Thanks to the omnipresent cameras of that national treasure C-SPAN, the nation then saw Joe Biden amble all alone among the sacred tombs, staring down at them and hopefully feeling saddened. Because as vice president, he was the most prominent backer of Barack Obama’s much-touted 2009 dispatch of 30,000 more U.S. troops over there, en route to 100,000-plus. See, Obama believed Afghanistan was the “good war” as opposed to George W. Bush’s bad Iraq War.

But wait! There’s more from the Arlington show! In order to signal to photographers and his senior health adviser Anthony Fauci the steadfast virtue of this long-vaccinated man, Joe Biden wore a mask among the dead. Yards and yards from any living soul. And now we will forever have this cringe-worthy image of a president using for optics the graves of fallen who can no longer respond.

Some of us may recall that a major goal of the forever Afghan War was to capture and bring to justice Osama bin Laden, 9/11’s mastermind. That did not work out early on because a certain newspaper reported that U.S. intelligence was tracking Bin Laden in the mountains by his satellite cellphone. He turned it off. And escaped.

When intelligence tracked him down again almost 10 years later, Special Ops was prepared to go get him. Joe Biden was the only senior adviser to vote against the mission. Obama ignored him.

Biden said he would be sending two destroyers to the Black Sea to deliver a message to Putin about not making moves on Ukraine, after Russia had massed thousands of troops on their border with Ukraine.

Putin warned the U.S. to stay away “for their own good.” What did Biden do then? He blinked and decided not to send the ships, an incredibly weak move, making it look like he was caving to Putin, perhaps the worst possible thing he could do. Putin was putting him to the test and he failed it badly.

Now Putin, believing Biden to be all talk and no action, just announced he’s going to close the Kerch Strait, beginning next week until October to block any foreign warships out, including the United States.

“I do think we should be expanding the court,” she told reporters. “The idea that nine people, that a nine-person court, can overturn laws that … hundreds and thousands of legislators, advocacy and policymakers drew consensus on … we have to … just ask ourselves, I think as a country, how much does that current structure benefit us? And I don’t think it does,” she said.

That’s literally the point of the Court, according to the purpose of the Founders, that nine people sometimes overrule laws and decisions of politicians and others. To be above the political fray, to not do what is popular, but to do what is in accordance with the Constitution, however unpopular it might be. The Court’s decision is based on interpretation of the law, not the politics. //

“How much does that current structure benefit us?” Yikes. According to this logic, why would adding four more justices – what the court-packing Democrats are proposing – make things any better? What’s magical about thirteen? //

The Recount
@therecount
·
Apr 15, 2021
Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA): “The Republicans stole two seats on the Supreme Court … we undo the damage that the Republicans have done by restoring balance. And we do it by adding four seats to the court …”

Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA): “We must expand the court and we must abolish the filibuster to do it.”

If I pass a current through a copper conductor, how can I calculate how hot the conductor will get?

For example, if I have a 7.2kW load powered by 240VAC, the current will be 30A. If I transmit this power to the load via a 2.5mm2
copper conductor, how do I calculate how hot this conductor will get?

Breaking911
@Breaking911
BREAKING: House Democrats have introduced a resolution to abolish the electoral college
1:31 PM · Apr 15, 2021

Breaking911
@Breaking911
Democrats introduce court-packing legislation, say Trump ‘stole’ Supreme Court seats - https://breaking911.com/democrats-introduce-court-packing-legislation-say-trump-stole-supreme-court-seats/

Breaking911
@Breaking911
BREAKING: House Oversight Committee advances D.C. statehood bill
11:17 AM · Apr 15, 2021

Talk about demolishing norms. Two of those are right in the Constitution. And the other — a nine-justice Supreme Court — has been around since 1869.

But the Democrats under a Joe Biden executive office don’t care about that, apparently. Probably because, much like with their efforts to push the PRO Act and H.R.1 — both of which would override state laws related to right-to-work and elections, respectively — they need to upend the regular order so they can find ways to win that don’t rely on their having better, successful policy ideas. All five of these efforts are intended to change the system to clear a path for a permanent progressive majority. //

Washington Examiner
@dcexaminer
.@Jim_Jordan: "You don't think Americans' liberties have been threatened the last year, Dr. Fauci?"

Fauci: "I don't look at this as a liberty thing... I look at this as a public health thing."

Jordan: "You think the Constitution is suspended during a virus, during a pandemic?"

Abigail Marone
@abigailmarone
Why won’t Facebook & Instagram let users share this @nypost article about ‘BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors’ million-dollar real estate buying binge’?

https://nypost.com/2021/04/10/ins

Abigail Shrier
@AbigailShrier
Facebook will not allow you to post this NY Post story or even to message it to another person. (I just tested it).

So Facebook is now effectively opening your mail and reading the contents for ideologically objectionable material.

Anyone worried?
Inside BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors’ million-dollar real-estate buying binge
nypost.com

With cost and accessibility acting as two major barriers to quality care for patients, there is a potential solution to this massive problem: Direct primary care.

The DPC approach, unlike the overly burdensome current system, allows doctors to spend more time with patients instead of filling out paperwork to submit to a third-party payer. And anyone who has been to a doctor’s office in the past few years can attest to the insane amount of time doctors spend filling out mountains of paperwork.

One of the advantages of DPC agreements as opposed to the current health system is that it allows doctors to charge a membership fee for primary care services ranging from $50 to $100 per month for routine health services.

The substantial cost benefits of DPC couldn’t be clearer. According to a study in the American Journal of Managed Care, DPC patients are 52 percent less likely to use services at an expensive hospital than at a traditional private practice.

What’s more, under a DPC model, medical practice overhead can be reduced by as much as 40 percent. This is important because these savings are often passed onto the patients.

Currently, 32 states have approved DPC and 12 states have pending pilot programs that would expand DPC to Medicaid. More than a quarter of a million Americans are using DPC to access quality health care. //

One obstacle to DPC expansion is the quasi-socialist health care system that is filled with corporate cronyism and government overregulation.

Fortunately, the South Carolina Legislature is addressing this issue and introduced legislation that would codify DPC agreements into law. This bill would define DPC and not constitute it as health insurance. By differentiating DPC and health insurance, doctors would be able to continue to offer monthly membership fees in exchange for primary care services.

DPC also removes layers of government red tape and cuts out the health insurance middlemen.

Costochondritis is inflammation of the areas where your upper ribs join with the cartilage that holds them to your breastbone. These areas are called costochondral junctions. The condition causes chest pain, but it’s typically harmless and usually goes away without any treatment. But any chest pain in adults should be taken seriously, so you should be examined and tested for heart disease. //

Chest pain linked to costochondritis usually comes on after exercise, minor trauma, or an upper respiratory infection.

Sharp pain in the front of your chest, near where your breastbone and ribs meet, typically on the left side. It may spread to your back or belly.
Pain when you take a deep breath or cough. It gets better when you stop moving or your breathing is quieter.
Tenderness when you press on your rib joints. If you don’t have this tenderness, you probably don’t have costochondritis.
If costochondritis happens because of an infection after surgery, you’ll have redness, swelling, or pus discharge at the site of the surgery. //

These home remedies may provide relief from costochondritis:

Over-the-counter pain relievers such as nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medications (NSAIDs) like ibuprofen or naproxen as needed
Using local heat or ice to relieve pain
Avoiding unnecessary exercise or activities that make the symptoms worse; avoiding contact sports until there is improvement in symptoms, and then returning to normal activities only as tolerated
Doing stretching exercises //

Costochondritis Outlook
Noninfectious costochondritis will go away on its own, with or without anti-inflammatory treatment. Most people will recover fully.

“Expanding the Supreme Court rights the wrongs the Republicans have done to this great court. Expanding the Supreme Court is equal justice and will ensure equal justice is dispensed to all Americans.”

The reality: The United States Supreme Court is not broken. Rather, the balance on the Court is not currently to the liking of the left. And the “wrongs the Republicans have done” have been comprised solely of operating within constitutional boundaries agreed upon by both parties 232 years ago and a nine-justice limit in place for 152 years, Ed. //

We’ve seen it time and time and again. When Democrats don’t win by the rules, they try to change the rules — and/or cheat, of course. Hillary wins the popular vote in 2016, but loses the Electoral College? Eliminate the Electoral College.

Yet, if 2016 had been a mirror image? If Trump had won the popular vote but lost the Electoral vote? A: Republicans would not have called for the demise of the EC. B: Democrats would have defended the EC to their dying hypocritical breath.

And so? They set about changing as many state election laws across the country between 2016 and 2020 as they could get away with. Yet when Georgia Republicans enact true election reform — which benefits all voters? Cry “Racism!, “Jim Crow!,” and behave as the left is now behaving.

And when the literal law of the land — nine justices on the United States Supreme Court, a number which even liberal-stalwart justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was opposed to changing — doesn’t go your way? You attempt to pack the Court. All in the name of “democracy.”

Ted Cruz encapsulated it, this morning.

“Today’s Democrat Party doesn’t care about undermining the rule of law.

If Democrats pack the Court, our free speech rights go out the window, our religious liberty goes out the window, and the Second Amendment is effectively repealed from the Bill of Rights.”

In January, we learned about a Chinese espionage campaign that exploited four zero-days in Microsoft Exchange. One of the characteristics of the campaign, in the later days when the Chinese probably realized that the vulnerabilities would soon be fixed, was to install a web shell in compromised networks that would give them subsequent remote access. Even if the vulnerabilities were patched, the shell would remain until the network operators removed it.

Now, months later, many of those shells are still in place. And they’re being used by criminal hackers as well.

On Tuesday, the FBI announced that it successfully received a court order to remove “hundreds” of these web shells from networks in the US.

This is nothing short of extraordinary, and I can think of no real-world parallel. //

xcv • April 14, 2021 12:32 PM

@ O.P.
xcv But every courthouse in the United States is running on Microsoft’s legal-industry-specific software products. Lexis-Nexis databases, title deed and recording software, court filing software, etc. So some guy is going to end up in the federal penitentiary, and all the court records will be deleted, altered, or hacked on Microsoft software, and after a few years, nobody can even look up any records as to why the guy’s in prison, but they’re never going to let him out, because he’s been classified as a violent felon in the federal prison population.

It makes me wonder what they classify as “violent crime” or not, because pulling the trigger of a handgun with your finger is no more violent than striking a key on a computer keyboard with the same finger — and consequences no longer matter in court — because modern courts no longer require the third of three elements necessary to convict a crime since the time of the ancient Romans, namely

1. mens rea;
2. actus reus; &
3. noxa rea.

The ancient Romans insisted that if (#1) it wasn’t something you intended to do, or (#2) it wasn’t something you really did, or (#3) you did not really harm anyone — then you didn’t commit a crime, and therefore you could not be convicted of a crime.

Modern courts on the other hand have repealed the classical third necessary element of conviction for crime, and omitted due process by either imposing punishment for harmless or victimless acts, or by falsely imputing harm (noxa) where none exists.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/04/the-fbi-is-now-securing-networks-without-their-owners-permission.html/#comment-372456

Given the present non-existence of any perfect agreement on where applications should store their cached information, I propose a very simple convention that will at least allow such information to be identified effectively. Regardless of where the application decides to (or is configured to) place its cache directory, it should place within this directory a file named:

CACHEDIR.TAG

This file must be an ordinary file, not for example a symbolic link. Additionally, the first 43 octets of this file must consist of the following ASCII header string:

Signature: 8a477f597d28d172789f06886806bc55

Case is important in the header signature, there can be no whitespace or other characters in the file before the 'S', and there is exactly one space character (ASCII code 32 decimal) after the colon. The header string does not have to be followed by an LF or CR/LF in the file in order for the file to be recognized as a valid cache directory tag. The hex value in the signature happens to be the MD5 hash of the string ".IsCacheDirectory". This signature header is required to avoid the chance of an unrelated file named CACHEDIR.TAG being mistakenly interpreted as a cache directory tag by data management utilities, and (for example) causing valuable data not to be backed up.

The content of the remainder of the tag file is currently unspecified, except that it should be a plain text file in UTF-8 encoding, and any line beginning with a hash character ('#') should be treated as a comment and ignored by any software that reads the file.

We will henceforth refer to a file named as specified above, and having the required signature at the beginning of its content, as a cache directory tag.

For the benefit of anyone who happens to find and look at a cache directory tag directly, it is recommended that applications include in the file a comment referring back to this specification. For example:

Signature: 8a477f597d28d172789f06886806bc55
# This file is a cache directory tag created by (application name).
# For information about cache directory tags, see:
#   http://www.brynosaurus.com/cachedir/

'Dirty Jobs' and 'Six Degrees' host Mike Rowe is correct about the negative economic and social effects of the minimum wage.

Over the weekend, while promoting his new Discovery Channel show “Six Degrees,” Mike Rowe shared some thoughts on the push to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour. Appearing on Fox Business, the former “Dirty Jobs” star said he wants “everybody who works hard and plays fair to prosper.”

As the host, executive producer, and creator of “Six Degrees,” which focuses on the interconnectedness of the world throughout history, Rowe added:

I want everybody to be able to support themselves. But if you just pull the money out of midair you’re going to create other problems, like there is a ladder of success that people climb and some of those jobs that are out there for seven, eight, nine dollars an hour, in my view, they’re simply not intended to be careers. They’re not intended to be full-time jobs. They’re rungs on a ladder. //

Rowe’s 2013 “S.W.E.A.T. Pledge” (Skill & Work Ethic Aren’t Taboo) //

Reading now over Rowe’s S.W.E.A.T. pledge, I see I followed it. It wasn’t a pledge “to gratuitous abuse and disenfranchisement.” What Johnson, who mocked the pledge as “bourgeois propaganda” marketing “very basic human needs” misses, is that hard, honest work genuinely satisfies basic human needs. Indeed, that five-cent raise I earned at 14 still brings me more pride than most of my later white-collar job achievements.

My story is not an isolated one, but I also recognize it is not universal, which is why policy and policy debates should not focus on the anecdotal but the reality of economics and unintended consequences. Rowe raised those points, and he is correct.

Minimum-wage jobs are rungs, and if the government offers an “artificially high wage for unskilled jobs,” it takes away the incentives for “more people to learn a skill that’s actually in demand” and are careers that do support families. That reality is no less true just because Rowe once sang opera.

Remember that Russian bounties story with which the media absolutely flayed President Donald Trump?

The fake story claimed that, per U.S. intelligence agencies, supposedly, Russia had offered bounties for killing American forces in Afghanistan. Democrats went crazy, using the story to suggest that somehow Trump, who they painted as a Putin puppet, was not doing anything about this and endangering American troops.

Now that just got officially walked back by U.S. intel.

But on Thursday, the Biden administration announced that U.S. intelligence only had “low to moderate” confidence in the story after all. Translated from the jargon of spyworld, that means the intelligence agencies have found the story is, at best, unproven—and possibly untrue.

Squaretail
an hour ago
Geraldo's predominant character trait is his huge ego. That means he reacts badly and excessively when someone points out that he is wrong. If his base beliefs are wrong, his life, at least his all-important public life, is shown to be tawdry and meaningless. In his mind, he can't be wrong and important at the same time. His reaction to Bongino's facts was a desperate attempt to justify his life and professional existence. Sad and pathetic when you think about it.

The discussion starts with Geraldo speaking as an expert on how police wear their weapons and suggesting the gun should be moved to the non-dominant hand’s side. As Bongino points out, that’s a ridiculously stupid idea. Anyone that has tried to cross-draw knows the problems with it, and that’s specifically true when you might be pinned down on the ground with someone on top of you.

The reason police wear their guns where they wear them is so they can access them and shoot them accurately in situations that may be completely out of control. If you’ve ever shot a gun single-handed with your non-dominant hand, you understand. It’s not that it’s not possible, but it’s not ideal, and “not ideal” can be the difference between life and death in policing. That includes possibly hitting a bystander due to decreased accuracy.

Geraldo also tried to claim that black people are killed at twice the rate of white people by police per capita, insinuating there’s some kind of racial animus driving those numbers. What that ignores is the increased number of police encounters due to higher crime rates among certain demographics. There is no evidence, for example, that the warrant being served on Daunte Wright was motivated by racism. The same is true for the attempted arrests of George Floyd and Jacob Blake, to name a few. That doesn’t give license for police to go outside of what is legal and proper, but it is valuable context when you consider the predominant narrative being pushed by groups like Black Lives Matter.

Bongino rightly points out that there is no data to back up the idea that there is a plague of police officers hunting down and murdering black men. Geraldo then launches into an obscenity-filled tirade about how Bongino is why protesters have the rage they do. Apparently, facts make them outraged?

Look, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Be skeptical of police power. To do so is actually a good thing because you should be skeptical of all government power institutions. But that does not mean a-factual narratives not backed by data get to form an excuse for rioting and stupidity, nor should they shape our public debate. Bongino was right on the facts here. That’s what should matter.

National Review’s David Harsanyi dug up a quote from the Roosevelt era that pretty much sums up the whole thing.

FDR’s Court-packing scheme, wrote the Democrat-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee in 1937, “is a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.” //

Today, modern progressives, intent on centralizing state power and nullifying constitutional protections for the minority, disagree. After spending four years delegitimizing the Supreme Court, they’ve convinced Joe Biden to create the “Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court,” which is another step in normalizing the idea of packing the Supreme Court.

As a general matter, Potter could be convicted of the charge each of the following was proven by evidence beyond a reasonable doubt:

1. Her conduct in withdrawing her service weapon was “culpably negligent”.
2. That negligence created an unreasonable risk, and
3. In doing so she CONSCIOUSLY took the chance of causing death or great bodily harm.
   Maybe because of my capitalization and emphasis you might detect a hint of where I think there might be a problem in the case against her. //

A Glock and a Taser do not feel the same in your hand — and in some respects, the design of the Taser is purposely so.

But I want to give a H/T here to my friend Jazz Shaw over at Hotair who was the first I saw to raise the issue of “slips and capture” and how it might play into the analysis of Potter’s mistake.

What is “slips and capture”? I’m guessing that is a very common question, and one we will hear more about in the weeks and months ahead. //

“Capture” is the term used for when the officer’s attention is “captured” by an outside distraction. In the same moment, a high level of discernment is necessary to engage in a specific and precise form of conduct — in this case, making an intentional move to grab the Taser rather than their handgun. But the distraction takes away from the ability to engage in the higher-ordered thinking at a specific moment in time when needed, and the actor — in this case Potter — “slips” in the processing of what she needs to do and instead follows a well-practiced course of activity without the brain making an appropriate “attention check” before an action takes place that cannot be recalled. The action which is unintentionally taken is normally that which is the most habitually reinforced by practice — i.e., drawing her handgun.

He was not pulled over for an air freshener as the family claimed, but rather, the registration of the vehicle was expired. Upon learning who the driver was, police were made aware that an outstanding warrant existed for Wright’s arrest. //

Wright was accused of aggravated robbery stemming from a 2019 incident in which he allegedly choked a woman and held her at gunpoint in an attempt to steal $820 dollars. After being released on bail, the warrant was issued and his bail revoked because Wright was in possession of an illegal gun.

Japan’s government has backed a plan to dilute the processed water and release it into the sea.

The government says the process meets international standards, and it has been endorsed by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“Releasing into the ocean is done elsewhere,” IAEA’s director general, Rafael Mariano Grossi, has said. “It’s not something new. There is no scandal here.”

The release is not likely to begin for at least two years and will take decades.

A government spokesman, Katsunobo Kato, said the dilution would reduce tritium levels to well below standards set domestically and by the World Health Organization for drinking water, with IAEA supervision. //

Environmental groups like Greenpeace, which opposes nuclear power, say radioactive materials like carbon-14 that remain in the water can “be easily concentrated in the food chain”.

They allege that accumulated doses over time could damage DNA, and want to see the water stored until technology is developed to improve filtration. //

But “there is consensus among scientists that the impact on health is minuscule”, he told AFP.

Still, “it can’t be said the risk is zero, which is what causes controversy”.

Geraldine Thomas, chair of molecular pathology at Imperial College London and an expert on radiation, said tritium “does not pose a health risk at all – and particularly so when you factor in the dilution factor of the Pacific Ocean”.

She said carbon-14 was also not a health risk, arguing that chemical contaminants in seawater like mercury should concern consumers more “than anything that comes from the Fukushima site”.

On eating Fukushima seafood, “I would have no hesitation whatsoever,” she added.

Last week, Google pulled a video of DeSantis on March 18 discussing COVID-19 with medical scientists Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Dr. Scott Atlas, who all hail from elite institutions — Stanford University, Harvard University, and Oxford University. All but Gupta, who is based in the United Kingdom, also joined DeSantis’s April 12 press conference to respond to Google’s ban.

“For science to work, you have to have an open exchange of ideas,” Bhattacharya said Monday. “If you’re going to make an argument that something is misinformation, you should provide an actual argument. You can’t just take it down and say, ‘Oh, it’s misinformation’ without actually giving a reason. And saying, ‘Look it disagrees with the CDC’ is not enough of a reason. Let’s hear the argument, let’s see the evidence that YouTube used to decide it was misinformation. Let’s have a debate. Science works best when we have an open debate.”

“I’m very worried about the future of science because science is dependent on free exchange of ideas and it has been for 300 years now. So if this continues, this kind of attitude, the censoring of scientific views, then I think we have reached the end of 200 years of Enlightenment,” Kulldorff said Monday. //

“The lockdowns are the single biggest public health mistake in history,” Bhattacharya said on the banned March 18 panel. He said lockdowns are psychologically compelling to rich societies terrified of death, but are not only ineffective at stopping disease and death, they also make both worse. He noted a few minutes later:

The international evidence and the American evidence is clear: The lockdowns have not stopped the spread of the disease in any measurable way. The disease spreads on aerosol by droplets, it’s a respiratory disease. It’s very difficult to stop. The idea of the lockdown is incredibly beguiling… but humans are not like that. What’s happened instead, we’ve exposed working class, we’ve exposed poor people at higher rates. We’ve created this illusion that we can control disease spread when in fact we cannot. //

Lockdowns Are Bad for People, But Good for Google
Keeping people at home indefinitely has also drastically increased people’s screen time, which provides Google more ad revenue and influence over how people think and the information they receive. Screen use is correlated with obesity, and obesity puts people at a dramatically higher risk from COVID-19.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, 78 percent of those hospitalized with COVID were obese, and lockdowns have directly contributed to a huge increase in First World obesity, especially among children. Among people who have died while COVID-positive, according to the CDC, 94 percent had other significant medical conditions, including diseases exacerbated by obesity: diabetes, cardiac arrest, and heart failure.

“The laptop class, they have protected themselves through the lockdowns while we have thrown the working class under the bus,” Kulldorff said during the panel discussion Google banned. //

On Monday, DeSantis noted the irony of Google banning professional discussion from doctors whose scientific research has been cited by Google Scholar more than 10,000 times, more than 17,000 times, and more than 25,000 times, respectively. //

Three of the four doctors on the March 18 panel authored the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement now signed by nearly 14,000 medical scientists and more than 42,000 health practitioners, as well as nearly 800,000 “concerned citizens,” that promotes based on the scientific evidence the policy of focused protection in response to COVID, instead of ineffective mass lockdowns.