REPORTER: Is the increase in tornados [caused by] global warming?

DESANTIS: I think you can back and find tornadoes for all of human history, for sure, and especially, you know, Florida, how does this storm rate in the history of storms? I think it hit with a barometric pressure of (looks at the man behind him), what was it? About 950 millibars when it hit?

Which, I think if you go back to 1851, there's probably been 27 hurricanes that have had lower, the lower the barometric pressure, the stronger it is. I think there have been about 27 hurricanes that have had lower barometric pressure on landfall than Milton did, and of those, 17 occurred, I think, prior to 1960, and the most powerful hurricane on record since the 1850s in the State of Florida occurred in the 1930s, the Labor Day hurricane. Barometric pressure 892 millibars.

It totally wiped out the Keys. We've never seen anything like it, and that remains head and shoulders above any powerful hurricane in the State of Florida. The most deadly hurricane we've ever had was in 1928, the Okichobi hurricane. Killed over 4,000 people. Fortunately, we aren't going to have anything close to that on this hurricane, but even ones like Ian, it wasn't anything close to that. Yeah, I just think people should put this in perspective. They try to take different things that happen with tropical weather and act like it's something. There's nothing new under the sun. This is something that the state has dealt with for its entire history, and it's something that we'll continue to deal with.

REPORTER: In your history, sir, how many storms form as rapidly as they have between Helena and Milton.

DESANTIS: I think most people remember 2004 where it seemed like we had them every other week in 2004. Then there's also time period. From 2006-16, we had no hurricanes at all in Florida. There's also been times where we had a lot. In the 1940s, we were hit a lot. Now, more recently, we've had a spate for more. That's just kind of the nature of it, but this really does, it has a lot of similarities to 2004 in terms of the season.

His new film “Line in the Sand,” however, may go down as his biggest achievement yet, as it is a powerful, moving look at the border crisis, the human trafficking that goes with it, and the moral rot at the center. /)

I asked him what surprised him most while making this film, and he said it was the endless grift:

All the people that are on the take, all the people that were making money off of this. All the people that were not willing to do the right thing because they wanted to benefit. I don't know if that was surprising—but it was shocking to hear what people were saying.

James O'Keefe
@JamesOKeefeIII
🚨WORLD PREMIERE🚨

Line in the Sand (2024) - Official Trailer | James O’Keefe, Debut Film

Undercover journalist James O'Keefe goes to the front lines of the migrant industrial complex using hidden cameras and raw testimonials. O'Keefe reveals the shocking reality of the U.S.…
Embedded video
11:06 PM · Oct 9, 2024 //

Perhaps the most interesting thing he revealed, however, is just how much money is involved in perpetuating the problem and how many people on both sides of the boundary are benefitting from it—even as it endangers our country and causes misery for untold thousands (millions?).

Although O’Keefe didn’t get especially political in the film, the reality that he deftly portrays is one of a humanitarian disaster in large part caused by the corrupt Biden-Harris regime, aided and abetted by NGOs and others profiting from pain.

ince early September, Cloudflare's DDoS protection systems have been combating a month-long campaign of hyper-volumetric L3/4 DDoS attacks. Cloudflare’s defenses mitigated over one hundred hyper-volumetric L3/4 DDoS attacks throughout the month, with many exceeding 2 billion packets per second (Bpps) and 3 terabits per second (Tbps). The largest attack peaked 3.8 Tbps — the largest ever disclosed publicly by any organization. Detection and mitigation was fully autonomous. The graphs below represent two separate attack events that targeted the same Cloudflare customer and were mitigated autonomously.

This is not journalism. It's naked activism backed by an insane DEI apparatus that seeks to control the flow of information. The fact that CBS News even has a "Race and Culture Department" that is pre-vetting interview questions is an incredible breach of journalistic ethics. Yet, it's Dokoupil who is being accused of violating editorial standards.

Naturally, not a single mainstream press "media report" such as CNN's Brian Stelter has mentioned any of these scandals. Between this and the editing falsehoods by "60 Minutes," where a completely unrelated answer was cut and pasted to a question Harris flubbed, CBS News should not be considered a "news" network. At the very least, Republican politicians need to blackball them.

In late August, Mark Memmott, the senior director of standards and practices at CBS News, sent an email to all CBS News employees reminding them to “be careful with some terms when we talk or write about the news” from Israel and Gaza. One of the words on Memmott’s list of terms was Jerusalem.

Of Jerusalem, Memmott wrote: “Do not refer to it as being in Israel.”

He continued, in a note sent to thousands of journalists at the network: “Yes, the U.S. embassy is there and the Trump administration recognized it as being Israel’s capital. But its status is disputed. The status of Jerusalem goes to the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel regards Jerusalem as its ‘eternal and undivided’ capital, while the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem—occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war—as the capital of a future state.”

Jerusalem’s status is indeed contested. For instance, the United States’ embassy in Israel is in Jerusalem, and the Jordanian Islamic Waqf has custody of its holy sites. But acknowledging the competing claims on different parts of the city, or declining to refer to Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, are one thing. Denying that it is in Israel at all is quite another.

In which country is the Israeli Knesset, the home of the Israeli prime minister and the home of the Israeli president, located? The answer to that question is self-evident. Except, it seems, at CBS. In the rest of the United States, the answer is clear: Since 1995, when Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, the government has recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Bill Whitaker actually did a good job of asking some probing questions, and Kamala gave some ridiculous answers, including one incredible word salad about Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They released a clip on it early, but then when they did the whole interview on Monday, the answer had changed and been edited. //

anon-tf71 an hour ago
Can we sue CBS for election interference?

polyjunkie anon-tf71 an hour ago edited
Well, in New York, they would have to make some errors in their tax returns by deducting the expenses associated with the interview as a business expense instead of a contribution in kind to the Harris campaign. They would then be misdemeanor “bookkeeping errors”. Then, after the statute of limitations expires, the DA can declare that the statute was extended for a year for “reasons”, and then add them all together, declare them to now be felonies because “election interference”, and try CBS. So, yes. I would say sure, try them for election interference.

Many of the residents we spoke with lost their homes to landslides and flooding during Hurricane Helene.

The Daily Signal asked people a simple question: “What do you want to say to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris?”

An overwhelming majority said that they are frustrated that the U.S. government is spending billions of dollars abroad instead of helping American citizens first.

Frank Butera, a business owner in Lake Lure, said, “It’s nice that you’re helping the illegal immigrants, but it’s time to help us people that paid taxes all our life.”

FrogsAndChipsSilver badge
He's right, of course
The importance of using the active voice cannot be emphasized enough.

DostoevskyBronze badge
Reply Icon
Re: He's right, of course
It appears my idea was stolen by you.

2 days
Bill Gray
Reply Icon
Re: He's right, of course
I suspect about 50% of us came here to make that post. I first came across it from a list of 'fumblerules', I think collected by William Safire circa 1980, that included :

Don't use no double negatives.

Sentences should a verb.

One will never have used the future perfect in one's entire life.

Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read and figure out.

I've told you a thousand times : avoid hyperbole.

(plus quite a bit more not currently coming to mind) //

2 days
rafff
Reply Icon
Re: He's right, of course
"I have searched for a word that refers to itself."

In a logic text book I once read the word is "homologous". "Heterologous" denotes a word that does not refer to itself. Clearly, there are no other possibilities.

"Short" is a short word, and so is homologous; "long" is not a long word and so is heterologous. But what about "Heterologous" itself? If "heterologous" is heterologous then it does not refer to itself and so must be homologous. But if it is homologous then it does refer to itself and so is heterologous.

Benegesserict CumbersomberbatchSilver badge
Reply Icon
Re: He's right, of course
There's a Dr Gödel here who would like to have a word with you. //

Send Postal Mail Online By Email

If you need to send postal letters quick and simple, our email delivery service is perfect. It’s as easy as sending an email with the letter attached and Postal Methods will take care of delivering your documents.

QuickSend Portal System

Our QuickSend Portal is the easy and secure way to mail documents. Send letters online without going to the Post Office. QuickSend allows you to upload documents and create templates to easily send letters from anywhere.

Grammatical errors in the post itself notwithstanding (Muphry's law is axiomatic in this type of post, and likely also in this article describing it), The Reg thinks Torvalds is correct. The passive construction, which may be found in scientific papers and technical writing, can be confusing and annoying. It creates a lack of clarity that leads not only to confusion about responsibility or agency, but often hides important information about who should be doing what and when. Ideal for certain vendor manuals, then. //

The Linux supremo declared:

But what does make extra work is when some maintainers use passive voice, and then I try to actively rewrite the explanation (or, admittedly, sometimes I just decide I don't care quite enough about trying to make the messages sound the same). So I would ask maintainers to please use active voice, and preferably just imperative. //

Illustrating the point, and showing how far the Linux kernel chieftain has come from his more belligerent days, Torvalds said he'd "love it" (yep, he's a new man) if people would avoid writing their "descriptions as 'In this pull request, the Xyzzy driver error handling was fixed to avoid a NULL pointer dereference.' Instead, write it as 'This fixes a NULL pointer dereference in ..'"

The directive comes years after the great punctuation rant of 2016, where Torvalds pressed "brain-damaged shit-for-brains devs" to drop the "disgusting drug-induced crap" and use asterisks properly. He's toned it down several notches, basically.

In Android 14, Google introduced new limitations on the installation of applications targeting old versions of Android.

What’s changing
From Android 14 it is no longer possible to install any application that targets an API level below 23 - Android 6.0. Attempting to do so will trigger a security exception //

It's certainly better to ensure apps are targeting the latest API level where possible, but as long as applications target an API level of 23 (Android 6.0) or higher for Android 14, and 24 (Android 7.0) or higher in Android 15, apps will continue to be able to install without issue. //

Yes, on an Android 14 device you may connect to ADB and sideload an application with:

“Noncitizens voting in federal elections is illegal under the ‘Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996,’” Braynard said in a statement announcing the ad blitz.

“However, there are still cases of it occurring, putting noncitizens at risk of facing serious charges and of affecting the outcome of our elections,” he claims.

One such ad, posted to YouTube, begins by reminding all Americans of the importance of voting in the elections come November. But should one attempt to cast an illegal ballot, they face significant repercussions. //

The group also cites a peer-reviewed scientific study published in Electoral Studies in 2014 that found non-citizens had, in fact, voted in U.S. elections.

The study claims non-citizen voting “likely changed 2008 outcomes including Electoral College votes and the composition of Congress.”

It also reveals that “non-citizens favor Democratic candidates over Republican candidates.”

It goes to the heart of an argument long made by X CEO Elon Musk, who has repeatedly pointed out that the census counts illegal aliens, affecting the congressional makeup in blue states and incentivizing Democrats to allow open-border policies to continue unabated.

“If Dems win President, House & Senate (with enough seats to overcome filibuster),” Musk warned previously, “they’ll grant citizenship to all illegals (and) America will become a permanent one-party deep socialist state.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0261379414000973 //

In addition to allowing non-citizens to be counted towards congressional apportionment, the Biden-Harris administration has been actively granting citizenship to immigrants at speeds not seen in over a decade.

bk
an hour ago
"I like hurricanes - they remind me of circles on Venn diagrams."

Tolly bk
an hour ago
"...and the wheels on the short, yellow bus that used to take me to school."

CatsAliveInHim TheAmerican1
3 hours ago edited
We’re not voting for president of the senior class.

Your vote for Trump is a chess move to preserve our Republic in a world that would like nothing better than to see America disappear.

ETA my comment is directed toward the fence-sitting voter, not you.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Chinese hackers (Salt Typhoon) penetrated the networks of US broadband providers, and might have accessed the backdoors that the federal government uses to execute court-authorized wiretap requests. Those backdoors have been mandated by law—CALEA—since 1994.

It’s a weird story. The first line of the article is: “A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of U.S. broadband providers.” This implies that the attack wasn’t against the broadband providers directly, but against one of the intermediary companies that sit between the government CALEA requests and the broadband providers.

For years, the security community has pushed back against these backdoors, pointing out that the technical capability cannot differentiate between good guys and bad guys. And here is one more example of a backdoor access mechanism being targeted by the “wrong” eavesdroppers. //

Clive Robinson • October 8, 2024 12:34 PM

Funny in a sad way but I used CALEA as an example of a bad idea put into legislation just a short time back.

The thing that most do not realise is that the actual “back door” does not need to be present, just the hooks for it in the system.

I doubt many remember back the twenty years to the Greek Olympics, but the main cellphone provider did Vodafone did not have the CALEA software installed in it’s equipment. But because the switches had it as a paid for option the low level hooks etc were in place in them.

The CIA/NSA used “the games” as an excuse to “check security”, and in the process a backdoor was dropped onto the hooks and more than a hundred senior Greek Government individuals had their phones put under surveillance, as well as some of their families and arabic business men.

For reasons not clear but incompetence by a CIA officer was indicated the backdoor was found. As an enquiry got under way and started to home in on events a phone company employee was found dead and he was blamed. Initially claimed to be a suicide it was later found to be murder with fingers pointed at the US.

The point everyone should remember is that when designing communications systems, you must design them in a way that backdoors are not only not possible but indicative behaviour will get flagged up quickly.

Otherwise on the sensible view expressed in Claude Shannon’s pithy maxim of,

“The enemy knows the system”[1],

the enemy will try to build an illicit backdoor in if you give them any crack to exploit.

Such “defensive engineering” to stop it is not something the vast majority of software and other systems developers understand and it’s long over due as an industry that ICT “Got it’s ‘sand’ together” on the matter.

Whilst E2EE when properly done –and it’s mostly not– can protect the “message contents” it does not protect much of anything else about the communications. That is the actual traffic meta-data and meta-meta-data allows not just “Traffic Analysis” but other forms of analysis and correlation by which information can be reasoned.

[1] Actually a rewording of Dutch Prof Auguste Kerckhoffs’s 2nd principle from the early 1880’s. //

Who? • October 8, 2024 12:40 PM

NOBUS at its best.

I hope some day one of these mandated-by-law backdoors will be used to make a truly destructive attack against U.S. critical infraestructures, so they start taking cybersecurity seriously and radically change their minds with relation to government backdoors.

I am sorry for being so harsh, but weakening computer and network (well… both are the same as the old Sun Microsystems slogan said, right?) security has nothing to do with cybersecurity. A secure computer is a secure device, secure against adversaries and secure against us too. I will say more, if NSA finds a vulnerability in a software project developed outside the United States, they should communicate the vulnerability to the developers of that software project too, at least if that software is used in the United States.

No one should play in the cybersecurity field by weakening the security of computer systems, at least not if they play in the “good guys” team.

Well, take this event as a warning note. I am not able to read an article behind a paywall, so I am unsure about what this attack means, but hope it will not be too difficult to fix. And, no, the fix is not changing the backdoor to a different one. The only acceptable fix is closing the backdoor forever.

Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump has been doing all kinds of interviews in order to get out his message to the people, including friendly and unfriendly outlets. He went on the Flagrant podcast with Andrew Schulz and Akaash Singh in a free-wheeling interview where they covered all kinds of topics. No teleprompters; you can tell it's just a regular conversation. No talking points needed. So different from the Kamala "interviews."

Trump does particularly well in these kinds of interviews, where his humor and humanity come out more. The difference between his ability and knowledge versus Kamala Harris is stark.

Elon Musk has become a big supporter of Trump, so they asked if Musk was his "favorite African American."

Trump had a good laugh at that one.

He praised Musk for loving the country and "picking a side," noting how now (because of Democrats), you can suffer a cost for supporting the opposition, a troubling turn of events for the country. He mentioned how he had supporters who were hesitant to be supporters publicly for that reason. But Elon has gone "all out," which takes courage. //

Schulz asked about him being a father and about a funny story of Don Jr. asking if he could have five friends over when he thought his father would be out of town. He ended up bringing over 200, and his father showed up. It did not go well. //

He joked how he could never give closure for his son doing that. But then he spoke about what Don had to go through because of being his son. He also praised his daughter Ivanka for her efforts during his administration. //

Trump War Room @TrumpWarRoom
·
President Trump reveals the one ability Joe Biden has, that he doesn't: "He has an ability to fall asleep while on camera." 🤣

9:55 AM · Oct 9, 2024

The Supreme Court will not halt Special Counsel Jack Smith’s review of private messages between former President Donald Trump and Twitter, now known as X.

On Monday, the nine-justice panel issued handed down their decision without explanation, declining to consider Trump’s challenge against Smith’s secret warrant.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) first sought the records in January last year, demanding a complete trove of private information including Trump’s search history, direct messages, account settings, and activity under the “@realDonaldTrump” username. According to The Hill, the government obtained a nondisclosure order to bar X from revealing the existence of the warrant, even to the former president.

“The company challenged the order, arguing the records were potentially covered by executive privilege and not being able to tell Trump violated the First Amendment,” The Hill reported. “Court filings show X at one point was fined $350,000 for not timely turning over Trump’s data.”

Attempts to block Smith’s surveillance in the lower courts, however, failed. The Supreme Court ultimately refused to hear another challenge to the warrant in Smith’s criminal case, which is related to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson questioned whether the court should even be involved in addressing the policy in the first place, saying she was concerned about the court “taking over what Congress may have intended for the agency to do in this situation.”

"I think it can't be assumed that the agency exceeds its authority whenever it interprets a statutory term differently than we would such that all we have to do as a part of this claim here today is just decide what we think a firearm is." //

Justice Brett Kavanaugh expressed concerns that the regulation would criminalize ghost gun sellers who might not be aware that they are violating a law, CNN reported.

“This is an agency regulation that broadens a criminal statute beyond what it had been before,” Kavanaugh asked. “What about the seller, for example, who is truly not aware — truly not aware — that they are violating the law and gets criminally charged?”

Prelogar said prosecutors would have to prove that the seller was willfully violating the law. Kavanaugh described Prelogar’s answer as “helpful.” //

Twist Gamma
12 minutes ago
Kavanaugh nailed it at the end.

I was on board with the government's argument up until Kavanaugh made it clear that this was not a law but an interpretation of a law. Interpretations on something like this should absolutely go in the favor of the citizen, so that citizens do not become criminals without realizing it.

If guns are regulated, there is no problem with regulating, in the same way, a kit that has all of the ingredients + instructions to build a gun. It's the same thing, assuming the kit is complete. Any restriction on guns that passes Constitutional muster could equally be applied to a complete gun kit.

However, deciding that they are equivalent is the job of Congress, not the courts. And ESPECIALLY not the job of the bureaucracy.

Whether the restrictions themselves are Constitutional is a separate question, of course.

Presenting the following question to Vance, she said that CBS polling found that “more than 60 percent of Republicans under the age of 45 favor the U.S. taking steps to try and reduce climate change,” and she asked him what the Trump administration would do to reduce the alleged impact of climate change.

I want to isolate that bit about the CBS polling for a moment. I wasn’t able to easily find the poll they were referencing, but I won’t worry over the numbers there anyway, because people can claim to be in favor of the government doing “something” all they want. Yet when real policy hits pocketbooks and people have to see what their virtue signaling actually costs, their tune changes drastically.

For example, a poll conducted by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research (UC/AP) found that only 38 percent of Americans surveyed said that they would be willing to pay a $1 per month carbon fee to fight climate change. As the amount of monthly fee increased, support continued to fall. This same trend is seen in multiple polls, which means it is misleading to suggest that the “someone needs to do something” polling translates to voter support for higher energy costs and Green New Deal radicalism. //

The most astonishing part of this section of the debate, however, came at the very end of the relatively reasonable discussion about energy and foreign manufacturing and emissions, and it did not come from either of the candidates. After a short response from Walz in which he lied, saying that there had been no moratorium on natural gas and oil, moderator O’Donnell cut him off to tell him his time was up and, without even taking a breath, concluded with, “[t]he overwhelming consensus among scientists is that the earth's climate is warming at an unprecedented rate. Margaret?”

And moderator Margaret Brennan seamlessly pivoted to the next question on immigration.

She gave no time for either candidate to respond to her very random injection of the scientific establishment ad populum climate narrative argument, and it really seemed as if it was simply a line she was instructed to say at some point during the question period. //

CBS is partnered with a radical climate propagandist group called Covering Climate Now, which urges journalists to connect everything to climate change and environmental justice, and instructs them to never platform “climate denialists.” Who is a climate denialist? Anyone who balks at their definition of “rapid, forceful action” or anyone who disputes the consensus narrative. It is a nightmare of an organization, baldly propagandistic, and news organizations like CBS News take their marching orders from them. //

Musicman
4 hours ago
The response should always be, “Increased CO2 and temperatures is resulting in a greening of the planet, not its destruction. Yes, it will cause some disruption as the SW deserts become hotter and Canada milder and more fertile, but we humans are ingenious at taking advantage of nature’s bounty.”. //

Adler von Pfingsten
3 hours ago
Trump and Vance would be well advised to answer questions about climate change with a virtual challenge i.e. I followed the “science” of climate change and gender identity to its logical conclusion:

Lysenkoism: In modern usage, the term Lysenkoism has become distinct from normal pseudoscience. Where pseudoscience pretends to be science, Lysenkoism aims at attacking the legitimacy of science itself, usually for political reasons. It is the rejection of the universality of scientific truth, and the deliberate defamation of the scientific method to the level of politics.

The Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) is an aggressive domestic program to federally register millions of unsuspecting small business owners under the guise of an “anti-money laundering initiative.”

By the end of this year, Americans will be required to hand over their small businesses’ private data — such as owners’ names and home addresses — to the federal government’s law enforcement database, operated by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), housed under the Department of the Treasury. Such small businesses include limited liability companies, corporations, “and any other entities created by the filing of a document with a secretary of state or any similar office in the United States.” //

The true goal of CTA appears to be setting up yet another new database of citizens to monitor, observe, and punish. The federal government is moving quickly to implement the CTA, as millions of small business owners in the United States have no idea this law even exists (only 13 percent of businesses in California, 5 percent in Ohio, and 4 percent in Pennsylvania have registered). Millions of businesses owners face becoming felons in three months unless they comply.

There are currently seven separate lawsuits challenging the validity of the law. Last year, the House of Representatives passed a bill to give businesses more time to comply, but the bill is sitting in the Senate going nowhere. A recent email from their accountant may have been the first time many businesses realized this law exists. The legal confusion and seeming lack of urgency to inform the public suggest that FinCEN’s true intent is to “catch” millions of small business owners in “non-compliance” so that they can be investigated and audited by Department of the Treasury and punished. Serious criminals will not be concerned about paperwork violations. Mandatory compliance is required by January 1, 2025, or business owners will be subjected to hefty fines of $591 dollars per day (or up to 10 percent of a company’s annual receipts) and up to two years in federal prison. //

President Trump vetoed this unconstitutional power grab, as part of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2021, but his veto was overridden. In an unprecedented act of overreach, the feds are moving to collect data on all small business owners, who make up the backbone of the U.S. economy, for reasons that seem murky at best. And the information collected goes to FinCEN, the counterterrorism arm of the Treasury. Business owners have to register with a terrorism department. This seems to infer criminality on millions of law-abiding citizens.

Under CTA, for-profit business entities with fewer than 20 employees and under $5 million in revenue are in the crosshairs. But businesses that make more than $5 million annually, or employ more than 20 full-time employees, are exempt from this invasive self-reporting requirement that could put owners in prison. That means BlackRock, Amazon, Facebook, Pfizer, etc., can operate “business as usual,” but “Grandma’s Donut Shop” will be required to show her “paper’s please” if she wants to make a living. //

Business registration and entity creation has always been handled at the state level through State Corporation Commissions. With the CTA, even though a business is a registered entity at the state level, if it does not then self-report and register into a criminal database at the federal level, owners will not be able to operate the business. The federal government is overreaching into a state rights issue and creating a massive database in violation of the commerce clause. State attorneys general in every state should be weighing in on this issue. Unfortunately, their silence is deafening.