A spacecraft fitted with two flexible robotic arms is on the way to geosynchronous orbit after launching earlier this week on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, kicking off a planned decade-long mission to open new frontiers in satellite servicing.

The Mission Robotic Vehicle, owned and built by Northrop Grumman, rocketed into orbit from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Tuesday. Three small propulsion pods, each functioning as standalone spacecraft, accompanied the MRV aboard the Falcon 9 rocket.

The Falcon 9 deployed all four payloads within about an hour of liftoff. It will take about a year for the satellites to maneuver from their initial elliptical drop-off orbit into a circular orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator. At this altitude, the MRV and the three Mission Extension Pods (MEPs) will travel in lockstep with Earth’s rotation, //

Northrop Grumman’s first three Mission Extension Pods launched on the same rocket as the MRV, but they are flying separately up to geosynchronous orbit using electric propulsion. The pods, each about the size of a dishwasher unit, will loiter there for retrieval by the MRV’s robotic arms. After picking up the first pod, the servicing spacecraft will rendezvous with its first client satellite, lining up precisely with the client to install the pod into its engine compartment. The MEP will latch onto the satellite and take over propulsion for up to eight years, acting as a jetpack, or a smaller version of the MEV, to move the client around geosynchronous orbit as needed. //

This isn’t refueling, but the MRV serves the same end. The Space Force has a separate contract with a company named Astroscale to demonstrate refueling in geosynchronous orbit next year, something no US company has done before. The MRV can also do more than life extension. It can inspect, service, upgrade, or repair satellites that were never designed for it. //

“RSGS has full seven-degree-of-freedom robotic arms, heavily instrumented. The ends of the arms can attach multiple tools as hands, and they also have a good deal of autonomous control,” Shoemaker said. “It’s general-purpose, high-dexterity robotics.”

Ground teams could build and launch more jetpacks to meet up with the MRV in geosynchronous orbit after the spacecraft uses the three pods already in space. Future launches could carry new tools, such as a knife, a cutter, or a robotic screwdriver for more invasive servicing or repairs. And the MRV itself is designed to be refueled in orbit. Northrop Grumman doesn’t plan to immediately build a second MRV, but it will continue upgrading and augmenting the vehicle it just launched. //

These companies and more are taking distinct paths toward satellite servicing, orbital refueling, in-space depots, and what the military likes to call dynamic space operations. But the trend is unmistakable: to fully utilize the domain of space, the throwaway mentality must go.

Introduced Monday as H.R. 9780 by Rep. Abe Hamadeh, R-Ariz., the BRRRRT Act (Bolstering Recognition, Resurgence, Retention, and Remembrance of the Thunderbolt) gets its name from the bone-rattling “BRRRRT!” sound the jet’s 30mm Gatling gun makes when fired. //

The current National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has some provisions for keeping some A-10s flying as well. But that doesn't sound as cool as the BRRRRT Act.

This bill will probably end up going nowhere, sadly. The A-10s will stick around a little while longer, but the Air Force has stopped training Warthog drivers, and depot maintenance operations on the A-10 are wrapping up. That's too bad. There's still a place in the modern battle space for a dedicated, low-and-slow, dedicated close air-support airplane, and the A-10's a very, very good one.

The minimum lethal dose of undiluted ethylene glycol is 1.4 mL/kg in cats, 4.4–6.6 mL/kg in dogs, 7–8 mL/kg in poultry, 2–10 mL/kg in cattle, 1.6 mL/kg in macaques, and 6.61 mL/kg in guinea pigs. Younger animals may be more susceptible. //

Once absorption has occurred, excretion of ethylene glycol is increased by fluid therapy designed to correct dehydration, increase urine production, and compensate for expected future losses. Fluid rates should be reassessed often to accommodate changes in hydration and status of ongoing losses. //

Cats require a higher (and extra-label) dosage 4-MP than dogs: 125 mg/kg initially, followed by 31.3 mg/kg at 12, 24, and 36 hours after the initial dose. Alternatively, ethanol can be administered, using a bolus protocol of 5 mL of 20% ethanol per kg body wt diluted in IV fluids and administered as a drip over 6 hours for five treatments, and then over 8 hours for four more treatments.

Lastly, for both dogs and cats, 30% ethanol can be administered at 1.3 mL/kg, IV bolus, followed by 0.42 mL/kg per hour constant-rate infusion for 48 hours. This approach may increase ease of monitoring and the maintenance of blood glucose levels. CNS signs may be less likely to wax and wane.

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

The Odyssey—the original poetry and the modern film—is not really about adventure, although it has an abundance of it. It’s also not primarily about virtues in some abstract way, whether the kill-your-enemies or love-your-enemies type. The Odyssey is about home. Odysseus wants to return to his place but comes to see that his obstacle is not merely geographical. He must become a different kind of person, the kind of man who can receive home as gift rather than as trophy. And at almost every step of the path, those who imaginatively walk with him can feel the ache.

Some of us are pulled toward nostalgia, looking to something better in the past. And some of us are pulled toward discontentment, looking to something better in the future. Regardless of where we turn, we all recognize something is missing. And all kinds of people—politicians, marketers, tech lords—are there to say, “You want to get home, and I can get you there.”

But it never works.

That’s because homesickness points in contradictory directions all at once. //

The ancient problem says “I can’t get home.” The modern problem says “I got home—it isn’t home.” One longs for return, and one longs for escape. These are not two problems but one. No matter which way we turn, we don’t know what home is. That’s why Homer still rings true, even in the era of IMAX and SpaceX.

And that’s what makes the Christian story stranger than the pagan ones. Odysseus spends 20 years trying to get back to Ithaca. Jesus has spent 2,000 years (so far) telling us to stop mistaking Ithaca for Eden.

The Bible is full of odysseys: Abraham leaves Ur. The Israelites leave Egypt. The apostles set out to “the ends of the earth” (Acts 13:47). When describing examples of faith, the Book of Hebrews says none of them “received the things promised” (11:13, ESV throughout).

These pilgrimages were not about answering the longing for home with a return to something past. We want a place prepared for us, a place to belong, a place to be known, a place to be loved. But our longing for that can sometimes leave us nostalgic for the wrong thing. The Israelites hungered in the wilderness. They responded to that with nostalgia for slavery: “We remember the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic” (Num. 11:5).

The longing wasn’t wrong. As a matter of fact, God said the hunger was necessary. The emptiness was in order that “he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (Deut. 8:3). As C. S. Lewis reminded us, “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water.”

All of that should lead us to ponder: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” Identifying the ache is not the end, but it’s a start.

The Odyssey, Homer’s and Nolan’s, assumes the greatest human tragedy is losing the home you once had. The Bible says Abraham was looking for a city he had never seen (Heb. 11:13–14). The Odyssey doesn’t answer the question; it reminds us how to ask it. And that’s not nothing. But once we start asking those questions, we might find a whole Trojan horse full of meanings about which we could never start to ask or even think (Eph. 3:20). Asking those questions just might lead us somewhere else, to a better story than even Homer or Hollywood can tell.

The Genesee Valley Greenway State Park is a 90-mile open space corridor that follows the route of the Genesee Valley Canal (1840-1878) and the Pennsylvania Railroad Rochester Branch (1882-1963) from the Erie Canalway Trail in Rochester's Genesee Valley Park to the Village of Cuba in Allegany County. The Greenway will eventually extend to Hinsdale in Cattaraugus County.

It includes a public, multi-use trail and natural and historic resources. The majority of the trail is an old railway bed that is a straight, level surface consisting of cinders, gravel, and mowed grass. The Greenway passes through woodlands, wetlands, river and stream valleys, rolling farmlands, steep gorges, and historic villages in sixteen towns located in Monroe, Livingston, Wyoming, Allegany, and Cattaraugus counties.

He was offered immortality. He chose home.

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey opens this week. We won’t be talking about who plays Helen. We’ll be talking about what the poem actually says – which is so much more interesting.

1. The Odyssey is 2,800 years old and contains one choice that defines everything: a goddess offers a mortal man immortality, eternal youth, and paradise. He refuses. He wants to go home. This is not a minor plot point. It is the entire argument of the poem – and one of the most radical statements in Western literature.

2. Home is not a place. It is the accumulated particular – his wife, his son, his dog, his kingdom, the bed he built with his own hands around a living olive tree. Specific. Irreplaceable. The thing no paradise can substitute for, because paradise is general and home is yours. Odysseus knows exactly who he is for the entire poem. Every island, every temptation, every god is trying to make him someone else. He refuses all of it.

3. Immortality is the abstraction. The Form. The Idea. Calypso offers "transcendence" – escape from the mortal, the contingent, the particular, into something eternal and "perfect." This is what Plato promised. This is what every utopia promises. He looks at the offer, looks toward Ithaca, and says no. Written five centuries before Plato – and already containing the correct answer.

4. Every temptation in the poem is a variation of the same offer. The Lotus-eaters give you forgetting – and forgetting is always the first step to losing yourself. Circe turns men into pigs: comfortable, fed, no longer quite human. The Sirens offer pure knowledge – but knowledge that requires you to stop, to be detained, to never arrive. Each one is a different version of the same proposition: stay, be comfortable, become something other than what you are.

5. He defeats the Cyclops — pure brute force — not with strength but with a name trick. He tells the monster his name is Nobody. When the Cyclops screams for help, he screams that Nobody is killing him. Intelligence as the only weapon that works against power. The hero of this poem is not the strongest man in the room. He is the most lucid.

6. Penelope is an underrated figure in Western literature. Twenty years alone, surrounded by a parasitic class consuming everything her husband built, with nothing but intelligence and patience. She holds the line. She tests him at the end with the secret of the bed – not with passion but with proof. She too knows exactly who she is and what she is waiting for. The Odyssey has two heroes. One travels. One stays. Both refuse to become someone else.

7. This week, everyone is arguing about the casting. Helen’s complexion. Representation. Nobody is discussing what the poem says. This is — without anyone noticing — the Odyssey happening in real time. The Lotus-eaters don’t use force. They offer something comfortable enough to make you forget what you were heading toward. The debate about the casting is the Lotus flower – the smokescreen. The poem is Ithaca – home. Odysseus would have recognized the mechanism immediately. He encountered it on every island.

Communism and the Herostratos Instinct – They Couldn’t Build It. So They Burned It.

In 356 BC, a man named Herostratos burned the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus — one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world — because he could never build something that magnificent and needed the world to know his name. The Athenians made it a capital offense to speak it. We still know it. The first man to destroy a Wonder of the World. It is the same story as Cain and Abel.

1. Every civilization produces two types in permanent tension. Those who build – who create, who reach, who transmit excellence forward. And those consumed by the fact that others build better than they do. They cannot bear the height. Cannot match it. And eventually decide that if they cannot reach it, nobody should have it. The name for this is envy – the specific, corrosive pain caused not by your own suffering but by another’s excellence. Nietzsche called it ressentiment. Genesis called it Cain. Same wound, every century, different clothes.

2. The lie is the first weapon – not to win the argument but to poison it. Not merely strategic propaganda deployed to seize power, but deployed to corrupt, to stain, to contaminate. To make the great seem like thieves, the builder an exploiter, the cathedral oppression, the excellence privilege. The goal is not to defeat the excellent in open debate. It is to make admiring them shameful and transmitting them suspect – so the child who might have reached toward them never learns they existed. Zakłamanie aimed specifically at height (explained below). Not managing reality – poisoning the wells from which excellence drinks.

3. The targets are never accidental. Always the best – the cathedral, not the barn. The scholar, not the clerk. Colonel Ciepliński, not the collaborator who signed the confession (also below). Excellence is the specific offense. Height is the specific wound. The destruction is always aimed upward – which is how you know it is envy and not justice.

4. Communism is the Herostratos instinct given a five-year plan, a secret police, and a philosophy that makes destruction sound like justice. The most organized mobilization of ressentiment in human history. It gave envy a manifesto, an army, and the moral high ground – the most dangerous combination ever assembled. Previous destroyers burned one temple. Communism burned the concept of the temple.

5. The pattern is unbroken across centuries. The French Revolution scattered the bones of French kings – not military necessity, ideological purification. Mao’s Red Guards burned libraries and killed scholars because five thousand years of Chinese excellence was an implicit rebuke to the revolution’s mediocrity. Today’s version cancels Shakespeare, pulls down Newton, erases Jefferson – not despite their greatness but because of it. Same wound. Same response. Updated vocabulary.

6. The lie does not stop at winning. It keeps working before and after victory – corrupting memory, rewriting history, staining reputations across generations, demoralizing and poisoning the souls. A civilization that cannot point to its greatest achievements and say — this is what we are capable of — is a civilization that has been successfully poisoned. The envy wins not when it tears down the statue. It wins when the children no longer know what the statue was.

7. You cannot build from envy. Which is why every revolution driven by it produces the same result: the heights are not replaced by new heights but by the flat, the administered, the carefully mediocre – the Idiocracy, the Last Man blinking. Not a failure of implementation. The intended output of the Herostratos instinct at civilizational scale. The Temple of Artemis was rebuilt twice before the destroyers finally won. Western civilization has been rebuilt before. The question is whether enough people understand what is being burned — and why — before the last stones are gone.

The Thousand Years We Lost.Not because it burned.

In 240 BC, a man named Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth in a library in Alexandria. He was accurate to within 1%. Euclid worked there. Archimedes studied there. Hero of Alexandria built a working steam engine there. Aristarchus proposed that the earth orbits the sun – 1,800 years before Copernicus. The question nobody asks about the Library of Alexandria is not who burned it. It is: what happened to all of that? Why did we spend over a thousand years rediscovering things already known?

The answer has nothing to do with fire.

The Library didn’t burn in one dramatic catastrophe. That is the myth – Julius Caesar’s fleet accidentally igniting the greatest repository of knowledge in the ancient world in 48 BC, everything consumed in a single night. It makes a good story. It is mostly wrong. The Library was damaged, partially, by Caesar’s fire. It continued in diminished form for centuries afterward. What finally ended it was not flame but the slow withdrawal of the resources and attention that any living institution requires to remain alive. It was administered to death. Budget by budget. Scholar not replaced. Wing not maintained. Political priority shifted. The most consequential loss in intellectual history was not an act of destruction. It was an act of indifference.

What the Library contained mattered less than what it made possible. Eratosthenes, Euclid, Archimedes, Aristarchus – these were not isolated geniuses working alone. They were the product of an institutional ecosystem: scholars from every civilization gathering in one place, arguing about the same texts, cross-pollinating disciplines that had never been in the same room before. When the scholars dispersed — to Rome, to Constantinople, to Persia — they took the texts but not the conversation. What was lost was not the inventory. It was the living intellectual culture that gave the inventory meaning.

Think about what that means. The steam engine existed in Alexandria in the first century AD. The heliocentric model existed in the third century BC. The circumference of the earth was known. If the Library had survived and transmitted continuously, the Industrial Revolution might have happened a thousand years earlier. What humanity lost in the slow death of Alexandria is not a collection of scrolls. It is twelve centuries of compounded progress – every discovery that would have followed from the discoveries that were made and then forgotten, every generation that spent its intellectual energy rediscovering what the previous civilization already knew.

The parallel is precise and uncomfortable. The Western university was the Library’s successor – the institution that gathered, preserved, and transmitted the accumulated knowledge of civilization across generations. It is currently being emptied. Not by fire. By ideological capture, administrative indifference, and the replacement of open inquiry with approved conclusions. The scholars and the books are still there. The conversation is being shut down – not dramatically, not visibly, but in the same slow way the Library’s conversation ended: one cancelled course, one retired professor not replaced, one field of inquiry made professionally dangerous. The Library of Alexandria didn’t need an arsonist. Neither does the university.

Civilizational memory doesn’t burn. It is defunded, dispersed or erased until nobody notices it’s gone. The most dangerous threat to what we know is never the barbarian at the gate. It is the administrator at the budget meeting, the ideologue in the curriculum committee, the funding body that decides, for entirely reasonable institutional reasons, that this particular conversation is no longer a priority. We know how this ends. We watched it happen once already, in Alexandria, across three centuries of entirely reasonable decisions. We called what followed the Dark Ages.
We are still deciding what to call what comes next.

In the early 1990s, internetworking wonks realized the world was not many years away from running out of Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses, the numbers needed to identify any device connected to the public internet. Noting booming interest in the internet, the internet community went looking for ways to avoid an IP address shortage that many feared would harm technology adoption and therefore the global economy.

A possible fix arrived in December 1995 in the form of RFC 1883, the first definition of IPv6, the planned successor to IPv4.

The most important change from IPv4 to IPv6 was moving from 32-bit to 128-bit addresses, a decision that increased the available pool of IP addresses from around 4.3 billion to over 340 undecillion – a 39-digit number. IPv6 was therefore thought to have future-proofed the internet, because nobody could imagine humanity would ever need more than a handful of undecillion IP addresses, never mind the entire range available under IPv6. //

"IPv6 was an extremely conservative protocol that changed as little as possible," APNIC chief scientist Geoff Huston told The Register. "It was a classic case of mis-design by committee."

And that notional committee made one more critical choice: IPv6 was not backward-compatible with IPv4, meaning users had to choose one or the other – or decide to run both in parallel.

For many, the decision of which protocol to use was easy because IPv6 didn't add features that represented major improvements. //

While IPv6 didn't take off as expected, it's not fair to say it failed.

"IPv6 wasn't about turning IPv4 off, but about ensuring the internet could continue to grow without breaking," said John Curran, president and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN).

"In fact, IPv4's continued viability is largely because IPv6 absorbed that growth pressure elsewhere – particularly in mobile, broadband, and cloud environments," he added. "In that sense, IPv6 succeeded where it was needed most, and must be regarded as a success." //

But there are plenty of organizations that still see a need for IPv6. Huawei sought 2.56 decillion IPv6 addresses and Starlink appears to have acquired 150 sextillion, which is helping to push more countries past 50 percent IPv6 adoption.

As Think Tank the Mercator Institute for China Studies last year observed, IPv6+ “has obvious appeal for authoritarian regimes looking to control their citizens,” because a carrier could read metadata and act on it. //

Reading metadata could also enable censorship: Beijing already blocks a lot of content, and if dissidents had to identify themselves in packets, they’d be easier to find and block.

The Institute also notes that China’s telco equipment companies have implemented IPv6+ and exported kit that runs it to several nations.

That’s worrying because China already tried to create a protocol called “New IP” that also included surveillance-friendly features.

Some never saw their files again either, infosec biz Proofpoint finds //

Authorities have long warned organizations not to pay ransoms, and fresh figures underline why: handing over the money doesn't mean the crooks leave you alone.

Proofpoint survey data suggests that 58 percent of affected UK organizations paid a ransom. Worse, 22 percent of those who pay get extorted again anyway.

The UK broadly tracks the global picture: 54 percent of victim organizations paid, though the rate swings sharply by region, from just 19 percent in Japan to 93 percent in the US. //

UK organizations that paid fared somewhat better than the 37 percent global average for repeat extortion. Still, the core lesson stands: paying doesn't reverse an attack. You can't trust a criminal's word. It just restarts a negotiation where the attacker holds every card, including the data, decryption keys, and the threat of publishing what they've stolen.

Operation Cronos, law enforcement's LockBit takedown, provided hard proof of what had long been suspected: cybercriminals often retain victim data even after being paid. Before Dmitry Khoroshev's cybercrime empire collapsed, this was an assumption, not evidence-based.

The flight lasted less than nine minutes, the right two engines losing power in quick succession as the Douglas DC-4 made its initial climb from San Juan, Puerto Rico, en route to New York.

The pilot of the Pan American Clipper Endeavor had no choice but to ditch the plane at sea. All 69 of the passengers and crew members survived the initial crash on April 11, 1952, only for panic and confusion to hit in the precious few minutes after the water landing.

The plane’s tail section broke off and the fuselage sank, an accident that claimed 52 lives and became a catalyst for airline safety briefings and procedures for generations to come. //

Josh Gates, a host of “Expedition Unknown,” said, “Every time you step onboard an airplane today, you are safer because of what happened to ‘Clipper Endeavor’ and her passengers three-quarters of a century ago.”

This post-Apocalyptic award-winning tale of Catholic Monks who preserve learning to rise from the Dark Ages when society's survivors blame education and kill anyone having to do with technology and nuclear science in particular, is perhaps the best narrated of all audiobooks with multiple narraters and sound effects.
A monk novice, Brother Frances discoveries a fall-out shelter 600 years old, containing the tooth and skeleton of the wife of the Blessed Liebowitz, the founder of the order who taught his monks to collect books and memorize them and or pass them along AKA Bookleggers.
Blessed Liebowitz had been a nuclear engineer who sought refuge in Holy Mother Church. He is later betrayed by a friend and was martyred.
Hope is carried by the bookleggar monks but the ending is cyclically chilling but hopeful in the stars.

From roadside convenience stores to lonely landscapes, travellers are discovering little-known slices of Americana away from the host cities.

In the build-up to this summer's Fifa World Cup, much of the attention was on the host cities and stadiums where the matches would be held. But after two weeks, something I never expected is happening: social media is flooded with feel-good videos of fans discovering the US that exists between skylines. //

These stories of human connection have made me and many other Americans emotional during this World Cup. They are examples of our country at its best, and they are coming exactly when I and so many other Americans need them the most.

"Many US citizens have been feeling down on their country, and sad that their nation is seen in a negative light overseas," Russell told me. "With the negative news in the run-up to the World Cup… seeing people actually enjoying the US and its people feels more intensely joyful."

She's right: after consuming so many of these social media posts and videos, I find myself overwhelmed with a sense of national pride that I haven't experienced for some time.

While teeth play a greater role in health than many realise, current dental solutions for tooth loss are temporary and subpar. What if we could regrow our teeth instead? //

Despite the demand, we're still years away from the first person to get self-filling cavities or a lab-grown tooth replacement. Before "we can begin to talk about" studying humans, experiments with non-human primates have to happen first, says Ruohola-Baker. That will take more research, time, and money. Plus, to get lab-grown teeth into human mouths, researchers need to create improved environments for tooth development.

In the meantime, the lessons learned in regenerative dentistry could help broader efforts to reproduce various parts of the body, such as organs and bones. Because teeth are "highly sophisticated living organs," says Yelick, efforts to replicate them in labs are teaching scientists how hard and soft tissues work together on a very basic level.

Korean researchers working with Samsung Heavy Industries have cleared a key hurdle in their efforts to develop designs for a containership powered by molten salt nuclear reactors. The American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) granted basic design approval, an AiP, for the project, reports the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute.

The Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute is working jointly with the Korea Research Institute of Ships & Ocean Engineering and Samsung Heavy Industries on the design of a 15,000 TEU vessel with nuclear power.

The companies point to the safety and efficiency achieved through the use of molten salt. It combines nuclear fuel with the molten salt, which is a safety feature as it would harden if the reaction failed, encasing the nuclear material. //

The key feature of their concept is two Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) employing the molten salt technology. They point to a redundancy with the two reactors as well as a power system design to efficiently manage the reactors’ output against the ship’s power demands. They also incorporated a surplus power storage capability that could provide power when needed. //

ABS reviewed and verified the technical feasibility and safety of the technology and design. The receipt of the Approval in Principle (AiP), the group said, is a “confirmation of the potential of marine nuclear technology.”

I grew up poor, raised by a man with an Ivy League degree.

3 luxuries matter:

Home-cooked meals.

A car that starts every time you turn the key.

Two weeks of vacation each year.

Everything else is BE.

And yes, I said luxuries. We ate at one reasonably priced restaurant maybe six times a year. I didn’t even taste sushi until I was in college.

Even those luxuries were limited. Every meal was made with store-brand groceries.

The cars were reliable used cars. Ask AI for “the most reliable used car with the lowest resale value.”

Vacations = free museums, state parks, beaches, battlefields, and camping. No Disney. Hershey or Six Flags maybe once a year.

The essentials?

Clothes: Salvation Army. Honestly, this one sucked, but today Walmart & Target make it easier.

Fixer-upper: I’m talking serious problems. You need a solid foundation, walls & a roof. Everything else can be fixed with Harbor Freight tools, YouTube, and sweat equity. We literally bought an abandoned house in a good neighborhood.

I live in rural Massachusetts. My neighborhood has $1 million homes. I bought an abandoned house and restored it, but just outside my neighborhood there are still homes for $300,000.

Medical: Before settling down, one of you should get a government job with benefits or join the military before having kids.

Time: This is the hardest part. My dad was a firefighter, so he’d work double shifts, then spend his days off repairing the house.

Activities: Boy Scouts, Civil Air Patrol, church choir, church camp, etc. Sign your kids up for free or cheap activities.

Education: Teach your kids everything you know. Read to them for an hour every night.

DAD INTEL: This is the big one. Build a network. Know where to get discounted building materials, who has tools, who’ll loan you a trailer or skid steer. Firefighters, cops, National Guard members, tradesmen & church communities have always been great for this, but those networks are disappearing.

Family: Live within three hours of relatives if you can. Someday you’ll need emergency babysitting or another guy to help lift something heavy.

What to avoid like the plague:

NO COSTCO: Unless you’re extremely disciplined, you’ll buy more than you need.

NO HOME DEPOT: Lumber isn’t always the best value, tools are overpriced, and those marble countertops start looking “necessary.” Formica from a local building supply works just fine.

NO FLIGHTS. We won a trip to London when I was five. It nearly bankrupted us. No flights anywhere.

Fast food. This was my dad’s biggest weakness because it was cheap and easy.

Again: NO RESTAURANTS. They add up fast, and you’re paying for convenience more than nutrition.

No drinking or drugs. Bad decisions usually start with small compromises.

No expensive hobbies. Your hobby is fixing the house, improving the yard, and coaching your kid’s Little League team. Fish from shore if you want a hobby. Dig for worms. You don’t need $15 lures.

No subscriptions. You don’t need Netflix. I have plenty of money now and didn’t even own a TV until recently. You don’t need home security cameras if you own an inexpensive firearm. You don’t need Uber or constant Amazon deliveries.

Now the big one:

You’ll feel like shit. You’ll think you’ve failed as a dad. You’ll envy the families with nicer houses, newer cars, and bigger vacations.

Don’t.

This is not a competition.

Your job is to be a great father, love your wife, raise capable kids, and become a productive member of society.

The antidote is gratitude.

Go to church. Every Sunday, thank God for what you have. Gratitude is critical.

It also helps if your work serves the public: firefighter, police officer, teacher, construction worker, sanitation worker, military.

Mental health problems? Start with the basics. Stay physically active, journal for 30 minutes a day & pray a full rosary.

“But John, that’s extreme.”

Maybe. But you’ll still be better off than 80% of Europoors. //

One more thing: get comfortable looking weird.

Who cares if your clothes look simple (you should have one or two great outfits for church)?

Who cares if you look like a dork wearing a scoutmaster uniform?

Who cares if you feel like a jerk riding into town of an electric scooter because you only have one car and your wife is using it?

Who cares if your clothes are a little dirty on vacation because you are sleeping at a campground in a borrowed tent?

Nobody cares but you.

Your kids will complain to your face, yes, that’s what kids do… but they will brag to their friends at school about that backpacking fishing trip you took them on guaranteed. And those rich kids will ask their parents why they took them to boring Paris rather than a hike on the Appalachian Trail. Trust me, I know.

The completion of the acquisition expands Iridium’s role in the aviation ecosystem by combining Aireon’s space-based air traffic surveillance and aviation intelligence services with Iridium’s global satellite communications network and resilient PNT capabilities.

Roberts Flight Information Region (Roberts FIR), located off the west coast of Africa, has selected Aireon’s space-based automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) data to navigate and surveil aircraft in the combined upper airspace of its three member States, joining a growing number of African countries opting for the revolutionary product.

The Roberts FIR, which is headquartered in Liberia, is a tripartite organization responsible for the control and safety of air navigation in the combined upper airspace of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, with a total size of 770,777 square km. Each Member state manages its portion of the airspace from the ground to 3000 ft. Mean Sea Level (MSL).