Fifteen Years - Today's story from XKCD - Tears may be involved

Seen on Threads - by r.j.Jenson

An ad on FB for the lift used in the Louvre jewel heist

It is made by a German company.

When you need to move fast!



The first comment, in German - Ist das ein „Einstiegsmodell“ ? 😂
Is this the entry model?

Who said the Germans don't have a sense of humour?

Don't call them Nazis - A compendium of quotes, from Greg Olear.

I believe there is a spiritual battle happening all around us…Right now, this state is a Christian state; I want to see that to continue. But we need the faithful, we need those of you that have influence over your congregation to put pressure on your pastors.

—Charlie Kirk, Trump rally, October 24, 2024

The National Government….regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life.

—Adolf Hitler, “Proclamation to the German Nation,” Berlin, February 1, 1933

The necessity of virtue was fundamental to the American Founding Fathers. Fifty-five out of 56 of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were Christians who regularly attended church. At least a dozen were pastors and maybe even more than that had religious degrees….Freedom is not sustainable if you remove religion. I’ll be even more specific: Freedom is not sustainable if you remove Christianity. Eventually, it will implode.

—Charlie Kirk, “TAKEAWAYS,” February 2022

The views of liberalism have now become so much the dominant ideas of all so-called intellectuals that even current Christian orthodoxy is unwittingly corroded by it, and by having an enemy in its camp is prevented from fighting it in the open with any success.

Even men who are not orthodox, but zealous advocates of religion who really believe that nations can only thrive through religion, have fallen under the spell of the prevailing norms of liberalism and relapse into its basic principles, which deny nature and history.

How often people have set about creating a religious reawakening. But religion cannot be reawakened, it awakes.

—Paul de Lagarde, “The Need to Transcend Liberalism,” 1886

Best description I've seen of the Dead Stochastic Terrorist

Shortwave radio, Morse code, semaphores, and Aldis lamps are what we need

I had an interesting discussion last night concerning communications in the digital age with a guy who has been involved with the internet since about 1994.
He's an entrepreneur and developer and he thinks (knows) that we are too reliant on digital technology for communication. We have no backup systems. When the crash comes, it will be enormous.

For a breath of Fresh Air here's a link to the show that Terry Gross has been doing since 1975

Did you know that the Pope has an astronomer?

Fascinating article about Guy Consolmagno, head of the Vatican observatory.

The Pope's Astronomer

When the late Pope Francis was elected, a dozen years ago, and famously declined the pomp and perquisites typically associated with the office, among his renunciations was the use of the papal summer residence—a seventeenth-century palazzo in Castel Gandolfo, about fifteen miles south of Rome. Generations of Popes had enjoyed the use of the mansion, which overlooks a volcanic lake and is surrounded by spectacular terraced gardens. The palazzo is now a museum where visitors can admire a gallery of papal portraits, of varying quality, and imagine the dreams that visited the successive occupants of the papal bedroom, with its narrow twin bed. Castel Gandolfo is also home to one of the Holy See’s more unexpected institutions: the Vatican Observatory, which since its founding, in 1891, has been dedicated to the scientific study of the heavens.

Guy Consolmagno, the director of the observatory, first came to Castel Gandolfo as a newly minted Jesuit brother, in 1993. When I met him outside the palazzo, early this spring, he gestured at a window overlooking the building’s courtyard. This was the location of his first, decidedly modest bedroom in the mansion. Consolmagno, who grew up in suburban Detroit and retains a buoyant, emphatic, Midwestern manner, told me, “The Pope then was John Paul II, and when he was first elected he had made a rookie mistake, as we say in America. Somebody, a journalist—one of those terrible journalists—had asked him, ‘What’s your favorite hymn?’ And, being a fool, he actually gave the name of a hymn that he happened to like. So, every Sunday during the summertime, when he was living here, the doors would open at 10 a.m., and this place would be filled with two thousand Polish pilgrims singing that hymn underneath my window. I got totally sick of it.” Consolmagno never got sick, though, of being saluted by the Swiss Guards stationed at the palace gates.

Has America finally been defeated by the Confederacy?

I've been thinking about this since I started following Tad Stoermer and his perspective on how Reconstructionism was stifled by Johnson in the name of unity.

We are moving backwards, and being controlled by the rich white racists who have always wanted slavery and 'Christian values'.

Why They Tried to Erase Thomas Paine -- The Real Revolution vs. The Patriot Myth

Tad Stoermer - History professor