Barta was battling topical steroid withdrawal (TSW) syndrome, a debilitating condition some face after quitting high-potency creams to treat skin issues like eczema.
Common symptoms include intense burning, redness, itching and skin shedding. Many sufferers are bedridden or housebound for months — or even years — before the effects begin to subside, according to the International Topical Steroid Awareness Network (ITSAN), which advocates for awareness and supports those affected.
On June 23, New York’s Governor Hochul announced that she had directed the New York Power Authority to build a new nuclear energy facility with at least 1 GWe of capacity. During the announcement speech, she provided several bits of information leading to an informed prediction that the facility will initially include 4 BWRX-300’s on a site close to Lake Ontario. ///
Didn't New York just shut down a 1GWe (or more?) nuclear power plant near NYC just a couple of years ago in favor or "renewable energy"? So this is an acknowledgement that shutting it down was a mistake and waste of money.
Ron Howard's 1995 love letter to NASA's Apollo program takes a few historical liberties but it still inspires awe. //
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the 1995 Oscar-winning film, Apollo 13, director Ron Howard's masterful love letter to NASA's Apollo program in general and the eponymous space mission in particular. So we're taking the opportunity to revisit this riveting homage to American science, ingenuity, and daring. //
Howard ultimately shot most of the weightless scenes aboard the KC-135 since recreating those conditions on a soundstage and with CGI would have been prohibitively expensive.
In fact, Howard didn't rely on archival mission footage at all, insisting on shooting his own footage. That meant constructing realistic spacecraft interiors—incorporating some original Apollo materials—and reproducing exactly the pressure suits worn by astronauts. (The actors, once locked in, breathed air pumped into the suits just like the original Apollo astronauts.) The Mission Control set at Universal Studios was so realistic that one NASA consultant kept looking for the elevator when he left each day, only to remember he was on a movie set. //
Is every button pressed in the right way? No. Does it bug the crap out of me every time Kevin Bacon answers Tom Hanks' "How's the alignment?" question by nonsensically saying "GDC align" and pressing the GDC align button, which is neither what Lovell was asking nor the proper procedure to get the answer Lovell was looking for? Yes. But's also pure competence porn—an amazing love letter to the space program and the 400,000 men and women who put humans on the Moon.
And like Lovell says: "It's not a miracle. We just decided to go." //
Purpleivan
For anyone wanting a more extensive Apollo 13 experience, then have a look at LunarModule5's YouTube channel.
They've created an end to end (from a few hours before launch, to a few after splashdown) series of videos. These use the entire recorded audio for the mission, both for the crew and controllers on the ground. Long periods of silence have been edited our, but enough silence/static gaps between audio, for the cuts not to feel strange. They've also included some backroom discussion recordings, to fill some of the empty sections audio.
The videos show a simulation (I don't know the software used) to visualise the events of the mission, as well as a huge collection of photos from the mission.
I've watched a few of the videos and plan at some point to watch them all (something like) end to end. However, as the set of mission videos comes in 19 parts, with many 10 hours long, for a total of about 120 hours, it's a serious commitment of time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4gb6Eb_Mes&list=PLC1yaZz2qeGrj_-TCMeupfzRUmf6CysdF
June 29, 2025 at 7:15 pm //
postpar Ars Centurion
6y
221
Subscriptor
FWIW, and this is a throwaway here, Chrysler never really got the credit they deserved for their stellar work on those rockets, or on the electronic communication and diagnosis devices, which were quite advanced and reliable under tough circumstances. When Apollo ended, a lot of those guys went back to Detroit. Some of them worked on the racing program, doing aero and diagnostic work; others worked on electronic ignition and on-board automotive computers. They did all this for relatively small profits.
https://www.motales.com/chrysler-corp/aerospace-defense/rockets-by-chrysler.php //
Those Mission Control consoles were built by Ford (Philco division.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XbEIMcxl04)
Most fittingly, the Lunar Roving Vehicle was built in part by General Motors.
And with all that fresh space-age engineering experience under their belts, the American auto industry...basically fell apart at the seams for the next decade. //
JoHBE Ars Tribunus Militum
14y
2,881
Subscriptor++
The movie is now older than the mission was at [the movie's] release.
With these comments, Pulte is demonstrating that he, like his boss Donald Trump, subscribes to the standard Yellen-Bernanke inflationist model of monetary policy: the job of the central bank is to forever force down interest rates, churn out more easy money, and devalue the currency.
Pulte claims publicly that this somehow makes homes more affordable. As we’ll see below, though, the Fed’s easy-money policy of recent decades has not made home more affordable. Rather, Fed policy has helped to relentless increase home prices through the Fed’s asset purchases, interest rate policy, and monetary inflation. //
There are many factors that affect mortgage rates, of course, but over the past thirty years—and especially since 2009—falling interest rates have coincided with rising home prices. In fact, falling interest rates slightly precede rising home prices, suggesting a causal relationship.
I created this site to enable people to compare many so-called “secure messaging apps”. Likewise, I hope to educate people as to which functionality is required for truly secure messaging.
In 2016, I was frustrated with the EFF’s very out-of-date comparison, and hence I decided to create a comparison myself. Reaching out to various privacy organisations proved to be a complete waste of time, as no one was willing to collaborate on a comparison. This is a good lesson learnt: Don’t be beholden to other people/organisations, and produce your own useful work.
This site is not meant to be comprehensive; security is difficult, and a full review of each app is simply not plausible due to time, a lack of access to source code in many cases, and a lack of knowledge of development practices, and general cyber security maturity.
CNN weekend host Michael Smerconish spent more than six minutes in his opening, detailing Trump's accomplishments over the past 12 days. //
Winning became a punchline that Trump’s opponents used to lampoon him in his first administration. He was a political novice then, surrounded by a team with which he was unfamiliar, and he was probably as surprised as the rest of us were that he won the election.
This time is different. This time he came with a plan and a cabinet with senior advisers comprised of loyalists, all well known to the president. And recently, he’s exhibited a more layered approach to governing on both the domestic and international front, no longer solely guided by winning each day’s news cycle.
By any objective measure, President Trump has his opponents on the run.
Kwik EFIS is a suite of applications which implement a Glass Cockpit solution designed to function on most Android devices equipped with a GPS, gyroscope, accelerometer and a CPU with reasonable performance. The suite currently consist of applications:
- Primary Flight Display (PFD), Kwik PRIM
- Multi Function Display (MFD) Digital Moving Map, Kwik DMAP
- Combined Format Display (CFD), Kwik COMP
TimeLimit
Limit the usage of Android™ phones easily
Download at F-Droid
A group of simple, open source apps without ads and unnecessary permissions, with customizable colors. A fork of @SimpleMobileTools.
The question seemed easy enough: We’ve dropped a user, now we want to change the DEFINER on all database objects that currently have it set to this dropped user?
This should be possible by checking the INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables of the appropriate object types (routines, triggers, views and events) and performing an ALTER on each of them that just modifies the DEFINER but nothing else, right?
Unfortunately it isn’t that easy, or at least not yet (see http://bugs.mysql.com/73894 and https://mariadb.atlassian.net/browse/MDEV-6731 ).
“If you are in a boring meeting or driving or otherwise in the middle of something where nodding off is unacceptable, just hold your breath,” one person shared.
“If you hold it long enough, your body will send a rush of blood to your brain, which in turn will make you suddenly feel wide awake. The effect is not long-lived, though, but it can save you when you just need to stay awake and alert for just a bit longer.” //
“If you get a mosquito bite, run a spoon under hot water (not hot enough to burn obvs) and then press the back it to the bite, and repeat that a couple times — it helps ‘cook’ the itchy protein so that you don’t have that large histamine reaction!” advised another user.
“If you burn your tongue, put sugar on it,” suggested one person.
“Was in Mexico with a partner several years ago, and he got overconfident with hot sauce. He started freaking out and the waiter came over and advised him to pour a sugar packet on his tongue. It worked almost immediately, and I’ve always wondered if it was psychosomatic or a real thing!” someone wrote. //
“Sniff alcohol wipes when nauseous. Or in a pinch, hand sanitizer. The isopropyl alcohol somehow instantly stops nausea, even faster and more efficiently than ondansetron,”
The scheme highlights still unaddressed vulnerabilities in the voting process that leave elections ripe for fraud. //
In Pennsylvania, where officials swear elections are safe and secure, three elected officials are headed to prison after admitting they cheated in the 2021 election. Their cases reveal common vulnerabilities in the voting process that have yet to be cured.
The three men, who all at one time were elected Democrat members of the Millbourne Borough Council, tried to rig the mayoral election in favor of one of them. They failed by 30 votes, got caught, and in June each was sentenced to prison. Among the charges were conspiracy to commit voter fraud, giving false information in registering to vote, and fraudulent voter registration. //
The scheme highlights how easily electronic voter registration and ballot requests, drop off boxes, signatures, photo identification, and in-person voting each have a role in allowing or preventing election fraud. If they had been forced to vote in person and verify their address with a photo ID, this cheating would not have happened.
Rwanda and Congo Sign U.S.-Brokered Peace Treaty
President Trump claims credit for the outcome. The main question now is how the treaty will be implemented as fighting still rages in eastern Congo.
This supposed falling out may be making a mountain out of a molehill. In 1931, the American chewing gum model William Wrigley Jr., speaking to "The American Magazine," said:
Business is built by men who care—care enough to disagree, fight it out to a finish, get facts. When two men always agree, one of them is unnecessary.
Writing for the majority, Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett did not mince words when criticizing the lack of legal rationale behind the Biden appointee’s emotionally-charged dissent. //
While noting how the principal dissent authored by Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor “focuses on conventional legal terrain, like the Judiciary Act of 1789 and our cases on equity,” Barrett highlighted how Jackson’s dissent “chooses a startling line of attack that is tethered neither to these sources nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever.” More specifically, she underscored how her Democrat-appointed colleague’s expressed views on the power of courts go beyond those of judicial supremacists — those who believe the judiciary is superior to the other branches of government. //
“Waving away attention to the limits on judicial power as a ‘mind-numbingly technical query,’ post, at 3 (dissenting opinion), [Jackson] offers a vision of the judicial role that would make even the most ardent defender of judicial supremacy blush. In her telling, the fundamental role of courts is to ‘order everyone (including the Executive) to follow the law—full stop.'” //
“We will not dwell on JUSTICE JACKSON’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: JUSTICE JACKSON decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.“ //
While agreeing that the executive has an obligation to follow the law, Barrett chastised Jackson for “skip[ping] over” the fact that the judiciary must do so as well, and that separation of powers must be upheld.
“JUSTICE JACKSON would do well to heed her own admonition: ‘[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by law.’ … That goes for judges too.”
If cases targeting American energy continue to prevail, ‘it could result in shutting down the oil industry.’ //
Senators met yesterday for a subcommittee hearing to discuss claims that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), foreign donors, and leftist legal activism are behind a “systematic campaign” to dismantle American energy dominance.
Throughout the hearing, Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, emphasized how foreign funding and activist litigation are undermining U.S. energy infrastructure, posing a national security threat. His four Democrat colleagues repeatedly dismissed the concerns as a “conspiracy theory,” instead focusing on energy costs and “global warming.”
The “assault by the radical left,” “paid for by the [CCP],” seeks to “seize control of our courts [and] to weaponize litigation against U.S. energy producers,” Cruz said. He noted the assault is “three-pronged,” weaponizing “foreign funding, mass litigation, and judicial indoctrination” against “American energy independence.”
As conservatives, we consider ourselves to be the guardians of classics, protecting them from woke mobs. But works like Of Mice and Men were dubbed “classics” as our Western values were already coming to a close. I’m wary of books selected by leftist professors from the ’60s enjoying the same immunity status as veritable classics like Hamlet and Jane Eyre. The difference is that older classics are firmly rooted in our Western values, while many modern works are expressly fatalistic.
In other words, recent wokeism isn’t the only thing we should be looking out for on school reading lists. Literary trash has been the staple of the education system for decades. //
Modern literature shows hardship without hope. Plenty of literature depicts the hard realities of life. The difference is that some portray this in a context of hope, while others don’t. For example, Crime and Punishment portrays Sonya being compelled into prostitution; however, it makes it clear that she can choose a path of redemption. Modern literature, on the other hand, tends to have the message that “life is terrible and that is it.” The characters are not free agents but are acted upon solely for the purpose of affirming the author’s bleak message. They inculcate a victim mentality, not fortitude.
Modern literature focuses solely on negative examples, not heroes. Yes, Anna Karenina depicts adultery, but it also features Kitty and Levin’s loving marriage. In books like Of Mice and Men, there are no heroes worth emulating, just darkness. C.S. Lewis wrote, “Since it is so likely that [children] will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.” We should reevaluate literature that doesn’t show the good along with the bad.
Modern literature is ineffective in instilling morality. We can’t raise moral individuals by only showing them what not to do. First of all, studies show that when presented with educational TV shows, children are likely to imitate the depicted bullying rather than the problem-solving the programs intend to model. What’s far more likely to inspire virtue in young people is positive examples. But the modern authors that schools tend to favor are too cynical to provide heroes to emulate. //
Overly dark content desensitizes viewers rather than making them more empathetic and moral human beings. Well-intentioned media can have unintended adverse effects. Even if viewing violence doesn’t increase aggression in all individuals, studies show that it does consistently desensitize viewers and decrease empathy for victims. This is worth thinking about when deciding which books to expose young minds to.
There’s much better literature out there. Young men used to read riveting works with exemplary heroes like Robinson Crusoe. That has since been replaced with Lord of the Flies. Which one is more likely to teach a young boy about the sort of man he should become?
To be clear, I’m not knocking books just because they’re new; I’m suggesting that they’re a departure from our values and other works merit more attention. For example, The Lord of the Rings and To Kill a Mockingbird were written in the same century as Lord of the Flies, but both depict light and goodness along with evil. While Lord of the Flies only shows the fall of man, Lord of the Rings shows redemption and heroism. It’s interesting to consider that although Tolkien fought in the same World War that turned other writers to the dark and the cynical, he chose to write about goodness and light.
‘When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.’. //
On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court declared rogue lower courts’ universal injunctions against President Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship order to be unlawful.
“[F]ederal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them. When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too,” Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote.
Even if everyone who is eligible to vote in the country would have voted, President Trump still would have won the 2024 presidential election, a new study out Thursday from the Pew Research Center finds.
Trump won in 2024 with just under 50% of the vote, 49.7%-48.2% over Democrat Kamala Harris.
Roughly 64% of the eligible-voting population turned out in 2024, the second highest since 1904. 2020 was the highest.
But even if everyone who could vote did, Trump would have won by an even wider margin, 48%-45%, according to Pew's validated voters survey.
The survey of almost 9,000 voters was conducted in the weeks after the 2024 presidential election. Pew verified whether they had voted or not over the last five presidential elections using publicly available commercial voter files. For context, most well-conducted national polls include roughly 1,000 interviews.
Pew asked non-voters how they would have voted and found they would have broken for Trump, 44%-40%. That's a big change from 2020 and 2016 when they said they would have chosen Democrats. In 2020, they said they preferred Joe Biden 46%-35%. In 2016, it was Hillary Clinton, 37%-30%.
That upends a longstanding belief in politics that higher turnout generally helps Democrats. Younger and non-white voters, who tend to vote Democratic, are also among the least likely to vote.
But in 2024, Trump's coalition grew – it got more ethnically diverse and younger.
Anybody who knows a law book from an LL Bean catalog knows that federal judges just made up this concept of universal injunctions. There's no basis in statute, no basis in Supreme Court precedent. There's no basis in English common law.
They just made it up because they don't agree with what a president or Congress has done. You know, if they disagree, you know, I'm sorry—fill out a hurt feelings support. Buy a comfort rock.
But they can't just say, "I disagree and I'm putting the entire action by another branch of government on hold, because I don't like it," and that's what they've been doing…. //
They're not the superior branch of government. They're an equal branch of government. //
RocketGeezer NorCalGC
a day ago
That’s largely true for SCOTUS too, since Article 3 defines it’s jurisdiction, but doesn’t really define it role. SCOTUS has done a pretty good job of defining its role since the founding.
The lower federal courts, whose establishment, funding, role and jurisdiction were to be done by Congress, have been established and funded by Congress, but have essentially defined their own role and jurisdiction. Naturally, they’ve gone far afield from what the founders likely envisioned, especially in the last 30 or 40 years.
The lower federal judiciary now boils down to small, insecure people in minor roles trying to make themselves way more important than they were intended to be. I’d say that most of the lower federal judiciary has a bad case of SCOTUS envy! //
camd83 Marek76
5 hours ago
Excellent point! The President is the only person elected by the whole country - how can an unelected, single district judge, override action for the USA taken by the country-wide elected official? Wish SCOTUS was more definitive in their decision. Looks like the Left will just switch from injunctions to class-action lawsuits which will be approved by these same judges.