According to the Washington Post, attorneys sent letters to the Department of Justice and the Delaware attorney general requesting investigations of several people who either accessed or disseminated information from the laptop that he allegedly dropped off at the computer repair shop in Delaware. //

This is all sort of quietly hilarious because at this point they’re more than a little late. You can’t lock the door after the horse has bolted out of the barn and that happened a long time ago. The laptop material is everywhere.

But on top of that, hasn’t the left been telling us this was Russian disinformation for two years? //

What about those 51 former intelligence community officials who told us they thought was Russian disinformation?

But let’s not forget Joe Biden himself pushing that. //

So now that the lawyers are claiming that somehow people accessed and disseminate private information, it sounds like they’re acknowledging it’s real and that’s pretty funny after all the prior comments.

Mainstream society has been doing its absolute best to eliminate the common garden-variety boy from society. The rambunctious, exploratory, adventurous, and action-centric boy was the seed that grew into the masculine man that would drive civilization, right societal wrongs, and lead people with confidence into a better future.

Raising a boy isn’t necessarily easy. They’re no strangers to danger and find ways to hurt themselves unnecessarily, sometimes for the fun of it. They also love mischief, and will naturally gravitate toward it. Whether the mischief they get up to is good-natured or malicious is based on how well they were raised, but according to our now gyno-centric society, there is no such thing as good boyhood mischief.

Boys have been treated as defective girls for decades now. The goal was to make the boy extinct and turn him into something a bit more pliable and obedient. Schools would see to it that boys were punished for doing things normal boys would do, such as fighting imaginary bad guys on the playground by throwing imaginary grenades at them.

Sure enough, the boy has been lessened, especially with a severe lack of masculine figures to look up to thanks to our entertainment industry becoming so feminized. //

We need to bring back boys. They’re clearly good for society, and not just in the future.

Joseph Lear @josephmljr
Nah dawg, it’s nihilism. And the dread of daily life and existence. That’s what the church has failed to address. Politics only goes to far. We need metaphysics because everyone’s stuck in the abyss of immanence.

Dr. Kevin M. Young @kevinmyoung
·
Jan 19
The GREAT ABANDONMENT of the Church is caused more by its response to:

1. Donald Trump
2. George Floyd, BLM, and CRT
3. COVID

than it is

1. Deconstruction
2. Rejection of Jesus
3. The chance to sleep in

They had to leave the Church to keep their faith.

12:25 PM · Jan 20, 2023 //

“Nihilism” is a philosophical term (with a broad and complex history) that doesn’t really show up in everyday conversation (unless you’re a diehard fan of The Big Lebowski), so let me explain it as simply as I can. It comes from the Latin nihil which simply means “nothing.” So we might say “Nihilism” is “Nothing-ism,” or the belief that everything is fundamentally nothing—that all of existence is bereft of purpose, meaning, and substance, and that it’s therefore absurd. To be a nihilist is to believe that nothingness has the first and the last word about everything. It’s to believe that your existence is random and arbitrary, and that whatever awaits us in the future, or after death, is an eternal vacuous abyss. Maybe we should be depressed, or maybe we should laugh. Or maybe we should laugh depressingly.

I think nihilism strikes all of us as a bleak outlook on life (to put it mildly). But I also think it resonates on some level with the vast majority of us. Whether we’re Christians or not, there’s the gnawing sense, this haunting feeling that, really, nothing matters. It’s the existential malaise we find ourselves in here in the West. //

So, sure, people may use political compromise, anti-BLM rhetoric, or any hot button cultural issue as an excuse to leave the church, but really they’re leaving the church because the church is failing to issue a rejoinder to the dread of daily life we all feel. Not only has the church failed to confront nihilism, but the church is also itself nihilistic. It’s nihilistic precisely because it has failed to identify nihilism as the problem we are facing in the West. We end up throwing punches at the shadows cast by the thing itself. We don’t dare turn around and face the reality of our situation, because we’re afraid our anemic Christianity can’t really stand up to the challenge. So the church has had to adopt Trumpian politics (at least in Evangelical circles) to stave off and hide its own sense of absurdity.

The thing that Kevin from Twitter fails to recognize is that the liberal protestant church is in a much worse position that the Evangelicals are. The Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, and the Lutherans are hemorrhaging people not because they’ve preached MAGA but because they’ve preached nothing.

Back in 2003, David Bentley Hart wrote a piece called “Christ or Nothing,” in which he claims that the options set before us in the West are either faith in Christ or “an unshakeable, if often unconscious, faith in nothing, or nothingness as such.” And that’s the situation we continue to find ourselves in. No one is tempted by Islam. People aren’t running to become Buddhist monks. They dabble in witchcraft, rubbing crystals and burning sage in their living rooms not because they think it does something, but because it’s nothing.

So how does the church proceed as we continue to bleed the nihilists from our nihilistic churches? Here are four concrete steps we can take:

1. Invite people to be baptized as an alternative to suicide.
2. Preach: "God chose even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are.”
3. Fence the Lord’s Supper to remind people that the bread and the cup are not crystals and sage.
4. Delete Tiktok.

Washington Free Beacon @FreeBeacon
·
Q: “Judge, tell me what article V of the Constitution does?”

Biden judicial nominee: “Article V is not coming to mind at the moment.”

“How about article II?”

Nominee: “Neither is Article II”

11:05 AM · Jan 26, 2023 //

Igor Bobic @igorbobic
·
Durbin says he’s confident that Charnelle Bjelkengren, Biden nominee who was stumped by Kennedy over the Constitution, will be confirmed.

“The honest answer is, there aren’t many members of the Judiciary committee who can answer all those questions,” he said
12:38 PM · Jan 31, 2023 //

Sen. John Kennedy shamed the Democrats again when he said in response, “If you want to be an auto mechanic, you gotta know what a spark plug is.”

At the end of 2022, climate startup Make Sunsets announced it had launched two payloads of reflective sulfur into the New Mexico sky as proof of concept for its planet-cooling technology. By filling the sky with sun-reflective sulfur, the company hopes to attack climate change directly by simply reducing the world’s temperature — and it’s hoping to make a fortune in the process by selling carbon credits to greenhouse gas emitters.

But because blocking out the sun would produce catastrophic consequences for food and energy production and even human health, these credits would have to include both the “cost” of each ton of carbon dioxide offset by the sulfur and the negative effects of less sunlight reaching the Earth. Once accounting for the damage from blocking our sun, it’s likely Make Sunrise’s credits are worth less than zero and are a net liability for humanity that could, if scaled, cause significant damage to our planet.

To prevent financial fraud and ecological catastrophe, including acid rain, the Biden administration must take immediate action to shut the company’s operations down for good.

Often the path of least resistence. Here's some ideas that assume that your management is set in concrete on this, and simply won't be moved from having their own Super Special Just for Me Status Reports. Cause... let's face it... sometimes status reports are not about status, they are about ego. Here's some tips to minimizing work

• Never provide more than they want. State it clearly, concisely and unambiguously.. but that often means figuring out what the manager thinks of as "clear", "concise" and "unambiguous".

• Do not provide extra info unless you need them to take action. And then, consider whether you want it in a status report, or a phone call. Some of this is knowing where the status goes. They are tremendously useful red flags when you know who they will go to and how the reader will be reading it.

• Due date is usually the LAST date - I have never heard a manager say "hey, you gave me status too early!!!" - minimize the context switch and send status when you've finished the last reportable thing for that project.

• Keep a secret one true status report - It doesn't matter if it makes sense only to you - a status report that lets you build the others quickly will save a lot of time. It is also a wonderful thing if you work in a high-audit field where people with long lists of questions come to you asking to to prove that you know or did what you said you knew or did.

But of all the mysteries and maybes surrounding the Dodo, there is one question that has intrigued me for years, and in the face of the tragedy of its demise it may seem callous or cruel, but--What did a Dodo taste like?

The APD-D series Automatic Pressurization Dehydrator is designed for reliable pressurization of elliptical waveguide, coaxial cable and rigid transmission line systems. Dry pressurized air in the distribution system ensures that condensation is avoided and optimal system performance is achieved.

The dehydrator includes a self-contained completely automated air drying system that utilizes a pressure swing moisture adsorption cycle to provide pressurized dry air while continuously purging the collected moisture to the atmosphere. This eliminates the need for replacement or manual reactivation of the desiccant and makes our APD-D series dehydrators ideal for unattended operation, even at remote sites.

The dehydration system is completely automatic, with no need for periodic media replacement or reactivation. These units are capable of years of trouble-free service when properly installed, operated and maintained.

anon-95jb
18 minutes ago
Fact of the matter is that trucks and SUVs SAVE LIVES - let's have a look at those statistics: https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/study-shows-how-death-rates-for-drivers-vary-by-car-size/

Deaths per million registered vehicle years:
Cars: 48
Pickup trucks: 29
SUVs: 25
Minivans: 22

Study Shows How Death Rates for Drivers Vary by Car Size

Luxury SUVs had the lowest death rates in the three-year study by the highway safety research organization. Small cars had the highest. //

The IIHS study, which reviewed makes, models, and vehicle categories for 147,324 driver fatalities, provides an additional data point for safety-conscious consumers shopping for cars, to complement already available crash-test data and lists of available safety equipment. Crash tests are meant to compare vehicles within a specific class, the IIHS says. The death rates over time are one way to evaluate how cars and trucks in a variety of sizes compare against each other. //

Death rates are per million registered vehicle years, as indicated.

Cars: 48
Minivans: 22
SUVs: 25
Pickup trucks: 29

After a 20-year career as a tech reporter for CNET and the public radio program Marketplace, Molly Wood has come to see the climate crisis as an engineering problem requiring a lot more investment. In one of her last journalism projects, she produced the acclaimed documentary podcast “How We Survive” for Marketplace. //

She says framing the climate crisis as an engineering problem gave her a path to explore resilience, adaptation and solutions.

“That's why I called that series ‘How We Survive’ because the eight-episode podcast was the culmination of about four years of ongoing reporting under that name. And it really was a very literal approach to, okay, well, how are we not gonna die when things start to get more and more terrible.”

Now, she’s moved out of journalism and into venture capital, where she sees greater potential for climate solutions through focused investments. “Money can actually enable a solution to be born,” she says.

“We always talk about how capitalism is the disaster, it is the market failure, it's the thing that's created this problem. Greed is the reason that we’ll never get out of it,” she says. “But also, [the climate crisis] seems like kind of a big business opportunity.”

But after the birth of Kondo’s third child in 2021, she came to an important realization about the supposed “need” to keep a home tidy “at all times.” And as the WaPo recently reported, she’s admitted that it’s okay to have a messy home because sometimes priorities change:

Kondo says her life underwent a huge change after she had her third child, and external tidying has taken a back seat to the business of life. “My home is messy, but the way I am spending my time is the right way for me at this time at this stage of my life,” she said through an interpreter at a recent media webinar and virtual tea ceremony.

[…]

Kondo says that, for many, the perfectly organized space is not realistic. “Up until now, I was a professional tidier, so I did my best to keep my home tidy at all times,” she said at the event. “I have kind of given up on that in a good way for me. Now I realize what is important to me is enjoying spending time with my children at home.”

“The dose makes the poison,” as they say. So just how many days of consecutive Tylenol consumption are too many for a pregnant mother? That’s not clear. The general principle seems to be that the more Tylenol a woman takes, and especially the longer she takes it, the higher the risk for her baby or babies of developing autism or ADHD. The 2016 Spanish study researchers wrote that “These [autism and ADHD] associations seem to be dependent on the frequency of exposure.” And, as University of Texas Southwestern OB/GYN Dr. Robyn Horsager-Boehrer pointed out, none of the studies reviewed in the 2018 meta-analysis found an increased risk of ADHD when mothers used Tylenol for a week or less. //

While not a research study, in 2021, the journal Nature Reviews Endocrinology published a consensus statement* signed by more than 90 researchers, scientists, and clinicians, cautioning pregnant women to limit their use of Tylenol. The statement, which listed more than 160 references as evidence, read:

“We recognize that limited medical alternatives exist to treat pain and fever; however, we believe the combined weight of animal and human scientific evidence is strong enough for pregnant women to be cautioned by health professionals against its indiscriminate use, both as a single ingredient and in combination with other medications….Packaging should include warning labels including these recommendations.”

The statement signers recommend pregnant women take Tylenol “cautiously at the lowest effective dose for the shortest possible time” //

Differentiating correlation from causation

A 2017 position statement of the Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine, which issues practice guidelines for high-risk pregnancy specialists, called the research thus far “inconclusive.” While it’s true that research to date does not definitively establish causation, meaning that it doesn’t spell out ‘this amount of Tylenol use can definitely cause autism or ADHD in offspring,’ those raising the alarm point out that pregnant women deserve to know about the possibility of a connection because it may impact their decision to take Tylenol or not.

Is Tylenol during pregnancy better than other pain medications?

The USA Today story quoted Dr. Andrea Edlow, an OB/GYN and obstetric research director at Massachusetts General Hospital, noting that whereas she believes the potential Tylenol-neurodevelopmental disorders connection is “a nuanced area,” the common pain relief alternatives to Tylenol are already known to be unequivocally problematic for pregnant women and/or their preborn children. As Dr. Edlow points out, “Ibuprofen is clearly associated with developmental risk and maternal opioid use is also associated with maternal, fetal and neonatal risks.”

Locally stored movies played via kodi (available on most platforms except ios) or MrMc (available on ios including Apple TV) have the ability to mute audio (profanity) or skip designated scenes. This is controlled via an .edl file.

Filterflix will read an uploaded subtitle file (.srt) and create an .edl file to mute profanities.  Any desired skip scenes would need to be added manually later as these obviously can not be determined from a subtitle file. The created .edl file (named exactly the same as the movie file other than the extension .edl) needs to be placed in the same folder as the movie in order for this to be recognized by kodi or MrMc.

Filterflix will also create 2 subtitle files (.srt) with the profanities filtered out.

• One .srt file will contain the entire subtitles (with the filtered words replaced.)
• The other subtitle file will ONLY contain those subtitles whose lines were muted by the filter. Accordingly, if you turn the subtitles on for the movie they will only display during muted sections. 

Please be aware - Filterflix does NOT edit the movie file - it only creates an .edl file which tells Kodi/MrMc WHEN to MUTE or SKIP!

Winter • January 28, 2023 10:56 AM

@keithpeter

In the UK we have the word ‘reasonable’ in various laws and regulations.

Actually, almost every country has this in their law or procedures.

US law is different. In the 1990’s I read “The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America” by Philip K. Howard.
‘https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/239430.The_Death_of_Common_Sense

For me as a non-American, this was an eye opener. The basic philosophy of US legal thinking is explained as the principle that nobody can be trusted. Therefore, law should be written as algorithms with no option for interpretation, not by judges, not by prosecutors, not by lawyers.

This leads to all the idiocies of USA legal practice where, e.g., people are jailed for life for stealing a bicycle [1] or breaking into a car [2].

The underlying mistrust of everyone leads to a system where the law is a quagmire where no human being is safe. [3]

[1] ‘https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Bike-Thief-s-3-Strikes-Sentence-Judge-says-3035160.php

[2] ‘https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/us/california-prison-three-strikes-law.html

[3] Don’t Talk to the Police (really, really watch this)
‘https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

Because, you will be guilty of something:
Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime
‘https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2203713
‘https://newjurist.com/ham-sandwich-nation.html
‘https://economicthinking.org/ham-sandwich-nation-due-process-when/

PCIMAX3000+ is a computer card that will change the way you either do radio or listen to your MP3’s or other audio via PC. It will effectively change your PC into a powerfull broadcast worthy stereo FM radio station, it is a small digital FM transmitter in a form of a PC card. You will be able to play your audio files (CD, wav, MP3, real audio etc.) from your PC through radio waves directly to your household radio receiver in the next room, in the living room, across your yard, in whole block of flats….or for the entire village/small city. You need just an ordinary radio receiver to receive your signal. The included software lets you set the frequency and the output power.

Say goodbye to dry, chewy pot roast and hello to a melt-in-your-mouth experience. All you need to make this incredibly easy pot roast Crockpot recipe is a slow cooker and a little patience.

The arguments against sleepovers are logical. In a fragmented age with weakened communities, it’s harder to know where we’re sending our kids. In an age in which broken homes are even more common than when we were growing up, there are myriad variables thrown into the mix that our own parents never had to worry about.

While I am a huge proponent of making babies, and not just in the figurative sense, remember what life was like before you started making them. The freedom, the tranquility, the relative absence of inexplicable destruction to the kitchen can all be yours again, if only for a night. All that’s required is that you bring in a gaggle of other children on some night in the future and let them inflict a multiplicative level of damage upon your kitchen while your friends enjoy getting out the pressure washer and not running the dishwasher for an evening.

It’s not just about selfishness, either. As Dougherty mentioned, there is value in kids learning how to behave and be polite in a foreign environment. There’s the meal the host family loves that your kid doesn’t but has to choke down enough of. There are the differing family dynamics and interactions to navigate. The sleepover is a reality check, at least initially.

For we Gen Xers often moved beyond that reality check and to a point when we had secondary families. You didn’t have to ask what you could eat because you knew. Your dad didn’t hesitate to insist your buddy and you go out in the backyard and split some firewood. Good fences may make good neighbors, but the real magic happens when you have those neighbors who can come through the gate and get some callouses alongside you.

Not that the modern sleepover features much manual labor, unless you count the half-hearted attempts at cleaning the kitchen after the kids get done baking cookies, but they’re still a blending of people together, a little slice of community in an age in which we’re all always on the go.

Our children are fragile. They are mortal. They deserve our fierce protection. They also deserve to be raised to become adults, capable of navigating society and, yes, risks. Maybe they’ll see a movie you wouldn’t have approved of in your home. Maybe you’re the parents who let them watch that movie.

Which isn’t to say anything goes. There’s a difference between getting to watch a highly problematic movie like, say, “The Goonies,” what with its language and ableism and cisnormative displays, and watching porn, but that’s another way in which the sleepover can be beneficial. It can force parents out of their own bubbles and into talking to other parents, finding ones with whom they feel comfortable entrusting their little demons for an evening.

Dave Rubin @RubinReport
·
Replying to @RubinReport
“A Fractal Rube Goldberg Machine.”

That’s what @elonmusk called Twitter. As they fix the code more problems arise. A delicate balance he likened to a Jenga tower. One wrong move the whole thing collapses. They’re working nonstop, and both times I met him were after midnight.

12:57 PM · Jan 26, 2023

Dave Rubin @RubinReport
·
Replying to @RubinReport
What’s also really crazy now having seen under the hood is that Jack Dorsey repeatedly said they don’t shadowban. The entire machine behind Twitter is designed to shadowban. It’s almost as if that was the primary goal rather than the product itself.
2:02 PM · Jan 26, 2023

Dave Rubin @RubinReport
·
Replying to @RubinReport
Will share more in bit but have to catch a flight.

On a personal note Elon is funny as hell, laughs a ton and it’s just really obvious he cares about Twitter because he cares about free speech and the bigger problems facing the world. He doesn’t need this headache, he chose it.
1:23 PM · Jan 26, 2023

Dave Rubin @RubinReport
·
Replying to @RubinReport
Oh, one either thing for now…

Elon really lit up when we talked about the shifting political landscape and how anyone non-woke is now “far right.”

That notion is deeply connected to how screwy thing got at Twitter and he’s working to fix it despite the huge challenges ahead.
1:36 PM · Jan 26, 2023

Mr. Tweet @elonmusk
·
Replying to @RubinReport

Accurate thread
3:22 PM · Jan 26, 2023