There is an apocryphal quote, often attributed to Abraham Lincoln. When asked if he did not want to destroy his enemies, Lincoln supposedly replied, "Isn't that what I've done when I've made them my friends?" That's an admirable notion, but such friendships should be tempered with caution. Still, business relationships have a way of pouring oil on troubled waters. It will be interesting to see what the Middle East looks like a year from now.

The idea of a language that consists entirely of allegories — of references to heroic tales and historical incidents — has been analyzed at some length by academic linguists. There is a peer-reviewed scientific paper called "Darmok and Jalad on the Internet." While there is no such language on Earth, we in fact use a lot of allegories in everyday speech. People speak of "Road to Damascus conversions" (Paul on the road to Damascus) and Washington at Valley Forge. Caesar at the Rubicon. We all know what these events were, and we know that we are not to take them literally, but as symbols of a sudden change in life's purpose, or having to endure extreme hardship on the way to victory.

Let me suggest that this is how President Trump's head works. He quite often speaks in allegories. When Trump says he wants to reopen Alcatraz, he is not referring to that overgrown rock in San Francisco Bay, but to the Alcatraz that we all know as the storied (and movied) cage for the worst of the worst, the place from which no one escapes. Everyone in our culture knows what Alcatraz is. If Trump had said he wants to expand Atwater, no one would have paid any attention. The Democrats and their media wouldn't have gone berserk. Trump's plea for prison expansion would have died right there. Instead we got several days of people telling us how stupid re-opening Alcatraz would be, followed by, "Well, maybe not Alcatraz, but how about expanding the SuperMax?" //

I suspect the Qatari jumbo jet is another allegory. He can get a new Air Force One from some backwater in the Middle East faster than he can from Boeing. In case people don't know this, it shouldn't be like that. (In fact, it isn't, and he almost certainly knows it. Turning a plain-vanilla 747 into a VC-25 would cost billions and take longer than waiting for Boeing.) But somebody needs to light a fire under Boeing, and he's trying.

you got it.

Exploring the Spectrum, a groundbreaking 1974 documentary by Dr. John Nash Ott.

A captivating journey into the science of photobiology and the profound impact of light on health.

A pioneer in time-lapse photography and full-spectrum lighting, Dr. Ott reveals how natural and artificial light influences the growth, behavior, and well-being of plants, animals, and humans.

Through mesmerizing visuals and innovative experiments, the film challenges conventional wisdom, questioning whether fluorescent lights, UV-blocking glasses, and indoor lifestyles contribute to health issues like cancer, learning disorders, and immune system weaknesses.

Ott’s work highlights the essential role of natural sunlight and balanced light frequencies in sustaining life, urging us to rethink our relationship with the light that surrounds us.

In case you missed it, the below EO is a big deal. Trump is forcing the federal government to spell out everything that is a crime under federal law. The other thing the EO does is to force the government to add a "mens rea" element to most of these "crimes"; i.e., you have to be aware of the fact that you are committing a crime in order for it to be a crime.

Thus, if you decide to build a pond on your property and the EPA has some obscure regulation saying that is a crime, you would need to be aware of the criminal nature of the act before you did it in order to be guilty of anything.

This is great.

The whole EO is linked in my post below, but I wanted to call attention to one tangential aspect of it. The EO says:

"It privileges large corporations, which can afford to hire expensive legal teams to navigate complex regulatory schemes and fence out new market entrants, over average Americans.”

This is really important and is a theme I keep coming back to. Regulatory schemes like Dodd-Frank and the CFPB are created ostensibly to help the “little guy,” when in reality they create byzantine layers upon layers of compliance requirements that only mega-corporations can afford to navigate. Those sorts of laws are anti-competitive and hurt most of all the “little guy” they purport to help.

When you hear the likes of Bernie Sanders and Big Chief Lizzie Warren railing against the “oligarchy,” realize that they regulatory schemes they propose serve the oligarchy MOST OF ALL. In fact, Bernie and Lizzie and AOC are the oligarchs, not us.

Presidential Actions
FIGHTING OVERCRIMINALIZATION IN FEDERAL REGULATIONS
Executive Orders
May 9, 2025
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:

Section 1. Purpose. The United States is drastically overregulated. The Code of Federal Regulations contains over 48,000 sections, stretching over 175,000 pages — far more than any citizen can possibly read, let alone fully understand. Worse, many carry potential criminal penalties for violations. The situation has become so dire that no one -– likely including those charged with enforcing our criminal laws at the Department of Justice — knows how many separate criminal offenses are contained in the Code of Federal Regulations, with at least one source estimating hundreds of thousands of such crimes. Many of these regulatory crimes are “strict liability” offenses, meaning that citizens need not have a guilty mental state to be convicted of a crime.

This status quo is absurd and unjust. It allows the executive branch to write the law, in addition to executing it. That situation can lend itself to abuse and weaponization by providing Government officials tools to target unwitting individuals. It privileges large corporations, which can afford to hire expensive legal teams to navigate complex regulatory schemes and fence out new market entrants, over average Americans.

The purpose of this order is to ease the regulatory burden on everyday Americans and ensure no American is transformed into a criminal for violating a regulation they have no reason to know exists.

Sec. 2. Policy. It is the policy of the United States that:

(a) Criminal enforcement of criminal regulatory offenses is disfavored.

(b) Prosecution of criminal regulatory offenses is most appropriate for persons who know or can be presumed to know what is prohibited or required by the regulation and willingly choose not to comply, thereby causing or risking substantial public harm. Prosecutions of criminal regulatory offenses should focus on matters where a putative defendant is alleged to have known his conduct was unlawful.

(c) Strict liability offenses are “generally disfavored.” United States v. United States Gypsum, Co., 438 U.S. 422, 438 (1978). Where enforcement is appropriate, agencies should consider civil rather than criminal enforcement of strict liability regulatory offenses or, if appropriate and consistent with due process and the right to jury trial, see Jarkesy v. Securities and Exchange Commission, 603 U.S. 109 (2024), administrative enforcement.

(d) Agencies promulgating regulations potentially subject to criminal enforcement should explicitly describe the conduct subject to criminal enforcement, the authorizing statutes, and the mens rea standard applicable to those offenses.

Sec. 3. Definitions. For purposes of this order:

(a) “Agency” has the meaning given to “Executive agency” in section 105 of title 5, United States Code;

(b) “Criminal regulatory offense” means a Federal regulation that is enforceable by a criminal penalty; and

(c) “Mens rea” means the state of mind that by law must be proven to convict a particular defendant of a particular crime.

Sec. 4. Report on Criminal Regulatory Offenses. (a) Within 365 days of the date of this order, the head of each agency, in consultation with the Attorney General, shall provide to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) a report containing:

(i) a list of all criminal regulatory offenses enforceable by the agency or the Department of Justice; and

(ii) for each criminal regulatory offense identified in subsection (a)(i) of this section, the range of potential criminal penalties for a violation and the applicable mens rea standard for the criminal regulatory offense.

(b) At the same time the head of each agency provides to the Director of OMB the report required by subsection (a) of this section, the agency head shall publicly post the report on its agency webpage.

Senator Hawley: Listen to another piece of testimony from another witness, this is a whistleblower report that has come in to us. This person says, "I've dedicated my entire adult life to the claims adjusting world in numerous roles, I worked for Pilot and Allstate 12 years, as an independent adjustor. I wrote claims all over the country regularly throughout the years. And I have watched the progression and the controlling nature of claims worsen progressively. Allstate created an internal review team with the sole purpose of making sure claims were paid as low as possible. Allstate reviewers instructed adjustors to alter and delete factual findings in their estimates to drive down the cost of a claim.

Trump opened his speech with Lee Greenwood’s famous patriotic song playing. As the entire song played, the president stood on the stage before he took to the podium. //

After his speech, the president was joined on stage by the Saudi Crown Prince as the Village People's 1978 hit "Y.M.C.A." played in the background. Those in the room gave the president a standing ovation.

However, there was one noticeable difference at the speech in Riyadh because Trump did not show off his dance moves during the Village People’s hit. //

YMCA has topped the charts 40 [sic] years after its release thanks to an online dance sensation started by Donald Trump...

YMCA shot up the Billboard dance/electronic sales chart as polling day approached on Nov 5, and finally hit number one following Mr Trump’s victory the week of Nov 17.

Trump may be getting closer to Obama's recent policy.

ByABC News
August 29, 2016, 2:05 PM //

President Barack Obama has often been referred to by immigration groups as the "Deporter in Chief."

Between 2009 and 2015 his administration has removed more than 2.5 million people through immigration orders, which doesn’t include the number of people who "self-deported" or were turned away and/or returned to their home country at the border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

How does he compare to other presidents?
According to governmental data, the Obama administration has deported more people than any other president's administration in history.

In fact, they have deported more than the sum of all the presidents of the 20th century.

The district court dismissed the case, ruling that the APA claims were barred by sovereign immunity because the Library of Congress is part of “the Congress” and therefore not an “agency” within the meaning of the APA’s judicial review provision.

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed the district court's decision. The court held that irrespective of whether the Library is an “agency,” Congress has specified that copyright regulations under Title 17 of the U.S. Code are subject to the APA. The court concluded that DMCA rules are subject to the APA just like other copyright rules, and therefore, the APA provides the necessary waiver of sovereign immunity for this suit. The court remanded the case back to the district court to assess the APA claims.

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If anyone has ideas on how to set up automatic flattening on a non-rooted Android phone, I’m all ears. If not, perhaps there is a thing that would be possible with Tasker or some other tool which can run a linux command like:

find "$TARGET" -mindepth 2 -type f -exec mv -n "{}" "$TARGET/" \;
find "$TARGET" -mindepth 1 -type d -empty -delete

Hi @testing123,

I’ve implemented custom script support into the Syncthing-Fork app. The wrapper can now run shell scripts when a folder completes its sync progress. I’m using it myself to clean up mess Android itself repeatedly puts in my folders to prevent it from syncing across to other connected devices.

You can optIn to test it by turning expert options on and upgrading to this test build:

https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android/actions/runs/15002361443/artifacts/3116423884

For security considerations, you have to put your scripts into “.stfolder” and turn that option explicitly on per folder. See Expert option: Run custom shell script after folder sync completed by Catfriend1 · Pull Request [#1412](https://a.plas.ml/./add-tag/1412) · Catfriend1/syncthing-android · GitHub for more details and demo scripts.

This is an app that can synchronize SMS or Notification between multiple devices(PC, Phone).

Caution!
If someone else has asked you to install this app, be careful since he/she may be a fraud.

How to use

1. First, add a filter to set up recipients.
2. Enter the recipient phone number, email, URL, Telegram, Push Service ID. You can add several.
3. You can set keywords present in the phonenumber or message body as conditions, or leave it blank if you just want to forward everything.
4. You can customize the template for the forwarded message.

Features

• Forward SMS or Notification to Email, Phone, URL, Telegram, Push Service.
• Add filters to various options.
• Supports Gmail and SMTP.
• Supports Dual SIM setting.
• Supports setting of operation time.
• Supports filter backup/restore.

This app does not provide feature to get messages from devices that do not have the app installed.

In a recent piece for National Review, John Yoo and Robert Delahunty argue the Trump administration is justified in challenging Harvard’s tax-exempt status. Citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Bob Jones University v. the United States (1983), the authors point to precedent establishing university policies “contrary to a fundamental public policy” and in violation of “deeply and widely accepted views of elementary justice” constitute grounds for revoking 501(c)(3) status.

It can be added that the administration is on solid ground in stripping funding from Harvard under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars institutions receiving federal assistance from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin. That action was recently taken in response to Harvard’s rejection of the Trump administration’s settlement proposal following its investigation of Harvard’s failure to protect Jewish students from targeted harassment and violence. The terms of the settlement included several reforms, the most controversial of which required Harvard to take reasonable action to address rampant viewpoint discrimination against conservative-leaning students and faculty.

For Yoo and Delahunty, this minimally proscriptive requirement (asking Harvard to consult with an external party of its choosing) is a bridge too far as it “seem[s] to fall outside the mandate of a national government whose only true power here is to end racial discrimination and ensure that its grant recipients obey the Constitution and federal law.” //

First, consider that Yoo and Delahunty warn of a potential return to abusive diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies. The argument that conservatives should be careful not to go too far lest leftists reciprocate would carry more weight had leftists not already gone deep into that territory. That ship has sailed.

As sure as the sun rises in the east, the next leftist presidential administration will work to roll back the Trump administration’s civil rights reforms. The right’s newfound willingness to employ the potent tools of the civil rights state does not constitute the end of the left’s willingness to do the same. Rather, it means a formerly one-way, left-only ratchet now operates bidirectionally. //

The Trump administration should act boldly, as its rivals have acted before and will act again. It should wield its civil rights authorities to replace the left’s outcomes-based (“equity”) spoils system with one rooted in the principles of color-blind meritocracy.

This leads to the second problem with Yoo and Delahunty’s take: Although viewpoint discrimination is not prohibited under civil rights law, there is a clear connection between an aggressive left-wing campus monoculture and tolerance of campus antisemitism. The core tenets of the dominant “woke” paradigm cast Jews as “oppressors” by virtue of their success and proximity to whites. The institutionalization of this paradigm in higher education contributes to an astonishing two-thirds of 18-to-24-year-olds now asserting that Jews as a “class are oppressors.”

The Trump administration is right to hold Harvard accountable, not only for its toleration of antisemitism but also for the full range of civil rights violations it inflicts on students, faculty, and staff. It should aggressively wield its authorities to address rampant viewpoint discrimination at elite universities, understanding that such discrimination is intimately related to other forms of discrimination explicitly prohibited under federal law.

An Open Source ZFS NAS for the community

A community based fork of TrueNAS CORE

A day after the US Copyright Office dropped a bombshell pre-publication report challenging artificial intelligence firms' argument that all AI training should be considered fair use, the Trump administration fired the head of the Copyright Office, Shira Perlmutter—sparking speculation that the controversial report hastened her removal.

The report that the Copyright Office released on Friday is not finalized but is not expected to change radically, unless Trump's new acting head potentially intervenes to overhaul the guidance.

It comes after the Copyright Office parsed more than 10,000 comments debating whether creators should and could feasibly be compensated for the use of their works in AI training.

"The stakes are high," the office acknowledged, but ultimately, there must be an effective balance struck between the public interests in "maintaining a thriving creative community" and "allowing technological innovation to flourish." Notably, the office concluded that the first and fourth factors of fair use—which assess the character of the use (and whether it is transformative) and how that use affects the market—are likely to hold the most weight in court. //

Only courts can effectively weigh the balance of fair use, the Copyright Office said. Perhaps importantly, however, the thinking of one of the first judges to weigh the question—in a case challenging Meta's torrenting of a pirated books dataset to train its AI models—seemed to align with the Copyright Office guidance at a recent hearing. Mulling whether Meta infringed on book authors' rights, US District Judge Vince Chhabria explained why he doesn't immediately "understand how that can be fair use."

"You have companies using copyright-protected material to create a product that is capable of producing an infinite number of competing products," Chhabria said. "You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person's work, and you're saying that you don't even have to pay a license to that person." //

Some AI critics think the courts have already indicated which way they are leaning. In a statement to Ars, a New York Times spokesperson suggested that "both the Copyright Office and courts have recognized what should be obvious: when generative AI products give users outputs that compete with the original works on which they were trained, that unprecedented theft of millions of copyrighted works by developers for their own commercial benefit is not fair use."

In July of 2024, the Biden/Buttigieg FAA moved control of the New York/Newark airspace from New York, also known as N90, to Philadelphia Tower, or the Philadelphia TRACON [Terminal Radar Approach Control Facility].

As part of the move, the STARS [Standard Terminal Automation Replacement System] system that processes radar data for Newark remained based in New York City. They didn't move it from New York down to Philly, where the controllers would be. Redundant and diverse telecommunications lines feed this data from New York to Philadelphia TRACON, where controllers handle New York arrivals and departures.

The Biden/Buttigieg bungled this move without properly hardening the telecom lines feeding the data, which was already well known to be error-prone. Without addressing the underlying infrastructure, they added more risk to the system. In fact, there were issues in October and November under Biden and Buttigieg that would have highlighted to the prior Administration that the underlying hardware would continue to cause problems. //

The incidents on April 28th and May 9th resulted in very brief outages that impacted the STARS radar data displays going down. The most serious of these outages lasted approximately 30 seconds. This includes the STARS radar data displays going down, again, for 30 seconds. The STARS displays took approximately 60 seconds, then, to reboot and come back online.

So there's been some discrepancy, 30 seconds versus 90 seconds.

The outage was 30 seconds, but then the displays took another minute to boot. That's where you get 30 and 90 seconds, but the telecom was out for 30 seconds.

The outage also interrupted the phone line and radio frequencies for a very short period. This is how controllers talk to pilots....These frequencies returned almost immediately, which is why you heard pilots actually telling airplanes that they couldn't see them with the radar. //

On Friday night [May 8] the FAA implemented a software update to prevent future outages. The software patch was successful, and our redundant lines are now both working. We know this because on Sunday there was an outage -- you all reported on that -- and the outage was -- the main line went down, but the redundant line did stand up, meaning our patch, our fix worked.

Now...the controllers who had seen this the prior two times, when they saw the main line go down, they were concerned. Even though they could see airplanes and talk to airplanes, out of an abundance of caution they actually shut down the airspace for 45 minutes, but we still had our scopes and our telecom functioning on Sunday morning.

The Episcopal Church, after decades of shifting stances on the cause of life, the ordination of women, and the embrace of the LGBTQ+ and transgender agenda, now has a moral line—and Trump has crossed it. Because of this move by the Trump administration to welcome 49 white South African families to America as refugees, the Episcopal Church has chosen to shutter its 40-year-long Episcopal Migration Ministries (EMM). It seems that white South Africans do not fit the definition of those needing help fleeing "persecution in their own lands, to find compassion and welcome here."

So much for mercy to the stranger. For the Episcopalians, white refugees are the wrong cause, the wrong race, and definitely welcomed by the wrong administration.

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

I can't help but hear Lewis say that in my head whenever I hear about the left's approval of violence, or even lately, assassination. //

According to a Rutgers Social Perception Lab-Network Contagion Research Institute brief, 55.2% of Americans on the left “reported that if someone murdered Donald Trump, they would be at least somewhat justified.” Overall, 38.5% hold the same belief. //

I see a lot of people who talk about the left's violent tendencies and wonder how people can think that this kind of evil should be permissible.

Easy. They don't see it as evil. //

They don't see that what they're advocating for is inherently evil because they've been told repeatedly that evil is what they're standing against. //

FYI
PI may be equaled to SQRT(10) where appropriate. //

For practical use with hand tools, early Chinese engineers ussed pi=3, or for more precise work sqrt10. In the late Han dynasty Liu Hui independently derived Archimedes polygon method to achieve the figure of 355/113, but this was rejected by most at the time as impractical.

Neera Tanden🌻
@neeratanden
·
Follow
Hey America - while you were sleeping the Republicans started to put out their plan to rip health care away from millions of Americans. Almost 14 million people lose their health care so the GOP can fund tax cuts for the rich.
Jamie Dupree
@jamiedupree
The Congressional Budget Office tells Democrats that the GOP changes to Medicaid and the Obama health law will knock 13.7 million people off the health insurance rolls. Letter at https://democrats-energycommerce.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/democrats-energycommerce.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/cbo-emails-re-e%26c-reconcilation-scores-may-11%2C-2025.pdf
Last edited
7:18 AM · May 12, 2025. //

VoteGeneric
21 minutes ago
Likely that there are 13.7 million fraudsters in the Medicaid program. //

Musicman
18 minutes ago
I hope Tanden is right: there are surely 14 million on Medicaid who are not actually poor. (One of my best friends, who died last year, was on it even though he had over a million dollars in the bank because he didn’t have any “income.”)

Obama extended Medicaid way beyond its mission. Here in NM our governor has a scheme to extend it to all working class (as opposed to poor) people.