Luke 3:1 "In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar" - convention for counting years (NOT what the actual A.D. year was)

This question is NOT what the A.D. year was but about the counting convention for years when mentioning reign of a ruler.

RNC Research @RNCResearch
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In 2022, Biden claimed he had "a plan to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve" after draining it to its lowest level in four decades.

Today, they cancelled that plan because oil is too expensive.

10:51 AM · Apr 3, 2024 //

Not only are they paying more after they drained it, but they left it at its lowest point in 40 years, endangering our security for political reasons. It currently holds about 363 million barrels, down almost 600 million from the beginning of 2022. //

Brianna Lyman @briannalyman2
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Donald Trump wanted to fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in March of 2020 when oil was $24 a barrel.

Schumer called it a big oil bailout.

Biden will now pay about TRIPLE to fill the reserves after draining them to keep gas prices artificially ‘low’ for votes.

5:06 PM · Oct 19, 2022 //

//

Viscount Montgomery of Arkansi
10 hours ago
“Nearly 1 million barrels of oil from the most recent sale, which was announced on June 14 2022, went to Unipec America, Inc. Unipec is a Houston-based subsidiary of Sinopec, an oil company owned by the Chinese government.”

DonR Viscount Montgomery of Arkansi
10 hours ago
Virtually 100% of the oil they bought wound up in China's SPR, because they understand why having a bunch of oil handy is a good idea. As far as why, well 10% for the big guy comes to mind.

Janet - Stop #FreelanceBusting @webcodepro
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Both #AB5 and fast food minimum wage law were written by UNIONS

BOTH bills HARM the very people they are meant to "help"

Tons of independent contractors LOST their incomes because of AB5

Now it's fast food workers turn

California policies show what other states SHOULDN'T do

Janet - Stop #FreelanceBusting @webcodepro
California's #AB5 reduced self-employment AND overall employment by 10% and 4.4% respectively

Now CA fast food employees are getting laid off or losing hours because of new minimum wage law

Would love to see @mercatus examine this CA fiasco too

https://youtu.be/FWZd0JRKmH4?si=HZOlcvg0CyiGnHZv
12:19 AM · Apr 2, 2024 //

anon-9s7n
8 hours ago
Dollars are not what drives an economy, value is. These workers are providing WAY less than $20 of value per hour which is why consumers aren't paying, causing business to close. It's consumers that determine the price of value, not government.

And at the end of the day a new equilibrium will be established that'll make $20 have the buying power of $10 and low skill workers, who think low skill jobs are something they should be able to make a career out of, will end up even worse off than when they started. Like they have every single time this has happened before.

That's the result every time government puts it's finger on the scale. The lowest end of the economy get the worst impact. But the people in CA have the government they deserve. Suck it up and change how you vote in November. //

anon-a755
6 hours ago edited
As Thomas Sowell said, "Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero..."

watch this video below that details quite a few of the big lies that were told about Donald Trump by the media. No matter how you feel about Trump, the important thing to pay attention to is the readiness and willingness of corporate media to tell falsehoods about him.

The video is over five minutes long because there are a lot of examples of this happening.

https://twitter.com/Sassafrass_84/status/1774901013629059379

What you're seeing is an active attempt by our own government to lie to and manipulate us with the help of corporate media and big tech companies, all for the benefit of one political party. This is one of the most heinous attempts at subjugation in the history of this country and given the Biden administration's open attempts to establish organizations within the government that dedicate themselves to policing information, you can bet that it's only going to get worse.

Now we see that in Africa, the great apes are endangered by climate change; it's not like you might think, these apes are endangered by the mining of raw materials for electric vehicle batteries, which is destroying their habitat.

Mining companies hunting critical minerals could wipe out more than a third of Africa’s remaining great apes, a new study has found. //

Mining booms — whether for coal or cobalt — tend to be staggeringly destructive processes: A feedback loop of new roads pushed into the forest, which draw in job-seeking colonists, who further clear habitat.

This dynamic is particularly stark in Africa, where some of the world’s largest reserves of nickel, cobalt, copper and lithium lie beneath the soil — and nearly half a million great apes live in the forests above.

Terrell County Sheriff Thaddeus Cleveland stated that cartel members are taking advantage of modern technology, and have taken to social media to threaten Sheriffs including himself, and other officials. Cleveland went on to say that cartel members consistently check his Facebook account, as Cleveland said he posts about the Sheriff's Department's work along the border. It is because of that work, that he says he has been called vulgar and unpublishable names, and had. threats made against him. Perhaps the scariest part, members warned Cleveland that they were "watching him and his woman." //

But it is human trafficking that is turning drug cartel members into billionaires, and turning the entire southern border into a drug cartel war zone as the cartels fight each other for control of the smuggling routes. The cartels see to it that no one gets to the border for free. One cartel member admitted that human smuggling has become "more profitable than ever before."

"No one wants to work on anything else right now. Everyone wants to work with the migrants because you can make a lot of money from it these days and it is easy work. Right now it is more profitable to smuggle migrants than to traffic bricks of cocaine, and with less risk if you get caught." //

In just the Del Rio sector alone, just a 245-mile stretch of the border, cartels are bringing in a staggering $32 million a week, bringing illegal immigrants across the border. In 2021, cartels raked in roughly $13 billion. That amount has no doubt risen in subsequent years. With that kind of money involved, you would threaten anyone who wanted to cut off that cash flow, too.

Laravel is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. We’ve already laid the foundation — freeing you to create without sweating the small things.

The tendency toward political centralization that has characterized the western world for many centuries, first under monarchical rule and then under democratic auspices, must be reversed.
-- Hans Herman Hoppe //

The truth is any post-breakup map of America would not resemble an electoral map following state lines, nor even a redrawing of state boundaries, such that the fantastical greater Idaho or Free State of Jefferson might exist as part of a wider Confederation of Constitutional Republics, or a Breakaway Philadelphia city-State join a Union of Progressive Democracies…

No. It’d be nothing so comprehensible or easily mapped to modern politics.

A post breakup America would probably look closer to this:

If you’re a sane person and your immediate reaction is: WHAT THE HELL AM I LOOKING AT!?

….Well that’s kinda the point.

(I really do apologize for all I’m going to have to digress)

For our purposes we can broadly divide history into 2 types of period… Periods of Centralizing trends, and periods of Decentralizing trends.

Gavin
5d
Occasionally, one comes across something that just stops one in one’s track and messes up the day’s schedule. This long (I mean … long) article by Anarchonomicon fits the bill.

After the State: The Coming of Neo-Medievalism and the Great Decentralization

The article is too long to summarize, but the basic idea is that history has seen long periods of centralized political control, and much longer periods of de-centralized control. The author predicts that the inevitable collapse of modern states will lead to “Neo-Medievalism” in which small political units will proliferate.

".… What you may have noticed is there’s really just two great centralizing eras in the history of western civilization… the 300-350 years from the start of Alexander’s conquests til the final centralization of the Roman empire under the Caesars… And the 250-300 year history of modern empire: From approximately 1700-1945. …

… The total number of autonomous Greek city states, which prevailed from the Bronze age collapse to the first conquests of Alexander, and only truly ended with the final roman conquest of all of Greece, numbered over 1000. …

… In the past 3200 years we’ve had only 600-800 years of truly centralizing eras where power concentrated, or merely continued without disintegration, when power didn’t dilute… But 2400-2600 years of Decentralizing eras where polities where shrinking and the ability to exert power across distance was eternally shrinking. …

… The Roman empire ended when all of its tech advantages were adopted by the Germanic tribes its was fighting… because those Germanic tribes had been trained in them while employed as roman mercenaries. Likewise the age of imperialism ended shortly after WW2 ended, because at that point every colony had a generation of young men who’d just been trained in western fighting styles. A process that began with the Irish declaring independence after WW1 and reached a fever pitch after WW2 when even the colonial white settler states set up by the British (who you’d think would be the apex of dependence, what with minority rule) declared independence. …

… Federal Authority, legitimacy, and even Seeing Like a State style legibility and intelligibility to the central government is collapsing in real time before our eyes… and far from panicking and trying to rescue their control over the body of the American Nation… the US Federal Government is accelerating the collapse of their own power through petty bureaucratic interests and short term political considerations. …"

Optimistically, the author concludes:

“… whatever successor institutions, aristocracies, and duchies devour the modern welfare states in a orgy of map redrawing and private fortune making will probably find that there is a great deal of economic and technological low hanging fruit just lying about. …”

It really is worth reading the whole thing.

Biden and Xi held their first phone since July 2020 on Monday. Within hours, dozens of Chinese warplanes and multiple naval vessels were reported around Taiwan, the largest coordinated display (implied threat) of 2024. At least 30 planes and nine ships were detected in Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) by the country's Ministry of National Defense (MND).

Critical swing state Michigan announces a ‘first-of-its-kind collaboration’ with the Small Business Administration to help drive Biden’s GOTV campaign.

European farmers are reshaping the political landscape across the Atlantic just months before the EU’s parliamentary elections.

January 09, 2018

After 35 years, the consent decree that prohibited the Republican National Committee (RNC) from engaging in ballot security activities wasterminated by a federal judge. RNLA Chair John Ryder, former General Counsel to the RNC, stated:

Yesterday, the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey ended the consent decree that had banned the Republican National Committee from engaging in activities to ensure that elections are open, fair, and honest since 1982. Despite years and much money spent searching for evidence of Republican voter suppression, the Democratic National Committee could not present evidence to the court sufficient for the consent decree to remain in effect. We applaud the fact that the RNC may now, on the same, lawful, non-discriminatory basis as other political organizations, ensure that every eligible voter is able to vote and that the votes of ineligible voters are not counted. //

While the consent decree has been in effect, other Republican organizations, such as the RNLA, NRCC, NRSC, Republican state parties, and other groups, have worked to ensure that elections are open, fair, and honest. As Mr. Ryder noted, we look forward to a new era where the RNC can, if it so chooses, be a part of this effort to protect the right to vote of every eligible voter.

When the Wisconsin Republican congressman who chairs the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, announced March 22 his retirement from Congress effective April 19—after the April 2 primary—instead of at the end of this congressional session, he did more than ensure Republicans could not replace him before January.

He left unfinished his work exposing the Chinese e-retailers Temu and Shein - work that started with a flourish.

“These results are shocking: Temu is doing next to nothing to keep its supply chains free from slave labor," said Rep. Michael J. Gallagher in his remarks at the June 23 release of the committee's report: "Fast Fashion and the Uyghur Genocide: Interim Findings.” //

“At the same time, Temu and Shein are building empires around the de minimis loophole in our import rules—dodging import taxes and evading scrutiny on the millions of goods they sell to Americans,” the Marine captain veteran of Iraq said. “We need to take a hard look at this loophole that is being abused to tilt the playing field against American companies.”

That tax loophole, the so-called “de minimus” rule, was first enacted in 1938 to allow Americans traveling abroad to mail home knick-knacks and souvenirs outside the regular tariffs on imports.

In 2015, Congress raised the tax-free limit from $200 to $800, which did not seem consequential at the time. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic fueled the online shopping boom, suddenly, that $800 limit was child's play for Temu and Shien, where some dresses cost less than $15.

The report found:

Key Finding 1: Temu and Shein alone are likely responsible for more than 30 percent of all packages shipped to the United States daily under the de minimis provision and likely nearly half of all de minimis shipments to the U.S. from China. //

Now, there are more than 685 million packages shipped every year, tax-free, because the import tax loophole exempts packages addressed to a residence. //

Key Finding 2: Temu’s business model, which relies on the de minimis provision, is to avoid bearing responsibility for compliance with the UFLPA and other prohibitions on forced labor while relying on tens of thousands of Chinese suppliers to ship goods direct to U.S. consumers.

The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act directs the Homeland Security Department’s Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force to maintain a list of entities in violation. //

For a long time, I have been obsessed with how the ChiComs exploit our open society and good nature to vacuum up as much of our data as they can. //

Now, I see that Gallagher is out the door, and Temu is still avoiding import tariffs, using slave labor, and swiping data.

Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth (December 26, 1819 – June 30, 1899) was an American writer of more than 60 novels in the latter part of the 19th century. She was the most popular American novelist of her day.

The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America by Thomas Jefferson

A research letter published on March 28 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that the combined industries made more than 85 million payments to more than 820,300 (57 percent of) eligible physicians across 39 specialties from 2013 to 2022. Nearly 94 percent of the payments were related to one or more marketed medical products. Yeah, I'm gonna go with kickbacks. //

According to the JAMA report, the three drugs associated with the majority of payments were Xarelto ($176.34 million), Eliquis ($102.62 million), and Humira ($100.17 million).

The three medical devices associated with the majority of payments were the da Vinci Surgical System ($307.52 million), Mako SmartRobotics ($50.13 million), and CoreValve Evolut ($44.79 million).

Gordian Knot News is now up to 100 some posts. They range in importance from fundamental to trivial; in writing quality from pretty good to tech manualese. But it is impossible to figure out either importance or readability from the title.

So I've prepared a list of links, which groups the posts by subject and gives them a grade. The same post can show up multiple times.

A means you must read this to stay in the choir.

B means you should read the piece.

C means read this if you have nothing better to do.

D means don't waste your time.

In many cases, there is a very similar PDF on the Flop Book site, in which case I have also included a link to display that file.

Fear campaigns have led to tight regulation of nuclear power plants and nuclear waste, which means that to see dry fuel casks you have to jump through hoops with security clearance, over-the-top security checks, supervised visits and so on.

I think we should normalise nuclear waste by putting it in public places that allow people to see it. In the Netherlands, COVRA (The Central Organisation For Radioactive Waste) stores all of the country’s high-level waste and is also a public museum and art gallery that hosts many exhibitions.
Inside COVRA: the art of preservation

On a panel in Paris last year, I called nuclear power plants national monuments, and I believe that they are, because they represent clean air, good jobs, and high-quality lifestyles. I think we should decorate nuclear power stations like the mural on the Cruas-Meysse cooling tower in France. We should celebrate what humankind can achieve with clean energy: a high quality of life for everybody, without the negative impacts of burning fossil fuels.

Fortunately, someone stepped up to do something about it: Phil Izon of Alaskans for Honest Elections. On Monday, the Association of Mature American Citizens (AMAC) released their interview with Mr. Izon, describing in detail how RCV was pushed on Alaska, how he decided to fight back, how he got a repeal on the ballot for this fall — and in so doing provided a blueprint for other states faced with this terrible idea.

One man, it seems, can still make a difference. //

anon-7lqi
2 hours ago
Congrats.

Now the PR campaign leading up to the election begins. There are a lot of outside groups who want to protect their $7 million investment in Sen Murky Murkowski.

Good luck, may actual Alaskans who live in Alaska prevail.