🛸 🇺🇸 Biden delivers remarks on U.S. response to downed aerial objects.

https://www.youtube.com/live/g3mqS7hN-x0?feature=share

🛸 🇺🇸 Biden: U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment Suggests Objects in U.S. Skies Likely Linked to Private Companies or Research Institutions

🇺🇸 President Biden addresses the unidentified aerial objects:

📎 The Recount

🇺🇸 Biden balloon aftermath:

📎 ABC News Politics

🇺🇸 🇨🇳 Biden: "I expect to be speaking with President Xi...I hope we can get to the bottom of this. But I make no apologies for taking down that balloon."

📎 Daily Caller

NEW - Today, U.S. Senator Vance visited East Palestine, Ohio, where a train carrying toxic chemicals derailed.

Look what happens when he puts a stick into a creek.

@disclosetv

🚂 ☣️ Footage showing a fiery axle 20 miles before East Palestine train derailment raises questions about alert timing

🛤 The National Transportation Safety Board, which is leading the investigation into the derailment, said it believes a mechanical issue with one of the rail car axles is responsible for the accident. Board member Michael Graham said at a news conference on Feb. 4 that the train crew had gotten an alert “shortly before the derailment indicating the mechanical issue,” and started to apply the brakes.

🛤 For an overheating alert, the protocol calls for the train to stop and for the conductor to touch a waxy stick to the suspected defect to see if it melts the wax, explained Dan Cupper, another retired Norfolk Southern locomotive engineer.

🛤 “If it’s not working, you will get a message saying the detector is not working,” Mr. Wilcox said. “If that message gets to the dispatcher's office, they immediately send somebody out, day or night,” he said.

🛤 Jennifer Gabris, a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board, said on Thursday, “Investigators will check all the alarms and detectors to determine if they were or were not functioning properly.”

🛤 The agency is expected to release its preliminary findings within about 30 days.

https://www.post-gazette.com/news/transportation/2023/02/10/east-palestine-train-derailment-video-fire-axle-alert/stories/202302100070

https://archive.ph/gXNJU

🚂 ☣️ Solution to E. Palestine OH Chemical Spill: Repeal the Jones Act

🇺🇸 The Jones Act: A Burden America Can No Longer Bear | Cato Institute

📃 How an archaic, burdensome law has been able to withstand scrutiny and persist for almost a century

🛤 U.S. railways and roadways are being pushed to their limit. The Society of Civil Engineers has estimated that fixing the country’s surface transportation infrastructure would require an investment of at least $155 billion per year, which amounts to roughly 23 percent of the government’s $666 billion budget deficit in 2017.

🛤 Meanwhile, heightened reliance on trucks and freight trains not only increases infrastructure and maintenance costs from wear and tear on roads, bridges, and rail but also generates greater environmental costs. Surface transportation produces more carbon emissions than ships do, and its more intensive use increases the likelihood of highway accidents and train derailments involving hazardous materials. Relatedly, time wasted in growing traffic congestion — especially on highways running parallel to U.S. sea lanes — generates enormous opportunity costs from lost wages and lost output.

⛴️ Artificially inflated waterborne shipping rates increase demand for alternative forms of transportation, including trucking, rail, and pipeline services, raising those modes’ rates and inflating business costs throughout the supply chain. Transportation expenses — incurred to move raw materials and intermediate goods to the next stage in the production process and final product to retailers and end users — comprise a significant portion of the cost of goods sold. Elevated transportation costs affect nearly every business in nearly every industry, rippling through supply chains, squeezing profits, curtailing business investment, and disadvantaging U.S. companies relative to their foreign competitors, and depriving U.S. households of savings to spend elsewhere in the economy or to invest.

⛴️ While the law’s most direct consequence is to raise transportation costs, which are passed down through supply chains and ultimately reflected in higher retail prices, it generates enormous collateral damage through excessive wear and tear on the country’s infrastructure, time wasted in traffic congestion, and the accumulated health and environmental toll caused by unnecessary carbon emissions and hazardous material spills from trucks and trains.

⛴️ Maritime Administrator and retired rear admiral Mark H. Buzby testified that “over the last few decades, the U.S. maritime industry has suffered losses as companies, ships, and jobs moved overseas.” The Jones Act fleet is not only shrinking, but rapidly aging. The typical economically useful life of a ship is 20 years.24 Yet three of every four U.S. container ships are more than 20 years old, and 65 percent are more than 30 years old. Excluding tankers, the ships in the Jones Act fleet currently average 30 years old, fully 11 years older than the average age of a ship in the world merchant fleet of other developed countries.

https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/jones-act-burden-america-can-no-longer-bear

🎈 🇺🇸 Amateur balloonist group from Illinois says small balloon last reported over Alaska ‘missing in action’

An Illinois-based club of amateur balloonists says one of its small balloons is “missing in action” after last reporting its location over Alaska on Saturday, the same day the US military shot down an unidentified object in the same region.

The possibility that this recreational balloon could be one of the three unidentified objects shot down by the US military was first reported on Thursday by Aviation Week.

Pico ballooning combines high-altitude balloons with amateur or Ham radios.
“We send a small transmitter, with GPS tracking and antenna on a balloon filled with Hydrogen, rising to 47,000 feet, and travelling with the speed of the Jetstream,” the NIBBB website explains.

The NIBBB says its members, ranging from kids to adults, are responsible for launching more than 25 balloons since the group’s inception in June 2021.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/02/16/politics/illinois-balloon-group-alaska-missing/index.html

🐸 🇨🇦 Jordan Peterson's response to Canada's euthanasia policies:

"Next on the list: Jews"

📎 Dr Jordan B Peterson

https://archive.ph/Pf0PO

🇺🇸 🇮🇱 Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is headed to Israel during a time of turmoil

Democratic leaders have expressed concern about the Israeli government’s judicial overhaul plan

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is expected to visit Israel next week as mass protests over the Israeli government’s plan to curb the power of the high court and other democratic institutions continue to roil the country. A recent Israel cabinet decision to legalize illegal outposts and approve plans for 10,000 new housing units in existing settlements in the occupied West Bank, have also exacerbated tension with the Biden administration.

“I love Eretz Yisrael,” Schumer, the highest-ranking Jew in American politics, often says in speeches before Jewish and Israeli audiences. In recent appearances, Schumer has said that he has a special obligation as the leader of the Democratic Party to keep his caucus pro-Israel and preserve bipartisan support for the Jewish state no matter the makeup of the Israeli government.

Schumer will meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom he maintains a good working relationship, and with President Isaac Herzog. He has yet to speak out about the legal shake-up, which has already drawn criticism from President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and other Democratic leaders.

“I know Bibi very well, and so we work together,” Schumer said in a speech last November.

https://forward.com/fast-forward/536238/chuck-schumer-israel-netanyahu/

🇪🇺 JayMan471:
"Of course the AI knows about the Hajnal line. If it wasn’t hobbled by its developers, how many scientific discoveries could these AI make?"

🇸🇻 El Salvador:
“We have reached 300 days without homicides! To put it in context, the previous government did not have a single day without homicides, and the one before that only had one. A day without homicides in 10 years. But, thank God, we now live in a different country." This is how the president @nayibbukele reacted when confirming that El Salvador reached the unprecedented figure of 300 days without violent deaths on Tuesday. In effect, 15 years of the ARENA and FMLN governments have been left behind, in which there were only two days without homicides.

With these figures, 2023 is emerging as one of the safest years, January 2023 became the safest month in the 201-year history of El Salvador, closing with 11 homicides.

The authorities attribute these achievements to the implementation of the Territorial Control Plan and the exception regime. These security measures allowed 100 days without murders to be reached on May 14, 2022, and 200 on September 20 of the same year.

🇸🇻 ❌️ 🏴 El Salvador, population 6M, has gone 300 days without any homicides. Before Bukele took over, it was considered the most dangerous in the world. There were 382 homicides in the city of Los Angeles (3.8M pop) last year.

El Salvador now has the lowest murder rate in the Americas.

The previous administration - the one that the United States backed - didn't have a single day without homicides - in 4 years.

They called Bukele a tyrant. They said he was anti democracy. Funny how El Salvador now has peace and Bukele has an > 90% approval rating.

What's behind this unprecedented drop in violent crime? An unprecedented crack down on gang violence. Over 61,000 people have been detained.

90 people died in police custody in November 2022 alone. To sum up why the homicide rate in El Salvador has cratered: they're getting rid of all the criminals.

Petty criminals are being imprisoned, violent criminals are being killed in police custody. A zero tolerance purge.

They changed the homicide definition/ to exclude:

- People killed in police custody
- People who die in prison
- People who die in confrontations with police

Are state executions without due process a good thing? Is El Salvador's homicide rate dropping? Yes.

- Calvin 🏴‍☠️

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1625983166702919680.html

🇸🇻 In El Salvador a Police Dept director said: "The Policeman is a street judge who has criteria to arrest, identify and individualize any person"

📎 PNC El Salvador

🇸🇻 Carl B Menger:
"Hitchhiking with the police in El Salvador. Gotta 🧡 this country."

🇸🇻 "Quite amusing how El Salvador has become the safest place in the Americas almost overnight by having police jail/shoot gang members instead of not doing that"