If you thought the scandal of the Alexandria school principal weeding out weak students from the Standards of Learning (SOL) exams was bad, you ain’t heard nothing yet. In a superb piece of investigative journalism, Cherise Newsome with theVirginian-Pilot has exposed SOL-gaming in Norfolk that was more grotesque by far....
In my first column titled “Why We Can’t Live Without Autonomous Vehicles” I shared a number of reasons why semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles are being developed and why they will ultimately save us from ourselves. In this column I’ll explain the basics on how autonomous technology works and how it...
Winston Churchill called Russia a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. We could say Obama’s energy and climate policy is confusion wrapped in muddled thinking inside obfuscation – and driven by autocratic diktats that bring job-killing, economy-strangling, racist and deadly outcomes. President Obama was recently in China, where...
As I wrote time, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) includes 30 chapters. Within Chapter 2 there is Annex 2-D which lists each country’s general notes relating to tariff schedules and provides a list of each country’s tariff elimination schedule. Each country also lists, as Canada does, an appendix setting forth...
(This is the fourth part in a series that brings to the reader some basic facts about energy so that he/she can better understand the raging debate over energy supplies and environmental stewardship.) Energy Facts and Figures for Dummies Part IV Natural Resources * Estimates of crude oil resources are...
Martinsville is one of Virginia’s hard luck cases. Once a thriving center of home-grown furniture and apparel enterprises, its economy has been hollowed out by international trade, and its unemployment rate chronically runs around twice the state average. Earlier this year, when the statewide unemployment rate was hovering around 4.0%,...
Many voices in agriculture support TPP, but presidential candidates oppose it. Why? Contentious issues involve agriculture, intellectual property and investments. GOP nominee Donald Trump has claimed the document is 5,600 pages long. I do not know if he is correct, but it is certainly a lengthy document with all of...
As stubborn facts ruin their narrative that neonicotinoid pesticides are causing a honeybee-pocalypse, environmental pressure groups are shifting to new scares to justify their demands for “neonic” bans. Honeybee populations and colony numbers in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and elsewhere are growing. It is also becoming increasingly clear...
By now you have probably seen many stories with headlines like these: “Autonomous Taxis: Why You May Never Own a Self-Driving Car”; “Self-Driving Cars Will Transform the Human Environment”; and, “Shared Mobility Solutions Improve Social Inclusion.” The last of these is from a news release announcing the latest iteration of...
(This is the third in a series that brings to the reader some basic facts about energy so that he/she can better understand the raging debate over energy supplies and environmental stewardship.) Costs of Electricity From 1929 to 1967, the inflation-adjusted average price of electricity for U.S. residential customers declined...
