Free Republic

A crowd was told to redo their applause after President Biden showed up late to a Christmas tree lighting. The president and first lady were introduced at the Christmas tree lighting ceremony by LL Cool J, but the crowd waited nearly two minutes for the couple to come out. A video shows the rapper introducing the pair as music plays. As the crowd stands up, however, the president and first lady are nowhere in sight.

Tis the season for giving – so taxpayers are being asked to shell out $139,000 to cover the costs of President Biden’s first National Christmas Tree lighting. The National Park Service is paying the steep price to an Ohio company that located, transported and transplanted this year’s tree just outside the White House, TMZ reported Saturday, citing federal documents.

A mural of the late Black Lives Matter icon George Floyd has been struck by lightning and has collapsed. Eyewitnesses confirmed that nobody was near the mural when it was struck nor when its pieces fell to the ground. The Toledo mural, completed in June 2020, was struck by lightning in the middle of the day on Tuesday, leaving a charred wall where Floyd’s face was before. It was a direct hit; artwork to the left and right of the mural appeared unblemished.

Set of photographs of stone lamp experiment. Credit: Medina-Alcaide et al, 2021, PLOS ONEA recreation of three common types of Paleolithic lighting systems (torches, grease lamps, and fireplaces) illuminates how Paleolithic cave dwellers might have traveled, lived, and created in the depths of their caves, according to a study published June 16, 2021 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Mª Ángeles Medina-Alcaide from the University of Cantabria, Spain, and colleagues. Humans need light to access the deepest areas of caves—and these visits also depend on the type of light available, as light intensity and duration, area of illumination, and...

About two or three weeks ago I was thinking about all the absurd regulations in place to reopen businesses. In my thinking I came up with a idea that might work very well. Back in March I had to put in new HVAC unit for my upstairs, I had put in a a new downstairs unit in four years earlier. Well the HVAC guy told me that included with my new unit was a UV Light Filtering system. Since I am downstairs more than up I had him put UV system on the downstairs unit. According to the HVAC guy...

For everybody in the San Francisco Bay Area, December 7 is the one day each year that the beacon on Mount Diablo is lit in commemoration of the 1941 attack on the U.S. Yes, even in the Bay Area we have true patriots! Mount Diablo’s beacon is lit at sunset and shines all night on this single evening each year: The history of the beacon is interesting... The Beacon was originally lit by Charles Lindbergh in 1928 to assist in the early days of commercial aviation. The Beacon shined from the summit of Mount Diablo each night until December 8,...

The leading innovator of LED displays and lighting, Ultravision International, is set to invest $4mn to unveil its new manufacturing lines in Dallas. The firm, who also manufacturers and distributes its lighting displays, has shown its commitment to its American workforce in a move that is expected to triple the company’s capacity of employees and increase its production output. Ultravision currently has 39 patents for LED lighting and LED modular display panel technologies. William Hall, CEO and co-founder of Ultravision International, said: “Ultravision fundamentally changed the LED industry by inventing light-weight, modular display panels that eliminate the need for cabinet...

It came down to the addition of a single word for the a tree lighting ceremony, but that word carried enough significance for borough Councilwoman Charlene Storey to resign. Minutes after the council voted 4-2 Thursday night to change the name of the ceremony from A Tree Lighting to A Christmas Tree Lighting, the councilwoman-at-large, left the meeting. She later submitted her letter of resignation with the municipal clerk's office. "I cannot in good conscience continue to be part of a council that is exclusionary or to work with a Mayor who is such," Storey said in her letter. When...

From all the recent sounds of celebrating coming out of Washington, D.C., you might think the Pentagon’s biggest, priciest and most controversial warplane development had accelerated right past all its problems. The price tag—currently an estimated $1 trillion to design, build and operate 2,400 copies—is steadily going down. Production of dozens of the planes a year for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps is getting easier. Daily flight tests increasingly are hitting all the right marks. Or so proponents would have you believe.

Concerns about San Francisco’s decaying light poles were ignited Monday night after one corroded by urine toppled onto a car, narrowly missing the driver. The three-story-tall lamp post at Pine and Taylor streets snapped around 6:30 Monday and landed on a nearby car, almost crushing the driver. No one was injured.

The F-35 program could cripple U.S. defense for decades to come. “You could argue it [the F-35] was already one of the biggest white elephants in history a long time ago,” stated former U.K. defense chief Nick Harvey in a May interview. Harvey then doubled down, saying there is “not a cat in hell’s chance” the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) would be combat-ready by 2018. While it is noteworthy that a person of Harvey’s stature would level such harsh criticisms, his statement merely reflects the conclusions of reports by the U.S. Defense Department’s Director of Operational Test & Evaluation (DOT&E),...

Transcend Lighting, one of the more unconventional startups accepted into Y Combinator’s latest cohort, is launching out of beta today to bring its energy-saving LED lights to indoor farmers everywhere. Founder Brian Bennett, an optical engineer by training, invented the first Transcend prototype after his father challenged him to build some LED lights for the family farm in upstate New York. When the lights he designed were successful, Bennett entered a business plan competition at Columbia, won some money to continue developing the idea, and was accepted into Y Combinator’s Spring 2015 class. “Farms today, generally speaking, use high pressure...

The Pentagon’s new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is dead meat in a close battle against even a dated two-seat F-16D fighter jet, according to a scathing test pilot report War Is Boring obtained. Don’t sweat it, JSF-maker Lockheed Martin responded. “The F-35’s technology is designed to engage, shoot and kill its enemy from long distances,” Lockheed’s F-35 team wrote in a press release on July 1.

Advanced derivatives of the tri-service Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter could replace the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor, Boeing F-15C Eagle and F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, multiple sources told the National Interest. However, they added that the idea of replacing the high flying and fast Raptor with the slower and less agile F-35 was not well received by many within the Air Force. “No doubt that the F-35 will be doing air dominance missions in the future,” one industry official said. “Especially with more internal air-to-air, and maybe a new engine.”

Texas Republican Michael Burgess just won another round in his fight against federal standards that could force consumers to abandon inefficient incandescent light bulbs for more expensive LED and fluorescent alternatives. The House voted Wednesday to adopt an amendment by Burgess that would bar the Energy Department from using any funds to implement efficiency standards for light bulbs, six years after Congress first mandated the change. The provision in a 2007 energy law was designed to encourage manufacturers to produce more energy efficient light bulbs; although it didn’t rule out traditional incandescents, they would need a redesign to qualify under...

Surprisingly, there is a better --not well known-- energy efficient lighting solution than LED for roads, factories, and the like. Interestingly, Tesla invented it! It's called induction lighting. From the latest issue of Distributed Energy magazine... "While it’s more expensive than traditional lighting, it is cheaper than LED. However, it has other benefits, such as long life, due to electrode-less technology. Because there are no parts inside the lamp, it lasts “forever,” which Shelton equates to 100,000 hours or roughly 20 years if left on around the clock. LED is an adequate source light, Shelton explains, but it dissipates quickly—induction...

Youtube video of Scott Walker do official Xmas tree lighting at the capitol. Two in the audience prominently give a 'Nazi' salute as he is introduced.

SENECA, S.C. -- An Upstate man has again disproved the old adage about lightning never striking the same place twice after being struck for the sixth time on Monday. Melvin Roberts, 58, is recovering at Oconee Memorial Hospital after being struck at his home on Deer Park Drive in Seneca on Monday. His wife, Martha Roberts, said that her husband was outside trying to cover his lawn mower when he was struck. Neighbors found Roberts lying unconscious in the yard. Melvin Roberts said he was struck several times over the last several years, and in the last case in 2007,...

Three years after he led the charge to require consumers to ditch their comfortable old incandescent lights in favor of those twisty CFL bulbs, Rep. Fred Upton now wants to be the man to help undo that law as the next chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. That about-face is not unique among lawmakers looking to atone for stances they've taken over the past decade as they seek to gain top posts in a decidedly more conservative Republican Congress, but his reversal underscores how intent the GOP is on proving it has broken with past practices. "We have...

Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) seeks the chairmanship of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee (CNSNews.com) – Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) may have some explaining to do to fellow GOP colleagues as he seeks the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, given the incoming wave of new conservatives who may not appreciate some aspects of Upton's voting record.Upton joined with Rep. Jane Harman (D.-Calif.) in  2007 to co-author the legislation that effectively banned indoor incandescent light bulbs in the United States. In the last Congress, he an Harman teamed up again to offer new legislation that would extend the...