Month: September 2023

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

In my torts class, I often compare the different approaches and doctrines in the United States and the United Kingdom.

One of the most pronounced is the position and authority of physicians on issues like consent and malpractice. This week produced a particularly striking example.

British doctors are seeking to take a 19-year-old critically ill female patient off the intensive care despite her objections and those of her parents.

Unlike most such cases, the woman known only as “ST” is conscious and communicative.

Yet, the doctors argue that she is not being realistic about her chances of survival from a rare disorder. 

Now a British court has agreed and ordered that she can be placed on end-of-life care against her will.

ST is suffering from a rare genetic mitochondrial disease that is progressively degenerative. The case has similarities to that of Charlie Gard, an infant who was removed from life support at the insistence of doctors despite objections from the parents. The Gard family was seeking to take Charlie to the United States for experimental treatment.

ST has been in the ICU for the past year, requiring a ventilator and a feeding tube. She also requires regular dialysis due to chronic kidney damage from her disease.

She wants to be allowed to travel to Canada for an experimental treatment but the doctors oppose the plan and say that she is not accepting the realities of her terminal illness.

They say that she is “actively dying” without any hope of resuming life outside of intensive care.

Her deeply religious family have spent their entire life savings on her care and has complained that a “transparency order” requested by the hospital barred their ability to give details on the case to help raise public funds.

What is so remarkable about this case is that it is not an infant or a comatose patient. 

The court found that ST “is able to communicate reasonably well with her doctors with assistance from her mother and, on occasion, speech therapists.”

Moreover, two psychiatrists testified that she is mentally competent to make decisions about her own care.

Despite all the difficulties which currently confront her, ST is able to communicate reasonably well with her doctors with assistance from her mother and, on occasion, speech therapists. Over the course of the last week she has engaged in two separate capacity assessments. I heard evidence from two consultant psychiatrists whose conclusions in relation to her capacity in both domains are set out in full written reports. . . .

She has been described by those who know and love her as “a fighter”. That is how she sees herself. At the heart of the issues in this case is what ST and her family perceive to be a ray of hope in the form of an experimental nucleoside treatment outside the United Kingdom which might offer her hope of an improved quality of life, albeit a life which is likely to end prematurely in terms of a normal life expectancy. She has told her doctors that she wants to do everything she can to extend her life. She said to Dr C, one of the psychiatrists who visited her last week, “This is my wish. I want to die trying to live. We have to try everything”. [Court’s emphasis] Whilst she recognises that she may not benefit from further treatment, she is resistant to any attempt to move to a regime of palliative care because she wants to stay alive long enough to be able to travel to Canada or North America where there is at least the prospect that she may be accepted as part of a clinical trial. . . .

ST is well aware that she has been offered a very poor prognosis by her doctors. She acknowledges that they have told her that she will die but she does not believe them. She points to her recovery from previous life-threatening episodes whilst she has been a patient at the intensive care unit. She believes she has the resilience and the strength to stay alive for long enough to undergo treatment abroad and she wishes the court to acknowledge her right to make that decision for herself.

Nevertheless, the judge found that she is mentally incapable of making decisions for herself because “she does not believe the information she has been given by her doctors.” 

The court appears to reject her ability to make this decision because she is making the wrong decision:

In my judgment . . . ST is unable to make a decision for herself in relation to her future medical treatment, including the proposed move to palliative care, because she does not believe the information she has been given by her doctors. Absent that belief, she cannot use or weigh that information as part of the process of making the decision. This is a very different position from the act of making an unwise, but otherwise capacitous, decision. An unwise decision involves the juxtaposition of both an objective overview of the wisdom of a decision to act one way or another and the subjective reasons informing that person’s decision to elect to take a particular course. However unwise, the decision must nevertheless involve that essential understanding of the information and the use, weighing and balancing of the information in order to reach a decision. In ST’s case, an essential element of the process of decision-making is missing because she is unable to use or weigh information which has been shown to be both reliable and true.

Accordingly, the court ruled that decisions about ST’s further care should be determined by the Court of Protection based on an assessment of her best interests. Her “best interest,” according to the doctors, is to die.

Thus, the courts have declared that ST cannot choose to continue life-extending treatment and can be forced into palliative care against her will.

The logic of the decision is chilling.

The court is told that ST has cognitive and communicative abilities to make such decisions. However, because the court disagrees with her desire to continue to fight to live, she is treated as effectively incompetent. 

It seems like the judicial version of Henry Ford’s promise that customers could pick any color car so long as it is black.

Here is the opinion: In the Matter of ST

The United Nations is withdrawing 13,000 personnel from Mali, in what UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called an “unprecedented” move, following a request from the Malian military junta to vacate the country.

As Statista’s Anna Fleck reports, Mali’s Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop told the United Nations Security Council in June that the UN’s peacekeepers had “become a part of the problem in fuelling intercommunal tensions.” The UN has been given until December 31 to pull out its mission members, as well as to close its 12 camps and to hand over a temporary base to the authorities.

Mali has been under military rule since a coup in 2012, and has since experienced ongoing instability with separatist and jihadist rebellions. In 2020 and 2021 the country saw two more coup d’etats and in June 2023, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report stating that the Malian armed forces and foreign fighters – allegedly from the Wagner Group who had been brought in to fight jihadist groups – had killed dozens of civilians since December 2022.

The following chart shows that as of May 31, 2023, the Mali peacekeeping mission, formally known as the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali, or MINUSMA for short, was the fourth largest of its kind, with more than 13,000 uniformed personnel stationed there. The mission that was established in April 2013 supported the now deposed elected government of Mali with the stabilization of the country. According to the UN peacekeeping platform, a total of 303 MINUSMA personnel have been killed in Mali so far, making it the second deadliest of the 12 UN missions currently ongoing. Only UNIFIL in Lebanon is more fatal for peacekeepers, with 329 deaths recorded.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Three other UN missions currently rank higher in terms of personnel numbers, all of which are in Africa.

As the chart above shows, as of May 31, the largest of the group was the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA) with nearly 17,000 personnel, which became operational in September 2014. The United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) was the second largest with more than 15,000 personnel, followed by MONUSCO, the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with around 14,600 members.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

We have previously discussed the denial of religious expression in France for Islamic women who wish to wear abaya, Islamic swimsuits, or burkas.

Many of us have lamented about how France, the cradle of so many individual rights in history, has become so inimical to those rights.

France has adopted the opposite position to these rights.

It has relentlessly attacked free speech (including the criticism of religious beliefs) while denying the expression of religious beliefs.

The latest example is the ban announced this weekend on Muslim women wearing the Islamic abaya to school as violations of France’s strict secular laws in education.

Education Minister Gabriel Attal  declared:

“When you walk into a classroom, you shouldn’t be able to identify the pupils’ religion just by looking at them. I have decided that the abaya could no longer be worn in schools.”

It is, in my view, an outrageous denial of the religious freedom of these women and girls.

They must choose between an education and their faith.

To adopt a Millian Harm Principle approach, how does the wearing of an abaya harm others beyond irritating those who reject their beliefs?

We previously discussed France’s ban on the wearing of full face veils in public.  The same intolerance could be used to ban crosses around necks or yarmulkes on heads as conveying religious faith.

There are five million Muslims living in France who want to be able to move around in public and go to school without being forced to discard their religious beliefs.

How is banning religious garb and symbols in France any different from requiring them in countries like Iran or Afghanistan?

Both sets of laws regulate and criminalize the expression of religious faith and values.

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

Despite closing its nuclear power plants to focus on renewable energy production, more than a fifth of imported electricity last month was produced from nuclear power…

Germany is importing more electricity than ever before after purchasing a record 6,505 gigawatt hours from abroad in August, according to the Federal Network Agency.

The federal government has replaced much of the electricity produced by its recently closed nuclear power stations with imported electricity, almost half of which was ironically produced using nuclear power and fossil fuels.

This resulted in a significant electricity trade balance deficit, with the country importing €557 million worth of electricity more than it exported to its EU neighbors last month.

Electricity imports typically occur through the construction of transmission lines or undersea cables that connect power grids across national borders. The energy can be generated from various sources including hydroelectric, nuclear, fossil fuels such as gas and coal, or renewable energy.

And despite the German federal government seeking to prioritize renewable energy sources to generate power, evidenced by its policy decision to shut down the country’s remaining nuclear power plants earlier this year, 21 percent of the imported electricity last month was generated by nuclear power and 28 percent was generated by burning coal and gas, according to the Bild newspaper.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz sought to play down concerns over rising imports back in July, claiming that “every year there are phases in which we buy electricity from other countries.”

However, electricity imports into Germany have increased significantly since the closure of the country’s nuclear power plants on April 15.

As Tim Meyerjürgens, the managing director of transmission system operator Tennet, explained, the rising imports don’t necessarily imply that Germany isn’t capable of generating enough electricity itself, but they do “say something about the price of production,” namely that is has become more expensive.

Following the nuclear phase-out, much of Germany’s electricity has been produced through natural gas and coal-fired plants when renewable energy production hasn’t been viable.

“These are often more expensive than renewables and nuclear power abroad,” Meyerjürgens explained, implying that the federal government is approving imports of nuclear-produced electricity when it could have simply produced this itself with domestic nuclear plants at a cheaper rate.

Authored by Derrick Berthelsen via The Critic,

By now we all “know” that Brexit has had an enormous detrimental effect on the UK economy. We ‘know’ this because the MSM and various “independent experts” have continually told us so. 

Take the BBC who in their January 2023 article entitled “What impact has Brexit had on the UK economy?” included the chart below to argue that Brexit is the cause of the UK’s failure to grow GDP above pre covid levels:

Or the FT which published a similar chart to blame Brexit for the failure of the UK economy to return to pre Covid levels and who in their article entitled “UK economy set to be one of the last to recover from pandemic” were quick to emphasise that Brexit was the cause:

And of course the Guardian who in their piece “How Britain’s economic woes stack up against Europe’s — a close look at the figures” relied on the same graphic:

CNN, Politico and many others made exactly the same point about the failure of UK GDP to recover and how it was all a result of Brexit. 

The argument was clear.

Brexit could be proven to be the culprit for the UK’s weak economic performance post the covid outbreak because only the UK had left the EU and only the UK of all of the G7 had failed to see GDP return to pre covid levels.

However, today the ONS published updated estimates of UK GDP, in part to adjust for the different way the UK accounts for health spending vs the rest of the G7, which they state shows that the UK economy has actually performed much more strongly than previously calculated since Covid.  

The main changes they highlight are:

• Annual current price gross domestic product (GDP) growth in 2021 is revised up 0.9 percentage points to an 8.5 per cent increase; this follows an unrevised fall of 5.8% in 2020.

• Annual volume GDP growth in 2021 is revised up 1.1 percentage points to an 8.7% increase; this follows an upwardly revised 10.4 per cent fall in 2020 (previously an 11% fall).

• Upward revisions to annual volume GDP growth in 2020 and 2021 mean that GDP is now estimated to be 0.6 per cent above pre-coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic levels in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2021; previously this was estimated as 1.2% below.

• In 2021, the services sector is now estimated to have grown by 10.9 per cent, revised up by 3.9 percentage points. Annual services growth has also been revised up in 2020 by 0.5 percentage points.

These changes, as Simon French, @shjfrench the Chief Economist and head of Research at investment bank Panmure Gordon tweeted are “extraordinary”, adding:

“The entire UK economic narrative — post-pandemic — has just been revised away.”

He continued:

“Every ‘UK not back at pre-CV-19 level’ headline (is) now obsolete. ‘UK bottom of the G7’ no longer true.”

He could (and probably should) have added, that the same is true of every claim of a Brexit inspired economic collapse.

Simon also posted the chart below comparing G7 members GDP performance since Q4 2019 with the previous ONS UK GDP estimates and the new revised figures. 

As you can see, all signs of a Brexit inspired collapse in UK GDP growth have simply disappeared:

Independent Economist Julian Jessop tweeted that the “revised @ONS  data show that UK #GDP recovered to pre-Covid levels in 2021, roughly 18 months earlier than previously thought… Maybe #BrexitBritain isn’t such a laggard after all?”

John Burn-Murdoch of the FT tweeted “Vibe shift, economic data edition: After the latest GDP revisions, turns out the UK economy had recovered to its pre-pandemic size by the end of 2021, has recovered more strongly than Germany, and roughly as strongly as France. 

He also quoted FT Economics Editor Chris Giles (who has been extremely vocal in his negative view on the economic cost of Brexit): “Per @ChrisGiles_ calculations, by the end of 2021, UK recovery was behind only the US and Canada!”

A point that has also been made by City AM in their article “Doomsayers ‘proved wrong’: UK had third-fastest Covid recovery in G7, revised GDP data now shows”

Indeed in its article published today on the ONS data changes entitled “UK Covid-era economic performance better than previously stated”, the FT writes that the “Statistical agency’s revisions put Britain’s post-pandemic recovery in line with G7 peers” stating that “revised figures (have) added nearly 2 per cent to the size of the economy.”

It continues to state that:

The revisions suggest the UK no longer has the worst growth record among G7 countries since 2019. They are also likely to show Britain performing better than Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, once they are included in official figures in October.

Quite a change….

Some of us have been arguing for years that the cries of a Brexit economic catastrophe were overdone and driven by an ideological aversion to the UK leaving the EU rather than the economic reality. 

Whether it was the OBR ignoring the importance of estimates for immigration and productivity in their forecasts for lower GDP growth from leaving the SM and CU. Or the FT failing to look at the export data fully, and misrepresenting inflation, business investment, GDP data in order to drive an anti Brexit economic narrative. Or the Centre for European Reform’s doppelganger model failing to sanity check their modelled outcome with the estimates of both the gains to the UK economy of SM membership and the economic performance of the whole of Europe versus the US. 

All these arguments of a huge negative economic effect from Brexit have been simply blown out of the water by the ONS today.

Not that I think this means the UK economy is performing well. Quite the opposite. The whole of Europe is struggling with issues of poor productivity and lack of investment — in no small amount driven by ludicrous energy policies which are inevitably leading to de-industrialisation and economic decline. 

But as the ONS has demonstrated today, Brexit is simply not a primary cause or major factor in our economic weakness. But taking advantage of our new found post-Brexit freedoms may well be a very big part of the solution.

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Censorship of the Internet has been getting worse for years, but we just crossed a threshold which is going to take things to a whole new level. 

On August 25th, a new law known as the “Digital Services Act” went into effect in the European Union.  Under this new law, European bureaucrats will be able to order big tech companies to censor any content that is considered to be “illegal”, “disinformation” or “hate speech”.  That includes content that is posted by users outside of the European Union, because someone that lives in the European Union might see it.  I wrote about this a few days ago, but I don’t think that people are really understanding the implications of this new law.  In the past, there have been times when governments have requested that big tech companies take down certain material, but now this new law will give government officials the power to force big tech companies to take down any content that they do not like. 

Any big tech companies that choose not to comply will be hit with extremely harsh penalties.

Of course mainstream news outlets such as the Washington Post are attempting to put a positive spin on this new law.  We are being told that it will “safeguard” us from “illegal content” and “disinformation”…

New rules meant to safeguard people from illegal content, targeted ads, unwanted algorithmic feeds and disinformation online are finally in force, thanks to new regulation in the European Union that took effect this month.

Doesn’t that sound wonderful?

When this new law was first approved, NPR admitted that it will enable European governments to “take down a wide range of content”…

Under the EU law, governments would be able to ask companies take down a wide range of content that would be deemed illegal, including material that promotes terrorism, child sexual abuse, hate speech and commercial scams.

In addition to “illegal content” and “hate speech”, the Digital Services Act also applies to “hoaxes” and any material that is considered to be “disinformation”.  The following comes from the official website of the European Commission…

At the same time, the DSA regulates very large online platforms’ and very large online search engines responsibilities when it comes to systemic issues such as disinformation, hoaxes and manipulation during pandemics, harms to vulnerable groups and other emerging societal harms.

These new content rules are so vague that they could apply to just about anything.

And that is precisely what they want.

From this point forward, if you post something that they do not like, they will have the power to have it taken down.

Even if you don’t live in the European Union, they can have your content taken down, because someone in the European Union might see it.

So who will be doing the censoring?

Well, it is being reported that “hundreds of unelected EU bureaucrats will decide what constitutes disinformation and instruct Big Tech firms to censor it”…

Under this Orwellian regime, a team of hundreds of unelected EU bureaucrats will decide what constitutes disinformation and instruct Big Tech firms to censor it. The firms themselves, faced with reputational risk and financial penalties, will have little choice other than to comply. This can be done in all manner of ways: simply by human moderators removing content, by shadow-banning problematic creators to reduce their reach, by demonetising certain content, and by tweaking algorithms to favour or disfavour certain topics. And though, legally speaking, the DSA only applies in the EU, once installed inside Big Tech firms, this vast content-regulation apparatus will surely affect users in the rest of the world, too.

In addition, the official website of the European Commission is telling us that big tech companies must “react with priority” to any content that has been reported by “trusted flaggers”…

A priority channel will be created for trusted flaggers – entities which have demonstrated particular expertise and competence – to report illegal content to which platforms will have to react with priority.

This means that far left organizations that have been set up to police content online will now be given extraordinary power to restrict speech on the Internet.

Needless to say, the Internet is never going to be the same after this.

Initially, this new law will apply to 19 very large online platforms…

The online platforms affected are Alibaba AliExpress, Amazon Store, Apple AppStore, Booking.com, Facebook, Google Play, Google Maps, Google Shopping, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, X (listed as Twitter), Wikipedia, YouTube, the European clothing retailer Zalando, Bing and Google Search.

If any of those large online platforms choose not to comply with the new law, the penalties could be extremely severe…

A firm that does not comply with the law could face a complete ban in Europe or fines running up to 6% of its global revenue.

Last month, X/Twitter said it was on track to generate $3bn (£2.4bn) in revenue. A fine of 6% would be the equivalent of £144m.

Once we get to February 24th, 2024, the Digital Services Act will also apply to a vast multitude of smaller platforms.

At that point, it will be very difficult to escape the reach of this new law.

And just to make sure that they can keep a very close eye on things, the EU just established a brand new office in San Francisco on June 22nd…

European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton cut the ribbon to commemorate the official launch of the European Union’s San Francisco office on Thursday, June 22, alongside Lieutenant Governor of California Eleni Kounalakis, California State Senator Scott Wiener, and Chair of the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs Adrian Vazquez.

“I am very glad to be here today in Silicon Valley, a global centre for digital technology and innovation, to officially inaugurate the new European Union office in San Francisco,” Commissioner Breton said in his keynote address to an audience of business and technology sector leaders. “As like-minded partners who strive for reciprocity and common principles, all while respecting our respective democratic processes, our transatlantic ties are more relevant than ever in the area of technology.”

For many years, the Internet was one of the last bastions for free speech.

But now everything has changed.

From this point forward, far left European bureaucrats will get to determine what is acceptable and what is not acceptable on our large online platforms.

Direct government censorship of the Internet is here, and that is going to make it much more difficult to share the truth with a world that desperately needs it.

These are such dark times, and they are getting darker with each passing day.

*  *  *

Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.

Authored by Mike Fredenburg via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

“By scrapping the A-10, the Air Force is guaranteeing more Gold Star families will be created,” according to Charlie Keebaugh, president of the largest group of tactical-air-control party airmen.

The 2024 version of the National Defense Authorization Act (pdf) allows the Air Force to retire 42 A-10 Thunderbolt 2s in 2024, with the remaining 220 or so to be retired with prejudice by 2029. This retiring of the A-10 “Warthog” is predicated on the fantastical disproven idea that the A-10, which to this day is the most cost-effective plane in the Air Force’s inventory, can be replaced by the F-35.

This power play by the Air Force is just another chapter in the long, ongoing saga of senior Air Force leaders using every tactic, including underhanded tactics, threats, and rigged testing, to justify retiring the A-10. It certainly isn’t about improving our country’s close air support (CAS) capabilities that have saved countless American lives. Instead, it’s about converting A-10 maintainers to F-35 maintainers in order to satisfy the F-35s endless, ravenous appetite for maintenance and support. And it’s about killing off the plane that will continue to show up the F-35 as long as it continues to fly.

Before talking about the respective CAS capabilities of the A-10 and F-35, an understanding of what’s meant by CAS is necessary. Joint Western military doctrine defines CAS as “air action by fixed- and rotary-winged aircraft against hostile targets that are in close proximity to friendly forces and which require detailed integration of each air mission with the fire and movement of those forces.”

More specifically, CAS pilots must be able to coordinate in real time and near real time with their certified joint terminal attack controllers (JTAC), to be able to dynamically adjust targeting and be able to relay enemy positions and movements back to their JTACs in real time. In a real CAS mission, the plane will be flying close enough to frontlines that even if it’s stealthy, it will still be seen on radar and by plain old human eyes.

In terms of what you want in a CAS plane, the engineers and experienced CAS pilots who designed the A-10 in the mid-1960s concluded that a CAS attack plane must be able to operate near the frontlines from an austere airfield with short runways, have low maintenance requirements and high reliability, be able to carry a large weapons load including anti-armor capability, be tough enough to survive small arms fire and be resistant to the kind of anti-air weapons one will find at the frontline of a ground battle, have long range and endurance, have a speed of at least 350 knots, have great low-speed maneuverability, and have a low cost of acquisition so that the CAS planes that will inevitably be lost in combat can be quickly and cost-effectively replaced as needed.

To say that the A-10 design team hit it out of the park is an understatement. And the heavily modernized A-10C, despite unsubstantiated Air Force claims, has the most sophisticated CAS capabilities of any plane in the world. Consequently, modernized A-10Cs, combining modern A-10-enabled tactics with its air defense capabilities, can operate in environments full of anti-air weapons that other aircraft, including the F-35, can’t. And, the Warthog, with its triple redundancy, twin engines, and titanium bathtub to protect its pilot, is the toughest plane in the world that gets its pilot home after sustaining many times the damage that would have downed any other aircraft.

While the F-35 certainly can fly fast enough, it fails to meet any of the other CAS criteria. And while the F-35, a flying fuel tank, does have decent range when flying stealthily, its inability to fly out of austere air bases located near the frontlines means that it will spend most of its fuel flying back and forth from the battle. In contrast, the A-10, with its ability to fly from austere makeshift airfields with short, unimproved runways, can be based mere minutes from the frontlines and can spend hours in or near the battlefield. This, plus the fact that the A-10 can conservatively double the number of sorties per day of an F-35, means that an A-10 will minimally be able to spend four to eight times more time at or near the frontlines delivering lifesaving, mission-advancing support than an F-35.

Adding insult to injury is that the A-10 can carry far more ordnance than an F-35 flying in stealth mode. And while the F-35 can swap out stealth mode for its “Beast Mode,” which allows it to carry more ordnance than the A-10, its operational range will be cut in half, meaning that it almost certainly will require infight refueling to be able to use its ordnance.

So far, the F-35 isn’t looking so great as a CAS plane, but things only get worse, much worse.

What About the Guns and ‘Danger Close’?

One of the critical missions that a CAS plane needs to be able to execute is a “danger close” mission. This is an operation in which the CAS plane will be attacking enemy troops and equipment that are within 50 meters of friendly troops. Consequently, explosive ordnance use is restricted or not used out of fear of harming or killing friendlies. In these cases, the A-10’s fearsome GAU-8 Avenger 30-millimeter cannon is vastly superior to the 25-millimeter cannons that the F-35s mount. And much to the chagrin of enemy forces, the A-10 carries 1,174 rounds of ammunition, five to six times what the F-35 carries, allowing it to make multiple attack runs per sortie. However, these comparisons are pointless when it comes to the F-35A, whose gun is hopelessly inaccurate and damages the plane when it’s fired.

Finally, equipment critical to protecting the F-35 from going up in flames was either stripped off or left off due to weight considerations (pdf). This arguably makes the F-35 the most fragile plane in the U.S. fighter inventory. Not only is the F-35 highly vulnerable to small fragments common to anti-aircraft artillery fire and near missile misses, but it can’t fly anywhere near lightning, while the A-10 is capable of flying in weather conditions that will ground all other aircraft.

F-35 Will Be Able to ‘Fire and Flee,’ but Can’t Do Real CAS

The F-35’s extreme vulnerabilities to weapons and weather, and its poor low-speed maneuverability, mean that it won’t be allowed to do genuine CAS; instead, it will fire extremely expensive weapons at ranges far enough from the frontline that the situation will often have changed dramatically by the time the glide bomb or missile reaches its target. The F-35 pilot won’t be able to dynamically adjust targeting second by second, as can an A-10 pilot who can actually see the battlefield, even when electronic jamming is present. Further, the F-35 pilot won’t be providing real-time information on enemy movements and positions as can the A-10 pilot.

Col. William Smith, a retired Air Force pilot with more than 3,000 hours of A-10 flight time and 128 combat sorties, said in 2015, “We are regularly able to use something that other planes often cannot, the Mark I Human Eyeball, and sometimes there is no substitute for that,” and “we live in the armpit of the guy on the ground.”

In sharp contrast, the F-35 pilot, in his fragile, flammable, flying tinderbox, will be firing and fleeing many miles away from the frontlines.

In conclusion, the F-35—with its extreme fragility, high acquisition cost, high cost of support and maintenance, inability to operate near the frontlines, poor low-speed maneuverability, lack of an effective gun, poor sortie generation rate, short loiter times, and lack of ability to carry a large weapons payload without inflight refueling—is the antithesis of a CAS plane.

Consequently, in canceling the A-10, the U.S. Air Force will be canceling the most important and effective plane it has to execute lifesaving, mission-advancing CAS. And it will be killing the only plane that can do danger close support. This could cost the lives of countless Marines and soldiers. But on the upside, the A-10 maintainers can be moved over to support the troubled, maintenance-hungry F-35s.

When Google announced the release of its own web browser Chrome in 2008, many people asked themselves why Google was building a web browser.

In retrospect, the better question would have been, why Google hadn’t built a web browser earlier. After all, the company’s entire business was people using a browser to access Google’s services.

As a matter of fact, as Statista’s Martin Armstrong reports, the plan to make a Google web browser had existed for years, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt just hadn’t considered his company ready to enter the resource draining ‘browser wars’. By 2008, Google was making billions of dollars a year and had finally matured enough to go head to head with Microsoft and it’s market dominating Internet Explorer.

15 years ago, on September 2, 2008, the first official release of Chrome was published and the open-source browser began its steady climb through the ranks. By the third quarter of 2009, Chrome had caught up with Apple’s Safari and set its sights on the next contender: Firefox. It took a bit longer to catch up with Firefox, but in the fourth quarter of 2011, Chrome’s share of global web browsing surpassed that of Firefox. Less than a year later, Chrome became the world’s number one browser, overtaking Microsoft’s Internet Explorer which had utterly dominated the market just five years earlier.

Remarkably, Chrome’s ascent came almost entirely at the expense of Microsoft’s browser. Since the third quarter of 2008, Internet Explorer’s market share dropped from 68 to 25 percent, while Chrome’s soared from zero to 43 percent. Today, Internet Explorer’s successor, Edge, commands just 5 percent of the global market, while Chrome is sitting at the top of the pile with a slice of the pie consistently and securely above the 60 percent mark – the nearest competitor being Safari with 20 percent in August 2023.

According to data from web-tracking firm StatCounter, Chrome is the world’s number 1 internet browser. Between July and August 2023, Chrome was used by 63.6 percent of internet users worldwide. Safari ranked in second place, having been used by just under 20 percent of the world’s online community. Edge (5.4 percent), Firefox (2.9 percent), Opera (2.7 percent) and Samsung (2.3 percent) trail much further behind.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Regionally, Chrome is particularly popular in South America where it has a browser market share of 78.9 percent. In Europe and North America, the share is comparatively lower, at 58.6 percent and 53.1 percent, respectively. The United States’ Chrome market share was only marginally below North America’s regional average, with the browser seeing a 51.7 percent use rate, followed by Safari (30.8 percent), Edge (8.4 percent), Opera (3.5) percent, Firefox (3.5) percent and Samsung Internet (1.1 percent).

You will find more infographics at Statista

Safari ranks as the most prevalent web browser in a number of smaller countries and islands, including North Korea (90.99 percent), Bermuda (92.7 percent), the Faroe Islands (78.52 percent) and Andorra (56.9 percent), while Armenia is one of the only countries worldwide to favor Firefox (Firefox was 55 percent of the online population, Chrome 31.9 percent and Safari 8.7 percent).

Africa is the only continent where Safari does not take second place, but is pushed to third after competitor Opera.