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A Strange Anniversary, August 9th and Nixon’s Last Flight on Air Force One

Fifty years ago today, Colonel Ralph Albertazzie, then pilot of Air Force One, was flying over Jefferson City, MO with President Richard Milhous Nixon and his family on board.   He was taking the Nixons home to California. Passing the mid-Missouri air control, he received word that Vice President Gerald R. Ford had just been sworn in as President of the United States. Albertazzie contacted ground control and gave this message: "Kansas City, this was Air Force One. We are now redesignating SAM 27000." The reversion of the plane to its assigned tail number indicated there was no longer a President on board. Nixon had resigned a few hours before and was heading into a shameful retirement.   The resignation, the shame, the enduring stain on what was, in many ways, a laudable Presidency was the result of Nixon’s Presidential hubris and latent moral flaws.   I met Richard Nixon once.   I was at the Western States Young Republicans’ Convention in Albuquerque, New Mexico...
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We May Have a Problem With Low Albedo

While our poorly equipped Secretary of Defense, Little Peter Hegseth is concerned about testing our military for low testosterone, there is another measurement to which this this country should be paying more attention.   It seems we are suffering from both low and dropping albedo.   I will pause here while someone tells Little Peter and his confused boss that “albedo” does not refer to levels or effects of testosterone.   For those of you who have never had the fun of a class on meteorology, the word albedo rhymes with speedo.   [Oh, there goes Peter again—he starts to hop around and giggle the minute he thinks of men in speedos.] Albedo refers to the amount of light Earth reflects into space.   It is measured on a scale from 0 to 1.   Zero means you absorb all light (like a black hood on a car); 1 means you reflect all light (like a field of fresh, icy snow).   As anyone who has rested their hand on the surface of a black car standing in the sun ...
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The Triune Festival of the Pearls by LAW Butler

The Triune Festival of the Pearls LAW Butler   Those who were members of the map were both self-aware and in constant communication with those who lived in the other spheres spread across the planet.   They followed the habits of their culture and obeyed the rules of the map. But the greater purpose of their being, they would only know after their deaths, and this, too, was something they had been taught from birth. Given the weight and wonder of that knowledge, it was natural that the prelude to their deaths was a celebration. The Day of Emergence, the Day of Sharing and the Day of Harvest, coming one upon the other, were considered a single festival.   And because their sun had the same glow as the pearl-like spheres on the planet’s surface, the festival had long been known as The Triune Festival of the Pearls.   The softly iridescent pearls, ranging from the size of a robin’s egg to the two-handed heft of an ostrich’s, formed a haphazard web across e...
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