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The amazing thing about Katherine was that with only a pencil and a slide rule she could calculate the precise trajectories for Apollo 11 to land on the moon in 1969. She could do so much of the math in her head that determined the success of missions to the moon and other planets.  Another amazing thing is that even though the white women worked separate from the white men and the black women worked separately, there was mutual respect. As Katherine puts it NASA was a very professional organization and there was not the time to think what color I was. She said she never had a feeling of inferiority, never, she thought of herself as good as anybody else, and not any better. NASA has its computational facility named after her. She also had a famous line- calling her group of women mathematicians at NASA "computers in skirts." A movie "Hidden Figures" recalls this time and the women at NASA, America's space program agency. ...

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American kayaker makes it over a134 foot waterfall in the mountains of central Chile. Best position to land is vertical says Dane Jackson, a national kayaking champion from Tennessee. Few kayakers go over 100 feet in waterfalls.

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Is a Win-Win possible for the US/Israel and Iran possible with the US/Israel strikes and operations started March 1, 2026. Not just for the American and Israeli people, but for the people of the Arab countries and for the people of Iran, and for the people of Russia. Greg Ip in the WSJ, Marc Thiessen in the NYT, and Bret Stephens of the NYT have looked at this in this way and offer an alternative view of what might happen, even though the tendency of the WSJ and the Washington Post is to be skeptical and the NYT with an opposition to all things DJT offering pessimistic version. First, all the anticolonial writings that were read by Khamanei in Moshaad are no longer the case as the US is no longer acting to secure some benefit to itself as the British and French colonial powers did for themselves or their oil companies in pre1960's Iran. Second the US truly wants to learn the lessons of 30 years of troubles in the region at every level of the DJT administration which is to extend a true olive branch to the subdued foe as it did to Germany and Japan under generals Eisenhower and McArthur. Third moderates in Iran could emerge as in Germany ( Adenauer) and in Japan Shigeru Yoshida who worked to adopt the 1947 Japanese Constitution under Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Behind the student protests and now national protests there is a realization in Iran that living perpetually under sanctions is not the way to live, that it can increase oil production, get investment in its industry, and raise standards of living, by doing something different. That nuclear weapons development, supporting movements overseas, perpetual conflicts with Arab states, these things have been tried and are not working. That this is the last chance to build a prosperous Iran before fossil fuels are replaced by renewable energy over 10-15 years and which will make it that much harder to modernize and develop Iran for the benefit of Iran's future 110 million people. The gap with India will only widen as India catches up with China, the way China caught up with Japan. It is better to accept that these anticolonial writings that emerged from decolonizing Arab North Africa applied to the British and the French, and that the world is a different place today as the Indians and the Chinese have realized modernizing ancient societies with ancient religions is possible with the help of the Americans and the Europeans, working with the Americans and the Europeans. Theodore Roosevelt says in his Autobiography that one should be careful to judge people as the best have some negative aspects and the worst have some positive aspects, an experience he described in his dealings with progressives and those who opposed changes. Adenauer and Yoshida had contacts and dealings with earlier governments defeated in the war, but wanted to search for an entirely different path for rebuilding their countries having learned from experience. A thoughtful moderate Iranian outcome is possible as happened in Germany and Japan and which is beginning to develop in Venezuela.   ...

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By taking action in Venezuela in a way that benefits the Venezuelan people (and similar action in the long run interests of the Iranian people to dedicate most of the resources for development and increase share of oil revenues without discounting and removing sanctions ill effects on economy and quality of life) major new changes can improve quality of life in the world.  Venezuelan production which was 3 million barrels a day has declined to 900,000 without US investment and technological upgrades. With US investment this can be increased to put additional oil supplies on the market lost in the war with Iran and smaller traffic through the Straits of Hormuz. Venezuelan crude is best suited to US refineries which frees up shale oil for export to meet needs of India and Europe. China which had hyper growth through massive oil consumption would reduce its growth rate and its impact on climate change as it adjusts to the loss of 3 million barrels a day it no longer gets from Iran. Slower growth rate in China is good for the climate as it is the hyper growth of China that put the most pressure on climate even as Europe and the US had cut  fossil fuels consumption over the last decade. China made 2 coal plants a week and 95% of all new global coal construction in 2023. India needs additional oil supplies as it increases its growth rate from a much lower point of development (and electricity poverty) than China. By simply settling for normal development compared to hyper development targets( China has reached a point of Oil Fairness Percentage where each country gets to use the same percentage of oil as its population is as a percentage of world population- the number being about 17% for China for both, with the number being 18% for India and it having a shortfall of 12% based on its oil consumption being only 6% of the world total). China can reduce oil and coal consumption reducing pressure on oil prices and absorbing most of the impact from the loss of Iranian oil. China and Russia + (old Soviet territory) Canada, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, make up about 40% of the world's territorial landmass, would be large beneficiaries with improved climatic conditions from burning less coal. They are now highly developed countries and do not need hyper growth which requires China to build 2 coal plants a week and consume excessive amounts of crude oil and coal based on artificially set targets that make no sense by destroying the climate when no child in China lacks electricity to read. Marathon Philipps Valero with over half a million barrels of refining capacity for heavy Venezuelan crude can now put this to use using the imports by US of lower priced (by $9 to Brent crude) Venezuelan crude oil. In a few months of 2025 US has imported 280,000 barrels a day of Venezuelan crude in February 2026 alone some of it going to the large Valero refinery in Port Arthur, Texas. American oil refiners make larger margins using the Venezuelan crude than they make on light crude from shale oil producers in the US. What this does is to increase the supply of crude and refined oil products on the market as the light crude get shipped overseas to India and Europe- including countries like Spain which took in 100,000 barrels a day of shale crude from US in February 2026. ...

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This report by Timiraos in WSJ describes the tussle between supply siders led by Mike Pence and David Malpass with the zero sum advisors who advised Trump on trade during the campaign. The zero sum advisors are focussed only on how to turn trade to improve the U.S. position and cut trade deficits. The supply siders are trying to show that trade can benefit the U.S. only that it needs to be adjusted so that it works better for the U.S.

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Krugman points out that the inflation adjusted wages of non-supervisory workers in the retail field in America has declined by 30% since 1973. He says there are no adverse effects on unemployment because workers in retail are not competing with workers in other countries as happens in manufacturing. They are also some of the lowest paid workers to begin with, and the numbers are not small. One estimate is that here are 30 million workers who would benefit from an increase in the minimum wage from the current level of $7.25 to $10.10. State by state comparisons provide proof of this as no evidence of losses in employment are to be seen when one state has raised the minimum wage and another neighboring state has not. Germany is facing a similiar problem of low paid temporary workers and a new coalition government is planning an increase in the minimum wage in 2014 as a response to increasing inequality and disparity in incomes developing in the last two decades.

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Classic story of a chain that fit the times and was on a tear as hundreds of Applebees opened all across the American landscape and it became a sign that a small town had arrived to have one. And then as quickly as it had grown it began its downhill slide as it lost touch with the times. Eating healthy had become popular, organic or fresh healthy ingredients were now poular, so also tastes had become more varied as the ethnic landscape of America changed and as more people travelled in the states and abroad, and people tried new flavors, so also new restaurants that opened were doing all these things, and cooking shows on TV popularized the new things to more of the Applebee's customer segment which had modest incomes around $50,000. How do you create a menu that is healthy and fits this kind of budget even as you compete with more and more choices for the average American. The you have the decor it s now outdated the kind of decor Applebee started with.

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Adidas new CEO Kasper Rorsted, of Danish origin, adopted a costcutting approach at Henkel. Adidas needs to improve margins in its competition with Nike. It has also lost ground in European markets. He is seen as an American CEO in Germany.

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This video of former Attorney General Bill Barr shows his testimony to the US Congress on president Trump's statements that there was election fraud from voting boxes coming into Detroit at all hours and in the design of voting machines. This led to Mr. Trump saying the election was stolen. Mr. Barr says he told the president that this was "detached from reality" and he feels that it was doing "a disservice to the country."

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This is what former Attorney General Bill Barr has to say about Mr. Trump. "If you believe in his policies, what he's advertising as his policies, he's the last person who could actually execute them and achieve them...He does not have the discipline, he does not have the ability for strategic thinking and linear thinking, setting priorities or how to get things done in the system."

"And so you may want his policies, but Trump will not deliver Trump policies. He will deliver chaos, and if anything lead to a backlash that will set his policies much further back than they would otherwise would be."

This WSJ Editorial Board report says a lot of the work done during the Trump administration was a result of work done by the Federalist Society, Mitch McConnell, Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, other Republicans. Many of these Republicans will not support a second term or be actively involved in a second term, says the WSJ.

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At a time of great inequality and lack of fairness in wages after the pandemic in 2023-2024 when the United Auto Workers were struggling to negotiate a living wage the $55.8 billion pay package for Musk will stand out for its sheer recklessness. Tesla lacks a collective agreement with its workers in Europe and the US and its efforts to keep wages low were seen as an impediment for the UAW to negotiate its agreement to correct some of the flaws that hurt workers in earlier agreements. These agreements were made when the auto industry was recovering in the previous decade and tiered wages made as a concession meant new workers could earn less than the poverty level. Rarely in American history have such extremes of pay existed and diminish the idea of America as a nation of opportunity for all, as a beacon to the world.

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Perseverance at NASA, and after eight years of patient hard work overcoming the hurdle of doing the Mars Mission during coronavirus lockdown, lead to the final launch of the spacecraft to Mars on July 30, 2020. The mission craft is aptly called Perseverance. Names matter, the ship James Cook used to make the first trip of discovery to Australia was aptly called Endeavour and a replica can still be seen at the British Museum. The mission will provide clues to why the planet Mars once warm and wet turned into a dry desert, what about its ancient history made this happen. The mission will send rock samples back to earth, investigate the geology and climate on the planet, search for any signs of life, and look at the prospects for human exploration. A small helicopter Ingenuity will make the first flight on another planet.  Some facts about this mission- It can only be launched every 26 months as the earth and the planet Mars have to be on the same side of the sun which happens every 26 months for 3 weeks.  It costs 500 million dollars just to store the craft if the mission was delayed 26 months because of the pandemic. Other than the cost the reason for launching now without error was the need to give America enthusiasm about new frontiers to be explored even as it conducted the fight against the pandemic. NASA has 2000 scientists and engineers at JPL in California and 400 technical workers at KSC in Florida who do the work for missions. This mission used an essential team that did the work during the lockdown even as other scientists and engineers worked from home.   ...

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Efforts to bring better wages and conditions to fast food business  through a law passed by Governor Newsom in California, to bring upward mobility and integration into the mainstream of society for millions of American families and children being opposed by McDonald's and Starbucks. Current wages are $15 a week which would bring a typical fast food worker $30,000 a year for a 40 hour week for 50 weeks. The poverty level for a family of five is $32,470 on the Healthcare.gov site for the USA. Are fast food business corporations saying that children of these families should be kept forever at below the poverty level set by the American government? Why? Are they saying that labor is subordinate to capital? Are they then going to go further to say that upward mobility shall forever be denied to millions of children in these families? On what grounds? Republicans say they are the party of Lincoln. Something more- What did Lincoln fight the Civil war for? The plantation economy of the South also denied labour and children of labour the rights of upward mobility. How did Lincoln win the civil war? By speaking up for the rights of free men everywhere in a land of abundant land and new future. "This is essentially a People's contest. On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form and substance and government, whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men- to lift artificial weights from all shoulders- to clear the path of laudable pursuit for all- to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance in the race of life. Yielding to partial, and temporary departures, from necessity, this is the leading object of the government for whose existence we contend." July 4, 1861, Special Message to a special session of the US Congress. "Our adversaries have adopted some Declarations of Independence; in which unlike the old one, penned by Jefferson, they omit the words " all men are created equal."  Why? They have adopted a temporary national constitution, in the preamble of which unlike our  good old one signed by Washington, they omit "We, the People" and substitute "We, the deputies of the sovereign and independent States." Why? Why this deliberate pressing out of view, the rights of men and the authority of the people?"   ...

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Both the Tories in Britain and the Democrats in the US were caught by surprise by the sudden surge after the pandemic of illegal migrations flows in 2023-2024 which dropped to all time lows in 2019-2021 with the covid lockdowns. Tories with factional infighting and Democrats falsely believing they were virtuous humane could not take effective decisive immediate action costing them the defeats in 2024. The size of the illegal migration problem to the UK was underestimated in 2023. Tory rhetoric alone failed to convince the British public. In the US Biden not confronting it head on also failed to reassure the American people as the US Border also meant destructive Mexico/China fentanyl flows. Even today the action proposed falls short and new US bipartisan legislation is needed to make it the law of the land, closing three decades of stealth in immigration policies. ONS now estimates that it missed 166,000 people. The real figure for the year ending June 2023 for net migration was 906,000 not 748,000 as previously estimated. In the year ending June 2024 this figure for net migration was 728,000. Labour party under Keir Starmer made setting up the new structures for tackling alarming rise in migration the top priority in 2024. That lesson was not learned in the US and the issue not confronted head on to win public confidence- the Biden support for Republican Senator Lankford's legislation on illegal migrants and the border came late in 2023 and the issue was left to fester for 2 years eroding public confidence. In the US the issue of illegal fentanyl flows at the US Border and from China makes the Border and China relations issues that required effective and immediate action overriding everything else. In the end Tories confusion and internal factions, other controversies, led to lack of vigilance and lack of effective action as net migration deceptively hit lows of 254,000, 111,000, and 254,000 in the pandemic years 2019, 2020, and 2021, only to surge tremendously to 634,000 and 906,00 in the years 2022 and 2023.  Labour's Starmer took action to make it No. 1 priority in the platform going into the 2024 election winning public confidence. A similar surge in migration happened in the US after a deceptive slowdown in the pandemic, compunded by Venezuela and central American states collapsing. ...

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Friedman on the energy bill, why its watered down in response to efforts of coal-state democrats in the absence of any support from Republicans, and why he still thinks by setting a price on carbon emissions this bill put forward by Waxman and Markey is good for America and the world. The need for young Americans to mobilize support, and for President Obama to do the same. The bill's goal is to reduce carbon emissions to 17% below 2005 levels.

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Gregory Fleming was President and Chief Operating Officer of Merrill Lynch in 2007 and left when it merged with Bank of America. He later joined Yale Law School as lecturer. The new CEO of Morgan Stanley Gorman has appointed Fleming as head of Morgan Stanley's investment management business. Fleming played a key role in the combination of Merrill Lynch investment managemet with money manager Black Rock, where he was a director. At Merrill Fleming oversaw the private equity and real estate investment businesses.

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On Facebook "Back the Badge" targeted at wives of police officers remembering killed police officers was seen 1.3 million times. Another ad "Woke Blacks" for Afro-American culture targeted at the civil rights movement was seen 750,000 times.These and other ads on Twitter were cited in Congressional investigations in the U.S., as ads paid for in rubles and conducted by Russian internet agencies. Facebook, Google, Instagram and Twitter managers answered questions in Congress about the ads during the U.S. presidential election of 2016.

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The two incidents in July 2016 of shootings of police officers on July 7 with five killed in Dallas, and July 17 with 3 killed, have led to deep anguish among the 900,000 state and local law enforcement officers in the U.S. Videos showing shootings of African-American young men have led to protests in cities, and attacks by persons on the fringe. Police officers say they are now worried about their safety because of the ambushes in Dallas and Baton Rouge, and are taking extra precautions.

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The yuan has risen 14.5% against the yuan in the last 4 months, according to the Chinese Commerce ministry. Loosening the Chinese currency's peg to the dollar will increase the value of the renminbi even further. And with further declines in the euro expected this would seriously affect Chinese exporters to Europe. This also makes European goods more competitive than American goods in the Chinese market putting the Obama's administration's goal of doubling exports further at risk. The Shanghai stock index declined by 5.1% on Monday May 17, 2010, reflecting these concerns. The Chinese government continues to intervene in currency markets and the renminbi is now at 6.827 renminbi to the dollar.

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The Trump administration is looking at ways to protect U.S. automobile manufacturing by enforcing stricter environmental rules for automobile imports. The EPA is looking at whether VW which has 3.5% of the American market can be asked to meet stricter standards because the diesel emissions scandal gives the U.S. legal justification to set stricter emissions rules. VW has accepted that it used illegal software to evade government emissions tests. Such non tariff barriers are faced by the U.S. companies in Japanese, South Korean, Chinese markets. It is not clear how this would affect the 17.1 million cars made in NAFTA factories with parts made in one country and shipped for assembly in another country, between Canada, Mexico and the U.S.

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Meyerson points to Germany's success in manufacturing with labor costs that are higher than in the USA. Hourly manufacturing compensation in Germany (wages plus benefits) was $48 in Germany in 2008, and $32 in the USA, according to the most recent year surveyed by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Meyerson says American companies are sitting on $1.9 trillion in cash at a time when companies are creating jobs at a crawling pace. Only 50,000 net jobs were created in November 2010. He suggests a new economic advisor for the Obama administration, someone who brings experience and also believes in the US role in manufacturing- Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel Corporation. See Grove's article on US manufacturing and its special role in keeping the American economy strong. He would replace Larry Summers.

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This WSJ editorial after the riots in Baltimore, points out that the "blue city model" is not working. Baltimore has 8.4% unemployment compared to the 5.4% unemployment in the state, and 21% unemployment in the neighborhood of African- American Freddie Gray in Baltimore. It says failing public schools, economic decline with people leaving the city, and a general lack of opportunity, are causes for the breakdown in the city leading to the call of the National Guard by the governor to maintain law and order. The editorial emphasizes the need for private economic development, "broken windows" policing of the type encouraged under Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg in New York City, a culture of personal responsibility, and school choice, as a way out of the crisis in American cities such as Baltimore that are failing.