Forty-six years ago, the deadliest peacetime aviation disaster in history took place. //

After the crash, it became mandatory for pilots and air traffic controllers in most countries around the world to use standardized, hard-to-confuse terminology. Words such as "OK" were replaced with "Roger" (meaning that the receiving person acknowledges). Phrases such as "We're at takeoff" were replaced with "[Insert Flight Number] is taking off the runway [insert number]" or "[Insert Flight Number] holding short runway [insert number]".

In the moments leading up to the crash, both the first officer and flight engineer were hesitant to question Captain Van Zanten's decision to immediately go for takeoff roll due to his seniority at KLM. In a post-1977 world, airlines began to incorporate playing down the idea of a cockpit hierarchy, choosing to place more emphasis on pilot training based on team decision-making. This idea of "Crew Resource Management" (CRM), has become a mandatory requirement for cockpit crew training in North/South America (FAA) and Europe (EASA) since 2006.

http://www.project-tenerife.com/nederlands/PDF/finaldutchreport.pdf/tenerife-air-disaster-report

Notice the format of the hostname: ::ffff:a.b.c.d

I had to look this up: this is a IPv4-mapped IPv6 address. It is a format to describe an IPv4 address using a IPv6 address format.

From Wikipedia article on IPv6 addresses:

::ffff:0:0/96 ? This prefix is used for IPv6 transition mechanisms and designated as an IPv4-mapped IPv6 address.

With a few exceptions, this address type allows the transparent use of the transport layer protocols over IPv4 through the IPv6 networking application programming interface. In this dual-stack configuration, server applications only need to open a single listening socket to handle connections from clients using IPv6 or IPv4 protocols. IPv6 clients are handled natively by default, and IPv4 clients appear as IPv6 clients at their IPv4-mapped IPv6 address. Transmission is handled similarly; established sockets may be used to transmit IPv4 or IPv6 datagram, based on the binding to an IPv6 address, or an IPv4-mapped address.

The IPv4 part of the address can also be represented in hexadecimal: ::ffff:aabb:ccdd

We all think we know the story of pregnancy. Sperm meets egg, followed by nine months of nurturing, nesting, and quiet incubation. But this story isn’t the nursery rhyme we think it is. In a way, it’s a struggle, almost like a tiny war. And right on the front lines of that battle is another major player on the stage of pregnancy that not a single person on the planet would be here without. An entirely new organ: the placenta.

Listen with me to Voices along the Way who inspire us toward the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

According to multiple reports, Hamas leaders who have been living in luxury in five-star hotels in Qatar are reportedly on the run, fleeing Qatar,

The Jerusalem Post is reporting that several of the leaders fled their locations, "turning off their phones and not accepting calls, KAN's Arabic language channel reported citing sources in Doha on Tuesday evening."

KAN News also reported that Saleh al-Arouri, a senior member of Hamas, left his usual residence in Beirut for Turkey.

Here is the conversation that needs to be had: Why do we wish to discard children, especially potentially special-needs or health-challenged children, rather than do all we can to help them survive and thrive, no matter how long that might be? Why do we not give families making this difficult decision the support necessary to see life not as an option but as the only quality choice? //

edhuff bk
9 hours ago
The public really didn't want to know about this ladies' personal reproductive health problems and because the termination "services" she sought were readily available in adjacent states, the public was unswayed by the legal theatrics.

Ed in North Texas edhuff
8 hours ago
The "theatrics" will be played over and over again in 2024 and subsequent elections.

George Orwell Ed in North Texas
7 hours ago
So be it. Evil has always sought compromise and that compromise has always led to more evil.

The message of life and hope must be clearer, smarter, and louder.

This message must permeate all media on every platform.

The message must grab and hold the viewer. Make them pause and think, but also feel the goodness of life in the message.

This requires a ton of talent and messaging skill, enough money to produce the messages, and a ton of money to get those messages to the people being lied to.

It's gonna be hard.

Will we even try? //

DaveM
2 hours ago edited
I thought the Texas Supreme Court got it right here.
The Supreme Court did not deny her a medically necessary abortion.
What I found really interesting was their statement that a woman does not need a court order to get a medically necessary abortion. What she does need is a determination from a medically competent professional that she needs one. And that medical professional is expected to use reasonable medical standards in making that determination.

The current federal income tax system is clearly broken — unfair, overly complex, and almost impossible for most Americans to understand. But there is a reasonable, nonpartisan alternative before Congress that is both fair and easy to understand. A system that allows you to keep your whole paycheck and only pay taxes on what you spend.

The FairTax is a national sales tax that treats every person equally and allows American businesses to thrive, while generating the same tax revenue as the current four-million-word-plus tax code. Under the FairTax, every person living in the United States pays a sales tax on purchases of new goods and services, excluding necessities due to the prebate. The FairTax rate after necessities is 23% compared to combining the 15% income tax bracket with the 7.65% of employee payroll taxes under the current system -- both of which will be eliminated!

Important to note: the FairTax is the only tax plan currently being proposed that includes the removal of the payroll tax.

Keep Your Paycheck

For the first time in recent history, American workers will get to keep every dime they earn; including what would have been paid in federal income taxes and payroll taxes. You will get an instant raise in your pay!

Social Security & Medicare Funding

Benefits will not change. The FairTax actually puts these programs on a more solid funding foundation. Instead of being funded by taxes on workers’ wages, which is a small pool, they’ll be funded by taxes on overall consumption by all residents.

Get a Tax Refund in Advance on Purchases of Basic Necessities

The FairTax provides a progressive program called a prebate. This gives every legal resident household an “advance refund” at the beginning of each month so that purchases made up to the poverty level are tax-free. The prebate prevents an unfair burden on low-income families.

Turner's bill would extend Section 702 for nine new years, not fix any of the warrantless search problems; plus, it will require hotels, fast food places, etc., with public WiFi to hand over user data on demand.

My view is simple. Section 702 needs to go away. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." //

We have tried this experiment with warrantless searches and have seen it turn out pretty much as expected. The privacy violations will only increase as AI matures and makes more sophisticated searches possible, and more and more of our lives are conducted using smartphones and various apps. There is no reason to believe that agencies that have violated Section 702 for two decades have suddenly decided to become civil libertarians.

Speaker Johnson should show some leadership and let this bill die. But we know how this movie ends, don't we? //

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."

• William Pitt the Younger, Speech in the House of Commons, Nov 18 1783

U.S. defense aid to Ukraine is not only bolstering the defense of a friendly nation but also creating jobs for American workers and revitalizing the defense manufacturing base that has been in a death spiral since 1992. According to an exhaustive meta-analysis of Ukraine defense spending in the Washington Post, well over 90 percent of the military-related aid provided to Ukraine is spent domestically. The spending has resulted in the opening of new production lines, increased operations at existing facilities, and thousands of direct and indirect jobs created. //

The end of the Soviet Union resulted in a bacchanalia of Department of Defense cuts. Not only were the military services offered up as Bill Clinton's "Peace Dividend," but a round of "cost savings" under the Base Realignment and Closure Program savaged facilities that had little peacetime use but would be critical in wartime. One of the major targets was government-owned, government-operated (GOGO) and government-owned, contractor-operated (GOCO) factories that built munitions and military hardware. Even those facilities that survived found themselves deprived of money for modernization and partially mothballed. The ammunition plants operate very much like they did during World War II. //

But this automated capability isn’t available for the nuances of mixing explosives or filling shells, Brig. Gen. Gavin Gardner, commander of Joint Munitions Command, told Defense News on a tour of the ammunition plant’s production line for the Mark 82, a 500-pound bomb used by the Air Force. Operators still manually mix explosives — like tritonal, which is 80% TNT and 20% aluminum powder — using steam heated kettles, then adding it to the weapon mostly by hand.

That last sentence needs to be read carefully. The number of people alive who know how to steam-sweat tritonal and pour it into shell casings is in the low double digits. The number of those who are not Social Security recipients is a fraction of the total. With few facilities and limited production lines, providing a career path that would encourage someone to train for that job is very difficult. //

Another underlying problem is that the machine tool component of the defense industrial base is so decrepit that when we went to expand production of 155mm shells, we found we did not have the machine tools to build equipment for new production lines. //

As we've seen from the Israel-Hamas War, it is impossible for any friendly nation to defend itself without our assistance. Just three weeks into the war, Israel was making emergency calls for ammunition and equipment. What the Ukraine War is showing us is that we cannot help Taiwan provide a credible defense against China. Worse, we don't have the capacity to provide the United States military with the ammunition or equipment they would need to prevail should we end up in a shooting war with China.

Via Scientific Reports: Infectivity of exhaled SARS-CoV-2 aerosols is sufficient to transmit covid-19 within minutes. The case for continued masking and improved ventilation seems inarguable. The abstract:

Exhaled SARS-CoV-2-containing aerosols contributed significantly to the rapid and vast spread of covid-19. However, quantitative experimental data on the infectivity of such aerosols is missing. Here, we quantified emission rates of infectious viruses in exhaled aerosol from individuals within their first days after symptom onset from covid-19.

Six aerosol samples from three individuals were culturable, of which five were successfully quantified using TCID50. The source strength of the three individuals was highest during singing, when they exhaled 4, 36, or 127 TCID50/s, respectively.

Calculations with an indoor air transmission model showed that if an infected individual with this emission rate entered a room, a susceptible person would inhale an infectious dose within 6 to 37 min in a room with normal ventilation.

Thus, our data show that exhaled aerosols from a single person can transmit covid-19 to others within minutes at normal indoor conditions.

Designed to study Pluto, the spacecraft’s instruments are being repurposed. //

New Horizons is now nearly twice as far from the Sun as Pluto, the outer planets are receding fast, and interstellar space is illuminated by the vast swath of the Milky Way ahead. But the spacecraft’s research is far from over. Its instruments are all functioning and responsive, and the New Horizons team has been working hard, pushing the spacecraft’s capabilities to carry out new tasks. //

In 2021, his team photographed a dark patch of sky and digitally removed all known light sources in the Universe. What remained—the estimated COB—is roughly twice as bright as expected. “Our test field was far from the Milky Way, bright stars, dust clouds—anything that would wash out the fragile darkness of the Universe, yet that mysterious glow is still there. It’s like being in an empty house out in the countryside, on a clear moonless night, with all the lights turned off, and finding it’s not completely dark,” said Lauer.

If there is one issue in world politics on which opinions are held most strongly while being least informed it is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Vast numbers of people, almost certainly a majority, believe these falsehoods:

1. The Palestinians had their country taken away from them by the Jews.

2. The Israelis expelled the Palestinians.

3. The Israelis illegally occupy territories that belong to the Palestinians.

4. The Israelis refuse to negotiate for peace with Palestinian leaders.

5. Israeli intransigence impeded a peace process that Palestinian leaders pursued in good faith.
   We summarily dismiss points 1 and 2: –

6. There never was, in all history, a State of Palestine.

7. There is no evidence that any Arabs were expelled from the State of Israel. There is evidence that in at least one city – Haifa – they were implored to stay. There is also evidence that the Mufti of Jerusalem and Arab leaders urged them to leave before five Arab armies invaded the newly-declared State of Israel, promising them a victory after which the refugees would return to their homes. And there is absolute certainty that hundreds of thousands of Jews were forcibly expelled – stripped of all they possessed – from the Arab states. //

https://phillipsblog.dailymail.co.uk/2011/11/blaming-the-victim.html
The claim that the establishment of a Palestine state would end the dispute is also ridiculous. Such a state was on offer in 1948; Israel offered to give up more than 90 per cent of the West Bank for such a state in 2000; and an even more generous offer was subsequently made by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. The Palestinian response was in every case war and terror. Yet all this is ignored, and Netanyahu is blamed instead for the impasse. //

The burden of peace is not on Israel. They have made every effort that reasonable people would expect them to make, but the problem is that Israel is not dealing with reasonable people, not in Gaza, not in Lebanon, not in liberal enclaves in the United States, and certainly not in the United Nations. The refusals have been on the part of Hamas, Hezbollah, the PLO, Iran, and the other usual suspects.

At some point you will run into the situation where you have transferred an ebook in .mobi format to your Kindle Fire and it is displayed as a document instead of a book. This creates an inconvenience since now your books are in two locations instead of just one. Here is how to make your .mobi files be registered as books on the device.

The issue that is causing the device to register your .mobi file as a document rather than a book is that there was a personal doc tag (PDOC) placed in the .mobi file during conversion. This tag needs to be removed by reconverting the book without the problematic PDOC.

While a ton of mistakes have been made in Argentina to bring the country to where it is, the vast majority of these mistakes stem from the belief that government is the path through which to do good things. It is not. Government is a necessary evil. It cannot be a source of good. You don't expect a venomous snake to inject you with vitamins and minerals upon biting you, yet we look at the snake that is government in the same way. //

This isn't how a free people should see government.

The government is a restrictive force by nature. Its job is to get in your way, and if not yours, then somebody's. This is utilized properly when it comes to fighting necessary wars and conflicts. We want our military to get in other people's way pretty efficiently. However, this gets turned on its head when federal law enforcement agencies are created, or enforcement agencies within government departments.

For instance, I'm still waiting for someone to explain why the IRS needed billions of our tax dollars to train "enforcers." After watching the FBI be weaponized against its own citizens on behalf of a political party, I'm not entirely sure why we need that department either. //

This is going to be a long march. Like a stain, once it sets into the fabric of a nation, big government bureaucracy is hard to get out.

It's going to take the Argentinian people to maintain that view of government that they have now and realize that the less of it that there is, the more successful the people are.

The same has to happen here in America, and I have every confidence we'll get there someday, but things may have to get worse before they get better. Things have to get to a point where it becomes beyond clear where the problem is and that we need people willing to go into government to reduce it by leaps and bounds.

We need law-unmakers, not lawmakers.

• Paramedic Eli Beer gave a harrowing description of finding a baby in the oven
• Video of his emotional remarks spread on Twitter this weekend as war rages on
• Gaza professor Refaat Alareer called it 'Zionist propaganda' and asked: 'What's next? Hamas ate the Jews?' //

A lauded Palestinian professor sparked fury by tweeting a warped joke about claims Hamas terrorists baked an Israeli baby to death in an oven.

Gaza-based professor Refaat Alareer - who was once glorified by the New York Times - responded to a paramedic's testimony that they'd found an infant who'd been cooked to death by tweeting: 'With or without baking powder?.'

He was replying to another tweet from journalist Dovid Efune which said: 'A baby was found in an oven, baked to death by Hamas terrorists, leading Israeli first responder @EliBeerUh recounted to an @RJC gathering last night.

After the past week's Congressional hearings, the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania are being exposed to an amount of publicity and scrutiny they're not used to and likely wish would go away. As we reported, the trio claimed that calls for genocide against Jews needed to be placed into context before deciding whether they violated student codes of conduct.

The backlash was swift, and so was the backpedaling. //

Hallen
2 minutes ago
...indicating that Gay might have plagiarized...

There is no 'might have'. She did. 100%, no doubt, blatant plagiarizing.

It's even more egregious because Swain, the brilliant woman Gay plagiarized, is also a black woman. It's even more funny because Swain is conservative and rational. She has done a lot of work debunking the whole 'Democrat to Republican migration in the south' canard. You can see her on Prager U talking about it. Brilliant woman.

It's dastardly that Gay stole so blatantly from Swain and the fact that the Harvard PhD committee didn't even notice. Talk about the bigotry of low expectations. Harvard so wanted a black female PhD that they willingly (I'm betting) ignored the plagiarism in order to credential here. And then they made her president as soon as they could even though she lacked any form of credible academic achievement or publishing. //

anon-t26i
4 hours ago
What we have is an infatuation with higher education. Once upon a time a PhD was granted to, not persons of continuing education, but to persons who contributed new, not re-hashed, not unusual view points on an already known idea, but new, original ideas to the corpus of knowledge in the discipline. There is no evidence that the number of PhD's we currently have, and paid for, and continue to pay for have contributed that number of new ideas. In any discipline much less than a "studies" program, which is no discipline at all.

Cafeblue32
21 minutes ago edited
Education, healthcare, culture, women’s rights etc out (Afuera!)

Gee, I recall a time when the federal government didn't have agencies to control any of those things here. Yet we managed to be better educated in the basics, we still came up with cures for diseases, we had a culture that was both blended and separated naturally, and after 1920, women had the same voting rights as men to vote for change.

Government is supposed to be like a wedding venue- it provides the facilities, takes care of liability, and offers electricity, water and heat/air conditioning. It doesn't plan the wedding, officiate it, decide who the wedding party will be and their gender/color/queerness makeup, or MC the reception. //

TheAmericanExperiment
2 minutes ago
"or they can turn tail and run back to the socialists the moment things get difficult."

They elected Macri in 2015 whop ran on the same platform as Milei and after one term the "turned tail" elected a socialist to replace him. Argentina is probably already a failed state. I have friends there and they have all moved across the Rio del la Plata to Montevideo. It's completely unsafe there. The half of the population that hasn't sunk into abject poverty and hunger is becoming prey for those who have.

Open calibre, click preferences, second row down (conversion), click output options. in the list on the left select mobi output. delete anything in the "personal doc tag" and leave it empty. click apply then close prefernces and close and restart calibre. now when you send book to device, they should show up in the Books category on your kindle.

Drauku • 5 yr. ago • Edited 5 yr. ago
EDIT: I think I found a solution to this. When I was converting the book files to .mobi format, Calibre automatically added a '[PDOC]' tag, and this makes the Kindle organize those "doc" files differently (as personal documents). As soon as I removed that tag from the conversion process, no more lost books! I had to go back through my entire Calibre library and re-convert the .mobi files in order to remove the tag. If this still doesn't work, try adding the '[EBOK]' tag to the MOBI output convert dialogue.

Here's a good guide on how to remove the [PDOC] tag in Calibre: https://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/20147/kindle-fire-how-to-display-mobi-files-as-books-and-not-documents/

The above guide describes how to remove the tag on each conversion, if you want to remove the default behavior of adding [PDOC] every time you convert to .mobi, you need to remove the tag from the Convert settings for the .mobi format

Victor Davis Hanson
@VDHanson
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Our Three Blind Mice

​​​​​​“Three blind mice. Three blind mice.
See how they run. See how they run…”

The recent testimonies of the three university presidents (Claudine Gay of Harvard, Sally Kornbluth of MIT, and... University of Pennsylvania’s Liz McGill) concerning their inaction about endemic anti-Semitism on their campuses have probably done more damage to higher education than any recent event in memory. (And note there was not a white, male, heterosexual supposed oppressor to be found among the enlightened). …

The three blind mice could not even lie well. Like nearly all contemporary university presidents, they have long revoked admissions, suspended students, or relieved faculty from teaching for any language, expression, or advocacy they considered incorrect, which translates as anything not compatible with wokism or DEI. Invoking ‘freedom of speech’ to disguise their moral cowardice is pathetic when they have never on their campuses believed in freedom of speech. One incorrect word about someone trans, a misplaced pronoun, or a clumsy reference to a non-white student, and the offender would be punished immediately—followed by the usual performance-art, virtue-signaling, “this is not who we are”/“there is no place for such hatred on this campus” memo from a careerist dean or bully provost. …
1:04 PM · Dec 9, 2023