Free Republic

In August 2020 the United States Air Force was set to receive its 250th Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightning II, and with that milestone, the fifth-generation multirole stealth warplane became the third-largest fighter fleet in the service’s fleet. That number also accounted for nearly half of the total F-35s of all variants delivered worldwide to that point. The Air Force’s program of record is to purchase and acquire a total of 1,763 F-35As – and 48 of the advanced aircraft have been requested in each of the last three budgets, while Congress has also increased the purchase in recent funding cycles.

Joe Biden’s reign as US president is due to get off to a rocky start – a barrage of asteroids are set to make “close approaches” to our planet as the Democrat takes the oath of office on Wednesday. NASA has identified six asteroids that will blaze past Earth on inauguration day. The space agency labelled the plethora of space rocks as Near Earth Objects (NEOs), meaning they warrant close scrutiny. “NEOs are comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth’s neighbourhood,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion...

When it comes to getting from point A to point B, taking to the air is the quickest way possible, obviously. For commercial fliers, nothing was faster than the British-French designed Concorde SST, which could reach Mach 2.04 (2,180 km/h) at cruise altitude. The supersonic transport had an excellent safety record until 2000 when Air France flight 4590 crashed just after taking off from Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport. It re-entered service, but rising costs grounded the plane permanently three years later. The Concorde’s record for cross Atlantic commercial travel has yet to be beaten, but when it comes to raw...

Early in the pandemic, “trust the science!” could actually be used in a debate without attracting derisive laughter. But as the flip-flops, mistakes and, yes, lies have accumulated, a consensus seems to be forming that the health care authorities are no more trustworthy than the people running Congress or the Fed.For proof, let’s start with vitamin D, which sure seems to lessen the severity of coronavirus infections. As the chart below illustrates (couldn’t find the source, but google “covid vitamin D” and you’ll find lots of studies that track with this data), people with higher levels of vitamin D in...

THINK ABOUT IT! Questions to Government we all should be asking.... If I get vaccinated: 1. Can I stop wearing the mask? - No 2. Can they reopen restaurants etc. and everyone work normally? - No 3. Will I be resistant to covid? - Maybe, but we don't know exactly, it probably won't stop you getting it 4. At least I won't be contagious to others anymore? - No, you can still pass it on, possibly, nobody knows. 5. If we vaccinate all children, will school resume normally? - No 6. If I am vaccinated, can I stop social distancing?...

Iowa governor Kim Reynolds’s reluctance to embrace stringent coronavirus lockdown measures resulted in a case spike in November and guaranteed certain disaster over the holidays, according to an ominous story featured prominently on The Atlantic’s website in December. Titled “Iowa Is What Happens When Government Does Nothing,” the article, written by Iowa native Elaine Godfrey and published on December 3, attributed the brief statewide spike in cases and hospitalizations to Reynolds’s insistence on weighing economic factors when making decisions about COVID, and predicted that the state “can expect to see nothing less than a tsunami” over the upcoming holiday season.

Trump’s now infamous suggestion that the country would eventually tire of all the winning has become a de rigueur joke among the smart set. “Aren’t you tired of all the winning?,” they laugh while presumably texting photos to their group chat of the violence at the Capitol last week.And it’s a fair bet they won’t give the Trump administration credit for their actual wins, even as the country settles back into the comfortable malaise of suffering under the new policies of an old guard that is disturbingly compromised by a nation most recently engaged in unleashing a designer virus on...

The coronavirus vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech has been found to be 50.4 percent effective in a late-stage Brazilian trial—falling far below the 78 percent level that was initially announced. While the percentage barely met the 50-percent threshold required for regulatory approval, the finding has only raised more concerns about the veracity of vaccine data put forth by Chinese companies.

No other U.S. Air Force aircraft could fly faster or higher than the Lockheed SR-71 “Blackbird,” and on its final flight, it set a truly impressive record. The reconnaissance aircraft flew from the west coast of the United States to the east coast – some 2,404 miles – in just 68:17 minutes. During that flight, it traveled from St. Louis, Missouri, and Cincinnati, Ohio, a distance of 311 miles in about eight and a half minutes.

Local authorities in areas in and surrounding Beijing are increasingly imposing stringent lockdowns to curb the recent surge in new coronavirus cases. Despite its 1.4 billion population, China has largely stemmed new cases of domestic transmission of the virus, but recent reports have surfaced detailing that dozens of people have tested positive for the contagion in Hebei Province, which borders Beijing. That outbreak comes at a concerning time, as the nation ramps up preparations for next month’s Lunar New Year holiday.

I unknowingly damaged a bunch of my beakers and then mixed them back with my good ones. I then had no idea which ones were good or bad anymore, so I ended up having to sacrifice them all.

It was over twenty years ago the Lockheed SR-71 “Blackbird” was retired by the United States Air Force, and while surveillance satellites can provide that eye in the sky for intelligence gathering there is still a need for such high flying, ultra-fast aircraft. Such a platform would complement other manned aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), providing flexibility in how intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) is gathered. Back in 2013, Lockheed Martin proposed a follow-up to the SR-71. Fittingly, it was the SR-72, which has also become known as the “Son of the Blackbird,” and it was suggested that the...

Roughly one in every fifteen Americans have now tested positive for the novel coronavirus, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Over the past weekend, the United States surpassed twenty-two million cases and 370,000 related deaths—both figures by far the highest among all countries. Health officials, however, are anticipating even darker days ahead despite the surge in cases and fatalities in recent weeks.

“Mathematics is the language of the universe“. You might have heard this a lot of times from a lot of people. Did you ever think what does it mean? and How is it justified? In this article let us do an analysis of this special language of the universe called Maths. We live in an age of huge technological and scientific advancements. Today we can do a lot of things which we did not even think about a few years ago. We can land rovers on Mars, we can accelerate tiniest of all particles to unbelievable speeds and smash them....

Throughout the last year, there’s been a great deal of rancor related to Chinese-owned tech companies that do business in the United States. The Trump administration spent the better part of 2020 attempting to ban the Chinese-owned TikTok. The U.S. government has also devoted energies in recent years to cracking down on Chinese-made smartphone manufacturers Huawei and ZTE, with the FCC, last summer, declaring both companies threats to national security. More recently, security researchers discovered what they described as a “Chinese backdoor” in TCL’s Android TVs that are sold in the United States. The acting secretary of homeland security, Chad...

Dr. Anthony Fauci said "I'm sure" some individual institutions will make coronavirus vaccinations mandatory, while it is "quite possible" that the COVID-19 vaccine could become a required travel vaccine when visiting other countries. Speaking to Newsweek, America's top infectious disease expert said: "Everything will be on the table for discussion" when asked if he will be discussing the possibility of introducing COVID-19 vaccine passports and potential mandatory vaccinations at a local level, including in schools, in his role as chief medical adviser to President-elect Biden.

A recent NPR report said that disinfecting surfaces using sprays and wipes might not be necessary to prevent the coronavirus. Scientists say that if a person infected with the coronavirus sneezes, talks loudly, or coughs, droplets containing particles of the virus are airborne and can land on surfaces. But Emanuel Goldman, a microbiologist at Rutgers University, told NPR the risk of getting infected from touching a surface with the virus is low. “In hospitals, surfaces have been tested near COVID-19 patients, and no infectious virus can be identified,” Goldman says. Instead, what is left over is viral RNA, otherwise known...

The paper of record in 2020 shifted dramatically to the most illiberal stance possible on the virus, pushing for full lockdowns, and ignoring or burying any information that might contradict the case for this unprecedented experiment in social and economic control. This article highlights the exceptions. The first shocking sign of the placing of a persistent bias was a podcast with reporter Donald McNeil on February 27. This was the beginning. It was grossly irresponsible. He asserted that half the American public would get this disease and that it would have a case fatality rate of 2.5%, or 25 times...

A hospital employee in Wisconsin who "intentionally" ruined hundreds of doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine has been fired, Advocate Aurora Health said Wednesday. Earlier this week the medical center learned that 57 vials had been removed from a pharmacy refrigerator and left out overnight. Each vial contains 10 doses. “While some of the vaccine was administered to team members on Dec. 26 within the approved 12-hour post-refrigeration window, unfortunately most of it had to be discarded due to the temperature storage requirements,” Advocate Aurora Health said Monday. After an internal review, officials initially believed the cause was “inadvertent human...

Dr. Fauci, the media darling of the Covid pandemic, is nothing more than a liar and politically-minded bureaucrat. He acts like he is trying to save America, yet all he does is bend to the political winds of the time. When lockdowns are popular, he supports them. If they fall from grace, he cautions against them. He was against masks, then he wasn’t. He set one number for herd immunity, then he changed it. Every statement he has made he has gone back on, and often he changes his mind multiple times! But the worst instances of that flip-flopping are...