And a douche bag of a president who drops bombs next to schools and kills 135 kids . Should resign on the spot for that.

Look up "human shields", the practice of siting military targets among (or in or under) large collections of non-military civilians, in order to deter strikes against them or produce propaganda claims of atrocities when they're attacked anyhow.

In such situations the fault for the "collateral damage" is assigned to the side that set up the arrangement, not the side that hit it.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the US has been trying very hard to use precision munitions and extreme military intelligence to take out military targets with as little harm to the innocents they're embedded among as possible, with impressive success. Compare the amount of collateral damage in this war to any of those conducted in the 20th century.

He's doing the bare minimum sniff test of verifying that *you* are the guy whose name is on the bookings and not someone sneaking in on someone else's name who can't even pronounce the name on your fake id.

At least in the case of people claiming to be returning citizens I've been told that they're comparing your accent to your claimed residence (or residence history).

Different words are acquired at different ages, and many are pronounced with regional variations. An expert can talk to you for a few minutes and come up with a pretty good age-map of where you lived as you grew up. An agent with a modicum of training can detect a mismatch between how you pronounce certain words and your claimed residence and pass you through quickly or keep you around and drill more deeply. (If you now live in an area with a regional accent wildly different from where you grew up it can help to answer a where-do-you-reside question with "Footown, but I grew up in Barstate".)

I presume they are doing something similar, though no doubt with lower resolution, on the world-wide level for visitors from other countries.

This might not be such a good idea as Vegas was begging Canada to come back. Their tourism isnâ(TM)t what it used to be and talk of 51st state has turned off Canadian tourism.

and the boys were already ten and eleven years old when I entered their life

I hope you got a good relationship with them! My son can't even talk yet. So, right now, he's just this cute thing that runs around and causes trou^H^H^H^Hgood things to happen.

Well, some of that is for classes for people who can't see that default 3-pixel wide scrollbar on Windows 11 in high contrast dark mode. :-)

Fair. Just making fun of Windows 11.

Yeah, you're blessed to have one of each. Until they start conspiring against you, which you KNOW is going to happen.
ha!

Hopefully we'll raise them better than that. And let them see us honoring our parents.

You charge to "upgrade" to Windows 11? How evil are you? :P

For all my pro-life ramblings, we were granted only one child.

Precious. I feel bad you couldn't have more though. G-d has been very generous to us.

Keeping up with two toddlers after age 50 can't be easy.

And yet i wouldn't trade it for anything! Thank G-d, we have a lot of help. Especially, when some neighboring girls come by to take our son for a walk. G-d bless them all.

Seen Youtube lately? I just watched a video on how to make nitroglycerin. Stuff like this has been available for over a decade.

Back in the days that home solar systems still mostly used lead-acid batteries - which in some cases of degradation could be repaired, at least partially, if you had some good strong and reasonably pure sulfuric acid - I viewed a YouTube video on how to make it. (From epsom salts by electrolysis using a flowerpot and some carbon rods from old large dry cells).

For months afterward YouTube "suggested" I'd be interested in videos from a bunch of Islamic religious leaders . (This while people were wondering how Islamic Terrorists were using the Internet to recruit among high-school out-group nerds.)

Software - AI and otherwise - often creates unintended consequences. B-)

It's kind of surprising it isn't all squealing nonsense.

Give it a little more time. B-b

We had a lab known to be unsafe. A lab known to be performing gain of function on the specific type of virus that emerged in public. We have a lab in close proximity to the market where the outbreak was traced back to.

We also had rumors that low-paid lab techs supplemented their income by selling test animals they'd been ordered to destroy to the nearby wet market.

So current AI training procedures - which amount to "read all the internet you can" - fall for astroturf campaigns. Why am I not surprised?

...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

There's also the "Detox" exercise of leaving your phone at home. and only taking it with you when it's absolutely necessary for example to work if you have to use a third factor authentication application to get into your computer)

Just switch on "airplane mode". No incoming calls, message notifications, or app push crud. (If you've got any apps, other than alarm/calendar notices for your schedule reminders which YOU set up, that poke brain-derailng messages at you, disable (or delete) them.)

Then get into the habit of not going to it for anything non-essential while in this mode.

Now you can use it for a key, or wallet, or whatever, if you must, without it constantly killing your attention span with interruptions. Yet you can always turn it back on to make a call, or in the timeslot you reserved for handling this trivia.

No incoming calls, though. (What a relief: No phone spammers!)

There is one scientist later on in the first part who does say they couldn't rule out someone who may have been infected at the lab visiting the market and starting the ball rolling, but they also say there is no evidence to back this up. Considering the number of people who ride that line each day, if there was a sick person from the lab spreading their infection, there should have been far more people getting sick all over the place. That didn't happen. The earliest known infections were all clustered around the market.

It doesn't have to have been an infected human. An infected experimental animal - or a pest animal that had come into contact with lab animals or materials - could have been an initial vector.

For some time stories have circulated that low-paid lab techies at the Wuhan lab had been known to supplement their income by taking experimental animals they had been ordered to kill and dispose of safely and instead sell them at the wet market.

is it just me, or does that sound like a sexy place?

I hear chines live-food-animal markets are called that because they typically sell seafood (fish, lobsters, etc.) which are kept alive in big water tanks.