Since its beginnings, assisted reproduction has wreaked havoc on women’s bodies and minds, deliberately left innocent children without mothers or fathers, made human existence transactional, effectively doomed millions of unborn lives to frozen orphanages, and created a moral and ethical minefield of problems for generations.

Good intention without good guardrails is exactly the kind of formula required to turn utopic fantasies into dystopian nightmares. Assisted reproduction and artificial intelligence could both use some good guardrails right about now but instead, they are heralded by those in power.

There is a belief among the rich and academic that science and technology can create capabilities beyond humans’ current physical and mental limitations. What was once an obsession with transcending death, however, has shifted in recent years to become an obsession with transcending life. //

Assisted reproductive technologies and AI have been named as tools to advance that agenda because both stem from a desire to distance and even detach us from the natural limits of our bodies and minds. People seek reproductive technologies to outpace their biological clocks or navigate the infertility hurdles they unexpectedly face. People seek artificial intelligence because it can perform research and tasks faster than humanly possible.

In reality, that is not a sustainable way to live. Humans need physical and intellectual connections with each other, and both of those are threatened by the rise of ART and AI.

Yesterday in these pages Margot Cleveland rightly noted that the most damning finding in the 306-page report from Special Counsel John Durham is not necessarily the FBI’s scandalous Crossfire Hurricane investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016, but that the egregious abuses of power detailed in the report cannot be remedied “absent a curing of the corrupted hearts and minds of law enforcement and intelligence agencies.”

For all the FBI’s blatant partisanship, its disregard of exculpatory evidence, and its outright deception to secure FISA warrants on Trump campaign associates, writes Cleveland, “what should terrify the country is not the catalog of malfeasance the special counsel recited — for mistakes and even gross failures can be corrected — but that Durham warned of corrupted hearts and minds, unfaithful to the people and their Constitution.”

For his part, Durham didn’t recommend any changes to FBI guidelines or policies, because no amount of reform will be sufficient if the people in charge feel free to disregard guidelines and policies whenever they see fit to do so. As such, wrote Durham, “the answer is not the creation of new rules but a renewed fidelity to the old. The promulgation of additional rules and regulations to be learned in yet more training sessions would likely prove to be a fruitless exercise if the FBI’s guiding principles of ‘Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity’ are not engrained in the hearts and minds of those sworn to meet the FBI’s mission of ‘Protect[ing] the American People and uphold[ing] the Constitution of the United States.’” //

That people like former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, along with the entire cast of villains and liars in the Durham report, rose to positions of such power, and then proceeded to abuse that power by arrogating to themselves the right to decide who should be president — a right that belongs solely to the American people — says something about the state of our republic.

What it says is this: We have produced, and are still producing, a totally corrupt elite bereft of any sense of “Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity,” to say nothing of moral virtue or the common good.

Put bluntly, an elite like that makes self-government in a republic of free citizens impossible. It also means that the elite will work to corrupt ordinary Americans, eroding their respect for the rule of law and fidelity to the Constitution. As the elites go, so eventually the entire country goes.

Seen in this light, the Durham report should be understood as a dire warning about the fate of our country. John Adams issued a similar warning when he penned his famous line, that “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” George Washington did the same in his farewell address when he said, “’Tis substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” //

The founders knew what we seem to have forgotten: Without a virtuous people, without citizens and leaders who believe in objective moral truth and understand themselves to be bound by it, we cannot be a free people, and we cannot sustain a republic. Laws alone, to say nothing of guidelines and policies, are not enough to support and sustain self-government. You need citizens who will respect and uphold the law, and leaders who actually believe in the principle of self-government — something our current crop of leaders clearly rejects.

Without a morally virtuous citizenry, the founders also knew we would eventually become a society not of free men and women, but of slaves to a tyrannical regime. That’s the real warning embedded in the Durham report. The corruption of the FBI, the CIA, and the entire federal intelligence community, which led to the Russia-collusion hoax and almost took down Trump’s campaign, and then his presidency, cannot be fixed with new rules and policies. It’s a moral failing, moral corruption, and it can only be fixed by a spiritual renewal in America, by a return to — let’s be honest — a civic culture shaped and guided by Christian moral virtue.

Good Samaritans don’t stand by and do nothing while others are threatened and attacked. //

Law and order are prerequisites for any positive vision, conservative or liberal, for America. An ideology that disdains order disdains the good of the citizens it aspires to rule, and will constantly sabotage its own stated goals. //

It is oppressive and unjust when George Soros-funded district attorneys refuse to prosecute crimes. It is a violation of social justice when those in power allow rioters to run free and destroy homes and businesses. It is wicked of government officials to permit violent men to threaten, harass, and assault innocent citizens. Yes, governmental efforts to enforce order will always be flawed, as government employees are imperfect. We should keep a close eye on police and other agents of the state and strive for accountability. But civilization cannot exist without order, so of course people will cheer those private citizens who step up to try to protect order when the legal authorities have abdicated their responsibilities to maintain it. //

People have a right, and sometimes even a duty, to defend themselves and others, and they do not always have the luxury of carefully calibrating their response to the sensibilities of New York Times writers. Trying to restrain a violent, mentally ill man, or protect oneself against an armed mob, is necessarily risky and imprecise. Self-defense isn’t a video game. //

Loving our neighbors means protecting them against violence. And we should even seek the good of those who threaten or commit violence due to drug abuse and mental illness, which means treating their addictions and illnesses when possible and keeping them away from those whom they might harm. Thus, it was no kindness to allow Neely to degenerate into a violent man who randomly threatened and attacked people. //

Letting the mentally ill roam free while they decline into violent menaces to everyone else is unjust both to their victims and to them. Put simply, law and order are social justice, and so a left-liberalism that refuses to maintain order will rightly be rejected by voters, and its projects will be ruined.

Jesus did not tell the parable of the Good Samaritan to teach us to stand by and do nothing while others are threatened and attacked.

Manufactured racial animosity is only made possible by out-of-context clips and willing accomplices in Big Tech and corporate media.

He also judged that the right was insufficiently concerned about social justice. Although it would be inaccurate to frame him as a champion of third-wave critical theory, he accepted enough of the second-wave progressive framework to take certain leftist narratives about race and power imbalances for granted. This inevitably created more blind spots and misplaced priorities in his sociocultural analysis, leading many conservatives to look elsewhere for more useful guidance. And the sad irony is that for all Keller aimed at fundamentalists and their influence, it is fundamentalists who have historically been on the front lines of caring for the poor and evangelizing nations. //

Yet, to remember him solely as a flawed thinker is to trivialize the sum total of a man who loved his family and friends faithfully, who never brought the shame of scandal to the bride of Christ, and who in his final days modeled how every Christian should face death — calmly, courageously, with eyes fixed firmly on the joy set before him.

Benedict XVI’s last words, reportedly, were “Jesus, I love you.” Tim Keller, in his final hours of home hospice care, said “I can’t wait to see Jesus.” May we all be so eager and ready to meet our maker, when our time comes.

USS Vincennes in Disappointment Bay, Antarctica, during the Wilkes Expedition, circa 1845-1878, attributed to Capt. Charles Wilkes. (Public Domain) //

On Aug. 18, 1838, the United States Exploring Expedition (also known as the Ex. Ex. or the Wilkes Expedition) departed Hampton Roads, Virginia to embark on a four-year surveying and exploring mission that would also be the last circumnavigation of the globe powered fully by sail. //

The Wilkes Expedition produced 241 charts, mapping out 280 Pacific islands, including for the first time the full group of Fiji Islands. The expedition also mapped out 800 miles of the Oregon coast, 100 miles of the Columbia River, a land route from Oregon to San Francisco, and arguably the most consequential, 1,500 miles of the Antarctic coastline, which confirmed it as the world’s seventh continent.

From their adventures, the group collected more than 4,000 ethnographic pieces, which was a third more than those collected from Cook’s three voyages. The naturalist, Titian Peale, collected 2,150 birds, 134 mammals, and 588 species of fish. The geologist, James Dana, collected 300 fossil species, 400 coral species, and 1,000 crustacea species. There were more than 200 entomological and zoological species collected in jars, and more than 5,000 larger specimens placed in large envelopes. Among the horticultural and botanical collections, William Rich, William Brackenridge, and Charles Pickering assembled an astounding 50,000 specimens of 10,000 different species, with an additional 1,000 living plants and approximately 650 seeds belonging to other species of plants.

As the tens of thousands of items were ushered into the country, the United States government struggled to place them. Poinsett and Paulding decided to place the collections in the 265-foot-long Great Hall of the Patent Office Building in Washington, D.C. The following decade, more than 100,000 people annually visited the “Collection of the Exploring Expedition” in the Patent Office.

In 1858, the Collection found a new and permanent home inside the Smithsonian Institution, now the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex. “Today,” according to the Smithsonian Institution, “the specimens constitute the core of nearly every collection in every scientific department in the National Museum of Natural History.”

A bestselling author who stepped down as Redeemer’s senior pastor in 2017, Tim always had something interesting, wry, witty, or wise to say. He had an uncanny ability to disagree without being disagreeable—an increasingly lost art today.

Despite pressure from numerous camps and causes, I also appreciated Tim’s unbending commitment to orthodox Christianity. Whether it was holding fast to a biblical understanding of human sexuality or his support for the sanctity of life, he was unwavering and unapologetic.

This courage and boldness should strengthen fellow Christians’ own resolve as we wade into the culture with our convictions and invite conversation and debate.

New research has found that smelly armpits may turn some people into a mosquito magnet.

This is apparently the reason that some people are so plagued by the annoying critters — while others get off scot-free, according to scientists.

So, it’s not a good practice to allow direct root login via SSH session and recommend to create non root accounts with sudo access. Whenever root access needed, first logged in as normal user and then use su to switch over to root user. To disable direct SSH root logins, follow our below article that shows how to disable and limit root login in SSH.

Disable SSH Root Login and Limit SSH Access
However, this guide shows a simple way to know when someone logged in as root or normal user it should send an email alert notification to the specified email address along with the IP address of last login. //

 echo 'ALERT - Root Shell Access (server) on:' `date` `who` | mail -s "Alert: Root Access from `who | cut -d'(' -f2 | cut -d')' -f1`" name@example.com

Alloys are listed in the order of the potential they exhibit in flowing sea water. Certain alloys may become active and exhibit a potential near -0.5 volts in low velocity or poorly aerated water, and at shielded areas.

Alloys are listed in the order of the potential they exhibit in flowing sea water. Certain alloys indicated by the symbol (symbol) in low velocity or poorly aerated water, and at shielded areas, may become active and exhibit a potential near -0.5 volts.

Gorsuch has this right. The Title 42 restrictions have long since run their course and the were being used as a proxy in the fight over the Biden White House’s lawless immigration policy. At best they were questionable. They were probably unconstitutional when President Trump put them into force. It seems like at least one justice has learned the right lesson from what we went through.

Jordan requested Tristan Leavitt further explain from a Congressional perspective, what constitutes a whistleblower:

In light of all these obstacles for FBI whistleblowers, you think Congress would do everything that it could to welcome their disclosures here. But FBI employees coming to Congress have unfortunately been shamefully treated by Democrats on this committee. It’s one thing to hear allegations and find them unpersuasive or even distasteful. An office can even ignore the allegations if they choose, that is their prerogative. But to go out and actively smear the individuals making disclosures, is far worse. That’s what the Democrats on this committee did when they released the March 2nd report entitled, “GOP Witnesses: What Their Disclosures Indicate About the State of the Republican Investigations.”

That report was inaccurate, both on the law and on the facts. The law doesn’t define the term “whistleblower.” Instead, it protects from retaliation individuals who engage in protected activity. For over a century, simply making disclosures of any information to Congress has been a protected activity. Furthermore, an appropriations rider in effect at this time prohibits money from paying the salary of any federal employee who prohibits or prevents any other federal employee such as FBI whistleblowers from communicating with Congress. The Democrats’ report denied whistleblower status to individuals engaged in the precise activity the legislative branch has considered protected since 1912. The report’s reliance on evidence for whistleblower status is also misplaced. Simply communicating a reasonable belief of misconduct is protected whistleblower activity under the law. This applies regardless of whether the whistleblower produces evidence at that time backing up their allegations. Only protecting whistleblowers disclosures accompanied by conclusive evidence, as the Democrats seem to require, would have disastrous consequences for retaliation throughout the federal government. My experience working for Congress was that whistleblowers brought allegations, and where the committees found those allegations worthy of further follow-up and congressional action, we conducted investigations.

No one expects a private citizen to investigate a crime before going to the police. And we didn’t expect the whistleblower to investigate their own agency.

It’s also essentially how the law for remedying retaliation through the MSBP is set up. Where making a non-frivolous allegation, leads to discovery, interviews, and more. Simply put, the burden isn’t on the whistleblower to produce the evidence at the outset. That’s why there’s an investigative process.

Despite there being serious holes in their version of events, the couple demanded that the Backgrid photo agency turn over any photos taken that night by their freelance photographers. This is where things get good.

In America, as I’m sure you know, property belongs to the owner of it: Third parties cannot just demand it be given to them, as perhaps Kings can do.

Perhaps you should sit down with your client and advise them that his English rules of royal prerogative to demand that the citizenry hand over their property to the Crown were rejected by this country long ago. We stand by our founding fathers.

Fought Law, Law 1
2 hours ago edited
The US Constitution has fewer words than the role of Juliet in Shakespeare's play. She can't remember the gist of what teen girls can memorize verbatim?

But then she will only have the power to incarcerate people for up to the rest of their lives.

Is no one prepping them? Kennedy has been embarrassing them for years.

Culture analyst and YouTuber Misha Petrov gathered some of these responses from American women, noting that these Western feminists are actually insulting these foreign women by claiming they’re uneducated and weak-minded due to their lack of feminist mentality and that these feminists who see themselves as being better than men are also seeing themselves as better than other women.n

Petrov brings up an excellent point and her entire video about the paradox of feminists hating men while still focusing their entire lives around them should be viewed in its entirety (and possibly written about in a separate article) but for now, I want to address the accusations about men being “predatory.”

The idea that men are taking advantage of “dumb” foreign women is wholly out of touch with reality, and it’s a take born out of the ignorance modern women seem to have about men. As I’ve written before, too many young women are taught all their lives what to expect from men but never taught what to deliver in return. This can have a nasty side-effect of dehumanizing men, making them seem like tools meant for the convenience of women than people with their own emotions, hurts, wants, and dreams. //

Men — whom I can personally report are, in fact, human — see this and vacate the very toxic Western dating pool, abandoning Western women to the life of isolation from men they’ve been asking for all along to the chagrin of these women. //

A man desires a partner, not a Queen to serve. He desires stability, and to give and receive love in a relationship that works both ways. He wants to earn for his family, and have the appreciation of his wife as he appreciates her for tending to the home he provides for her and their children utilizing basic homemaking skills. There’s nothing wrong with these desires, in fact, they’re incredibly wholesome.

Then the feminist woman must step back and ask herself what she brings to the table. If the answer is nothing but “me” then what use is she to a man? If that makes her angry, then she should ask if she would be okay with being in a relationship with a person who continues to be useless to her by her own definition.

Any Republican who follows what the 2017 GOP did at the beginning of the hoax is an accomplice to Democrats’ radical institutional takeover. //

When Special Counsel John Durham released his explosive 306-page report about the Russian-collusion hoax on Monday, he merely confirmed what many of us already knew: the Obama Administration colluded with Democrats and the corporate media and weaponized the FBI to take down former President Donald Trump before he was even elected to office.

For years, the government, sworn to protect the people, created a partisan scheme to take down an American citizen because he threatened the deep state’s near-total grip on power. Durham’s report was critical because it exposed the years of corruption and “confirmation bias” fueling the “Russia Russia Russia” lies.

Durham uncovered several red flags that should have dissuaded the FBI from opening its ‘seriously flawed’ Crossfire Hurricane investigation.

Elon Musk @elonmusk
·
Replying to @krassenstein
You assume they are good intentions. They are not. He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.
10:14 PM · May 15, 2023 //

Elon Musk may not be a conservative. He has his issues, like all of us. But he’s a considered thinker, who seems to be learning fast about the dangers of the left. He’s spoken about the threat to civilization in the past posed by the “woke mind virus.”

Musk showed again that he does have some understanding of the left during an interview he gave to CNBC on Tuesday. //

Musk was asked about why he made his comment about Soros during the interview and he laughed at the interviewer, David Faber. “I think that’s true, that’s my opinion,” Musk responded. //

But why share it if people might not agree with you? Faber asked. What if advertisers on Twitter or Tesla buyers might not agree?

Boy, isn’t that a liberal in a nutshell? Why not share it if it’s his opinion? Is he supposed to go easy on what he thinks about Soros because it will upset the left? Maybe it’s more important to point out that Soros is doing harm to society. The look on Musk’s face in response was priceless — like, are you nuts?

He paraphrases Inigo Montoya in “The Princess Bride”: “Offer me power, offer me money, I don’t care.” To drive the point home, Musk declared: “I’ll say what I want to say, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.”

The importance of last night’s performance can’t be overstated. For years the anti-American left that has opposed Ballistic Missile Defense ever since President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” speech has claimed that Patriot doesn’t work and that an anti-missile system can’t hit either a hypersonic missile or a missile with some maneuverability. //

Last night should put to rest, for once and for all, the bullsh** slung by the “arms control” kibitzers who have made tenure and a lot of money chanting “you can’t hit a bullet with a bullet” for 40 years. It is apparent that Patriot is a viable system for defending a city against a variety of simultaneous missile attacks. Patriot’s performance demonstrates it has capabilities that haven’t been advertised and lead one to think that THAAD can do a lot that we don’t know about.

As I write this, another Russian missile attack is targeting Ukrainian cities. Kiev is not among them.