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.

Vice President JD Vance, who was actually in India at the time of the assault, played an instrumental role in negotiating the ceasefire. It was decided he would get the job of calling Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi:

In his noon phone call with Modi, Vance made it clear that the U.S. believed that there was a high probability of dramatic escalation as the conflict went into the weekend.

The vice president encouraged Modi to consider de-escalation options, including a potential off-ramp that U.S. officials knew the Pakistanis would be amenable to.

Officials from all sides stayed up into the wee hours working for a breakthrough:

Modi listened to the vice president’s message, although he didn’t explicitly indicate openness to any of the options put forth.

Vance's call to Modi came less than a month after he met with the Indian leader in New Delhi to discuss trade talks.

From that point, key U.S. officials continued to work the phones with their counterparts in India and Pakistan into the night to help re-establish communications between the two sides, allowing them to work out terms for a ceasefire in the next 12 to 18 hours.

Expect to see a lot more of his conversion of anecdotes into data in opposition ot Hegseth's enforcement of President Trump's directives. I think that we'll also see a lot of folks who developed gender dysphoria under Obama as a tool to advance their careers and make themselves bulletproof to charges of incompetence suddenly "cure" themselves as they look at the trans gravy train coming to an end. //

anon-kcqz
36 minutes ago
While I applaud SecDef Hegseth doing this for cultural reasons, let's not lose sight of the fact that divesting ourselves of these lunatics is part of a broader overall strategy to evaluate every member of the service for whether or not they could contribute meaningfully in a war. Hegseth is giving us back our teeth, and the whole world will become more peaceful as a result. //

stm-33
18 minutes ago
The Pentagon has spent 51 million of your tax dollars in the past four years to treat over 4200 transgender troops. Biden and former Secretary of Defense Austin turned our once proud military into a "woke" joke and disastrous social experiment. Since when is it a good idea to have mentally ill troops in the military; especially ones that need continual harmful hormonal injections that can possibly cause psychotic episodes. They had troops flying rainbow flags and were painting "rainbow bullets" on Marine helmets in recruiting ads. The Chinese and the Russians were rolling on the ground laughing and the armed services couldn't meet 75% of their recruiting goals.

Thank God, that Trump has stopped this nonsense as is constitutionally his right as Commander in Chief. Amazingly, the fact that recruiting has reached a 20 year high in just a few short months after Trump was elected should tell you everything you need to know how harmful and ridiculous this whole idea was.

Judge Illston’s ruling exemplifies a growing trend where district judges are using temporary restraining orders and nationwide injunctions as tools to block executive actions they disagree with. This is judicial activism, plain and simple. It’s one thing to hear a case and rule on it within the confines of a specific district. It’s another to issue a nationwide injunction that overrides the president’s authority across the entire country. //

The judiciary’s role is to interpret the law, not to decide what presidential directives are appropriate. If Congress disagrees with Trump’s restructuring plan, it has the power to pass legislation to counter it. But a single district judge should not have that power. //

The president’s authority to direct the federal workforce and implement agency restructuring must be upheld — otherwise, we’re looking at a future where unelected judges, not elected leaders, are the ones calling the shots.

The Constitution is clear: The president is the head of the executive branch. //

Outerlimitsfan
2 hours ago edited
We are witnessing the tyranny of the Judicial branch that Jefferson was concerned about.

The media is correct that a Constitutional Crisis is on the brink of occurring. The blame lies with the Judicial branch and in particular Roberts who refuses to stop the overreach by district courts.

So many leftist activist judges are angry that Trump got elected again and the lawfare failed to throw him in prison. //

Mrs. deWinter
2 hours ago
If previous Presidents and their administrations can add endless agencies and personnel and grow the government bigger and bigger without any complaint or judicial oversight, then another duly elected President can un-grow it! Period. HE'S the elected Executive. He's the one who makes those decisions about personnel and departments. And obviously, Trump was elected to do just that since the debt is out of control and the government has grown to mammoth proportions where the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing any longer, and the waste, fraud, and corruption are on steroids.

There are two subplots to the complaint.

First, anti-death penalty lawyers have pushed hard to create a doctrine that says executions must produce instantaneous, painless deaths. Otherwise, they are "botched" and illegitimate. The strategy is to convince fellow-traveling judges to rule that the possibility of a "botched" execution is, by definition, a violation of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment." This is obviously hogwash, as that prohibition applies to punishments designed to inflict pain.

In 1947, Louisiana attempted to execute Willie Francis via its traveling electric chair. A drunk technician improperly wired the device (Louisiana, go figure), and Francis survived the attempt. The Supreme Court ruled that the Eighth Amendment did not apply and the state was entitled to another go, and this time, it was successful.

Things change, and our imperial judiciary has expanded the clear meaning of the Eighth Amendment into something no one would have conceived at its drafting. //

Second, there are insinuations that the execution may have played out the way the members of the firing squad intended. All the rounds missed Mahdi's heart, though bullet fragmentation did cause some injury to that organ. //

Most curiously, there were only two entrance wounds in the body, but three shots were fired. The Department of Corrections spokeswoman said that this was due to two bullets hitting the same spot, and it has happened before on test runs. While not ready to throw the bull**** flag on this story, but relying on my four years as a member of my college rifle team (yes, we used to have those) and many more years teaching basic rifle marksmanship, I'd contend that even though two rounds through the same hole does happen on a rifle range, there is a huge difference between one man shooting several rounds at a target and three men shooting precisely one round each into a human. When one considers that Mahdi tried to kill a corrections officer during a 2009 escape attempt, some degree of payback, rather than universally bad marksmanship, might be a better explanation. //

Poteen
40 minutes ago
The French of all people had the right idea. Lop off the head. Over in seconds. No pain whatsoever. Do it every week on PBS and they wouldn't need government funding.
Their next best idea was Devil's Island. Just drop them off on island and let them fend for themselves. The sea around the island becomes a live fire gunnery range. Drop in a few cameras and you'll have the most popular reality show in history. Keeping Up with the Krazy Killers. //

DavidW
37 minutes ago
If you want painless execution, carbon monoxide is the answer. You give the executee a strong sedative so that he/she falls asleep. Place the unconscious person into a cylinder or very small room. Then introduce CO into the room until it has displaced all of the air. CO is readily absorbed by the body (why so many people die from malfunctioning gas heaters), so there is no reaction by the body to "choking". Give it 60 minutes then vent the room/cylinder. Check the executee for a heartbeat. There won't be.

streiff DavidW
23 minutes ago
that was the original plan for the gas chamber.

JD Vance
@JDVance
·
Follow
Great work from the President’s team, especially Secretary Rubio.

And my gratitude to the leaders of India and Pakistan for their hard work and willingness to engage in this ceasefire.
Secretary Marco Rubio

@SecRubio
Over the past 48 hours, @VP Vance and I have engaged with senior Indian and Pakistani officials, including Prime Ministers Narendra Modi and Shehbaz Sharif, External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Chief of Army Staff Asim Munir, and National Security Advisors Ajit
9:00 AM · May 10, 2025 //

It wasnt me
3 hours ago
Trump to India, Pakistan: You know China is behind this, don't you? They are trying to distract investors from leaving China and moving to your countries or the US.

Far fewer babies went to the hospital struggling to breathe from RSV, a severe respiratory infection, after the debut of a new vaccine and treatment this season, according to an analysis published today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

RSV, or respiratory syncytial (sin-SISH-uhl) virus, is the leading cause of hospitalization for infants in the US. An estimated 58,000–80,000 children younger than 5 years old are hospitalized each year. Newborns—babies between 0 and 2 months—are the most at risk of being hospitalized with RSV. The virus circulates seasonally, typically rising in the fall and peaking in the winter, like many other respiratory infections.

But the 2024–2025 season was different—there were two new ways to protect against the infection. One is a maternal vaccine, Pfizer's Abrysvo, which is given to pregnant people when their third trimester aligns with RSV season (generally September through January). Maternal antibodies generated from the vaccination pass to the fetus in the uterus and can protect a newborn in the first few months of life. The other new protection against RSV is a long-acting monoclonal antibody treatment, nirsevimab, which is given to babies under 8 months old as they enter or are born into their first RSV season and may not be protected by maternal antibodies. //

Lastly, the researchers looked at hospitalization rates for toddlers and children up to 5 years old, who wouldn't have been protected by the new products. There, they saw RSV hospitalization rates were actually higher in the 2024–2025 season than in the pre-pandemic years. That suggests that the latest RSV season was more severe, and the drops in infant hospitalizations may be underestimates. //

ChasNC Smack-Fu Master, in training
1y
9
For some reason, the news has not followed the recent findings that early vaccinations in life dramatically lowers dementia risk, as well as Alzheimer's. The largest study that I saw was done in Finland where they used the data of the entire country. In that study, they found that respiratory vaccines seem to have the strongest impact (like this story here about RSV). Here is another paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08800-x

They don't know the actual cause of the improvements, but one paper I saw said that they believe that since viruses damage DNA, there are long term effects of early lifetime DNA damage. The body's DNA repair or cell culling cannot keep up with all of the viral damage. Another scientist also pondered if vaccinations would also have another beneficial side effect of reducing cancer. Same idea: reduced DNA damage.

Neutron stars are incredibly dense objects about 10 miles (16 km) across. Only their immense gravity keeps the matter inside from exploding; if you brought a spoonful of neutron star to Earth, the lack of gravity would cause it to expand rapidly. //

A neutron star is the remnant of a massive star (bigger than 10 Suns) that has run out of fuel, collapsed, exploded, and collapsed some more. Its protons and electrons have fused together to create neutrons under the pressure of the collapse. The only thing keeping the neutrons from collapsing further is “neutron degeneracy pressure,” which prevents two neutrons from being in the same place at the same time.

Additionally, the star loses a lot of mass in the process and winds up only about 1.5 times the Sun’s mass. But all that matter has been compressed to an object about 10 miles (16 kilometers) across. A normal star of that mass would be more than 1 million miles (1.6 million km) across.

A tablespoon of the Sun, depending on where you scoop, would weigh about 5 pounds (2 kilograms) — the weight of an old laptop. A tablespoon of neutron star weighs more than 1 billion tons (900 billion kg) — the weight of Mount Everest. So while you could lift a spoonful of Sun, you can’t lift a spoonful of neutron star.

With the tuberculomas visualized, the doctors worked to diagnose the man's condition. Generally, the CNS tuberculosis can be notoriously difficult to diagnose, given that M. tuberculosis are slow-growing and stealthy and can produce generic symptoms. The man's cerebrospinal fluid, for instance, was negative for the bacteria. But a sputum sample was positive.

Tuberculomas are often seen amid tuberculosis infections that have not been adequately treated. That seems to be the case for the patient here, who had been previously treated for tuberculosis. Sometimes patients with tuberculomas also have tubercular meningitis, brain inflammation from the infection. Fortunately, the man did not develop this even more serious manifestation of the disease. With an intensive course of anti-tuberculosis antibiotics and an anti-inflammatory drug, the man's symptoms gradually began to ease. After a month, he was feeling better. After 18 months, his symptoms had completely resolved, and a repeat MRI of his head was normal.

Tuberculosis is the leading infectious disease killer globally. In 2023, the bacteria infected 10.8 million people and killed 1.25 million. The World Health Organization estimates that about a quarter of the world's population has been infected with M. tuberculosis, which spreads through the air.

GaidinBDJ Ars Scholae Palatinae
11y
1,266
Subscriptor

actor0 said:
Why do people think E2R encryption means the data can't be decrypted?
Probably a gross misunderstanding of encryption in general.

ANYONE with access to the keys can unlock it.
The ones with access to the keys own the platform.
The one who own the platform are legally required to submit your info to Subpoena, Homeland Security warrants, and Patriot Act related actions.

This is totally incorrect.

With end-to-end encryption, the platform doesn't have the keys. The clients exchange keys through the platform, but it's done in a way that the platform doesn't know what they are. A subpoena doesn't let them provide information they don't have. The platform may have metadata about your message, but not the contents.

On the Wikipedia page for Diffie-Hellman key exchange there's a good diagram explaining the concept of how you can exchange private keys through public transport. It's the one down the page a bit where they use paint colors. In the real world, it's done with math, but the paint concept is sound to understand the underlying idea.

Just 10 years ago, a mere thousand or so operational satellites may have orbited our planet, but there will be tens or even hundreds of thousands a decade from now.

Experts have been sounding alarm bells for years that Earth orbit is getting a bit too crowded. So how many satellites can we actually launch to space before it gets to be too much?

Jonathan McDowell is an astrophysicist and astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who studies super-energetic phenomena in the universe such as jet-emitting black holes in galactic centers. In recent years, however, McDowell has gained prominence for his work in a completely different field of space research. In his monthly digital circular called Jonathan's Space Report, McDowell tracks the growing number of satellite launches and the ballooning number of objects in Earth orbit.

The project started with an ambition to "provide a pedantic historical record of the space age," but has, in a way, become a chronicle of the environmental destruction of the near Earth environment. In his frequent media appearances, McDowell has been vocal about his views on the future of the increasingly overcrowded near-Earth space.

"It's going to be like an interstate highway, at rush hour in a snowstorm with everyone driving much too fast," he told Space.com when asked what the situation in orbit will be like if existing plans for satellite megaconstellations such as SpaceX's Starlink, OneWeb and Amazon Kuiper come to fruition. "Except that there are multiple interstate highways crossing each other with no stoplights." //

"There's good evidence that the number of minor collisions is already increasing significantly," McDowell said. "We're seeing debris from objects that shouldn't really be creating debris. They probably have been hit by something small, even if they carry on working afterwards."

While the larger debris fragments over 4 inches in size are regularly tracked, trajectories of the smaller pieces are mostly unknown, and the collisions they can cause come entirely without warning.

Debris experts, however, are most concerned about encounters between two large defunct bodies — dead satellites or used rocket stages. One such close approach, between a decades-old Russian rocket upper stage and a long-defunct Russian satellite, took place on Jan. 27. With neither object being able to maneuver, space traffic guards could only look on with their fingers crossed, hoping the two would miss each other. On this occasion, they did —by a mere 20 feet (6 meters). The incident, described as a close call "worst-case scenario," could have spawned thousands of dangerous debris fragments that would have stayed in orbit for centuries, threatening everything in their path. //

McDowell says that humankind is likely going to discover the natural capacity of near-Earth space "the hard way." Despite the pledges of megaconstellation operators, the astrophysicist doubts that things will remain manageable in the years ahead.

"Five or 10 years from now, we'll have somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 satellites, and I am very skeptical that at the upper number of 100,000 things can be operated safely," McDowell sai

A team of researchers confirmed that behavior in a recently released formal analysis of WhatsApp group messaging. They reverse-engineered the app, described the formal cryptographic protocols, and provided theorems establishing the security guarantees that WhatsApp provides. Overall, they gave the messenger a clean bill of health, finding that it works securely and as described by WhatsApp.

They did, however, confirm a behavior that should give some group messaging users pause: Like other messengers billed as secure—with the notable exception of Signal—WhatsApp doesn’t provide any sort of cryptographic means for group management.

“This means that it is possible for the WhatsApp server to add new members to a group,” Martin R. Albrecht, a researcher at King's College in London, wrote in an email. “A correct client—like the official clients—will display this change but will not prevent it. Thus, any group chat that does not verify who has been added to the chat can potentially have their messages read.” //

By contrast, the open source Signal messenger provides a cryptographic assurance that only an existing group member designated as the group admin can add new members. //

Most messaging apps, including Signal, don’t certify the identity of their users. That means there’s no way Signal can verify that the person using an account named Alice does, in fact, belong to Alice. It’s fully possible that Malory could create an account and name it Alice. (As an aside, and in sharp contrast to Signal, the account members that belong to a given WhatsApp group are visible to insiders, hackers, and to anyone with a valid subpoena.)

Signal does, however, offer a feature known as safety numbers. It makes it easy for a user to verify the security of messages or calls with specific contacts. When two users verify out-of-band—meaning using a known valid email address or cell phone number of the other—that Signal is displaying the same safety number on both their devices, they can be assured that the person claiming to be Alice is, in fact, Alice.

HomeThe Aerospace Corporation
Reentry Predictions
COSMOS 482 DESCENT CRAFT (ID 6073)
Sharing
Reentry Prediction
Predicted Reentry Time
10 May 2025 06:12 UTC ± 3 hours
Orbit Epoch
09 May 2025 19:55:03.226 UTC
Prediction Ground Track
COSMOS 482 DESCENT CRAFT (ID 6073) Reentry Prediction Image
Yellow Icon – location of object at midpoint of reentry window
Blue Line – ground track uncertainty prior to middle of the reentry window (ticks at 5-minute intervals)
Yellow Line – ground track uncertainty after middle of the reentry window (ticks at 5-minute intervals)
Pink Icon (if applicable) – vicinity of eyewitness sighting or recovered debris
Note: Possible reentry locations lie anywhere along the blue and yellow ground track. Areas not under the line are not exposed to the debris.

Terminal Velocity Calculator

If you go through most of your days without worrying about space junk falling on you, there's little reason for serious alarm now. The Aerospace Corporation says any one individual on Earth is "far likelier" to be struck by lightning than to be injured by Kosmos 482. The US government's safety threshold for uncontrolled reentries requires the risk of a serious injury or death on the ground to be less than 1 in 10,000. The Aerospace Corporation projects the risk of at least one injury or fatality from Kosmos 482 to be 0.4 in 10,000 if the descent craft reaches the surface intact.

Marco Langbroek, a Dutch archeologist and university lecturer on space situational awareness, wrote on his website that the risk of public injury from Kosmos 482 is lower than that from the reentry of a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage. One of those came down uncontrolled over Poland in February, scattering some debris but causing no injuries.

Langbroek said the reentry analysis suggests the Kosmos 482 descent capsule will impact the ground or water at about 150 mph (242 kilometers per hour), assuming it makes it to the surface in one piece. The lander carries a parachute that would have slowed its final descent to Venus, but it's not likely that the parachute deployment system still works after 53 years in space. //

But what happens in the unlikely event that Kosmos 482 winds up in your yard? "If Kosmos defies the odds and does land in your yard, please don’t touch it!" the Aerospace Corporation said. "It could potentially be hazardous, and it is best to notify your local authorities.

"As for keeping it, don’t get your hopes up," Aerospace says. "There is a United Nations treaty that governs found debris—the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. It states that countries keep ownership of objects they launch into space, even after those objects reenter and return to Earth. The country that launched the object in this case is Russia, which could request the return of any parts that survived reentry. "It is also worth noting that the treaty says that the launching country is also internationally liable for damages." //

Cthel Ars Tribunus Militum
5y
7,663
Subscriptor
SimonRev said:
Technically wouldn't that have been the Soviet Union. Admittedly Russia is the obvious successor state, but couldn't one of the former republics conceivably attempt to make a claim if they felt they had a connection to it
Fun fact - the sections that deorbited in 1972 included several titanium alloy pressure vessels that landed intact (and very hot) in New Zealand; however the USSR formally disclaimed ownership so they ended up property of the farmers whose land they crashed into.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/new-light-on-mysterious-space-balls/VYQ6S2QIC4QREO55ERXWVIKNSI/

Longest period of continual operation for a computer

Who
Voyager Computer Command System

What
43:70 year(s):day(s)

Where
Not Applicable

When
20 August 1977

The computer system that has been in continual operation for the longest period is the Computer Command System (CCS) onboard NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft. This pair of interlinked computers have been in operation since the spacecraft's launch on 20 August 1977. As of 29 October 2020, the CCS has been running for 43 years 70 days.

CKing123 Ars Centurion
9y
282

MedicinalGoat said:
No more 486 support?! Don't come crying to me when your fancy pants speculative execution gets you into another security bind! Angrily shakes old man fist at clouds

That made me interested on the last in-order x86 CPU and it is Saltwell atom chips (which were a die-shrink of Bonnell) and some of these chips based on Saltwell were released as late as 2012(!) and they are even 64-bit.