The 2025 Half Century spectacular will showcase large daily field demonstrations, remarkable feature displays, a daily Parade of Power down the runway, and sanctioned tractor pulls.

We look forward to seeing you August 21-24!

In an appearance on Fox News' Faulkner Focus, Kennedy said, "Well, people will still get indemnified for it to the extent that they're already indemnified. But, you know, it is an issue, it's a balance. You're gonna see probably slightly more cavities, although in Europe, where they banned fluoride, they did not see an uptick in cavities.

"The issue is parents need to decide because the science is very clear on fluoride. The National Toxicity Program issued a report of a meta-review of all the science on it in August that said there's a direct inverse correlation between the amount of fluoride in your water and your loss of IQ."

Kennedy has long advocated for the removal of fluoride from drinking water and some states have looked to remove it, including Florida and Oklahoma. While research has shown effects on brain development, some dental organizations have raised concerns that removing fluoride from drinking water will lead to poorer oral hygiene.

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon released a video highlighting the huge win given to parents by the Supreme Court when they ruled in favor of the parents of children attending the Montgomery County school system, in the landmark case of Mahmoud v. Taylor.

Parents sued Montgomery County School Board Superintendent Thomas Taylor for introducing illustrated LGBT books into the children's curriculum without notifying parents. The school decided it didn't need to ask permission, resulting in the lawsuit that went all the way up to the highest court in the land, where it backed the parents and upheld their First Amendment right to freedom of religion.

Now the school must notify the parents before introducing these things, and parents have the option to opt their child out of the lesson.

McMahon said this "is not only a win for religious liberty, but parental rights." //

Moreover, it should be pointed out that Mahmoud v. Taylor was a 6-3 decision that was divided along ideological lines. That we'll have a Supreme Court that isn't ideologically tilted to the left is not guaranteed for the future, so what was decided today effectively needs to be codified into law.

Parental Oversight and Educational Transparency Act (H.R. 1416) is important for just this very reason. //

Too many school districts and even teachers with personal socio-political itches to scratch believe that your child is their sculpting clay and that their authority outweighs the parents when it comes to education. They are wrong about this.

But this is why H.R. 1416 is necessary.

I think too many public school educators and staff forgot that public schools are public institutions, not sovereign kingdoms where students — and even parents to a degree — are their subjects to be ruled over.

Around 03:13 UTC on 21 June (22:13 local time) a flight of US Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker aerial refueling aircraft departed Altus Air Force Base in Oklahoma. Operating in two flights of four aircraft, the Stratotankers headed northeast toward Missouri. Those aircraft quickly climbed to the top of Flightradar24’s most tracked flights list—not because thousands of people find aerial refueling aircraft over the central US fascinating, but for the inference of their purpose.

..Federal authorities detained more than 70 people during a raid on the Glenn Valley Foods meatpacking plant near 68th and J streets, ICE said in a statement.

The large-scale raid also involved the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals Service and Omaha police, according to the plant’s president. //

When I initially heard about this raid, I thought it was a repeat of that classic dance from the late 90s and early 2000s, but was kind of surprised that a factory owner would be so sanguine about employing illegals in numbers approaching that in this day and age. It didn't seem especially prudent.

I also gave a passing moment to wondering why the feds would be bothering with a plant in the middle of nowhere when surely there were plenty of the first-to-go criminals to be found by the gross in any city they were already working in.

And that was that, until I read a Judicial Watch newsletter this morning, which began to explain exactly HOW an obscure plant out of thousands in the country wound up raided.

It also answered my question about the plant owner's apparent lack of concern. It turns out, as far as he knew, all his employees were kosher by virtue of passing their E-Verify screenings. The plant was 100% compliant with federal regulations for hiring. The workers did so by using stolen identities and Social Security numbers. //

Years after Judicial Watch reported that the government’s system to verify if employees are authorized to work legally in the United States approved hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, federal authorities have uncovered widespread identity theft at a meat processing plant that used the defective tool to screen 100% of its staff. //

What led the feds to raid that plant in particular was a deep, detailed, multi-agency investigation into at least a hundred cases of individual identity theft across the country that - SURPRISE! - all led back to a massive identity theft ring originating in that very plant. //

“These so-called honest workers have caused an immeasurable amount of financial and emotional hardship for innocent Americans. If pretending to be someone you aren’t in order to steal their lives isn’t blatant, criminal dishonesty, I don’t know what is.” //

Agents took hours to meticulously go through and verify everyone's paperwork and authenticate documents. They even allowed workers to return home to retrieve paperwork for other family members or friends who didn't have what they needed with them. This wasn't any inhumane cattle round-up. //

Every seat in the waiting area of Glenn Valley Foods was occupied with people filling out job applications early Thursday afternoon, two days after the meatpacking plant became the center of the largest worksite immigration raid in the state of Nebraska so far this year. //

Min Headroom
a day ago
The canard of the “law abiding undocumented worker” takes another big hit.

By the way, notice that identity theft victims hardest hit are the legal citizens with Hispanic surnames that “look like them?” I bet that’s a demographic already and increasingly disenchanted with the whole “undocumented migrant” thing - and the politicians supporting it. //

In a 6-3 decision authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the court granted the government's applications to partially stay the district court's nationwide injunctions in the birthright citizenship cases, noting that universal injunctions "likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts." The caveat here is that the applications are granted "only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue."

The key to the court's decision appears to be summed up thusly:

When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.

Additionally, the court has instructed the district courts to "move expeditiously to ensure that, with respect to each plaintiff, the injunctions comport with this rule and otherwise comply with principles of equity."

What is the purpose of immigration policy for any nation? The correct answer is to add to numbers either in general, or in areas of certain aptitudes that are needed to enable a specific, tangible, and quantifiable benefit to the larger society. While feeling and expressing sympathy for people in nations rocked by harsh conditions is noble, it is not a responsible basis for policies related to population growth here. //

In our time, the argument about immigration has ceased entirely from being about what’s good for the nation, and instead focuses on sympathy for those who want to escape the plight of the homelands that they are unable or unwilling to fight to save or improve. This has led to a surge of people who come not to join the American experiment, but to derive the financial and security benefits of the Western tradition while working to subvert it. The mindset gave us people like Ilhan Omar—who said publicly that her top priority is what’s good for Somalia—as a member of Congress, and Zohran Mamdani—whose mother characterized him as “not an Uhmericcan (American) at all”—as the Democrat nominee for NYC mayor. //

The relationship progressives demand of us is very one-sided. This is a breach of trust for America’s citizenry, as those of us here legally are given no choice in the importation of new cultures at odds with our own. Nor are we given a vote when it comes to these new masses being immediately absorbed into taxpayer-funded services. The process is deliberately undemocratic. //

One might have thought that a leftist finally said the quiet part out loud. But they have been saying the quiet part out loud for years with arguments that America needs open borders because we need a class of people to pick tomatoes, clean hotel rooms, and shingle roofs. The implication is that these are menial, unworthy vocations that should be ascribed to those who open borders advocates seem to view as a servant class of humanity. In recent months, it occurred to me that similar arguments were made to justify the chattel slave trade during the first half of American history. Replace the word "tomatoes" with "cotton" and then ask if we’re really more enlightened than our 18th and 19th-century ancestors. There are many indicators—like the abortion trade, the butchering of children for the transgender agenda, and the human sex trafficking trade—that suggest the opposite is true. //

other nations grow food and build structures without importing millions of people from South America. Just as the antebellum South built an economy around slavery, the America of my lifetime built an economy around a class of foreign labor that’s deliberately shuffled into the shadows. That’s the opposite of compassionate.

Our living generations are at a crossroads in America’s history. We inherited a nation of E Pluribus Unum—Out of Many, One. Will we steward that and hand it to our descendants? Or will we falter under the lie that justice demands a nation in which every culture is respected, except the one that birthed and sustained it? The choice is binary. We must reject thinking that reflects chattel-based moral commitments, and stand for an America-first immigration policy that perpetuates the unique greatness of this land to the ordered liberty benefit of all across the fruited plain.

PsychoArs Ars Scholae Palatinae
20y
768
Subscriptor

jhodge said:
If your management network is accessible from the Internet, you're doing it wrong.

It needs to be fixed, but this shouldn't be a full-on freakout for most shops.

Yes and no.

If your management network is accessible from your workload network, you're doing it wrong. All it takes is a compromised laptop/desktop/IoT device that's reaching out and lets a bad actor control it. Defense in depth. //

fuzzyfuzzyfungus Ars Legatus Legionis
12y
10,234

PsychoArs said:
Yes and no.

If your management network is accessible from your workload network, you're doing it wrong. All it takes is a compromised laptop/desktop/IoT device that's reaching out and lets a bad actor control it. Defense in depth.

You also probably want 'your management network' to be internally divided to the degree possible. Ideally you'd like all your BMCs to work for you; but if one of them turns out not to you can't necessarily trust the remainder to protect themselves(and for newly added devices that aren't supposed to require hands-on provisioning more or less blind trust in the first thing that talks to you is a feature; so you really, really, want that to be you).

Not every wire can be cut, or you might as well just get an empty shed for much, much, less money; but there is often not much call for any two random devices on the management network to talk to one another, rather than a relative handful of monitoring and provisioning systems talking to otherwise solitary BMCs who have no excuse for knowing about one another. //

Little-Zen Ars Praefectus
24y
3,201
Subscriptor

Deny_Deflect_Disavow said:
“The vulnerability, carrying a severity rating of 10 out of a possible 10, resides in the AMI MegaRAC, a widely used firmware package that allows large fleets of servers to be remotely accessed and managed even when power is unavailable or the operating system isn't functioning.”

I‘m not sure I understand how firmware can be manipulated if electricity is not available or the OS is not functioning. Secondly, these hosts may be physically wired to any network, yet how can a remote execution or procedure call be issued to the server if powered down?

If there's literally no power, like at all, then they aren't accessible, yes. But that's "no power" as in "the whole building's power is out."

If, however, it's just that the server has been powered off but is still plugged in, and the BMC is connected to a network, you can reach it. These are things like Dell iDRAC, HP iLO, Lenovo IMM, etc. They're designed to be always on, and they provide a way to access the server as though you were physically there, including a virtual console that acts like a connected monitor and keyboard, so you can even remotely power on/off a server if necessary. It doesn't use the installed host operating system - thing of it like a remotely accessible BIOS with a ton of other functionality that also lets you see what's happening on the system in real time. You can even virtually mount ISOs to remotely install an operating system.

It is extremely convenient and I'm sure anyone here who has worked in IT has stories about how iDRAC saved their life at one point or another. I certainly have a few.

However, I can also say - when I was managing servers, all my BMCs were connected to an isolated VLAN, in-building only accessible from another isolated VLAN and to only a very specific set of users with separate logins used solely for interacting with devices on the management network, and remotely over a VPN that only allowed that very specific set of users to access a jump box, which itself was accessible only with the separate management network logins.

You absolutely want to isolate and protect these interfaces specifically because of vulnerabilities like this one.

symbolset Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
12y
116
If you let any vendor be essential to your operation, they will blackmail you or they will go out of business and leave you inoperable. That is the nature of the essential dependency relationship. You can't shut them down, can you? No.

This very thing is both the reason for Unix and the thing that killed it. Mainframe lockin being what it is. People got tired of rebuilding everything and demanded portability. And then AT&T exploited their need for Unix.

Sure, their software is convenient. It's useful. But you have to be ready to unhook from any vendor instantly without disrupting your operation. That's inconvenient. It's expensive. It's necessary. If a vendor controls whether you could continue in business, they own your business. You work for them. You wouldn't allow that from any employee, a security contractor, a landlord, an Internet service, an accountant, an engineer, tech or manager. If your CEO goes rogue or dies in the chair you get another and move on. Why should a software vendor have this privilege above all others? There's always another way to do anything. For everything essential responsible people always have a hot spare, a workaround, a plan B. Always

This is also useful when going into negotiations. The one who cares the least controls the relationship.

RickyP784 Ars Tribunus Militum
13y
2,213
Subscriptor
I'm so looking forward to de-VMware-Ing and de-Cisco-ing my network over the next few years as much as possible.

We're starting soon with Arista fiber switches and will start replacing copper IDF switches in the coming years. I think we'll keep Cisco APs, phones, and firewalls, but it's gonna be real nice when our only SMARTnet costs are FirePowers and an ISR voice gateway.

Our Dell VxRail ends service life in 2 years, and that will be the last VMware equipment to go. Unless Proxmox comes a long way in a short time, we'll switch to straight Nutanix. Not ideal, but it's the best of a bad situation. //

Evil_Merlin Ars Legatus Legionis
25y
23,732
Subscriptor
We got ours. And we WERE a big VMware user. We migrated from Hyper-V to ESXi in 2019 for stability and extendibility reasons. The cost increase could be justified by the back end we had, so it wasn't a huge deal. Fast forward to now, we are on a deadline.

July 18th, no more ESX. Anywhere. No VMware products period.

All Windows systems going back to Hyper-V using Windows Server 2025.
All Linux/GNU and appliances going to KVM.

The company saves a BOAT load of money.

Broadcom made the decision REALLY easy for us. Best thing is that we will have it all gone before the audit, so when they get here (and we will LET them come) we can turn them away at the door with proof in hand. //

Are you willing to pay for your host? Windows Server does VM's quite fine for almost any loads. Good management tools and decent amount of guest coverage. //

Depending on guest oses
Proxmox, quemu with vmm or other gui, openstack , openshift with addon for vm's
or
if mostly windows hyperv. //

sjl Ars Tribunus Militum
19y
2,785

Spuwho said:
Heard a company is looking into a general Broadcom boycott. processors, controllers, network switches, storage equipment, other software products. Not just dumping VMWare, but anything related to or dependent on Broadcom. They really pissed off a lot of people.
I have an LSI (Avago, Broadcom - in order of the buyouts) SAS controller in my home-brew NAS.

If I ever need a replacement, I'll be looking at options from Microchip (the company that bought the company [Microsemi] that bought the company [PMC-Sierra] that bought Adaptec.) Possibly Marvell. Not Broadcom, specifically because of this. Sure, I'm a very small fish in that particular pond, but still.

A team in China just showed that the math behind RSA encryption is starting to bend to the will of the quantum realm.

Using a quantum annealing processor built by D‑Wave Systems, the researchers say they factored a 22‑bit RSA integer that had resisted earlier attempts on the same class of hardware. Wang Chao and colleagues at Shanghai University carried out the experiment. //

When RSA encryption debuted in 1977 it was lauded for tying security to the difficulty of splitting a large semiprime into its two prime factors .

Classic computers still need sub‑exponential time to break today’s 2048‑bit keys, and the largest key so far cracked with conventional methods is only 829 bits (RSA‑250) after weeks on a supercomputer.

“Using the D‑Wave Advantage, we successfully factored a 22‑bit RSA integer, demonstrating the potential for quantum machines to tackle cryptographic problems,” the authors wrote. //

Universal, gate‑based quantum machines run Shor’s algorithm, which in principle can shred RSA by finding the period of modular exponentiation in polynomial time.

Those devices still struggle with error correction, while D‑Wave’s annealers, though not universal, already pack more than 5000 qubits and avoid deep circuits by using a chilling 15 mK environment and analog evolution. //

A White House event framing the publication urged U.S. agencies to begin swapping vulnerable keys because adversaries may already be hoarding encrypted data for “hack now, decrypt later” attacks.

“Businesses must treat cryptographic renewal like a multi‑year infrastructure project,” the Wall Street Journal’s CIO briefing noted when the final standards neared release last year. Corporate technology leaders echoed that sense of urgency. //

Large‑key RSA is still safe today, yet the study shows that hardware improvements and smarter embeddings keep shaving away at the gap.

On Monday, court documents revealed that AI company Anthropic spent millions of dollars physically scanning print books to build Claude, an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT. In the process, the company cut millions of print books from their bindings, scanned them into digital files, and threw away the originals solely for the purpose of training AI—details buried in a copyright ruling on fair use whose broader fair use implications we reported yesterday. //

Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use—but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them. The judge compared the process to "conserv[ing] space" through format conversion and found it transformative. Had Anthropic stuck to this approach from the beginning, it might have achieved the first legally sanctioned case of AI fair use. Instead, the company's earlier piracy undermined its position.

But if you're not intimately familiar with the AI industry and copyright, you might wonder: Why would a company spend millions of dollars on books to destroy them? Behind these odd legal maneuvers lies a more fundamental driver: the AI industry's insatiable hunger for high-quality text. //

Publishers legally control content that AI companies desperately want, but AI companies don't always want to negotiate a license. The first-sale doctrine offered a workaround: Once you buy a physical book, you can do what you want with that copy—including destroy it. That meant buying physical books offered a legal workaround.

And yet buying things is expensive, even if it is legal. So like many AI companies before it, Anthropic initially chose the quick and easy path. In the quest for high-quality training data, the court filing states, Anthropic first chose to amass digitized versions of pirated books to avoid what CEO Dario Amodei called "legal/practice/business slog"—the complex licensing negotiations with publishers. But by 2024, Anthropic had become "not so gung ho about" using pirated ebooks "for legal reasons" and needed a safer source. //

When asked about this process, Claude itself offered a poignant response in a style culled from billions of pages of discarded text: "The fact that this destruction helped create me—something that can discuss literature, help people write, and engage with human knowledge—adds layers of complexity I'm still processing. It's like being built from a library's ashes."

ANGUISH
LANGUISH

by
Howard L. Chace

English words are astonishingly versatile and could readily be made to serve a new and extraordinary purpose, but nobody seems to care about this except SPAL[8] (Society for the Promotion of the Anguish Languish).[1] In keeping with its lofty ideals and its slogan, ANGUISH FOR EVERYBODY, the Society is sponsoring this little text, which has three aims:

1. To improve the public’s understanding of the Anguish Languish.

2. To improve the academic standing of the Anguish Languish.

3. To improve the social and financial standing of the Society.

Last month, Microsoft released a modern remake of its classic MS-DOS Editor, bringing back a piece of computing history that first appeared in MS-DOS 5.0 back in 1991. The new open source tool, built with Rust and simply called "Edit," works on Windows, macOS, and—in a twist that would have seemed unlikely three decades ago—Linux. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/edit-is-now-open-source/

Aside from ease of use, Microsoft's main reason for creating the new version of Edit stems from a peculiar gap in modern Windows. "What motivated us to build Edit was the need for a default CLI text editor in 64-bit versions of Windows," writes Nguyen while referring to the command-line interface, or CLI. "32-bit versions of Windows ship with the MS-DOS editor, but 64-bit versions do not have a CLI editor installed inbox.". //

https://github.com/microsoft/edit

At 250KB, the new Edit maintains the lightweight philosophy of its predecessor while adding features the original couldn't dream of: Unicode support, regular expressions, and the ability to handle gigabyte-sized files. The original editor was limited to files smaller than 300KB depending on available conventional memory—a constraint that seems quaint in an era of terabyte storage.

The frustration has reached a point where AI companies themselves are backing away from their own technology during the hiring process. Anthropic recently advised job seekers not to use LLMs on their applications—a striking admission from a company whose business model depends on people using AI for everything else. //

However, this trend from businesses has led to an arms race of escalating automation, with candidates using AI to generate interview answers while companies deploy AI to detect them—creating what amounts to machines talking to machines while humans get lost in the shuffle. //

So perhaps résumés as a meaningful signal of candidate interest and qualification are becoming obsolete. And maybe that's OK. When anyone can generate hundreds of tailored applications with a few prompts, the document that once demonstrated effort and genuine interest in a position has devolved into noise.

Instead, the future of hiring may require abandoning the résumé altogether in favor of methods that AI can't easily replicate—live problem-solving sessions, portfolio reviews, or trial work periods, just to name a few ideas people sometimes consider (whether they are good ideas or not is beyond the scope of this piece). For now, employers and job seekers remain locked in an escalating technological arms race where machines screen the output of other machines, while the humans they're meant to serve struggle to make authentic connections in an increasingly inauthentic world.

Perhaps the endgame is robots interviewing other robots for jobs performed by robots, while humans sit on the beach drinking daiquiris and playing vintage video games. Well, one can dream. //

OldPhartReef Ars Centurion
12y
225
Subscriptor
You can skip all the AI silliness by just going back to old-fashioned relationship building. You know, the human-2-human; face-2-face kind?

Smack me now for such a stupid idea. //

fuzzyfuzzyfungus Ars Legatus Legionis
12y
10,222
I'd be a lot more sympathetic if Team HR hadn't been using fairly extensive(if less technically trendy) tooling for auto-screening resumes for keywords and such and just silently binning any that don't meet criteria; and (at least judging by the hype) they were all on board with 'AI-enabled' resume screening as well.

Obviously an arms race is a loss for everyone involved; but let's not pretend that there was some sort of bucolic non-broken state before people started huffing LLMs.

Microsoft will also extend a year of additional Windows 10 security updates to any users who opt into Windows Backup, a relatively recent Windows 10 and Windows 11 app that backs up some settings and files using a Microsoft account. Users can also opt into ESU updates by spending 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, which are handed out for everything from making purchases with your Microsoft account to doing Bing searches. //

FIxed the taskbar with Stardock's Start 11. Restored traditional right click menu with a registry entry . Now it works the way it should have been with the UI and Start Menu. //

Also, your Windows 11 taskbar is hot garbage. Fix it. If you're not sure how, Valinet's Explorer Patcher handles it pretty well; ask him.

A federal judge in San Francisco ruled late on Monday that Anthropic’s use of books without permission to train its artificial intelligence system was legal under US copyright law.

Siding with tech companies on a pivotal question for the AI industry, US District Judge William Alsup said Anthropic made “fair use” of books by writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson to train its Claude large language model.

Alsup also said, however, that Anthropic’s copying and storage of more than 7 million pirated books in a “central library” infringed the authors’ copyrights and was not fair use. The judge has ordered a trial in December to determine how much Anthropic owes for the infringement. //

AI companies argue their systems make fair use of copyrighted material to create new, transformative content, and that being forced to pay copyright holders for their work could hamstring the burgeoning AI industry.

Anthropic told the court that it made fair use of the books and that US copyright law “not only allows, but encourages” its AI training because it promotes human creativity. The company said its system copied the books to “study Plaintiffs’ writing, extract uncopyrightable information from it, and use what it learned to create revolutionary technology.”

Copyright owners say that AI companies are unlawfully copying their work to generate competing content that threatens their livelihoods. //

Anthropic and other prominent AI companies including OpenAI and Meta Platforms have been accused of downloading pirated digital copies of millions of books to train their systems. //

Anthropic had told Alsup in a court filing that the source of its books was irrelevant to fair use.

“This order doubts that any accused infringer could ever meet its burden of explaining why downloading source copies from pirate sites that it could have purchased or otherwise accessed lawfully was itself reasonably necessary to any subsequent fair use,” Alsup said on Monday.

Life on Earth is in crisis crop failure, social and ecological collapse, mass extinction. We have a moral duty to take action. These statements made by Extinction Rebellion reflect the climate alarmist narrative that has continued to escalate across the Western world. Hysteria over climate change can be seen throughout history, from the human sacrifices of the Aztecs to bring back rain, to the Salem witch trials to eliminate the women they blamed for crop failure during the little ice age.

Today the climate industrial complex is funded by trillions of dollars seeking to control what we buy, eat and where we are allowed to travel, all in the name of sustainability and achieving net zero carbon emissions. This fear campaign is rooted in the belief that we will not look into the data ourselves, but instead look to the governments and to the media to tell us what is true. //

Historical temperature records indicate that we are not in the climate crisis western governments claim. We are looking at a graph of the past 65 million years from NOAA. The Earth today seems to be in a particularly cool period; in fact the Earth is still coming out of an ice age. History demonstrates that life has existed and thrived in much warmer temperatures, and that temperatures have been much higher without the human influence of industrial CO2 emissions. //

Although the mainstream media has tried to alarm its consumers with the accelerating emissions of CO2, the Earth is actually in a CO2 famine. Current levels are about 423 parts per million; however in the past they have been at least a thousand parts per million and have likely reached 8,000 parts per million. //

This is how you do it. And she did it as a high school senior science project.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3CfBG8uppw8&t=16s&pp=2AEQkAIB

Logging, we might note, involves a renewable resource - trees. Here in the Great Land, the implementation of the so-called "Roadless Rule" in 2001 hampered logging in places like the Tongass National Forest. Yes, in a national forest; part of the justification for the national forest system was the preservation and availability of a strategic asset, timber. The Biden administration('s autopen) enforced the "Roadless Rule" with vigor, and that rule was used to lock up 58.5 million acres of National Forest land.

On Monday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke L. Rollins announced that the Roadless Rule has gone the way of the dodo. //

Rescinding this rule will remove prohibitions on road construction, reconstruction, and timber harvest on nearly 59 million acres of the National Forest System, allowing for fire prevention and responsible timber production.

This rule is overly restrictive and poses real harm to millions of acres of our national forests. In total, 30% of National Forest System lands are impacted by this rule. For example, nearly 60% of forest service land in Utah is restricted from road development and is unable to be properly managed for fire risk. In Montana, it is 58%, and in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the largest in the country, 92% is impacted. This also hurts jobs and economic development across rural America. Utah alone estimates the roadless rule alone creates a 25% decrease in economic development in the forestry sector. //

Bogia
14 hours ago
One of my first jobs in the 90s was installing flooring. I learned way back then that there are more trees in the world BECAUSE of the hardwood flooring industry. There are very responsible ways to harvest this truly renewable resource. Unlike, say, the strip-mining methods used for rare earth minerals that are so precious to our green energy cultist friends. //

Musicman
15 hours ago
Here in New Mexico we have had millions of acres burned over the last 10 years. I'm not suggesting that was because of the particular rule you mention, but rather the attitude that created that rule: better to let forests burn and add to air pollution and "global warming" than let Americans use that lumber to build stuff. Because that is what it comes down to. I'm not a builder but I have done enough diy stuff to have watched the price of wood go up and up and up, while the quality gets worse and worse. Doesn't it make sense to harvest enough wood from our national forests to prevent or at least greatly mitigate these disasters? //

Yes Hemp Now
16 hours ago edited
Better late then never. The idiocy started in California over 30 years ago when the Sierra Club lobbied to stop harvesting our forests. The result is permanent destruction of what was the most beautiful forests in the world located in California. Natural fires happened, slow and meandering in the 60's usually ignited by lightening burning the pine needles mostly. If those fires lit by nature in a forest floor that was maintained through natural function, they were controlled with a couple of fire trucks if they threatened structures. The "do gooders" let the forest over grow and that is why we see the wild fires we have for decades now. After thes fires nothing grew back except manzanita and hand planted trees. The fires burned so fiercely it destroyed the topsoil. Save what we have and re-plant what was destroyed. Grow it and manage it. This is good news Thank You Secretary Rollins!

Townhall.com
@townhallcom
·
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President Trump, before leaving the WH for NATO, reacts to the ceasefire being broken last night.

"These guys gotta calm down. It's ridiculous."

7:17 AM · Jun 24, 2025 //

Just an old soldier...
an hour ago
I understand that Trump wants peace. But the enemy gets a vote. If they say no peace, then you should give them what they want. Good and hard, until they beg for peace.

Real GOP 690 Just an old soldier...
35 minutes ago edited
Agree.

"People want peace."

No, they don't. MAGA wants "peace", because the neocons once gave them a sad, and Democrats want "peace" because they have basically been p*ssies since Vietnam, and they oppose anything Trump does.

The problem is that Israel doesn't really want peace with Iran under its current leadership, and Iran certainly doesn't want peace with Israel under any circumstances. Israel wants regime change, and all Iran wants is time. This forced, premature and desperate "ceasefire", engineered by Trump because MAGA was starting to push back, will not hold, because neither Israel nor Iran really gives a shit if Trump's base gets squeamish every time a bomb drops.