GROUNDED: Tens of thousands of air travelers remain stranded this morning after a breakdown in the flight control communications system yesterday evening forced the FAA to ground all commercial air traffic for five hours. 

  The shutdown lasted four hours, enough to create lasting travel chaos. About a third of yesterday’s flights … roughly 8200 … were cancelled.

  FlightAware reports that nearly 4,000 flights are cancelled today and nearly 10,000 delayed. It’s even affected the college football schedule.

  Thousands of travelers are without luggage checked into the baggage system while hotels and rental cars are fully booked. One couple said they are going on a cruise without their bags.

  The FAA has a communications and control system that runs on 1980s technology. Some of their computers still use floppy discs, for those of you who remember what they are. “What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told reporters last night, predicting that without significant upgrades, “it’s going to continue to fail.”

  “We have old, old switches, old routers — we use 1980s little copper lines,” he said. 

  And he said about the state of air travel for the next few days, “I believe that it’s going to take us some time to get back to capacity.” They’ll be under the gun to recover for Thanksgiving travel.

  The suspicion of many people last night was that the system may have been the target of a cyberattack but Markwayne Mullion, the secretary of Homeland Security, said “We’ve seen zero evidence” of that.

  Congress last year approved $12.5 billion to upgrade the FAA system, but last night Duffy publicly asked Congress for an emergency $50 billion to fix the system. “This is an emergency, I want Congress to give us emergency funding,” he said. “How many more times does this have to happen for Congress to give the money to fix it?”

THE LONG COUNT: The lead for Democrat Mary Peltola continues to grow against incumbent Republican Dan S. Sullivan in the vote count for Senator from Alaska with the race still uncalled.

  Peltola leads by 10,412 votes at 49.84 percent. If she is declared the winner, the Democrats will have a 56 seat majority in the Senate.

  Also in Alaska, Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, a former state representative from the small island community of Sitka, has been elected the state’s first Democrat governor since Tony Knowles, who left office in 2002.

  The count in the House is now 256 seats Democrat, 169 Republican with 10 or 11 seats uncalled.  Colorado’s MAGA firebrand Lauren Boebert is out.

COLLISION COURSE: An asphalt tanker named Atlantic Asphalt  yesterday lost steering control and rammed into the docked paddle-wheel river cruise ship American Heritage on the Mississippi in New Orleans. Amazingly, no one was killed bit 32 people were taken to hospitals.

  Somewhere between 130 and 200 people were on board the river cruiser when it was hit. The boat began to take on water and list, forcing some passengers to jump into the chilly Mississippi. The American heritage eventually rolled onto its side and settled.

SPOTTY RECORD: The US has lost its status as having eliminated measles from the population, The Wall Street Journal reports on a finding by the director of the Pan American Health Organization. 

  The US was considered to have eliminated the disease in 2000 but it’s making a comeback with the increase of vaccine skepticism and refusal. Medical experts say that the increase in measles cases is an indication of a weakening in the US public health system’s ability to deal with infectious diseases.

THE OBIT PAGE:  Sister June Carpenter, one of three practicing members of the last active celibate Shaker Christian community died on November 3rd. She was 88.

  The remaining Shakers At Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in New Gloucester, Maine, are Brother Arnold Hadd, 70, and Sister April Baxter, who joined only last year and is around 60 years old.

  The Shakers were a sect of Quakers who got their name from their ritual of ecstatic dancing. They landed in North America in 1774 after fleeing England, where they had been persecuted for their opposition to the hierarchy of the Anglican Church — and their concept of a dual-gendered God. 

  Their practice of celibacy obviously gave them a limited future unless new members joined. The NY Times reports that the sect has always been annoyed by news coverage of their dwindling numbers. The Times reports that when, “The Boston Globe published a story about the community headlined ‘The Last Man Standing,’ one of its members, Brother Wayne Smith, fell in love with the reporter and left.”

THE SPIN RACK: A bomb was found yesterday at the BioUrja Renewables ethanol plant in Peoria, Illinois, prompting a mandatory one-mile evacuation zone and a federal investigation by several agencies. — An attempt by SpaceX yesterday to safely re-land its Super Heavy rocket booster failed, forcing the booster to splash down in the Gulf of Mexico. — The Middletown, NY undefeated high school football team was disqualified from continuing in the championships because an ineligible player spent 53 seconds on the field. The ineligible player was a kicker fielded in Middletown’s 48-15 semifinal win against Valley Central.  The school unsuccessfully argued that the players should not be penalized for a mistake by the coaches.

BELOW THE FOLD: Actor Distin Hoffman reveals in his new memoir “Look at Me” that there’s sex, acting, and internal arguments going on in Hollywood.

Huang’s biographer Stephen Witt writes in The Ny Times that; “Nvidia without Jensen Huang is like the Bulls without Michael Jordan. He built Nvidia from nothing but, through his arrogance and toxic self-regard, he has left an empty space that might be impossible to fill.

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