The war on history has come for Thomas Jefferson.

On Monday, the New York City Council unanimously voted to remove a Jefferson statue from New York City Hall, though it hasn’t yet decided where to put it. The statue has been there for nearly a century and was originally created to celebrate religious liberty.

The effort to remove it met no resistance from Mayor Bill de Blasio. In fact, the whole thing was driven by the historical art commission he launched in 2017.

To get an idea of what this commission was about, the tomb of Ulysses S. Grant was under consideration for being labeled a “hate symbol.” //

Jefferson, whatever his personal foibles, was the author of the greatest anti-slavery document in modern history. The Declaration of Independence, which contains the famous line, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal,” not only became a rallying cry to abolish slavery in America. It was an inspiration to anti-slavery movements around the globe.

Today, the institution of slavery has disappeared nearly everywhere, despite being with almost every human civilization through all human history.

Thank you, Mr. Jefferson. //

However, as much as has been purged, the entire movement is an indictment on the mob, the New York City Council, and the country’s ruling cultural elite, not Jefferson and the great men and ideas of our history.

It’s an indictment of the small-minded fanatics who’ve built and accomplished nothing other than tearing down the symbols of greater men, whose accomplishments were profound and transformative. //

We have to protect and build on our history. When a statue is torn down, build another one in another city in defiance. The only way the war on history ends is when Americans begin to put their foot down and say “no” to the absurd demands.

We need to go out and explain to our friends and neighbors why the ideas and people who built this country were great and worth defending, and why we should look to build on what they accomplished rather than reducing everything to rubble and hoping something good can emerge from the ashes.

The New York City Council may be tearing down statues. It’s our job to now start building more up and furthering the profound and true ideas that Jefferson stood for.

Sec. 5604 of the James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023 specifically addresses the issue:

"A flight instructor, registered owner, lessor, or lessee of an aircraft shall not be required to obtain a letter of deviation authority from the [FAA administrator] to allow, conduct, or receive flight training, checking and testing in an experimental aircraft if 1) the flight instructor is not providing both the training and the aircraft; 2) no person advertises or broadly offers the aircraft as available for flighty training, checking, or testing; and 3) no person receives compensation for use of the aircraft for a specific flight during which flight training, checking, or testing was received, other than expenses for owning, operating, and maintaining the aircraft."

With the president's signature, experimental aircraft owners may resume receiving instruction in their aircraft without having to jump through this frustrating hoop.

• Winter Storm Elliott has highlighted the vulnerabilities of U.S. energy systems, with energy providers having to resort to rotating outages.
• Natural gas production plunged during the storm, sending lower volumes to power generation units and causing gas prices to spike.
• The Texas power grid managed to avoid the catastrophic failures it experienced in 2021, but energy systems remain vulnerable.

The cold blast this holiday weekend across the eastern half of the US exposed the fragility of power grids as soaring heating demand spiked peak total loads to record high in many areas while supplies were tight. Grid operators and utilities told tens of millions of Americans to conserve power -- some conservation efforts are still ongoing Christmas morning. Christmas Eve was a mess for many customers in the Southeast states, including North Carolina and Tennessee, as utilities implemented rolling blackouts.

Fossil fuels and nuclear power generation mix across the eastern US saved grids from collapse. Unreliable renewables, such as solar and wind, were just a tiny fraction of the power mix.

What's idiotic is the decarbonization campaign to decommission nuclear and fossil fuel generators for renewables. This weekend's grid chaos is a wake-up call. America has a severe grid problem sparked by the 'green' movement. Thank the climate alarmist, woke corporations, and progressive politicians for ushering in so-called green reforms that have transformed once-stable grids into a third-world country prone to rolling blackouts anytime temperatures fall below freezing.

Readers have been well informed of our view that advanced nuclear reactors will play a critical role in decarbonizing electricity in the US by providing carbon-free energy, and it is a much better form than solar and wind assets.

There are some filmmakers who would rather leave the meaning of their films up to the audience to interpret than explain what the filmmaker is trying to say. Stanley Kubrick was one of the directors, opting to challenge audiences at every level.

He didn’t subscribe to one single interpretation of his work, telling Playboy magazine in 1968, “You’re free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film—and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deeper level—but I don’t want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue." //

Kubrick responded to Yao’s question regarding the final scene in 2001, where the protagonist Dave Bowman lies in bed, saying, “I tried to avoid doing this ever since the picture came out because when you just say the ideas they sound foolish, whereas if they’re dramatized one feels it.”

The director continues, adding, “The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by god-like entities, creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form and they put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him, and his whole life passes from that point on in that room and he has no sense of time, it just seems to happen as it does in the film.”

To elaborate on this concept, Kubrick notes that the room was a very deliberately inaccurate replica of French architecture to show that the entities had some idea of what Dave would find comforting and familiar like humans do to animals in zoos.

Concluding his comments about the film’s ending, Kubrick says, "When they get finished with him, as happens in so many myths of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some know of superbeing and sent back to Earth. It is the pattern of a great deal of mythology, that was what we were trying to suggest.”

Republicans must be wary of Democratic efforts to fortify elections in 2023 and beyond. While some congressional Republicans might think the post-2020 election integrity fight is over, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Democrats have a massive ground game advantage over Republicans already, and if they pass these policy proposals — under the insufferable label of “voting rights” — in key swing states, that advantage will only grow to an insurmountable one. Republicans must realize election integrity is not a seasonal push nor a battle isolated to 2020. Rather, they must be on offense for years to come.

Twitter’s global guidelines lean toward Silicon Valley-style free speech absolutism, in which everybody has the right to speak and be heard (and never shadow-banned). Vulnerable users increasingly felt the effects of Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance, that if we include in a more tolerant discussion those who are less tolerant, they will prevent the discussion from being fully open. (Thus, in Popper's view, some level of "intolerance towards intolerance" must be exercised even by the tolerant.) In a 2021 report, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) bluntly stated that, "Surveying the current landscape of leading social media platforms, the entire sector is effectively unsafe for LGBTQ users." //

If you want to run an instance to bring local friends onto the Fediverse, the first question is which platform to base it on. Lemmer-Webber recommends that those who want a single- or few-user instance try Misskey. Pleorama, with a less discovery-focused project governance group, has its own how-to for installing it onto various flavors of Linux. Mastodon, as the incumbent, has some pre-built packages that offer a relatively turnkey setup, or follow the full step-by-step procedure. //

Kazemi is optimistic about coming full circle and using ActivityPub as the next RSS. "I hope it's even better. I hope it's even more widely adopted than RSS was back in its heyday," he said. While we chatted, he set up @ars_technica@rss.friend.camp, an ActivityPub actor republishing everything on Ars' main RSS feed; search for it from your Mastodon, Pleorama, or Misseky instance, follow it, and you can retire that RSS reader you keep only to check for Ars articles.

SAO PAULO (AP) — Pelé, the Brazilian king of soccer who won a record three World Cups and became one of the most commanding sports figures of the last century, died Thursday. He was 82. //

Throughout the years, the legend of Pelé continued to grow – so much so, that in the late 1960s, the two factions in the Nigerian Civil War reportedly agreed to a 48-hour ceasefire so they could watch Pele play in an exhibition game in Lagos.

Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan summarized Pelé’s stardom when the soccer star visited him at the White House and he said: “My name is Ronald Reagan, I’m the president of the United States of America. But you don’t need to introduce yourself, because everyone knows who Pelé is.” //

EzraTank
7 hours ago
I loved the movie Victory with him, Stallone, and Michael Caine.

Those who favor civil asset forfeiture argue that it helps law enforcement fight crime by depriving criminals of the resources used to perpetrate crimes. But, critics argue, that it is nothing more than a revenue-generating scheme. Many have criticized policing for profit, including Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

In the case of Leonard v. Texas, he laid out his case when writing his opinion. He noted that “unlike a criminal case in which a prosecutor must prove a defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, in a civil forfeiture case, the prosecutor only needs to establish the basis for the forfeiture by a preponderance of the evidence.” //

State governments have raked in tons of cash from civil asset forfeiture. In 2017, Texas’ law enforcement took in about $50 million, which included people who were not charged or convicted of a crime. Since the state’s attorney general does not distinguish between the two when calculating the numbers, it is not known exactly how many were never charged. Since 2000, state and federal governments have taken at least $68.8 billion, according to the Institute for Justice. //

According to the Institute for Justice, the clearance rates for violent crimes tends to drop as the amount of forfeiture revenue increases. This Is largely due to the fact that when police are hunting for cash drug offenders, they are not as focused on addressing violent criminals. Moreover, the practice has not led to a decline in drug use in communities in which it is used. //

C. S. P. Schofield
6 hours ago
“ The rationale behind this practice is the notion that property can be charged with an offense, even if the person who owns it has not been charged or even convicted. Proponents argue that this ability is critical to the efforts of law enforcement to crack down on crime.”

This is the inevitable consequence of the “we gotta get them goddamned drug dealers” mentality that has driven the War On Drugs my whole life. RICO, Asset Forfeiture, no-knock raids, and so on are all justified to ‘get’ drug dealers…and gradually crept into general use on the population.

I like cops, as a rule. I have only had one bad interaction with a policeman (rent-a-cops are another matter), and his own department was trying like hell to get rid of him (thank you, civil service rules). But the War On Drugs has made a LEO culture that has much broken about it.

I don’t think street drugs are a good thing. I’ve known junkies, and they were mostly sad, broken people, and often seriously untrustworthy. But the fallout of the War On Drugs seems to me to be worse than the drugs themselves.

But the current border crisis is not a COVID crisis. And courts should not be in the business of perpetuating administrative edicts designed for one emergency only because elected officials have failed to address a different emergency. We are a court of law, not policymakersers of last resort. //

While acknowledging the dire threat to America in the current uncontrolled immigration across our southern border, we should all be opposed to using public health edicts for other policy goals. I thought we all learned that lesson over the last two years, but it may bear repeating. Likewise, we should be horrified that a policy based on an expired emergency is not only being used but is one of the few effective tools in combatting illegal immigration. It really isn’t possible to oppose DACA, which is based on a memorandum from a Secretary of Homeland Security who left office nearly a decade ago, and support Title 42.

I think Justice Gorsuch is correct. The Supreme Court is using this case as a vehicle to define the degree to which states have an interest in immigration law. So to that extent, it may be a victory.

But, as Justice Gorsuch also notes, the courts should not be forced into policymaking roles. As conservatives, we’ve opposed this consistently when the courts get involved in making up voting laws and the boundaries of congressional districts. Keeping Title 42 in place is wrong because the reason for the regulation has expired. It is wrong because it insulates Congress and the Biden White House from their failure to address the illegal immigration crisis. It is wrong to have the courts dragged into doing what the Legislative and Executive Branches will not do.

EDS COMPLICATIONS AND TREATMENT CONSIDERATIONS

Obtain my information packet by emailing golderwilson@gmail.com

You have contacted me to request information on Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) and related connective tissue laxity disorders. This packet contains 1) history, 2) natural-family history, and 3) physical examination forms for your self-assessment followed by 4) summary of finding frequencies in my EDS patients, 5) general information on how clinical and DNA findings in EDS fit together, and 6) a sample summary letter that for a fee of $100  I could write for you to take to your doctors as discussed below. Those who request a summary letter, have severe impact from EDS as indicated on the lower part of the history form, and have interest in social security disability, I can refer to a specialist although there is no guarantee you would qualify.

The history and physical forms list common findings that were noted in 946 EDS outpatient evaluations and converted into standard forms I used on a subsequent 710 outpatients (596 females and 114 males). You can see the full results in the article: Clinical analysis supports articulo-autonomic dysplasia (reference 1 in the attached information) that includes the summary of finding frequencies attached here. In essence I found that people with more than 10 history and 8 physical findings had EDS by traditional criteria and that women have higher scores than men (more than accounted for by 3 extra points for questions regarding gynecologic issues). Most findings of patients with hypermobile hEDS (more flexibility complications like subluxations, dislocations, and deformations like scoliosis and flat feet) versus those with classical EDS (more atypical cigarette-paper or keloid scars, less hypermobility complications) are similar, the reason I emphasize recognition of a general EDS clinical pattern before considering specific types. 

An Information Service for EDS and related disorders

What does the service consist of?

After 40 years of academic and private practice encompassing over 27,000 new medical genetic evaluations, I am changing my genetics practice to an information service that will be backed by continued article and book publication. I stopped in-person clinics in 2018 due to my own arthritis issues and now will provide information including standardized history and physical forms that will allow people to assess their probability of having an EDS diagnosis. Patients can send in their forms for my interpretation and I will provide a packet with a summary letter that they can take to their doctors to obtain appropriate diagnoses of EDS and dysautonomia. I will provide the information free of charge but ask payment of $100 to provide the summary letter and information packet. I no longer have the resources to coordinate DNA testing but the $100 fee will include my interpretation of DNA testing provided with the history-physical information or sent to me afterwords. For patients with large numbers of history-physical findings on my standard forms and who additionally register significant difficulties with work, school, and activity functions on my physical form, I also offer referral to a specialist in social security disability who can help them with an application; there is of course no guarantee that the specialist or court will approve their application.
​.
The next page has a description of the information service that describes options for the summary letter and possible referral for disability consideration. If you are interested in receiving the described information package you should email me at golderwilson@gmail.com and I will forward it to you with the introductory letter, medical history/natural-family history/physical forms along with a table of these finding frequencies in 710 EDS patients, discussion of how EDS clinical and DNA findings correlate, an overview of preventive management and therapy for EDS, and an example of my summary letter. The latter table, correlation discussion, overview of therapy, and summary letter example are shown on later pages of this website.

Moz in Oz • December 26, 2022 8:35 PM

Writing down the master password is all but essential if there’s anything important in your password database. The lawyer who did my wills (living and dead) was adamant about that. There are fun crypto system to let you distribute bits of a password around so that it’s harder for people who have other things to think about to make it work at all. Meanwhile you’re in a coma and the bailiffs are selling your house, “comes with a ready-made family for the lucky buyer”. Write the bloody thing down, put it in a safe place. My lawyer has half the password plus a list of people who each have a copy of the other half. And they have a copy of the file from ~2 years ago, and know how to get the latest one off my website(s), and that my work has a copy of it.

Security is always a balance, and I’ve been around long enough to have seen a few too many “Bob died so his website is gone forever”, not to mention seen families wandering lost in technology wondering whether Bob really had investments at all, or were they concealing a gambling problem (trick question, it was both: they invested in cryptocurrency). If no-one knows where you invested they can’t use your death to access those funds.

Last August, LastPass reported a security breach, saying that no customer information—or passwords—were compromised. Turns out the full story is worse: //

To date, we have determined that once the cloud storage access key and dual storage container decryption keys were obtained, the threat actor copied information from backup that contained basic customer account information and related metadata including company names, end-user names, billing addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, and the IP addresses from which customers were accessing the LastPass service.

The threat actor was also able to copy a backup of customer vault data from the encrypted storage container which is stored in a proprietary binary format that contains both unencrypted data, such as website URLs, as well as fully-encrypted sensitive fields such as website usernames and passwords, secure notes, and form-filled data.

That’s bad. It’s not an epic disaster, though.

These encrypted fields remain secured with 256-bit AES encryption and can only be decrypted with a unique encryption key derived from each user’s master password using our Zero Knowledge architecture. As a reminder, the master password is never known to LastPass and is not stored or maintained by LastPass. //

John Thurston • December 26, 2022 1:31 PM

“I think the question of why everything in the credentials store was not encrypted is interesting. What possible advantage is there of not just encrypting the whole thing under your master password.”

Because this is how Lastpass is able to offer to supply uid:pwd values when you have not unlocked your vault. If this information was kept encrypted, then the browser extensions would not know when to prompt you to unlock to supply the creds.

I’ve never liked this ‘feature’, but there’s nothing I can do about it. //

Wladimir Paöant • December 27, 2022 6:56 AM

I would have been less problematic had LastPass not messed up. They:

1. Failed to upgrade many accounts from 5,000 to 100,100 iterations.
2. Didn’t keep up with cracking hardware improvements (100k iterations are really on the lower end today).
3. Didn’t bother existing their new password complexity rules for existing accounts.
4. Didn’t bother encrypting URLs despite being warned about it continuously, allowing attackers to determine which accounts are worth the effort to decrypt.

Their statement is misleading, they downplay the issues. I’ve summed it up on my blog here: https://palant.info/2022/12/26/whats-in-a-pr-statement-lastpass-breach-explained/ //

Conex Energy Liberia has announced the shortage of jet fuel in the country.

Last year, the African distribution business acquired the Liberia and Sierra Leone businesses of French petroleum refining company Total Energies for an undisclosed sum.

Cherif Abdallah is the company’s Chief Executive Officer.

In a statement issued in Monrovia on Tuesday, December 26, the company disclosed that the arrival of jet fuel in Liberia will be delayed as a result of the shortage on the global market. //

“Based on the above, Conex Energy Liberia informs the public that there is a delay in the arrival of the next Jet Fuel vessel, causing low fuel stock at Roberts International Airport (“RIA”). The vessel should have arrived on December 14, 2022. We are now being informed that the vessel will not be in Liberia until January 13, 2023.”

The company disclosed that during this period, airlines will use alternative methods / locations for fueling.

Watching the video of Dick Proenneke living Alone In The Wilderness is an escape, allowing us to imagine a life free from the suffocating technological and bureaucratic grips. //

One my favorite documentaries is of Dick Proenneke building his Alaskan cabin Alone in the Wilderness. I’m not sure when I first saw it, but it was well into adulthood, and I think it was on PBS.

I watched it whenever I could. There was something so appealing about not just the story, but the life alone.

I thought about it today when I saw a link to a video of a Swedish 18-year-old building a cabin by hand, I Spent 3 Years Alone Building A Log Cabin:

https://youtu.be/FtiaSn5iCg8 //

alaskabob
December 25, 2022 at 10:25 pm
When he had to fly out from his cabin…it was a challenge for the bush pilot.
Proenneke never bathed much. That aside he was an amazing character.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x89c6yg

The flight took off at about 9:24 p.m. on 20 February 2005. When the aircraft, a four-engine Boeing 747-436, was around 300 feet (91 m) into the air, flames burst out of its number 2 engine, a result of engine surge. The pilots shut the engine down. Air traffic control expected the plane to return to the airport and deleted its flight plan.[citation needed] However, after consulting with the airline dispatcher, the pilots decided to set off on their flight plan "and get as far as we can" rather than dump 70 tonnes of fuel and land. The 747 is certified to fly on three engines. Having reached the East Coast, the assessment was that the plane could continue safely. The cross-Atlantic journey encountered less favourable conditions than predicted. Upon reaching the UK, believing there to be insufficient usable fuel to reach their destination, the captain declared an emergency and landed at Manchester Airport.

A safety controversy ensued; the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) accused the carrier of flying an "unairworthy" plane across the Atlantic Ocean. The FAA proposed fining the carrier, British Airways (BA) $25,000. BA lodged an appeal on the grounds that they were flying according to United Kingdom Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) rules (which are derived from International Civil Aviation Organization standards).

One thing is for sure, most reindeer don’t have glowing cherry schnozzes—but the Eurasian mountain variety living in the Arctic Circle have a magic trick not seen elsewhere in the animal kingdom. They can change their eye color from yellow to blue. //

In the summer, reindeer’s tapetum lucidum—a mirror-like layer at the back of their eye—is a luminous gold streaked through with turquoise, iridescent like a golden opal. But in the winter, that layer turns a deep, rich blue. //

Learn Something @LEARNS0METHlNG_
·
A Reindeer's eyes turn blue in the winter so they can see better in low light, blue eyed people can also see better in the dark than brown eyed people!
10:19 AM · Dec 19, 2022 //

“You add these things up and the sensitivity of their eyes is at least a thousand times higher in winter than in summer,” says researcher Nicholas Tyler at the Arctic University of Norway.

The other part of the fiction about E cars is that batteries are made with a massive amount of raw material, mined by diesel-driven equipment, and slave labor.

Notwithstanding the dream that E-Cars are produced in Santa’s magic workshop, they are not. All of the raw minerals and elements needed for EV batteries are strip-mined. Liberals happily drive their E cars while scolding truck drivers, almost certainly never consider the environmental and human cost of the battery powered “clean vehicles.” Almost all of the known deposits of cobalt are found in the Congo. Slaves/Child laborers harvest those raw materials. The conditions for miners range from horrid to barely humane.

China has the corner on graphite and lithium. America will import almost all of its lithium and 100 percent of its graphite from Communist China to make E-Car batteries. How does the CCP get those elements out of the ground? Thank a Uyghur slave. China employs hundreds if not thousands in the forced labor of minerals. The mining giant Xinjiang Nonferrous Metal Industry works hundreds of Uyghurs in its mines. EV car? Thank a slave.