The New York Times, ever ready to preach the faith of “climate responsibility,” recently published a piece titled “What Shopping Bags Should I Use?” It’s a fascinating read, not because it provides clarity, but because it demonstrates just how convoluted eco-virtue has become. Spoiler alert: you can’t win. But you can feel like you’re winning, and maybe that’s the point. //

Plastic bags, we are told, are the spawn of fossil fuels, and as such, must be banished. Their recycling rate is a dismal 10%, and their afterlife often involves floating past a turtle’s nose or breaking into confetti-sized microplastics that haunt us for centuries. But here’s the twist—according to not one but two studies cited by the article (from Britain’s Environment Agency and Denmark’s Environmental Protection Agency), those unholy plastic bags actually have the smallest environmental footprint of the lot when judged by greenhouse gas emissions.

So how did they become public enemy number one? Simple. They look bad. They’re flimsy, crinkly, and associated with other people who don’t bring their own bags to Trader Joe’s. //

Then there’s paper—renewable, biodegradable, and about as sturdy as wet tissue paper and prone to tearing dramatically halfway across the parking lot, right as your oat milk makes a break for it. Surely this is the sanctified option? Not quite. Paper bags, according to the same British study, need to be reused three times to match the global warming impact of a single plastic bag. Which, for anyone who’s ever had a soggy-bottomed paper bag explode in the rain, is optimistic bordering on delusional.

Still, paper has better PR. Its recycling rate is 43%—respectable, though still meaning most paper bags end up decomposing into methane and carbon dioxide in landfills. Methane, for those keeping theological score, is one of the top demons in the pantheon of greenhouse gases. That’s right: while plastic might just sit there, paper actively farts its way through the afterlife.

The Solar Eclipse Analemma Project
Image Credit & Copyright: Hunter Wells

Where were these Guardians of Justice when Joe Biden illegally invited and lured in millions and millions of "new Americans and undocumented immigrants?" Where? Why nowhere, of course. These robes seemingly had very little to say about U.S. Code § 1325 (based on Article IV, Section IV of the Constitution) and its undeniable violation. A violation that has, and will continue to for decades, fundamentally changed the history of America. Letting in millions and millions of aliens, and then making the citizenry pay for their everything from schooling, health care, drunk driving deaths, rapes, murders, and any other crimes they committed while here has changed life for us all on many different levels.

Francos said the order to release the files came directly from the president, and it would be part of a larger Milei project to declassify and release information about the 1970s military crackdown on government opponents, many of whom disappeared.

The government announcement came on March 24, which in Argentina is a public holiday to commemorate the victims of the political strife during the so-called Dirty War. The Dirty War ran roughly between the 1974 death of President Juan Peron and the subsequent 1976 military coup, through to the junta’s fall in 1983.

Peron, who was sent on a 1939 mission to learn about Italian fascism, is an essential figure in the Nazi migration to Argentina. He was a senior member of the fascist government coup that took over the country in 1943. That government declared war on Germany in February 1945, which could be seen as a fig leaf for its true leanings.

In a 1969 interview with historian Felix Luna, quoted by Tomas Eloy Martinez in his Wilson Center paper, “Peron and the Nazi War Criminals,” Peron said he reached out to influential members of the German community to explain that the war was over and Argentina needed to act. “Please understand, we have no choice but to go to war, for if we do not, we will go to Nuremberg.”

Eloy Martinez said Peron told him in 1970 that he orchestrated the effort to collect as many worthy Germans as possible—just as the United States, Russia, England, and France were doing—and because they were technically on the winning side, they would have a free hand.

Peron, who began his first of three presidential terms in 1946, also said he coordinated with Spain’s Generalissimo Francisco Franco, who had remained formally neutral throughout the war.

When you run a command in bash it will remember the location of that executable so it doesn't have to search the PATH again each time. So if you run the executable, then change the location, bash will still try to use the old location. You should be able to confirm this with hash -t pip3 which will show the old location.

If you run hash -d pip3 it will tell bash to forget the old location and should find the new one next time you try. //

for most bash features it's easier to use help instead of man, so here help hash

We've noticed that some of our automatic tests fail when they run at 00:30 but work fine the rest of the day. They fail with the message

gimme gimme gimme

in stderr, which wasn't expected. Why are we getting this output?

Answer:

Dear @colmmacuait, I think that if you type "man" at 0001 hours it should print "gimme gimme gimme". #abba
@marnanel - 3 November 2011

er, that was my fault, I suggested it. Sorry.

Pretty much the whole story is in the commit. The maintainer of man is a good friend of mine, and one day six years ago I jokingly said to him that if you invoke man after midnight it should print "gimme gimme gimme", because of the Abba song called "Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight":

Well, he did actually put it in. A few people were amused to discover it, and we mostly forgot about it until today.

I can't speak for Col, obviously, but I didn't expect this to ever cause any problems: what sort of test would break on parsing the output of man with no page specified? I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that one turned up eventually, but it did take six years.

(The commit message calls me Thomas, which is my legal first name though I don't use it online much.)

This issue has been fixed with commit 84bde8: Running man with man -w will no longer trigger this easter egg.

Israel armed forces “eliminated the terrorist Hossam Basel Abdul Karim Shabat, a sniper terrorist from the Beit Hanoun Battalion of the Hamas terrorist organization, who cynically posed as an Al-Jazeera journalist,” the IDF said in a statement Tuesday. //

The ties between Al Jazeera and Hamas are so deep that Israel in May 2024 had to ban the Qatari state-funded broadcaster from operating in the country.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Al Jazeera a “terror channel.”

“Al Jazeera harmed Israel’s security, actively participated in the Oct. 7 massacre, and incited against Israeli soldiers,” Prime Minister Netanyahu said in March 2024.

The loquacious Enten detailed what the numbers mean:

“If the polls have historically underestimated Donald Trump, what is a metric that might get an understanding of how popular he may actually be. So let’s take a look at the percentage of the country who say that we’re on the right track,” Enten said. “It’s actually a very high percentage when you compare it to some historical numbers. What are we talking about? According to Marist, 45% say that we’re on the right track. That’s the second highest that Marist has measured since 2009. How about NBC News? 44%? That’s the highest since 2004.”

“The bottom line is the percentage of Americans who say we’re on the right track is through the roof….

“And also keep in mind, back when [former Vice President] Kamala Harris lost and the Democrats were turned out of power, only about 27 to 28% of the country said the country was on the right track.”

But then he dropped the real kicker:

But in reality, he’s basically more popular than he was at any point in term number one and more popular than he was when he won election back in November of 2024…

There are a lot of things that God cannot do, by his very nature. For example, God cannot lie (Numbers 23:19, Hebrews 6:18). God cannot commit an unloving act. God cannot act unjustly. God cannot do an unholy thing.

God is much more consistent in himself than we are. One could even claim (probably an exaggeration) that there are more things humans can do than God can do because we are inconsistent and we can do things which violate our beliefs. We can do one thing one day and then a completely contradictory thing the next. God never acts this way. We can lie. God cannot. We can treat other people with hatred. God cannot. We can be unjust. God cannot.

My conclusion is that God cannot do anything which violates his nature. There are many things that God is… God cannot do anything which violates what he is…

The typical (and really rather shallow) example used by skeptics is that God cannot create a rock so big he cannot lift it. By his nature, since God is omnipotent, then he cannot create a thing he cannot lift. To do so would be to make him not be omnipotent, but he is omnipotent, therefore he cannot do this thing.

The OED includes a specific sense of this usage of introductory and, and provides early examples from hymns and poems, citing works by Thomas Wyatt, Isaac Watts, John Wesley, and Charles Wesley. This usage is grammatical, though it follows an older stylistic convention, particularly common in verse, hymns, and elevated or rhetorical language.

Here is the definition along with the three earliest citations from the OED:

In expressing doubt at, or asking the truth of, what one has already heard.
Frequent in earlier use in verse, esp. in poems of lament or elegy.

According to numbers compiled by the Harvard Law Review, U.S. District Courts have issued more sweeping injunctions against Trump in the past two months than they have against three former presidents over their entire terms.

Since Jan. 20, lower courts have imposed 15 nationwide injunctions against the Trump administration, compared to what the Harvard Law Review recounts as six over the course of George W. Bush’s eight-year presidency, 12 over the course of Barack Obama’s eight years in the White House, and 14 during Joe Biden’s single four-year term.

During his first term, Trump was subjected to 64 nationwide injunctions. If inferior courts continue issuing nationwide injunctions against the Trump administration at the current rate (15 for every two months in office), then the second Trump administration will have accumulated 360 nationwide injunctions by the time the president leaves office—and a grand total of 424 over the course of both of Trump’s terms. However, there have been a total of over 45 rulings or more targeted injunctions leveled against the second Trump administration overall, according to The New York Times. //

The Harvard Law Review’s tally (published in 2024) also noted the increased partisanship of the federal judiciary. Of the six injunctions imposed against Republican Bush, half came from judges appointed by Democrats and half from judges appointed by Republicans. Of the 12 injunctions imposed against Democrat Obama, seven (less than 60%) were issued by judges appointed by Republicans. Of the 64 injunctions Trump’s first Republican administration was slapped with, 92.2% were issued by judges appointed by Democrats. All—100%—of the 14 injunctions issued against Democrat Biden came from Republican-appointed judges. //

The growing use of nationwide injunctions by inferior courts, the prestigious legal journal warned, necessarily has a chilling effect on the development of law and precedent. When several inferior courts of different jurisdictions issue conflicting rulings, the matter often winds up at the U.S. Supreme Court, where a definitive standard is set for addressing similar issues going forward. However, nationwide injunctions halt the continued challenging of executive orders, executive actions, or laws, since, as the Harvard Law Review pointed out, various other inferior courts simply refuse to take up related cases, determining that there can be no demonstration of injury in fact while the nationwide injunctions are in place.

anon-xnrk Laocoön of Troy
3 hours ago
China’s geopolitical strategy was always to create dependencies with other nations. It’s amazing we allowed it to get so far into a one sided game. Correct me if I’m wrong but an American company has to partner with a Chinese company then transfer technology to the Chinese one in order to set up shop there. The list of one sided nonsense goes on and on. Who loves Greenpeace more than China? EU and US decimate the industrial base while they build a coal plant a week. Can’t use a windmill to run a steel mill, sorry. Look at how people like McConnell voted pre and post WTO admission for China. Oh, and look at his family business. Chinese shipping!! And his father in law James Chao? Founder of Chinese shipping company Foremost, and also close friends and classmates with former president Jiang Zemin. This is just Mitch, any others make a nice living like this? Did this affect how this relationship between the world, US, and China evolved? Who knows? //

Guy Las Vegas anon-j5pd
3 hours ago
Since the tariff is on the wholesale price, a $10 item that costs Walmart $6 would see a $1.20 tariff. That makes the item $11.20 - just to clarify.

This question is based on a popular misunderstanding about the definitions of words like “almighty” or “omnipotent.” These terms do not mean that God can do anything. Rather, they describe the amount of God’s power. Power is the ability to effect change - to make something happen. God (being unlimited) has unlimited power, and the Bible affirms this (Job 11:7-11, 37:23; 2 Corinthians 6:18; Revelation 4:8; etc.). Therefore, God can do whatever is possible to be done. God cannot, however, do that which is actually impossible. This is because true impossibility is not based on the amount of power one has, it is based on what is really possible. The truly impossible is not made possible by adding more power. Therefore, unless context indicates otherwise (e.g. Matthew 19:26 where man’s ability is being shown in contrast to God’s), impossibility means the same thing whether or not God is involved. //

So, the first part of the question is based on a false idea—that God being almighty means that He can do anything. In fact, the Bible itself lists things God cannot do - like lie or deny Himself (Hebrews 6:18; 2 Timothy 2:13; Titus 1:2). The reason He cannot do these things is because of His nature and the nature of reality itself. God cannot do what is not actually possible to be done, like creating a two-sided triangle, or a married bachelor. Just because words can be strung together this way does not make the impossible possible—these things are contradictions, they are truly impossible in reality.

Over the past 30 years you have probably seen multiple articles on constant pressure water pump control valves (CPV). Every article talks about the "magic" of these simple mechanical valves, but rarely do they talk about the benefits of constant pressure during variable water demand for your entire water system.

Adding life to your pump is what CPV's are all about. Additionally, you have the benefits of longer life on all other well components such as pressure switch points and pressure tank bladders/diaphragms. This is due to a CPV limiting excessive cycling on your system.

The goal of these valves has always been to control the pump and keep it from cycling itself to an early death. Your customers enjoying constant pressure is icing on the cake.

Let's look at the most common myths about constant pressure water pump control valves: