Of all the classes of people who ever lived, the American woman is the most privileged. We have the most rights and rewards, and the fewest duties. Our unique status is the result of a fortunate combination of circumstances. //

If the women’s libbers want to reject marriage and motherhood, it’s a free country and that is their choice. But let’s not permit these women’s libbers to get away with pretending to speak for the rest of us. Let’s not permit this tiny minority to degrade the role that most women prefer. Let’s not let these women’s libbers deprive wives and mothers of the rights we now possess.

Tell your Senators NOW that you want them to vote NO on the Equal Rights Amendment. Tell your television and radio stations that you want equal time to present the case FOR marriage and motherhood.

Jake Schneider @jacobkschneider
·
🚨 BIDEN: "We've run a campaign that's basically scandal free. That's hard to do in American politics."

(Except covering up his obvious cognitive decline, peddling his family's influence, hiding classified documents, etc etc etc)

6:39 PM · Dec 15, 2024

It goes without saying that all such claims by the enfeebled president are demonstrably false. Consider: Bidenflation. Botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. Pardon-palooza. Mishandling of classified documents. Weaponizing his Justice Department. Failing to secure the release of the hostages in Gaza.

All of that barely scratches the surface of just how bad of a president Biden has been. The fact is that Joe Biden will go down in history as one of our country's worst, with a recent poll showing his abysmal performance over the past four years has earned him the bottom-most position.

What's a washed up politician to do to save his legacy with scant little time to do it? Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) thinks she has the perfect solution: Make the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) a Constitutional amendment. //

The Sunday version of The New York Times published a grotesque leftist wish list of things a weird assortment of people — Rick Steves and weed? — want Biden to do before he's booted from The White House. The premise? Biden couldn't debase himself anymore than he did by pardoning his own son, so he might as well do all sorts of additional shameful things. //

Gillibrand is running with the idea, writing:

With Republicans set to take unified control of government, Americans are facing the further degradation of reproductive freedom.

Fortunately, Mr. Biden has the power to enshrine reproductive rights in the Constitution right now. He can direct the national archivist to certify and publish the Equal Rights Amendment. This would mean that the amendment has been officially ratified and that the archivist has declared it part of the Constitution.

She thinks she's got it all figured out, saying “I’ve never done more legal analysis and work since I was a lawyer.” Here's the gist of it:

Both houses of Congress approved the amendment in 1972, but it was not ratified by the states in time to be added to the Constitution. Ms. Gillibrand has been pushing a legal theory that the deadline for ratification is irrelevant and unconstitutional. All that remains, she argues, is for Mr. Biden to direct the national archivist, who is responsible for the certification and publication of constitutional amendments, to publish the E.R.A. as the 28th Amendment. //

The late Phyllis Schlafly wrote her seminal "What’s Wrong with ‘Equal Rights’ for Women?" essay back in 1972, and every one of her points from then holds true today.

Why should we trade in our special privileges and honored status for the alleged advantage of working in an office or assembly line? Most women would rather cuddle a baby than a typewriter or factory machine. Most women find that it is easier to get along with a husband than a foreman or office manager. Offices and factories require many more menial and repetitious chores than washing dishes and ironing shirts. Women’s libbers do not speak for the majority of American women. American women do not want to be liberated from husbands and children.

Schlafly circa 1972 is pure gold: "The 'women’s lib' movement is not an honest effort to secure better jobs for women who want or need to work outside the home. This is just the superficial sweet-talk to win broad support for a radical 'movement.' Women’s lib is a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother, and on the family as the basic unit of society." //

Devin
10 minutes ago
The deadline the states missed is completely relevant - it was in the amendment itself. So since they didn't meet the deadline, it failed. To pass it, it has to be re-introduced and voted on again

There is no such thing as traceroute.

I used to deliver network training at work. It was freeform, I was given wide latitude to design it as I saw fit, so I focused on things that I had seen people struggling with - clearly explaining VLANs in a less abstract manner than most literature, for instance, as well as actually explaining how QoS queuing works, which very few people understand properly.

One of the "chapters" in my presentation was about traceroute, and it more or less said "Don't use it, because you don't know how, and almost nobody you'll talk to does either, so try your best to ignore them." This is not just my opinion, it's backed up by people much more experienced than me. For a good summary I highly recommend this presentation.

But as good as that deck is, I always felt it left out a crucial piece of information: Traceroute, as far as the industry is concerned, does not exist.

Look it up. There is no RFC. There are no ports for traceroute, no rules in firewalls to accommodate it, no best practices for network operators. Why is that?

Traceroute has no history
First off: Yes, there is a traceroute RFC. It's RFC1393, it's 31 years old, and to my knowledge nothing supports it. The RFCs are jam-packed with brilliant ideas nobody implemented. This is one of them. The traceroute we have is completely unrelated to this.

Unsurprisingly however, it's a good description of how a traceroute protocol should work. //

As the linked presentation explains, traceroute simply no longer works in the modern world, at least not "as designed" - and it no longer can work that way, for several reasons not the least that networks have been abstracted in ways it did not anticipate.

There are now things like MPLS, which operate by encapsulating IP - in other words, putting a bag over a packets head, throwing it in the back of a van, driving it across town and letting it loose so it has no idea how far it's traveled. Without getting much further into how that works: It is completely impossible for it to satisfy the expectations of traceroute.

This "tool" works purely at layer 3, so it's impossible for it to adapt to the sort of "layer 12-dimensional-chess" type shenanigan that MPLS does - and there are other problems, but they're all getting ahead of reality, since traceroute never even worked correctly as intended, and there's no reason it would.

Traceroute, you see, is "clever," which is an engineering term that means "fragile." When programmers discover something "clever," any ability they may have had to assess its sustainability or purpose-fit often goes out the window, because it's far more important to embrace the "cleverness" than to solve a problem reliably. //

I can't count how many times this happened, but I do remember after about four years of doing this, I had come up with a method for getting more accurate latency stats: just ping -i .1. Absolutely hammer the thing with pings while you have the customer test their usual business processes, and it'll be easier to see latency spikes if something is eating up too much bandwidth.

What I discovered is that running two of these in parallel would produce exactly 50% packet loss, with total reliability. I then tested and found that if I just fired up three or four normal pings, at the default interval, it would do the same thing. 30% or 40% packet loss.

There is no telling how many issues we prolonged because everyone was running their own pings simultaneously and the kernel was getting overloaded and throwing some of them out. This is a snapshot of every network support center, everywhere. It is a bad scene.

yuliyp 40 days ago | next [–]

I think the "The Worst Diagnostics In The World" section is a bit simplistic about what traceroute does tell you. It can tell you lots of thing beyond "you can reach all the way". Specifically, it can tell you at least some of the networks and locations your packet went through and it can tell you how far it definitely got. These are extremely powerful tools as they rule out lots of problems. It's useful to be able to hand an ISP a "look, I can reach X location in your network and then the traceroute died" and they can't wonder "are you sure your firewall isn't blocking it?"
It's still a super-common tool for communicating issues between networking teams at various ASes. That the author's ISP thought they were too small to provide reasonable support to is not a strike against traceroute. Rather, it's a strike against that ISP.

Gather around the fire for another retelling of computer networking history. //

Systems Approach A few weeks ago I stumbled onto an article titled "Traceroute isn’t real," which was reasonably entertaining while also not quite right in places.

I assume the title is an allusion to birds aren’t real, a well-known satirical conspiracy theory, so perhaps the article should also be read as satire. You don’t need me to critique the piece because that task has been taken on by the tireless contributors of Hacker News, who have, on this occasion, done a pretty good job of criticism.

One line that jumped out at me in the traceroute essay was the claim "it is completely impossible for [MPLS] to satisfy the expectations of traceroute." //

Many of them hated ATM with a passion – this was the height of the nethead vs bellhead wars – and one reason for that was the “cell tax.” ATM imposed a constant overhead (tax) of five header bytes for every 48 bytes of payload (over 10 percent), and this was the best case. A 20-byte IP header, by contrast, could be amortized over 1500-byte or longer packets (less than 2 percent).

Even with average packet sizes around 300 bytes (as they were at that time) IP came out a fair bit more efficient. And the ATM cell tax was in addition to the IP header overhead. ISPs paid a lot for their high-speed links and most were keen to use them efficiently. //

The other field that we quickly decided was essential for the tag header was time-to-live (TTL). It is the nature of distributed routing algorithms that transient loops can happen, and packets stuck in loops consume forwarding resources – potentially even interfering with the updates that will resolve the loop. Since labelled packets (usually) follow the path established by IP routing, a TTL was non-negotiable. I think we might have briefly considered something less than eight bits for TTL – who really needs to count up to 255 hops? – but that idea was discarded.

Route account
Which brings us to traceroute. Unlike the presumed reader of “Traceroute isn’t real,” we knew how traceroute worked, and we considered it an important tool for debugging. There is a very easy way to make traceroute operate over any sort of tunnel, since traceroute depends on packets with short TTLs getting dropped due to TTL expiry. //

ISPs didn’t love the fact that random end users can get a picture of their internal topology by running traceroute. And MPLS (or other tunnelling technologies) gave them a perfect tool for obscuring the topology.

First of all you can make sure that interior routers don’t send ICMP time exceeded messages. But you can also fudge the TTL when a packet exits a tunnel. Rather than copying the outer (MPLS) TTL to the inner (IP) TTL on egress, you can just decrement the IP TTL by one. Hey presto, your tunnel looks (to traceroute) like a single hop, since the IP TTL only decrements by one as packets traverse the tunnel, no matter how many router hops actually exist along the tunnel path. We made this a configurable option in our implementation and allowed for it in RFC 3032. //

John Smith 19Gold badge
Coat
Interesting stuff
Sorry but yes I do find this sort of stuff interesting.

Without an understanding of how we got here, how will we know where to go next?

Just a thought. //

doublelayerSilver badge
Responding to headlines never helps
This article's author goes to great lengths to argue against another post based on that post's admittedly bad headline. The reason for that is simple: the author has seen the "isn't real" bit of the headline and jumped to bad conclusions. It's not literal, but it's also not satire a la "birds aren't real". The article itself explains what they mean with the frequent claims that traceroute "doesn't exist":

From a network perspective, traceroute does not exist. It's simply an exploit, a trick someone discovered, so it's to be expected that it has no defined qualities. It's just random junk being thrown at a host, hoping that everything along the paths responds in a way that they are explicitly not required to. Is it any surprise that the resulting signal to noise ratio is awful?

I would have phrased this differently, without the hyperbole, because that clearly causes problems. This response makes no point relevant to the network administration consequences of a traceroute command that is pretty much only usable by people with a lot of knowledge about the topology of any networks they're tracing through and plenty more about what that command is actually doing. Where it does respond, specifically the viability of traceroute in MPLS, it simplifies the problem by pointing out that you can, if you desire, manually implement the TTL field, then goes on to describe the many different ways you can choose not to, ways that everyone chose to use. It is fair to say the author of the anti-traceroute article got it wrong when they claimed that MPLS couldn't support it, but in practice, "couldn't support" looks very similar to "doesn't because they deliberately chose not to". It is similar enough that it doesn't invalidate the author's main point, that traceroute is a command that is dangerous in the hands of people who aren't good at understanding why it doesn't give them as much information as they think it does. //

ColinPaSilver badge

It's the old problem
You get the first version out there, and see how popular it is. If it is popular you can add more widgets to it.

If you spend time up front doing all things, that with hindsight, you should have done, you would never ship it. Another problem is you can also add all the features you think might be used, in the original version, and then find they are not used, or have been superseded.

I was told, get something out there, for people to try. When people come hammering on your door, add the things that multiple people want.

20 hrs
the spectacularly refined chapSilver badge

Re: It's the old problem
Cf the OSI network stack, which took so long to standardise that widespread adoption of IP had already filled the void it was intended to.

In some ways that is not ideal, 30+ years on there is still no standard job submission protocol for IP, OSI had it from the start.

What is wrong with these people? What is wrong with this culture, that it sees this as acceptable?

This is not a mere "cultural" difference. This isn't something that may be considered wrong in one society and not in another. This is wrong in essence; it is wrong no matter where, when, or to whom it happens. And the sad part is that the current law isn't nearly as, well, savage. //

Batta's story, should serve as a cautionary tale, as we have been importing thousands upon thousands of people from this part of the world, for who knows what reason, for years now. They are setting enclaves in places like Dearborn, Michigan, and Minneapolis, Minnesota - and some among them might agree with these Iraqi lawmakers and clerics.

It can happen here, and if you think some of these people might not try it, well, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

Germany: The Christmas markets are besieged by Syrian Islamists. They are demonstrating where Christianity is celebrated. Random choice of location or deliberate demonstration of power?

The latter. There is nothing random about this. The Christmas markets are seen by the Syrians as an overt celebration of a Christian tradition - which it is - and therefore cannot be tolerated, and must be interfered with or broken up if possible. These are not tolerant people, these are not people who are accepting of dissenting views, especially where religion is concerned; they are viciously intolerant and unforgiving, and it's important to note that they were imported to Germany from lands with Bronze-Age sensibilities. As long as they are allowed to remain in Europe, these things will only get worse - not better. //

Most of the nations of Western Europe are committing suicide on the installment plan. All we can do is watch - and hopefully learn from Europe's mistakes.

Experts recommend storing at least three days’ worth of emergency water for each person in your household. A simple way to calculate this:

A case of 24 (16.7 oz) bottles of water = 3 gallons
Purchase one case per person to meet the minimum three-day requirement during a disaster that disrupts your water supply.

Jews Fight Back 🇺🇸🇮🇱 @JewsFightBack
·
Israel to Ireland: If you’re going to embrace extreme anti-Israel policies, don’t expect us to stick around for tea.

Embassy CLOSED.
Last edited
10:38 AM · Dec 15, 2024 //

“The antisemitic actions and rhetoric that Ireland is taking against Israel are based on delegitimization and demonization of the Jewish state and on double standards,” says Foreign Minister Gideon] Sa’ar in a statement. “Ireland has crossed all red lines in its relationship with Israel. Israel will invest its resources in promoting bilateral relations with the countries of the world according to priorities that are also derived from the attitude of the various countries towards it.”

At the same time, Sa’ar announces that Israel will open an embassy in Moldova, which already has an embassy in Israel. The opening is expected to occur in the next year, and Israel is beginning the process of finding a site and appointing an ambassador.

“There are countries that are interested in strengthening their ties with Israel and do not yet have an Israeli embassy,” says Sa’ar. “We will adjust the Israeli diplomatic structure of our missions while giving weight, among other things, to the approach and actions of the various countries towards Israel in the political arena.”. //

jester6
24 minutes ago edited
I have known a few Irish, including natives, not just expats and immigrants. The Irish seem to have a reflexive response to side with rebels and underdogs, no matter the cause or politics. They love Palestinians, Cubans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, Iranians, and anyone fighting a bigger force. I honestly think if some whacky Ayn Rand inspired insurgency sought to overthrow the government of Canada, the Irish would send them military aid.

Maybe that's why my Irish friends in college seemed to only pick bar fights when the odds were overwhelmingly stacked against us.

Andrew Fox of the Henry Jackson Society in London has spearheaded an effort to examine the Gaza Health Ministry figures, and the result is that the health ministry numbers are completely unreliable. //

The number of civilians killed in the Gaza conflict has been inflated to portray Israel as deliberately targeting innocent people, a report claims.

Researchers accuse the Gaza ministry of health of overstating casualty data by including natural deaths, failing to differentiate between civilian and combat casualties and over-reporting the numbers of women and children killed.

The study by the Henry Jackson Society, a think tank, claims the figures have been manipulated by the Hamas-run authorities in Gaza for propaganda purposes, with international media outlets happy to repeat them uncritically…..

The report found numerous statistical anomalies and inaccuracies. Researchers say that around 5,000 natural deaths, which would have happened even without the conflict, appear to have been added to the list of casualties, including cancer patients who later appeared on lists of those still receiving hospital treatment….

https://henryjacksonsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/HJS-Questionable-Counting-%E2%80%93-Hamas-Report-web.pdf

Listmonk is a simple, all-in-one self-hosted newsletters and mailing lists solution for Linux. Unlike traditional mailing list programs, it excels in providing a lean platform that is lightweight and fast. Here we show you how to install Listmonk using Docker on Ubuntu, and how to get started using it to send newsletters.

Note: You can easily create a random password with the command:

cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'A-Za-z0-9' | fold -w 32 | head -n 1

Over 7-8 December, much of Flightradar24’s most tracked flights list was occupied by flights to, from, or near Syria as rebels entered Damascus and news spread that Syria’s Bashar al-Assad had been deposed. With the Russian government announcing it had granted Assad and his family asylum and they were in Moscow, we began to ponder Assad’s possible paths to Russia.

The following options present to us the most likely scenarios, though there are certainly multiple variables that leave open the possibility of additional options.

It took a few years, but the “green blob” finally settled on manmade carbon dioxide (CO2) as the main culprit, and climate extremists and their allies in government have been railing about the need to rapidly transition to non-CO2-producing energy sources to “save the planet” from impending climate-driven catastrophes.

The problem for the blob is that contrary to the predictions of the various climate models, no scientific evidence has yet been developed to categorically prove the theory that manmade CO2 emissions cause climate change. The various hair-on-fire predictions from the likes of Al Gore have been proven to be drastically wrong over the years (see here, here, and here).

In point of fact, there is no scientific evidence that manmade CO2 emissions cause climate change. Rather, the real causes of significant climate change (over long periods of time) are natural solar cycles, major and minor volcanic eruptions, natural changes in ocean currents, and the hydrologic (water) cycle in the Earth-Atmosphere system that has existed for millennia. In short, the factors that most US high school physics students learned through the 1970s until physical science textbooks began to be corrupted by CAGW theory activists in public education. I fondly recall learning about the beneficial effects on plant growth of introducing carbon dioxide into enclosed terrarium experiments in my own high school physics class. I wonder if such simple and highly illuminating experiments are ever conducted these days? //

Economists, average Americans, and big-tech billionaires are weighing in on the green new scam and questioning the Left’s headlong rush toward the sustainable energy fraud. Whether it is the horror stories about exploding EV batteries, EV fires, purposeful skyrocketing energy prices, or the reality that clean energy simply cannot produce the energy required to maintain current energy needs let alone accommodate the requirements of AI data centers and other future needs – not to mention that the predicted climate disasters simply haven’t materialized as promised by green scam backers! – Americans are beginning to understand the realities of radical green policies. And the potential return of nuclear energy is the clearest sign that some sanity is being injected into the US energy production debate.

The massive green subsidies of the Biden-Harris regime could very well be the highwater mark of the green nonsense in America. This is a great shift that is long overdue!

Recently, a few of my virtual pals have inquired about what it’s like to live in South Dakota, with at least a passing interest in considering a major life change. Most are clueless and have never even passed through the state and thus have no idea what it’s like to live here. To many, all they’ve heard about is Mount Rushmore, empty prairieland, the Badlands, and bitter cold winters. Little do they know!

I have compiled my thoughts below from the prospective of informing someone who may wish to move/retire here to give you just a taste of the Sunshine State.

Florida is known as the “Sunshine State” but South Dakota may have claimed it before Florida.

The first South Dakota flag was made in 1909. One side of the state flag was to include a sun and the words “The Sunshine State” according to the South Dakota Secretary of State website. //

The state also has more sun than its neighbors to the east. Multiple weather data websites said the state averages about 213 sunny days. There are about 200 days in Iowa and about 198 sunny days in Minneapolis, Minnesota. North Dakota has about 201 sunny days. //

Thrifty South Dakotans may have led to the loss of the “Sunshine State” nickname.

The two-side flag with the words “The Sunshine State” existed until 1962. Legislators decided that a flag with two distinct sides was too costly to make. It cost residents too much to buy it, so few state flags were flown, according to the S.D. SOS website said.

The flag design was changed in 1963 but “Sunshine State” hung around, apparently.

“In 1992, a measure sponsored by State Rep. Gordon Pederson of Pennington County, South Dakota, changed the wording on the flag to read “The Mount Rushmore State,” the S.D. SOS website said.

Out with the sun, in with the faces of the famous four.

But perhaps known to South Dakotans by 1992, the Florida Legislature had already taken action 22 years prior to officially adopt the nickname “The Sunshine State.”

Statesymbolsusa.org said the Florida lawmakers passed the measure in 1970. That state is also known as the “Peninsula State” for its shape. Florida has on average 273 sunny days.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “But synthetic stocks are more durable!” Sure, if you’re planning to drop your rifle off a cliff or leave it in the rain for a week, plastic might hold up better. But durability isn’t the end-all, be-all of a rifle’s value. Wooden rifles weren’t designed to survive a zombie apocalypse; they were made to connect the shooter to something deeper—the land, the tradition, the story. If your only concern is having a rifle that’s “indestructible,” you’re not looking for a rifle. You’re looking for a shovel.

Let’s not forget the charm of modularity—the argument that a modern rifle can be Frankenstein-ed into whatever you want it to be. Adjustable stocks, interchangeable grips, tactical rails galore. But let me ask you: Does a Lego set stir your soul? Because that’s what these modern contraptions are—a mishmash of parts with no heart, no spirit, and no connection to anything but your wallet. A wooden-stocked rifle, on the other hand, is a piece of art. It’s a singular creation, made with purpose and integrity. It’s not a platform; it’s a rifle.

In the end, the difference is simple: a wooden-stocked rifle has a soul. It’s a rifle in the truest sense of the word—a tool, yes, but also a companion, a legacy, and a reminder of what matters. A rifle without wood? It’s just another tool in your toolbox, wedged between the cordless drill and the crowbar. And if that’s what you want, fine. But don’t call it a rifle. Call it what it is: a plastic imposter.

It’s hard to choose my favorite Christmas movie. Each time I try to pick one, I’m afraid I’ll shoot my eye out.

There are, of course, obligatory holiday movies which bring to mind one’s parents and grandparents. A period in post-war national history which featured Buicks Roadmasters, Hula Hoops, and pineapple upside down cakes made almost completely of mayonnaise. This era features movies such as “Miracle on 34th Street” (1947); “A Christmas Carol” (1951); and “White Christmas” (1954).

Somewhere at the top of my movie list sits “A Christmas Story” (1983). Perhaps because, not unlike the movie’s protagonist, Ralphie, I too grew up among folks who believed no Christmas gift better embodied the True Meaning of Christ’s Birth than an American-made firearm. //

I’m also a big fan of the multiple retellings of Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge. For my money, George C. Scott delivers a prize-winning performance in 1984’s “A Christmas Carol.”

Still, it is the Dickensian musical “Scrooge” (1970), starring Albert Finney, that takes the cake. The movie’s flagship song, “Thank You Very Much” is a musical ear worm which will burrow into your frontal lobe and live there until your death. //

I’m skipping over a lot of great Christmas movies here, such as “Holiday Inn” (1942), “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946), “Die Hard” (1988).

But if you forced me to choose the greatest Christmas movie of all time, I would have no choice but to choose “A Charlie Brown Christmas” (1965).

With text adapted from scripture and music to bring the text to life, we can hear the gentle, yet insistent pleading of the Savior to “come” and find rest in Him. Artfully set for SATB with piano, this rich and warm accompaniment is further enhanced with a beautiful solo cello line.  The cello part is included in the octavo.

Let’s go through the entire Tailscale system from bottom to top, the same way we built it (but skipping some zigzags we took along the way). With this information, you should be able to build your own Tailscale replacement… except you don’t have to, since our node software is open source and we have a flexible free plan.