Souza
@soarathena
Here’s another cool thing I stumbled upon. Not as cool as yours, hah, but it sort of blew me away too.

This was written in 1973 - literally calls out this election as being consequential to eliminating corruption:

“We have noted that corruption appears to visit the White House in fifty-year cycles. This suggests that exposure and retribution inoculate the Presidency against its latent criminal impulses for about half a century. Around the year 2023 the American people would be well advised to go on the alert and start nailing down everything in sight.”

—Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Imperial Presidency
11:40 PM · Jan 9, 2025
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Battleboy
@JohnMercer62573
·
Jan 10
Biden has been in DC for THE ENTIRE 50 YEAR CYCLE...

stepfanie tyler

@wildbarestepf
so let me get this straight… Nikola Tesla dies, and the ONLY person allowed access to his safe—the one containing all his most secret inventions—is John G. Trump, a brilliant MIT scientist and, oh yeah, Donald Trump’s uncle, who conveniently says, “nothing to see here” while the government quietly packs up Tesla’s life’s work
...

fast forward to 1953 and Wernher von Braun—the father of rocket science—publishes a book about humans colonizing Mars led by a guy literally called Elon!!!

and today we’ve got Elon Musk, who runs Tesla (named after Nikola Tesla!) and is obsessed with getting us to Mars and is not only working with Trump but quite literally got him elected and has even visited his magic wall

how is this not the wildest, most ridiculous, too-weird-to-be-real conspiracy of coincidences ever?

like, who’s writing this timeline?

Representative Mike Waltz, President Trump's choice to lead the National Security Council, said in an interview published Thursday that all current civil service members of the NSC who are detailed from another agency are expected to be out of the building as soon as Trump is sworn in.

“Everybody is going to resign at 12:01 on January 20,” Waltz said. “We’re working through our process to get everybody their clearances and through the transition process now. Our folks know who we want out in the agencies, we’re putting those requests in, and in terms of the detailees they’re all going to go back.”

What Waltz, a retired Special Forces colonel, is reacting to is the obstruction and leaks from the NSC staff on loan from other agencies that damaged Trump's agenda in his first term. He plans to get rid of people who may have made a career as part of the "interagency process" and have more loyalty to that process than they do to Trump. //

Alexander S. Vindman 🇺🇸
@AVindman
·
Follow
Statement on National Security Staff Firings

Yesterday, President Trump’s National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz @michaelgwaltz , announced a sweeping directive to terminate all national security staffers loaned from other departments and agencies who serve in apolitical,… Show more
2:34 PM · Jan 10, 2025 //

Nah, you were fired for leaking a privileged conversation to a co-conspirator who then had himself labeled a "whistleblower" to create a fake fact case for impeaching President Trump. And also for being a treasonous oxygen thief. //

There is an admitted danger in groupthink. We can see that in the way the Biden NSC has coddled Iran, China, and Russia in the misguided view that in some bizarro universe, they would become useful members of the international community. Dissent doesn't need to be hashed out at the staff level. Also, I don't think anyone in the Trump administration is interested in "continuity of policy" with Biden because his foreign policy failures, both active and in terms of missed opportunities, are the stuff of legend. //

You have to admire how Vindman categorizes himself as a "talented professional" who was dismissed for taking "principled stances or offering objective advice." Actually, the role of making policy in civil service is the realm of political appointees. The career staff are supposed to serve every president loyally. The last thing needed in the NSC are staffers who are first and foremost loyal to "the way we've always done it," who are overly concerned about the agency "equities" at stake when decisions are made, and who see themselves as players in policy in their own right. //

John Q. Public
3 minutes ago
LOL at the tags…
Douchenozzle is correct.

Also, when he says, “tens of thousands of senior apolitical government officials” he is unintentionally letting slip how many actually need to be fired.

One of the primary drivers of the devastation has been a lack of water due to unfilled reservoirs in Los Angeles County and unmaintained, failing infrastructure that caused fire hydrants to run dry. As RedState reported, the Ynez Reservoir was taken offline for maintenance during wildfire season, a decision that has turned out to be catastrophic.

When three 1-million-gallon capacity water storage tanks in Pacific Palisades went dry Tuesday night, firefighters were forced to abandon efforts to save thousands of homes. LA Department of Water and Power (LADWP) CEO Janisse Quiñones has repeatedly claimed during press conferences that her utility did everything it could to prepare for the forecasted wind event and support the Los Angeles Fire Department as it responded, but left out one key fact: The Santa Ynez Reservoir in the hills above Pacific Palisades, which holds 117 million gallons of water and normally feeds those tanks, had been drained and taken offline for repairs to its cover even though the state's brush fire season was ongoing. //

Is Quiñones a unique talent, though? She sure doesn't seem to be given how badly and quickly the infrastructure failed in this case. Not filling the Ynez Reservoir for wildfire season was bad enough, but clearly, the water pumping facilities and hydrant system were not prepared for what should have been treated as an inevitability. For context, the hydrant issue has been known about since at least 2021.

What Quiñones did do well, though, is push the preferred narratives of the far-left. When Bass hired her, the mayor touted the new "CEO" as a person who could shift the city to "100% clean energy," but take a wild guess what else Quiñones was really concerned with? If you said "equity" and "social justice," collect your winnings at the window: //

Bearsblow
8 hours ago
They're achieving equity! The rich and the poor are suddenly homeless!!

Well done Janisse Quiñones. You deserve a raise!

Denmark sent private messages in recent days to President-elect Trump's team expressing willingness to discuss boosting security in Greenland or increasing the U.S. military presence on the island, two sources with knowledge of the issue tell Axios.

Not only that, Greenland’s leader Múte Egede said that he was prepared to enter into negotiations with Trump about the territory.

At first, I was going to just respond in the comments, but after a few attempts, I decided it would best be an article of its own.

He said:

I've always been somewhat bemused by the notion that God lost in the Garden of Eden, that Satan won, and that there was this mad scramble in Heaven to come up with a "Plan B".

Ask yourself this, "If Adam and Eve weren't supposed to fall, why didn't God just start over again with a new couple in the Garden of Eden? Had he lost the power to create such a couple?"

When you realize that the Fall was planned from the beginning, it all makes sense. //

This presents the idea that God had written this drama from the beginning, which would logically lead to the idea that our fates were already decided beforehand. This is a topic that inevitably gets brought up when discussing God at length, which usually triggers a debate between free will and determinism. I can assume the commenter takes the side of determinism, at least in some capacity.

Personally, I take the side of free will. //

To get back to my commenter, the reason God let us fall even though He knew we were going to is because he is a God who knows that love and free will are intermingled, and you cannot have one without the other. //

In Deuteronomy 30:19 God is directing Israel to make a choice with Moses as his spokesman saying, “This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live." Here is God offering the choice to do as one pleases, but points out which way is the right way, which is a habit of God's throughout humanity's existence. //

Here are 34 favorite sayings from Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking and founder of Guideposts. //

19 of 34 I’ll tell you a secret: The way to handle the little things is to bring God into them, for nothing is so small that it is beneath His notice.
—Dr. Norman Vincent Peale

The Meta CEO tried to paint the censorship as well-intentioned, claiming:

"I still think it's good for more people to get the vaccine. I'm not sure in that case how much of it was like a personal political gain that they were going for. I think that they had a kind of goal that they thought was in the interests of the country."

But Rogan wasn't having it. He fired back:

"Well, there's a bunch of problems with that," //

"There's the emergency use authorization that they needed in order to get this pushed through. And you can't have that without valid therapeutics being available. And so they suppressed valid therapeutics." //

"This was Fauci's game plan. I mean, this is the movie Dallas Buyers Club. That's Fauci in that movie. That was with the AIDS crisis. This exact same game plan that was played out with the COVID vaccine." //

They pushed one solution, this only one, suppressed all therapeutics through propaganda, through suppressing monoclonal antibodies, like all of it. And that was done, in my opinion, for profit. The amount of money that was made was extraordinary during that time." //

While Zuckerberg tried to frame the censorship as serving the greater good, Rogan exposed how it actually served to create a vaccine monopoly by eliminating discussion of alternative treatments.

For conservatives who have warned about the dangers of Big Tech-government collusion, this conversation provided smoking-gun evidence. It showed how content moderation policies were used to enforce a single narrative about COVID treatment, even when that meant suppressing legitimate medical information. //

Gordon of Cartoon
13 hours ago
Fascism is the systemic coordination of totalitarian government with monopolistic big business to crush competition and individual liberty. Naturally the thugs in charge get rich. //

Neil_
9 hours ago
Zuck is pulling back now because he probably realized colluding with the government in the way that he did is the definition of fascism. The Biden Administration and most leftist governments in Europe and around the world proved that leftists CAN be fascists.

mopani Neil_
a minute ago edited
It's because he doesn't want to cooperate with the next [Trump] administration, and free speech will be his defense.

He will pivot back to fascism and cooperation with the government as soon as the next Democrat administration counts along, he just won't advertise it like he is advertising the embrace of free speech.

Here’s the reality: it is a battle zone. An existential fight over the future of America. Is this massive progressive failure the norm that we should just accept as the new American reality, or are we going to look to a new way forward, one that focuses on excellence, competence and innovation over identity politics, a lowering of our standards, and an acceptance of mediocrity (or worse)?

Many including myself have been writing for years about the decline of the Golden State—and Democrat-run cities in general—but the progressive assault continues in Chicago, St. Louis, Oakland, Seattle, New York, San Francisco… the list goes on. Could this disaster be the wake-up call to America that their warped priorities and policies simply aren’t working? //

The list of failures in this disaster could fill a lengthy tome—the decades of water mismanagement and the continued failure to adequately supply LA, though it’s well within our means to do so, the refusal to capture the billions of gallons of rainwater, opting to instead let it just flow out to the Pacific Ocean while we are told to let our lawns die, the focus at the LAFD on DEI and LGBTQ instead of actual firefighting, the billions thrown at the homeless-industrial complex with almost nothing to show for it except more homeless people…

Is this what the future of America looks like? In too many cities, it already does, with Third-World country conditions prevailing, but do we want to see that everywhere? //

Altadena and the Pacific Palisades in particular look like battlegrounds as of this writing—the images reveal a hellscape that looks like it’s been carpet-bombed by our enemies for months.

Los Angeles and the entire state of California have become a battleground for ideas. Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election shows very clearly that many Americans have woken up and are starting to reject the progressive worldview—but remember, it was just four, short years ago they voted in a man who turned out to be the most divisive, spite-filled president in our history. The battle is far from over.

On Saturday, though, the White House put out a press release revealing the real reason at last--Biden bestowing on Pope Francis the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction, the only so designated honor by the president. Instead of handing it over in person, Biden and Pope Francis spoke on the phone. //

Oh, please!
6 hours ago
The new name for the presidential medal of freedom is "Participation Medals for Marxists."

The scare story caravan has moved on to pastures new these days, not unrelated to the fact that at the end of 2024 the extent of sea ice in Antarctica was roughly the same as the 1981 to 2010 average. According to the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC), “this provides a sharp illustration of the high variability of Antarctica sea ice extent”. It does indeed, and it also provides us with a classic case study of how a short-term natural variation, well understood by many scientists, is weaponised by activists in science, politics and journalism to induce mass climate psychosis with the aim of promoting the political Net Zero lunacy. //

All of the confusion – designed to constantly promote Net Zero – arises because narrative-driven commentators assign most weather and climate changes to humans adding trace amounts of a trace gas into the atmosphere. It leaves little room for explaining the role of natural variation in the changing climate. Antarctica has not warmed for at least 70 years and a recent paper found that the summer temperature had shown a dramatic 1°C fall from 1977-1999, followed by a pause since the turn of the century. Another paper found that Antarctica sea ice extent had slowly increased since the start of continuous satellite recordings in 1979. //

Measuring temperatures and ice levels over the tiny span of modern human measurements is not. The proponents of this are not engaged in serious research; they are working backward from a conclusion in pursuit of an agenda. //

Cherry-picking of data, careful tweaking of information, the control of the flow of information: Not science. Not open inquiry. Not a scrupulous examination of facts, of data. This is activism and fear-mongering. Nothing more. Nothing less.

David135
13 hours ago
Name names. Produce emails of all WH and Fed emails employees who were pressuring him and his company. Give them to the Taibbi gang to sort through. That would help a little.

bpbatch David135
12 hours ago
Yep, this. Musk put himself in danger with the Biden regime by exposure through the Twitter Files. Commission a "Facebook Files" type investigation and let the cards fall where they may, despite the political outcome. Do this, and I'll trust Zuck more, otherwise he's proving he's moving towards the constitutional right only for financial reasons and to save FB from the overturning of Section 230. //

veritaseequitas
2 hours ago
A) He must be losing money
B) He will change back if and when the Communist Democrats get back in office
C) He's a wuss who was too afraid to be a trail blazer. //

Mark Clancey
10 hours ago
What Could Mark Zuckerberg Do to Convince People He's Turned Into a Defender of Liberty?
Get on his knees and beg God and this nation for forgiveness that he spent $450 million to rig and steal the 2020 election. Until then he's just a garden variety Marxist twerp looking for secular salvation that will not come. //

Political-Paige
42 minutes ago edited
A tale of two billionaires.

Faced with the exact same pressures, Zuckerberg censored, lied, undermined a presidential election, and sentenced us to 4 years of national rot, while Musk spent 44 billion dollars of his own money to restore free speech across the globe and brought us back from the brink.

Set to be killed by Trump, the rules mostly lock in existing trends. //

The net result of a number of Supreme Court decisions is that greenhouse gasses are pollutants under the Clean Air Act, and the EPA needed to determine whether they posed a threat to people. George W. Bush's EPA dutifully performed that analysis but sat on the results until its second term ended, leaving it to the Obama administration to reach the same conclusion. The EPA went on to formulate rules for limiting carbon emissions on a state-by-state basis, but these were rapidly made irrelevant because renewable power and natural gas began displacing coal even without the EPA's encouragement.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration replaced those rules with ones designed to accomplish even less, which were thrown out by a court just before Biden's inauguration. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court stepped in to rule on the now-even-more-irrelevant Obama rules, determining that the EPA could only regulate carbon emissions at the level of individual power plants rather than at the level of the grid.

All of that set the stage for the latest EPA rules, which were formulated by the Biden administration's EPA. Forced by the court to regulate individual power plants, the EPA allowed coal plants that were set to retire within the decade to continue to operate as they have. Anything that would remain operational longer would need to either switch fuels or install carbon capture equipment. Similarly, natural gas plants were regulated based on how frequently they were operational; those that ran less than 40 percent of the time could face significant new regulations. More than that, and they'd have to capture carbon or burn a fuel mixture that is primarily hydrogen produced without carbon emissions.

Starship will test its payload deployment mechanism on its seventh test flight. //

blackhawk887 Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
8y
18,175
Keith Tanner said:
2.7 megawatts of electrical power! It's running the computers, the gimbal actuators and the flaps. Anything else?
Mostly flaps. They need to apply a lot of torque at a high speed, which means lots of power.

2.7 MW isn't really that much, though, except for the fact that it's electric power. Each Raptor turbopump puts out 75 MW of shaft power, and each Raptor combustion chamber puts out 7,000 MW of thermal power.

During boost, Starship's thermal power output is roughly equal to half the entire United States' average electric generation power output.

Since those initial reports were published in Western media, a small band of dedicated space trackers have been using open source data to try to identify precisely which space object fell into Kenya. So far, they have not been able to identify the rocket launch to which the large ring can be attributed.

Now, some space trackers believe the object may not have come from space at all. //

However, an anonymous X account using the handle DutchSpace, which despite the anonymity has provided reliable information about Ariane launch vehicles in the past, posted a thread that indicates this ring could not have been part of the SYLDA shell. With images and documentation, it seems clear that neither the diameter nor mass of the SYLDA component matches the ring found in Kenya.

Additionally, Arianespace officials told Le Parisien newspaper on Thursday that they do not believe the space debris was associated with the Ariane V rocket. Essentially, if the ring does not fit, you must acquit.

So what was it?

Months later, according to the SFC, AVM provided all the relevant source code and scripts, but the suit continued. AVM ultimately paid Steck's attorney fee. The case proved, once again, that not only are source code requirements real, but the LGPL also demands freedom, despite its "Lesser" name, and that source code needs to be useful in making real changes to firmware—in German courts, at least.

"The favorable result of this lawsuit exemplifies the power of copyleft—granting users the freedom to modify, repair, and secure the software on their own devices," the SFC said in a press release. "Companies like AVM receive these immense benefits themselves. This lawsuit reminded AVM that downstream users must receive those very same rights under copyleft.". //

At the top is perhaps the best-known case in tech circles, the Linksys WRT54G conflict from 2003. While the matter was settled before a lawsuit was filed, negotiations between Linksys owner Cisco and a coalition led by the Free Software Foundation, publisher of the GPL and LGPL, made history. It resulted in the release of all the modified and relevant GPL source code used in its hugely popular blue-and-black router.

The backstory, such as it exists from reports and retrospectives, is that Cisco bought Linksys, Linksys outsourced certain chipset development to Broadcom, and Broadcom outsourced firmware development to an overseas developer. Everybody up the chain ended up with a lawsuit once people started looking.

Cisco made history yet again in 2007 when it was the first entity to be actually sued by the FSF over GPL violations, which started in 2003 and continued to come up with new hardware products. Cisco settled the case with the FSF in 2009, making a donation to the FSF and appointing a Free Software Director at the company to keep track of its licensing obligations.

LA Department of Water and Power (LADWP) CEO Janisse Quiñones has repeatedly claimed during press conferences that her utility did everything it could to prepare for the forecasted wind event and support the Los Angeles Fire Department as it responded, but left out one key fact: the Santa Ynez Reservoir in the hills above Pacific Palisades, which holds 117 million gallons of water and normally feeds those tanks, had been drained and taken offline for repairs to its cover even though the state's brush fire season was ongoing. //

A LADWP spokesperson said in a statement to the LA Times that the utility was "still evaluating the effect of the reservoir being placed offline, and that staffers were conducting a root-cause analysis." The spokesperson added, “Our primary focus is to provide water supply throughout the city. The system was never designed for a wildfire scenario that we are experiencing.”

Why not? The system, at least in the Palisades, is in an area where a suburban area adjoins rural, difficult-to-access mountains and canyons, and where wildfire risk is often high. //

Anon, good nurse!
10 hours ago
This all boils down to 117 million gallons of water to fight a raging wildfire rather than 3 million, right? Like, it seems like a lot of words to avoid the obvious fact that 117 is a lot more than 3....
Also, whatever happened to "if it saves one life...."? Are we not doing that anymore?

JohnV1787 Anon, good nurse!
9 hours ago
I was thinking that too. Maybe the water pressure, uphill pumping and other physics don't make it possible to keep those 3 tanks perfectly filled all of the time, but you could fill them 35 times with a full reservoir. That extra water could have done something...maybe not extinguish the raging fire completely but perhaps dampen areas enough that it couldn't spread farther and do more damage. The dismissive attitude that it wouldn't have mattered anyway must really grate on those poor people who just lost their homes and businesses and wish that the fire department at least had the chance to try.

With this announcement, Meta becomes the third major corporation to bail out of the burning DEI airplane since Trump was reelected. Walmart terminated its DEI programs in late November, and McDonalds dropped its programs Tuesday. They join a growing list of companies deciding DEI is terrible for business since the US presidential election season got underway:

Boeing — November, 2024
Toyota — October 2024
Harley-Davidson — August 2024
Caterpillar — September 2024
Stanley Black & Decker — September 2024
Brown-Forman — September 2024
Molson Coors — September 2024
Lowe's — August 2024
Ford — August 2024
John Deere — July 2024
Tractor Supply — June 2024

For more than 40 years Advantech has enabled businesses to embrace new technology and accelerate industrial intelligence. Advantech is a global leader of embedded and automation solution platforms, renowned for manufacturing high-performance hardware and software computing components. With more than 92 offices and 9,000 employees worldwide, Advantech has its sights set on enabling an intelligent planet.

According to the SFC, GPL/LGPL lawsuits have tended to focus on copyright enforcement, but Steck's claim was about user rights. "There is now no doubt that both GPL and LGPL mandate the device owner's ability to make changes to the software in the flash memory so those changes persist across reboots," the SFC said. //

Denver Gingerich, director of compliance for the SFC, told The Register that this is the first time to his knowledge that the LGPL has been successfully litigated.

"The AVM lawsuit is an excellent example of how users can make practical use of the courts to receive the freedoms owed to them by the companies that sell devices to them," he said. //

50 mins
rgjnk
Reply Icon
Re: Stretching
The LGPL might mean the manufacturer have to publish their modifications to the source code but that's still not "mandate the device owner's ability to make changes to the software in the flash memory so those changes persist across reboots"

The GPL license doesn't even come close to what's claimed there, especially what's very specifically described.

They apparently claim a right to be able to reflash a device and the GPL has nothing to do with that. An implemented right to repair may grant that in various forms (often in reality very limited by other legislative concerns) but the GPL is about the 'source code' only and nothing more.

I can only hope something has got lost in translation from German and they didn't actually say anything about a mandate at all. //

hr
PyLETS
Choice of jurisdiction and distributors
In this case a German developer went though German courts to get redress from a German company. Not all software access claims will be so easy in relation to local law where the manufacturer operates. However, for consumer electronics containing free software with enforceable licenses, these apply to distributors also, and effective cease and desist demands against distributors until conditions are met will force the manufacturers hand if distributors decline to distribute the offending product otherwise.