It is great to be an Iowa Wrestling fan.

Go Hawks!

More encouraged from this performance than any win this entire season.

A high-speed, multicounty car chase ended abruptly with a head-on collision that killed two people on Highway 218 in Washington County Sunday afternoon.



According to a crash report from the Iowa State Patrol, Brittany Miles, 35, of Cedar Rapids, was fleeing police as she drove north in the southbound lane of Highway 218. Her vehicle ran head-on into the car driven by Olivia Alvarez, 27, of Cedar Rapids, who was driving south just before 4 p.m.


Miles died on impact, according to the report, while Alvarez died after emergency medical responders arrived on the scene.




The chase began in Muscatine after police there received reports of a woman driving around shooting at people at 3:15 p.m. According to a news release from the police department, the suspected driver refused to stop for police. Instead, she left town along 231st Street and traveled through Louisa County before entering Washington County.


The crash happened close to mile marker 78, just south of Riverside near 135th Street. Emergency response vehicles could be seen lining the median in the area, where traffic was backed up in both directions.


The Muscatine Police Department reported no one was hurt by the gunfire, but it is “continuing to investigate those reports.” The chase did wreck a Muscatine squad car and injure an officer.


“A Muscatine Police Officer, involved in the pursuit, lost control of his car and crashed near the Cedar River,” the news release states. “The Officer sustained non-life threatening injuries and was transported to the hospital for treatment.”





Assistant Police Chief Steve Snider said the crash totaled the police vehicle. The officer driving it was released from the hospital Monday morning.


Miles had previously been charged with eluding officers at least twice in Iowa. One of those charges was in June, and followed another high-speed chase in Cedar Rapids, which reached 100 mph, according to court records, which report her license was barred at the time. She was convicted of eluding officers in 2021, and was convicted of theft and numerous traffic violations in recent years.

Just spent 10 minutes on line and did all the wife's Christmas shopping, I may not like a lot of things about the era we're currently in but not having to go out to stores to shop anymore is wonderful! csb/

They’re laying the groundwork now. As stupid as this claim is.

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Does anyone have $29 trillion laying around?

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Just saw in NYT

From possible US AG to this

I caught myself doing this today in ChatGPT.

Going through some investment strategies and ending with a “Thanks”.

After this I thought to myself… why the F did I just do that..does anyone else do that??

Some details from our national team on a 2025 three-star center who plans to take an official visit to Iowa.

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The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative finalized its plan Friday to raise tariffs on a slew of goods made in China, largely adopting hikes it first proposed in May.

The heightened tariffs go after strategic product categories, including electric vehicles, batteries, critical minerals, semiconductors and solar cells. The final tariff structure includes 14 product categories that cover thousands of items.

The first tariff hikes are set to go into effect on Sept. 27, with the next increase dates at the start of 2025 and 2026.

The Biden administration’s dramatic hikes for this year include a 100% tariff on electric vehicles, a 25% tariff on lithium-ion EV batteries and a 50% tariff on photovoltaic solar cells. A 50% tariff on semiconductors made in China will go into effect in 2025.

The final plan provides additional relief for ship-to-shore cranes, which are set to get a 25% tariff that begins this year. The final structure will allow exclusions for cranes ordered prior to May 14, 2024 and that enter the country before May 14, 2026.

The updated structure hones in on increased tariff rates for medical supplies.

The administration initially proposed a 25% tariff on face masks — that increase will still go into effect this year, now followed by a 50% tariff in 2026. USTR took similar action on medical gloves, upping its initial 25% tariff proposal to a 50% tariff in 2025 and a 100% tariff in 2026.

Finally, it decreased the number of allowed exclusions for solar manufacturing equipment from 19 to 14. It eliminated five exclusions for solar manufacturing module equipment.

The federal agency had previously pledged to finalize the new tariff structure by the end of last month, delaying the process by two weeks.

The Amazing Kreskin, an entertainer who used mentalist tricks to dazzle audiences as he rose to fame on the night show circuit during the 1970s, died on Tuesday in New Jersey. He was 89.
Ryan Galway, his former road manager and close friend, said that Mr. Kreskin had died in his home in Caldwell, N.J. He did not name the cause of death.
Mr. Kreskin’s feats included divining details of the personal lives of strangers and guessing at playing cards chosen randomly from a deck. And he had a classic trick at live shows: entrusting audience members to hide his paycheck in an auditorium, and then relying on his instincts to find it — or else going without payment for a night.
Born George Joseph Kresge Jr., in Montclair, N.J., Mr. Kreskin has said he was drawn to magic and psychology as a child. He was performing mentalist tricks for audiences by the time he was a teenager.
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His star rose in the 1970s when he was a regular guest on the talk show circuit, appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, The Mike Douglas Show and Late Night with David Letterman. With other famous guests, he played psychological tricks that looked like magic: asking people to put their fingers on objects that would seem to move, for example, or guessing what card had been pulled from a deck.
He also did live performances around the world, using audience members as his props, promising that he had no secret assistants or electronic devices that enabled him to find hidden objects or guess a strangers’ thoughts.
As his career progressed, Mr. Kreskin diversified. He wrote several books. He earned a few acting credits. He offered mental training to boxers. He even created a dating website for people interested in the supernatural.
Mr. Kreskin often said that he was not psychic and did not possess any supernatural powers but was able to read certain cues, like body language, and use the power of suggestion to guide people’s actions.
That didn’t stop him from making predictions about the future, including about the 2016 presidential election. In 2015, Mr. Kreskin told a Fox News affiliate in Washington that he knew who would win the presidential election nearly a year later but didn’t want to get too specific.

​

“I’ve been in his house,” he said. “The one that’s been shouting all over — everywhere.” Fox’s report mused that “the one presidential-hopeful who could easily fit his description would be Republican candidate Donald Trump,” whom many considered a long shot at the time.
But Mr. Kreskin’s predictions have disappointed fans, too — most notably in 2002, when he said there would be mass U.F.O. sightings over Las Vegas on June 6 and promised to donate $50,000 to charity if he was wrong.
Reports indicate that the gathered crowds were underwhelmed by the night sky on that Thursday. But Mr. Kreskin said a few people saw strange things overhead — enough that he didn’t have to make his donation. And anyway, he said to The Las Vegas Sun, his ultimate goal had been to make a point about the dangers of public susceptibility to suggestion.
Though he continued to perform until this spring, Mr. Kreskin’s star has been on the decline since the 1970s. That trajectory was captured in a 2008 movie based loosely on Mr. Kreskin’s life, “The Great Buck Howard.” The actor John Malkovich starred as the title character, a once-famous mentalist struggling to make a comeback amid increasingly distracted audiences.
Mr. Kreskin himself has suggested that the march of technology was making his work more difficult, changing not only the entertainment industry but the nature of human interaction in general.
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In a video for the online knowledge forum Big Think, Mr. Kreskin complained that “traditional culture is disintegrating” in ways that made it hard to communicate as a mentalist.
“People don’t hear each other anymore,” he said. “There are actually human beings, and this is going to seem incredible, who when they’re in a restaurant have a cellphone on the table and they’re looking into it.”
Fans mourning Mr. Kreskin might take some solace in a comment he made in 2015, suggesting that not even death could stop his work. It was during an interview with The Huffington Post, when the still-practicing mentalist was asked when he might retire.
“Exactly 10 days after I drop dead,” he replied.
A list of survivors was not immediately available.

I have a feeling I'm going to regret watching this.

I'm one episode in working on two

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PSA - Christmas games will be on Netflix

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President-elect Donald J. Trump’s support for Pete Hegseth, whom he announced as his nominee for defense secretary shortly after Election Day, is wobbling after a crush of controversy over a rape allegation and a 2018 email from Mr. Hegseth’s mother accusing him of a pattern of abuse toward women.
How Mr. Hegseth fares through a series of tests on Wednesday will be critical for his chances. He is set to continue his meetings with key senators, including Joni Ernst of Iowa, a combat veteran who has spoken about being sexually assaulted herself, and his mother is expected to sit for an interview on Fox News. He is also set to start defending himself on television.
Mr. Trump has made clear to people close to him that he believes Mr. Hegseth should have been more forthcoming about the problems he would face getting confirmed, according to two people with knowledge of his thinking.
The combination of events could determine whether he hangs on as the expected nominee. Mr. Trump is openly discussing other people for the job, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whom he defeated in the Republican presidential primaries and with whom he has had a contentious relationship. Mr. Trump likes the story of bringing on someone he dominated publicly, and he talked about it with Mr. DeSantis on Tuesday at a service honoring three Florida sheriff’s deputies who were killed in a car crash.
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The Wall Street Journal earlier reported Mr. Trump’s discussions about Mr. DeSantis.
But the number of people in Mr. Trump’s world who dislike and distrust Mr. DeSantis — and bitterly recall the campaign he ran against the president-elect — is vast. Those people are discussing other options, including whether Mike Waltz, the Florida congressman whom Mr. Trump picked as his national security adviser, could slide into the job, expecting he would be confirmed fairly easily by the Senate. While criticizing Mr. Trump in the past is not always an obstacle for his appointees, Mr. DeSantis threw aggressive jabs at Mr. Trump during the primary. They included a flip line about paying money to a porn star, which was the basis for an indictment against Mr. Trump.
“I think some of these articles are very disturbing,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close Trump ally, told CBS News, referring to Mr. Hegseth. “He obviously has a chance to defend himself here, but some of this stuff is going to be difficult.”
Mr. Trump has spent little if any personal capital with senators trying to push Mr. Hegseth through. And the incoming president’s advisers are mindful in private discussions that Republican senators are trying to be respectful of Mr. Trump while not approving of a nominee who concerns them.
Mr. Hegseth, 44, could become the third person whom Mr. Trump has announced as a nominee to withdraw from the role after Matt Gaetz withdrew his name for attorney general and Sheriff Chad Chronister withdrew as D.E.A. administrator.
In the past two weeks, Mr. Hegseth has come under intense scrutiny. It was revealed that he had entered into a settlement agreement with a woman who accused him of rape in 2017; he had insisted it was a consensual encounter, and Mr. Trump told aides at the time that he wanted to stick with his announced nominee.

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But the troublesome headlines, which Mr. Trump hates, only grew worse. The New York Times reported on an email his mother wrote him in 2018 as he was going through an acrimonious divorce, in which she told her son he had “abused” a number of women “in some way” over the years. Mr. Hegseth’s mother has recently said she regretted sending the email and has retracted the comments that she said she made during an emotional time as he was going through a divorce — a comment she is expected to expand upon in her Fox appearance.
Mr. Trump has told people he was unhappy with the story about the email.
Mr. Hegseth was also the subject of a damning article in The New Yorker, which reported that he had been forced out as the head of two veterans’ groups because of his behavior. NBC News reported on Tuesday that Mr. Hegseth’s drinking worried his colleagues at Fox News.
It was unclear how extensive the vetting was into Mr. Hegseth’s past by Mr. Trump’s transition team.
Now the Trump team will watch closely how Mr. Hegseth and his mother perform in the interviews, knowing they will be critical for the incoming president in deciding whether to stick with the former Fox News host and combat veteran whose qualifications to lead the Pentagon have come into question.
The perception from people close to Mr. Hegseth is that if he wants to save himself, he must perform well. The Trump team is particularly worried about female Republican senators breaking with Mr. Hegseth, and especially Ms. Ernst.

He is your daddy! >

This shit is insane! And a pretty sad reflection on modern society in this grumpy old man's opinion.

The first step to F1​

The preteen go-kart drivers spending millions on a shot at professional motorsports​

By Kevin Sieff
,
Claudia Gori
and
Zoeann Murphy
December 11, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EST

Julian and Alessandro were walking to the starting line, trying their best not to look at each other. They wore child-size racing uniforms and tiny driving gloves. Behind them, mechanics pushed their 160-pound cars with a list of corporate sponsors on the hood. The team’s name was emblazoned on the side: Baby Race.
The two boys were Baby Race’s star drivers, among the favorites to win the World Series of Karting championship that was minutes away. In theory, they could work together to secure a team victory. But Alessandro Truchot and Julian Frasnelli had been fierce competitors since they were 9 and 10. Now they were 11 and 12, respectively, and the rivalry had grown violent, culminating in high-speed crashes that caused a roaring crowd to hold its breath.
As its popularity has boomed, Formula One has faced a problem: how to identify future champions who can’t yet drive a car. Karting is the sport’s best approximation, a birthday party diversion that has been bankrolled and professionalized into a series of miniature Grand Prix races. Every current F1 driver started in a go-kart.
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Julian and Alessandro’s race in Sarno was a battle for childhood pride, but it was also leverage in dueling quests to reach Formula One. The boys’ parents and sponsors had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in their careers. Julian and Alessandro had stopped attending school full-time to focus on racing. They were too light for the karts, so mechanics added weights to the chassis to keep them from flipping over. Scouts representing Mercedes and Ferrari, who are now tracking drivers as young as 6, know their names.
Before they got to the pit, Julian removed his SpongeBob sandals, took off his helmet, vomited and cried. Alessandro, who wore only gray and black Nike apparel, repeated over the grunts of go-kart engines what he had said to himself many times before: “I’m not here to make friends.”
Unmute the videos below to meet Alessandro and Julian.


Julian


Alessandro
Elite go-karting has become both maniacally competitive and wildly expensive. To become one of Formula One’s 20 drivers — the sport has only 10 teams with two cars each — now requires an absolute commitment years before a child is eligible for a driver’s license.
By the time a driver makes it to Formula One, his parents and sponsors will have invested several million dollars in his career. Go-karting has become a magnet for the money and power flowing through motorsports. Baby Race charges its drivers $7,500 for a four-day race event (plus a $600 entrance fee).
The team motto: “The First Step to F1”.
Julian, who is Italian, and Alessandro, a French American citizen, represent different marks on the spectrum of go-karting wealth. Julian’s father owns a karting track in northern Italy, where he had finagled sponsors to finance his son’s career. Alessandro’s father started a string of technology companies that brought him enough wealth to bankroll the soaring costs of racing. The two families, who spend weekends under the same Baby Race tent, do not speak to each other.
TOP: Drivers prepare for race in Brescia, Italy, on Sept. 8. Every current F1 driver got their start in racing in a go-kart.

BOTTOM: Racing fans gather for a look at the podium in Brescia, Italy, following a race in early September.
When the Sarno race started, with the karts quickly nearing their top speed of 50 mph, even a casual fan could tell that Julian and Alessandro appeared to be in their own class.
“There goes Frasnelli,” the Australian commentator bellowed over the loudspeaker at the racing facility south of Naples. “There goes Truchot.”
The boys’ parents watched from opposite ends of the track, screaming, “Pass! Pass!” in French and Italian when their sons drove by in a blur. Julian and Alessandro had freakish control over their lawnmower-size vehicles, weaving expertly through a mass of other drivers. Julian had just won the Italian championships. Alessandro was the second-ranked driver on the karting tour. Either could be the next Max Verstappen or Lewis Hamilton, F1’s current superstars. But the chances that both boys will make it to Formula One are almost zero.

As they neared the end of the fourth lap, Julian was in second place and Alessandro was a few feet behind him. The two cars rocketed toward the front. But Julian and another driver made contact coming around a turn. Julian lost control. His kart went airborne.

“Huge crash!” the announcer exclaimed.

Julian’s father gripped the metal fence at the edge of the track and then put his hands on his face, almost covering his eyes.

“No, NO, NO!”



Formula One scouts swear they can predict future greatness in the way a child handles a tight turn or avoids a crash. They’ve identified talent that way before.
At 6, Michael Schumacher, one of Formula One’s all-time greats, won a karting race with a vehicle his father put together with spare parts. In the early ’90s, Hamilton started racing in a secondhand kart while his father washed dishes to pay for races.

But the sport is now unrecognizable. The surge in global interest in Formula One has transformed karting into a kind of oligarchy. It is now crowded with the sons and daughters of multimillionaires (and actual oligarchs) who crisscross Europe every weekend for mini-Grand Prix. The circuit is a traveling carnival for the global elite, a series of racetrack parking lots colonized by parents in luxury athleisure wear.

There is effectively no way for young American drivers to aspire to Formula One without relocating across the Atlantic. Alessandro flies from Miami, where he lives, to Italy once a week during peak karting season. That’s where the F1 scouts spend their time.

The races are dominated by prestigious teams, like Baby Race, which supply personal mechanics to each child. Some kids arrive with their own bodyguards. Some arrive in helicopters. Many parents seek sports psychologists for their preteens. A number of Baby Race’s 25 drivers — it’s obvious which ones — are extremely wealthy and extremely average.

“I’m paying 50,000 euros a year for you to race like this?!” one of the lesser drivers’ fathers screamed at him one morning in Sarno.

Who’s buying goog stock tomorrow?
Sure hope they manufacture the chips locally and secure the tech from theft.

“Google has unveiled a new chip which it claims takes five minutes to solve a problem that would currently take the world's fastest super computers ten septillion – or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years – to complete.”

Interesting list. Click on the screen at the bottom for the larger list. Don’t know how accurate but …

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