Thu 14 Jan 2016 // 07:02 UTC
The Register has learned, thanks to a post to a semi-private mailing list, of a server that has just been decommissioned after running without replacement parts since 1997.

The post, made by a chap named Ross, says he “Just switched off our longest running server.”

Ross says the box was “Built and brought into service in early 1997” and has “been running 24/7 for 18 years and 10 months.”

“In its day, it was a reasonable machine - 200MHz Pentium, 32MB RAM, 4GB SCSI-2 drive,” Ross writes. “And up until recently, it was doing its job fine.” Of late, however the “hard drive finally started throwing errors, it was time to retire it before it gave up the ghost!” The drive's a Seagate, for those of you looking to avoid drives that can't deliver more than 19 years of error-free operations.

The FreeBSD 2.2.1 box “collected user session (connection) data summaries, held copies of invoices, generated warning messages about data and call usage (rates and actual data against limits), let them do realtime account enquiries etc.”

The server lived so long because it was fit for purpose. //

Ross reckons the server lived so long due to “a combination of good quality hardware to start with, conservatively used (not flogging itself to death), a nice environment (temperature around 18C and very stable), nicely conditioned power, no vibration, hardly ever had anyone in the server room.”

"At the time of construction, we included large, 24V case style fans with proper bearings, but running on the 12V rail. These ran slowly and quietly, yet moved plenty of air. The clean conditions probably helped them survive. All the fans were still running at the time it was switched off".

A fan dedicated to keeping the disk drive cool helped things along, as did regular checks of its filters.

The U.S. marriage rate is near its lowest point in history, but it’s even worse among black Americans.

The black marriage rate has collapsed by half, from a 1960 high of 61 percent to today’s low of 31 percent, the lowest for any demographic group in America.

Almost 70 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers. These fatherless black children are three to four times more likely to be poor than their counterparts raised by married black parents. The outlook is particularly bleak for young black men who are far more likely to become incarcerated and suspended from school. Over the last several decades, the problem has become generational: Fewer black men with good jobs leads to fewer marriageable men and, in turn, fewer black marriages.

But add a married biological father to the home and what happens? As Conn Carroll writes in his new book, Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage is Destroying Democracy, “There is nothing wrong with black boys in America today that can’t be solved by more married black fathers.” //

In the aftermath of Reconstruction, for the first time in our nation’s history, blacks had the legal right to marry and stabilize their families. And they did in droves. From the late 1800s until about 1960, young black men and women were more likely to be married than young white couples.

But government programs came along that “effectively eviscerated the black family and made fatherhood absence the norm,” Jamil says. In turn, black mothers became dependent on a government check to sustain their “impoverished lifestyle.”. //

Earlier on, she’d been juggling two small children, a part-time job, and college classes. Even with her husband’s full-time job, the couple barely made ends meet. When she sought financial assistance, a college administrator told her help was only available if she ditched her husband. “My peers were on assistance and seemed to be making more money,” she says. So why be married?

Why indeed? But that was America’s prevailing cultural message to black mothers and fathers. These welfare “man in the house” exclusions supposedly ended with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in King v. Smith; however, the ruling only held that the state had too broadly defined father to include cohabitating men, whether or not they were the child’s father.

The deceitful propaganda that voter ID laws suppress the vote and disenfranchise voters was spread only to demonize efforts to make elections more secure. //

The report noted that while “it is likely too large of a leap to say voter ID has increased turnout due to the correlational nature of our analysis, it seems that there is no negative relationship.” Further the report found there is “no evidence of a negative effect” on minority voters “from the implementation of voter ID.”

El Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele has won a landslide victory in the country's presidential election, earning him a historic second term and underscoring his status as one of the world's most popular political leaders.

Posting on the X platform, Bukele announced that he had won the election with over 85 percent of the vote.

"According to our numbers, we have won the presidential election with more than 85% of the votes and a minimum of 58 of 60 deputies in the Assembly," he wrote. "This is a record in the entire history of the democratic world... God bless El Salvador.". //

Libs of TikTok
@libsoftiktok
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Nayib Bukele is expected to win re-election tonight in a sweeping landslide victory.

Why is he so popular? He did what he was elected to do. He cracked down on crime, jailed criminals & gang members, and murder rates dramatically decreased by 70% last year.

In 2023, El Salvador became safer than the US. Destruction is a choice."
Last edited
6:38 PM · Feb 4, 2024

Anna and her four young daughters were on a trip to England on the SS Ville du Havre. It was a French steamship. All iron. Built like a tank. Except, of course, tanks weren’t around yet. This was 1873.

The girls were excited to be on a ship. They were running on deck, playing TAG in the companionways, seeing what happened when they spit overboard at high altitude.

The ship was loaded deep with mostly first-class passengers. It was November, the weather was cold. Everyone was wearing coats and mittens.

They were bound for Havre de Grâce, Seine-Inférieure, France. Anna and her daughters were Americans, on their way to England to help with church revivals.

In a few days, the Havre was midway across the icy Atlantic when the ship collided with a Scottish clipper vessel. The collision was so loud, it sounded like an explosion. People were thrown from their beds. Some were injured.

Kids have figured out that America’s failing liberal institutions have left them surrounded by a harmful cultural and political order that can’t justify itself. //

But in the clip from the debate that was most widely shared, a young Hispanic guy asks Seder about his objections to supposed religious fundamentalists and then, as the kids say, he proceeds to absolutely own Seder. Essentially, the question put before Seder is this: If he objects to traditional religious values as a foundation for guiding America’s collective political and legal decisions, what does he think should be the basis for morality? //

Presumably, Seder knew this debate would be hostile, but he seems genuinely shocked a kid would cut right to matters of first principles and question the assumptions of moral authority underpinning bog standard boomer liberalism. But this shouldn’t have been entirely unexpected. When it comes to political punditry, there’s a pretty basic test for whether or not you take someone seriously: How does that person justify the use of political power to implement the policies they favor?

What Seder was asked was far from a trick question; rather, it’s basic American civics. This is exactly the question that the Declaration of Independence addresses, as the founders knew that any attempt to legitimize the rejection of their present government would start with establishing why the government they were proposing was more just and morally superior. In that sense, it wasn’t just a declaration — it’s an explanation of the basis of morality, and how England’s governance was illegitimate for not respecting it. So our founding document is a fairly succinct and compelling natural law argument for a government that recognizes all men are created equal and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights that cannot be abrogated, let alone by a king who claims the “divine right” to tax people on a whim.

Of course, the actual structure of American governance is more complicated than that because we have to define and apply those rights, and the most just way to do that involves consent of the governed. So our system hinges on allowing an element of democracy, while putting enough checks in the system to ensure the tyranny of the majority doesn’t overwhelm the God-given rights of individuals. We don’t always get the balance right, but that’s the basic idea. And there’s no getting around the fact that having objective notions of morality, traditionally represented by a belief in God, is foundational to our whole system. You may not like the structure of American governance, but you’d think a guy who’s been doing liberal talk radio and podcasts for over twenty years would recognize why the question he was asked was so important and have a coherent way to answer it.

As Chris Rufo observes, “The remarkable thing here is that the Left’s ‘debate champ’ doesn’t see the entire setup, which means he’s ignorant of basic Christian theology, the natural rights theory of the American founders, and the criticism from Nietzsche to Weber to Foucault. Just doesn’t know any of it.” There’s also an element of blatant hypocrisy here as well. “Seder objects to religion because it ‘imposes’ values on everyone,” notes professor and First Things editor Mark Bauerlein. “It is, however, a dream to think that imposition of values is NOT a precondition of every social order. (Foucault’s prime critique of liberalism is that it presumes such.)” //

In other words, it’s safe to assume Seder is defending the dominant liberal order imposing its values on everyone because it’s what he knows and what he prefers, not because he can articulate why it’s justifiably “moral.” Nor is our current liberal order necessarily a matter of consent or democracy. This is pretty evident in the left’s approach to social issues. Gay marriage flailed in nearly every referendum it faced, and only became legal after the Supreme Court made it legal by decree, using a decision that has all the defensible legal and moral rubric one would expect to find on the back of a cereal box. And when a more conservative Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the left screamed in unison they actually preferred it when nine unelected judges conjured up a new right to murder children in the womb that half the country found morally abhorrent, rather than letting such a controversial issue be decided by be democratic means.

And when liberals couldn’t exercise raw power to get their way in courtrooms and legislative chambers, they leveraged the economic might of corporate America to enforce their agenda. Despite the fact BLM was a scam literally run by communists who explicitly stated the nuclear family was an obstacle to “social justice,” corporations were alternately bullied and praised into giving BLM and related causes $83 billion even as the movement burned cities to the ground.

The problem is that you can only arbitrarily impose values on people from the top down for so long before there’s political and cultural backlash.

The press and left call the right “culture warriors,” but we were not the ones who put pornographic material in elementary schools. We were not the ones who demanded kids in colleges attend seminars to learn about their inner racism. We were not the ones who demanded boys get into girls sports.

The left and press call us “culture warriors” solely because we said no and fought back against them.

And this is what it looks like for them to lose.

The press, infested by the left, sees horror and destruction all around it. What I see, as a conservative, is an effort to raze the purportedly neutral institutions irredeemably infected with progressivism. Government bureaucracies, academic institutions, and non-governmental entities were all formed as neutral institutions, but the left chose institutional capture. The left chose to advance its agenda from within these otherwise neutral institutions, infecting them, and now the only cure is tearing them down.

Academia became reliably progressive and deeply hostile to alternative viewpoints. USAID started funding trans-kids in Uganda. The press rushed to call pregnant women first “pregnant person,” then “birthing person.” The homeless became “unhoused.” And non-profits threw money at media outlets to subsidize left-wing activists as reporters to scare everyone about climate change. Progressives demanded diversity so long as the skin colors, genders, and sexual identities were different and the thinking was all homogeneously, uniformly progressive.

The left spent so long calling those of us on the right culture warriors, we finally decided to declare war. This is us fighting back, tearing down the ideologically captured institutions, and making it hard for them to rebuild or restore their trust.

You people on the left pivoted to censorship and press coverage of misinformation and disinformation — all while getting stuff wrong. We have used the internet to weaponize your lies against you and destroy your credibility with your own reporting. Trust in the media is now lower than even freaking Congress.

And you brought it on yourselves. You chose to embrace the left, be infiltrated by the left, be co-opted by the left, and finally taken over by the left. Along the way, you became arrogant and sclerotic. //

But you will not find me criticizing the razing of these institutions or the hard-charging approach to burning them all down.

It is time. The hubris of those involved from the left shows that reform is not possible, only destruction.

This is what it looks like when the right has had enough and starts fighting back. And right now, you progressives are, very deservedly, losing.

We would have accepted neutral institutions. But you foisted DEI on us all. The New York Times declared the country is systemically racist and rewrote the founding history of the nation, which some of you then pushed into public schools for re-education. You used your cultural, institutional, and media clout to chase advertisers and revenue away from right-leaning institutions and voices. You attacked productive industries with media outlets subsidized by progressive environmental groups. You captured the government-funded national radio network and turned it into soft-spoken progressive hacks. You took over academic institutions and started discriminating against Asian kids. You took over public schools and decided learning the colors of the Pride Flag was more important than learning math. When COVID happened, you people shut down schools, kept those schools shut down, and when the inevitable collapse of learning occurred, you lied about keeping schools shut down and tried, with willing accomplices in the left-controlled press, to shift the blame. In Illinois, progressive educators dragged girls into bathrooms and forced them to change in front of boys. You even got the Voice of America to explain white privilege while refusing to call Hamas “terrorists.”

So now you’ll watch the rest of us wipe out those institutions. You could have had neutrality. Instead, you called us culture warriors all while waging war to capture and use neutral institutions against everyone else. You could have chosen to embrace diversity of thought. Now, you can embrace the rubble.

This is what it looks like when the right fights back. When Trump is done, you’ll eventually take power again. There is no permanence in American politics. But you will find rubble and learn it is faster to destroy than to build. You brought this on yourselves. I have plenty of words of caution to the right and Trump supporters about overplayed hands, going too far, etc. But I can save those thoughts for later.

President Donald Trump declared any pardons signed by former president Joe Biden via autopen are officially "void," directing his ire very specifically at the House Select Committee behind the investigation of the January 6th protest at the Capitol.

Trump's comments were posted on his Truth Social media platform in the early hours of Monday morning.

"The 'Pardons' that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen," the President wrote.

"In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them! The necessary Pardoning Documents were not explained to, or approved by, Biden.". //

Laocoön of Troy
an hour ago
This crap is why for millenia Kings, nobles, generals, Popes, and others who wield power employed heavy wax seals, signet rings, witness signitures, and other seals applied to documents to verify authenticity. The Sumerians used them for goodness sake!

At the bare minimum, physical access to the autopen machine must be as tightly controlled as the nuclear launch codes. Nobody should ever be authorized to use it solo. At least 1 other individual should be required for the machine to even work.

Indylawyer Laocoön of Troy
an hour ago
Note that those rings did allow the ruler to choose one aide to have the authority to use the ring and make decrees in his name, but the identity of that aide was therefore well known so that he could be held accountable for abusing the authority. See, for example, the fate of Haman in the Biblical book of Esther 3:10, 7:5-10, 8:2.

Hank Reardon
an hour ago
And let’s not forget that Biden DOJ senior executive and pardon attorney Liz Oyer was suddenly relieved of her job and escorted from the building two weeks ago. Because, stuff’s going on . . .

Shipwreckedcrew reported in Red State last week that Oyer was suddenly fired, had her government phone(s) confiscated, and was immediately escorted out the door before she could access any government computers. The long play here seems to be the full investigation of precisely how all of Dementia Joe’s pardons were vetted. And whether he even knew.

That gets into the issue over who was controlling the auto pen. I hope this stays front and center.

https://redstate.com/shipwreckedcrew/2025/03/10/pardon-attorneys-n2186488