The call, as I guess Mom suspected, was because her father died.
One of his possessions we inherited was a beautiful silver .38 revolver. Firearms of many kinds were all over rural Ohio in those days. Autumn was a dangerous time to be a deer or pheasant there or a little kid playing frontiersman in the bushes.
Dad’s childhood came on a dairy farm in rural western Canada in the years before electricity. “You need to know about guns,” Dad had said. So, we took a thick board out back and leaned it against a tree.
Dad pulled out this shiny pistol. “Here,” he said. “It’s not loaded.”
I reached for the gun. With no warning, the thing went off with a huge bang and blasted a large hole in the board. I may have yelled an unpleasant word. Dad was just standing there, all calm and fatherly.
“You said the gun wasn’t loaded!” I screamed.
“Everyone says the gun’s not loaded,” Dad replied.
That’s another thing my father said.
Dad was a quiet, friendly sort, almost shy in public. Sometimes, I’d be next to him when he’d mutter some observation that just broke me up. He was funnier than Jack Benny. //
Dad had occasional advice. “When you have something to do, do it now. Then, you’ll have time for fun stuff later.” I probably should have thought about that the past few days when I could have been writing this.
I realized later his parenting style was very Socratic. One Sunday, no matter how many times I yanked the cord, the stupid lawnmower defied my efforts to start it. Dad happened to walk by, “I’m sure you checked the gas tank.”
I hadn’t, of course. It was bone dry. So, he passed on that lesson in privacy without confronting me with my own stupidity.
Dad had a phrase, “Minus to a plus.” It was okay to make a mistake, as long as you learned something, anything, from it every time so you’d never make the same error again.
“Think of how far ahead of everyone else you’ll be when you grow up and avoid all these early mistakes.”
But it’s not brain surgery. Every woman’s cycle is different to some degree, which is why it’s up to each of us to attune to the signals of our bodies. When women experience fertility-related symptoms, we do research and hypothesize what might be the issue. We change certain variables from cycle to cycle, observe the changes, and test the most effective ones repeatedly. Then we draw conclusions based on all the best evidence and testing. It’s science by definition. When it comes to my menstrual cycle, yes, I’m becoming the best expert.
The feminist left hates it. They’re all “pro-choice” until women choose to tell about their adverse experiences with birth control and detoxify their bodies of hormone disruptors. Invoking The Handmaid’s Tale is always in vogue, but Democrats’ ugly little secret is that birth control isn’t just the best way to control reproduction; it’s the best way to control women. The longer women remain single and childless, the longer they tend to be dependents of the state and therefore Democrat voters. The fewer times they go on maternity leave, the more soulless hours they can clock for their corporate bosses.
But look around. Are efforts to make women more like men making us happier? The “explosion” of females flushing their birth control offers a resounding no. Women bought the feminist lie for a while, but it only bankrupted them. It turns out that having your health concerns dismissed is not “empowering.” Masking symptoms isn’t “liberating.”
Despite the media’s hand-wringing about “effectiveness,” women — and men —have way better birth control options available, such as cycle syncing and natural family planning. So you’ve been told you have to ingest synthetic hormones every day… but did you know you’re only fertile about one week out of every month? Now, knowledge like that is empowering.
Clive Robinson • March 28, 2024 6:04 AM
@ OldGuy, ALL,
Re : Chain of history
How we get from your,
“Then boss forgot his password, didn’t want to pay to get it unlocked, and turned me loose on it. Turned out their security consisted of XOR’ing every byte written to disk with the same hardcoded 8-bit value.”To,
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/judge-orders-halt-to-defcon-speech-on-subway-card-hacking/
And how history is being rewritten by AI agents etc.
Your comment brings back a memory from nearly a quarter of a century ago. With ElcomSoft’s Dmitry Sklyarov being arrested and as it later turned out illegally detained and coerced by the FBI on behalf of Adobe Systems and their P155 P00r security in their e-book reader that used what sounds like exactly the same encryption system,
“Dmitry Sklyarov the 27 year old Russian programmer at the center of this case was released from U. S. custody and allowed to return to his home in Russia on December 13 2001”https://www.eff.org/cases/us-v-elcomsoft-sklyarov
Interestingly, searching around shows that slowly bit by bit write ups on,
1, What Dmitry had presented at Defcon-9 about the truly bad state of e-book software.
2, The fact he was arrested on behest of Adobe for embarrassing them publicly about the very poor security in their e-book system
3, The fact it was even Adobe Systems or their product
4, The unlawful behaviour of US authorities
5, The names of FBI and DoJ people involved
6, The fact Dmitry was a PhD researcher.
7, A jury found both Dmitry and Elcomsoft entirely innocent on all charges brought against them.
Is getting “deleted from history” or made difficult to find, via the likes of DuckDuckGo and Microsoft AI based Search engines…
The case was quite famous at the time as it showed the FBI was not just “over reaching” but actively trying to crush legitimate academic research. With even the usually non political and non feather ruffling “Nature” making comment,
https://www.nature.com/articles/35086729
And how speaking “truth unto power” can have consequences,
‘https://www.linux.com/news/sklyarovs-defcon-presentation-online-supporters-reputation-bonfire/
Much of which is what got repeated by the Massachusetts Government against the three students and the RfID “Charlie Card”.
Clive Robinson • March 28, 2024 6:41 AM
@ OldGuy, ALL,
I forgot to add the all important,
https://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Snake_oil_(cryptography)
Which tells you,
‘One company advertised “the only software in the universe that makes your information virtually 100% burglarproof!”; their actual encryption, according to Sklyarov, was “XOR-ing each byte with every byte of the string “encrypted”, which is the same as XOR with constant byte”. Another used Rot 13 encryption, another used the same fixed key for all documents, and another stored everything needed to calculate the key in the document header.
‘You can see why your comment triggered my memory ancient memory 😉
This isn’t just any old dead white guy who is bleeding out at the center of this piece, however. This is Cato the Younger or, as his contemporaries knew him, Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis, a Stoic, scion of the late Roman Republic, a famously incorruptible statesman, and an advocate for liberty (or at least what passed for it in those days.) He set a standard for statesmanship that is no longer seen; I can think of no one practicing politics today who is fit to stand in Cato’s shadow. //
houdini1984
7 hours ago
We need a Cato. We need a Cicero as well, an orator and philosopher who can lend eloquent words to the cause of saving our republic, but Cicero’s is a story for another day. From where will come our incorruptible Stoic? From where will come the statesman who will confront those who will drag our republic to ruin and tell them, “No, no further; this ends now”?
I’m concerned by the apparent fact that men like him no longer exist.
Sigh. No one is coming to save you. Hell, Cato couldn't even save Rome. By the time he was at his peak, the rot had already grown too deep and the people had largely given up on the idea of liberty. Eventually, that happens to all "free" societies. And why? Well, part of it has to do with the very idea that we need a Cato to save us.
That's one of the main weaknesses of the American experiment in self-rule. Too many people are looking for a superman to save them, rather than rallying behind the mortal men who are already in the field. DeSantis is a great advocate for liberty and sound government. So is Rand Paul. Ted Cruz. My own governor here in Iowa, whose response to Covid involved little more than confirming that she trusted us to make the best decisions about our health.
Unfortunately, that superman myth has overtaken our national psyche -- at least on the Republican side of the political aisle. That's the whole appeal of Trump. It's not that anyone believes that he understands the constitution, the idea of God-given rights, or the true burden that government places on liberty and individualism. Instead, it's that he's made himself larger than life, through decades of forcing himself into the spotlight and building a reputation as a winner. It's myth, but myth is an easy sell to the average person.
Forget Cato. We need tens of millions of normal Americans to commit to saying no to the ongoing Marxist revolution. We need a counter-revolution that restores our national identity. We need to get aggressive in our opposition to the would-be authoritarians and their statist agenda. Because that is the only thing that can possibly reverse our slide toward tyranny.
Now satellite overheads have been revealed by Business Insider which appear to show mock-ups in the Inner Mongolian desert of some of the important government districts in Taipei - Taiwan's capital city - along with what appear to be models of specific government buildings. It's hard to imagine any reason for this other than military training with an eye toward an eventual assault on these districts.
How could America shift so babies were more welcomed, less dreaded?
Tim Carney, author of the new book “Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be,” has a few ideas. He’d like to see corporations offer parents their child’s birthday off every year. He wants parents to not work so hard at parenting—and to never, ever, sign up their kids for a travel sports team. He’d like to see local governments prioritize sidewalks and denser housing, which would make neighborhoods safer for kids.
But he also wants us to think about why we have a falling birth rate—and what it says about us. After World War II, America had a baby boom, while Germany experienced a baby bust. Now, we’re struggling with our own baby bust, even as we are hammered by relentless discussions of America’s failures, the threat of climate change, and more. “The spirit of the age now is what I call civilizational sadness,” says Carney. “And the sadness is a belief that we’re just not good or that humans were a mistake.” //
"Kids make us be better people. They make us aspire to be better people, both our kids and other people's kids around us," says author Tim Carney.
The FBI posted a video of Director Christopher Wray testifying on March 11 and highlighting the "Bureau's compliance with Section 702 during the hearing at the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence." //
Community Notes kept it simple and blunt, "The FBI violated American citizens’ 4A rights 278,000 times with illegal, unauthorized FISA 702 searches." We reported on that in the past, so anything they say now has to be viewed through that lens.
READ: FBI Misused Surveillance Tool More Than 278,000 Times Including Against Jan. 6 People, BLM, Political Donors //
Weminuche45
2 hours ago edited
The 3 hop rule allows them to electronically surveil millions of people without even a FISA warrant against them, probably everyone.
Example:
Warrant for one person
Hop 1 - person with warrant has communicated with 136 people over the last 7 years IN ANY WAY.
137 people now
Hop 2 - those 136 people have communicated with 136 people
18,632 people now under surveillance
Hop 3 - 18,632 people x 137 people
2.5 MILLION people now under surveillance
From one FISA warrant.
No one seems to care much about this though, so it will continue.
The goal of the proposed “Nature Restoration Plan” is….Climate Neutrality by 2050. //
The last time I checked on the European farmers’ protests, it had appeared the continent-wide demonstrations made an impact, as the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium, nixed some of its unrealistic green plans for a global utopia. Gone, for example, are rules to force the reduction of nitrogen (essential for fertilizers) and methane (generated by cattle) and plans to persuade European citizens to eat less meat.
The demonstrations have continued, and now a major European Union climate change plan for the 27-nation bloc has been postponed…indefinitely. //
What would “climate neutrality” even look like? Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history has examples of significant changes to the global climate, the vast majority occurring before the first hominid walked on the planet. //
The original environmental agency’s mission of reducing needless pollution is a reasonably achievable goal.
“Climate neutrality” is a faith-based quest that misuses science, creates cult-like behaviors, and generates destructive policies.
The Border Patrol encountered 53,282 illegal aliens between ports of entry in the San Diego Sector in fiscal year 2020, the last full year of President Donald Trump’s presidency. In fiscal year 2021, encounters in the San Diego Sector nearly tripled, rising to 142,459.
Since Joe Biden became president, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has encountered more than 9 million illegal aliens on America’s borders and at ports of entry. That doesn’t include 1.7 million “known gotaways.”
Syzdek says he and the men he served alongside “never imagined in our wildest imagination that our country, that we all worked so hard to defend for those many years that we were in, would have open borders.”
Terry Richardson, Senior Instructor of Astronomy & Physics at the College of Charleston designed a "Make Your Own Safe Solar Viewer" for the upcoming solar eclipse, sunspot cycle 25 and beyond. This set includes our L14810 achromat (52mm diameter by 600mm focal length) and a Barlow lens with a focal length of -27mm. For the achromat: Place the crown (double convex) with its strongest curve against the negative side of the flint. Use a couple pieces of masking tape on the edges to hold them together. The crown side faces the sky. Using an achromat instead of a single element lens you will get to see more of the sunspots and less blue fringe around the sun (chromatic aberration).
The left is apoplectic over the bill. That’s a good sign for anyone who values election integrity in Georgia.
"If, after this tragedy, we can focus on the urgent need to turn away from spit-in-the-face insults to Black Americans," he continues, "count me in on some of that." Wayne, newsflash: we are not at the point where we are "after" this tragedy; we are still right smack in the middle of it. Can't you have the decency to wait until at least we have the bodies recovered before you shove your racial polemic down our throats?
Wasn’t Obama supposed to bring us a post-racial nation? It seems to me that he and his legacy have brought us nothing but outrage and a permanent distrust of each other among a citizenry that had been moving closer to unity and equality (not “equity”) before his arrival on the scene
The Walt Disney Company has bent the knee and agreed to a settlement with the Ron DeSantis-appointed Central Florida Tourism Oversight District in exchange for dropping its state-level lawsuit. After over a year of legal machinations and false proclamations from a breathless press stating DeSantis had been beaten by "Mickey Mouse," the complete opposite turned out to be the truth.
Nika4h @nikit2h
·
Replying to @crit_architect
A hailstorm this month has damaged thousands of solar panels at the 350-MW Fighting Jays Solar Farm in Fort Bend County, Texas, “Golf ball”-sized hail fell in the area on March 15, and aerial footage captured from a helicopter offered a glimpse at the extent of the damage
11:05 PM · Mar 26, 2024 //
Corey Thompson @Roughneck2real
·
BREAKING: Hail storm in Damon texas on 3/24/24 destroys 1,000’s of acres of solar farms.
Who pays to fix this green energy? @StateFarm? @FarmBureau? @Allstate?
Or you the taxpayer?
3:06 PM · Mar 25, 2024 //
Daniel Turner, the executive director of energy watchdog group Power the Future, was even more emphatic about the need to proceed carefully with solar power:
"There's this enormous shell game happening by the Biden administration, by the environmental left, presenting wind and solar as perfectly green, clean, and carbon-neutral," Turner told Fox News Digital. "They use all of these buzzwords. But they're none of that and they also have enormous drawbacks. And it's doing the American people a great disservice to obfuscate these very obvious shortcomings."
He noted that, because solar panels are largely manufactured in China, the destruction of solar farms could be leveraged in geopolitical disputes between the U.S. and China.
"Why would we expect them to race to our aid when our grid is down nationwide, and they are the ones holding the goods that we need to get back up?" Turner said.
We all want a future where humans can thrive in a clean environment. But as the eye-opening documentary “Climate the Movie: The Cold Truth” reveals, while we hear dire warnings that we must rapidly eliminate fossil fuels to avoid a climate catastrophe, we are manufacturing a humanitarian crisis of our own.
https://youtu.be/zmfRG8-RHEI //
Wealthy countries built their economic resilience on coal, oil, and gas. Denying the same benefit to poor countries for the sake of hypothetical climate risk is immoral.
As Nobel Prize-winning physicist John Clauser bluntly puts it, “It’s all a crock of crap.”
The documentary shows that the goal of energy policy should be to provide clean, reliable, and resilient power to raise standards of living, both in America and overseas.
That means maintaining an energy mix that can handle nature’s curveballs. It means maximizing our options, not banning entire categories of energy the world still needs. But as environmentalists seek to ban fossil fuels, they are raising the price of electricity for some and depriving others in emerging economies of that valuable resource.
Ars Technica's guide to keyboards: Mechanical, membrane, and buckling springs.
Psychological Warfare by Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger
Subject: Hacking the brain
The historian and scientist Yuval Noah Harari talks about the means by which the great companies hack our brains. If you read the last paragraph of this book you’ll see that Edward Bernays talks about the same thing. The only difference is the technology used to hack into our minds.