Court could also decide the case on other grounds. It could uphold the Colorado decision. Or it could restore Mr. Trump to the ballot based on different reasoning, like saying that Mr. Trump’s actions leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot fell short of insurrection, or that — as Professor Tillman also argues — Section 3 would need a statute to be enforceable.

But earlier in the case, a trial judge in Denver embraced Professor Tillman’s idea. While the judge ruled that Mr. Trump’s efforts qualified as insurrection, she kept him on the ballot because, she said, presidents are not “officers of the United States.” The Colorado Supreme Court later disagreed. But Professor Tillman said the fact that a lower court had embraced his position already meant it could no longer be dismissed as off the wall.

An Orthodox Jew who goes offline for the Sabbath at sundown each Friday, Professor Tillman was born in New York in 1963, the second of two children. His father was a co-owner of a factory in Yonkers and his mother a homemaker.

His parents relocated to the suburbs of Rockland County when he was 7, he said, because they were alarmed that he had witnessed a murder on a playground. He said a woman had slapped a drunk man, who chased her until a janitor intervened and choked the man to death.

After earning an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Chicago in 1984, he worked as a commodities trader and researcher until 1997, when he enrolled in Harvard Law School. Once he graduated in 2000, he bounced around for a decade, completing four judicial clerkships and a stint at two law firms — while writing academic articles on the side.

He wanted to be a law professor but had difficulty finding a full-time position. In 2011, Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology hired him as a lecturer and he moved to Ireland with his wife, now a secretary at a Dublin synagogue, and their four children. In his spare time, he said, he enjoys stargazing and East Asian history and political philosophy. This term, he is teaching equity and trusts law.
He said he was grateful for the job, but he also sounded somewhat lonely professionally. Most of his Maynooth colleagues, he noted, focus on legal questions related to Ireland or the European Union, rather than on the American constitutional issues that preoccupy him.

Professor Tillman described himself as the perpetual odd man out. His great passion, he said, has been to show that the original meaning of words and phrases in the Constitution are rooted in parliamentary understandings that quickly disappeared after its ratification, as American thinking shifted to a separation-of-powers model that emphasized the judiciary rather than Congress. Few scholars on the left or the right, he said, are interested.

“I’m not on anybody’s speed dial back in the United States — my work is very unusual,” he said, adding, “If you try to hawk that or to sell that position in the United States, within legal academia, the opportunity of finding an audience is vanishingly small.”

Professor Tillman employs a hyperclose reading of the Constitution. He assumes that the text was written with tremendous precision and intentionality, so subtle distinctions are significant — and their meaning can be inferred by carefully tracing words through the text.

His argument that presidents are not “officers of the United States” traces back to his response to a 1995 law journal article by Professor Amar and his brother, Vikram D. Amar, a professor at the University of California, Davis.

A law that puts the speaker of the House and the Senate president pro temp in the line of presidential succession is unconstitutional, the Amars argued, partly because of a provision that bars “holding any office under the United States” while also being a member of Congress. In a footnote, they observed that a “quibbler” might try to insist that the presidency is not an “office under the United States,” even as they rejected that idea.

“The whole basis of the paper, as I understood it, was that the varying terminology in the Constitution for ‘office’ and ‘officer’ all meant the same thing,” Professor Tillman recalled. “I set out on an intellectual project of saying, ‘Well, what if the Amars are wrong? What if the different “officer” phraseology in the Constitution had different meanings?’”

In short, Professor Tillman became a quibbler. As a law clerk in 2008, for example, he asserted in a paper that the winner of the 2008 presidential election, which pitted Senator Barack Obama against Senator John McCain, could keep his Senate seat while also serving as president.

Professor Tillman made various iterations of that argument, eventually catching the eye of William Baude, a University of Chicago law professor. In a short essay in 2016, Professor Baude appeared both bemused and intrigued.

“When you read an individual Tillman piece, you will notice exceedingly technical arguments combined with an almost urgent voice,” Professor Baude wrote. “You cannot help but think the author is brilliant, and you cannot help but wonder if the author is rather eccentric. As you read more of the pieces together, you will realize that he has a constitutional project, that he pursues it with great skill and knowledge, and that if he didn’t do it, nobody would.”

That did not mean Professor Baude agreed. Last summer, he co-wrote a widely cited article arguing on originalist and textualist grounds that Mr. Trump is ineligible to be president again. The essay repudiated Professor Tillman’s view, saying that phrases like “officer of the United States” must be read “sensibly, naturally and in context, without artifice” that would render it a “‘secret code’ loaded with hidden meanings.”

Professor Tillman’s theory started to get more attention as Mr. Trump’s presidency raised novel legal issues. After Mr. Trump won the 2016 election, Professor Blackman said he recognized that a president who owned a global hotel empire would lead to legal fights over the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause. It bars people holding “any office of profit or trust under” the United States from accepting certain payments from foreign states.

Professor Blackman approached Professor Tillman and proposed they write about the office issue. In a case challenging Mr. Trump’s acceptance of foreign government patronage at the hotel he then operated in Washington, the two scholars submitted a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that the clause does not cover the presidency.

In a 2018 ruling, a federal judge in Maryland engaged at length with Professor Tillman’s view — and rejected it. That case was eventually dismissed on other grounds. But the Colorado ballot case has now given the line of inquiry even greater salience.

“His work was frantic,” Professor Blackman said. “Now everyone is listening.”

Listen up, CAT5's are just not scary enough!

Quote:Study Calls for New Category 6 Mega-Hurricane Classification Amid Climate Change

A recent study by scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory presents compelling evidence that the current Saffir–Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, which classifies hurricanes up to Category 5, is no longer sufficient for the types of mega-hurricanes the world could soon start seeing.

With hurricanes reaching unprecedented intensities due to global warming, researchers say there’s a strong argument for introducing a new Category 6 classification.

“Both observations and models suggest that the open-endedness of the 5th category of the Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale becomes increasingly problematic for conveying wind risk in a warming world,” study authors write.

“Our motivation here is to reconsider how the open-endedness of the scale can lead to an underestimation of risk, and, in particular, how this underestimation becomes increasingly problematic in a warming world.”

Historically, the Saffir–Simpson scale has been instrumental in communicating the potential wind damage of hurricanes to the public. However, it caps at Category 5, which includes storms with wind speeds of more than 157 miles per hour.

Dr. Michael Wehner, a senior scientist in the Applied Mathematics and Computational Research Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and climate scientist Dr. James Kossin say the Category 5 cap now fails to accurately represent the increased intensity and potential damage of the most mega-hurricanes in a warming world.

Researchers say extending the scale to include a Category 6—for storms with wind speeds exceeding 192 mph—will better convey the risks associated with the types of mega-hurricanes we will likely experience in the near future.

Study findings published in the journal PNAS-Environmental Sciences highlight a concerning trend of global warming significantly increasing the strength of the most intense hurricanes.

Using a blend of observational data, theoretical models, and climate simulations, researchers said evidence suggests future hurricanes are expected to increasingly surpass the Category 5 threshold.

According to the U.S. National Hurricane Center, 22 Category 5 hurricanes have occurred in the last 100 years. Nearly half (48%) of those occurred within the past 20 years.

In the last 10 years, several storms, including Typhoon Haiyan and Hurricanes Patricia, Haiyan, and Goni, all exhibited wind speeds exceeding 192mph, placing them within the researcher’s proposed Category 6. 

And current climate projections suggest that such ultra-intense mega-hurricanes will only become more frequent as global temperatures rise.

The issue’s core lies in the fact that global warming is pumping more energy into the climate system, particularly the oceans, which serve as the engine for hurricanes.

Warmer ocean temperatures increase the latent and sensible heat for storm formation, leading to more powerful hurricanes. This phenomenon raises the peak wind speeds of these storms and increases their potential for destruction.

The recent study isn’t the first time climate scientists have kicked around introducing a new Category 6 mega-hurricane classification.

At a 2018 climate conference in New Zealand, climatologist and the director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, Dr. Michael Mann, described the current Saffir–Simpson scale as increasingly outdated.

“Scientifically, [six] would be a better description of the strength of 200mph storms, and it would also better communicate the well-established finding now that climate change is making the strongest storms even stronger,” Dr. Mann said.

In a 1991 interview, meteorologist and co-creator of the Saffir–Simpson scale, Dr. Robert Simpson, said going beyond the maximum Category 5 is unnecessary because the scale was initially designed to measure property damage, not as a scientific barometer.

“When you get up into winds in excess of 155 miles per hour, you have enough damage [and] if that extreme wind sustains itself for as much as six seconds on a building, it’s going to cause rupturing damages that are serious no matter how well it’s engineered,” said Dr. Simpson. “I think that it’s immaterial what will happen with winds stronger than 156 miles per hour. That’s the reason why we didn’t try to go any higher than that anyway.”

Regardless of its original intent, many climate scientists like Dr. Mann, Dr. Wehner, and Dr. Kossin say today’s Saffir–Simpson scale is used for more than simply demonstrating a hurricane’s property damage potential.

“Since the scale is now used as much in a scientific context as it is a damage assessment context, it makes sense to introduce a category six to describe the unprecedented strength 200mph storms we’ve seen over the past few years,” Dr. Mann explained.

Given the system’s current use and the increasing intensity of modern storms, Dr. Simpson may have eventually warmed up to the idea of updating the scale he helped create. However, he passed away in 2014 at the age of 102.

Researchers say introducing a Category 6 mega-hurricane to the classification system is more than a technical adjustment. It’s a crucial step for public safety and awareness.

With storms growing stronger, researchers argue that current categorizations underplay the actual risk posed by the most severe hurricanes. They say a new category would better reflect the escalating hazard, helping to ensure communities are more appropriately prepared for the impacts of these supercharged mega-hurricanes.

The study’s authors advocate adopting a Category 6 classification to raise awareness and prompt action. They hope that recognizing the increasing intensity of storms will improve preparedness and response strategies, potentially saving lives and reducing damage.

The study also underscores the broader issue of climate change, highlighting the urgent need for global efforts to mitigate its impacts.

“Tropical cyclone risk messaging is currently a very active topic, and changes in messaging are widely believed necessary to better inform the public about inland flooding and storm surge, phenomena that a wind-based scale is only tangentially relevant to,” wrote study authors.

“While adding a 6th category to the Saffir–Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale would not solve that issue, it could raise awareness about the perils of the increased risk of major TCs due to global warming.”

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Quote:A Bellevue, Washington man had a conundrum. He had acquired a the rocket of a missile built to carry a nuclear bomb during the Cold War from his deceased neighbor and was looking to donate it. He had called the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio about giving it to them. The museum then called the police. That’s according to the Bellevue Police Department, which this week shared that they had sent the bomb squad to the man’s home to discover he was in possession of an air-to-air munition.

Photos shared by the Bellevue Police Department make it clear the device is obviously a rocket. But what the bomb squad found when they inspected it was that it wasn’t just any rocket. It was an AIR-2A Genie — a Cold War-era air-to-air rocket.

According to the very museum the man tried to donate the rocket to, the AIR-2A Genie “is an air-to-air rocket with a nuclear warhead designed for use against formations of enemy bombers. It has no guidance system and is powered by a solid-propellant rocket motor.”

Somehow a Cold War-era air-to-air rocket meant for carrying a nuclear payload ended up in the greater Seattle area. According to the would-be donor, his neighbor had bought it at an estate sale and he acquired it after his neighbor died. The chain of custody before that is unclear.

Thankfully the rocket was inert. Not only was there no nuclear warhead inside of it threatening the greater Seattle area, there was no fuel either. A spokesman for the police department even described it as essentially being a gas tank for fuel when talking to the BBC.


The AIR-2 Genie was introduced in the 1950s, being put into use by the U.S. military in 1957. It was also used by the Canadian military (with an arrangement with the U.S. that left them in American custody until needed). However it was taken out of service in 1988. It was early in its operational use that its biggest test was done. On July 19, 1957 the military did a test detonation over Yucca Flats, NV as part of Operation Plumbbob. That was a series of more than two dozen nuclear tests, with the AIR-2 (or the MB-1 as it was also known as) being fired at approximately 18,000 feet above sea level.

“It was the first and only test detonation of a U.S. nuclear-tipped air-to-air rocket,” according to the museum. The museum itself already has at least one AIR-2 on display.

Now here’s where the situation in Bellevue gets weird. The rocket, which again was meant for launching nuclear warheads, was left with the owner.

“Because the item was inert and the military did not request it back, police left the item with the neighbor to be restored for display in a museum,” Bellevue police said in a statement. That means the owner is going to get another shot at sending the rocket to a museum. It’s unclear if he intends to try giving it to the Air Force Museum a second time. 

Police find rocket from nuclear missile in Washington home

Quote:A mysterious phenomenon is caught on camera in different places , but no one knows what it is, or where it's coming from. Could it be "the hum" , or the oakville blobs ? To make things even stranger and creepier mysterious monster like footprints are showing up in people's backyards and they seem to disappear out of nowhere. Bigfoot ? Skinwalkers ? Let's find out. From creepy jelly like blobs falling from the sky to unexplained glitches in the matrix, In this video I will analyze the creepiest and most unexplained videos that are shaking the internet. Welcome to the Impossible channel where James LaFleur analyses the creepiest and the most mind blowing videos for your entertainment.