p3n

I’m curious what your definition of religion is?

If I exercise today, what will I accomplish? Will I be different tomorrow? Of course the answer is that I won’t accomplish much, and I probably won’t be noticebly different tomorrow; nobody increases their bench press 25lb after a single workout.

The point is not the results of a single workout, because what is significant is not the effect of a single workout or protest or any other long-term effort you want to examine, it is the cumulative effect of continued work toward a common goal.

The Powell Memoradum was written in 1971. The Heritage foundation began developing project 2025 in early 2022. These are efforts that have been in development for decades and years, respectively with many people working very patiently to see them implemented.

Of course a single protest isn’t going to do anything to undo decades of well-orchestrated political and economic changes. If people want to see this changed they can’t stop with a single protest. Just like making a new years resolution to go to the gym once isn’t going to undo years of neglect to change someone’s physical fitness, going to a protest once isn’t going to undo the years of damage to the U.S. Government.

That seems like an easy thing until you consider:

1. Federalized National guard troops are under Title 10 Authority.

2. Under Title 10 USC 890 Article 90: Willfully disobeying a lawful order in wartime is punishable with the death penalty.

3. With the executive branch claiming wartime powers and the DoJ willing to pursue any claim they want, they could certainly choose to pursue the maximum punishment to make an example out of someone.

The ranks of the JAG and military judges hasn’t been purged yet, so I believe it is very inlikely that a court-marshal would reach this punishment, but these orders aren’t something a Soldier can just walk away from without serious legal and financial repurcussions.

What they do in Chicago matters far more than their presence there. Every Soldier needs to recognize their ultimate purpose is to defend the freedom and liberty of their nation’s citizens. They must have a line in the sand that they will refuse to cross and are willing to die for, but simply deploying to a city to stand outside a federal building is not that line.

Yes. I think people are wise to the fact that the simple potential of facing charges is the threat that is supposed to intimidate and suppress opposition. Tying someone’s life up in a trial that has no chance of seeing a guilty verdict is the actual punishment they are aiming for because they know they have no legal standing.

Death from unnatural causes aside, there are so many potentially fatal complications involved with an organ transplant, and even if you dodge all those bullets, there is the simple fact that we degenerate at a cellular level. None of us are on this Earth for long: rich, poor, president or janitor, death will not discriminate.

The RegEx thing is so true in my experience. I started working on a Neovim plugin to make editing injected code easier, and instead of suggesting Treesitter integration it wanted to create its own parser using RegEx…

If you like this book, you should also check out: “The cat in Redhat” and “ripgrep and PAM”.

They certainly don’t have to work as much, or at all really. I recognize that there is an enormous gap between someone struggling to put food on the table and a billionaire, but it is also very easy to focus on work and increasing financial stability/independence at the detriment of more important things. It reminds of the song Cat’s In The Cradle: https://youtu.be/5u-KWa3tL-0?list=RD5u-KWa3tL-0 (especially appropriate on Father’s day weekend). My dad worked long hours when I was growing up, and I slept in a hallway/laundry room because he couldn’t afford to rent a larger place, but he still made time for me and my siblings, and I wouldn’t trade my childhood for literally all the money in the world.

Does that mean that people who are struggling to feed their family don’t really need the money? No. Would it have been easier if my family had more money? Sure. But I have also noticed that peoples’ lifestyles seem to grow to match their incomes, and it never seems like it is quite enough. There is always that next job or promotion or opportunity that will put you in a slightly better position and then finally it will be enough. Once basic needs met (air, water, food, shelter), I believe that money can start creating more problems for people than it solves. With tons of money comes tons of distractions, and temptations; there aren’t any poor people on the Epstein list. Its easy for me to say they are horrible people and I would never engage in activities like that, but it also isn’t an option for me. I can’t honestly claim virtue for avoiding an evil that my situation in life doesn’t allow for. Life seems much easier when nobody stops you from getting what you want, but I have to wonder if sometimes it is a blessing in disguise when they do…

With the focus of wealth inequality, I thought I’d just share this morbid reminder from the middle ages that there is no inequality in death. It will find everyone. No amount of money will let anyone escape it. Just something to consider when you are thinking about what to pursue in life. To that extent, I do feel somewhat sorry when I hear that a billionaire has died, because I know that they likely spent most of their life pursuing things that are ultimately worthless, and it makes me re-evaluate just what I am doing with mine.

Here is an easy way to tell: If someone wears a cross, that isn’t a strong indication of faith. If a cross wears them, that’s a pretty strong indication of faith.

Ya, maybe bills shouldn’t be 1000+ pages so that people can actually know what is in them.

This is a concept that somehow software developers seem to grasp, but lawmakers don’t?

Try submitting a pull request with 100,000 lines of code to the Linux kernel, or any other serious project. Nobody is going to review and accept it because that is a rediculous amount of code to change with a single PR. How much more important is a federal law than a software project? Yet one will have maintainers pour over it line by line while the other the “maintainers” don’t even read.

I guess I didn’t communicate my point effectively. I wasn’t trying to nitpick semantics. I was trying to say that people don’t think critically because they assume impartiality.

If the first thing people did when they looked at a study was to ask what possible biases or conflicts of interest the sponsors have, then conducting a meta-study concluding that biased studies are biased wouldn’t be news to anyone.

There is no such thing as an impartial sponsor; some are more obviously biased than others, but the belief in a fictitious impartiality is part of the problem. It shouldn’t take a meta-study for people to see am obvious conflict of interest.

I’m biased. You are biased. Everyone is biased.

Is it really screwing up the education system, or is it just revealing how screwed up it already was?

I’m curious, do the same people who think that the moon landing was faked also believe that Voyager is fake? Because to me, Voyager is more impressive at this point.

I am not arguing with the obvious corruption, but to provide a counterpoint to the second part of the argument: if we aren’t allowed to make peace with former terrorists, then we can never stop fighting each other, and if we keep fighting each other, then we will keep creating the next generation of terrorists.

I say please and thank you when writing to LLMs, not because I think they care or will remember or to anthropomorphize them, but because I don’t want to develop bad habits. I don’t want all my writing and conversations with actual humans to become curt and transactional because I forget that they are human and talk to them like an LLM.

I can hardly believe that we have devolved so far, so quickly. We are literally one step away from becoming an authoritarian dictatorship. The plan is this:

1. Deport (and by deport, they mean imprison for life) immigrants. These immigrants will mostly be legitimately illegal and gang associated criminals, but there will be a few individuals with legal standing and no criminal records. This could simply be the result of denying due process, or it could be an intentional test. The important factor is that 5th Amendment Due process rights are denied to all of them. The fact that these people (but be sure to de-humanize them as much as possible) are immigrants will be the distracting factor. <---- We are here

2. Deport (and by deport, they mean imprison for life) criminals. These will be legitimate criminals with legitimately horrible records; that will be the distracting issue that will be made the focus of the argument: “They are serial killers, rapists, pedophiles, we don’t want them here, so we should get rid of them.” This has already been announced as the plan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUfrwWz-m5I . That is not the point! The point is that they are still U.S. citizens, despite their crimes. The significance of this is that it will be the final barrier that needs to be broken, and the final protection that must be dismantled for the final solution to be enacted. If no one steps up and successfully defends the constitutional rights of these American citizens, then all the pieces will be in place for step 3.

3. Deport (and by deport, they mean imprison for life) political dissidents, rivals, business opponents, and maybe just anyone the administration doesn’t like. If they are political dissidents they will claim that they have committed crimes like, “hate speech against America™”, if they are a minority, they will be “associated with gangs”, if they are business rivals it will have committed “economic terrorism”, or something like that. It doesn’t really matter because they eliminated due process in step 1 (remember that was the important factor, not the immigrant dis-tractor), and without due process they don’t have to prove any crimes. Our last defense would have been the simple fact that we are American Citizens, but we established that doesn’t matter in step 2 because they were “bad people”, but now the “bad people” are whoever the administration decides is bad.

The context of the 5th amendment is important to understand its intent:

Historically, the Fifth Amendment draws significant influence from English common law. The grand jury clause specifically dates back to the Magna Carta, and was designed to protect accused persons from prosecution by the English royalty. In keeping with that intention, the Constitution’s framers opted to adapt the grand jury to the Constitution, so as to protect citizens from prosecution by the federal government.
Reagan Library

Even in a Monarchy, which is not the form of government we are supposed to have, the Magna Carta offered protections against the King from prosecuting commoners, which is the origin of this amendment. We aren’t just devolving to pre-revolution America, which had enough disagreements with the rule of King George III that it sparked a war…no we are devolving to a pre-Magna Carta England type of Government. We are descending into middle-age feudalism with complete authoritarian rule… and we aren’t fortunate enough to have a dictator like Alfred the Great.

Lol the folks at archive.org are the real heros.

Looks like archive.org has it: https://archive.org/details/virtual-history-ancient-egypt