The quick and simple editor for cron schedule expressions by Cronitor

NARA told Trump it would proceed with “providing the FBI access to the records in question, as requested by the incumbent President, beginning as early as May 12, 2022,” according to the order.

Contrary to Biden’s claims, per the order, it was Biden who requested that the documents that had been turned over to NARA be provided to the FBI.

While Biden might not have known of the moment of the raid, he knew of the involvement of the FBI because he had requested the documents be turned over to them. He was directly involved in the FBI action. //

Robert A Hahn
3 hours ago
I wish someone could explain to me why every judge involved in this case prefers to ignore the existence of the Presidential Records Act, which would appear to render moot the issue of whether any of these documents were classified. That law, on its face, anticipates that some of the records taken by an outgoing president will be classified. Yet the law contains no penalties or even restrictions on taking them. This would appear to make it impossible to charge a former president -- as the Democrats and their blue media insist must happen -- with "possession of classified documents." Given that, what possible legal reason could there be for even asking for a search warrant, let alone conducting a raid on someone's home? And now here we are again with the "review which ones were classified" nonsense, when the law draws no distinction in that area?

1. One of the greatest areas that we can pray for our children is for their salvation.
2. At the same time, we can pray that our children will come to have a love for God’s Word.
3. Pray that our children will learn the benefit and joy of submitting to God and obeying Him.
4. Another area that I frequently pray for my children is for them to be convicted of their sin.
5. Pray that God will protect them from evil.
6. Pray that our children will have wisdom and make wise choices in their lives.
7. Pray that our children will have Godly friendships.
8. Pray for our children to make wise choices in a future spouse and to have God’s favor in doing so.

Welcome to Screen-Free Parenting. Becoming a mother led me to start this site back in 2016 to help parents, doctors, and other caregivers tackle the challenge of raising a child in today’s tech-heavy world.

Since 2016, a lot has changed and the pandemic has forced rapid adoption of tech by many families that were otherwise very thoughtful about screen time.

We’re here to help. Since our inception we have been scouring academic publications and written hundreds of articles to help you make smart choices and advocate for the children. Over the years this site has gotten deep with research results and helpful, fun parenting tips.

This positive journey has led me to write my book Spoiled Right: Delaying Screen Time and Giving Children What They Really Need, and develop an old-fashioned family board game called Starting Lines.

Some experts are embracing the notion of a soft landing, the belief that recent interest rate hikes will translate into a modest decline in growth. However, such claims lack evidence. The history of the Federal Reserve and its monetary management doesn’t lend much credence to any soft-landing optimism.

The latest proof of that comes from economists Alex Domash and Lawrence Summers, who addressed these claims in a recent paper analyzing rate hikes since 1955. The scholars found there has never been a time in which high nominal wage growth and very low unemployment weren’t followed by a recession. Similarly, they looked at supposed soft landings (interest rate hikes that weren’t followed by a recession) in 1965, 1984, and 1994 and found these periods lacked the tight employment market we’re seeing today, making them hard to compare to the current economy.

Since the publication of that research in April 2022, the conditions discussed have taken a turn for the worse. Inflation has risen even more sharply despite recent rate hikes.

This article shows my take on DHCP server lease script, which creates and deletes static DNS records automatically, based on creation and deletion of DHCP leases. Although, bunch of such scripts is already available, I wanted to have the features I liked merged into one universal script.

N2O4/Kerosene propellant rocket stage. Clustered to form Otrag launch vehicles. Pressure-fed, using cheapest possible propellants.

AKA: CPRU;Otrag. Status: Retired 1983. Thrust: 26.96 kN (6,061 lbf). Gross mass: 1,500 kg (3,300 lb). Unfuelled mass: 150 kg (330 lb). Specific impulse: 297 s. Specific impulse sea level: 240 s. Burn time: 140 s. Height: 16.00 m (52.00 ft). Diameter: 0.27 m (0.88 ft). Span: 0.27 m (0.88 ft).

Injection pressure: 40 - 15 bar; Thrust control: 100% - 40 %; Pressurization: Compressed air 66% tank filling in blow-down mode; Injector: Radial like on like; Chamber cooling: Ablative phenolic; Material of injector, valves, bulkheads: AlMg5; Material of cylindrical tank sections: cold rolled low carbon stainless steel.

Cost $ : 0.025 million. Propellant Formulation: (50% N2O4- 50% HNO3/Diesel fuel or Kerosene.

Without mystery, hero, handsome prince or fairy godmother — Goodnight Moon has now lulled millions of children to sleep, in more than two dozen languages, for 75 years.

Otrag rockets would have been assembled from clusters of Common Rocket Propulsion Units (originally called modules, but von Braun pointed out that the M could be construed as "Missile", further fuelling the charges of OTRAG's critics). These CRPU's properties and dimensions were optimized to achieve one and one only goal: Minimum transport cost per unit of payload mass to low earth orbit and beyond. The $ 200 million spiral development and test program took 40 years, went through more than 1000 versions, included over 6000 static tests firings with total burning time approaching one million seconds, and achieved 14 suborbital test flights. The CRPU was human-rated and had a confidence level higher than 6-sigma. Main characteristics were:

• Thrust: 25,000 N (5,000 lbf)
• Oxidizer: High Density Acid (HDA) (50% N2O4- 50% HNO3) Den: 1.66 gr/cm^3
• Fuel: Diesel fuel or Kerosene
• Specific Impulse: First stage - 270 seconds, Stages 2 and 3 - 297 seconds vacuum
• Injection pressure: 40 - 15 bar
• Thrust control: 100% - 40 %
• Pressurization: Compressed air, 66% tank filling in blow-down mode
• Injector: Radial like on like
• Chamber cooling: Ablative phenolic
• Mass total: 1,500 kg
• Mass empty: 150 kg
• Material of injector, valves, bulkheads: AlMg5
• Material of cylindrical tank sections: cold-rolled low-carbon stainless steel
• Dimensions: Diameter 0.27 m, Length: 16 m
  A small launch vehicle with a 1 metric ton payload to low earth orbit would have consisted of 4 CRPU's in the third stage, 12 CRPU's in the second stage, and 48 CRPU's in the first stage. These were stacked in parallel in a quadratic ring arrangement. Larger vehicles would be assembled using hundreds or thousands of identical CRPU's. //

Orbital Transport-und-Raketen Aktiengesellschaft, Germany. Manufacturer of rocket engines and rockets. $200 million was spent from 1975-1987 by Lutz Kayser in a serious attempt to develop a low-cost satellite launcher using clusters of mass-produced pressure-fed liquid propellant modules. The project was finally squelched by the German government under pressure from the Soviet and French.

• Status: Retired 1983.
• First Launch: 1977-05-18.
• Last Launch: 1983-09-19.
• Number: 18 .
• Payload: 1,000 kg (2,200 lb).
• Thrust: 1,170.00 kN (263,020 lbf).
• Gross mass: 100,000 kg (220,000 lb).
• Height: 24.00 m (78.00 ft).
• Diameter: 0.76 m (2.49 ft).
• Apogee: 185 km (114 mi).

As policymakers have shifted focus from pandemic challenges to economic recovery, infrastructure plans are once more being actively discussed, including those relating to energy. Green energy advocates are doubling down on pressure to continue, or even increase, the use of wind, solar power, and electric cars. Left out of the discussion is any serious consideration of the broad environmental and supply-chain implications of renewable energy.

As I explored in a previous paper, “The New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking,”[1] many enthusiasts believe things that are not possible when it comes to the physics of fueling society, not least the magical belief that “clean-tech” energy can echo the velocity of the progress of digital technologies. It cannot.

This paper turns to a different reality: all energy-producing machinery must be fabricated from materials extracted from the earth. No energy system, in short, is actually “renewable,” since all machines require the continual mining and processing of millions of tons of primary materials and the disposal of hardware that inevitably wears out. Compared with hydrocarbons, green machines entail, on average, a 10-fold increase in the quantities of materials extracted and processed to produce the same amount of energy.

This means that any significant expansion of today’s modest level of green energy—currently less than 4% of the country’s total consumption (versus 56% from oil and gas)—will create an unprecedented increase in global mining for needed minerals, radically exacerbate existing environmental and labor challenges in emerging markets (where many mines are located), and dramatically increase U.S. imports and the vulnerability of America’s energy supply chain.

As recently as 1990, the U.S. was the world’s number-one producer of minerals. Today, it is in seventh place. Even though the nation has vast mineral reserves worth trillions of dollars, America is now 100% dependent on imports for some 17 key minerals, and, for another 29, over half of domestic needs are imported.

Among the material realities of green energy:

• Building wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity, as well as batteries to fuel electric vehicles, requires, on average, more than 10 times the quantity of materials, compared with building machines using hydrocarbons to deliver the same amount of energy to society.

  • A single electric car contains more cobalt than 1,000 smartphone batteries; the blades on a single wind turbine have more plastic than 5 million smartphones; and a solar array that can power one data center uses more glass than 50 million phones.

  • Replacing hydrocarbons with green machines under current plans—never mind aspirations for far greater expansion—will vastly increase the mining of various critical minerals around the world. For example, a single electric car battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials. Averaged over a battery’s life, each mile of driving an electric car “consumes” five pounds of earth. Using an internal combustion engine consumes about 0.2 pounds of liquids per mile.

• Oil, natural gas, and coal are needed to produce the concrete, steel, plastics, and purified minerals used to build green machines. The energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil is used in the processes to fabricate a single battery that can store the equivalent of one barrel of oil.

• By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels—much of it nonrecyclable—will constitute double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage. //

All machines wear out, and there is nothing actually renewable about green machines, since one must engage in continual extraction of materials to build new ones and replace those that wear out. All this requires mining, processing, transportation, and, ultimately, the disposing of millions of tons of materials, much of it functionally or economically unrecyclable. //

Over the past century, there have been two significant developments. First, the U.S. has not expanded domestic mining, and, in most cases, the country’s production of nearly all minerals has declined. Second, the demand for minerals has dramatically increased. These two intersecting trends have led to significant transformations in supply-chain dependencies. Imports today account for 100% of some 17 critical minerals, and, for 29 others, net imports account for more than half of demand. //

For a snapshot of what all this points to regarding the total materials footprint of the green energy path, consider the supply chain for an electric car battery. A single battery providing a useful driving range weighs about 1,000 pounds.[15] Providing the refined minerals needed to fabricate a single EV battery requires the mining, moving, and processing of more than 500,000 pounds of materials somewhere on the planet (see sidebar below).[16] That’s 20 times more than the 25,000 pounds of petroleum that an internal combustion engine uses over the life of a car.

“I just dissected the Inflation Reduction Act,” Mills said. “Frankly, IRA’s ‘clean energy’ provisions will make you spoil the Earth to save it.”

“I’m listening,” POTUS grumbled.

“I brought you my paper, “Mines, Minerals, and ‘Green’ Energy: A Reality Check.” [1]

“Intriguing,” POTUS mumbled, as he thumbed through its 19 pages and 127 footnotes.

Mills told POTUS that the solar panels, windmills, and electric vehicles that he and congressional Democrats crave would mean mining, refining, shipping, and dumping that would scar the planet but barely nick expected global warming.

“Compared with hydrocarbons, green machines entail, on average, a tenfold increase in the quantities of materials extracted and processed to produce the same amount of energy,” Mills said.

“Continue,” POTUS replied.

• “A lithium EV battery weighs about 1,000 pounds,” Mills explained. “Such a battery typically contains about 25 pounds of lithium, 30 pounds of cobalt, 60 pounds of nickel, 110 pounds of graphite, 90 pounds of copper, about 400 pounds of steel,” plus aluminum and plastic.

• These substances must be clawed from the earth, Mills noted. This battery’s components would be purified from 12.5 tons of lithium brines and ores of cobalt (15 tons), nickel (3 tons), graphite (a half ton), and copper (12.5 tons). Isolating those commodities involves excavating 250 more tons of dirt and rock.

• Dig, baby, dig: “The mining of cobalt for batteries will need to grow 300% [to] 800%,” Mills said. “Lithium production … will need to rise more than 2,000%,” he added. “The mining of indium … will need to increase as much as 8,000%.”

• That requires power. “The energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil is used in the processes to fabricate a single battery that can store the equivalent of one barrel of oil,” Mills said. POTUS’ eyes widened.

• Energy-efficient pipelines carry 75% of oil and 100% of natural gas. For green machines, Mills observed, “Using trucks instead of pipelines entails a 1,000% increase per ton-mile in the embodied transportation of energy materials.”

• When green machines die, “[n]early all of them will eventually show up in waste dumps,” Mills noted. A decommissioned 100-megawatt wind farm’s 20 turbines will pollute “fourfold more nonrecyclable plastic trash than all the world’s [recyclable] plastic straws combined. There are 1,000 times more wind turbines than that in the world today.”

Too bad these efforts barely tame global warming.

Copenhagen Consensus Center founder Bjorn Lomborg calculates that the Inflation Reduction Act would decrease expected global temperatures by 0.0009 degrees Fahrenheit to 0.028 degrees Fahrenheit in 2100. Imagine lowering a thermostat from 72 degrees Fahrenheit to 71.9991 degrees Fahrenheit or (best-case scenario) 71.972 degrees Fahrenheit.

“Come on, man!” POTUS snapped. “We have this under control.”

Mills tilted his head in curiosity. From the bottom desk drawer, POTUS pulled a footlong rod.

“This was carved from a chair leg at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, America’s birthplace,” POTUS whispered. “Watch this.”

POTUS stood at his desk and waved the stick over his head. “Presto!”

[1 https://www.manhattan-institute.org/mines-minerals-and-green-energy-reality-check]

NASA confirmed Wednesday that it has awarded five additional crew transportation missions to SpaceX, and its Crew Dragon vehicle, to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. This brings to 14 the total number of crewed missions that SpaceX is contracted to fly for NASA through 2030.

As previously reported by Ars, these are likely the final flights NASA needs to keep the space station fully occupied into the year 2030. While there are no international agreements yet signed, NASA has signaled that it would like to continue flying the orbiting laboratory until 2030, by which time one or more US commercial space stations should be operational in low Earth orbit.

Under the new agreement, SpaceX would fly 14 crewed missions to the station on Crew Dragon, and Boeing would fly six during the lifetime of the station. That would be enough to fill all of NASA's needs, which include two launches a year, carrying four astronauts each. But NASA has an option to buy more seats from either provider. //

SpaceX started flying operational missions to the space station in 2020, with the Crew-1 mission. Although Boeing's Starliner has a crewed test flight early next year, likely in February, its first operational mission will not come before the second half of 2023.

Additionally, there is some question about the availability of rockets for Starliner. Boeing has purchased enough Atlas V rockets from United Launch Alliance for six operational Starliner missions, but after that the Atlas V will be retired. During a news conference last week, Boeing's program manager for commercial crew, Mark Nappi, said the company is looking at "different options" for Starliner launch vehicles. These options include buying a Falcon 9 from a competitor, SpaceX, paying United Launch Alliance to human-rate its new Vulcan rocket, or paying Blue Origin for its forthcoming New Glenn booster. //

Since we now know how many flights each company will be providing NASA through the lifetime of the International Space Station, and the full cost of those contracts, we can break down the price NASA is paying each company per seat by amortizing the development costs.

Boeing, in flying 24 astronauts, has a per-seat price of $183 million. SpaceX, in flying 56 astronauts during the same time frame, has a seat price of $88 million. Thus, NASA is paying Boeing 2.1 times the price per seat that it is paying SpaceX, inclusive of development costs incurred by NASA. //

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PrometheusDoomwang Smack-Fu Master, in training
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ColdWetDog wrote:
Interesting that the $90 million lasts charged by Roscosmos isn't too far off the SpaceX cost.

The Russians were seen to be price gouging - and in a way that's true, the Soyuz development costs have been paid back years ago - but it wasn't too outrageous of a price in retrospect.

Of course, giving the money to SpaceX has many other advantages.

It's not a good comparison regarding Roscosmos seat price because the SpaceX "seat price" actually includes the complete capacity of the Dragon and it's trunk for cargo up mass and down mass.

Legislature approves plan to give Diablo Canyon another five years. //

The heatwave itself is expected to be unusual in three ways: It's expected to last about a week, cover most of the West Coast and extend substantially inland to interior states, and it's coming in September, when temperatures usually start to moderate.

It's also coinciding with a 15 day watering ban in the LA area:
https://www.latimes.com/california/stor ... l-a-county

If there's also an earthquake and a forest fire I think they get a tsunami for free.

USB4 vs. Thunderbolt 4—and everything else to know about the newest USB standard.

USB has come a long way since the 12Mbps days of the '90s. It has waved goodbye to USB-B and is inching away from USB-A in favor of the slim, reversible USB-C connector. Data transfer rates have increased so dramatically that we can run powerful setups with high-resolution monitors, speedy external storage, and numerous other devices from the USB Implementers Forum's latest open standard, USB4.

USB4 unifies the USB and Intel Thunderbolt protocols for the first time, expanding USB's capabilities while further dividing the technology into different performance classes. Adding features like dynamic bandwidth allocation ensures that USB4 is by far the most advanced USB generation.

Much is known about how the federal government leverages location data by serving warrants to major tech companies like Google or Facebook to investigate crime in America. However, much less is known about how location data influences state and local law enforcement investigations. It turns out that's because many local police agencies intentionally avoid mentioning the under-the-radar tech they use—sometimes without warrants—to monitor private citizens.

As one Maryland-based sergeant wrote in a department email, touting the benefit of "no court paperwork" before purchasing the software, "The success lies in the secrecy."

This week, an investigation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Associated Press—supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting—has made public what could be considered local police's best-kept secret. Their reporting revealed the potentially extreme extent of data surveillance of ordinary people being tracked and made vulnerable just for moving about small-town America.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/inside-fog-data-science-secretive-company-selling-mass-surveillance-local-police

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/how-disable-ad-id-tracking-ios-and-android-and-why-you-should-do-it-now#History

Any of us can become better at following Jesus by focusing on the demands and spiritual realities of our work. Rightly understood, work is the training ground where good Christians are made.

How does work make us better Christians? How can we “redeem the time” we spend laboring?

If the Christian life can be summed up as being made “partakers of the divine nature” in and through Christ (2 Pet. 1:4, ESV), then I think it could also be said that the core activity of the Christian is prayer.

As defined by one 19th-century Church of England priest, prayer is “the soul’s approach to God,” and the soul that approaches God takes on the characteristics of God. It’s similar to a copper pipe—cool to the touch and reflective of external light and eventually taking on the characteristics of the flame as it is made ready for the solder.

In his letter to the Thessalonian Christians, Paul says, “Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thess. 5:16–18).

When do we pray? Always. At what frequency? Constantly. Even when turning wrenches? In all circumstances.

The Zyklus' MIDI Performance System allows you to record sequences: 99 polyphonic single-channel sequences, to be exact. These can be organised into groups of 12 sequences which are known as Configurations, of which the MPS allows you to store 24 in its internal memory. Once you've recorded a few sequences and organised them into a Configuration, you can "play" them from a MIDI keyboard and from dedicated front-panel Control buttons. These actions can in turn be recorded into one of 12 Performances. The important point to bear in mind is that the MPS's sequences are totally independent of one another. You can treat the MPS as a 12-track sequencer, but that's only one of countless options available to you, and it's really missing the point.

The Zyklus MIDI PERFORMANCE SYSTEM is a MIDI equipment controller designed to provide an unprecedented level of musical control. It achieves this by allowing the musician to interact with previously recorded MIDI data such as sequences so that complex music can be build up in real time. In a typical setup, the MIDI PERFORMANCE SYSTEM would be used in conjunction with a MIDI master keyboard or keyboard synthesizer, plus up to 64 slave MIDI devices - synthesizers, expanders, drum machines, MIDI-equiped signal processors, etc.

The MIDI PERFORMANCE SYSTEM can be thought of a collection of sequencers, MIDI control boxes and MIDI effects units integrated into a single system. This system is designed so that it can be "played" like a musical instrument in its own right. At its most basic level it is rather like 12 polyphonic sequencers, each of which can be run at any transposition or set of simultaneous transpositions independently of the others, simply by pressing a note or chord on the MIDI control keyboard. 99 different sequences can be stored in each memory bank, of which any 12 can be assigned to the front panel for immediate access together with related control information. These sequences need not consist of repeating musical phrases. They could be single chords, short fast runs which end on held chords, segments of control data such as MIDI program changes, the synthesisers/drum part for an entire song, etc.
In addition to keyboard triggering, sequences can be triggered from a footswitch, an external trigger source or directly from the front panel. The panel controls consist of 40 keys mostly with LED indicator, plus a encoder wheel used for tempo control, editing functions, menu selection, etc. User information is provided by a 40 x 2 backlit LCD with externally adjustable brightness and contrast.

You all will know my motives much better after reading Bill Marshall's own informative article about the issue:

Twenty Five Years Later… (in case you don't have Word program, you could use wordpad)

First, let me begin with my own impression:

Do you rememeber when Yamaha DX-7 came the first time? At the time it was totally new thing, something that you never heard before and there wasn't anything else to compare it's features, so basically you had to hear and see the device yourself before you could understand, experience and see the potential of it.

Could you possibly imagine what the world would have been if the DX7 would have ended up as a flop product that no-one could understand? What if only handful DX7 were produced and then disappeared from the public? Perhaps in such world we would have seen much wider and more perfect analog instruments, with all the features finished to their maximum potential. Perhaps Yamaha would have brought their CS-80 to next level and continued their incredible legacy of ultimate player's and performer's keyboard that acts like real instrument. Even though I'm not the correct generation, but I think, DX7 as a flop product actually could have happened. No-one knew how to program it and there was no much of live controls either. What if Yamaha wasn't able to provide their large palette of presets and users were left with basic "Init" waveforms? Would that been enough make it finito?

I can imagine that, because I have already "seen it". I have seen that world in form of Zyklus MPS-1 - Midi Performance System. At the time, what DX7 was for synthesizers, MPS-1 was for sequencers. MPS-1 represented entirely new way of thinking... a totally new approach sequencing and making music. People couldn't understand it. Even today with all these groove boxes and other things, people can't understand what MPS-1 is capable, mainly because there never were anything else to compare. I can only imagine what the world would have been if MPS-1 could have made even moderate level of success. As Bill said, he expected someone else to continue his visions and innovations but the industry took totally different direction and totally abandoned these all. Even today, the modern industry still makes the usual safe product that will sell for sure, a new reverb or new compressor... or another "studio-in-the-box" gadget.

The problem is that even in this very modern world where technological progression is unbelieveable when comparing to 1988, still we don't see products that can act as a tool for encouraging the actual creative process of creating music. Everything is only about recording, editing and composing music in traditional way but nothing to encourage you to experiment and try new things.

If MPS-1 is still alien in this highly advanced modern world, just imagine it in 1988. Even today people expect easy "analogies". When it comes to sequencers, people still expect them to work like traditional multitrack tape recorders. I surely will have difficulties to describe the potential of MPS-1 without having chances to actually show the process how it works. The situation reminds me of John Cage and his methods. You need to show people that music performance could include weird things like pouring water to bathtub... any sound could be music too.

“Eloquent. Extraordinary. Timeless. Paradigm-shifting. Classic. Half a century after it first appeared, Leonard Read’s ‘I, Pencil’ still evokes such adjectives of praise. Rightfully so, for this little essay opens eyes and minds among people of all ages. Many first-time readers never see the world quite the same again.” ~ Lawrence W. Reed

Hundreds of thousands of Americans of all ages continue to enjoy this simple and beautiful explanation of the miracle of the “invisible hand” by following the production of an ordinary pencil. Read shows that none of us knows enough to plan the creative actions and decisions of others.

Back in my parents’ day, which saw them in their childhood fighting the Great Depression and in their teen/young adult years fighting World War II, politics was as much a rough-and-tumble bare-knuckled business as is presently the case. However, there was one noticeable difference between then and now. Those in Washington and various state capitals/local power centers/etc. would and did fight like terriers from 9 to 5. Yet after work, they would go out together for drinks and socialization, setting aside political differences in favor of what was more important. Namely, being human beings who are able to treat each other in the same manner they wish to be treated.

Alas, this went away when Saul Alinsky became the Democrats’ satanic patron saint. In our present era, actively practicing the politics of personal destruction has become the norm. Vicious direct attacks against any and all who dare to differ one iota from cherished beliefs, then squealing like a stuck pig crying “racism,” “sexism,” and whatever else you can come up with -ism (translation: petulant butthurt) whenever somebody breathes so much as a word against you or has the unmitigated gall to respond in the same brute impersonal manner that the original messenger put forth, is now standard operating procedure. Be it actual politicians or those who make discussing politics vocation or avocation; the same methodology. Snark for me, not for thee. //

Right now, we live in the locust days, days of insane inflation and unnamed recession; wars abroad and attempts to create wars at home. Such days can hover and smother for weeks, months, years, even decades, seemingly eating us alive. But they will end. We must not take the bait offered by those attempting to lure us into illegal conflict. Without compromising principles or policies, we must remember the other person is also a person of value, even as each of us is a person of value, not a thing to demolish. No one is beyond God’s reach. //

The locust days have descended upon us. We must choose whether to acquiesce and crumble … or ascend and conquer in Christ.