Author: Morissa Schwartz

A life path collision of a destiny….A woman’s sense of integrity seems to be entangled within the ethic of care that is often quietly buried in neat rows like the graves in Arlington. Their personal dreams have been traded for their families….except those with the heart of a soldier who write their own destiny. “Farewell To The Last Drive-In” addresses the awareness of the challenges woman face in having a personal life and a career. Act one is innocent enough as we are introduced to colorful characters, full of heart and texture. We grow to know them quickly and easily…

Taiwan’s defense chief, Chiu Kuo-Cheng, has revealed that American troops are permanently stationed in Taiwan. Our soldiers are there to train Taiwan’s military in the use of things like drones.  However, some of those troops are less than two miles from China’s border. A headline in London’s The Express warns that this puts the â€Å�world” on â€Å�the brink.” But that’s not all. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken met with President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines Tuesday, March 19th, at a time when Manila and Beijing are slamming ships into each other over China’s claim that it owns all 1.3 million square…

The TikTok issue is one of the biggest damned if you do, damned if you don’t problems on America’s agenda. On April 14, 2023, nearly a year ago, Montana became the first state to try to ban TikTok, but a US District Judge put a temporary halt to the ban, saying it â€Å�oversteps state power,” â€Å�likely violates the first amendment,” and has a â€Å�pervasive undertone of anti-Chinese sentiment.” Then FBI head Christopher Wray told Congress that TikTok â€Å�screams out with national security concerns.”  So at 9:09 Wednesday morning, March 13th, Congress passed a bill demanding that TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, sell…

Nikki Haley competed against Donald Trump in primaries in 29 states and territories over the last five months and won only in two—Vermont and Washington, DC. So, Wednesday morning, March 6th, Haley gave a speech suspending her campaign. Haley’s words mark a profound change in the Republican party and in America’s kind of politics. In her address, Haley laid out four basic values: â€Å�Our national debt,” she said, â€Å�will eventually crush our economy. A smaller federal government is… necessary for our survival.” She pointed out that, â€Å�Our world is on fire because of America’s retreat. Standing by our allies in Ukraine,…

There is a fight in America between those who want Russia to win its loathsome war in Ukraine and those who want Russia to lose.  The top cheer leader for a Russian victory is former President Donald Trump. Mr. Trump controls the Republicans in Congress.   A bill to give $38 billion to Ukraine has passed the Senate with 22 Republican votes but has been stalled in Congress by House speaker Mike Johnson, who it appears is following Mr. Trump’s orders. Former president Trump has called those in Congress and the Senate who have approved $75 billion worth of aid so…

On Tuesday, February 20, at 1:54 pm, an American Airlines flight took off from Albuquerque’s International Sunport headed for Chicago, a three-hour flight away. Roughly half an hour into the flight, a passenger, Emma Ritz, says that a man whose seat was next to the emergency exit â€Å�cracked open the window that was protecting the handle” of the emergency door, then â€Å�ripped down the handle where it exposed some of the emergency exit and all the wind came rushing in.” Another passenger, Blaze Ward, says, â€Å�the man had the safety mechanism down, with both hands on the lever and he…

There have been a series of accidents over the last few months that can easily make you leery of autonomous cars, self-driving automobiles controlled by artificial intelligence. Waymo is a self-driving car company owned by Google’s parent, Alphabet. CNN reported on Wednesday, February 14th, that sometime at the end of 2023 in San Francisco a Waymo self-driving taxi encountered a tow truck dragging a pickup truck.  The pickup truck’s hind end was in the air, and its front end had its wheels on the ground. That dangling front end was nosing out of its own lane and into a neighboring…

On January 30th, the board of supervisors in California’s San Mateo County, a county across the bay from San Francisco and next to Silicon Valley, did something ground-breaking. For what is probably the first time in American history, a governmental body voted unanimously to declare a health emergency for something very strange, a health emergency for an emotional state, a health emergency for loneliness. In reality, this was not as unprecedented as it sounds.  In October of 2018, over five years ago, British Prime Minister Theresa May launched a government initiative to tackle, of all things, loneliness. The prime minister called…

The Senate Judiciary Committee, under Democrat Dick Durbin and Republican Lindsey Graham, held a hearing Wednesday, January 31, that the Committee advertised as â€Å�the first time a group of Big Tech CEOs will testify on online child sexual exploitation.” The CEOs included Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, TikTok’s Shou Chew, X’s Linda Yaccarino, Snap’s Evan Spiegel, and Discord’s Jason Citron. The hearing was a setup, a hate-the-social-media session.  In the front row of the audience were 20 parents of children who had been killed or seriously damaged by criminals using social media.  All of the parents wore black. At the beginning of the hearing,…

CNN announced on Wednesday January 24th in a headline that â€Å�The US and Iran are dangerously close to confrontation in the Middle East.” To support their point, CNN listed where America and Iran operate. First they focused on areas where Iran’s proxy armies are on the attack.  The list of these nations is disturbing: Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, the Gaza Strip, and Israel. Then CNN pointed out the places where America has stationed its forces—Kuwait, where America has 13,500 troops, Qatar with 10,000, Saudi Arabia with 2,700, the UAE with 3,500, Jordan with 3,000, Turkey with 1,465, and Bahrain, the really big one, where…

â€Å�The Korean peninsula is dashing toward the cliff of a nuclear war,” says the North Korean government publication Rodong Sinmun.  Here’s why. For 73 years, the goal of North Korea has been to swallow South Korea in a â€Å�peaceful reunification.”  On Monday, January 15th, that changed.  Forty-year-old North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un gave a speech to his Supreme People’s Assembly in which he called for two amendments to the North Korean constitution. Those two amendments would declare South Korea the North’s â€Å�principal enemy.”  Yes, in North Korea’s very constitution, South Korea would be named â€Å�primary foe and invariable principal enemy.”…

England’s Morrisons, a 470-store British supermarket chain, has tried something innovative but disturbing. In a few of its stores over the Christmas season, it installed a robotic intrusion detector designed to act as a night watchman on construction sites, in mines, and on farms.  Morrisons tried this machine to detect, not trespassers, but shoplifters. The robotic device is the Safer Pod S1s from Scotland’s Safer Group.  A machine the size of a post office box that, like a post office box, is as high as your chest, stands on four legs, and is rooted to the ground, but unlike a postal…

The big question is whether it will cause World War III. Early Wednesday morning, at 3 pm in the afternoon Iranian time, a suicide bomber a mile from the modest grave of Lieutenant General Qasem Soleimani in southeastern Iran’s Kerman province blew himself up.  Then, 20 minutes later, as people crowded to the explosion’s site to help the injured, a second suicide bomber detonated his vest.  This time, over one and a half miles from Soleimani’s grave. Between them, the two bombers killed 84 people and injured 284. Why would the crowd around Soleimani’s grave be so massive that a bomb a…

There are new fears that the war in the Middle East between Hamas and Israel could spill over into a wider conflict.  And there is reason to fear that, in the end, the conflict could go nuclear and kill us all. Here’s what’s happened in the last few days. Early on Saturday, December 23, a chemical tanker just 200 miles off the coast of India was hit by an attack drone from Iran. Then, on Christmas morning, in Iraq the Kata’ib Hezbollah attacked Americans at Erbil Air Base, wounding three. Kata’ib Hezbollah is backed by Iran. Later on Christmas day,…

A new survey from LendingTree, the online loan comparison service, looked at accident rates of 30 auto brands and found that the brand with the most accidents per 1,000 drivers was Tesla. Other brands high on the list of accidents per 1,000 drivers were Dodge Ram and Subaru.  When it came to driving incidents, a category that includes accidents, driving under the influence, speeding, and traffic citations, Dodge Ram drivers were the worst. And when it came to Driving Under the Influence by itself, BMW drivers topped the list. By two to one. But should you trust these LendingTree rankings? …

The Wall Street journal has published a story that may explain many of the mysteries of the war against Hamas in Gaza. The Journal reveals something the Israelis are keeping secret.  The Israeli military has built five water pumps near the coastal Al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City and has been experimenting with flooding Hamas’ 310 miles of tunnels with water from the Mediterranean Sea. Why is this important?  Because that 310-mile military tunnel system is Hamas’ secret weapon.  It’s what Ynet calls â€Å�an underground city.”  It houses Hamas’ command and control centers. It has stores of fuel, water, weapons, ammunition, a ventilation system,…

At 10:52 Wednesday morning, The Wall Street Journal reported new data from the National Center for Health Statistics on suicide in the United States.  The data was shocking. According to the Journal, last year close to 50,000 Americans committed suicide.  That’s the highest level of suicides since 1941. 50,000 is not just a lot of suicides for the USA.  It’s also a big figure for the world. On the rest of this planet, suicide has gone down â€Å�more than 30%” â€Å�over the last three decades” according to a recent overview in the Annual Review of Public Health. But, says that overview, in…

The SpaceX Starship has launched its second orbital test flight. Which means that America now is about to have two mega-rockets, two of the biggest rockets ever to take to the skies. One is SpaceX’s Starship.  The other is NASA’s Artemis Moon Rocket. How do the two stack up against each other? The Artemis Moon Rocket’s engines generate 8.8 million pounds of thrust. Utterly phenomenal. But the Starship’s engines generate nearly twice as much–17 million pounds. In fact, the Starship’s engines generate twice as much thrust as any rocket humans have ever flown. But that’s just the beginning. The Artemis Moon Rocket carries…