"Save the Whales" was the rallying cry of Greenpeace and other environmental extremists in the 1970s and 1980s, and it might be time for them to pull it out of the attic, dust it off, and use it again. Since 2016, 204 humpback whales have died off the east coast of the United States, most of them in the area of New Jersey to Massachusetts and North Carolina to Virginia. This number is far from norms in numbers, and the clustering is unusual. Many of the whales have been killed by boat strikes, but that still doesn't explain why the number of humpback whale deaths jumped by over 100% from 2015 to 2016.

There are several moving parts here. First, this is not the product of the imagination. The number of humpback whale deaths has skyrocketed since 2016. //

What these two pieces of data have in common is that 1) the first offshore wind farm went into operation in 2016, and 2) there are two wind farms in operation, one off of Cape Henry, VA, and another off Block Island, RI.

If you were a detective, you might call this a clue. //

You'd think the same environmental movement that put national security at risk by forcing the end of sonar testing by US submarines would be up in arms. But you'd be wrong.

The bottom line is that a huge, multi-billion dollar gift is at stake, and government, industry, and their fluffers in the media all know that if offshore wind farms are associated with the kill off of whales and other marine mammals, that industry is dead. This is the same behavior that led to the environmentalists shutting down nuclear power in Germany and replacing it with coal-burning generators.

Veilid (pronounced Vay-Lid, from 'Valid and Veiled Identification')

Veilid allows anyone to build a distributed, private app. Veilid gives users the privacy to opt out of data collection and online tracking. Veilid is being built with user experience, privacy, and safety as our top priorities. It is open source and available to everyone to use and build upon.

Veilid goes above and beyond existing privacy technologies and has the potential to completely change the way people use the Internet. Veilid has no profit motive, which puts us in a unique position to promote ideals without the compromise of capitalism.

No one is arguing for marrying young for the sake of marrying young. Who you marry is the most important decision you will ever make, and must be done wisely with careful consideration of your potential spouse’s character and values.

What people open to marrying young are saying is that once you find someone you love, are attracted to physically and emotionally, and who shares your values, you should take the plunge and get married. You don’t need to “sow wild oats” or take your future spouse for a test drive before you make your vows. In fact, studies suggest that couples who do not cohabitate before marrying in their 20s have the lowest odds of divorce in America.

There’s no need to engage in the most depressing and debased aspects of modern culture. It’s not a rite of passage to get crossed and hook up with a guy you met at the bar. What is a rite of passage that stretches back centuries in human history is marriage, particularly marrying young.

Young women should ignore Marcotte’s “advice.” If you find a good person, don’t wait. Choose wisely, have faith, and take the leap.

Democrats and media keep insisting that absentee ballots and mail-in voting don’t contribute to voter fraud — but a mayoral election in Connecticut could blow a big hole in that dubious claim.

Red blip in a blue city 2 hours ago

650 Generals and Admirals? Some serious inflation going on there:
https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Publications/Article/1325984/are-there-too-many-general-officers-for-todays-military/

There are approximately 900 Active-duty general/flag officers (GO/FOs) today of 1.3 million troops. This is a ratio of 1 GO/FO for every 1,400 troops. During World War II, an admittedly different era, there were more than 2,000 GO/FOs for a little more than 12 million Active troops (1:6,000).

That was from 2017.

IPFS is an open system to manage data without a central server

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a set of composable, peer-to-peer protocols for addressing, routing, and transferring content-addressed data in a decentralized file system. M

Google Workspace Status Dashboard

Israel’s national carrier El Al Airlines (LY/ELY) was established in 1948, the year the State of Israel itself was founded. El Al, which means “to the skies” or “upward” in Hebrew, has connected Israel to the world for 75 years, and has played its own part in the country’s security and politics since its inception. //

The introduction of the Boeing 707 in the early 1960s brought El Al into the jet age and cemented its place among the famous global flag carriers. The 707 connected Tel Aviv directly to New York, a route which was the longest commercial service in operation at the time. The 707 also marked the turning point for El Al’s fleet strategy, as the airline has only ordered Boeing aircraft since.

About 450,000 African slaves were taken from Africa to North America.

Meanwhile, about 1.25 million Europeans (English, French, Icelandic, Danes, Dutch, Welsh, etc) were taken from Europe to Africa as slaves.

Yes, 1.25 million!!!

See this drawing from 1675 showing the slave journey.

The women were mainly used as sex slaves or domestic servants.

The men as labourers or soldiers, with some undergoing castration and becoming eunuchs.

It was considered a sign of prosperity for an Algerian or Turkish leader to have white skinned eunuchs and female sex slaves.

The punishments for these slaves were horrific. Their noses and ears cut off for misbehaving, shackled in chains.

In many cases they were forced to convert to Islam. Their children were taken from them and often faced a difficult fate as sex slaves.

So, if you want to talk about reparations, let’s start here. //

Simon O'Neill
@simonathletepr
·
Sep 20
Some people refuse to believe that Europeans were taken as slaves. They think slavery only began 400 years ago with Europeans taking blacks to the USA. Most black slaves were out in chains by fellow blacks. That is never taught by those seeking reparations. //

Miss Jo
@therealmissjo
I never said that this was the trans Atlantic number.

I said that this was the number that went to North America. About 388,000 went directly and 50,000-70,000 went by way of the Caribbean.

The vast majority ended up in South America and the Caribbean. An incredible number in Brazil. //

₿lockChain ₿ob Charles @BlockChainBobC
·
23h
Where are you getting your numbers. The trade in Africans globally went on from the early 1500's and lasted until at least 1870. Over that 300 years there are some estimates as high as 15 million people brought to North America alone. The scale of the slavery does not make… Show more
Miss Jo
@therealmissjo
Sorry that is not true.

The slave trade was from about 1500-1900. 400 years. And in that time about 12 million (some estimates are 10.6 million) were sent across the Atlantic but only a small portion of them went to North America: 388,000 to be precise.

Most were sent to the Caribbean and South America. About another 50k - 70k were sent from the Caribbean on to North America. Hence the 450,000.

How psychological dysfunction has been embedded in our institutions.

CHRISTOPHER F. RUFO
SEP 20, 2023

The fact is, no amount of appeasement short of total capitulation will ever satisfy Armenia’s powerful Muslim neighbors, Azerbaijan and its “big brother,” Turkey.

Appropriating Artsakh has always been only the first step of a larger project. As Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev once openly proclaimed, “Yerevan [the capital of Armenia] is our historical land and we Azerbaijanis must return to these historical lands.” He has also referred to other ancient Armenian territories, including the Zangezur and Lake Sevan regions, as “our historic lands.” Taking over those territories “is our political and strategic goal,” Aliyev maintains, “and we need to work step-by-step to get closer to it.”

But as Tigran Balayan, spokesman for Armenia’s foreign ministry, responded: “The statement about territorial claims of the president of Azerbaijan, a state appearing on the political map of the world only 100 years ago … yet again demonstrates the racist character of the ruling regime in Baku.”

This is a rather restrained and diplomatic way of saying that, not only are Azerbaijani claims absolutely false but they are also — as most falsehoods nowadays tend to be — the exact inverse of the truth.

Armenia is one of the oldest nations in the world. Armenians founded Yereyan, their current capital, in 782 BC — exactly 2,700 years before Azerbaijan came into being in 1918. And yet, here is the president of Azerbaijan waging war because “Yerevan is our historical land and we Azerbaijanis must return to these historical lands.” //

Fast forward nearly a millennium to Azerbaijan’s war on Armenia in 2020, a Muslim fighter was videotaped triumphantly shouting “Allahu Akbar!” while standing atop an Armenian church chapel where the cross had been broken off.

Such is an idea of what the Turkic peoples did to Christian Armenians — not during the Armenian Genocide of a century ago when some 1.5 million Armenians were massacred and even more displaced — but one thousand years ago when the Islamic conquest of Armenia first began.

This unrelenting history of hate makes one thing perfectly clear: all modern-day pretexts and “territorial disputes” aside, true and permanent peace between Armenia and its Muslim neighbors will only be achieved when the Christian nation has either been conquered or ceded itself into nonexistence.

Nor would it be the first to do so. It is worth recalling that the heart of what is today called “the Muslim world” — the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) — was thoroughly Christian before the sword of Islam invaded. Bit by bit, century after century after the initial seventh-century Muslim conquests and occupations, it lost its Christian identity. Its peoples were lost in the morass of Islam so that few today even remember that Egypt, Iraq, Syria, etc., were among the first, oldest, and most populous Christian nations.

Armenia — the first nation in the world to adopt Christianity — is a holdout, a thorn in Islam’s side, and, as such, will never know lasting peace from the Muslims surrounding it — not least as the West has thrown it under the bus.

After 40 years of teaching a patently stupid, illogical, and scientifically unsound method of reading instruction that condemned millions of Americans to functional illiteracy, the "whole language" movement has given up the ghost as Columbia University shutters the " Teachers College Reading and Writing Project" and sends its founder, Lucy Calkins, off on "permanent sabbatical." //

Whole Language was based on the insane presumption that elementary-age children could learn to read by essentially guessing at the pronunciation and meaning of words.

Gregory Shafer, a professor of English at Mott Community College, has claimed that "the seeds" of the whole language movement were "firmly rooted" in the theories of linguist Noam Chomsky.[31] In 1967, Ken Goodman had an idea about reading that he considered similar to Chomsky's, and he wrote a widely cited article called "Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game".[32] Goodman set out to determine whether the views of Chomsky could serve as psychological models of the reading process.[33] He chided educators for attempting to apply what he saw as unnecessary orthographic order to a process that relied on holistic examination of words.[34] Whether Goodman was indeed inspired by Chomsky, neither Chomsky himself nor his followers have ever accepted Goodman's views.[35][36]

About 450,000 African slaves were taken from Africa to North America.

Meanwhile, about 1.25 million Europeans (English, French, Icelandic, Danes, Dutch, Welsh, etc) were taken from Europe to Africa as slaves.

Yes, 1.25 million!!!

See this drawing from 1675 showing the slave journey.

The women were mainly used as sex slaves or domestic servants.

The men as labourers or soldiers, with some undergoing castration and becoming eunuchs.

It was considered a sign of prosperity for an Algerian or Turkish leader to have white skinned eunuchs and female sex slaves.

The punishments for these slaves were horrific. Their noses and ears cut off for misbehaving, shackled in chains.

In many cases they were forced to convert to Islam. Their children were taken from them and often faced a difficult fate as sex slaves.

So, if you want to talk about reparations, let’s start here. //

Simon O'Neill
@simonathletepr
·
Sep 20
Some people refuse to believe that Europeans were taken as slaves. They think slavery only began 400 years ago with Europeans taking blacks to the USA. Most black slaves were out in chains by fellow blacks. That is never taught by those seeking reparations.

How psychological dysfunction has been embedded in our institutions.

CHRISTOPHER F. RUFO
SEP 20, 2023

You’re not imagining that the world has gone mad.

Healthy debate has been replaced by activist hysterics. Speech is declared violence, while violence is excused as speech. Masculinity is condemned as regressive, while men in skirts and heels are celebrated in the public square.

It’s easy to laugh at these outbursts as the ravings of a small but vocal minority, but the compromised health of our body politic is not a trivial concern. A strange, new pattern of psychological dysfunction has infiltrated our most prestigious institutions, our corporate bureaucracies, and the highest offices in the land.

In short, we’re sick. Our society is out of balance. We’ve been consumed by a cluster of disorder that appeals to our worst instincts and deranges our most important social functions.

We need to recover our sanity. But to do so, we must first know exactly what we’re dealing with: the emergence of a Cluster B Society.

This video is sponsored by Manhattan Institute.

There are approximately 900 Active-duty general/flag officers (GO/FOs) today of 1.3 million troops. This is a ratio of 1 GO/FO for every 1,400 troops. During World War II, an admittedly different era, there were more than 2,000 GO/FOs for a little more than 12 million Active troops (1:6,000). This development represents “rank creep” that does not enhance mission success but clutters the chain of command, adds bureaucratic layers to decisions, and costs taxpayers additional money from funding higher paygrades to fill positions. As end-strength fluctuates, force structure and strength projections for the next decade show the uniformed Services maintaining substantial excess capacity at senior ranks. Although historical numbers are inexact guides and future threats could radically change circumstances, the case for reduction is strong. The Department of Defense (DOD) should reduce the numbers, billets, and percent of GO/FOs in each Service to increase efficiency, streamline decisionmaking, achieve modest cost savings, and enhance accountability of decisionmaking.