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“The office district is empty, with boarded up towers, copper thieves, and failing retail,” reports the Wall Street Journal of Democrat-run St. Louis, Missouri. “[E]ven the Panera outlet shut down. The city is desperately trying to reverse the ‘doom loop.’” Let’s look at the mayoral history of the doom-looping St. Louis, shall we? Oh, look, there hasn’t been a Republican mayor in St. Louis since — not a typo — 1949. For 75 years, the people of St. Louis have voted for More of the Same, so excuse me if I don’t whip out a violin over all this unavoidable...

“There’s a scene at the beginning of The Bourne Identity where the film’s protagonist is sitting in a diner, trying to figure out who he is and why he has a bunch of passports and a gun stashed in a safety deposit box. Bourne also notices that he, well, notices things that other people don’t. “ ”That superhuman ability to observe his surroundings and make detailed assessments about his environment? It’s not just a trait of top secret operatives; it’s a skill known as situational awareness, and you can possess it too. “”As the names implies, situational awareness is simply...

... It might have served as a warning to some, as another “teen takeover” unfolded in the heart of downtown the following night, and two teen boys were shot and wounded near Millennium Park. More than a dozen police reports obtained by the Tribune show how the chaos unfolded as Chicago police for hours struggled to control hundreds of teens and young adults as they darted through traffic, smashed windows and carried out acts of violence. Large outdoor gatherings of young people aren’t new in Chicago, and the “teen takeover” events — organized on social media, usually a few days...

In all his years in auto racing, NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace said Tuesday night, he has never seen anything like what he described as a “straight-up noose” that was being used as a door pull in the garage he was assigned last week at Talladega Speedway in Alabama. “I’ve been racing all of my life,” Wallace told CNN's Don Lemon. “We've raced out of hundreds of garages that never had garage pulls like that. So people that want to call it a garage pull and put out all the videos and photos of knots being as their evidence, go ahead,...

“On Monday, fifteen FBI special agents conducted numerous interviews regarding the situation at Talladega Superspeedway. After a thorough review of the facts and evidence surrounding this event, we have concluded that no federal crime was committed. The FBI learned that garage number 4, where the noose was found, was assigned to Bubba Wallace last week. The investigation also revealed evidence, including authentic video confirmed by NASCAR, that the noose found in garage number 4 was in that garage as early as October 2019. Although the noose is now known to have been in garage number 4 in 2019, nobody could...

Started streaming 3 hours ago Welcome to KCTV at 14:29 or 2:29 PM Pyongyang Time (+08:30 GMT) [14:30-15:00] Highly modified version of the Philips PM5544 (4:3), Philips PM5644 (16:9), Test Pattern with digital clock and multiple elements including colour bars, resolution grids and other markings (the audio is music – usually classical or patriotic – and clock ident with the "Voice of Korea jingle" as time signal) [15:00-15:10] National anthem, introduction announcement, "Song of General Kim Il-sung" (instrumental version) & "Song of General Kim Jong-il" (instrumental version), television listings 10 minutes [15:10-16:20] Special events recap [16:20-17:00] Documentary specials [17:00-17:20] Afternoon...

Within hours of the Navy Yard shootings, the FBI had traced the gunman's recent shotgun purchase and sent agents to the shop in northern Virginia where he bought it. Left out of the loop was the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, a surprising snub between top U.S. law enforcement agencies that comes as the ATF struggles to show its relevance in Washington. The ATF is the federal agency in charge of tracing guns used in crimes, including the military-style semi-automatic rifle used in rampage at a Connecticut school last year, a similar rifle used in the deadly shooting...

From the show Detektor, Danish Broadcasting Corporation DR. Host is Thomas Buch-Andersen: http://www.youtube.com/v/erYpXzE9Pxs&

From the show Detektor, Danish Broadcasting Corporation DR. Host is Thomas Buch-Andersen: http://www.youtube.com/v/erYpXzE9Pxs&

ABHAY ASHTEKAR remembers his reaction the first time he saw the universe bounce. "I was taken aback," he says. He was watching a simulation of the universe rewind towards the big bang. Mostly the universe behaved as expected, becoming smaller and denser as the galaxies converged. But then, instead of reaching the big bang "singularity", the universe bounced and started expanding again. What on earth was happening? Ashtekar wanted to be sure of what he was seeing, so he asked his colleagues to sit on the result for six months before publishing it in 2006. And no wonder. The theory...

Business is a dogfight. Your job as a leader: Outmaneuver the competition, respond decisively to fast-changing conditions, and defeat your rivals. That's why the OODA loop, the brainchild of "40 Second" Boyd, an unconventional fighter pilot, is one of today's most important ideas in battle or in business. The F-16 fighter jet is, as supersonic military aircraft go, a modest machine. It measures just 49 feet long and 31 feet wide from wingtip to missile-capped wingtip, and it weighs about half as much as its U.S. Air Force predecessor, the F-15. With a top speed of 1,350 MPH, it lags...

Scientists use quantum gravity to describe the universe before the Big Bang.Scientists may finally have an answer to a "big" question: If the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe, what could have caused it to happen? Using a theory called "loop quantum gravity," a group led by Penn State professor Abhay Ashtekar has shown that just before the Big Bang occurred, another universe very similar to ours may have been contracting. According to the group's findings, this previous universe eventually became so dense that a normally negligible repulsive component of the gravitational force overpowered the attractive component, causing...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2003 January 18 Filaments in the Cygnus LoopCredit: William P. Blair and Ravi Sankrit (Johns Hopkins University), NASA Explanation: Subtle and delicate in appearance, these are filaments of shocked interstellar gas -- part of the expanding blast wave from a violent stellar explosion. Recorded in November 1997 with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 on board the Hubble Space Telescope, the picture is a closeup of a...

I will be on a college trip to the Loop on 22 October and would like to meet and hopefully stage an Infinite Freep with Chicago area Freepers during the 3 hours of personal time we will have. If you can't help with that, tell me what you would do with three hours in the Loop on a Tuesday afternoon. Just one thing: Please use Freepmail to discuss any details of location times/places/descriptions of personnel, etc.

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 May 8 Sunspot Loops in Ultraviolet Credit: TRACE Project, NASA Explanation: It was a quiet day on the Sun. The above image shows, however, that even during off days the Sun's surface is a busy place. Shown in ultraviolet light, the relatively cool dark regions have temperatures of thousands of degrees Celsius. Large sunspot group AR 9169 is visible as the bright area near the horizon. The...